The Killing Forest (9 page)

L
ouise's phone alarm startled her. She stared confusedly at the dark-gray ceiling for a moment before realizing she was in her childhood bedroom, in Lerbjerg. Slowly, everything came back to her.

She had taken the train from Holbæk after the meeting with René Gamst. Exhaustion had won out over anger as she walked to the station and sat down in the Copenhagen train, but when they reached Vipperød she called her father and asked him to pick her up at Hvalsø station. She wasn't ready to go home just yet. First she had to stop by the Starling House and talk to René's wife.

Louise swung her legs off the bed and sat a moment. She'd told her parents that Jonas was staying with a friend; that it was convenient for her to stay there because she had an interrogation in the area the next morning. She took a quick shower and hoped that Bitten hadn't already left to drop her daughter off. René's wife worked for Hvalsø Kommune, the local government.

She finished her shower at twenty past eight, and soon after wrestled her mother's green bicycle out of the old horse stall and pedaled angrily into the forest, thinking about René's scornful words.

Camilla could be right: He might have wanted to hurt her. At least that could be part of it. But Klaus's parents didn't believe he'd committed suicide, either. And others had to be punished if it turned out they were involved.

Louise hopped off the bicycle and leaned it against a tree. She walked down an uneven stone pathway to the old forest ranger's house. Hollyhocks lined an outer wall with small-paned windows, their tops leaning over toward the thatched roof's overhang. She knocked on the stable door and glanced around but saw no sign of anyone apart from the pink child's bike lying on the lawn.

She knocked again and stepped back. She heard a noise inside the house, then Bitten opened the door and stared at her in obvious surprise. She was wearing one bath towel and drying her hair with another.

“Yes?” she said. She seemed uneasy about her unannounced morning visitor.

“I'd like to talk to you for a few moments,” Louise said.

The last time they had spoken together, a sort of confidentiality had arisen between them. But of course that was before Louise put her husband behind bars.

“This isn't such a good time,” Bitten said, but Louise was already halfway in the hallway. She pushed Bitten into the living room. Before they reached the sofa, she noticed a dark shadow in the bathroom doorway. Big Thomsen stepped out. He had just taken a shower; a small pool of water formed at his feet while he wrapped himself in a dark-blue bathrobe.

Louise guessed that Thomsen had appropriated René's robe, seeing that it barely covered his stomach and stretched tightly across the shoulders.

“What do you want?” he asked. He stood behind Bitten, acting as if he were master of the house.

“I just want to hear how Bitten is doing,” Louise ad-libbed.

“She's doing just great,” he said. He grabbed Bitten's narrow hips, pulled her back, and began grinding against her ass. He stared into Louise's eyes. “I'm making sure she don't get lonely.”

René's wife turned pale. Her eyes darted over the furniture and the complete mess in the living room.

Louise followed her eyes and noticed several things that hadn't been there before. An overnight bag beside the woodstove, a large, wide leather chair with footstool, an enormous flat-screen television.

So. Big Thomsen had moved in and taken over Gamst's wife while he sat in Holbæk Jail. For a moment she stared at Bitten, trying to get a read on her thoughts.

“It won't bother me one bit, you talking to her while I'm here,” Thomsen said. He walked over to the coffee table and picked up his iPhone. “But you can see for yourself that she's fine.”

Bitten said nothing, her eyes glued to the floor.

Louise ignored Thomsen and kept watching her in the hope she would look up. She couldn't believe that René's wife had voluntarily allowed Big Thomsen to move in. On the other hand, it seemed as if she were resigned to the situation. But surely she had something to say. She knew Bitten had been having an ongoing affair with her husband's friend, but it was her impression that the woman had been pressured into it, that Thomsen otherwise would have fired Gamst.

Thomsen worked for the Bistrup Forestry District besides owning three semis. Gamst drove for him. Louise had once asked Bitten why Thomsen even bothered working for the district. She'd explained that he just loafed around in the forest; he made his living from the trucks but was too lazy to drive long distances.

“Call me sometime today, okay?” she said. She headed for the door when Bitten didn't answer.

“Why the hell should she?” Big Thomsen snapped at her. “Nobody here owes you a thing.”

“I've heard enough out of you.” Louise whirled around and glared at him. “Bitten can answer for herself.”

“You keep your nose out of our business,” he sneered.

Bitten's expression was blank, her arms hanging limply at her sides.

“No!” Louise spat out. “There is no ‘our' business. I will have nothing to do with you. You will not interfere with my work and you will stay out of my investigations. I couldn't care less what strings you pull or who you try to shut up.”

She slammed the stall door and stood under the trees to calm herself. She breathed the morning air deep into her lungs. Damn it, she thought. She'd lost her temper. Not that she regretted it, but she'd just made things a little more difficult for herself. Especially if Thomsen started asking about this investigation he was supposed to stay out of. Her chances of asking Bitten about Sune, about why he was hiding in the forest, had also taken a hit.

The morning sunlight poured in from above the treetops. Louise was certain that Thomsen stood inside watching her, if he wasn't already calling around on his phone.

She pedaled away, but her legs felt heavy, as if they held all her animosity toward him. She rode behind a mountain of firewood and stopped, leaned against the wood, and closed her eyes.

What the hell had happened to Bitten? She was thirty-one, with a young daughter. Despite that, she didn't seem to realize she had the right to say no. Or was it Louise who didn't get it?

What was going on around here? Not just with Bitten. Everyone seemed mixed up in something or with somebody, and Louise couldn't connect the dots, didn't understand the games they were playing. But even if she had to show up at Bitten's job, she was going to pressure her and find out if there were problems between the butcher and his son. And if René's wife knew anything about Klaus's death, she would get that out of her, too.

Louise put Thomsen out of her mind and checked her phone to see how late she would be. She'd better call Eik, she thought. It annoyed her that he still considered a text to be something the devil thought up. If you needed him, you had to call.

Three messages. Two were from Jonas who, being the responsible boy he was, had gone home to be with Dina instead of sleeping at his friend's, after Louise told him she was staying in Hvalsø. He'd walked the dog and was on his way to school now.

That warmed Louise's heart. She missed him. Overnight, it seemed, he'd grown up into a mature teen. She knew it wouldn't be long before parties and friends began to pull at him more strongly than the yellow Labrador, whom he'd taken good care of as he'd promised.

The last message came from a number Louise didn't have on her phone.
C was hit by a car, call. Frederik.

T
he asshole meant to hit me,” Camilla told Frederik again, in the car on the way home.

The X-rays had taken an eternity, and it had been the wee hours of the morning before the doctor finally examined her. Only then had he decided to keep her under observation for a day, to make sure she hadn't sustained a concussion.

Camilla's entire body had hurt too much for her to complain about waiting. Everyone in the emergency room had been in the same boat. Several slept on hard chairs, and a mother had left despite her son's considerable pain from a fall on his trick two-wheeler scooter. She'd sat straight in her chair and waited patiently for eight hours as blood soaked through the tall teenager's pants at the knees and tears ran down his acne-covered cheeks.

The emergency room nurse had walked around with her eyes on the gray linoleum floor, avoiding contact with the many people waiting. “These poor people,” Frederik had said, after trying several times to get someone to help. “My wife was rushed here in an ambulance and still no one has time to look at her. HEY! ANYONE HERE?”

But nothing happened, apart from an elderly lady with a scarf tied neatly around her head, who looked up from her magazine and said her husband had fallen down the stairs at the train station.

It had to be tough, working here every day under this kind of pressure, Camilla thought, when the doctor sent Frederik home and told him to come back for her the next day. They had waited for the doctor all morning, with compelling reasons to protest cuts in the national health care system going through her head.

“We can't know he ran you down on purpose,” Frederik said. Without saying it directly, he was critical of her for not having reflectors on her bicycle. That, of course, annoyed Camilla even more.

“Oh we can't, can we? Well, I can. I can goddamn tell when a driver turns his brights on right in my eyes. I was standing in the middle of the road. It wasn't like it was dark when he sped up to hit me!”

Frederik nodded while concentrating on traffic. “Whether he tried to hit you or not, there's no doubt he was driving way too fast,” he said. “And we don't allow unauthorized vehicles. But right now, I'm just relieved you weren't hurt worse.”

Camilla cooled down. She knew he was right. The doctor had said it was a miracle her injuries weren't severe. He'd added that the next few days she would probably feel like she'd gone twelve rounds in a heavyweight fight. But no bones were broken. Her black-and-blue eye looked bad. The doctor thought she must have hit a tree trunk after being flung into the air. The right side of her face was swollen, closing up her eye. Camilla had been shocked when the nurse handed her a mirror.

“Tønnesen went out and put the chains up so nobody can drive into the forest now. Once in a while, someone ignores the signs and drives down to the creek. But this happened on one of the small roads, and I'm thinking we may have a poacher. What did the car look like?”

Camilla thought for a few moments, then shook her head. “It was bigger than most cars, but I don't know if it was a van or a four-wheel-drive. It came at me like a big, black shadow.”

That's all Camilla could remember. She had no idea how long she had been on the ground. Didn't know whether it was Frederik's voice or the ambulance's siren she'd heard first. Her entire world had consisted of pain. She'd cried when they lifted her up on the stretcher.

“By the way, how did you find me?” she asked Frederik.

“I didn't. It was Elinor. She came up to the house and demanded I follow her. I didn't realize until I got out there that there'd been an accident.”

In her head Camilla saw the old lady with the long gray braids. She shuddered.

She put her hand on Frederik's thigh and moaned loudly when they took a sharp right just after the Viking Ship Museum. “It was a good thing you went with her,” she said. She asked if he'd spoken with Louise.

“She and Eik have already looked around out there. They went back to their office, but she insisted on coming out to stay the weekend. She just had to pick up Jonas and the dog.”

Camilla nodded. She was happy that her friend had investigated the scene instead of showing up at the hospital with flowers and chocolate. “And Eik! What about him? Is he coming, too?”

She couldn't figure out if Louise still had something going with her colleague. Camilla liked him, a lot. Louise and Eik as a couple—that she hadn't seen coming, but they got along very well. Though Louise hadn't mentioned him since that night at the gamekeeper's. Maybe it was a good idea to get him back in the picture, now that so much from Louise's past was flaring up again.

“Anyway, I'll call and ask,” she said.

“Shouldn't you maybe—” Frederik began, but Camilla had already called the National Police Department and asked to speak to the Search Department.

“Eik sounded happy for the invitation,” she said a few moments later. “He'll see if they can't take off early. What about Markus?” They turned into their driveway. “Is he home this weekend?”

“I don't really know,” Frederik said. He shrugged.

Lately it was as if someone had stuck a rocket up Markus's rear end. Her fifteen-year-old son was out constantly with his friends, and on the rare occasions he was home, he lay around on his bed wrapped up in Facebook while his TV blasted away. It was more or less impossible to come into contact with him. At least for her.

They drove up to the house. Camilla swung her legs out of the car. “Oh shit,” she moaned.

Frederik came around and pulled her up. Unable to stand straight, she hobbled slowly toward the house.

“We better get you in bed,” he said. Despite her weak protests, he carried her up the broad steps to the front door. “If you take a few of the pills the doctor gave you and rest awhile, maybe you'll feel better when Louise comes.”

Camilla relented; it was too painful to walk anyway. Frederik carried her to their second-floor bedroom. He helped her out of her clothes and tucked her into bed. He sat for a while, stroking her cheek. Then he fetched a glass of water and handed it to her.

“Thanks,” she whispered, and kissed him. His longish hair fell over her face, his stubble tickling her chin.

She swallowed the pills and nodded when he said he would check on her later.