Dicte could tell by looking at him that he wanted to run. His eyes darted sideways, searching for an escape route, but then he seemed to be borne along by the tide of children and teenagers coming down the corridor towards her.
‘Hi Morten.’
He looked at her. The bell echoed in their ears.
‘Lunch break,’ she said. ‘That gives us some extra time. Twenty minutes, isn’t it?’
There was disdain in his eyes, but she could also see something else. Fear. She couldn’t help feeling smug.
‘What do you want?’
‘I just want to talk,’ she said. ‘Where can we go?’
He looked around irritably and came close to being knocked over by a gang of teenage boys chasing each other. ‘Why don’t you look where the hell you’re going?’ he yelled after them, and their frightened eyes told her that he was a teacher they would hate to get on the wrong side of.
He nodded towards the entrance. ‘Not here. We can go outside if you insist.’
They went outside. A gust of wind swirled leaves around the school playground and the sounds and smells reminded her of a time so far back that the images were dissolving.
‘Kirsten Husum,’ she said, watching him. ‘What do you know about her?’
Muscles twitched around his eyes and mouth, but only for a millisecond. His voice was hard and there was nothing about him she recognised. ‘Why would I know anything about her?’
‘You can stop pretending right now. I’ve spoken to Dion.’
He leaned his head back and looked up at the clouds scudding across the sky as light alternated with shade.
‘So what?’
‘So now I know what happened, more or less.’
He slumped down on a bench. He didn’t say anything, so she perched on the edge watching him, struggling to understand how, once upon a time, he’d not only been her choice, but also her ticket to another life. He had used her, but she had used him, too, she knew that.
‘In that case, you don’t need me,’ he said. ‘You can manage on your own. Clever Dicte, you always were a star pupil. Clever and willing,’ he added, but she wouldn’t be provoked; the opposite, in fact.
‘I was sixteen years old. I had lived a very sheltered life and you knew it. You were my teacher, you were the adult.’
She spoke without accusation. The facts spoke for themselves. He blushed, and for the second time within a few days, Dicte felt power in her hands. Much as she was both attracted and repelled by the feeling, she was certainly happy to exploit it.
‘We have a child together, I suppose you know that.’ She did not wait for him to react. ‘I had to cope on my own. I had no one to talk to. You were the responsible adult and you rejected me when I sought help and comfort from you. I gave birth to the child without a father present. It was a boy.’
Her voice grew hoarse from the effort this cost her. Against her will, she was moved by her own words and tears pressed against her eyelids. ‘He’s out there somewhere. I gave him up for adoption and I have regretted it ever since. For a while I thought it was him.’
She’d wanted to use this argument to apply pressure, but now it was on the verge of overpowering her.
‘Him? What do you mean?’
‘Someone sent me a text message. I thought it was him,’ she repeated. ‘I was meant to believe it was from him. The execution … The films …’
Morten stared into space. Perhaps he was moved, it was hard to tell, but she had one more round to fire and in order to distract him from the first, she chose to aim it right in his face.
‘You knew that Kjeld Arne had taken Kirsten back to the commune. You knew that he kept her imprisoned in the utility room in the cellar for two weeks while the police were looking for her and her parents were going out of their minds with grief and anxiety. You knew what went on down there and that he and Dion shared a sick obsession with children.’
She spat out the words and they showered down over him. ‘She was four years old. You knew her own brother raped her downstairs. Yet you acted as if nothing was going on. You invited me into your room and turned up the music—so perverted, having sex with me while a little girl was exposed to the worst kind of torture in the room directly below your bed.’
She leaned forwards, very close to him; so close that she could kiss him, or bite him. So close that she could see the pores of his skin and a couple of liver spots on one of his cheeks. So close she could stare into the eyes that had once bewitched her but which now seemed to be devoid of a soul. Kirsten Husum had never been her own flesh and blood; she had never even known her. But at this moment she wanted to kill.
‘What kind of a person are you really, Morten? How do you define decency? Or did you convince yourself that it had nothing to do with you?’
He said nothing for a long time, just sat there looking at his hands, which grappled with each other as if seeking comfort, or perhaps forgiveness.
‘She survived,’ he said at length. ‘We persuaded him to let her go. If it hadn’t been for us …’
From his tone of voice she could tell that he had convinced himself of his own virtue.
‘How very heroic,’ she said.
She sat for a while watching him. Was there anything else to be gleaned from him? The bell went once again and the whole school came alive as children of all ages rushed like lemmings towards the classrooms.
Dicte stood up. She wondered how to say goodbye to a part of her own life, then realised that you never do.
‘The police will want to talk to you at some point,’ she said and left.
Was it probable? Was it even possible? Had Kirsten Husum indeed perished in the tsunami with her husband and child, or had she survived somehow and transformed herself into a brutal avenger? And if so, why now? After so many years? Why had she never talked about the days she had spent in the cellar? Why had she lived half a lifetime without ever holding her brother accountable?
Flesh and blood, she thought, as she drove back to the office. Perhaps that was where the answer lay. Staying true to blood ties? You could distance yourself from them; you could cut them out of your life. But turning your back on them and then holding them to account was a huge step. She wondered if someone had given Kirsten Husum a nudge and made her take that step.
At the office Davidsen was in the middle of a telephone conversation with an angry reader, and Holger and Helle were sitting close together pretending to discuss that day’s edition. Bo was out on a job, she was told. Something to do with sport.
In order to find a starting point she rummaged through her notes for the articles she had written about the tsunami victims. She also found the name of the psychologist who had been assigned when the survivors returned home after the disaster. She called and left a message on her answer phone. When her telephone rang shortly afterwards, she thought it was the psychologist returning the call.
‘Dicte Svendsen,’ she responded.
‘How are you?’
All the way from Nuuk, Anne sounded worried, and even with the hiss of the satellite on the line emotions welled up in her, just when she didn’t need them.
‘Great. How about you?’
‘Liar,’ Anne declared, cutting to the chase. ‘How can you feel great with what’s going on? We do get the news up here, you know.’
Of course they did. Of course the kidnapping of Anders Nikolajsen had reached Nuuk.
‘So what’s this about?’ Anne asked. ‘What’s it got to do with you?’
Dicte told her about the meetings with Dion and Morten and her tsunami theory.
‘And what else?’ Anne asked, like a dog with a bone.
‘What else what?’
‘Why you?’
Dicte blurted out something, knowing immediately that Anne wouldn’t let herself be fobbed off. ‘Because I used to go to that house. Because I was Morten’s girlfriend? How would I know?’
Anne said nothing, the silence filled with white noise. Then she said, ‘That doesn’t make sense. There has to be something else. There has to be more to it.’
‘What on earth could that be?’
She heard herself speaking. It sounded too much like a laboured defence and was relieved when her mobile started ringing from the bottom of her bag. She thought it might be the psychologist trying to get hold of her and she paid very little attention to Anne’s objections as she finished their conversation with a promise to call her later the following day.
She answered the call just before it went to her message bank. ‘Dicte Svendsen.’
It was a kind of groan, as if the caller were in pain. She waited and the words came, recognising Kaspar Gefion Friis’s junkie drawl. It sounded as if he was struggling to gain control of his tongue.
‘She was here … at first … She lived in my cellar …’
‘Kaspar?’
‘I couldn’t refuse her, could I? I owed her. We all owed her, didn’t we? It’s all so fucked up.’
Dicte wanted to pin him down and ask more questions, but he hung up. She found his number and called him back, but there was no reply.