“I think we’d like the chocolate best.” Magdalena smiled irresistibly, revealing the braces on her teeth. It wasn’t hard to imagine that this was a girl with secrets concealed in the garden.
He waxed lyrical on the beauty of the Jutland heath and told them how excited he was about moving to the area permanently. And by the time they reached the crossroads at Finderup, the mood was quite as he had hoped-relaxed, trustful, and chummy. That was where he turned off the road.
“Hey, not yet,” said Samuel, leaning forward in his seat. “The Holstebro road’s the next one.”
“I know, but when I was driving around looking at houses the other day, I found this shortcut that leads up to Route 16.”
He turned again, a few hundred meters from the memorial stone for the medieval king Erik Klipping.
Hesselborgvej.
“It’s along here. A bit bumpy, I know, but a good little shortcut,” he said.
“Are you sure?” Samuel read the sign as they passed: Military vehicles strictly prohibited on bypaths. “I thought this road just petered out,” he said, and sat back in his seat.
“You’ll see, it carries on beyond that yellow farmhouse there on the left, then on past another farm on the right that’s all broken down, and then we turn left.”
He nodded to himself a couple of hundred meters farther on. The unmade road turned into wheel tracks. Here was a landscape of stubble, undulating and dotted with woodland. One more bend and they were there.
“Hey, what did I tell you,” Samuel exclaimed, pointing up ahead. “You can’t get through here at all.”
He was wrong, but there was no need for explanation now.
“Do you know what, I think you’re right, Samuel,” he said. “We’ll just have to turn around again and go back. Sorry about that, kids. I was certain…”
He turned the wheel and brought the van to a halt at an angle across the track, then reversed in between the trees.
He pulled on the hand brake, swiftly drawing the stun gun from the side pocket. In one seamless movement, he released the safety catch, thrust the weapon against Magdalena’s throat, and fired. It was a fiendish device that delivered 1.2 million volts into the body of the victim, resulting in momentary paralysis. Her scream, and not least the sudden, violent way her body jerked, at first threw Samuel completely. Like his sister, he was utterly unprepared. The look in his eyes was of terror, and yet of readiness to fight. In the brief second that elapsed from the moment his sister slumped toward him till he grasped the fact that the object about to be pressed against him was lethal, the full gamut of the youngster’s adrenaline-driven mechanisms was activated at once.
And so, quick though he was, his sister’s assailant was not quick enough to prevent the boy from shoving his sister aside, tearing at the door handle, and tumbling out before he could discharge his weapon again.
He gave the girl another shot and leaped out of the vehicle in pursuit of the boy, who had by now managed to limp some way along the lichen-green track, his bad knee buckling beneath him. It was only a matter of seconds before his turn came.
Reaching the fir trees, the boy turned suddenly. “What is it you want?” he yelled, invoking the assistance of his God, as though from out of the organized rows of fir some heavenly host would appear to defend him. He limped to one side and picked up a heavy stick spiked viciously with the sharp remnants of branches.
Shit. He should have dealt with the boy first. Why the fuck hadn’t he listened to his instincts?
“Don’t you come any closer,” the boy screamed, waving his stick in the air. There was no doubt he would use it. The boy knew combat, and would fight as well as he could.
The thought flashed through his mind that he should have a Taser C2 instead. Armed with one of those, he would be able to incapacitate his victims from a distance of several meters. He knew there was not a second to be lost. They were only a few hundred meters from the farms and, although he had selected the location with care, there was no guarantee that some farmer or woodsman wouldn’t suddenly materialize. And in a few moments, the boy’s sister would recover sufficiently to be able to escape.
“That won’t help you, Samuel,” he said, and thrust forward to counter the boy’s frantic blows. He felt the crack of the stick as it came down heavily against his shoulder at the same moment as the stun gun made contact with the boy’s arm. The cries they emitted were simultaneous.
But this was not a battle between equals, and the boy fell to the ground.
He glanced at his shoulder where Samuel had struck him so cleanly. Shit, he thought again, as his blood spread like the points of a star in the fabric of his windbreaker.
Wishing again that he had a Taser, he dragged the boy into the back of the van, found the chloroform rag, and covered his face with it. For a moment the boy’s eyes stared emptily, and then he was under.
He repeated the procedure with the sister.
Then he blindfolded them, bound their hands and feet with gaffer tape, gagged them in the same way, and put them in the recovery position on the thickly carpeted floor.
He changed his shirt and put on another jacket, standing for a few minutes, watching them to make sure they didn’t react badly, throw up and choke on their own vomit.
When finally he was satisfied, he closed the doors and drove away.
His sister and brother-in-law had settled in a small cottage just outside Årup, with whitewashed walls and close to the road. It was only a few kilometers from the parish church where his father had spent his final incumbency.
It was the last place on earth he would think of settling.
“So where have you been this time?” his brother-in-law asked without interest, gesturing toward a pair of timeworn slippers that were always left in the hallway and which all visitors were obliged to shuffle about in. As if their floors had ever been worth shit.
He followed a sound into the front room and found his sister humming in a corner, a moth-eaten shawl draped across her shoulders.
Eva knew him by his step but said nothing. She had put on a considerable amount of weight since the last time he’d been here. Twenty kilos minimum. Her body had spread, and soon the image he retained of the sister with whom he had so gleefully frolicked in the garden of the pastor’s residence would be gone forever.
There was no exchange of greetings between them. There never was. But then politeness had never been much cherished in their childhood home.
“I can’t stay long,” he said, squatting down beside her. “How are you doing?”
“Villy looks after me,” she answered. “We’ll be eating shortly. Perhaps you’d like something?”
“Just a spot of lunch. And then I’ll be making tracks.”
She nodded. Truth was she didn’t care. Since the light had gone out in her eyes, the desire to be with other people and listen to what they had to say about themselves and the world around them had likewise waned. Perhaps it was necessary. Perhaps the faded images of childhood had suddenly taken up too much room inside her.
“I’ve got some money for you.” He pulled an envelope out of his pocket and pressed it into her hand. “There’s thirty thousand there. That should tide you both over until next time.”
“Thanks. When will you be back?”
“In a couple of months.”
She nodded and got to her feet. He offered his arm, but she declined.
The oilcloth that draped the table had seen happier days in decades long gone and was now adorned with supermarket liver pâté and indeterminate pieces of roast meat in foil trays. Villy knew all sorts of folk who shot more game than they could eat, so they were never short on calories.
His brother-in-law wheezed asthmatically as he bowed his head to his chest and said grace. Both he and his sister squeezed their eyes tight shut, though all their senses were directed toward the end of the table where he sat.