Disgrace Read Free Page A

table.
    ‘Right. So I don’t understand how this case got down tous,’ Assad said. Normally he would have smiled at this point, but he didn’t.
    Carl shook his head. ‘I don’t, either. A man is in prison for the crime. He confessed, got a life sentence and is now behind bars. As a matter of fact, he turned himself in, so why the doubts? Case closed !’ He clapped the file shut.
    ‘Except ...’ Assad bit his lip. ‘He didn’t turn himself in until nine years later.’
    ‘So what? He did turn himself in. When he committed the murders he was only eighteen years old. Maybe he realized, as he grew older, that a bad conscience never fades.’
    ‘Fades?’
    Carl sighed. ‘Yes, fades. Withers, dies. A bad conscience doesn’t go away with time, Assad. On the contrary.’
    Assad was clearly puzzled about something. ‘The Nykøbing Sjælland and Holbæk police worked on the case together. And the Mobile Investigation Unit, too. But, who sent it to us, I can’t tell. Can you?’
    Carl lowered his eyes to the file’s cover. ‘No, it doesn’t say anywhere. Very peculiar.’ If one of those three units hadn’t sent them the file, who had? And if the case had ended in a conviction, why bother reopening it at all?
    ‘Could it have something to do with this?’ Assad asked. He riffled through the file until he found a document from Revenue and Customs, and handed it to Carl. ‘Annual Report’, it said at the top. It was addressed to Bjarne Thøgersen, residing in Albertslund County in Vridløselille State Prison. The man who had killed the two youths.
    ‘Look!’ Assad was pointing at the gigantic figure in the stock revenue line. ‘What do you think?’
    ‘I think he comes from a wealthy family, and now he’s got enough time to play with his money. Apparently he’s done pretty well with it. Where are you going with this?’
    ‘I’ll have you know, Carl, that he doesn’t come from a wealthy family. He was the only member of the boarding-school gang who attended on a scholarship. You can see that he was quite different from the others. Take a look.’ He turned the pages back.
    Carl propped up his head with one hand.
    That was the thing about holidays.
    They came to an end.

4. Autumn 1986
    Although they were six very different people, the fifth-form students had something in common. When classes were over, they would meet in the forest or on the nature paths and light their hash pipes, even if rain was bucketing down. They kept the paraphernalia within reach in the hollow of a tree trunk; Bjarne made sure of that. Cecil fags, matches, tinfoil and the finest dope money could buy on the square in Næstved. Standing in a cluster, they would mix fresh air with a few quick drags, careful not to get so stoned that their pupils would give them away.
    Because it wasn’t about getting high. It was about being their own masters and defying the authorities in the biggest way possible. And smoking hash right next to the boarding school was pretty much the worst you could do.
    So they passed the pipe around and mocked the teachers, trying to outdo each other imagining what they would do to them if they could.
    And that’s how they spent most of the autumn until the day Kristian and Torsten were nearly caught with hash on their breath, which not even ten cloves of garlic could hide. After that they decided to eat it, because then there was no scent.
    It was shortly afterwards that everything began in earnest.
    When they were caught in the act, they were standing beside a thicket close to the stream, high as kites and acting silly, while melting frost dripped from the leaves.
    One of the younger boys suddenly appeared from behind a bush, staring straight at them. He was a blond, ambitious little shit, an irritating goody-two-shoes on the prowl for a beetle he could display in biology class.
    Instead, what he found was Kristian busily shoving the whole works back into the hollow of the tree, while Torsten, Ulrik and Bjarne