The Killing Forest Read Free Page A

oak, the gothi put his robe back on. The men gathered again. The bonfire was dying out, its flames flickering as darkness overtook the clearing. The men formed a circle, and the gothi closed it. Sune stared at what was being passed around from hand to hand. The oath ring.
    The chill of the night spread into his chest as he realized that this was the reason they had been looking for him. He was a grown man now, a part of all this. He had sworn with his blood that he was one of them. They expected him to stand together with his brothers as they took an oath of silence, one they could never break.

2
    L ouise Rick glanced around the allotment cottage. She had gotten up early to pack and load the car. While on sick leave, she’d been staying in this small, black wooden house in Dragør that she and her neighbor Melvin Pehrson had bought.
    She was returning to her apartment in Frederiksberg and her job at National Police Headquarters. Not that the easygoing routine out here she and her foster son, Jonas, had slipped into hadn’t been pleasant. In fact, it had fit her frame of mind perfectly. It was exactly what she needed.
    Every morning after sending Jonas off to school on the bus, she’d made a pot of tea, packed it in her bike basket, and ridden to the beach with their dog, Dina, running beside her. Dina also went along on her morning swims. Dina had a puzzled look when Louise swam back to land, as if the dog were trying to convince her to stay in the water longer. And once in a while, Louise had the urge to do just that. To swim all the way out and be swallowed by the waves; to disappear. But each time she had signaled to her deaf pet to follow her in.
    She’d kept Dina at a distance until she shook off. If the morning was gray and rainy, she would wrap herself up in a thick towel and crawl in under the Scotch roses, gazing out over the sea while drinking her tea. Dina loved to run back and forth across the sand and eat mussels that washed up on the beach.
    She’d been on a leave of absence since the shooting at the gamekeeper’s house, where a man had been killed while attempting to rape her. But it wasn’t the images of her own naked body and the man behind her that haunted her. Nor was it the bullet wound in his head or the blood that had spurted all over her body.
    René Gamst, the man who had saved her. The lust in his eyes as he waited to fire the fatal shot, the scorn in his voice when he said it was clear she liked it. That’s what she couldn’t shake.
    But worst of all was what Gamst said about Klaus, Louise’s first love, who had hanged himself the day after they moved in together:
    “Your boyfriend was a pussy. He didn’t have the fucking guts to put the noose around his own neck.”
    The words had been echoing in her head since the ambulance drove off with her that day.
    The hospital examination had revealed three broken ribs on her left side, but otherwise only scratches and bruises. She was released that evening. Her boss, Rønholt, suggested she take sick leave, and she had agreed, but only because Gamst’s words had reached that private place inside her she’d hidden away for many years. Not only from the outside world, but from herself.
    She and Klaus had been together since Louise was in ninth grade in Hvalsø School; on her eighteenth birthday he had given her an engagement ring. A year later, after he finished his apprenticeship as a butcher, they had moved into an old farmhouse in Kisserup. Two nights later he was dead.
    In all the years since stepping into the low-ceilinged hallway to find him hanging from the stairway, a rope taut around his neck, she had been plagued by guilt. For going to a concert in Roskilde the previous evening and staying over with her friend Camilla. For apparently not being good enough. Because if she had been worth loving, he wouldn’t have taken his life.
    She’d never understood what had happened that night, all those years ago. Not until Gamst spoke up.
    If he