‘But there was no sexual activity?’
‘Not at that point, only later. It was in the air that something had to happen. Everyone felt that, I think. Apart from Lucy, perhaps.’
‘So later on, things happened. Is that right?’
‘We decided we needed some beer. Lucy said we should club together and put in some of her own money. The rest of us did likewise and the boys went off to the grocery store. When they got back we lit the campfire and started drinking. It was late afternoon by then.’
‘Still without clothes on?’
‘No, not at that point. It was too cold. But then Troels turned up. He had Down’s. Back then we’d have said he was retarded, a mongol. Lucy called him Happy Troels. Helena had seen him before and knew he was harmless, so we let him stay and even gave him a beer. Afterwards we made sure he stuck to fizzy drinks because we weren’t sure what’d happen if he got drunk. Later on, they whistled from the farm next door for him to come back. Imagine, they whistled like he was a dog, but off he went back home and we went inside. We’d had a few beers by then, without really being drunk, and we decided to play strip poker, even if… well, it wasn’t that exciting seeing as how we’d been going about with no clothes on most of the day anyway. So that all petered out. But then Lucy knew a game she taught us.’
Hanne Brummersted paused and glanced around. Simonsen got the feeling she’d been opening up in the expectation of someone else taking over.
‘Go on,’ he said.
She obeyed, though with ill-concealed reluctance.
‘It was a game of five dice. Mostly it was down to luck, but you had to throw the dice in the air and catch them again according to a series of increasingly difficult rules. She called it knucklebones. If you lost, you had to do something the previous player picked for you. And, of course, it got more and more daring each time you lost.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Sexual things, increasingly intimate. To begin with, you lost the rest of your clothes, but after that it got more erotic, a lot more erotic… I don’t suppose we need go into detail.’
‘We most certainly do need to go into detail. Besides, you’re a doctor. I’m sure you can be detached about it.’
The look she gave him was one of sadness rather than anger.
‘At first all we did was touch each other, one on one, depending on who lost. The others watched, and then it just escalated, getting more intense all the time. At some point Troels came back and wanted to join in. When he saw what we were doing he took his pants off and sat there with an erection, masturbating himself. Then it was my turn to lose and I had to make him ejaculate, with my hands. It was a mistake, a big mistake. After that, he left and we carried on. It all got out of hand. We were doing all sorts of things we shouldn’t have, opening up for each other, fondling, groping, kissing, licking.’
‘Was Lucy directing all this?’
‘No, not at all. She just thought it was funny. She played along like the rest of us, only she hardly ever lost, she was very dexterous with the dice, much better than us. I remember she took her clothes off, though she didn’t have to.’
‘So she didn’t get involved physically, as it were?’
‘Hardly at all. She kissed me when we were both naked, and she had to fondle Jørgen’s penis while the rest of us counted to twenty. But by that time it was nothing. Pia and Jesper had already had intercourse by then, and after that it was Mouritz and me. I was a virgin, so I bled. It hurt, too, but I just clenched my teeth.’
Simonsen turned to Helena Brage Hansen.
‘It sounds like some of you, at least, wanted it to stop. I’ve read the agony column you edited in the scouting magazine. You come across as a mature, sensible girl who would have known how far to go and when to say stop. Why didn’t you step in? Or at least leave?’
Her reply came promptly:
‘A lot of it was probably to do with the alcohol, though that wasn’t the most important reason. We all carried on in the hope that Lucy would lose, too, and really lose. The boys had their obvious reasons, and we girls because we’d already gone so far, some of us all the way, we thought it was her turn.’
‘Did her turn come round?’
‘No, it didn’t.’
‘Was she cheating?’
‘No, she was just too good.’
‘So how did it end? Perhaps you gave fortune a helping hand?’
‘No, we didn’t. Pia felt ill and was sick, and by then the boys were… well, spent. We’d run out of beer, too, so we just went to bed.’
‘You went to bed?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about Lucy?’
‘She went back to her tent.’
‘And nothing more happened?’
‘Not until the next morning.’
‘All right, go on.’
‘We were the first ones up again. Lucy was still asleep. We all felt terrible. We were embarrassed about what had happened and couldn’t look each other in the eye, so we immersed ourselves in maths and just wanted to go home, I suppose. I think we were angry with Lucy, too, because in a way she’d started it all off and yet she’d never really got involved herself. That’s how I felt about it, at any rate.’
Simonsen noted the nods of agreement.
‘And then Troels came back. It was obvious what he wanted. He had his hands down his trousers, and so on. At first we were going to send him home, but then we got the idea of sending him down to Lucy instead.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘I’m afraid so. We said now she could have a taste of her own medicine, and went to the windows and watched as he crawled into her tent. Obviously, there wasn’t that much we could see, and after a while he crawled out again and went away.’
‘And you were hoping he was going to rape her?’
‘No, not like that. We just thought she could take care of Happy Troels the way we, or rather Hanne, had done the night before. But then when nothing happened, we went back to our Maths and hangovers, moral as well as physical. It wasn’t until after lunch we began to suspect something wasn’t quite right. We called for her, and when she didn’t appear we eventually went down to the tent and looked inside. And that’s when we discovered she was dead. He’d strangled her.’
‘Six people don’t get the same idea all at once. Which of you suggested sending Troels off to Lucy?’
‘I can’t remember. All I know is we were all in agreement.’
Jesper Mikkelsen’s memory was rather better:
‘I did,’ he said, almost inaudibly.
The rest of the interview was predictable and, if possible, even sadder. Pia Mikkelsen hit the nail on the head.
‘We panicked. It was pure panic. The obvious thing to do was call the police and tell them what had happened, but we didn’t even consider it. The mere thought of our parents finding out what we’d done was unbearable, not to mention what would happen to us. We decided to bury her and I said we should do it under the campfire. I thought if they sent dogs out looking for her they wouldn’t be able to detect her there if we buried her deep enough. The boys worked like mad, while we girls packed her tent and rucksack. We couldn’t find room for her Afghan coat, so we lit a fire and burned it.’
‘Where was her body while all this was going on?’
‘We carried her out of the tent, then covered her up with a sheet and put some stones down on the edges so it wouldn’t blow away.’
‘Did she have any clothes on?’
‘Only her knickers. We took them off her and put them in her rucksack. We thought she’d decompose in time, but the clothes wouldn’t.’
‘What were you going to do with her things?’
Jesper Mikkelsen cut in:
‘We washed semen off her thigh as well. Troels had ejaculated on her, but she hadn’t been raped, only killed.’
Simonsen turned on him like a clap of thunder, but Mikkelsen managed to nip his rage in the bud.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant was only that she at least hadn’t been raped.’