• • •
With ten days until the trial, now’s our last chance to try to rescue Frederik from prison and a criminal record that’ll prevent him from ever returning to the education field. For Niklas, it’ll determine whether he’s branded for the rest of his life as a swindler’s son. And as for me, I’d really like to rid myself once and for all of the endless gossip about whether I was Frederik’s accomplice and whether we’ve salted away millions of crowns somewhere.
It’s been a long time since Bernard first suggested we speak with Trine, one of Frederik’s secretaries, and find out if she noticed any personality changes in her boss. But Trine’s brother who works in Brazil invited her and her husband and kids to stay all summer in his house in Rio, and only now is she finally back home.
In Denmark, it’s highly illegal to do anything that could be construed as trying to influence the testimony of a witness. So Frederik mustn’t talk to Trine, and it’d be equally unlawful for Bernard to contact her. But if I seemed to bump into her by chance, and we fell into conversation, no one could object to my pumping her a bit.
Every afternoon just after four, she leaves Saxtorph and walks along Old King’s Road to the Frederiksberg subway station. There she boards first the metro and then a tram to Måløv, where she shares a row house with her husband and three children.
It’s unseasonably cold for August. The sky’s asphalt grey, and for the last two hours, it’s looked as if it could start pouring down at any moment. As Trine passes by the Netto supermarket on Old King’s Road, I step outside with a full bag of groceries, pretending I haven’t been standing just inside the door waiting for her.
She tries to walk past me as if she doesn’t know me.
We’ve talked to each other at tons of parties. During the many years he worked with her, Frederik came to trust Trine implicitly, and at home he spoke about her with greater respect than he did about the board members, his deputy headmaster, and almost everyone else on the staff.
“Hi, Trine,” I say distinctly, with a smile that I think seems natural.
She stops then anyway. She’s tanned but otherwise looks the same: she isn’t very tall, has always had a weight problem, and wears her thin medium-blond hair in a bad perm.
It’s Frederik’s fault that her husband, who taught at Saxtorph, was fired a couple of months ago as part of the bank’s harsh austerity demands — and that her closest friend, who also worked in the school office, was fired then too.
I start prattling away about all the ordeals of the last year, acting as if Frederik is still sicker than he actually is, and I say that Trine’s the only person who knows him as well as I do.
It’s true. In some respects, she knows him even better. Year after year, she spent many more hours with him than I did. And I know that, someplace deep within, she must still be fond of him. She must. Just as she must also hate him now too.
“I don’t think …” she says, screwing up her eyes and taking a step backward.
Of course, her world’s been ruined too. The school might limp along for the time being, but it’s with a new headmaster she never got along with when he was an ordinary teacher. She must feel the need to unload about a thousand things — and the need to ask about a thousand more.
“You’ve no idea how happy I am to run into you,” I say. “If you’ve got a few minutes, I’d really like to treat you to coffee and cake at the Métropolitain.”
I’ve planned this too; I know she loves Café Métropolitain.
“No thanks,” she says.
I remain standing there, smiling, giving her time.
She hesitates, but then just repeats herself. “No … no thanks.”
“Look, Trine, I was just as devastated by the embezzlement as you. My life’s completely changed now too. We’ve had to move, our pension’s gone, the car’s gone, my furniture, everything.”
She begins walking away.
Bernard’s carefully instructed me that I’m not, under any circumstances, to press her or give her any pretext for saying that I tried to. The laws about this are completely different here in Denmark than in the U.S. or on TV. But I end up not sticking to the plan.
I rush after her, shouting, “Trine! Trine!”
She stops and lets me catch up with her. She speaks to me slowly, enunciating each word with great deliberation. “I trusted him more than any other person in the world.”
“But that’s the way I felt too. I also trusted him more than …”
My despair at this moment is completely genuine. I have nothing! Nothing except a clandestine lover and a hope of maybe rescuing my husband from prison.
Perhaps that’s what she sees now. She peers calmly into my face, and I see how the muscles around her eyes have gone slack; how she’s abandoned them.
The first raindrops strike us and we look up into the sky. And she says, “I know that it was at night that he gambled away the school. Maybe his brain was sick when he was tired … I have no way of knowing. But during the day, when we were together? Then he really wasn’t sick! He wasn’t! Why didn’t he say anything during the day? We had meeting after meeting. Parent conferences, him and me alone looking through correspondence together, all those trivial things. And yet it was during the day he went to the bank and forged the signatures.”
Then the roar starts. Not of thunder, but of water sluicing down upon the pavement. Everyone around us is fleeing toward driveway ports and shop doorways, and we run under a tree. From there we look out silently on the rain.
Frederik often said that if Trine had had another degree, she could have had a stellar career as an administrator. But that was not to be. Instead, in her job as school secretary, she had a crucial part in why Saxtorph became a refuge from the world outside — the refuge it once was. And she knew she played a linchpin role. Everybody knew.
It isn’t possible for us to walk out into the rain. I see her weighing how wet she’d get if she left the tree behind and ran into one of the nearby stores.
She says, “Frederik and I were sitting in his office, going through the teachers’ scheduling preferences—”
Her sentence grinds to a halt.
I say, “Yes?”
The sound of the rain lashing the city. Pedestrians standing everywhere motionless, under every kind of shelter. She says, “It took almost the entire day, but it was important — or so the rest of us thought. And later I saw in the documents that on that very morning, he’d been in the bank, defrauding the school of another eight hundred thousand crowns. He knew that it would destroy the school. He knew it. Why didn’t he say something?”
“He’d become a completely different person, Trine. And now the tumor’s removed.”
Oops; that just slipped out. Did I just suggest what her opinion should be in court? Can she tell that our meeting might not be totally random? I know she’s as smart as a whip.
“We felt kind of sorry for you,” she says. “It was clear that Frederik didn’t especially want to spend time at home.”
“I know that.”
“He said he was bored.”
“He said that, did he?”
“Yes. You just weren’t much of a match, he said, intellectually or emotionally.”
I answer calmly. “But that changed, didn’t it? The last years before he was diagnosed, he was perfectly fine staying home with me.”
She doesn’t say anything, which must mean she concedes the point.
But can I take that to court? Your Honor, my husband’s secretary felt that when he was healthy, he found me boring. At the time of the crime I was no longer boring him, so therefore he must have been severely mentally impaired.