‘Is that where she is?’
He nodded.
‘And you’re quite sure? The campfire might have been somewhere else then.’
Mikkelsen looked around and stammered a reply:
‘I – I’m sure.’
‘How far down did you dig?’
He held a hand above his head, and Simonsen estimated two to three metres.
They went back. The women were still sobbing, though both Hanne Brummersted and Helena Brage Hansen had taken a bread roll from the buffet. Jesper Mikkelsen poured himself a glass of orange juice before returning to his chair. Simonsen addressed them all.
‘Right, just so everyone knows: you can turn on the waterworks as much as you want, but you will tell the truth and every little bit of it, so I strongly advise you to pull yourselves together. It’ll make things easier. Now, let’s start at the beginning, shall we? You were all in the same class at the Brøndbyøster Gymnasium from nineteen sixty-seven to sixty-nine, and there you formed a club you called the Lonely Hearts Club. The other students in the class called you the Hearts for short. Did you refer to yourselves in that way, too?’
Helena Brage Hansen answered:
‘Yes, we were the ones who shortened it, as it happens. The long form was a bit unwieldy.’
‘And you, Helena, were the club’s founder, is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who was in it from your class?’
‘The four of us here, Jørgen and Mouritz.’
Her voice sounded frail and pitiful. Simonsen went on without any sympathy:
‘When you went back, did you tell him what had happened?’
‘No, of course not.’
He continued speaking to Helena Brage Hansen.
‘All right, back to the Hearts. Why was this club formed?’
‘So those of us who were left out could enjoy a sense of community, too.’
‘Left out of what?’
‘The class, the parties, the talk… all the movements, however loose they were – the hippies and the provos, the singing and the guitar-playing, the concerts, the general day and age… everything.’
‘So you were bullied?’
‘No one thought of it like that at the time. But suffice to say that while our so-called classmates preached love and togetherness, they could be nasty and mean. We’ve all of us got our own stories and memories, things we’re stuck with the rest of our lives.’
Simonsen wheeled round and pointed at Hanne Brummersted:
‘Tell me yours.’
The shock effect he had hoped for failed to materialise, the consultant merely doing as she was instructed, muttering her story bleakly and without delay.
‘In the first year I was part of the main group for a while. I even came to school without a bra on once. It happened to be the day we had our class photo taken. Someone wrote a letter and complained. Nearly everyone in the class signed it. It was before pornography was made legal, that wasn’t until a couple of years later. They sent it to the Ministry of Justice for a laugh, accusing me of debauchery. They even got a reply they put up on the noticeboard and sent a copy home to my parents. For a time after that they called me Nia. It stood for nipples in agony, but at least then they weren’t calling me Chub, Fat-face or the Virgin Blubber. There was a lot more unpleasantness besides that, but the thing that hurt most was when they gave me a frying pan for my eighteenth birthday. I cried nearly the whole day, even though by then I had the others for support.’
She indicated her three former classmates.
It was hard for Simonsen not to feel pity.
‘So the reason you formed the Hearts was to counter all that?’
Pia Mikkelsen answered without having been asked.
‘The worst thing was that to begin with we used to be in on the teasing, too, trying to make ourselves popular. I actually signed that letter Hanne just mentioned, but then in the third year I finally had the guts to tell the ones who gave her that frying pan what I thought of them. But there’s no doubt the Hearts was a defensive move, a place to go, because no one else wanted us.’
The three others nodded, and even Helena Brage Hansen was in agreement. She added:
‘It wasn’t just appearance that mattered, though that was definitely important. You had to think, do and feel the same as them. Anyone who didn’t was going to have a hard time of it, even from the younger teachers. It was unfair and very… wrong.’
Simonsen believed he’d got the gist. It wasn’t that far from what he’d imagined, though as witnesses they were hardly reliable, having a clear interest in exaggerating and putting themselves forward as victims.
He continued:
‘On Friday, the thirteenth of June nineteen sixty-nine you’d got your last oral exam but one out of the way and would soon graduate. All that was left was Maths the week after, on Friday the twentieth. Who wants to go on?’
Jesper Mikkelsen spoke up.
‘It was a long-standing arrangement that we’d revise together for Maths. Not that any of us was in danger of failing, because we weren’t. But it was our most important subject and the grade meant something in terms of getting on to our favoured courses at university and college. Hanne wanted to be a doctor, so she needed at least eight on the old scale, preferably more…’
Simonsen cut in:
‘You remember that, so many years on?’
‘I remember every minute of that trip. There hasn’t been a day gone by without my thinking about it. I remember what I dreamed at night, and how much our train tickets cost.’
‘All right, go on.’
‘Helena had the use of this place through her dad. The Scouts only used it at weekends and never in holiday seasons. We didn’t even need to pay for it. The idea was for Jørgen to be a kind of teacher to us, he was really good at Maths. He and Pia had worked out this really tight revision schedule, so it was no picnic. We arrived on the Sunday evening, that’d be the fifteenth of June, and from Esbjerg to Nørballe we got the bus.’
He paused.
‘Go on.’
‘Can’t someone else?’
‘I said, go on.’
‘On the Monday we revised as planned for half the day. We were all very concentrated about it and were soon ahead of schedule… so then Jørgen and Mouritz went into Esbjerg to get some shopping in while the rest of us worked on assignments. Integrals, I remember. The Scouts had bikes here, so they borrowed two of them.’
‘What about Mouritz, wasn’t he supposed to be revising, as well?’
‘He didn’t really need the grade. He was going into his dad’s firm, and it didn’t matter much what results he got. Besides, Jørgen needed a hand with the shopping.’
‘There was a grocery store close by. How come they didn’t go there instead?’
‘It was a lot more expensive, Helena knew that, and we didn’t have much money.’
‘OK, so what happened then?’
He let Jesper Mikkelsen off the hook and pointed to Helena Brage Hansen instead. She took a deep breath and carried on in a quiet voice.
‘They got back just after three with an English girl they’d met in Esbjerg. Jørgen had given her a ride on the back of his bike. It was Lucy.’
‘Lucy Selma Davison?’
‘Lucy Selma Davison, that’s right. But of course we just knew her as Lucy.’
‘Of course,’ Simonsen echoed. No one else spoke.
‘Does anyone feel the need for a break?’
They’d only been going for ten minutes, and yet everyone wanted the pause. Pauline and Arne each sent him a look of surprise. He ignored their silent protests and indicated that he wanted them to stay put. He himself stepped outside.
The weather had changed, it was calmer now, the layer of cloud breaking up from the east. It looked like the sun was coming out. He ambled down to the campfire site and stood for a minute with his hands folded, annoyed with himself for not being able to remember a single prayer. He lingered nonetheless.