She rose from the park bench and kicked at the seagulls gathered round her.

Which way to go?

Mille, little Mille, flowed her inner mantra incessantly. This was a bad day. There was too much to consider.

She looked down, saw how the fog put moist droplets on her shoes and thought once again of the letters at the end of Tine’s note. ‘T. K.’ Where did the ‘K’ come from?

They were coming up to the break prior to fifth-form exams. Not long after Kimmie had cut Kåre Bruno loose and let him sink, crushed by the lecture she had given him on how mediocre he was, both in terms of intelligence and personality.

It was during the following days that Kristian began to tease her.

‘You don’t have the guts, Kimmie,’ he whispered each day during morning assembly.

And each day he would nudge her and clap her on the shoulder as the rest of the gang formed a ring round her. ‘You wouldn’t dare, Kimmie!’

But Kimmie did dare, and they knew it. They watched her movements closely. Cultivated her zeal during class. Her legs sprawled between rows of chairs, her dress inching up. Dimples on display as she sashayed up to the teacher’s desk. The see-through blouses and the bedroom voice. Two weeks went by before she awakened desire in the only teacher at the school whom practically everyone liked. Wakened it so emphatically that a person had to laugh.

He was the most recent addition to the faculty. Baby-faced, yet a real man. The year’s highest final exam scores in Danish at the University of Copenhagen, so the story went. But he was not the archetypal boarding-school teacher, not at all. He expounded on society beyond the school grounds in nuanced terms. The texts he had them read ranged widely.

Kimmie went to him to ask if he would tutor her for exams. Before the end of the first session he was a lost cause, martyred by the sight of the curves her thin cotton dress so generously revealed.

His name was Klavs with a ‘v’, a name he was at pains to explain as the result of his father’s poor judgement and overblown interest in the world of Walt Disney.

None dared to call him Klavs Krikke, the Danish version of Horace Horsecollar from Donald Duck, but she managed to bring out his inner steed anyway. After three sessions, he no longer kept a record of tuition hours. He received her in his flat, already half undressed and with the radiators at full blast. Captured her with uncontrollable kisses, restless hands against her bare skin. Lit by a tireless lust that burned his brain empty, he was indifferent to pricked-up ears and envious glances. To rules and regulations.

She was going to tell the headmaster that he’d forced her, curious to see where it would lead. See if she could regain control of the situation.

But it didn’t work.

The headmaster called them to his office at the same time. Let them sit silently and uncomfortably next to each other in the waiting room with the secretary as their chaperone.

And after that day, Klavs and Kimmie never spoke again.

What happened to him afterwards was none of her concern.

The headmaster told Kimmie to pack her things, the bus to Copenhagen was leaving in half an hour. She needn’t bother wearing her school uniform. In fact, he asked her not to. From now on she could consider herself expelled.

Kimmie studied the headmaster’s flushed cheeks for some time before meeting his eyes.

‘It’s possible that you …’ she paused a moment, stretching out the unforgivable insult of using the familiar form to address him ‘… that you don’t believe he forced me. But can you be certain that tomorrow’s tabloids will see it the same way? Can you imagine the scandal? “Teacher rapes pupil at …” Can you see it?’

She would stay quiet on one simple condition. Yes, she would go. Simply pack her things and leave the school immediately. She didn’t care, as long as the school didn’t notify her parents. That was her condition.

He protested, saying it was improper for the school to receive money for a service it didn’t provide, so Kimmie disrespectfully tore the corner from a page of the nearest book on the headmaster’s desk and jotted something down.

‘Here is my bank account number,’ she said. ‘You just transfer the money into my account.’

He sighed regretfully. With that slip of paper, decades of authority vanished.

Raising her eyes in the fog, she felt a calm wash over her. Over at the playground, children’s voices shrieked light-heartedly, prodding her.

In the entire playground there were only two small children and their nanny. The children were bumbling about, playing tag between autumn-silenced jungle gyms.

She approached them through the mist and silently observed the girl, who held something in her hand that the boy wanted.

She’d once had a little girl like that.

She felt how the nanny was watching her. How her warning bells had rung the instant Kimmie emerged from the bushes in filthy clothes, her morning hair wild.

‘I didn’t look this way yesterday,’ she shouted to the nanny, ‘you shoulda seen me.’

If she’d been wearing the get-up she had on at the central station, things would have been different. Everything would have been different. Maybe the nanny would’ve even talked to her.

Listened to her.

But the nanny didn’t listen. She sprang forward, resolutely blocking Kimmie’s path to the children, her arms outstretched. She called for the children to come to her this instant, but they didn’t want to. Didn’t the woman know that little trolls like these didn’t always listen? It amused Kimmie.

So she thrust out her chin and laughed in the nanny’s face.

‘Come here!’ the nanny screamed at the kids hysterically, glaring at Kimmie as if she were pure filth.

Which is why Kimmie stepped forward and punched her. She wasn’t going to let this person make her out to be some kind of monster.

The nanny lay on the ground yelling at Kimmie that she bloody well better not hit her, that she would bloody well fix her good and proper. She knew plenty of people who could.

Then Kimmie kicked her in the side. Once, and then again, so she fell silent.

‘Come over here, little girl, and show me what you have in your hand,’ she lured. ‘Is that a little stick you have there?’

But the children were frozen in place. Standing with their fingers held out stiffly, howling for the nanny to come.

Kimmie moved closer. She was such a cute little girl, even though she was crying. And she had such long, pretty hair. Brown hair, just as little Mille had had.

‘Come here, my dear, show me what you’ve got in your hand,’ she said again, approaching cautiously.

She heard a hissing from behind, and though she whirled around, she couldn’t ward off the hard, desperate blow to her neck.

She fell face first into the gravel and felt her abdomen slam against a rock that marked a fork in the path.

Meanwhile, the nanny flew silently around her and grabbed the children, one in each arm. A real Vesterbro hussy. Tight jeans and greasy hair.

Kimmie raised her head and watched as the two screaming children’s faces in the woman’s arms disappeared behind the bushes and further into the open.

She’d once had a little girl like that. Who now lay in a coffin at home under the bed. Waiting patiently.

Soon they would be reunited.

21

‘This time I’d like for us to talk completely openly to each other,’ Mona Ibsen said. ‘Last time we didn’t make it as far as we should have, did we?’

Carl surveyed her world, the posters of beautiful nature scenes, palms, mountains and the like. Bright, sun-splashed colours. Two chairs made of precious wood, wispy plants. Such astonishing tidiness. There were no accidental elements here. No small thingamajigs to distract. And still, lying on the sofa with his mind opening up, there was this enormous distraction that made him able to think only about tearing the woman’s clothes off.