by Rose, Willow
Ulrik Gyldenlove had only lost a bit of his hair since the picture was taken at the port. He had gotten older and wasn’t as slim as back then. But I recognized the look in his eyes, and his smile when he now and then showed me one. He seemed burdened, as though life had been hard on him. That surprised me. I had expected him to be more like Didrik Rosenfeldt, caring more for himself than others. But this guy was different.
As we walked slowly along a path in the forest looking at the wildlife, he sighed deeply.
“This is my favorite spot in the whole world,” he said and took in a deep breath of the moist air. “So quiet and calm.”
I nodded. It was truly beautiful.
He looked at me with a smile.
“So how did you know I used to be friends with Didrik and Henrik? I haven’t seen any of them in ages. We can hardly call each other friends anymore.”
“Why haven’t you seen each other for so long?” I asked deliberately avoiding answering his question.
“Oh, I don’t know. It has been so many years. Time flies. We went to the same school for years and I have tried to watch everybody’s careers from a distance, but we never saw each other since the day we graduated.”
“Why do you think that is?”
He shook his head. “We were just school buddies. We really didn’t have that much in common.”
We walked down the path for awhile in silence. Then I took out Irene’s picture from the pocket in my brown leather jacket. I showed it to him.
He stopped and stared at it for a long time.
”How did you get that picture?” He said.
“It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you seem to be much more than just school buddies in this picture.”
He sighed deeply and put a hand to his forehead. He seemed a bit preoccupied for a second.
“What is it you want from me?” he asked.
“I want to know about your friends. What were they like? My sister used to date Didrik Rosenfeldt for a short while and she told me you and your friends acted out a lot when you came to Karrebaeksminde on summer vacation in the Rosenfeldt’s residence. That you harassed people on the port area, and I know that you were at one point accused of having raped a girl on the boat.”
Ulrik Gyldenlove sighed again.
“I just want to know the truth,” I continued.
“You must do your research a little better next time,” he said handing me the picture back. “The charges were all dropped. There was no case against us. They were false accusations. The poor girl must have been mentally ill or something.”
“It was dropped because you paid her family off. Don’t think I didn’t do my research,” I said, suddenly afraid of having said too much. Would they come after Irene for this?
He sighed again. “It’s such a long time ago. Why dig up the past now? Why can’t you just leave it alone?”
“Because someone is killing your old school buddies and it might be because of something you did back then. For all I know you might be next.”
He looked at me with serious eyes. “Don’t you think I have been asking myself that?”
Chapter Fourteen
Ulrik Gyldenlove was quiet for a long period of time while we were still walking on the path. I had borrowed a pair of Wellies at the Riding Club and they made a funny squelching sound when I walked. We reached Erimitageslottet, a small castle that never was used for the royalties to live in, but as a place for the king to have his banquet for the riders of the hunt. It was placed on the highest point of the forest overlooking all of the beautiful landscape.
It had a big history. I sensed that as we passed it.
“Most of the other students were afraid of that group,” he said suddenly without looking at me. He stared out in the wide landscape that opened up between the trees. A flock of deer were gathered not far from us. One looked up and stared back at us.
“They enjoyed it. They liked to make people scared of them,” he continued. ”The school was their domain. And a lot of the other students got a taste of their tough love. They had a reputation of being like wild animals.”
“What do you mean by they ‘got a taste of their tough love’?”
“They beat them up. Sometimes half to death.”
“Why?”
He looked at me. “For fun.” He looked away again. ”They got some kind of pleasure out of it. Sometimes there was no reason at all for them to pick on some poor kid and beat the crap out of him. He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“What is there to understand? They were just pure evil. They wanted to be evil.”
“But weren’t they afraid to be kicked out of the school? Didn’t their parents send them there to get a good education and a bright future?”
“You don’t know a lot about boarding schools do you?”
“I’m sure I don’t.”
“Boarding schools are used for rich parents to get rid of their kids. Sending them to boarding school means they don’t have to deal with them any longer. Most rich parents are emotionally inadequate, almost disabled. Because their own parents didn’t love them, they are not capable of loving their children. Then they ship them off to boarding school and only have to spend time with them on the holidays. And even then they will be too busy for them. So they are left to themselves. Rich and merciless. Without any compassion for other human beings since they haven’t gotten any growing up. That’s the life of most boarding school kids. They did indeed want to amount to something. But they knew they would on account of their parents. And everybody knew if you wanted to be someone when school was over, you’d better not have pissed these guys off while you were in the school. If you were friends with Didrik Rosenfeldt you would surely amount to something later in life.”
“But you are not like that. You are different, why?”
“I broke off with them in 1986. Told them I didn’t want to be a part of their game anymore. It was over for me.”
“Game?”
He sighed again. I sensed that he had been running from this story most of his adult life, thinking he could escape it, but now it had caught up on him.
“They had a game called ‘A Gentleman Hunt.’”
“A Gentleman Hunt? What was that?
“It was a game that Didrik Rosenfeldt invented. One of the guys would come up with a fantasy and they would go out and make it real. Like raping the girl while dressed as Freddy Krueger. It was a challenge. Someone would challenge the rest of the group to do something awful and then they had to do it. If one refused they would be beaten up and thrown out of the game. To be excluded from the group meant no protection. You were certain to be their next victim.”
“How did he come up with that?”
“One time he told us he had this fantasy about scaring the shit out of a boy in eighth grade, and then he told the rest of the group what he wanted to do to him, and then they all went out and did it.”
“What did they do?”
“The kid was from the U.S. He had lost his parents in a car accident and had this one picture of them he always kept close to him, in his pocket. Didrik and the rest took the picture from him one afternoon in the boys’ bathroom. They took it from his clothes while the kid was in the shower. When he came out all naked they showed him they had taken it. He wanted it back and started crying, but they didn’t care. They stuck the picture in his mouth and lit it on fire. He was to hold it like that. If he dropped it they would shoot him, they said and placed a gun to the boy’s head. As the picture burned the crying boy eventually burned himself and dropped the burning picture to the floor.”
“Then what?”
“Then they pulled the trigger. But it clicked. It wasn’t loaded.”
“Wow. That was tough.”
“The boy had to leave the school after that.”
“What about Didrik Rosenfeldt and his gang?”
“Their parents paid the victim off and
they continued their lives. And this was just the beginning. Now they started picking on all the new students who came to the school. Challenging each other in various fantasies and making them real.”
“Someone must have been complaining about them to the headmaster.”
“Some did every once in a while. And they paid the price for it. I remember one in particular who told on the boys and they hung him from the ceiling in the gym, by his arms. Then they beat him all night like a punching ball. He had to spend six months in the hospital. And he never told anyone who did it.”
Ulrik looked up and spotted a falcon looking for food on the ground. He pointed at it and I saw it too. The fog had gotten lighter and we could now see more of the forest.
“Did they pick on you?” I asked.
“You only pick on someone who won’t fight back.”
I nodded.
“But I could have stopped them,” he then said. “I should have.”
We began to walk back to the riding club. I had promised Sune I wouldn’t take too long since we had a long drive home, and he had to pick up his son.
“You have a son?” I asked in surprise.
“Yes I do.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“Well, you didn’t ask.”
His son was apparently seven years old. Sune was only nineteen when he got him. The boy’s mother had been young too, and she didn’t want the child. So he was a single dad.
I was stunned at the way people kept surprising me lately and wondered what else he had kept from me as we walked back in silence. I also wondered about this group of boarding school kids who had terrorized the whole school for years without any consequences. I wondered what role Ulrik Gyldenlove had in it and how I was supposed to put it all in an article without putting Irene Hansen’s life at risk. I would have to discuss it with Ole, my editor, when we got back., We reached the riding club where Sune was waiting for us together with Ulrik’s daughter.
“Can I see the picture again?” Ulrik asked just as we were about to leave.
I got it out of my pocket and handed it to him.
He stared at it and I saw sadness in his eyes.
“These two are dead now,” he said and pointed at Didrik Rosenfeldt and Henrik Holch.
I nodded.
“Then there are only three of us left.”
I looked surprised at him.
“You mean four, right?”
He put his finger on another boy’s face in the photo.
“No. This guy, Bjorn Clausen, killed himself in 1987. That means there are only three left.”
Chapter Fifteen
So one of the boarding school boys was already dead. But how did he die? I searched the internet when we got back to Karrebaeksminde and in all the newspapers at the library. And I had Sune find anything he could on Bjorn Clausen and his suicide in 1987 from the Internet and the police archive. But all we got was a small note in the local paper and an old report from the police of what was a closed case, a definitely suicide.
Jumped out from a bridge in front of a train
I had run dry of ideas. Who was that guy? I asked myself and looked at the picture. Brown hair, blue eyes. Tall, muscular. He looked a bit familiar too me, but I couldn’t quite place him.
I decided to let it go and concentrated on my article while Sune went to get his son. I told him he could drop his son off at my dad’s and he would take care of him while we were working.
Sune called me after he had dropped off his son. I learned his son was Tobias, Julie’s new best friend in school, so that turned out to be a very popular decision. I was getting quite good at this small-town life I asked Sune to bring pizza when he got back.
Jumping out from a bridge, getting hit by a train was certainly an effective way of killing yourself. But why? He was nineteen. He had just graduated from high school six months before. Was it just teenage depression? Ulrik Gyldenlove had described as a cold-hearted player of a game where they would beat the living out of kids that were younger than them and rape a local girl just for the fun of it Had he had some regrets? Some kind of conscience? Was he unable to keep on living knowing what he and his friends had done? It sounded a bit unlikely to me.
“Maybe the killer had already begun looking to get revenge back in 1987.” Sune said with cheese from the pizza on his lip.
I signaled with my finger on my own lip, and he removed it.
“That‘s possible. But why wait twenty-four years before killing the next?”
“I don’t know,” Sune said with his mouth full.
“Maybe the killer has been away. Maybe he was sent to college somewhere out of the country. Maybe in England or in the U.S.?”
Sune nodded. ”That sounds likely. A lot of these kids went on to become big-shots later in life and often they would have to go to foreign countries in order to get the best education money could buy before they came back and took over the family business.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“But that doesn’t help us much,” he said with a grin.
”What do you mean?”
”After what you told me today, almost every kid in that school could have a potential motive for killing them. A lot of kids were beaten and harassed and would like to get their revenge at some point.”
“You’re right,” I said a heavily. “There could be hundreds of potential killers out there wanting to get rid of Didrik Rosenfeldt and his gang.”
Sune took another piece of pizza from the box.
”So what do we do now?” He leaned back in his chair while eating.
“What is there to do?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“First I will write my article on the boarding school boys and where they are now. And then I will write another article on the harassment. I made a deal with Gyldenlove that I wouldn’t use his name and thereby tell the rest of the gang he is the one who ratted them out. I will just call him an anonymous source from the school. Then I am going to e-mail the articles to my editor in Naestved. He is waiting for them and promised to read them right away and then put them in the paper.”
“And then?”
“Then I will be going home to my family. My daughter is supposed be sound asleep by then, but since Tobias is there with her she will most likely be fully awake, running around having the time of her life. I will then tuck her in, after saying goodbye to you and Tobias.”
“Then what do we do with the case?”
“What is there left to do but to wait for the killer to strike again?”
An hour or so later the door suddenly buzzed to the editorial room. Sune got up and let someone in. It was Giovanni Marco. He had come to get his picture taken for the article. He had made the appointment with Sune since he was already in town doing some other business.
I smiled at him, and said hi, but didn’t pay any more attention to him. I was busy with my articles. Sune asked him to stand against a wall and then he took a lot of different pictures of him.
Then they went outside to get some photos of him with some of his work displayed in town. Before they left Giovanni approached me.
I looked up and into his blue eyes. He smiled his handsome smile.
“I am sorry you threw away my phone number,” he said with that cute irresistible Italian accent.
“Who said I threw it away?”
“I just figured, since you didn’t call me back.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“Okay, then,” he said and turned away.
“Okay.”
He stopped himself and looked at me again. “Then maybe you would consider having dinner with me some day?”
I blushed and hoped he didn’t notice.
“I might consider that.”
“I will call you, then.”
It was late when Sune and I got to my dad’s home. Sune had been researching Bjorn Clausen for hours while I wrote the stories for the newspaper. The editor had read them and loved them right away
. They would be in the morning paper, he said.
When we came inside we both had quite a scare. Inside in the living room stood two men twice the size of Sune. My dad was sitting on the couch looking at us with fear in his eyes.
“Dad, are you okay?” I yelled and ran across the room. I kneeled in front of him and looked him in the eyes.
He nodded and took my hand.
“I am fine, sweetheart. I am fine.”
“Where are the kids?”
“They are upstairs. They are sleeping. Don’t worry about them.”
I breathed a sigh of relief and got back on my feet. I looked at the two guys staring at me and started yelling at them. ”Who are you? And what the hell are you doing here?”
One of the men looked at me. “Peter sent us.”
I froze. Sune looked at me. He grabbed my arm.
”Are you okay? Who is Peter?”
I looked at the tall bald guy with broad shoulders. I knew his type. He didn’t scare me.
”Well then you can tell Peter to just butt out of my life. Out of our lives. I don’t want anything to do with him ever again.”
”Peter wants to see his daughter.”
“Tell him I don’t care. I don’t want her to be among criminals. I want her to have an ordinary life of an ordinary girl.”
I stepped a couple of steps in the big guy’s direction while I kept yelling at him. The worst I could do right now was to show fear. Peter could never know that I was afraid of him. He would use it against me. Manipulate me into coming back.
I opened the door and showed the men out.
“You go tell him that.”
Chapter Sixteen
“You have some explaining to do, young lady.”
My dad stood by the stove in the kitchen the next morning when I came down. Julie had been sleeping when I woke up, so I let her sleep a little longer. After all, it was Saturday and she didn’t have school.
I sat down at the table. I felt like I was thirteen years old again and my parents had caught me smoking.