The Purity of Vengeance (32 page)

 • • • 

After another couple of intellectual challenges, Carl was finally let off the hook. Two more portions of fries were rounded off with three scoops of ice cream, by which time the boy was exhausted. Samantha and Ludwig called it a day and said their good-byes, leaving Mona standing in front of him with sparks in her eyes.

“I’ve made an appointment with Kris for Monday,” Carl said, wanting to get this part over with quickly. “I called him to apologize for not being able to make it today. Honestly, Mona, it’s been all go since this morning.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, drawing him into a tight embrace, so tight Carl was almost at boiling point.

“
I
think
you’re
ready for a bit of nooky,” she said, sliding her hand down the front of his trousers.

Carl sucked in air through his teeth. She certainly was perceptive, he’d give her that. Maybe she’d inherited it from her daughter.

Following the obligatory initial maneuvers that resulted in Mona popping off to the bathroom to powder her nose, Carl was left sitting on the edge of the bed with blazing cheeks, swollen lips, and a pair of briefs that suddenly felt far too small.

And then his mobile rang.

It was Rose’s number at HQ. Bollocks.

“Yeah, what is it, Rose?” he said bluntly into the receiver. “Make it short, I’m in the middle of something important,” he added, sensing his pride and joy slowly beginning to wilt.

“We came up trumps, Carl.”

“What are you talking about? And how come you’re still at work?”

“We both are. Hi, Carl!” Assad chirped in the background. What were they doing, having a dance party down there, or what?

“We’ve found another missing persons case. It wasn’t reported until a month after the others, so we didn’t see it to begin with.”

“OK, and what makes you think they’re linked?”

“They called it the VéloSoleX case. Bloke from Brenderup on Fyn gets on his moped and heads off for Ejby, leaves it outside the railway station, and no one ever sees him again. Vanished into thin air.”

“And what was the date?”

“Fourth of September 1987. But there’s more.”

Carl glanced toward the bathroom, where the woman of his erotic dreams was already making cooing noises.

“Come on, make it quick. What else did you turn up?”

“His name was Hermansen. Tage Hermansen.”

Carl frowned. “And?”

“Hermansen, Carl!” Assad cried out in the background. “Don’t you remember? That was the name Mie Nørvig mentioned in connection with the very first case her first husband handled for Curt Wad.”

“OK,” Carl replied. “We’ll have to look into it. Nice work. Now go home, the pair of you.”

“See you at HQ, right, Carl? Nine o’clock tomorrow morning?” Assad’s voice echoed in the receiver.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday, Assad. Haven’t you ever heard of days off?”

There was noise on the line as Rose handed the phone to Assad.

“Listen, Carl. If Rose and I can work on the rest day, you can drive to Fyn on a Saturday, can’t you?”

It wasn’t a question.

25

September 1987

Rita looked out across
Peblinge Lake, outwardly relaxed, yet tense and expectant, her body craving nicotine. Two cigarettes and she would head for the gray brick building, press the entry-phone button, push open the front door, and climb the stairway that would return her to her past. And then life would begin again.

She smiled to herself, and to the young man who was jogging by and who cast a flirtatious glance in return. Though she’d been up at the crack of dawn, she was in high spirits. She felt invincible.

With a cigarette between her lips she noted how the jogger stopped twenty meters on and began doing stretches, his gaze trained on her open coat and ample breasts.

Another day, perhaps,
her eyes signaled as she lit her cigarette.

The only thing that mattered at the moment was Nete. Seeing Nete was more urgent than a kid with his brains dangling between his legs.

She had been turning the question over in her mind from the day she opened the letter until this morning, when she’d climbed into her car and headed for the capital. Why did Nete want to see her? Hadn’t they agreed years ago never to meet up again? Hadn’t Nete made that abundantly clear last time they saw each other?

“It was your fault I ended up on that bloody island. You’re the one who dragged me into it that day,” Rita mouthed, mimicking her former friend between drags on her ciggie, the young jogger still trying to gauge his chances.

Rita laughed. Those had been pretty unhealthy times, back in the solemn rigor of the asylum in 1955.

 • • • 

The day Nete arrived at the institution in Brejning in eastern Jutland, four of the less-retarded patients had got themselves into a fight. The high-ceilinged halls echoed with shouts and cries. It sounded like bedlam.

Rita loved days like that, when something happened. She’d always enjoyed watching a good punch-up, and the staff excelled at meting out punishment in kind.

She was standing by the entrance as the two police officers led Nete in. A brief glimpse was all she needed to realize that here was a girl much like herself. Keen eyes, shocked by the ugliness of what she was seeing. Not only that, there was a fury about her. Nete was a survivor, the same as herself.

Rita set store by anger. It was what kept her going. Stealing, relieving gullible fools of their wallets, pushing those aside who stood in her way. Of course, she knew anger would never be a solution, but somehow the emotion was enough in itself. With a rage inside her, she felt capable of anything.

The new girl was given a room two doors from her own. Rita decided to approach her that evening. They would be friends, allies, no matter what. She would cultivate her.

She took the girl to be a couple of years younger than herself. Essentially naive, poorly broken in. Most certainly intelligent, but without yet having learned enough about life and human nature to understand everything worked like a game. Rita would teach her.

When the girl tired of darning socks all day long, and her first clashes with the staff knocked her out of synch, she would come to Rita for comfort. And Rita would provide. Before the beech tree came into leaf, the two of them would abscond, Rita promised herself. They would cross the Jutland peninsula to the west coast, where they would board a fishing boat in Hvide Sande that would take them to England. There would always be fishermen ready to help two pretty girls on the run. Who in his right mind would pass up the chance of rocking the boat with the two of them belowdecks?

When they reached England, they would learn English and get jobs, and when they were ready they would move on to America.

Rita had the plan. All she needed was someone to carry it out with.

 • • • 

Less than three days passed before this new girl’s problems began. She asked too many questions, it was that straightforward. The way she stood out from all the other deranged and simpleminded souls, her questions would never be taken as anything but criticism, an assault upon the system.

“Keep your head down,” Rita told her in the corridor. “Don’t let them know how clever you are. It won’t do you any good. Do as they say, and do it in silence.”

And then she pulled Nete toward her and drew her tight. “You’ll get away, I promise, but first there’s something I need to know. Is anyone likely to come and visit you here?”

Nete shook her head.

“So there’s no one to go home to if they ever let you out?”

The question clearly shocked her. “What do you mean, if they ever let me out?”

“You don’t think anyone ever just gets out of here, do you? I know the buildings look nice, but it’s still a prison. We might be able to look out on fields and the fjord, but all around us there’s invisible barbed wire growing up out of the ground. You’ll never scale that fence without me, so you’d better fucking get used to the idea.”

Nete giggled unexpectedly.

“Hey, we’re not supposed to swear in here,” she admonished quietly, digging a playful elbow into Rita’s side.

She was all right.

 • • • 

After Rita had smoked her two cigarettes she looked at her watch. It was 10:58. Time to put her head into the jaws of the lion. Time to break its teeth.

The jogger was now leaning against a tree. She almost called out to him, to tell him to wait until she came back, but then she thought of Nete’s luscious hair, her curves, and thought better of it. There’d always be cocks available. All she had to do was snap her fingers. Anywhere. Anytime.

Nete’s voice seemed unfamiliar over the entry phone, but she didn’t let this bother her.

“Nete! How lovely to hear your voice again,” she said into the mike, pushing open the front door at the buzzer. Maybe Nete really
was
ill. It sounded like it.

A moment’s unexpected apprehension vanished when Nete opened the door of the apartment and stood looking at her as if the twenty-six years that had passed had been but a gust of wind, and all the bad blood between them was gone.

“Come in, Rita, you look marvelous. And thanks for being on time,” Nete said.

She led her to the living room and invited her to sit down. Still the same white teeth, the full lips. And the same blue eyes that could shift from frost to fire like no one else Rita had ever met.

Fifty years old, and quite as beautiful after all these years, Rita thought to herself as Nete stood with her back to her, pouring the tea. Those fine slender legs of hers in neatly pressed slacks. A tight blouse that clung to the curve of her hips, her bum as firm as ever.

“You’ve kept well, darling. I can’t believe that whatever’s wrong with you can be anything serious. Tell me it’s not true. That it was just a wheeze to get me here.”

Nete turned to face her with the teacups in her hands and warmth in her eyes. But she said nothing. The quiet one, as ever.

“I was sure you never wanted to see me again, Nete,” Rita went on, looking around the room. It wasn’t opulent. Not for a woman Rita’s inquiries told her was good for millions. “Even so, I’ve thought about you a lot, as I’m sure you can imagine,” she added, now looking at the tea Nete placed in front of her.

She smiled. Two cups, not three.

She turned and peered out of the window. No lawyer. This was looking cozy.

 • • • 

Rita and Nete made a good team. The staff realized as much instantly. “We’re short of hands in the children’s ward,” they said, and equipped them with spoons.

For a couple of days they fed children who stood tethered to radiators because they were mentally incapable of sitting at the table. It was horrible, messy work that took place slightly removed from the others in order to spare them the sad spectacle. When the girls proved worthy of this new responsibility and able to keep their charges presentably clean, they were rewarded with the additional task of keeping the other end of the digestive system equally unsoiled.

Rita puked. Where she came from, the only foreign excrement that encroached upon her life was what the sewers occasionally spewed up when the heavens opened in sudden, torrential downpours. Nete, on the other hand, could wipe bums and wring dirty nappies like she’d never done anything else.

“Shit’s just shit,” she stated. “It’s what I was brought up in.”

She told of cowpats and pig shit and horse dung, of days so long that being at the asylum must have seemed like a holiday in comparison.

But Nete knew it was no vacation. That much was plain from the dark blotches under her eyes, and her cursing the doctor who had duped her with his outrageous IQ test.

“None of the doctors here know what it’s like getting up at four in the morning to milk cows in winter, or even in summer for that matter,” she would snarl when a besmocked physician made a rare appearance. “Would he recognize the smell of the shed when a cow has an infection in the womb that won’t go away? Never in a million years. So why call
me
stupid, just because I don’t know who’s king of Norway?”

When they’d been wiping mouths and arses for two weeks and found they could come and go on the children’s ward as they pleased, Rita began her crusade.

“Have you been to see the consultant yet, Nete?” she would ask in the mornings. “Or any of the other doctors? Have they written that recommendation to the parish council yet? Have they even noticed you’re here?” She rattled the questions off like a machine gun.

And after a week had passed, Nete had heard enough.

When lunch was over that day, she looked around her at the vacant faces, the crooked frames, the short legs and shifty eyes. It was beginning to dawn on her.

“I want to speak to the consultant,” she said to one of the nurses, who passed her by with a shake of her head. And after she’d repeated her request a couple more times with no response, she stood in the middle of the room and screamed it as loud as she was able.

Now Rita’s experience stood her in good stead.

“You’ll certainly see him if you keep
that
up. Only before you get there you’ll have been strapped to a bed for days on end and given injections to shut you up. I’m not joking.”

Nete leaned her head back to scream out her shrill appeal with renewed force, but Rita stopped her.

“The only way girls like you and me can get out of here is either by doing a runner or getting sterilized. Do you realize how fast they can sort who’s to be sterilized from who isn’t? I know for a fact the consultant and the psychologist picked out fifteen girls in ten minutes last week. How many do you think got off? No, once the cases have been through the board in the Ministry of Social Affairs, you can be sure most of them are packed off to Vejle General Hospital before they know what’s happening.

“So I’ll ask you again, Nete. Is there anyone outside this place you’re going to miss? Because if there isn’t, then do a bunk with me after we’ve given the kids their dinner.”

 • • • 

The events of the two weeks that followed were easy to sum up.