Free The Killing Forest by Sara Blædel

old Roed Thomsen. He’d retired just before Louise had finished at the police academy. He had always been well respected, was one of the town’s leaders—he probably still was, Louise thought. Hadn’t he been president of the Hvalsø Sports Association? She was never around him. Her parents didn’t belong to the town’s elite. Her family would always be regarded as outsiders, no matter how long they lived there.
    “What happened out in Såby?” Louise asked.
    “The school janitor was killed by a hit-and-run driver. They never found him.”
    “For God’s sake, Lissy!” Ernst said. “There’s no reason to start in on things we don’t know about.”
    She ignored her husband. “Did you know him?”
    Louise shook her head.
    “But then you never played handball, did you?”
    “I did, yes. But I don’t remember the janitor out there.”
    “He lived in Vestre Såby with his wife and two small children. There was a handball tournament that weekend, and as I recall he left for the gym early Saturday morning to let the cleaners from Roskilde in. There’d been a dance the night before.”
    “None of this matters now,” Ernst said. He looked at Louise. “A paper boy found him in the ditch. They never did catch whoever ran him over, even though the police questioned everyone around there. The chief of police finally gave up.”
    “Of course he gave up,” Lissy said. “He knew who was out there in the middle of the night, running the intersection with their headlights off.”
    Ernst sighed. “I don’t know why you’re digging all this up.”
    “I’ll tell you why, because it’s so easy to see what goes on around here.” Suddenly Lissy sounded tired. “You’ve always been afraid of the bigwigs in this town; you’d rather just shut your eyes. But I’m not going to keep quiet anymore, not about anyone who might have been involved in Klaus’s death. And that’s that! Not after hearing this from Louise.”
    Chills ran down Louise’s spine. Her joints suddenly felt stiff and sore, as if she’d been sitting motionless too long. But she couldn’t move. “Who drove around at night with their headlights off?” She looked back and forth between Klaus’s parents, though she felt she already knew the answer.
    Lissy avoided her eyes, and Ernst folded his hands in his lap again, perhaps considering her question. Finally he looked at her. “Thomsen and his crowd. Klaus was with them the night the janitor died.” He didn’t look away this time, as if he wanted to show her that he realized he’d let the cat out of the bag.
    Louise opened her mouth, but no words came out.
    “They shut their lights off and crossed the intersection,” Lissy said quietly.
    “It was a sort of test of their manhood,” Ernst said.
    Louise was familiar with the Såby intersection. When you crossed the highway to Holbæk, the road continued on to Torkilstrup. A large building blocked the view on the left side of the road, and if you didn’t stop at the intersection, you couldn’t see traffic coming from Roskilde. A gas station on the other side of the highway made it difficult to see cars coming from Holbæk.
    “They didn’t stop, they just hoped there weren’t any cars,” Louise said to no one in particular.
    “When it happened, Klaus didn’t say anything about being out there that night,” Ernst said. “Later, he talked about it, but he claimed he hadn’t seen anything. I told the chief of police what these kids were up to, but he said they had nothing to do with the accident. Monkey business, as he put it, is a lot different from killing a man. He also said the janitor was thought to have been drunk, and the question was whether he’d even been hit by a car.”
    “And two days later you got sacked at the sawmill,” Lissy said. Ernst nodded.
    She looked at Louise. “That’s how things are done here. You must know that. The chief of police plays poker with the owner of the sawmill.”
    “Yeah, but I got my job