The Purity of Vengeance (52 page)

Resolved, she opened the door of the airtight room as swiftly as she was able, closing it behind her in the same manner. Even now, the smell was pungent in the air, mostly on account of Philip Nørvig.

She stared at his corpse with disdain. She would have a job on her hands with him once the bodies were to be made ready. Perhaps even with all of them, she thought to herself as she found her extra tablets.

She sat down at the head of the table and studied her victims one by one.

Apart from Tage, who still lay on the floor like a beached walrus, they all sat nicely in a row. Rita, Viggo, and Philip.

She poured herself a glass of water, put three pills into her mouth, aware that two would suffice, then raised her crystal glass to the dull eyes and hanging heads.

“
Skål
, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, and swallowed her pills.

She chuckled at her toast and thought of all the formalin she would soon be forcing down the throats of her silent guests. It would stem the worst of their decomposition.

“Patience, now. You’ll have your drinks soon enough. And in a short while you’ll be receiving company. One or two of you know her already. Gitte Charles is her name. That’s right. That nasty blonde woman who made life miserable for some of us on that infernal island. She was a decent sort once, so we must hope she has retained some of the same quality. We don’t want her bringing down our standards, do we?”

She laughed heartily until her headache told her enough was enough. Then she got to her feet, curtsied to her guests, and hurried back out.

She didn’t want Gitte Charles to wait.

 • • • 

After breakfast Rita Nielsen drew her aside. “Listen, Nete. When Gitte gets tired of you she’ll dump you, and that’s when your problems will start. You saw what happened to me.”

She thrust out her arm and showed Nete the needle marks. Five in all, Nete counted. Four more than she had received herself.

“My life’s sheer hell here now,” Rita went on, glancing around warily. “Those bastard wardens are always shushing me and slapping me about if I don’t watch out. They’ve got me cleaning the toilets, washing menstrual rags, and running slops to the compost heap. The worst jobs, with the worst idiots, all day long. They’re always on at me, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that’ and ‘We’ve already told you once.’ It’s like it’s all right for them to be getting at me all the time now. And it’s Gitte’s fault. Have a look at this.”

Rita turned her back, loosened the straps of her overalls, pulled them all the way down, and displayed a bloom of blue-red bruises across the back of her thighs, just below her buttocks. “Do you think they just appeared on their own?”

She turned back to face Nete, index finger raised in the air. “And I just
know
that next time the doctor comes they’ll talk him into having me sterilized. That’s why I’ve got to get away now, and you’re coming with me, do you hear? I need you.”

Nete nodded. Gitte Charles’s threats to poison her with henbane were one thing, but her ice-cold demeanor toward the other girls was quite another. The way she howled with laughter when describing how she did with them as the fancy took her, recommending them for sterilization as she saw fit, no matter their willingness to please.

Nete, too, had become afraid of Gitte’s whims.

“How are we going to cross the strait?” Nete asked.

“Leave that to me.”

“Then what do you need me for?”

“To get us money.”

“Money? How?”

“You’re going to steal Gitte’s savings. She boasted about them when I was her little pet. I know where she keeps them.”

“Where?”

“In her room, silly.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself?”

Rita smiled and indicated her clothing. “Do you think they let us girls in overalls wander about the corridors in there?” Her face grew serious again. “It’s got to be done in the daytime, while Gitte’s bossing us about outside. You know where she keeps her key. You said so yourself.”

“You want me to do it in the daytime? But I can’t.”

Rita clenched her fist and pressed it hard against Nete’s chin. She was white in the face, her cheek muscles tensed.

“You can, and you will, if you know what’s good for you, understand? What’s more, you’re going to do it now. We can get away tonight.”

 • • • 

Gitte’s room was on the floor above the sewing room. Nete sat for most of the morning with beads of perspiration on her upper lip, waiting for a suitable moment to nip out unseen for a few minutes. But the moment wouldn’t come. The work that day was easy and the warden sat quietly at the window with her embroidery. There was an unusual calm about the place. A day without tumult, and no errands to run.

Nete looked around. There would have to be a commotion of some sort. The question was where and how.

And then she had an idea.

In front of her sat two girls who had been living as prostitutes, working the old Pisserenden area of inner Copenhagen. They went by the names of Bette and Betty on account of their always going on about Bette Davis and Betty Grable, whom they admired and did everything they could to model themelves on. Nete had no idea who these two Hollywood stars were, for she had never been to a cinema in her life, and the girls’ incessant chatter about them had long been getting on her nerves.

And then there was another tart, Pia from Århus, who sat behind Nete with her weaving. Pia was less talkative than most, perhaps because she was rather slow-witted, one of the older prostitutes who had been on the game for a long time and done just about everything that could be done with a man. She and Bette and Betty had plenty of stories to exchange about their profession, but could do so only in brief moments when the warden was not present. These were stories of crabs and the clap, of process charged for various sexual services, of malodorous men and how surprisingly effective a well-aimed kick in the gonads could be when it came to prompting a recalcitrant punter into paying up.

Nete looked over her shoulder. The girl from Århus looked up and smiled at her. She had three pregnancies behind her and all three children had been forcibly removed for adoption immediately after birth. Her history indicated that she would more than likely soon be on her way to be sterilized at the hospital in Korsør. Nete knew all too well what happened there, and talk was always rampant among the girls. Upon request of the head physicians of the mental asylums, the Ministry of Social Affairs referred many girls for sterilization without their knowledge. It was a time bomb in their lives that could go off at any minute. All of them knew it, including Pia from Århus. For that reason, she kept her head down and immersed herself in daydreams. Everyone on the island had their dreams, and most of them were about family and children.

Pia’s and Nete’s, too.

Nete turned toward her and put her hand up to cover her mouth as she whispered. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, Pia, but Bette and Betty have been blabbing. I heard them say to the warden that you’d told them you could make a hundred kroner in one morning by sucking men off, and that you’d be doing it again if you ever got out of here. Just so you’re warned. I think Gitte Charles might already know. I’m really sorry to have to tell you, but that’s how it is.”

The sound of the loom stopped and Pia put her hands in her lap. She needed to sit for a moment and digest what Nete had said. To grasp the consequences, and Bette and Betty’s unspeakable treachery.

“They said you were going to stick a pair of scissors in Gitte Charles, too,” Nete whispered. “Is it true?”

And then something snapped inside the girl, and seconds later she got to her feet and showed them just how hard a streetwalker from Århus could get stuck in.

Nete backed away and out of the room as the warden called for help and the ruckus between the three prostitutes spread to the other girls.

They came running from the kitchen and the stores, and someone rang the bell that hung outside the matron’s office. In no time at all, an otherwise uneventful day became a deluge of yells and screams, the air filled with words decent girls ought never to utter.

She was up the stairs and into Gitte’s room in seconds, finding the key on the ledge above the door.

Nete had never been inside before, but now she saw how tidy the place was, with fine drawings on the walls and the bed neatly made. Gitte had only a small number of possessions in a small chest of drawers, and a pair of sturdy walking shoes Nete had never seen her wear.

Inside them she found almost five hundred kroner and a ring with an inscription:
Alistair Charles to Oline Jensen, Tórshavn, August 7, 1929
.

She left the ring where it was.

 • • • 

That evening, both the punishment cell in the basement and the one upstairs were occupied by the sewing-room combatants.

It was one of those days when not a word was exchanged during dinner. None of the girls felt inclined to draw attention to themselves as long as several of their guardians still wore the bruises of the brawl earlier in the day. Tension crackled in the air.

Rita stared at Nete and shook her head. Stirring up this kind of trouble was not what she’d had in mind.

She raised all ten digits in the air, then two on their own. It meant they’d be leaving at midnight, though how on earth Rita thought they were going to get out of this seething place Nete had no idea.

She wouldn’t in a million years have guessed that Rita would set her roommate’s bed on fire. Of course, matches were an item the wardens were extremely careful about, but Rita was Rita, and all she needed was a single safety match and a scrap of the striking surface of a matchbox stolen from the kitchen. It had been well hidden under her bosom most of the day, waiting to be put to use when her imbecilic roommate had fallen asleep.

The roommate it was who raised the alarm when she awoke to find her blanket alight and the room filled with smoke. Everyone was up and out in no time, for it had happened before. The stables had been ablaze on several occasions, and a number of years ago the whole institution had gone up in flames. The lighthouse keeper and his assistant appeared, too, almost within seconds, shirts hanging out and braces dangling at their hips as they organized pumps and buckets and instructed water-carriers.

Rita and Nete met up behind the herb garden and looked back at the fire that made the skylight of Rita’s room suddenly burst with a bang, sending smoke spiraling into the clear night sky.

It wouldn’t be long before Rita was suspected and a search initiated, so time was short.

As Nete had guessed, boatmen awaited them in the glow of the Retreat’s paraffin lamp. What she had not expected was that Viggo would be among them and that he would fail to recognize her.

He eyed her up with the same lustful grin on his face as when Nete had seen him and his mate look on as a third man took Rita from behind. The kind of look a woman might want from her lover, but not from a stranger, and a stranger was what he was now.

When she told him she was the girl from the fair, he couldn’t even remember the episode. He laughed and said if they’d already rolled in the hay once, they might as well do it again.

Nete felt her heart being wrenched in two.

Another of the men had counted the money, and now he declared that it wasn’t enough. They’d have to lie down on the table and spread their legs to make up the difference.

This clearly wasn’t part of the agreement. Rita began to kick up a fuss, lunging at the man in anger. It soon turned out it was the wrong thing to do.

“Right, you can stay behind on the island,” the man said, then slapped her in the face. “Get lost.”

Nete glanced at Viggo, hoping he would protest, but he remained passive. It told her he wasn’t in charge and was content with his inferior status.

Rita changed her mind. She pulled up her dress, but the men were no longer interested. Why bother with an insolent harpy they’d shagged before on countless occasions, when they could have someone new? That was how they put it.

“Come on, Nete, let’s go. Give us our money back,” Rita demanded. It only made the men laugh even louder as they divided the cash between them.

Nete was horrified. Gitte Charles would know that Nete had stolen her savings. How could she possibly go back to the home tonight? It would be hell on earth.

“You can d-do it with me,” she stammered, climbing onto the table as the men bundled Rita out of the shed.

She heard Rita cursing outside, but then all was still, apart from the grunting of the stranger inside her.

When he had finished and it was Viggo’s turn, the thought came to her that she would never again be able to cry, and that life as it ought to have become had now been irrevocably snatched from her hands. She had never imagined so much betrayal to be possible, so much malice.

And while Viggo satisfied himself, her eyes wandered around the small space as though she were saying farewell not only to Sprogø, but also to the girl she once had been.

At the same moment as Viggo’s body tensed toward climax, his friend grinning in the corner, the door was flung open and she was confronted by Rita’s accusing finger and the piercing glare of Gitte Charles.

The men were gone in an instant, leaving Nete as though fixed to the table, her sex laid bare.

From that moment Nete’s hatred of both women, and of Viggo, who called himself a man but was little better than a pig, knew no bounds.

41

November 2010

Rounding the bend by
Brøndbyøster Church, Curt was surprised to see such hectic activity, clusters of onlookers huddled in the cold.

A shiver ran down his spine when he realized they were standing outside his house. Flashing blue lights, shouts and cries, and the drone of fire-engine pumps. It was everyone’s nightmare.

“I’m the owner. What’s happened?” he barked, defense mechanisms primed and ready.

“Ask the police. They were here until a few minutes ago,” a fireman shouted back, as he doused down the last glowing embers inside the outbuilding. “What was his name, that detective who was here? Can you remember?” he asked a colleague who was busy rolling hoses.