The Return E-Book

Lone Theils

• Herausgeber: Storytel Original
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: The Return
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 438

Beschreibung

As a young and newly qualified detective, Superintendent Signe Brask is put on the case of 10-year-old Mille who has disappeared without a trace during a family trip. Despite a vigorous search, the girl is never found. Ten years later, a young woman shows up in Copenhagen claiming to be Mille. The family welcomes her home, but where has she been for 10 years? When Signe goes to close the case, she makes some unexpected discoveries. And that's exactly when the family is hit by a new tragedy....

Leseprobe

www.storytel.com

Copyright © Storytel Original 2021

Copyright © Lone Theils 2021

Original title: Hjemvendt - 1. sæson

Translation: Christine Gasbjerg

Cover design: Cover Kitchen Company Limited

ISBN 978-91-7967-515-8

Prologue

Tears were running down her cheeks, the frosty tracks stinging her skin. She was utterly exhausted. She could no longer feel her feet, her fingers were stiff, and every inch of her body was screaming to get out of the cold. Into the warm light, so far away behind the trees that she no longer knew how she would ever get back there. A world of cottages with thatched roofs, where people were safe. Where there was food and warmth. Peace and quiet.

Darkness had long since fallen over the woods, turning the large fir trees into jagged monsters towering over the small path. They flicked at her face, as if to say: The worst of all things has happened. You will never find her. She was small and weak, and the forest was far too big. Her boots crackled on the stiff, frozen grass. The smoky smell of peat fires told her it was not far now. She could hear a dog barking. Her voice was raw and hoarse from calling out for hours to no avail. All the same she gathered the last remains of her strength.

“Milleee? Milleee?”

Nobody answered her, and, overcome by despair, she stumbled across a stub and did not get back up. She was too tired to ever get up again.

Eventually it was Quist who found her. “Come on, Signe. You have to go home now. There’s nothing more we can do tonight. Home to sleep.” His tone of voice did not invite for debate.

“No,” she protested.

Quist did not say anything more. He simply pulled her up by her sleeve, led her to the old gamekeeper’s farm and handed her over. “She can’t go on tonight,” he announced to the room in general.

Signe submitted, and sat down obediently to drink the cup of hot coffee he handed her. She waited until he had been gone for five minutes.

Then she pulled her gloves on and went back into the forest.

Part 1

The Phone Call. 13th of December

It would start on the main road, where the black trees stretched up above the loamy, bare earth, pointing towards the heavens like accusing fingers. The flood of guilt and despair that forced Signe to return to Hjerm once a year.

She had arranged for it to be the last job of the day. From experience, she knew that the short drive and what followed would drain her strength as quickly as the setting sun was yielding to the deep, black darkness. A darkness that seemed all-consuming on this Thursday afternoon in December. As soon as she had passed the city limit of Holstebro, there would be no street lights or oncoming traffic to soften the deepening night, the flat, naked winter scenery, the heavy knowledge of what lay ahead. It was the same every year. Signe could not decide whether it was some kind of tortured penance that she had to drag herself through, or if she really did it for the sake of the family.

She closed her bag and turned off the computer, heaving a sigh so deep that Martinus glanced up from the case he was working on.

“The Lindbergs?” he said, briefly.

Signe nodded. Even though most of her colleagues at the Holstebro station had of course heard about Mille Lindberg, it was only a few who remembered the exact anniversary of the decade-old case. But Signe’s partner knew well enough that on the 13th of December one should refrain from leaving problems on the desk of police officer Brask. On that date, Signe would always have one foot in the past, when she had been a 22 year-old police recruit, completely unable to assist a family living through the worst nightmare that can happen to anybody.

The small avenue of linden trees appeared to the right, and Signe turned her black Fiat Punto down the dirt road with the blue mailbox and the newspaper- tube for Dagbladet. The grass in the middle of the road had been flattened under a light layer of snow. The car took the turning almost by itself. It had been brand new the first time she had pulled into the courtyard, her heart pounding in her chest, afraid that she would not do her job well enough. Well aware that there was only one thing that was good enough. The thing that she had failed to deliver on for ten long years.

She hadn’t made an appointment, and it wasn’t until she saw the dark grey Volvo parked in the courtyard that she acknowledged that part of her was hoping they were not in. But Katrine and Karl were always in. Farmers never travel anywhere. Families with a missing child hardly ever relocate. The hope of the child one day returning makes it impossible, because the thought of the missing child being met by a locked door or strangers is unbearable. And so, to leave is to admit that you have lost hope.

It was almost dark now, and the golden square of the kitchen window lit up the middle of the white farmhouse. Katrine was standing at the kitchen sink, bent in concentration over her work. Signe hesitated by the front door with the small metal knocker, not wanting to invade the small, peaceful haven belonging to Mille’s mother.

The same old Christmas wreath, made from straw with faded, red ribbons, was hanging on the door. Exactly as it had done that Christmas, and Signe knew that when she stepped into the entrance hall, the same old straw goat would be standing right inside the door. The Lindbergs held on to tradition.

She let the knocker fall, and it banged like a gunshot through the quiet courtyard. If Signe had to point to one thing that had changed through all the years she had been coming here, it was the fact that the courtyard had grown quieter. As if sound and life had started to seep out of the buildings, as it gradually became clear that Mille had not been found. Perhaps never would be found. As if the three-winged farm, with the cowshed on one side and the barn on the other, had folded upon itself in a mournful, Japanese origami of silence.

Signe hardly saw any evidence of friends these days. In the early years, there had been a motley collection of little girls’ bicycles, and later Stig’s moped had been joined by several Puch Maxis. But these days Malene’s red bike was abandoned in the garage, and the ghost of Stig’s rusty moped could be discerned behind the garage door.

After a moment, Katrine opened the door, a wary expression on her face.

“I thought it might be you,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. They were red, as if she had immersed them in cold water for a long time. She stepped back. “Come on in. I’ve got coffee on the stove.”

Signe followed her into the kitchen. It still looked the same - the plate rack with the seagull service, and the blue and white china containers with curly writing to hold sugar, flour, and coffee. A pot half-full of peeled potatoes was standing next to the sink.

Katrine got a mug with flowers on it from the cabinet, went to the coffee pot, filled the mug, and turned the radio down in the middle of a disco-version of Jingle Bells. She put a jug of fresh milk as thick as cream in front of Signe, along with a small plate of sweet vanilla biscuits.

“I just baked yesterday,” she said.

Signe thanked her and wriggled out of her black uniform jacket. Then she went to the utility room to hang it on the rack, next to Karl’s boiler suit and a golden duvet jacket which could only belong to Malene. As an investigator, she wore civilian clothes, but she kept the jacket because it was warm, practical, and had spacious pockets. By the time she returned to take a seat on the settle, Katrine had poured her own coffee and was seated by the table.

Signe studied Katrine. She was still a beautiful woman, but grief had roughened her features every day and night for ten years. Her long fair hair had gradually turned to grey, and her hairstyle had become shorter. Faint grooves on both sides of her chin told of a life lived with little cause for laughter.

“You’ve had a haircut,” Signe said.

Katrine touched her hair with a faint smile. ”Yes. I needed a bit of change.”

They drank their coffee in silence for a moment.

“Karl’s just gone to Vinderup to check out a couple of heifers he’s got his eye on,” Katrine said, explaining why her husband had not come in from the stables when their guest called.

That suited Signe fine. Sometimes it was easier just to sit face-to-face with one other person. “How are you doing, Katrine?” she asked quietly.

Katrine shrugged and gazed at a Christmas decoration in the middle of the table, with a calendar candle counting down the days until Christmas, and spruce twigs that had already started shedding needles. The golden numbers running down the side of the candle showed they were three days behind and had only burned down to the 10th. “It’s never an easy day. You’d think it would get easier as the years go by. But it doesn’t,” she said.

“And the kids? How are they doing?”

Katrine looked up again. “Malene is going to be confirmed in April. She’s playing handball right now. She’ll be home for dinner.”

“And it’s going well in school?”

“It could be better. But it’s not easy for her. She still has nightmares every now and then.”

“About Mille?”

Katrine sighed. “Yes. I think so. She doesn’t talk about it, but some mornings she’s so pale and shaken, and won’t even let me touch her. But when I try to talk to her about it, she shuts down completely.”

“Does she have any good girlfriends to talk to?”

“No. That’s what worries me so much, you see. Of course I know that teenagers don’t speak to their mothers about everything. God knows I didn’t do so myself when I was her age and started fooling around with boys. But she never brings any friends home, and she doesn’t speak about anybody from school. Neither girls nor boys.”

“You know she can get help, right? There’s support if …”

Katrine didn’t let her finish the dangerous sentence. “Karl doesn’t want it. He thinks it’ll get worse if we keep on bringing it up.” She wrung her hands and then deliberately changed the subject.

“Stig has got himself a job as an apprentice. As an electrician.”

“Oh. That’s nice.” Signe reached for a biscuit, but her hand somehow ended on top of Katrine’s, still very cold and damp, where it rested on the table.

“And how about you, Katrine? Are you coping OK?”

Katrine looked up with tear-filled eyes. “It hurts so much that I don’t know where she is. It may sound silly, but every Christmas I pass those pillows you can buy at the florist. You know, the little hearts of moss with tiny, red winter tulips. For placing on the graves. Mille loved tulips. She said they sparkled. But I can’t buy her a heart. I don’t have anywhere to place a wreath. Perhaps I could move on, if only I had somewhere to go visit her. Karl says it’s nonsense, but it means something to me. It really does,” she said. Her voice was controlled, but Signe could hear the despair just below the surface.

Katrine removed her hand and wiped away a tear with her thumb before it could trickle any further down her cheek. Signe left her to recover in peace while she dug out the orange folder from her bag. It contained a summary of the missing person case, with a code number she knew by heart: 83167. A file that had not grown by as much as a single new sheet of paper over the past three years, Signe had to admit with shame. But there just was nothing new. No more new leads. Every stone had been turned over. And none had yielded the most microscopic hope that the ten year-old, blonde girl with the bright smile, who had gone on a Christmas adventure at Hjerl Hede one Saturday, ten years ago, would ever be reunited with her family.

Signe shuffled her papers, pointlessly, and cleared her throat. “Well, Katrine, as you’ve probably guessed, I don’t have any new information for you. But I want to assure you that we haven’t forgotten Mille. That will never happen, as long as I’m on the force. And we’re still keeping the investigation open. If anybody calls or enquires, then …”

Now it was Katrine who patted Signe’s hand. ”I know, Signe. I know.”

Just then the door opened and they could hear the little plonks of Karl kicking his clogs off and hanging up his coat. Soon after, he entered the kitchen and gave Signe a nod.

“I recognised your car again,” he said.

Katrine got up to get a mug, but Karl stopped her. “No thanks. I just had coffee over at Mogens’ house.”

“Are we going to get those heifers then?” Katrine asked.

“Yes. If he lowers the price.” Karl glanced at Signe and saw in her eyes that there was no need to even ask the question. There was no news. This was merely the annual ritual that this dark-haired woman with the serious eyes apparently needed to perform.

Katrine moved over to make room for Karl, but he hesitated. Perhaps he could not handle hearing Signe repeat all the poor excuses. About how she was not getting anywhere in the case of his beloved daughter, whom the police had never found. Surely there was nothing else to say on the matter.

Deep in her heart, Signe flinched. It had been the first big case she was involved in, and it was still open. Like a festering, weeping wound that was always there. Or a toothache you ignore, hoping it will pass by itself.

“I’ll be in the stables,” he said briefly, went back to the utility room, and put his boots back on.

Katrine slumped a little. “Dinner will be ready in half an hour,” she called and cast a sidelong glance at the large, red kitchen clock.

Soon after, they saw him cross the courtyard to visit his livestock. Signe was relieved to have him out of the kitchen. There was something unnerving about his dark gaze resting on her, demanding answers she did not have. While Katrine drew her sympathy, she had never felt at ease in the company of Karl.

“Will you join me upstairs?” Katrine asked. It was part of the ritual, and Signe had never refused. Katrine led the way up the steep staircase and down the narrow corridor. The second door on the right was locked, and Katrine dug a small key out of her apron pocket.

Mille’s room was a shrine to a life that was never lived. It was not untouched, and Signe knew that it must be Katrine who came in, once in a while, to clean and dust down. The small children’s room with sloping walls and a view over the fields was a snapshot of the life of a typical ten-year-old girl, right down to the half-read Harry Potter book on the night stand. The posters of horses stuck to the sloping walls with thumb pins. The satchel propped against the wardrobe. The threadbare soft toy dog. The pink cushions on the bed. More than anything, it was the absence of mess which revealed the fact that Mille had not been in her room for years. There were no exercise books and half-sharpened pencils on the desk, no horse magazines or crumpled T-shirts on the floor. It was too tidy for the living, here.

Ten years ago, the police had been in here looking for clues. A diary, a letter - anything which might indicate that Mille had disappeared of her own free will. Signe recalled that Krag had ransacked the wardrobe and even lifted the carpet. But his heart had not been in it. He knew Mille had not chosen to leave her family. Ten-year-old girls do not voluntarily leave their mothers.

On the shelves above the desk, a pile of presents was growing bigger. Signe counted nineteen. Nine Christmases and ten birthdays. She refused to consider what it would be like for a 20-year-old girl to open presents for her 10-year-old self, her 12-year-old self, and sense the longing contained in every little present. And she tried not to dwell on what it must be like for Katrine to maintain such a strong and passionate faith that she would know what a child she had not seen for ten years would want for Christmas, and would actually go and buy it in a shop. While at the same time, she had processed her grief over the years to the point where she was ready to buy a wreath for a grave that also did not exist.

To be able to hold those two thoughts at the same time - Signe could not comprehend how Katrine was able to manage it without falling to pieces every single day.

Katrine caught her eye. “I haven’t bought her Christmas present yet. But I’m considering a good book. Mille has always been so fond of reading. Or perhaps a perfume …”

Signe did not know what to say. Katrine had switched on the pink unicorn night light. In her mind’s eye, Signe saw a little girl in red pyjamas, and how Katrine must have stood right here by the bed, hundreds of times, to kiss her daughter good night. Right up until the day when Mille never came home to sleep in her own bed again.

The door was flung open downstairs and a deep voice called, “Hi mum! Is dinner ready?”

Katrine started. She reached over Signe to turn off the night light and hustled her out of the room.

Downstairs, Signe briefly greeted Stig before she put on her jacket. He was sitting in the living room and waved his hand at her without taking his eyes off the television screen. It was the same every time she came here. He would not speak to her, but whenever he thought she was not looking, he would stare at her, scanning her from head to toe. It had been like that from the first moment she set foot on the farm, and she had hoped he would grow out of it. So far, that had not been the case.

Katrine walked her to the door. There was nothing more to say. “Well. I guess we’ll be seeing each other again …”

Signe held her gaze. “Katrine, I promise you that I will never forget Mille. Never,” she said and closed the door gently behind her. She saw Katrine return to the sink to peel potatoes.

As she was standing by the car, fishing for her keys, the door to the stables opened, and Karl walked over. It was as if he had been waiting for her. He was a big man, with strong hands used to herding cows,and Now, he put one of those hands heavily on Signe’s shoulder. driving a tractor.

“I believe you come here with the best of intentions. But isn’t it about time to leave Katrine in peace?” he said, not trying to hide the anger in his voice.

She stared at him.

“Every time you’ve been here, Katrine is in pieces for days afterwards. We’d honestly rather not see you any more. She’s just too polite to tell you.”

Signe burned with shame. Was that really how Katrine felt about her attempts to keep the case alive? Was she just pretending? She recalled the atmosphere in the kitchen. “I believe that Katrine wants to see me,” she said, calmly.

“Well. We’d rather not.” Karl turned on his heel and slammed the stable door behind him.

The Fiat’s engine started right away, and as she slowly drove up to the main road again, she asked herself why she did this to herself every year. Was it really for Katrine? For Mille? Or to soothe her own sense of failure? When would she be ready to admit to herself that Mille was presumably dead, and that she would never find out who had taken her?

Her father had stopped asking. A long life as Principal had taught him that the human mind does not always comply with logic. Martinus had been asking for the first two years after he, a Funen man, had transferred to a precinct that he still considered to be the desolate Sibiria of Denmark. But he had also learned that his partner Signe Brask had no-go areas, covered by a thin, black ice that would break if you stamped too hard on it. You had to skate over it, and let her be. None of her other colleagues knew that she was still visiting Lindberg. Not even Richard Kirk, their head of department, had a clue that Signe religously drove to the farm in Hjerm on the 13th of December every year.

Officially, of course, Kirk knew the case was open as far as the police department of the Central and Western part of Jutland was concerned. But it had been a long time since any resources had been allocated to the search for Mille. The girl had vanished into thin air. Being the boss, he expected Signe to focus on their active cases - preferably those quickly and easily solved.

“We’re the largest precinct in Denmark,” Richard Kirk liked to point out at every opportunity. Signe hated his spread sheets and budget plans, and as much as possible, steered clear of having anything to do with the boss. There were no boxes in a spread sheet large enough for justice, anyway. There was no budget for visiting families capsized by grief. And there was no room in her job description for guilt about a case that had never been solved.

*

It was seven o’clock when she dropped by Netto, on one of those shopping trips that started with her remembering she needed rye bread, and ended with her leaving with a bunch of wilting tulips, a pack of frozen mince, a box of cleansing wipes, ketchup - and no rye bread.

When she let herself into the flat she did not want the mince any longer, and pushed it into the freezer next to a box of fish and a bag of frozen raspberries, from the brief period when she had resolved to drink fresh smoothies every morning.

She dug out her mobile and checked the time. Her father answered after three rings.

“Svend Brask.”

“Dad, you can tell from the display that it’s me calling,” she said.

“Hm. It’s rude to answer the phone without announcing your name. It’s a bad habit.”

“How are you doing today?”

Her father heaved a deep sigh. “Cauliflower gratin. Doesn’t that tell you everything?”

The council food delivery to the elderly was a constantly recurring topic. Svend Brask detested almost everything that was delivered to his door in vacuum-sealed servings, and Signe did not blame him. The food was greyish and meagre, like the fare of a humpbacked medieval monk, and seemed to be intended to cause acute eating disorders.

“Alas,” Signe said.

“I swear, even Oliver Twist was fed better at that rotten Victorian orphanage!”

“I’ll bet,” Signe said dryly, as she grabbed a carton of milk out of the fridge and checked the date stamp. It was fine until tomorrow.

“Well, what time are you coming tomorrow, and what are you bringing?”

Signe sighed. “I haven’t decided yet. But most likely a steak and stuff.”

If anybody had told her as a teenager that she would end up having dinner with her father every Friday night, she would have stared at them in disbelief. She might even laughed scornfully at the mere idea of ending up in Holstebro at all as an adult. This was not the life she had planned for herself. She meant to live in Copenhagen and be happy and strong - free to be someone other than the Principal’s daughter.

“How did it go out there?” her father asked, distracting her from the dream of her life in the capital that had never come to pass.

Signe sighed. “Same as usual. Katrine cried a little.”

Svend Brask drew in a breath, as though he were about to say something, but then changed his mind.

“What is it, dad?”

“Nothing.”

“No. It’s not nothing. Just say it, OK?”

“Okay. But you asked for it.”

Signe guessed what was coming and forced herself not to hang up.

“It’s been ten years now. When was there last any kind of progress in the case?” her father asked quietly.

“Three years ago. That witness from Ulfborg who had seen Mille in a black Citroën.”

To be precise, three years, two weeks, and three days ago. And three years, two weeks, and three days ago, Signe had confirmed it was a dead-end, and that the baker’s wife calling in the tip was just looking for some excitement. Signe had gone out there herself to follow up on the call, and when, after five minutes of conversation, she had found several large gaps in the statement of Else Pedersen, the young woman had started talking about the UFO she had seen late one night on her way home from the village hall in Vemb.

The old principal remained silent.

“Yes. Three years,” she said again, when the pause had dragged on for too long.

“Signe,” he said in the fatherly tone that both infuriated her and soothed like honey and a pat on the cheek when you have just fallen down and hurt your knee.

“Leave it, dad. Not today, okay?”

“Okay. As you wish. But ask yourself this: What are you gaining from constantly picking that wound? Why do you keep on going?”

“Dad!” Her voice came out harder than she had intended.

“All right, I’m leaving it. Inspector Morse is on in a minute. See you tomorrow, my dear. I wouldn’t mind some bearnaise with that steak,” he added, and ended the conversation.

For a while Signe stood holding the phone in impotent, smouldering rage – until her upstairs neighbour kindly provided an outlet in the shape of Lady Gaga at full blast.

She tightened her ponytail angrily, so hard it hurt her roots, and marched up the stairs, while Lady Gaga entertained all six flats in the house with this really bad romance she had got going. She hammered on the door to Jeanette’s flat with all the authority of someone who has been on patrol and seen their fair share of domestic disturbances. Still it took a full minute before the lady could be persuaded to open the door. She was wearing full make-up and a rose-pink kimono made of silk.

“What’s the matter? Where’s the fire?” she asked, fluttering the fake eyelashes that framed her eyes like little black insect’s legs.

At the academy they were taught body language – how to assert yourself, how to defuse a situation and enter a conflict without posing a threat. But if any of that knowledge had stayed in Signe’s mind, today was not the day she chose to use it. Her index finger hovered about ten centimetres from Jeanette’s well-powdered nose. “You’re turning that music down now. Right now! Understood?”

“Oh, relax. I’m just going out,” Jeanette said.

Signed drew herself up to her full height of 1.68 metres. Four centimetres above the requirement of the academy.

“Understood?” she repeated.

Jeanette rolled her eyes. You really need to get a life. But that’s no reason to stop the rest of us having a bit of fun now and then,” she snapped.

Signe didn’t move a muscle. Jeanette’s small, poisonous dart had hit a bull’s eye. Her personal life was indeed as barren as a flat snowfield. But there was no need to give that away.

“Turn it down!” she said simply. She turned on her heel and went back downstairs to her own apartment.

Thirty seconds later, the noise was reduced by half and the words were no longer distinguishable. Only a pounding bass frequency, apparently designed for some form of aural torture.

Back in her kitchen, she made herself a bowl of porridge with milk and plenty of sugar. Then she went to the living room and switched on the news. The voice of the announcer, just loud enough to be heard above the pounding bass from upstairs, earnestly reported the situation in Ukraine. The images and the cut to the correspondent in Moscow drifted over her as she ate and absent-mindedly opened the bag she had taken with her to the Lindbergs. There was a draught along the floor, and she put her granny’s crochet blanket over her legs as she pulled out the orange file and placed the tired and dog-eared pile of papers next to her bowl of oats.

She had ploughed through the case so many times that she knew it inside out. The orange file was more of a totem than an actual point of reference. The main body of the evidence was carefully filed in five yellow binders, sitting in the office at the police station. Martinus had looked questioningly at her when they’d moved into the brand new police station on Stationsvej. A place with modern art in the reception and shiny surfaces and windows did not look like the right home for a ten-year-old case that refused to be solved.

“Are you sure it should come to the new office?” he’d asked, with a hint of summer mornings in Funen in his voice.

“Yes,” she’d replied - as short and cold as a gust of wind by the North Sea in November.

And then they dropped it.

Signe hated the new building. It still felt like she was turning up at an accounting firm when she parked the Punto every morning. For this reason, Martinus had taken care to make the corner of the homicide department floor that constituted their office unit feel homely. He had put up his Henry Heerup poster of the swan, and decorated his notice board with photos of the red cocker spaniel Walter, who was his pride and joy.

Not that many people came to see their decor. People brought in for questioning were usually shown in to one of the meeting rooms, with a view of the health centre across the street. Which was probably just as well.

A photo from the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Aarhus hung on Signe’s notice board. The photo showed a close-up of a particular knot tied on a garrotte that had strangled a man. The knot had been key to the perpetrator being found guilty and charged with an additional murder, and it was for that reason that Signe was not concerned by the fact that the garrotte in the photo was still sitting around the neck of the victim. Even Martinus had become accustomed to the dreadful photo of Petersen - as he had named him, without knowing anything about his identity.

Apart from Petersen, the only decoration on Signe’s notice board was a request to contact the municipality in case of any suspicion of abuse of children.

One day Martinus had brought two succulent plants that he placed on the window sill.

“You’re taking care of those yourself,” Signe stated.

Martinus gave her a knowing wink. “No problem. They’re plastic.”

There were worse partners than Martinus. Signe knew that only too well, and had grown inured to his ongoing complaints about how impossible it was to find a decent brown sugar pastry anywhere in the precinct. She was even willing to take on the job of interpreting the taciturnity of Western Jutland, which still seemed to baffle the cheerful native of Funen after five years in the area.

“We’ll never get anything out of him. He obviously hated me from the moment I set foot in the house,” Martinus had grumbled, after a visit to the home of a witness. And Signe had had to explain that it was not a sign of hate or distrust of the police, when a fisherman from Thyboron did not talk the hind leg off a donkey. It was just a certain … economy of words.

“He shook your hand when you left. He’s crazy about you,” she insisted.

Martinus looked doubtfully at her. “Crazy about me? Is this the wry humour of Western Jutland?”

“No. He really liked you. But you do talk a bit too much.”

The pounding bass coming from Jeanette’s apartment upstairs had ceased , and shortly after, the front door slammed shut. She was probably going on another date. Signe thanked her maker for the ear plugs sitting in her night stand, in case the twenty-three-year-old hairdresser brought home one of her gentleman friends. She was a girl who seemed to believe that sex was not good enough unless you expressed yourself like a baby seal who had lost its mother.

Signe settled down with her papers and went over the information for the umpteenth time.

The case was reported to the police on the 13th of December at 14:03, and the commanding officer had immediately sent a patrol car to Hjerl Hede.

It was Katrine who had called in. Crying.

“My little girl is missing. You have to help me,” she had stammered.

The transcript of the call was in one of the files. Signe had only listened to the original recording once. There was something about the naked grief that made it unbearable to listen to. The panic and the voice breaking. The forced calm of the woman on the phone at the police control room.

“May I have your name, please?”

“Katrine Lindberg.”

“Okay, Katrine, where are you and what happened?” The voice belonged to Gerda Nielsen who had retired about five years ago now.

“I’m in Hjerl Hede! Mille is gone!” Desperate little sobs.

“And when did you last see Mille?”

At this point there was a long pause on the tape where you could hear Katrine cry. You could hear rattling.

“I don’t know. Suddenly, she was just - gone.”

“Mille is your daughter?”

“Yes. She’s ten years old. We’ve been looking for her for nearly two hours. She’s not here.”

“Okay. You are at Hjerl Hede?”

“Yes. The whole family is.”

“Have you reported her missing at the entrance?”

“Yes! Of course we have! She’s only ten!” The voice choked with tears.

“Okay, Katrine. We’re going to help you. I’m sending assistance. Okay?”

You could hear Katrine’s irregular breathing. It sounded like the futile attempts of a child trying to stop sobbing after convulsive crying.

Gerda had switched on the listening-in mode, so you could also hear her calling in the officer on duty. It sounded like he was chewing something, possibly pepper cookies.

“Katrine, you must be calm now, can you do that for me? We’ll help you. Tell me, when was the last time you saw Mille?”

Katrine hesitated. “We split up. Karl and Stig went to look at Christmas trees. And I took Malene to see the gnomes in the barn. We each thought the other one had brought Mille along.”

“Okay, Katrine. Can you remember what time that was?”

“After lunch. Perhaps half past twelve?” Katrine sounded doubtful.

“So, a bit more than an hour and a half ago.”

“Yes! She’s only a little girl. It’s cold.”

“We need a personal description, Katrine.”

“Oh, God!” The voice was choked, as if it was only now dawning on Katrine how serious the situation was, with the police asking for a description.

“What was she wearing, Katrine?”

“A dark red ski jacket and blue ski pants. A red knitted cap.”

“Okay. That’s good, Katrine.”

“She’s blonde. Hair in a braid. Blue eyes.”

The Officer of the Watch was Svendsen. Back then he was fairly new on the job and a lot easier to impress than he was these days. He took over the conversation.

“Katrine, I’m passing you on to my superior now,” Gerda said.

“I don’t need to speak to any superior. I just need to get my little girl back again.” The voice was harsh with anger. A fine and fragile layer to cover the panic.

Svendsen cleared his throat. “Katrine. It’s Michael Svendsen here, Officer of the Watch. Your daughter is missing?”

“Yes! I already told you!”

“And she’s been missing for roughly two hours?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve asked the staff at Hjerl Hede to look for her?”

“Yes. They’ve also sent someone into the forest to search. She’s not here! Can you come and help us?”

“Katrine, we’re sending you a patrol car. I’m sure we’ll find your daughter soon enough and get her home in time for dinner,” Svendsen said reassuringly. The next moment, he had handed her back to Gerda.

Signe knew that Svendsen had said it with the best of intentions, but Mille had never since that day sat down for dinner at home in the kitchen in Hjerm.

As it happened, Signe Brask was in the patrol car closest to Hjerl Hede that Sunday. She and Kasper Quist were responding to a report about the vandalism of a scout hut outside Vinderup. Someone had broken a window and gained access to the hut to sit inside and drink vodka, judging by the empty bottles. Either a pack of young thugs who could not drink at home, or a poor drunk seeking shelter from the cold, who would probably do it again. None the less her partner insisted that everything had to be substantiated.

Usually, police recruits rolled their eyes over Quist because he showed such an obsessive regard for details that he drove most people crazy. The stock joke was that Quist never even went to the loo without filling out a report in three copies. But Signe liked him and respected his thoroughness. In truth, she would rather have stayed warm and comfortable at the station than be outside in the cold, sniffling, as she tried to find some usable footprints in the frozen ground below the window. But she held her tongue and set about the assignment, while Quist supervised, stomping the ground to stay warm.

“Now, this is real police work. Not the trash you watch on t.v. with car chases and serial killers. This really means something to the scouts,” he said in response to a complaint Signe would never have uttered.

Signe was bending down to take an extra photo of the broken window and the broken glass scattered on the floor, when suddenly the radio crackled into life.

Two minutes later, they were in the car and heading for Hjerl Hede with Svendsen on the radio.

“A ten-year-old girl. She’s been gone for two hours. The family has been searching, with assistance from the staff. Start off by getting an overview of the situation. We’ve called in Lauridsen and Rolf, but they’re coming from Viborg, so they won’t make it for another forty-five minutes,” Svendsen briefed.

It started snowing as they drove up the small winding roads towards the old open-air museum. Not the soft, light snow reminding you of down floating gently down from the heavens. But sharp little grains that temporarily covered the ground in white, as if someone had tried to decorate the black fields with an over-sized foam extinguisher.

Quist remained calm in the car. “Then you’ll get that handed to you as well, Signe. It’s always a bit of an unknown, how to talk to the parents of a missing child,” he said and squinted at her.

She had nodded solemnly, confident that she was up to the job.

“We’ll find her all right. I mean, she’s ten years old. How far can she have gone in two hours?” Quist said reassuringly.

“But what if she hasn’t gone by herself?”

Quist grinned. “Oh, we really don’t have that kind of drama around here,” he said without getting into details.

Still, Signe felt an uneasy shiver, an odd premonition that this wasn’t a girl who had just decided to go for a walk in the forest and lost her way. She pushed the thought aside, preparing herself to meet the parents when the patrol car pulled up on the patch of cleared field that constituted the parking lot in the middle of the open-air museum’s Christmas exhhibition.

Families with children in knitted caps were buying Christmas trees wrapped in nets, eating burnt almonds, or looking at felt hats, infused aquavit and hand carved wooden gnomes. Signe recalled memories of her own childhood. Of hot doughnuts, sprinkled with powdered sugar-snow. Of brown sugar cookies from the bakery, cones of candy from the old merchant’s house where dried cod was hanging from the ceiling, and you could buy amber sugar to sweeten your coffee. Of half-timbered, thatched houses, and the barn where children dressed like gnomes were skipping around and pulling the caps off the visitors. Of the lumber mill running on steam, and the sounds of sleigh-bells when the horse-drawn sleigh came by with two ponies harnessed to it, if there was enough snow.

She loved the old open-air museum and had pestered her father to take her there every Christmas when the place came alive with extras in historical costumes. She loved to inspect the cosy old sitting rooms of the vicarage and to sneak in to see the schoolmaster test the dressed up children on their catechism, as they did in the old days. And to watch the women working in the kitchen, plucking the Christmas goose, and see the cabbages sitting in the vegetable patch covered in frozen dew.

But memories of the safe land of childhood disappeared as soon as she saw Katrine. Nothing of what she had been taught at the Police College took into account the flesh and blood people who were waiting at the entrance of Hjerl Hede, where there guy selling Christmas trees was already beginning to pack up.

Katrine’s face was swollen from crying. Quist took a single glance at her and ordered Signe back to the parking lot. “We need photos of all the license plates. Do it now - people are already starting to leave. So that we can contact them later on, if they happened to notice anything,” he said.

Signe sighed and dug out her camera again. Back then, she thought it was a manoeuvre to get a rookie away from a family in panic. But in retrospect, it was one of the smartest decisions Quist made that day. The numerous license plates produced a gold mine of witnesses. Or rather, they led to a number of witnesses who all provided contradictory and confusing statements, pointing in too many different directions for Krag to be able to see any particular pattern in them when he subsequently took over the case.

She had to take her gloves off to take pictures with the old Nikon she had been supplied with at the station, and the freezing weather made her fingers stiffer with every passing minute. The sun was hanging like a blood orange in the sky when Lauridsen finally pulled into the lot, with Rolf on the tailboard. The well-trained German shepherd, who was a family dog at the weekends, wagged his tail, eager to get to work, while Lauridsen took it considerably more easy. Signe pointed him in the direction of the ticket office where she had last seen Quist with the family.

“Ten-year-old girl, I gather?”

Signe nodded.

“She quite possibly got lost in the woods. Did she have an argument with anybody?” Lauridsen asked curiously.

She shook her head. “I don’t know any more than you do. Quist talked to the family.”

Rolf yelped impatiently and pulled the leash. Eager to get busy.

“We’ll find her in under an hour,” Lauridsen predicted.

He was wrong.

Sitting on the sofa, Signe turned up the report from the dog handler. At first, Rolf was sure enough on the scent. The dog led Lauridsen to the old grocer’s store, on towards the vicarage, and finally in the direction of the saw mill.

Here things took a wrong turn.

One of the thatched buildings across from the gamekeeper’s farm was supposed to look like a hunting lodge, and to support the illusion a man was sitting in front of the lodge, skinning a fox. He was half-done with the task, and the eyes of the fox protruded like alarming, white balls from the red muscles that had been covered by fur. The sight and scent of the snarling, dead fox sent Rolf berserk. The dog howled and barked until Lauridsen could do nothing but return to the ticket office, and wait for the skin and carcass of the fox to be removed and for Rolf to settle down. And so, valuable time was lost.

*

In any investigation that ends up being solved, it is usually just one event, one single lead or fluke, that gives the police the clue that leads to the offender. Similarly, a single mishap, the smallest detail missed, can result in a case never being solved. Mille’s disappearance, and the following attempts to find her, involved a series of misfortunes, which meant they never really got things moving on the case. As if the investigation was damned from the very beginning.

Signe had never given up hope that she would somehow spot the one detail that had escaped police officers far more experienced than her. The tiny little thing that could be pulled out like a thread from an old, shabby sweater and finally unravel what happened to Mille that day.

She no longer had any hope of Mille’s returning alive. It had been too long, and she knew the statistics as well as most cops. Children kidnapped by a stranger only survive the first forty-eight hours on rare occasions.

She got up and went to the kitchen to put the kettle on for a cup of tea. As the itcame to the boil, she could hear the annoying beep from the phone in the living room. It was probably her father again. Wanting to complain about Morse, probably. Or to ask what they were having for dessert tomorrow.

With a sigh, she returned to the living room and answered the phone while turning down the television.

“Yes, dad, what is it?”

A moment of silence. “Ahem … am I speaking to Signe Brask?”

She held the phone away from her ear, to look at the screen. Unknown caller. Shit. Typical telephone salesman-ploy.

“Sorry, I thought you were someone else. But let me say upfront that , yes, I’m happy with my current provider, my home contents insurance, and my pension. And that I also donated to Save the Children Fund and Doctors without Borders last month. Does that cover what you were planning on spoiling my Friday night with?”

“No.”

Signe waited. Normally sales people would hang up after that routine, but Signe could still hear life at the other end of the phone - noise from a crowd, as if the person calling was sitting in a large open office. Perhaps a call-centre in Greve.

“Are you done?” the voice asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. My name is Ole Holst. I’m the officer on duty at the City Station. I got your number from the officer on duty in Holstebro.”

“Okay?”

She quickly ran through the reasons why a colleague from Copenhagen would call her at home on a Friday night and couldn’t find an obvious answer. As far as she knew, there were no pending cases directly connected to the capital.

“And you’re Signe Brask?”

“Yes. I already said. What’s this about?” she said, impatiently.

“You’re the investigator in charge of the case of Mille Lindberg?”

Signe felt her heart contract. Had they found a body? A new lead? “Yes. What’s it all about?” She repeated herself out of sheer eagerness.

Ole Kragh spoke hesitantly. “The fact is that … eh …”

“Yes, what is it, man. Just say it!”

He cleared his throat. “We’ve got a young woman here. About twenty years old. She claims to be Mille Lindberg.”

“What?” Her legs collapsed under her, and she slumped down onto the sofa.

“That’s what she says. I’ve tried to pull some information about the case and I’ve studied the photo from the archive. It does look like her.”

“Can you send me a photo of the girl you’ve got there?”

“Yes. I’ll send it by text message once we’ve disconnected.”

“Do you believe her? Is it Mille? Where has she been?” The questions poured out in a torrent before she regained her composure and remembered that she was speaking to a colleague. “Can you tell me more about the girl? Where did she come from?”

“She’s not saying much. Just that she’s Mille, and she would like to go home now,” Ole Holst admitted.

“But surely she must be able to explain where she’s been for ten years? Are you sure it’s her?”

Holst sounded stressed. “Listen, I haven’t talked to her myself. All I know is that she’s here at the station, and that she’s turned herself in because she wants to go home. I’ll find the relevant paperwork in order to pass on the case.”

“Has she been seen by forensics?”

“No. She doesn’t want to, and seeing as she’s over twenty, she can decide for herself. Of course, I’ve strongly recommended her to get the full examination. But she doesn’t want to do anything until she’s spoken to you. So the question is, can you get over here? I’d prefer to put off calling her family until we’ve got something solid.”

Signe didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Yes. Of course I’ll come and pick her up.”

“Thanks. When can you get here?”

Signe looked at the time. It was almost nine. “Half past midnight, if I leave now.”

Ole Kragh considered for a moment. “Better wait until the morning then. We’ll keep her here for the night. She’s pretty battered, and a doctor has attended to her.”

“Battered?”

“Yes. That’s what the notes here say.”

“Did she walk in on her own?”

“I don’t know, but …”

His voice was cut off by a loud alarm-like wailing making any further conversation practically impossible. “I’ve got to go. See you tomorrow, okay? I’m here until half past eight.”

The phone went dead. Signe sat, staring straight in front, of her for a minute or two. Then a little ping and a faint vibration, indicating an incoming text message, snapped her out of it. Ole Kragh had kept his word.

She opened the message and looked at the photo. It showed a delicate, fair-haired girl anywhere between sixteen and twenty-three years old. The girl was looking down, and her eyes were partly covered by a long, tousled fringe. The chin was pointed, and the clothes looked like things found in the second-hand pile at a youth centre. A faded, black hoodie and a pair of ripped jeans. The light was bright, and the girl looked pale and unhealthy, as if she had not seen daylight in years. Perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps someone had kept her hidden for ten years. Signe’s thoughts flew to the story of the Austrian Natascha Kampusch who had been held in captivity in a basement for years, until she got a chance to escape and took it at the age of eighteen. The Austrian girl had been ten, like Mille, when she vanished into thin air.

Signe found the old school photo of Mille in the orange file on the coffee table and placed it carefully next to the phone. She studied the two photos at length. The chin was the same. The cheekbones were similar. The school photo had been printed in all national newspapers ten years ago and showed a little girl in a pink shirt with a cautious smile and her head tilted to one side. The girl in the police photo held her head in almost the exact same manner.

But it was impossible to tell if she was Mille.

*

She left at half past four in the morning. The streets were empty except for a salt truck, and the assistant at the petrol station looked like he was sleep-walking, as he handed her a roll with butter from the counter, and she paid him for that and a coffee. That should keep her going for the next three and a half hours. She left the city perimeter and headed for the Great Belt Bridge.

Should she have called Katrine and Karl last night? First, she had called Richard Kirk, who advised against doing anything at all until she had met the girl and confirmed that she was, indeed, Mille. And Signe realised it was for the best. It would be unforgiveable to give Katrine and the rest of the family false hopes, in case it wasn’t really their daughter after all. It was a brief conversation, and even though Richard Kirk praised her for asking his advice, she could still sense his irritation at being disturbed at home.

“Right, then. Keep me notified of how things progress. And at any rate, let’s keep it quiet until we know what we’re dealing with,” he said, in his most formal, managerial tone.

She called Martinus straight after, to explain why she was not coming in the next day.

“Well, I’ll be damned. And on the very anniversary, too” Martinus said in his bright Funen dialect.