For three hours they trudged round grounds that were criss-crossed with paths wide and narrow, trampled by the feet of countless children and maintained throughout generations. There was a group booked in at the camp, and now and again an inquisitive little face would pop up in the most unexpected of places, until eventually tiring of spying and deciding to let them get on with it.
Occasionally, when Klavs Arnold felt inclined, they chatted; otherwise they exchanged few words.
Simonsen’s mind had turned inwards. He concentrated solely on the ground as if the girl in her grave might reveal herself to him if only he stared at it with sufficient intensity. His partner was evidently more used to being outdoors and consistently knew exactly where they were in relation to the main cabin and the gravel tracks surrounding the area. As time progressed and they found themselves retracing their footsteps for the third or fourth time, Simonsen gradually began to recognise various parts of the grounds.
‘We can rule out anywhere near the bigger pines. The roots would have made it impossible to dig there, so we’d be wasting our time,’ said Arnold.
‘How much does a pine tree grow in forty years?’
‘It depends what sort it is, but ten centimetres a year in general.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I looked it up on the internet this morning while you were still snoring.’
Simonsen had slept in the spare room at Arnold’s place and been woken for breakfast with the children, the object of curious looks from two boys, aged about seven or eight, who quizzed him with all sorts of questions when they weren’t feeling too shy. Their dad was busy doing their packed lunches for school. Is it true you’ve been on TV? Do you decide over our daddy? Haven’t you got your own car? Klavs Arnold returned to the table and chased them off to their school bags and bikes. Only then did Simonsen settle down to eat.
Later, after another half-hour of studying the ground, Arnold spoke again.
‘Open, sandy areas less than fifty metres from the main cabin. That’s my guess.’
‘That doesn’t exactly narrow it down.’
‘True.’
Simonsen had his own suggestion.
‘How about underneath one of the cabins? They’re all built on posts, so it could be done without that much difficulty, unless you wanted to creep all the way in.’
‘No, it’d be visible far too long. Open sandy earth is much, much better.’
They sat down under a pair of pine trees and devoured the packed lunches Arnold had made for them. The sun was out, but each passing cloud turned the air cold. Simonsen peered above the trees in search of the next patch of blue. High up in the sky, flocks of migrating birds flew south, long formations that changed shape unpredictably while always perfectly co-ordinated, as though steered by a single brain.
He got to his feet and they carried on.
And then, all at once, three hours of more or less random searching paid off. It was Klavs Arnold who noticed it first. Almost at the far corner of the grounds, by the drystone wall next to the track leading off to the main road, he stopped suddenly, like a predatory animal sensing its prey, and there, among the crowberries, peat and moss, above a little cluster of bell heather whose sad, lilac flowers, swayed this way and that in the breeze, Konrad Simonsen saw it, too: the stone in the wall, jutting out irregularly, reflecting the light mattly and in a way that seemed all too wrong. Both men bent down, and Klavs Arnold scraped at the stone with his finger.
‘Candle wax.’
It didn’t take them long before they found the bag, wrapped up in a clear, heavy-duty plastic sack and stuffed into a cavity in the wall, only a few metres from the stone covered in candle wax. They put on gloves and Klavs Arnold took photos.
‘Do we need forensics?’
Simonsen shook his head.
‘No, just be careful, that’s all.’
‘I always am, with this kind of thing.’
And so he was. It took a while before the bag was opened and its contents consigned one by one to evidence bags: a box of tea lights, three glass cylinders to protect the flames against the wind, a roll of plastic bags, a bible and a small cushion. Some twenty metres away, in a thicket of raspberry bushes, they came upon a bundle of flower stalks held together by a red elastic band. Klavs Arnold commented expertly:
‘They’d be more than a year old, probably two or three. My guess is we’ll find more if we search through the thicket here. The wind’s always in the west here. It’ll have blown his flowers in this direction.’
Simonsen jabbed a finger at the ground in front of the candle-wax stone.
‘Do you think this is where she is?’
‘No, I think this is as far as he dared to go. He could kneel down here and pray and not be seen from the cabins or the track. But have we got a choice?’
‘Not as far as I can see.’
The JCB was frustratingly slow, consuming the sandy earth shovel by shovel, one load after another drawn a few metres back, then meticulously swung out and deposited on the heap mounting behind them. Each time the blade of the shovel scraped another ten centimetres of soil away, the two men peered into the ground and held their breath for a moment, heads bowed at the edge of the hole, hoping and not hoping that the remains of Lucy Davison would emerge in front of them. The taxing experience lasted almost a couple of hours, without any other result than fraying their nerves. Eventually, they halted the work and left the operator to fill up the hole again on his own.
Simonsen was sufficiently realistic to acknowledge that his options were ebbing away. The discovery of Jørgen Kramer Nielsen’s shrine was in no way earth-shattering. The holiday camp’s guestbook from 1969, on his desk that Tuesday morning when he clocked in at Police HQ, without him having the faintest idea how it had got there, wasn’t exactly a huge step forward either. True, the Gang of Six had dutifully written in their names, on Sunday 15 June 1969, and further investigation did reveal that no other guests had stayed at the place during the same week, but none of this information brought him the slightest bit closer to finding Lucy Davison’s last resting place. Therefore it did not provide him with any basis on which he could justifiably put off confronting the four suspects. Moreover, there were three compelling arguments for going ahead with that procedure: the Countess, Arne Pedersen and Pauline Berg. He had solemnly given his word to Arne Pedersen that he would commence questioning with the minimum of delay, and it seemed to him that the time had come to make good on his promise.
However, support for continuing along the same track came suddenly from unexpected quarters. Simonsen had called yet another meeting and had this time skipped the introductory status report, reasoning that it wasn’t going to tell anyone anything they didn’t already know. Reluctantly, he announced that he had reached the decision they had been waiting for.
‘We’re going to bring them in now. First Hanne Brummersted, then Pia and Jesper Mikkelsen. One at a time, if possible. Finally Helena Brage Hansen, providing we can get her to Denmark. I spoke to her brother yesterday and asked him to call and have a word with her.’
Pedersen’s voiced the general reaction.
‘About time, but better late than never.’
The Countess and Pauline Berg gave their agreement. Klavs Arnold, however, begged to differ.
‘Big mistake, if you ask me. Where’s Plan B? What do we do when they refuse to come in?’
The man from Jutland looked like someone who could do with a week’s holiday. Not only had he been criss-crossing the country for meetings and searches, he was also in the middle of moving house, not to mention having to look after all his kids.
The Countess responded:
‘What makes you think they’d do that?’
‘What makes you think they wouldn’t? They’d be wasting their money on a good solicitor, because even a bad one’s going to tear us to pieces. We’ve got nothing… nothing at all.’