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“Here,” he said. “I took the plate number.”

Henny Hayden was quick, so she understood people. She picked up on details and nuances; she had intuition. And as soon as she saw the two detectives, she knew something significant had happened.

“What is it?” she asked.

“We’ll soon find out,” Sejer replied.

She showed them in. They told her about the car up at the church, that they had the plate number, that it was one of several red cars that had been seen in the area. And that via the plate number, they had found out who owned the car.

Henrik was home, sitting by the window in a red-and-blue-striped dressing gown. When they came in, he turned to look at them with a tentative smile. Like a child who doesn’t know what the adults want. He was pale and thin and vulnerable. The silk dressing gown had opened slightly at the top to reveal his chest, which was covered in fine white hairs. He had been muscular when he was younger, but this had now turned to fat. A transparent tube, as thin as a thread, disappeared into his ear, indicating that he used a hearing aid.

They sat down and then focused their attention on Henny.

“Do you know the name Malthe?” Sejer asked. “Thomasine Malthe?”

Henny looked at them, confused. She couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. Malthe? No, it couldn’t be true.

“We had expected it to be a man,” Sejer explained. “We couldn’t imagine that Bonnie and Simon had been killed by a woman. But perhaps Thomasine has a husband. Our witness saw a man up at the graveyard. He was relatively young, probably in his twenties.”

Henny was still confused. She shook her head every now and then, as if what was happening seemed unreal, that they were on the wrong trail. But something that came from way back in the past broke over her like a storm.

“Do you know Thomasine Malthe?” Sejer asked again.

“No, not really.”

“But you know who she is?”

“Yes.”

“Is there something that you’ve been keeping from us that you’d like to tell us now?”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s got nothing to do with the case.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“She has a son,” she said with trepidation.

“A son?”

“Yes, Thomasine Malthe has a son. He’s twenty-one.”

“And do you know anything about this son?”

“Yes, if it’s important.”

“It is important.”

“Should I have told you right away?”

“Yes.”

She couldn’t look at them anymore. She seemed to be disconsolate and ashamed, desperately trying to get out of the situation.

“Tell us about Thomasine and her son.”

She took a deep breath. “Bonnie had a boyfriend when she was fifteen. I think I’ve already told you about him. His name was Jørgen. We never got to meet him; she never brought him home because Henrik was so strict. He broke off their relationship after a few months and Bonnie was distraught. We couldn’t understand why she was taking it so badly. She wouldn’t have any trouble getting a new boyfriend because she was so pretty. She was more beautiful than any of the other girls. We thought it all very odd. Girls have boyfriends. I had five before I met Henrik.”

“But she didn’t get a new boyfriend?”

“No, and she didn’t try either. And a few weeks later, we realized why: he had gotten her pregnant. That was why he had broken it off; he didn’t want to have a child, the coward. We didn’t know how far gone she was.”

“Did you contact Jørgen?” Skarre asked.

“No, we didn’t even know his surname. She didn’t want us to know who he was. But she did want to have the child. It was almost as though she was doing it in defiance, maybe to punish him. And Henrik was furious that she wouldn’t tell us who he was. He swore that if he ever found out, he would wreak his revenge. Make mincemeat out of him, was what he said.”

“But he never did?”

“No.”

“So Bonnie went to term. And how was that?”

“It was embarrassing for us to have to tell the family that we didn’t know who the father was. As if there were several candidates, a line of them. To be honest, I was ashamed of Bonnie. She was no longer the daughter I knew; she was possessed. She ran around the house screaming and slamming doors. Buried herself in her bed, wouldn’t talk. Henrik was in shock, and we had no idea what the future held. Bonnie had so many plans. She wanted to study medicine. She wanted to work with geriatrics, and no one else wanted to do that.”

“So she gave birth to a son?”

“Yes. She was sixteen at the time. He was born prematurely and was in an incubator for a long time. Eventually we took him home. But then Bonnie didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to breastfeed him; she didn’t want to look after him. So I had to do everything. And then suddenly, sometime after the birth, she stopped eating. From one day to the next. Like a landslide. Henrik and I had our hands full and we quite simply gave up. It was the baby who had ruined everything and we didn’t want him either. So he was sent to a foster home, not far away. And we concentrated on saving Bonnie. She was under eighty-eight pounds by this stage. Later the little boy was formally adopted and given the surname Malthe. After Thomasine and Anders Kristoffer Malthe.”

“And did you have any contact with the boy over the years? Did Bonnie have any contact with him?”

“We couldn’t bear to. It’s a terrible thing to say, but we tried to forget the whole thing. I telephoned once to make sure that he was OK, but I didn’t tell Bonnie. Only he wasn’t OK — he had some kind of undiagnosed personality disorder. He would never manage on his own. His father found another woman and moved to Copenhagen. So it was just the two of them, Thomasine and the boy. And my conscience weighed on me even more, as if it were a punishment for what we had done.”

“But did you perhaps christen him before he was fostered?”

“We went to the town hall,” Henny told them. “It was a humanist name day. Bonnie came, but she didn’t dress up. She wore an old anorak and she didn’t say a word.”

“But she gave him a name?”

“No, that was me. His name is Eddie.”

“Eddie Malthe?”

“Yes.”

“And the father?” Skarre asked. “Did you ever find out who Jørgen was?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I found him in the end. I had to see who he was, to know who had ruined so much of our lives. And when Bonnie finally met Olav and was happy and pregnant with Simon, she was able to tell us everything. She eventually told me his name, albeit reluctantly. He lived locally and of course he had his own family, so I got his number and called him right away.”

“What did you say to him?”

“That I wanted to meet him. That I wanted to talk to him about something important.”

“But you didn’t say what?”

“No, because then he might not have come. But you know, people are curious. So we arranged to meet in the shopping center, in Christiania Café. I got there early and was wearing a red silk scarf, so he could see me as soon as he walked in. And I sat there and waited. People came in all the time, but I didn’t see anyone who I thought might be Jørgen from all those years ago. I sat there a while longer, with a cup of coffee, and eventually a man came over to the table. He was calm enough, as though he had thought through all the possibilities. But I was shocked when I saw him. He was much older than Bonnie. And after we had spoken for a while and he understood who I was, it emerged that they had started a relationship when Bonnie was only fifteen and he was over thirty. He was already married and had two children. He hadn’t told her that, so he had betrayed her in every way. He’d promised her that it would be the two of them, but she had to be patient because he had some things he needed to sort out first. Then she got pregnant, and he panicked and left her. He said that he hadn’t realized that she had taken it all so seriously, but that he had often wondered whether she had given birth to the child. You are a coward, I told him. Irresponsible. Arrogant and egotistical. And he agreed. He asked me to give his best wishes to Bonnie, and I said that there was no way I was going to do that, and that he should stay away.”