The Girl in the Ice aka A Price for Everything

CHAPTER 17

At first glance Konrad Simonsen seemed relaxed when he arrived at Hundested Harbour a good hour after he had spoken with Hans Svendsen. Arne Pedersen knew that it must have taken a major reorganisation of his workload for him to arrive so quickly. It was not difficult to imagine whose head would be on the line if the conversation with Rikke Barbara Hvidt did not bring any solid chunks of gold home to Copenhagen. Simonsen started by confirming Pedersen’s thoughts.

“Hi, Arne. Yes, I cancelled the psychologist again.”

Hans Svendsen lightened the mood. True to form, he took control in his own cheerful manner.

“Welcome, Simon, my old friend. It’s very nice to see you again. The jungle telegraph says that you’re about to hit the bull’s eye or win the lottery, or however you put it.”

Simonsen’s cheeks grew red, but he said nothing.

“Hell, I think you’ve lost weight too. More of a middleweight than a heavyweight these days.”

“Unfortunately I’m not even close to what I should be, but good to see you too, Hans.”

The two men shook hands and patted each other’s back.

“Come on, let’s go over to the other side of the harbour, I’ve reserved a table for us.”

Svendsen smiled and took Simonsen with him. Pedersen trotted behind, crossing his fingers for luck.

Their reserved place proved to be a combined table-and-bench set, placed so that a picnic could be eaten undisturbed while enjoying the view of the fjord. Two women were sitting waiting for them there, and the investigators from Copenhagen nodded briefly to each other when they saw Rikke Barbara Hvidt’s granddaughter. The men sat down, and Hans Svendsen spoke.

“Hi, Rikke, it was nice of you to come.”

At the same time he reached across the table and gave the young woman a pat on the arm. He was acknowledged with a smile from both women. The older one turned her blind eyes towards him and said, “Good afternoon, Mayor. We were almost family, remember?”

The young woman blushed.

“That we were, that we were. And who wouldn’t want to be part of your family? But that Mayor business, that was many years ago now. We’ve had a municipal merger, remember?”

He sat down next to her, and they talked for a while about old times, without worrying about the others in the party. Hans Svendsen gave Rikke plenty of time, and Pedersen felt anxious on his boss’s behalf. After all, he had not been dragged to this out of the way place in Zealand, however beautiful and idyllic it might appear in the summer haze, to listen to small talk. Simonsen himself did not seem to be bothered by the long-winded preamble. He sat observing the sunlight, which through the staggered planks of the table surface struck the asphalt in distorted parallelograms. Finally Svendsen returned to the present. Carefully he said, “I’ve brought two friends with me. They are from the police in Copenhagen, and one of them would like to ask you a few questions.”

“Two of them, Hans? Am I that interesting?”

“You’ve always been a popular girl, Rikke. Is it all right if he talks to you now? He is a bit busy, you know, they always are in the big city.”

“That’s fine, Jeanette explained to me what they want. But I would prefer not to talk about… that other thing, you know.”

“We all understand, Rikke. And he is only interested in the assault.”

He nodded to Simonsen, who echoed Svendsen’s tone and approach exactly.

“My name is Konrad, but my friends all call me Simon. That’s because my last name is Simonsen. May I call you Rikke?”

Simonsen could be very intuitive. Without at any point forcing the conversation, he spoke quietly and calmly to the nervous blind woman, whose voice soon returned to its normal range. Only once did he make a mistake, when he happened to call her granddaughter Pauline instead of Jeanette, but that misunderstanding was quickly smoothed over and forgotten. Only after Pedersen had looked at his watch numerous times, and even Hans Svendsen showed signs of impatience, did he tackle the subject he had come to broach.

“Rikke, will you tell me about back in 1977, when you were attacked?”

“Yes, I’ll be happy to, Simon. I was living out in Kikhavn with my parents along with… Jeanette’s mother, who was little at that time, and then one evening I was home alone. It was a Tuesday in May, I recall, and the others were at the movies. Suddenly there was a man standing behind me in the kitchen, and before I had time to do anything, he shoved me down across the table with my arms behind my back. I don’t know if I screamed, I must have, but it was a long way to the nearest neighbour’s so no one could hear me. He tied my hands together with that wide, shiny tape… What’s it called again?”

“Duct tape?”

“Yes, exactly. Then he stuffed a rag in my mouth so I couldn’t call out. The whole thing happened very quickly, and I was paralysed with fright. It was so terrible, I peed my pants in fear. He had a mask on.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that, and I am very interested in that mask. Can you remember what it looked like?”

“Dreadful… like a ghost. But it was homemade: black and made out of cardboard, I think with holes for the eyes.”

“Did you recognise the mask? I mean, did it look like any definite character?”

“I didn’t recognise it, but there was more. Around his head and over his hair he had a kind of grayish-black cloth that went with the mask.”

“So you didn’t see his face?”

“No, not at all. Only his ears and a little of his head between the fabric and the mask.”

“Did he have gloves on?”

“Yes, and they were black too.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“No, not in the house, not until we got down to the shore.”

“He took you down there?”

“Yes, he grabbed my clothes and shoved me ahead of him. We went quite fast, and a couple of times I fell, and then he pulled me up.”

“Did he pull you by the hair?”

“No, only by the clothes, and not brutally, more like firmly.”

“What about light? It must have been dark since you were living somewhere isolated?”

“He brought along a flashlight, and he took me pretty far down by the shore before he stopped. It was there I knew that I would die. I mean, that he was going to kill me.”

“You thought he would kill you?”

“No, I didn’t think so, I was sure of it, and I still am today. Yes, he wanted to kill me. He had dug my grave. A deep hole down in the sand, a place where the beach was narrow and the water reached almost to the dunes. There was a shovel to one side, ready for him to cover me with sand.”

“Did he use the flashlight to show you the grave?”

“No, the searchlight from the lighthouse at Spodsbjerg swept regularly across the beach, and then I could see it.”

“What happened to you there?”

“First I was supposed to take my jeans off, but not my panties. Then he forced me down on my stomach and tied my ankles together, after which he tore up my blouse in front and removed my bra. I can’t remember how, but I do recall that he looked away, as if he respected my modesty, and I also recall that I thought at least he wouldn’t rape me… That is, because he tied my ankles together first. Then I had to sit up, and he released my hands. Is this too disturbing, Jeanette? You can take a walk if you don’t want to hear this. Hans and Simon are with me.”

The girl answered in a voice filled with hatred.

“It’s not that I feel sick, Grandma, I just get so damned mad.”

“That’s the best reaction to have. Well, there on the shore, when I was sitting up, he took out a pair of scissors and sat down alongside me.”

Simonsen asked carefully, “Where did he get the scissors from? His pocket?”

“No, he had a knapsack on, a small one, that was where he got the scissors from while he was talking to me for the first time. It was in such a strange way. He was saying ‘she’ the whole time instead of ‘you’, and behaved as if the whole thing was an act. And then that disgusting mask he was wearing. When he looked at me, it was as if he was spewing out all the evil in the world.”

“What did he say?”

“She’s going to have her long claws clipped now, she’s going to have her long claws clipped now. That’s how he said it at first, and then in a completely different voice to instruct me, Then she shows her nails. But he did not speak harshly, more like we were playing a game or something like that. I didn’t understand at first, but then he simply repeated it. Then she will show her nails, then she will show her nails. At last I held my fingers up to him, and although my nails were quite short, he pretended that he was cutting them. That was with the first voice again. Uha da da, they need to be clipped. Clip, clip. Uha clip, clip. Look now, that was good indeed that we got the scissors out. Clip, clip. He spoke in that style, while he clipped in the air in front of each finger with his scissors.”

Jeanette Hvidt hissed in English, “Fucking weirdo.”

“What was that, dear? What did you say?”

“That he was crazy, Grandma.”

“Yes, he was, and if I hadn’t been so lucky, he would have killed me too. I don’t doubt that for a moment. But while we were sitting there some mopeds came driving up towards the shore. It was the young hands from the farms, tearing around for fun. Out and in between the dunes and racing by the water’s edge. Even though they were pretty far away, they scared him and he ran away. To top it off he asked me to wait. Can you believe that! I wriggled my legs free from the tape and ran for all I was worth in the opposite direction. I hid under an old rowing boat that was rotting on the shore. Then later, when the mopeds were gone, he searched for me. That’s almost what I remember best: him calling and the flashlight shining around in all directions. Where are you hiding? She has to come out for him. He wants her. Again and again. Sometimes close by, other times farther away, so the sea distorted his words. But I stayed where I was.”

Hans Svendsen said quietly, “I think it was good you did that, Rikke. I think it was really good.”