by Andrea Mara
“Disadvantaged backgrounds, she meant. Yes, Dina helps out. I believe your mother used to go there too, to the Youth Club. I never did. My mother wanted me to go after school when she was working, but Fru Hansen offered to look after me instead.”
“But my mother didn’t come from a disadvantaged background? Nor do you?”
“No, I don’t mean it that way – different groups meet there. Dina volunteers a lot,” she said, then darted forward towards a café across the street. “Come on, a free table!”
Inside, the café was dark but cosy – it continued to amaze me how warm Danish buildings were despite the cold outdoors. We picked out pastries and ordered coffees, and settled down with no plan to move anytime soon. Something else I’d learned about Denmark – they know how to do pastries like nowhere else I’d ever been. I put the bag with the scarf and the figurine on the table, and took off my gloves.
“The present is for your boyfriend?” Asta asked, nodding towards the bag.
I laughed. “Yeah. Boyfriend sounds funny. Ray’s thirty-seven. A bit old to be a boyfriend, isn’t it?”
“Ja, maybe, but words don’t really matter, do they?” Asta said, taking off her woolly hat and stuffing it in her satchel. “He is your person, the other half of you.”
Our coffees arrived just then and I took a moment to sip the too-hot drink, thinking about what she’d said. Was Ray my person, the other half of me?
“Do you have anyone?” I asked, pushing away questions I didn’t want to answer.
“Not right now. There was someone, but he was bad news.”
I waited for more, looking at her over the top of my coffee.
“My parents were super-protective when my brother and I were growing up,” she went on, “because of what happened.”
“To Hanne?”
“Yes. They were so afraid to let us out of sight, and of course when we were teens, we rebelled. My brother left home as soon as he could, and I found a boyfriend with a motorcycle and an apartment. Anything for freedom!” She smiled brightly, but her eyes looked sad.
“And what happened?”
“What happened was exactly what my mother said would happen – he cheated on me, lied, borrowed money from me, got in trouble with the police. If you tried to draw a picture of the worst boyfriend in the world, it would be that guy.”
“So you dumped him?”
She shook her head and laughed. “I wish, but no, he dumped me! I lay in my bed for days, crying about him. My mother brought me food and rubbed my back and never once said ‘I told you so’.”
“And do you really think it was all down to Hanne’s disappearance – her overprotectiveness?”
“Oh yes, no question. Much as she disliked Fru Hansen’s stories, she had her own more direct warnings. ‘Don’t go out after dark, you know what happened to Hanne Karlsen’ is something we heard over and over growing up.”
“But, logically, there was no reason for the killer to strike again in the same street – the other two victims were from different towns entirely.”
Asta shrugged. “I guess if you are a parent, logic doesn’t come into it.”
“This is the kind of stuff I’m interested in – hearing from people who remember what it was like back then. If you think of anything else, will you email me?” I pulled out a pen to write my contact details on a napkin.
“For sure. You go home tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “God, I don’t know what I expected, but I feel I’m going home without knowing much about Hanne, and obviously without knowing Dina and Erik at all.”
Asta gave me a funny look.
“Sorry, that sounds ungrateful,” I said quickly. “You’ve been very generous with your time.”
“That’s not it – I just didn’t take you for a quitter.”
I sat up straighter. “Hey, that’s not fair – I did try but she doesn’t want to see me.”
“She’s your grandmother. Your only link to your mother. Have you really come all this way to go home without giving it one more shot?”
And that’s how I found myself outside Dina and Erik’s house yet again that Saturday evening. It was pitch dark on Damtoften and bitterly cold as I rang the bell, and when there was no answer, I wasn’t disappointed – just empty. Nothingy. I tried a second time, and though I could see some light in the living room where the blind didn’t quite meet the windowsill, still there was no answer. Without stopping to think, I moved sideways along the path at the front of the house and ducked down to peer through the gap under the blind. Inside, a candle flickered on a shelf, but neither Dina nor Erik was there. There wasn’t a sound coming from the house, nor out on the street – Damtoften was a ghost-town after dark. I crept past the living-room window, and around to the back of the house. Bending low to make my way along the path, I hunkered beneath the kitchen window. Thin light filtered through on to the grass and as I watched, a shadow flickered across it. Someone was in there. I swallowed, wondering what the Danish penalty for trespassing was, then turned and raised my head so my eyes were just level with the bottom corner of the window. Dina was sitting at the kitchen table and opposite sat a man, his hands on hers. A man with light-coloured hair and a darker, red-tinged beard. A man who wasn’t Erik; someone I’d never seen before. While I crouched there, Dina inclined her head, as though listening for something. For what? Then it dawned on me. She was listening for the doorbell, waiting to see if I’d call again. A call she clearly wasn’t going to answer.
In the darkness, still unseen, I stood and walked away.
CHAPTER 41
Arriving back in Ireland that Sunday, it felt like I’d been gone for three months, not seven days, and Ray acted as though it was the former, wrapping me in a giant hug at Dublin airport, telling me all the way home to Wicklow how much he missed me. He had the kitchen table set and a slow-roast loin of pork in the oven – I didn’t even know Ray could cook. In retrospect, I can see that cooking just didn’t fit with the character in his head – the intellectual creative who didn’t have time for domesticity. The kitchen was freezing cold, and I suggested we decamp to the living room. Ray resisted – he’d put so much effort into setting the table apparently. But, as sleet began to fall outside, and we sat across from one another still wearing our coats, he had to accept defeat. We carried our plates to the couch, and began to thaw over a bottle of red wine.
Ray was full of questions – what was Denmark like, what did my grandparents look like, did I feel any connection to the country? That last question made me stop and think. The short answer was no, and that made me suddenly sad. Ray had moved on to the next question without waiting for an answer – was the man in the kitchen with Dina the blond man people had seen twenty years earlier? Maybe, I told him, though Denmark is bursting with blond men. Did I ring the bell again, he asked – did I see them before I left? No, I sneaked around to the front of the house, and walked away.
And Ray’s last question before we settled down to watch The Clinic – would I be going back?
No, I told him. I was done.
And I was done, at least until I found the key in my wash-bag while unpacking the next day. I studied it, wondering. Could something so tiny really open anything of value? There were no diaries of any sort on the shelves in the living room, and nothing but Ray’s computer in my dad’s old room. If there was something to find, it had to be in the attic.
Ray had gone down to the village to write – he couldn’t concentrate when I was in the house, he said, though how being surrounded by other people in the Wooden Spoon was going to be any easier, I wasn’t sure.
I pulled down the ladder and climbed into the attic, wrinkling my nose against the musty smell. I hadn’t been up in almost a year – not since I’d found Hanne’s goodbye letter, and now the smell seemed more pungent. Maybe it was time to clear it out properly, to get rid of Hanne’s stuff. Perhaps that would be the result of the trip to Denmark – not closure, but a prompt to move on.
At the back of the attic, the box of dresses stood where I’d left it, the silver dress near the top. The blue and jade dresses hung in my wardrobe, destined for a life almost as lonely as they’d had up here, wishing no doubt for an owner with more social obligations. I turned to a box of books and removed them, one by one, searching for a diary. Underneath were some journals, but none had a lock. The next box contained only sketchpads. I set it aside, deflated. No locked diary, no locked anything. Maybe the key was just a symbol, Hanne speaking metaphorically when she told Fru Hansen she wanted to lock away the past.
I sat back, turning the key over in my hand. This was the problem with growing up on mystery novels – everything was supposed to have meaning. Yet since I’d started getting to know Hanne and her story, I’d found only dead ends.
I pulled out the silver dress. Did she ever wear it? It didn’t seem like Købæk would offer any more opportunities for glamour than Wicklow did. Carefully I folded it and put it back, brushing against something solid as I did. I pulled it out – the wooden jewellery box with no jewellery inside. There was something so lonely about that.
The lower drawer was still stuck and I wondered where the handle was or if I could attach something to replace it. I held it towards the light to see better, and that’s when it struck me: I wasn’t looking at a missing handle, but rather, a keyhole.
The key slid in and turned easily, allowing the drawer to open. The inside was crammed with paper. With a glow of excitement, I crawled back to sit directly under the light bulb and pulled out what looked like four or five folded drawings. The first showed a deer, nuzzling a small girl. Drawn beautifully in pencil, the attention to detail was stunning. The second page showed a white horse, with a child on its back. In the third sketch, a child was being blown forward by an unseen wind. In the fourth, a man in robes was playing a violin while a young girl trailed behind, her face lit up. It was the final sketch that stopped my breath. Water, and a young girl’s face just below the surface, eyes wide in terror. Looking down at her was the man with the violin, only now his robe was covered with faces of crying children. And his own face was gone – in its place, just emptiness, as blank as the new-fallen snow.
CHAPTER 42
2018
Thoughts of footprints and chalk letters were still ricocheting around my head when I got back to the house on Sunday after coffee with Jamie. He was certain Alan couldn’t be responsible for any of it, but I wasn’t so sure. People we are close to do all sorts of things that are out of character, I reminded him, I knew that better than most. Look at Ray, I’d said, and what he was doing, under my roof. But as Jamie gently pointed out, I only knew Ray for a couple of years – he’d known Alan all his life. I wanted to say more – to remind him of all the things my dad didn’t tell me about Hanne, and what Hanne did to my dad, but I just nodded and agreed that Alan probably wasn’t the guy.
As we were draining our coffees, I told him I’d reported the chalk letter to the police that morning, and found myself watching his face for a reaction. But he just nodded and agreed it was the right thing to do. And then the weirdest thing of all happened. Jamie, the guy I’ve known since I was four years old, asked me if I wanted to grab a drink some night. To talk it through a bit more, he blurted, as soon as he’d made the suggestion, his face colouring. I could feel my cheeks heating up too as I nodded yes, and agreed it would be good to talk it through. Whatever it was.
And that was that. At the grand old age of thirty-five, life-long neighbours Jamie Crowley and Marianne McShane were going for a drink. Linda would have a field-day.
Parking the jeep at the side of the cottage, I walked around to the front door, my eyes combing the ground for more chalk letters. There were none, and no trace of yesterday evening’s R. R for what? R for “Ray”? I shivered. That made no sense. I scanned the front of the house. Everything looked just as it had this morning, nothing out of place. Bedroom curtains closed, living-room curtains open. Windows tightly shut.
Standing outside my bedroom, I slipped my fingers under the lower part of the sash window and tried to lift it. A fraction of an inch but nothing more. You could slip a piece of paper through at most. I thought about what Jamie had said – about putting sticky tape around the frame. Did I even have any tape? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d needed it. Christmas presents aren’t a big thing when you have no family. I unlocked the door and stepped inside. The house felt quieter than usual, though I couldn’t pinpoint what sounds I was expecting to hear. I stood in the living room, listening, my skin prickling. Would I know if someone had been here while I was out? Maybe I should put a piece of thread across the doorway. Or even easier, something in front of the door, something innocuous that would slide away if the door was pushed open. Like a book, I thought, glancing over at my Julia Land paperback on the coffee table.
I shivered. The living room was ice-cold. Sooner or later I’d have to invest in some kind of insulation, but the burglar alarm was going to eat up a chunk of savings. And the motion-sensor lights. What else had the security consultant said? Close the front gate – so simple, and yet I’d left the bloody thing open again. Sighing, I pulled on my jacket and walked down the driveway to close it. As I was about to turn towards the house, I spotted someone in the distance, standing in the middle of the road. Squinting into the afternoon glare, I could just about make out the black-brimmed hat. Alan. What was he doing? As my eyes adjusted, I realised he was staring in my direction. What the hell was up with him now? I shook my head and stalked back to the house, cursing Ray for getting me into this situation in the first place.
That night, with Ray and the bookshop sighting still on my mind, I googled him again. Still no news of a book tour in Ireland. So what was he doing here? I tried Facebook – we weren’t Facebook friends but Ray had no idea how to fix his privacy settings so I could pretty much see everything he posted. Back when he lived here, Facebook was the new shiny thing we were all trying, but he dismissed it, announcing it would never take off. He shook his head in mock dismay when I set up my account, and at the time I thought it was somehow cute – part of our relationship dynamic: the older, cultured writer, and the younger, tech-savvy girl. Now I could see it for what it was – a constant need to make pronouncements about anything and everything, whether he knew what he was talking about or not.
But his Facebook account gave me no clues. Photos of his books, his book signings, his pug, and his house – nothing about Ireland. Good. Maybe it was a fleeting visit. Maybe he was gone. Maybe it was never him.
There were new notifications in the Armchair Detective group. Judith and Barry both had updates on the footprint cases they’d been researching. Barry had taken four cases and had suggested I take just two, because I had my day-job to do as well. Barry didn’t have a job – something to do with a tech business he sold off in his thirties. He never struck me as the tech-entrepreneur type – according to Facebook, he was forty-two, but in his profile picture, courtesy of his receding hairline and 1980’s style gold-rimmed glasses, he looked older. He could be needy and obsessive about the group but, to be fair to him, he was extraordinarily good at research, and had come back with a whole heap of extra information on his cases. He’d typed up all his findings in a Word document and added the file to the Facebook group. It was brilliantly put together, but there were so many details – some similar to the Blackwood Strangler’s profile, some not at all – it made the whole thing muddier.
I’m way behind, sorry, guys,I typed, after a quick read of Barry’s document. The real world sucked me out of things for a bit. And I don’t know if I’ll ever manage such a detailed executive summary – fair play, Barry.
Barry replied with a hugging emoji. Thanks, Marianne, that means a lot. I can help with your cases if you like?
No, don’t worry – I have time tonight and could do with distraction.
Judith joined the conversation: Nothing wrong with being sucked out of the internet and into the real world, Marianne.
Yeah, it wasn’t anything good in the real world though . . . it was a bit weird actually. I woke up this morning to find someone had drawn a letter R in chalk just outside my front door.
I stopped, wondering if they’d think I was overreacting.
Oh my God, you mean like the woman in Denmark who found the hangman in chalk drawn in her front yard and ended up dead? That was Neil, lurking until there was a bit of drama.
Judith was quick to jump in. That’s not quite the same thing, Neil – you’ll be worrying poor Marianne.
It did make me think of that though, I typed. The chalk hangman and the initials scratched in the windowsill of another victim. And I didn’t tell you guys this but I may as well now – on Monday morning, there were footprints in my garden, and I thought I saw a face at the window in the middle of the night. And someone left a doll in my jeep.
Good Lord, but you surely don’t think the Blackwood Strangler is in Ireland stalking you? Judith said.
Before I could reply, Barry jumped in.
If I may say, there are strong links between the cases around Europe – there’s every possibility these were Blackwood Strangler, or copy-cat.
I realised then I’d told them my story so they could reassure me there was absolutely no way it had anything to do with a serial killer. On that front, things were not working out as planned.
I suppose if he’s gone to other countries, there’s no reason he wouldn’t go to Ireland.
That was Neil again. Thanks, Neil.
Isn’t it more likely it’s a child playing a prank? Especially the doll? Judith wrote, and I couldn’t tell if she was trying to make me feel better or saying what she really believed.