Free The Forgotten Girls by Sara Blædel

Lisemette.”
    After thanking Agnete Eskildsen once more for reacting to the police alert, Louise looked up Eliselund online.
    Day Center Eliselund, West Zealand County, it said, followed by a phone number. Louise dialed and waited while a mechanical voice offered choices: the business hours of the day center, how to contact a client, and which number to press to get in touch with the main office. She selected the last option and her call was picked up right away by a Lillian Johansen.
    “Records like that are very sensitive, of course, so we can’t just hand them over,” the woman said curtly after Louise explained who she was and why she was calling.
    “We’re not asking you to hand over the files,” Louise quickly pointed out. “We’d just like to see them—”
    “All records are protected by the Privacy Act,” the woman cut in.
    Louise tried again. She had just been so excited about possibly moving a step closer to an identification, and now this petty official was going to stand in her way.
    “We’re trying to identify a dead woman. We received a tip from someone who recognizes her, who told us that the deceased lived at Eliselund as a child,” Louise elaborated. “All I’m asking is if someone from your staff will go and see if her file is still there and give us a civil registration number or the names of the woman’s parents so we can get in touch with her next of kin.”
    “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” the woman stated bluntly.
    “I guess I’ll have to get a warrant then.” Louise sighed, aware that she had missed her opportunity to talk her way through the bureaucratic wall. “But maybe you can tell me if the old records are still kept on site?”
    “Yes, of course. It’s not like we throw anything away,” the woman answered pointedly.
    Following this minimal opening, Louise quickly assessed that it would be worth it to give it another try, now that she had confirmed that the records were accessible.
    “But then I’d just like to ask you,” she tried again, “if someone could please go down to the archives and check the old patient records to see if a girl lived there by the name of Lisemette. She was born around 1962.”
    “Anyone could call and ask for something like that,” was her reply, and Louise was about to lose what was left of her patience when the woman added that the police might bother to show up in person for starters. “Then you can explain to us exactly who it is you’re looking for.”
    “I’m coming down,” Louise quickly decided. “Would there happen to be anybody I can talk to who worked at Eliselund in the mid-sixties?”
    “No, but we’ve got the yearbooks. They have the names and pictures of everyone who lived here during that period.”
    L OUISE QUICKLY WROTE down the address and ended the conversation.
    “Let’s go,” she said as Eik came through the door, holding a pastry in his hand. “In all likelihood, the woman’s name is Lisemette and she was placed in a home for the mentally disabled outside of Ringsted as a child. It’s closed down now but they’ve got all the records. If you’ve got nothing else, I think we should drive down and have a look at the yearbooks to see if we can find out if it’s her. Maybe then we can find her next of kin as well.”

11
    T HE WARM M AY sun had turned the roadsides lush and green, and the yellow dandelions had finished flowering and transformed into fuzzy gray spheres. Every corner was drenched in idyll as they rounded a turn in the road lined by a couple of thatched timber-frame houses and horses grazing right by the road. Ahead of them was a tree-lined avenue, more than a mile long and winding through fields running down toward Haraldsted Lake. The drive from the main road had almost made Louise forget their reason for being there. The sky was clear and the area was divinely beautiful. The road curved one last time before it descended toward the water, bringing Eliselund into view.
    The