The Forgotten Girls by Sara Blædel Page A

there was to be any chance of her being enjoyable company.
    “And who’s Melvin, then?” Eik asked.
    Louise turned off Kalvebod Quay and drove past the central post office without answering.
    “I was just under the impression that you lived alone with your foster son,” he mumbled and got out his pack of cigarettes so he could sneak a few puffs.
    She parked by the curb, trying to refrain from reacting to the fact that he had obviously been checking up on her. She definitely had not told him any of that herself.
    “Melvin is our downstairs neighbor,” she answered, getting out of the car. “He’s seventy-five, and today is his turn to cook.”
    “You live in a commune?” he asked with respect in his voice as he tucked his lighter in his pocket.
    She laughed and shook her head. “Not at all. We just help each other out to make things run more smoothly. Melvin lends a hand with the practical stuff, and Jonas and I help him keep the loneliness at bay.”
    “Well, no wonder there’s no room for a man in your life.”
    Louise stopped. “What makes you say that?”
    “What?”
    “That there’s no room for a man in my life? Do people talk about that?”
    He shook his head innocently.
    “Who said that?” she demanded to know. “Was it Hanne?”
    “Oh, stop it, it wasn’t meant as an insult,” he shouted after her as Louise turned her back on him and walked away. She hated being exposed and questioned; hated that Eik knew her private business after only a couple of days.
    I T WAS LATE , so instead of going back up to the office, she walked over to her bicycle while she called the Department of Forensic Medicine to ask if they had set up an appointment with Lise Andersen’s father.
    “Actually, he’s already on his way,” Flemming Larsen informed her. He also reported that one of her colleagues from the Search Department had tried to track down the woman’sdental records now that they had her civil registration number. “No luck, though,” he lamented. “In fact, they haven’t found anything. It would have been a different story had she been registered as dead within the last ten or fifteen years. Then there’d have been a better chance of the information still being there.”
    “I’m pretty sure he’ll be able to identify her,” Louise said. She asked Flemming to call her once Viggo Andersen had been to see his daughter.
    “I’ll accompany him to the viewing room myself,” the medical examiner said. “If he’s the least bit unsure, I’ll be able to tell and then I’ll be sure to react.”
    Louise thanked him and got on her bike to go home.
    M ELVIN HAD MADE scalloped peas and carrots fresh from Grete Milling’s greenhouse. Louise smiled at him, appreciating the fact that he went all-out when he was in charge of dinner.
    “If only I had a greenhouse like that,” he sighed and put the last rissoles in the pan.
    “Maybe you could apply for permission to put one up in the yard,” Camilla suggested as she handed him a glass of white wine from a bottle she had brought. “It’s pretty big.”
    “But that’s not the same,” Melvin mumbled while flipping the breaded meat.
    “Or you could have your own vegetable garden at my place,” Camilla offered. “There’s plenty of room, that’s for sure. But I’m not going to take care of it for you.”
    “That’s the whole point of it, though,” he retorted, “unwinding and caring for the things that grow. Nancy was always so good at that.”
    Since meeting Grete Milling, he had been mentioning hislate wife less frequently but when he did, his voice always filled with love even though it had felt like forever since they had lived together. For the last several years of her life, Nancy had been in a coma at a nursing home, but Melvin had gone every day to see her.
    “Will you tell the boys that dinner’s ready?” he asked, nodding toward the closed door to Jonas’s room.
    Louise walked over and knocked. They had been in there since she