‘Where to?’
Dion shrugged his shoulders and folded his long body into the passenger seat of her Fiat. ‘Towards the city centre,’ he sulked.
Dicte ignored his tone of voice and turned the car around in a side street. She didn’t trust him and wished they were sitting face to face so that she could watch his eyes. But there were no obvious places nearby, so the city centre it was.
‘We’ll find somewhere,’ she says. ‘I’ll buy you a beer.’
He gave a snort of contempt and said nothing.
‘I want you to know what this is about,’ she said, positioning the car behind a white van. ‘Kjeld Arne Husum was the man who was executed on Samsø. Kaspar obviously told you that.’
She caught a brief, reluctant nod and went on. ‘What he hasn’t told you, because he doesn’t know of course, is that I received another film today. A convicted paedophile has been kidnapped. The hostage-takers have issued a forty-eight hour deadline before he is executed the same way as Kjeld Arne.’
Dion said nothing.
‘Have you ever seen anyone being beheaded?’ Dicte asked.
Dion shook his head.
‘It’s not a pretty sight,’ she said conversationally, deciding to overtake the van. ‘It’s not as easy as you would imagine. There can be complications. It’s tricky to get a clear cut. The body starts twitching—’
‘Shut up!’ There were tears in his voice.
She went on. ‘Someone had something on Husum. And Husum, in turn, had something on all of you. On Morten and Kaspar.’
She took her eyes off the road for a moment and looked directly at his profile, which was on the point of crumbling. ‘And on you.’
He said nothing. All the way into town he sat still, staring straight ahead. Dicte found a parking space near Sankt Pauls Kirkeplads and practically dragged him into a nearby pub she had never heard of and would probably never frequent again. It was dark and as good as deserted and stank of beer and tobacco. An anorexic-looking girl chewing gum was behind the bar and gave them a bored look. Dicte ordered two draught beers and found a table away from the window.
‘She sounds lovely, your wife,’ she said, taking a sip. ‘Got any kids?’
Dion looked ready to explode. His face flushed with blood and the words were spat out with a spray of beer. ‘Shut up! Leave my family out of this.’
‘Then tell me what happened,’ she said. ‘Enlighten me.’
He drank half his beer in a gulp and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The alcohol seemed to give him strength somehow.
‘I had … have … an old conviction. Well, what I mean is, it wasn’t old at the time. I was very young. I had a job at a nursery school in Aarhus …’
She knew what was coming. It all seemed so transparent.
‘Paedophilia,’ she said in a matter of fact voice, as though they were discussing petty thieving or failing to keep your dog on a leash.
He drained his glass. ‘I was twenty years old. It was my first job. I didn’t know what was right or wrong … Yes, of course, I knew it was wrong but … it’s not something I have felt the urge to repeat, not since then, and now I’ve got children of my own.’
‘But Kjeld Arne knew?’
He nodded into the empty beer glass. ‘We both worked in the same nursery for a while. So yes, he obviously knew.’
‘And when you moved into the commune, you got another job in a nursery. They didn’t screen you?’
He shook his head. ‘They didn’t do that in those days. I’m not even sure it’s working all that well nowadays. If you want to cheat the system there’s always a way.’ Then he looked at her. ‘I love children. I’m not a paedophile and I’ve never touched a child since. I wouldn’t dream of doing it.’
‘But you dreamed about it then?’
He shrugged. ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’
‘And Henriette doesn’t know?’
The panic rose in his eyes, and she was ashamed. She held a man’s destiny in her hands and she realised she liked this uncomplicated feeling of power. For a second it was irrelevant what she was going to do with it or whether her intentions were good.
‘No,’ he said. ‘She knows nothing and she never will.’
Dicte sensed it was time for a break. She bought him another beer and a cup of coffee for herself, then sat back down at the wooden table, stained by years of spilled drinks and countless glasses.
‘So you knew something which Kjeld Arne preferred to keep quiet,’ she guessed. ‘And when you threatened to reveal all, he used your old conviction to blackmail you. If your new employer knew the truth, would you be finished?’
He sipped at his second beer and nodded, visibly relaxed now, she could tell. His problem wasn’t what Husum had done, but what he had done. Now it was out in the open and all that was left was the other matter.
She waited. She thought of Astrid Agerbæk’s words: when it comes down to it we all have something to hide. Relationships we would prefer not to be made public, to be held up and scrutinised and judged by others. After all, if she had to be completely honest about all this, wasn’t this why she was running around playing detective? Because there was something that didn’t feel right?
The truth, Anne would have said—and she could almost hear her voice all the way from Greenland—the truth is always best.
She drank her coffee, which was lifeless and lukewarm. She wasn’t Anne and she didn’t have quite the same convictions. There were times when she felt that truth didn’t quite live up to its reputation. In this case at least, right now there was a discrepancy between supply and demand, and truth seemed to her somewhat overrated.
‘Kjeld Arne had a younger sister,’ Dion said. ‘She went missing. They searched for her and the whole country was turned upside down looking for her. But then fourteen days later, hey presto, she reappeared on a playground near her home.’
‘Unharmed?’
‘There were signs of ... abuse ... Rape,’ he said hesitantly.
Dicte thought back. Things were slotting into place, but she still didnt have the complete picture. Being brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness meant that you didn’t keep abreast of worldly issues. You read The Watchtower and Awake! and told yourself that was enough.
‘When did this happen?’
‘June 1977.’
She didn’t need to do the maths. It was the summer which was etched into her brain. Her summer with Morten.
‘Did they found out where she had been?’
Dion shook his head. ‘I think she was only three or four. And according to the media she was so traumatised that she couldn’t speak at all. Or she didn’t want to, or was afraid.’ His gaze moved from her to the skinny barmaid now serving a couple of AGF Aarhus football fans wearing scarves and hats.
‘Do you know what happened?’
For a long time he looked as if hadn’t heard her.
‘Dion?’
A movement in his neck revealed his tension. At length he nodded. ‘I know exactly what happened to her.’