Klitmøller lay bathed in sunshine as we bumped along the main road into town.
It was nine in the morning and a group of tourists was already heading for the beach. The sky was clear and bright over the sea, and I was so scared my teeth were chattering.
I wasn’t sure exactly what I was afraid of. All I knew was that this was a different kind of fear to the one that usually left me flat on the floor, arms and legs flailing.
This fear stemmed from something beyond my own person, from someone else, and it kept me awake on that madcap trip clean across country roads and bridges. Jens had been driving like a maniac, way too fast, not thinking to stop when I had to throw up once, twice, as we flew over the Great Belt Bridge—he simply leaned over and handed me a fresh Netto bag without a word. In fact, there were several plastic supermarket bags lying ready on the floor in front of me. Jens had taken just precautions before picking me up on Istedgade in Copenhagen.
For his own part, Jens was painfully sober, and he looked like hell. He had always been thin, but now he was skin and bone, his eye sockets sunk deeply, darkly into his skull after almost two weeks straight of hard drinking. But he hadn’t had a drop to drink since the day before. He wanted to be sure that the hospital staff would let him see Rosa. It was a worthy project that he tackled with chewing gum, chips, cola, and a couple of joints from the glove compartment to take the edge off the worst of the jitters.
“I think she’s mentally ill,” I said. “When we met her on the beach . . . she knew who we were, but didn’t say anything. She’s lied to us all along. The drawings of Alex, everything . . . ”
Jens didn’t answer, just sat staring straight ahead, his jaws chewing on thin air; he had plenty of demons of his own to contend with just then. The cold surged from the pit of my stomach and spread to the extremities of my body, but the all too familiar shaking did not take over. My body remained mine. Nothing was shaking as I directed Jens onto the sandy road leading to my grandmother’s house.
The first thing I saw was Lupo. He was squashed up against the front door. His coat was wet and rough, his head turned up at an awkward angle against the doorframe. Even when I got out of the car, he remained where he was instead of running up to me as usual.
The dread kneaded and keeled over my insides as I looked around me. All the windows were closed and dark. Alex’s fishing rod as well as the spade he used to dig out worms lay on the ground in front of the garage. The weathervane whirred in the wind.
I strode over to Lupo. He tried to turn his head in my direction and growled deep in his throat, but didn’t move. Someone had put a noose around his neck and tied it to the door handle on a leash so tight that he had to balance on his hind legs to avoid being strangled. The noose was locked round his neck and I couldn’t pull it loose with my fingers.
“Barbara!” I called in through the window. Nothing but darkness behind the dusty reflections. I set off at a stumbling run to the garage where I found a rusty garden scissors and ran back to cut the noose. Lupo yowled, tumbled backwards, and sprawled, but finally stood up with a hesitant wag of the tail. His coat was bloody where the noose had chafed into the skin.
“Is everything okay?”
Jens had climbed out of the car and was standing next to me with his hands hanging down by his sides. An old man. He looked like something that could be carried away by the wind at any moment, but I was glad he was there. Sober, Jens was as gentle as a lamb. Actually, he was equally gentle as a drunk, but drunks—especially drunk alcoholics—thought only of themselves and their next drink. You can never rely on a drunk. I opened the door into the hallway and was met by a strong smell of methanol and gas.
“Alex!”
There wasn’t a sound apart from the faint creak in the rafters when the wind lashed into the house. My heart fluttered in my throat.
“Alex, I’m home!”
Not a sound. If he were asleep, irrespective of how deeply, he should have heard me. Either Alex or Barbara. But the house was quiet as the grave.
When I got to the doorway of the kitchen I sensed the heat and the smell before I saw the glowing hot pot on the stove. A single flame had been lit below an unidentifiable, charred mass. The carpet was wet, soaked in petrol; my shoes left dark tracks on the thin grey piling as I cut the short distance to the stove and killed the flame. The air was thick and hazy with smoke. My eyes watered.
“Come out of there, Ella.” Jens was standing in the kitchen doorway and nodded emphatically at the toaster that was placed on the soaked carpet on the floor. “This place is going to go up in flames any minute.”
The wires of the toaster sparked, almost invisible blue flames hovered just above the piling. I spun on my heels.
Alex!
Jens stepped back as I rushed past him up and bounded up the stairs. In our bedroom, duvets and quilts were spread helter-skelter over the floor together with remnants of my files, papers, and reports. My grandmother’s journals and notes were torn and scattered everywhere, arbitrary chunks of text loomed large . . .
. . . new foster family. Ella is uncooperative, she shuns physical contact and interaction with her foster parents. She says she wants to die, that she isn’t a human being . . .
. . . in my opinion, Ella has a stunted emotional intelligence for her age . . .
. . . Ella is not suited to foster care . . . Ella requires intensive professional care in a secure, institutionalized environment . . .
. . . Ella misses her mother . . .
The windows in the roof were wide open and the bits of paper were swept up in the draft. I searched all the rooms, opened all the cupboards, even though they were ridiculously small, but there was no sign of my son anywhere. Then I heard the flames take in the kitchen below; it sounded like a rushing river colliding with a cliff. I salvaged my rucksack from under a mattress and charged down the steps, darted out the back door of the washing room. I could feel the flames like a wall of heat in my back. My hair stank like pork roast.
Jens was standing outside on the yard with a smoke, watching the fire in resignation.
“He’s not in there, Ella,” he said. “I smashed a window at the back of the house to check that room as well . . . ” He nodded over at Barbara’s bedroom window. “Nobody is in there either.”
The fire broke through the spine of the roof and a warm pillar of smoke rose up into the blue sky. I went around the back to Barbara’s room in time to see the heat blacken the pictures of Judgement Day, peel them off the walls and ceiling. I felt Jens’s hands on my shoulders, and briefly leaned back against his body, let him hold me for a moment. I fleetingly wished that someone were there for me. I was so utterly worn out by being alone. And this wasn’t something I could handle on my own.
“Ella . . . you need to think,” he whispered. “Where is she? Where could she be?”
People had started gathering round. Mr. and Mrs. Klitmøller in the front row, Mr. Klitmøller with a finger raised in the air to gauge the wind-direction in relation to his own thatched-roof house. He looked like an irate and aged schoolmaster, ready to give one of his favorite hobby horses a good kick in the ribs.
“One of the last surviving houses of the historic town of Klitmøller,” he said, as I walked past him. “I told you to be careful with fire out here. It’s very dry, and the wind is always . . . I told you to . . . ”
I left the burning house to the spectators and set off at a run, my rucksack bouncing on my back. As I turned down the road where we used to live, I could hear the sirens like a drawn-out, melancholy howl above the din of the wind. My childhood home stood naked and unprotected in the morning sunshine, but it was the house next door I was after. Here the hedge had grown thick and dense over the years so as to provide sufficient shelter to a garden that had become dark and lush as a jungle by comparison.
“Thomas!”
I called his name several yards before I reached the stone steps in front of his house, and I called it again as I hammered on the massive, oiled wooden door. I remembered the house fleetingly; screaming-yellow water pistols, tattered Donald Duck comics, and the taste of raspberries and golden gooseberries, absurd memories that muddled in rising panic. I couldn’t shout anymore, so I settled for banging furiously on the door instead.
“Hey! What’s going on?”
Thomas had popped up from behind the house and stood watching me with his arms crossed over his chest. He was wearing a sleeveless vest draped over his rod-thin torso. His shorts looped down from his waist like huge sails.
“Can I borrow your phone?”
“Okay,” he came over to me and fumbled in his pockets. “What’s the matter with yours?” he asked, finally handing me his.
“It’s dead,” I said, emptying the contents of my rucksack onto the ground. The pages were still intact, and the relief in my chest was so great I could have sobbed. There was the note from my grandmother, and there was the telephone number for Helgi Nygaard in Thailand.
I didn’t allow myself to think, just punched in the digits. My father deserved no ceremony. This was for Alex. My core was hard and smooth and cold as stone on the shore.
The line crackled.
“What the hell is going on?”
Thomas had caught sight of the pillar of smoke over my grandmother’s house. The sirens moaned in the wind, then suddenly stopped.
My head lolled on my shoulders. A distant, metallic ringing tone went through, and then a voice answered in English.
“Hello? Hello?”
Hard and smooth and cold. I was granite and steel.
“Is this Helgi?” I said in Danish.
Scratching interference, alternating with dead air. The connection dulled out, as if a finger were pressed to my ear.
“Yes, this is Helgi. Who is this?” He switched to Danish.
I wanted to reply, but the words were stuck in my body. My throat closed painfully.
“Who is this . . . ? Ella? Is that you?”
The broad West-Jutlandic lilt made all the difference. It sliced into my flesh like a newly honed knife. It was him. My father. The feeling of his hand in my hair, a sharp, physical pain above my eye. My knees gave way, and I sank onto the steps.
“She’s got Alex,” was all I said.
Silence. Dead fucking air.
“Ella . . . I am glad that you called. Very glad. But I don’t understand what you are saying? Who has . . . is Alex your son?”
“Barbara has my son. Barbara . . . or Lea . . . or Christi. You used to know someone called Christi,” I said. “She has taken Alex, and I don’t know where they are. Oh, God . . . ” The sobs racked my throat. “Where are they, Helgi?”
“Christi! Has Christi taken your boy?!”
His voice was focused now, and a halting image of him took shape before my inner eye. The two of us on the garage floor, we are bent over his hunting rifle.
You put the cartridges in here. A brief smile, eyes narrowed, concentrated. And you unlock the safety catch by pulling this lever back, here.
Cool metal in my hands. I lean my entire weight against the lever. It’s hard, but Dad says I should keep trying. That I can, if I want to. Then, at long last, a satisfying click.
“Where are they, Dad? Did you know her like that? Was it her you were . . . ? Where do you think she would take him?”
“Jesus Christ, Ella. I don’t know . . . but she liked churches, and graveyards. Paintings—but it’s such a long time ago. I don’t know . . . ”
“Give me a church, Helgi. Name me just one, and send the rest in a text later.”
“Vestby Church . . . She liked Vestby Church. She went there to think about her boys. Ella . . . I . . . ”
I cut the connection, allowing myself a few precious seconds to breathe deeply and wipe the tears away with the back of my hand. Fucking bastard. He had been in love with Barbara. He’d been screwing my mother’s best friend, then he’d killed her and let Barbara live. And now she’d taken Alex away from me.
He was nothing to me. If I ever found Alex, and my life turned back to normal, I would erase him from my mind. I would take my son someplace where nobody knew us, and nobody would ever get close to us again. You can collect cans anywhere in the world.
I got to my feet, fresh tears burning in my eyes. Jens was worn out. He’d driven six hours straight, had chronic withdrawal symptoms, his hands shaking on the steering wheel on the last fifty miles to Klitmøller. I looked at Thomas.
“Can you drive me to Vestby Church?”
He nodded.
“And Thomas . . . you hunt, right? Your gun. I need to borrow your gun.”