The Forgotten Girls by Sara Blædel

woman was beaten and killed.
    “Heineken,” she answered when Camilla asked what she would like to drink and listed off her options. She would not have minded a cigarette, to be honest, if it weren’t for the fact that she had quit long ago. Besides, she had been inhaling Eik’s secondhand smoke all day. She wasn’t sure if this was due toseeing Mik again or the encounter with Ole Thomsen. Maybe it was just because the day had been so crappy from start to finish, she thought. It seemed like days had passed since she had picked up Eik Nordstrøm at the bar in Sydhavnen.
    “I saw Big Thomsen today,” she said after Camilla opened her beer. “Do you remember him?”
    Camilla shook her head without taking the time to think, but then again she had always been better at putting things behind her than Louise had. “I have no idea who that is.” She put a glass on the table.
    “Yes, you do,” Louise insisted and started laughing. “You slept with him!”
    “I did?” her friend asked, surprised. From the look on her face, the discussion didn’t seem to be ringing any bells.
    “That time when you visited me in Hvalsø for the Whitsun celebration,” Louise reminded her. “At the very least, you went home with him.”
    When they’d first met each other, Camilla lived in Roskilde, too, and it had been difficult to convince her to come to Hvalsø even though the two towns were only one train stop apart.
    “Well, I don’t remember any of that,” her friend insisted.
    “Back then he had an apartment in the basement of his parents’ house with a corner bar and a big stereo. His dad was the chief of police in Roskilde. You remember him; you just don’t want to.”
    “Wait,” Camilla said, her eyes moving back and forth as she seemed to shift the pieces in her head. “Oh, that guy! How’s he doing?” she asked, her attention obviously elsewhere. Then she looked out the window and excused herself. “You’ll have to keep yourself entertained for a minute. I think the workers are about to leave even though we had a deal that they were going to keep at it until they finished the back room.”
    Louise was left to drink her beer alone. Through the open doors, she could hear her friend having a loud discussion with someone. She returned to the kitchen soon after, her eyes dark with anger.
    “I told him that they don’t need to bother coming back,” she groaned. “They’re not finished even though they promised, and they have the nerve to just pick up and go.”
    She banged the table angrily with her hand. “It’s Lars Hemmingsen—do you know him? Didn’t he used to hang out with Ole Thomsen and those guys back then?”
    Louise didn’t remember him off the top of her head, but Ole Thomsen did always have a group of followers.
    “They’ll get it done,” Louise soothed, not sure why this all came as a surprise to Camilla. Everyone knew that contractors never finished on time.
    “The painters are coming tomorrow,” her friend added indignantly. “But I guess there’s no point now since those bastards didn’t finish plastering the walls. And you know what?”
    Louise dutifully shook her head and listened.
    “That Hemmingsen guy asked if we could pay them under the table!”
    “Oh?” Louise asked, confused.
    “But Frederik said he wanted an invoice. Obviously that’s why they’re dragging it out—so they can charge us for more hours.”
    Camilla had decided to have the wedding at home. She wanted to hold the ceremony in the park behind the house where the grounds sloped down toward Roskilde Fjord; the reception would be inside in the spacious rooms. From what Louise had gathered, Frederik would prefer to have the ceremony at Roskilde Cathedral and then celebrate with a nice dinner at a restaurant, but Camilla refused.
    “I ran into Mik out by Avnsø Lake,” Louise said and poured the rest of the beer into her glass. “It was kind of weird seeing him again.”
    “What was he doing out