by Andrea Mara
She settled back on the couch and began to reminisce.
As she talked about Hanne in school, her friends, her studies, I took an occasional note, but mostly I just listened in a kind of suspended reality. This woman in front of me was my grandmother. I looked for a resemblance, but could see none. She had poker-straight, very dark grey hair, cut short, just below her ears. Her eyes were a light blue colour, not unlike mine. Her grey blouse was smart and well cut, with a string of pearls nestling in the collar, and a brooch that looked like a little golden dove pinned to her pocket. Other than that, she wore no jewellery. Her trousers were dark grey, and her shoes were flat, black, and sensible. She was wholly unremarkable, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
“I don’t have so much time today but it’s good that you take an interest in Hanne as a child – perhaps I can send you something in writing?” she said, looking at her watch.
“That would be wonderful!”
“Do you have an email address?”
Now I was stuck. If I told her my email address, she’d know I was Marianne McShane, not journalist-from-New Jersey but granddaughter-from-Ireland.
“Actually, I’m in the process of moving to a new website and my email address isn’t working properly yet – maybe you can give me yours, and I’ll contact you when mine is up and running?”
She looked at me for a beat, then nodded, perhaps wondering if I had lost interest in Hanne’s story after all. As she wrote her details in my tiny notebook, we heard the front door open, and a male voice said something in Danish.
“In the kitchen, Erik, we have a visitor,” Dina said in English.
I swivelled on my seat to see him walk into the room. He was just as he was in the most recent newspaper photo – a man who looked like he had once been taller, once filled the room, but had shrunk on all sides. His blue eyes were bright, taking me in with one glance, but his cheeks were sunken, and his shirt collar looked far too wide for his neck.
“Another journalist. I think we say everything before.”
“Linda wants to write about Hanne as a person, her life before . . . before it happened.” For the first time, her voice cracked.
He looked at me, then at his wife.
“Jeg forstår, men det vil ikke bringe hende tilbage,” he said softly to her, then addressed me. “I tell my wife I understand why she wishes to do this, but it will not bring Hanne back. And perhaps it is not good for us to keep talking about sad things?”
I nodded, swallowing as my throat tightened.
“Of course, I understand. Please excuse me.” Blurred by unexpected tears, I stood and half-ran to the front door, wondering what had possessed me to lie to these people, and dredge up their tragic past.
CHAPTER 32
I ran until I got to the end of their street, where I stopped to catch my breath, jamming the heels of my hands into my eyes to stem the tears.
A girl a couple of years younger than me was sitting on the front porch of the last house on the opposite side of the road, smoking a cigarette. She stared at me as I stood there rubbing my eyes and, with no idea what else to do, I turned my back. And then it registered – I was standing at the laneway, the spot where they found the torch. Was this where she was attacked? Or where she left with someone she trusted? Tall trees lined either side of the lane – it seemed to be a walkway through to a parallel street, though when I peered through I couldn’t see the other end. And up and down Damtoften, apart from the girl on her porch, there was nobody in sight at all. On a cold Sunday evening, the street would have been deathly quiet – no wonder no-one saw anything. But why her, and why then? An opportunistic killer hovering nearby who took his chance? Or a watcher, learning her routine? But then, she didn’t have a routine. The news reports said she hadn’t been out much at all, this was a first walk in weeks. That pointed back to an opportunistic killer: wrong place, wrong time. Suddenly spent, I sank against a tree and down to the ice-cold ground, my head in my hands.
Moments later, the sound of footsteps made me look up. The girl from the porch was standing a few feet from me, head tilted to one side, still smoking. A jet-black bob and choppy fringe framed pale features and dark, inquisitive eyes. She was wearing a purple shirt, buttoned up to the neck, skin-tight black jeans with Doc Marten boots, and a heavy black wool coat. As she raised her cigarette to her mouth, a tattoo that looked like a star peeped out from under her sleeve. Her slim fingers bore clunky silver rings, and around her neck hung a camera.
Still she said nothing, and neither did I.
Eventually she held her packet of cigarettes towards me and I found my voice.
“I don’t smoke, but thanks for offering.” Then I remembered where I was. “Sorry, I don’t speak Danish.”
“Want to talk about it?” she asked in perfect English, with a slight American twang.
She sat down on the ground opposite me as I shook my head – where would I even start?
“Try me,” she went on. “I promise you, nothing will shock me.”
It came out in one breath: “My mother was murdered twenty-four years ago, possibly in this exact spot, and I’ve just met my grandparents for the first time but pretended to be a journalist called Linda.”
She nodded, taking an unperturbed drag of her cigarette. Perhaps offspring of murder victims turned up regularly on Damtoften.
“Hanne Karlsen? I know about her. Everyone on this street does. I didn’t know she had a daughter.”
“And a husband. Nobody seems to know – neither my dad nor I have ever been mentioned in any news reports. And I’ve never met my grandparents. At least until just now.” I bit my lip. “Have you always lived here?”
“Yes, all my life. I wasn’t born when it happened, but we knew about it growing up. We used to play games about bad men and kidnappers here in the laneway. Silly stuff, we didn’t understand what it meant – that someone really died.”
I nodded. “In a strange way, it’s the same for me. I’ve known for a long time what happened to her, but until I came here today, it didn’t really hit me.”
“Are you going to tell the Karlsens who you are?”
“I have to. I just need to figure out how.” I traced a finger in the cold, sandy dirt and looked over at her again. “What do people say? What do locals think happened?”
“Ah. There are lots of stories.” She gazed at me from under her fringe. “Are you sure you want to hear?”
I nodded. “I never knew her. So I’m not as emotionally close to it as a daughter might otherwise be.” The words came out sounding cold, but it was enough to convince the girl.
“Okay. So, lots of people believe what the papers were saying – there was a serial killer in Denmark. That he killed three women that year, then stopped – maybe because he died or went to another country.”
It fit with what I had read.
“But there are other theories,” she continued. “Some say it was a man who used to walk the streets at night – he had a cabin out near the Fugl Sø Lake, and roamed Købæk at night, looking for children and teenagers out on their own.”
I raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Hanne wasn’t a teenager.”
“I know. And I think it came from old stories made up to get small children to go to bed. Bøhmand stories – in America they say ‘bogeyman’. I never saw this man and I don’t know if he was real.”
I nodded, remembering a similar story Jamie used to hear from his dad as a kid – the bogeyman collected naughty children who didn’t do what they were told. My dad never told bogeyman stories.
“It worked though,” she continued. “We were all afraid of him – this shadow person we never actually saw. And brave as we were playing kidnapping games in daylight, nobody ever stayed out after dark. This was the quietest street in Købæk at night.”
“Back then too,” I said, and she looked confused. “The night she was taken I mean. Nobody saw a thing.”
“No, which is what brings in the other popular theory: that
she went willingly, to meet someone.” She stopped and I waited. “Sorry, this isn’t very kind – telling you this when she was married to your father.”
“Please go ahead, I want to hear everything. I’ve read so much but this is the first time I’m hearing the locals’ version – you know?”
“Okay. There were rumours that she had met someone, a man. And that she went to meet him that night, and left with him, running away. She had gone away before – gone to America, and to England, or maybe Ireland I think.”
I nodded. “Ireland. That’s where she met my dad – it’s where I’m from.”
“Ah, I see. Yes, so some people said there must be a boyfriend, but something went wrong – a fight, and he drowned her in the lake.”
She stopped and we both sat looking at the ground and perhaps like me she was trying to bat away the image of Hanne being thrown in a lake like an unwanted kitten.
“Were there other stories?” I asked after a while.
“So many, but most of them silly. Some said she joined a cult, some said it was suicide, and that a woman who lives in the forest in Roskilde found her and tried to give her a burial. We heard too that it was the ice-cream man – some people said they heard the music of the ice-cream truck that night. I think that was to stop us asking for ice-cream. Locals did say they heard creepy music that night – violin music. And people said there were strange men in the area in the days before – one blond, one dark-haired. That story was repeated a lot and I think the police looked into it. There was also a story about a white van but, as my mother says, there are always stories of white vans when people disappear, because there are always white vans even when nobody disappears at all.”
“Your mother sounds smart.”
The girl shrugged.
“What’s your name by the way?” I asked, pulling myself to my feet.
“Asta. And you? Not Linda, I guess?”
“Not Linda.” I smiled. “I’m Marianne. And now I need to go buy some supplies, and figure out how to tell those poor people I’m their granddaughter.”
I thanked Asta for her time and set off back down Damtoften, with the sense that I knew more than ever before, but still I knew nothing at all.
CHAPTER 33
What next, I wondered, as I sat eating a bowl of microwaved soup in the communal kitchen at the hostel. Flipping the pages of my notebook, I winced at the “journalist” notes I’d taken. “Chatty” and “lots of friends” and “a busy child” scratched on one page, and “email” on the next. I didn’t even remember writing that. On the following page, Dina had written her email address, and I sat staring at it, eating my too-hot soup, and wondering if I should close the notebook and walk away from all of this.
Dotted around the kitchen, backpackers sat in twos and threes, chattering in different languages. One or two sat alone reading books and maps. My eyes roamed to the far corner where a long-haired man was sitting at a computer. A sign above it advertised Internet access. As I watched, he got up from the terminal, and before I could talk myself out of it, I was out of my seat and over at the computer.
“You have to buy a token at the desk,” the man said, packing his books. “And I think they’re closed right now.”
“Ah, okay,” I said, disappointed and relieved all at once.
“My session has seven or eight more minutes – maybe that’s enough for you?”
I smiled. “It is, thank you.”
He nodded and walked away.
It took less than five minutes to do what I needed to do and as I disconnected an email was winging its way from [email protected] to Dina Karlsen.
Unsure about my next steps, and wondering about the wisdom of the trip, I went out for a walk that afternoon. Købæk city centre was compact and easy to stroll around – more of a town really, spotlessly clean and very pretty. Narrow houses in every colour stood shoulder to shoulder – mint green, deep yellow, creamy orange and sunset red, with the occasional grey office block breaking up the rainbow. I rambled aimlessly, thinking about Hanne, imagining her stepping on these same streets, as a child with her parents, as a teen with her friends. I passed what looked like a public library, a two-storey building with burnt-orange walls, and decided to go in – a library seemed like a good place to do some research. But everything was in Danish, and apart from a bank of computers and a stack of today’s newspapers, most of what was there was fiction, or so it seemed. Perhaps it was only on TV that people used libraries to find old newspapers and read up on local crime. In fact, I thought, as I ran my finger over a row of hardbacks near the door, the place to go to find out about local crime was almost certainly the police station. Would they accommodate questions from a stranger walking through the door? Maybe not, but it was worth a try.
It took another half an hour to find the police station. In contrast to the picture-postcard buildings that filled the city centre, it was a squat, brown-brick structure that reminded me of so many ill-thought-out buildings back home. At the main reception desk, I blurted out my story – my mother had been murdered, and I wanted to ask some questions about it. I was told to sit in a waiting area and after a while a different person came and asked to see some ID. I gave her my passport and she took it with her. Would they have a record of Marianne McShane? It seemed they did. After thirty minutes, a smallish man with receding strawberry-blond hair approached me, offering his hand. Under his left arm was a brown file.
“Ms McShane? Vicepolitiinspektør Nielsen.”
I stood and shook his hand, then followed as he swiped us through to a room at the back of the building. Grey and bare, it felt like the kind of place criminals would be interrogated, and for the briefest moment I wondered if this was all a terrible idea. The man smiled as he sat down, flashing tiny teeth. He put the brown file on the table, then reached into his pockets as though searching for cigarettes before remembering where he was.
“So your mother was Hanne Karlsen?” he asked, though it was clearly a conversation opener rather than a real question.
“Yes. I don’t remember her at all. I was a baby. But my father passed away two years ago, and since then I’ve become more and more interested in finding out about her story. I’ve read everything there is to read, and it seemed like it was time to come here and see for myself.”
He nodded, watching my face intently, saying nothing.
“So could I look at the file, and ask some questions?” I said to fill the silence.
“I can’t show you the file, I’m afraid,” he said, patting it, “but I can certainly answer questions. I wasn’t here when it happened, so it is new to me too, but I have been reading up since we reopened the case. What would you like to know?”
Realising I had no idea where to start, I pulled out my tiny notebook for the second time that day, along with an unfamiliar pen. I turned it over in my hand – it was silver with the letters D.F.K. engraved in gold, and definitely not mine. Then I remembered – Dina Karlsen’s pen, I hadn’t given it back. D.F.K. – her initials presumably. A twinge of guilt hit when I thought about my journalist-lie and the fake email address, but I pushed it aside, and cleared my throat.
“So, I guess I just want to know what the current theory is. I know there’s a suspicion about a serial killer, and that the case is due to be reopened. Can you tell me anything else?”
“You know as much as we do then, Ms McShane. That is precisely correct. There is a general suspicion that the murders were connected, though this is circumstantial. New developments in forensics mean we can investigate this more scientifically now, and many old cases are being reopened.”
“When I read about it, it seemed to me there must be a link between the three cases, but it was also strange that it was just that one year, and then he disappeared. Do you think he moved to another country?”
He looked at me again, saying nothing for a moment.
I shifted in my hard chair.
“Maybe.”
I tried another tack.
“Oh, there is always a white van,” he said, with a hint of a smile. “But we never got any concrete reports of a van in the area, not that night.”
I looked up from my notebook. “But other nights?”
“Ha! I need to choose my words more carefully. On other nights in the lead-up to Hanne’s disappearance, there were reports of an unfamiliar vehicle – a black car on the street where the Karlsens live.”
“And did you find out who it was?”
“No, we never have, and it may not mean anything.”
He paused, and this time I said nothing. “There were also reports of two men in the area – not residents.” He looked at me, as though waiting for me to shed some light. “Have you heard this from anyone – from your father maybe?”
I shook my head. “Not from my father, but I did meet a girl this morning who lives on the same street – she said there were strangers around in the days leading up to Hanne’s disappearance. It’s hard to tell how much is urban myth. And she wasn’t born when it happened.”
He nodded. “The van is, as you say, urban myth. The two men – seen at separate times – that is less clear.”
“One blond, one dark-haired?”
“Yes, your friend from Damtoften is correct. What is her name?”
I hesitated.
“Don’t worry, we will interview everyone again as part of the new investigation – your friend will not be pulled in for questioning! Unless as a baby in her mother’s womb she committed murder?” He laughed at what seemed to me a fairly off-colour attempt at humour.
“Asta is her name. She lives in the last house on the street, near the laneway.”
He made a note, bobbing his head down to look at the page, exposing a bright-pink bald patch.