The Killing Bay

by Chris Ould

  And still: why? What was the attraction – compulsion – to come to a hippy commune almost as far north as you could go?

  They wanted to live differently, that was what Eileen Skoradal had told me. Was that what had drawn Lýdia here then? A girl who looked at pictures of the outside world with her best friend: was this as close as she could get to that outside, to living differently?

  I came back to the word compulsion. Wasn’t that really what I was trying to understand? Even though I knew it couldn’t be done – not if what I believed about Lýdia now was correct.

  And believed about myself?

  The light was shifting, less brilliant now: grey cloud from the west. Shadows on the land. I was starting to feel the chill. I stood up to head back.

  * * *

  I heard the sound of an engine as I got closer to Múli: something rougher than a car and too constant for that. When I climbed the wall at the end of the track I saw a man dressed in overalls and a peaked denim cap guiding a self-propelled mower towards a patch of uncut grass. At the front the machine had a three-foot blade of triangular cutting teeth.

  When he saw me approaching the man throttled back the engine until it was just ticking over.

  “Morgun,” I said, coming to a halt.

  “Morgun.” He looked me over. “Alliance?”

  It seemed like an odd question out here but I shook my head. “Nei. Eg eiti Jan Reyná. Duga tygum enskt?”

  “Nei. Small.” Then he pointed to himself. “Eyðun Thomsen.”

  We exchanged nods and greetings all over again, then I turned to point at the houses and took in the fields with a gesture, then pointed at him. “Is this yours? Your land. Hús. You?”

  “Nei, nei. Hoyggja.” He gestured at the mower and hay so I’d understand, which I more or less did.

  “Who owns it? Er… Hvat navn?” I made another gesture at the houses and fields.

  “Oh, ja. Múli,” he said.

  The name of the place, not the owner. Then I had a bright idea. “Duga tygum dansk?”

  “Dansk? Ja.”

  “Okay. Hang on.”

  I fished out my phone, swiped the screen and searched for the translation app. It didn’t have Faroese, but it did have Danish. Thomsen cocked his head and peered at the screen as I pecked out the question, “Who owns this land?” then tapped the translate button which turned it into Hvem ejer denne jord. I held the screen so he could read it.

  “Oh, okay.” He nodded. “Justesen – Boas Justesen.”

  He looked to see if I got it. I showed that I did, then typed out “Do you know where he lives? I would like to talk to him.”

  He read the translation then looked at me again with just a hint of suspicion. “You… er – buy? This?”

  “Nei, nei.” I shook my head and tried to show that it was the last thing on my mind. “I just want to talk to him. Tale.”

  Whether he fully understood that I couldn’t tell. I started for the translator again, but he stopped me. “Fuglafjørður,” he said. “Ennivegur fimm.”

  “Ennivegur?”

  “Ja, nummar fimm.” He held up a spread hand to show the number five.

  “Okay, takk,” I said. “Stora takk fyri. Hav ein góðan dag, ja?”

  “Ja. Sjálv takk.”

  I started away. After a couple of steps he called after me, “Hey. No problem!”

  I waved back. “No problem.”

  28

  “THIS TIME I’M TAKING THEM MYSELF,” SOPHIE KROGH SAID, holding up the aluminium flight case in her hand. She had her coat on and a rucksack over her shoulder, ready to go.

  “Will there be enough to give us answers if the other evidence can’t be found?” Hentze asked.

  “Some answers, yeh, but without her clothes for analysis…”

  Hentze got the point. “You’ll tell them it’s urgent?”

  “Yeh, of course.”

  “Okay. Thanks. Safe home, then.”

  “Takk.” She made to move on, then turned back. “Listen, Hjalti, take it easy, okay?”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “Okay then.”

  When Sophie had gone Hentze leaned back in his chair and wondered if it was so obvious that he had not been taking it easy over all this.

  Little surprise, perhaps. He should have insisted that Remi remove him from the investigation altogether and it bothered him that Remi had not, even when he’d suggested it yesterday. In fact, when it came down to it, Remi’s recent behaviour bothered Hentze in more ways than one – not least because he was letting Ári Niclasen run around like a headless chicken.

  Perhaps, as he’d considered before, Remi felt that a show of faith was in order, to bolster Ári’s position after the Tummas Gramm case. If so, then giving Ári a degree of latitude in how he led the investigation might be expected – at least in public. But in private it would certainly be possible for Remi to direct or divert Ári away from pursuing contradictory lines of enquiry, or those based only on wild speculation.

  But Remi had not, and that bothered Hentze. It was almost as if Remi was deliberately letting Ári set himself up for a fall. Was that it then? Was Remi giving Ári enough rope to hang himself?

  No, Hentze doubted that. Remi was more direct. If he wanted Ári gone he would just do it, or simply step in.

  What then? On such a serious case – not to say sensitive, given the involvement of AWCA – how did it make sense to let Ári run wild?

  Hentze sat up. Damn it all. He’d been dragged into thinking exactly the way he despised most: letting office politics become the subject of his attention. What he did was police work. He wasn’t interested in vying for position or pushing for credit. Leave that to others; he just got on with the job, which was exactly what he should do now.

  * * *

  “So where are we up to?” Hentze asked when he found Oddur, not in the incident room, but alone in a room two doors along. “Have we anything new to be looked at? Anything at all.”

  Oddur Arge seemed a little thrown by Hentze’s rather resolute tone. “Anything?” he asked.

  “Yes, whatever you have.”

  “Well, we’ve found nothing more on her email or social media accounts: nothing that’s interesting to us, anyway. Same for her photos and video.”

  “But?”

  Oddur still seemed uncertain, but then took the plunge. “You remember the SIM card Technical found in her car? Well, it got me thinking. Like, why did she have it, why was it hidden? So I went through the data and—”

  “Hold on,” Hentze cut in. “Wasn’t the SIM card with the samples that went – should have gone – to Copenhagen?”

  Oddur shook his head. “No, it came up negative for prints so there was no point sending it.”

  “Okay, go on then.” Hentze pulled a chair round and sat down.

  “Well, it turned out to be a pay-as-you-go card with two hundred krónur credit,” Oddur said. “But when I looked at the call history the curious thing was that it had only been used to send text messages. There are no voice calls at all and no messages received. And then it gets stranger. Look.” He turned and opened a document on the laptop and a list appeared: three columns of text. “On the left is the date,” Oddur said, pointing. “In the centre is the phone number the text was sent to, and on the right is the message. As you can see, the recipient number is always the same. I checked: it’s another pay-as-you-go cellphone.”

  Hentze squinted at the screen, then got out his reading glasses. The right-hand column was a series of letters and numbers: P 1500; S 1130; Q 1845; S 2100; Q 2200.

  “Are those messages?” he asked.

  “Yeh, that’s what was sent,” Oddur said.

  “What do they mean, do you know?”

  Again Oddur seemed slightly hesitant. “I think they could be rendezvous codes.” He glanced at Hentze. “The letter stands for a location, the numbers are the time. For example, if P was the football ground in Klaksvík, then sending ‘P 1500’ would mean ‘Meet me at
3 p.m. at the football ground.’”

  “That’s all a bit James Bond isn’t it?” Hentze said.

  Oddur looked slightly defensive. “Well, yeh, maybe, I suppose,” he said. “Listen, I’m a nerd, right? I know what everyone thinks, but the SIM card was hidden in the car and I don’t see what else the text messages can be if they’re not rendezvous codes.”

  One thing about Oddur was that he stuck to his guns, even when doing so only confirmed most people’s scepticism. It was something Hentze respected, even if most of the time he had no interest in whichever conspiracy theory Oddur was embracing.

  Hentze looked at the screen again. “Is there a pattern to the dates when the messages were sent?”

  “No, but that could be because they were only used to rearrange missed meetings,” Oddur said, then leaned in, warming to his subject. “What you’d normally do is arrange your next meeting while you’re together. So you agree the time and the place in advance. But if you can’t make that meeting for some reason, then you send a coded message to rearrange a new one. Or, if you’ve got something you need to pass on right away, you could also send a message to call a crash meeting.”

  “A crash meeting?”

  Oddur shrugged. “I read a lot of espionage novels.”

  “Okay, so you know what you’re talking about,” Hentze said, with no trace of irony. “But say that you’re right, why would Erla Sivertsen need to arrange secret meetings?”

  “She wouldn’t, not unless she was doing some sort of undercover work.”

  “Against who? The Alliance?”

  “Why not?” Oddur said, as if he’d already got this far in his thinking. “We all know there are contingency plans for Alliance protests, so wouldn’t it also be useful if we had someone on the inside who could give advance warning of what they were planning to do?”

  Hentze thought about that. “She couldn’t, though, could she?” he said in the end. “The Alliance can’t know in advance when a grind will take place any more than anyone else, and last Friday at Sandur everyone was caught on the hop.”

  “Yeh, I hadn’t thought about that,” Oddur admitted. He looked at the messages on the screen. “But even so, what else could this be?”

  “I don’t know,” Hentze said. “I tell you what, though: why don’t you compare the dates and times in the text messages with that geotagging thing on her photos. Would that be possible? It might tell us more – perhaps where she went.”

  Oddur brightened. “Yeh, sure, of course, it wouldn’t be hard.”

  “Okay then,” Hentze said. “See what you find.” He stood up. “Have you told Ári or Remi about this?”

  “Hardly.”

  “No. Right. Okay.”

  29

  BY THE TIME I GOT TO FUGLAFJØRÐUR I BADLY NEEDED COFFEE and food. Beyond Tórshavn cafés are a rare thing in the Faroes, but I found one with a view of the harbour and ate and drank and listened to the chat going on around me. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand more than the odd word. It felt companionable, and when I left I felt better. Sometimes you just get moments like that, in passing.

  Afterwards I walked back to the car and drove on around the bay, past the long dockside where large pressed-steel buildings edged close to the quay and three decent-sized ships were tied up.

  The harbour industry buildings went as far as the end of the road and on my left the houses became more thinly spread out. There was no other traffic, so it was easy to track the house numbers and finally spot number five, with a couple of cars parked outside on some gravel, neither of them anywhere near new.

  I drove past and made a U-turn, then parked and walked. The house wasn’t large: two bedrooms, maybe; a stone undercroft and white boarded walls above it, most showing their age. There were steps up to a side door and that looked like the best bet, so I climbed them and knocked on a uPVC door that seemed slightly out of keeping with the rest of the place.

  A minute or so later a young woman – maybe twenty – opened the door. She was heavily pregnant, wearing a floral print smock.

  “Hey,” I said. “Duga tygum enskt? Do you speak English?”

  “Yeh, of course. How can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Boas Justesen. I was told he lives here.”

  “Yeh, he does. But downstairs – in the cellar.”

  For a second that caught me off guard, until I worked out that she must mean the undercroft.

  Behind her a guy about the same age came to see what was happening. They both had that bright-eyed, clean-cut Scandinavian aura, as if anything was possible. Or maybe it was just youth.

  “You want Boas?” he asked. “He’s there. I saw him come in half an hour ago. Just knock on the door. But knock hard, yeh? Sometimes he doesn’t hear it so well.” He performed a drinking mime. “But now he should be okay. He was walking straight when I saw him.”

  “Okay, thanks, I’ll do that.”

  “You’re English, right?” he asked. “I lived there for six months. I love England. It’s a great place.”

  “It can be,” I said. “Sorry to disturb you.”

  Back down the steps I went round to the door of the undercroft and knocked on the frosted glass panel. This door was wooden and the broken paint showed it had been at least four different colours in its lifetime.

  Nothing.

  I tried again: a copper’s knock. “Harra Justesen?”

  This time there was an annoyed call – a couple of words – from inside. I knew it wasn’t an invitation – more like the reverse – but you can always trade on ignorance. I tried the door and it opened so I took a step into the gloom inside.

  “Harra Justesen?”

  Off to my right there was what sounded like a repeat of the words I’d heard from outside, just as truculent. The only light was from a couple of net-covered windows but it was enough to get an impression of the place: cramped and cluttered, seemingly a self-contained, one-room bedsit. The plasterboard on the walls was only partly skimmed and in various places electrical wiring protruded from holes. It had the look and feel of something intended to be temporary but which had become permanent.

  I located the man through a grey haze of cigarette smoke, half reclined in an armchair. He was in his mid-sixties, perhaps older: sallow-faced, with white stubble and deep crevasses. He was dressed for the outside, in a woollen coat that looked two sizes too big for him; as if he’d come in and sat down without bothering to do anything else. By his feet there was a carrier bag. I couldn’t tell how drunk he was, but enough.

  “Hey,” I said, deliberately making it sound upbeat, as if I’d failed to register his tone. “Eg eiti Jan Reyná. Do you speak English?”

  “Nei. Fara burtur! Eg eri sjúkur.” A rejection in any language, leaving no room for doubt.

  “I’m a policeman, from England,” I told him. “Ein politistur, ja?”

  I hoped it might get through and add a touch of authority, even if it was spurious. What it got me was a sulky, bad-tempered repeat as he waved at the door. “Eg skilji ikki. Eg eri sjúkur.” Then a definite gesture. “Fara burtur!”

  “I’ll come back in a minute,” I said and went to the door.

  I could have left it at that, but I didn’t want to; not because of the language barrier. I doubted that Boas Justesen would cooperate if I tried Danish as I’d done out at Múli, though, so I went back to the steps at the side of the house and up to the door where I knocked again. The young man answered it this time.

  “Hey. Everything okay?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Language problems,” I said. “Could you do me a favour and translate for me? I could pay you for your time.”

  “Shit, you don’t need to do that. Sure, I’ll come. Hold on.”

  He went back inside to put on a pair of trainers, then came out on to the steps, closing the door behind him.

  “I’m Aron,” he said. “My wife is Kirstin.”

  “Jan,” I said. “Thanks for doing this.”

  “
It’s no problem. We’re just waiting – for the baby to come. Any time now.”

  “Boy or a girl, do you know?” I asked for politeness.

  “A boy,” he said with some pride.

  “Any names yet?”

  “Ja. He’ll be Jógvan Hallur, after my father.”

  This took us as far as the undercroft. I opened the door and went in with just a cursory tap. It made Boas Justesen jerk round from his kitchen counter where he was now trying to find a relatively clean glass amongst half a dozen that weren’t. Aron followed me in and when Justesen saw him there was some back and forth between them, in the middle of which I heard the word politistur.

  In the end Aron turned to me and said, “He says you’re a cop. He doesn’t talk to the cops.”

  “It’s not official,” I said, not sure whether Aron might have the same reservations as Justesen. “It’s a personal matter. I was told he owns the houses and land at a place called Múli. Can you ask him if that’s true and how long he’s had it?”

  The explanation took a while, but in the end Justesen gave a grudging answer before going to the sink to rinse a glass. He leaned on the counter.

  “He says it’s his family’s place,” Aron told me. “They’ve always had it.”

  I nodded. “There was a commune there in the 1970s. They called it the Colony and I’d like to talk to anyone who was there. Can you ask him if he remembers any names?”

  “A commune – like with hippies?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  He got Justesen’s attention again and explained. The answer was a lot shorter than the question: an irritable shake of the head and a “Nei.”

  “What about someone called Matzen – Rasmus Matzen? I think he was Danish.”

  While Aron translated I watched Justesen again. I’d already seen a brief reaction when he heard me say the name. Now he wasn’t quite as quick to say no. Instead it was something like a “maybe”.