Pedersen shook his head.
“Well, during that case I was contacted by a woman who lives here in town. She told me that when she was young she was involved in an episode that in many ways resembled what happened down at Stevns. What was that poor girl’s name now . . . I’ve forgotten?”
“Her name was Catherine Thomsen.”
“Amazing it slipped my mind, but it wasn’t my case. In any event, this local woman contacted me one day. I actually knew her rather well from old times, so we sat and had a nice chat in my office. That was in 1997.”
“Were you police commissioner then?”
“Tell me, do you have a thing about police commissioners? No, I wasn’t. Then I had an office at city hall, but that’s by the by. The woman’s name was Rikke Barbara Hvidt, and she told about an assault she had been subjected to all the way back in 1977. It happened in Kikhavn, a small historic town a couple of kilometres along the coast. I could easily remember the case myself from back then, I was involved in it a little on the sidelines, but she had apparently forgotten that. Fortunately she got away from her attacker.”
“How was she assaulted?”
“One evening, when she was alone in her parents’ house—yes, she was living at home at that time—a man broke in and forced her to go with him down to the shore after stuffing a rag in her mouth and tying her hands behind her. Or that’s what she said afterwards.”
“You make it sound like you didn’t believe her.”
“There were many others who didn’t. As far as I recall, I was one of the moderate doubters, but possibly that’s a later rationalisation. But I’m talking about in 1977, because twenty years later, in 1997, I believed every word she said.”
“Why did you doubt her originally? Was there some reason for that?”
“It concerned her parents. Neither of them was what you’d call an upstanding citizen. It’s no exaggeration to say they were hard-core criminals. Their home was almost a distribution centre for smuggled or stolen goods, mostly cigarettes, jewellery and hi-fi systems, but also hash and other drugs. Rikke had had a child at a young age too, and . . . Well, not everyone was tolerant about that sort of thing back then.”
He waved his hand to apologise for the viewpoint and continued speaking.
“The majority thought that the attack was a way of putting pressure on her parents. A score being settled between criminals, something law-abiding citizens didn’t need to get mixed up in. A few even believed that the whole thing was a lie Rikke made up to get attention.”
“How old was she when she was attacked?”
“Mid-twenties, I think.”
“Was she a criminal too?”
“No, not in the least. But tainted by association in the eyes of some people because she had stayed living in that robbers’ den. But she had a child, and financially it was probably easier for her to stay put. The old crook her dad was actually good to his kids, I have to give him that.”
“And so she got away? That is, when she was attacked.”
“I think she saw her chance to run and took it, but she was completely convinced that the man who attacked her wanted to kill her. He had dug a grave for her, and he behaved crazily. That is, over and above the insanity of just breaking in and dragging her down to the shore.”
“And she didn’t know him?”
“Well, that’s what makes the whole thing even more peculiar. It’s one of the reasons many people didn’t really believe her story. She maintained that he had a mask on.”
“A mask?”
“Yes, that’s what she said. And today I firmly believe her, because since then she has built up a lot of credibility. She became a book dealer and member of the church council—an ordinary, respectable citizen—but she has always stuck firmly to her story from back then. She described it as a kind of ghost mask with black cloth down the sides of the head, a bit like an Egyptian headdress. But you can ask about that later.
“First let’s finish talking about 1977. There was an epilogue. A couple of weeks after the assault—by then Rikke had collected herself—a strange man began sneaking around after her. It was a small town even then, and people kept an eye on each other, so rumours about it quickly spread, and the man was real enough. Soon he could barely step outside his door without someone keeping an eye on what he was doing. Nevertheless he continued to live at the inn for over six months, wherever he got the money for that. A few times he avoided surveillance, and on several occasions was spotted out in Kikhavn, either in the countryside or on the shore. Rikke was convinced that he was the one who had attacked her, but she could not give a facial description because of the mask he’d worn so we had no way to intervene. But the same rules did not apply to her father, and at one point the Peeping Tom got a beating that sent him to the Emergency Room.”