33

She awoke with an empty stomach and no appetite. It was Sunday afternoon and she was still at the hotel. An hour’s worth of dreams had given her the assurance that everything would fall into place. What other sustenance did she need?

She turned to her bag containing the bundle, which was on the bed beside her.

‘Today I’m giving you a present, little Mille. I’ve thought about it. You shall have the best toy I’ve ever had in my entire life, my little teddy bear,’ she said. ‘Mummy has thought about giving it to you so often, and today’s the day. Doesn’t that make you happy?’

She sensed the voices lurking, waiting for her to make a blunder, but then she stuck her hand into the bag, felt the bundle, and let the warm feelings take over.

‘Yes, I’m calm now, my love. I’m completely calm. Today nothing will be able to hurt us.’

When she’d been brought in with massive haemorrhaging in her abdomen, the staff at Bispebjerg Hospital had asked her repeatedly how something like that could have happened. One of the head doctors even suggested calling the police, but she talked them out of it. The bruises on her body, she assured them, were the result of a fall from the top step of a long, steep staircase. She’d been having dizzy spells sometimes, and she’d had one as she was standing on that top step. No one had tried to kill her, she swore. She lived alone with her stepmother. It was just a foolish and ugly accident.

The following day the nurses had given her faith that the child would survive. It wasn’t until they brought her greetings from her old school friends that she knew she needed to be careful.

Bjarne came to visit in her private room on the fourth day. It was hardly a coincidence that he was the one who’d become their errand boy. For one thing, Bjarne, unlike the others, was not a public personality; for another, nobody could bring a conversation down to basics like he could, to where empty rhetoric and offhand lies were unable to take root.

‘You say you have evidence against us, Kimmie. Is that true?’

She didn’t respond. Simply stared out the window at the pompous, run-down buildings.

‘Kristian apologizes for what he did to you. He wants me to ask if you’d like to be transferred to a private hospital. The baby’s OK, isn’t it?’

She’d given him an angry glare. It was enough to make him avert his eyes. He was well aware that he didn’t have the right to ask her anything at all.

‘Tell Kristian that it was the last time he’s ever going to touch me or have anything to do with me. Get it?’

‘Kimmie, you know Kristian. He’s not easy to get rid of. He says you don’t even have a solicitor. One that you’ve confided in about us, Kimmie. He also says he’s changed his mind and now believes you do have a box with those items you claim to have. That it seems like something you’d do. He actually grinned when he told me.’ Bjarne made an unsuccessful attempt at conveying the impression by grunting like Kristian, but Kimmie was unimpressed. Kristian never laughed at anything that could threaten him.

‘And if you don’t have a solicitor, then Kristian’s wondering who you’ve allied yourself with. You have no friends, Kimmie, apart from us. We all know that.’ He touched her arm, but she jerked it away. ‘I think you should just tell me where the box is. Is it in the house, Kimmie?’

She turned on him suddenly. ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’

It was clear that he bought it.

‘Tell Kristian that if he just stays away from me, you can keep doing what you do, for all I care. I’m pregnant, Bjarne, haven’t you lot realized that? If those items see the light of day, then I will be hung out to dry, and my baby, too. Don’t you see that? The box is just an absolute emergency solution.’

It was the last thing she should have said.

Emergency solution. If there was anything that could threaten Kristian, it was those words.

After Bjarne’s visit she could no longer sleep at night. Just lay there in the darkness, on guard, with one hand on her belly and the other next to the cord to call the nurse.

He came wearing a doctor’s white coat on the night of 2 August.

She had dozed off for only a moment when she felt his hand on her mouth and the hard pressure of his knee on her chest. He put it bluntly: ‘Who knows where you’ll disappear to when you’re released, Kimmie? We’re keeping an eye on you, but still, you never know. Tell me where the box is, and we’ll leave you in peace.’

She didn’t respond.

He punched her hard in the belly with his free hand, and when she still didn’t answer he punched her again and again until the contractions began, her legs jerked and the bed rocked.

He would have killed her if the chair beside her bed hadn’t been flung over and filled the dead silence in the room with an infernal racket. If the headlights from an ambulance hadn’t lit up the room and nakedly exposed him in all his gruesome wretchedness. If she hadn’t laid her head back and gone into shock.

If he hadn’t felt certain that she was about to die anyway.

She didn’t check out of her hotel. She left her suitcase and simply took the bag with the little bundle and a few other things and walked the short distance to the central station. It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon. Now she was going to fetch the little teddy bear for Mille as she’d promised. And after that she would complete her task.

It was a clear autumn day and the S-train was filled with happy nursery-school children and their teachers. Maybe they were heading home from a museum, maybe they were on their way to the park for a few hours. Maybe the little ones would return home this evening to Mum and Dad with flushed cheeks, brimming with tales of multicoloured foliage and flocks of deer on the plains surrounding Eremitage Castle.

When she and Mille were finally reunited, it would be even lovelier than all those things. In the infinite beauty of Paradise. They would gaze at each other and laugh.

For all eternity, that’s how it was going to be.

She nodded and stared across Svanemøllen’s barracks in the direction of Bispebjerg Hospital.

Eleven years ago she’d got out of her hospital bed and taken the little child that lay under a sheet on the steel table at the foot of the bed. They had left her alone for only a moment. A woman in the next room had gone into labour, and there had been serious complications.

She had risen, dressed and swaddled her child in the sheet. And an hour later, after she’d been humiliated by her father at Hotel D’Angleterre, she’d taken the exact same route out to Ordrup that she was taking now.

On that occasion she’d known she couldn’t stay in the house. That the gang would come after her, and the next time would mean the end.

But she also knew that she badly needed help because she was still bleeding, and the pain in her abdomen felt unreal and frightening.

So she was going to ask Kassandra for more money. Make her give her what she needed.

Once again on that day she’d found out what people whose name began with ‘K’ could do to her.

All that Kassandra had angrily shoved into her hand was a lousy two thousand kroner. Two thousand from her and ten thousand from her so-called father, Willy K. Lassen, was as much as they were willing to inconvenience themselves with. And that was far from enough.

When she’d been asked to leave the house and found herself on the street with the bundle hugged to her chest and the sanitary pad between her legs once again completely soaked in blood, she knew the day would come when everyone who had mistreated her and forced her to her knees would pay for what they’d done.