by Chris Ould
Rasmus Matzen shook his head, not accepting the premise. “I wouldn’t say it was a failure. Many things were successful, but there were also things we didn’t know: like how difficult it was to grow anything except potatoes, and that it was hard to find the jobs we had hoped for.”
“The locals didn’t play ball? They were hostile?”
“Ja. Not in the beginning, but later there were stories and fairy tales about what we did. That made it harder.”
“What sort of stories?”
“Oh, the usual things: sex and drugs.”
“And they weren’t true?”
“That we had sex? Of course we did. And some of us smoked pot; we were normal people. We didn’t walk around naked or have orgies as some people said, but people believe what they want to believe – and what they’re told by others, like your father.”
“Signar?”
“Ja, he came to the Colony one time. He came to find Lýdia and you and take you away. That was not such a good situation. He made a lot of noise, saying Lýdia was forgetting her duty at home. I remember there was almost a fight when one of our people told him it was a free country and your mother is not a slave and can do what she wants. Your father didn’t like that, but he was there on his own so after some hard words he went away.”
“Did Lýdia and I go with him?”
“In the end, yes. But after that there was bad feeling with the other Faroese people and some of our group said it was because your father had been making lies about us.”
I could imagine Signar’s reaction to being told that his “rights” as a husband and father didn’t hold any sway in the commune, and also to the fact that Lýdia chose to spend time there, perhaps taking advantage of his absence when he was at sea.
“Do you know if Lýdia had any sort of relationship while she was there?” I asked, because it was an obvious question and perhaps an obvious reason for her to have kept going back.
“No,” Matzen said, thinking it over. “No, I don’t think so. Not that I know. I think one or two men would have liked it; she was very pretty. But no.” He said this matter-of-factly and when he tossed his cigarette aside I got the impression that this was a signal he was nearing the end of the road. But before he could completely disengage I still wanted to ask the questions Hentze was interested in.
“Just out of interest, do you remember the man who owned the buildings and land at Múli?” I asked. “His name was Boas Justesen.”
Matzen pursed his lips in thought. “Yeh, I remember. He came out to see us quite often. I think it was because he was curious about us, and also to see that we did no damage.”
“Did he do any work on the place while you were there – build anything, like a shelter for the sheep?”
He frowned. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“I just wondered,” I said, keeping it light. “But if I wanted to get in touch with the other people from the commune, would you be able to give me their names? Do you keep in touch?”
“Nej, not for many years.”
“But you remember their names?”
“Some, maybe. But it was a long time ago. People came and went. Some stayed for a long time and there were others who didn’t like it after being there for a few weeks, so they went home.”
“Do you remember a woman called Astrid? Astrid Dam. She was Norwegian and she had a daughter called Else, about ten years old.”
He frowned. “Yes, I think so. She wasn’t with us very long, I think.”
“Do you know where she went when she left the commune?”
“No, I don’t know.” He shifted and I could tell he was becoming suspicious. “Why are you asking about her? How is she to do with your mother?”
I knew I couldn’t push it much further without coming clean so I said, “I’m asking because a woman’s body was found buried at Múli a few days ago. The police think she was Astrid Dam.”
Matzen’s whole attitude stiffened. “I don’t understand. If this— If it is a police matter…”
“It is,” I told him. “An officer in the Faroes police department asked me to talk to you about it because I was coming to see you.”
His expression darkened. “Are you a police officer?”
I made an indefinite gesture. “British police,” I said, not to go into the detail. “But—”
“So you say you want to know about Lýdia but instead you come to make an investigation about Astrid?” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think this is honest.”
“Listen, if you’d like to talk to the officer in the Faroes he’ll be happy to explain,” I said. “His name is Hentze. He can tell you what he needs to know.”
But Rasmus Matzen was already shifting away. “No, I think I have talked enough,” he said. “I think you should leave now. I have work to do.”
He turned and heaved a hessian sack out of the back of the van and up on to one shoulder before heading towards the polytunnel.
I left him to it and walked back along the track to the house. It could have gone better, but I didn’t necessarily read anything into his reaction beyond my previous feeling that Matzen wasn’t a man who liked to be taken off guard. Without any authority to press him further I’d hit a dead end, but even so I wished I’d been able to get something a little more concrete for Hentze.
When I got back to the house I went to the back door and Elna called me in. She had an old biscuit tin open on the table, obviously a receptacle for memorabilia, and in front of her there was a small bundle of envelopes.
“I found some letters,” she said. “And some photographs.”
She opened the topmost envelope and handed me half a dozen snapshots. One showed a smiling Lýdia and me, aged about four, in a park of some sort; another was in the same setting but instead of Lýdia it was a twenty-something Elna beside me, her hair long and straight.
The rest of the pictures had obviously been taken at different times and were only of me. In the photos I was still the same age: at a table with a drawing; sitting on a wall; and one where I looked very seriously down the lens of the camera. By and large, I seemed like a fairly happy young boy.
“Did you take these?” I asked when I’d looked at them all.
“Yes, while you were with us in Christiania.”
“Did Lýdia own a camera, do you know?” I was thinking of the Leica.
“I’m not sure. I don’t remember so.” She picked up the rest of the envelopes and held them out. “I kept Lýdia’s letters together,” she said.
I took them and lifted the top one from the bundle. It was addressed to Elna at an apartment on Gasværksvej in Copenhagen and the handwriting was the same, flowing style that I’d seen in Lýdia’s notebooks, written with a fountain pen by the look of it, the ink light blue but still clear. I didn’t take out the letter because that seemed too personal and I wouldn’t have been able to read it in Danish anyway.
“The place it came from – the clinic – is on the back,” Elna said.
I turned the envelope and saw the address on the flap: Personale Indkvartering, Vesborggård Hus, Skovbakkevej, Skanderborg.
“Do you know what sort of clinic this place was – Vesborggård House?” I asked, finding my notebook and copying out the address.
“Nej, I’m not sure. Before you went there, Lýdia told me it was a place for young people.” She frowned and searched for the word. “They had a behaviour problem. Is that right? Troubled people. They were there to get help, I think – to be in control.”
I nodded. “You said before that she got the job there because she met someone she knew. Do you know who that was?”
“No, I don’t remember. I think it was someone she knew from her home in the Faroe Islands, but I didn’t meet him. I don’t know his name.”
“But it was a man.”
“Yeh, I think so.”
“So how long did Lýdia work there – at Vesborggård House – do you know?”
“Maybe six months.” She shrugged uncertai
nly. “I’m not sure. While you were there Rasmus and I also moved out of Christiania. We had a flat on Gasværksvej, here,” she touched the address on the letter. “But Lýdia and I still wrote to each other – perhaps two times every month – until October, I think. And then for a time I had no reply. I thought maybe Lýdia was busy, you know? But one day I saw her in Copenhagen: on Prinsessegade, near Christiania. You were with her, and a teenage girl about sixteen years old who I didn’t know. Of course, I was very surprised. I didn’t know you were in Copenhagen, so I called out and ran after you, but I had to get right up to Lýdia’s side before she would stop.”
She paused for a moment, as if trying to find the right words to sum up the situation. “Right away I knew something was strange,” she said then. “Lýdia pretended that she hadn’t heard me calling to her, but I knew that wasn’t true. And when I asked when you had arrived, where you were living and all those kinds of things, she made all her answers very short – as if she was in a hurry and didn’t want to talk.”
Elna shook her head, as if it still didn’t make sense. “Of course, I asked where you were living but she said she couldn’t remember the address. She said she would come and see me as soon as she could, but now she had to go and then she walked quickly away and you were gone. It was… I didn’t understand why she had acted like that and my feelings were hurt. I still hoped she would bring you to see me, but it never happened, and then, maybe a month afterwards, I heard from some friends that Lýdia was dead and you had gone away.”
She drew a breath, then she looked up. “So, now you know,” she said with a finality I knew she didn’t feel. Then she stirred herself and I knew she wanted to put it away so, to help her, I reached for my notebook again.
“Can you tell me what you remember about the girl? The one you saw us with? Do you remember her name?”
“No, I don’t know,” Elna said. “I don’t think she spoke at all. It’s in my mind that Lýdia said you had all come to Christiania together, but I don’t know for sure.”
“We’d all come there from Vesborggård House?”
“Yeh, I think so. I think that’s what she said.” Elna looked vaguely troubled. “You want to find her?” she asked. “Is that why you want to know?”
I made a half shrug. “I don’t know. It’s probably not possible, but apart from you, no one else I know of saw Lýdia just before she died.”
Elna’s expression suggested she doubted it was a good idea, but instead of saying so she gathered the photographs and letters up from the table between us. “Would you like to keep these?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Nej, tak. They’re yours.”
For a moment she seemed about to press them on me anyway, but in the end she nodded. “Okay. But I will keep them in case you change your mind.”
“Thank you.”
She put them back in the tin and, from the way she closed it, I knew I should leave now. Sometimes people just need to seal up the lid on what might have been, to preserve it.
14
“ARE THESE TO CELEBRATE YOUR PROMOTION?” ANNIKA ASKED Hentze, looking at the cakes on a low filing cabinet in the CID office.
“Help yourself if you’re hungry,” he said. “The funeral was a little over-catered. If Boas Justesen had any close friends they must be atheists or Jehovah’s Witnesses because they stayed away.”
“Pity to let it go to waste,” Annika said, putting a slice of Victoria sponge on a napkin. “How many were there?”
“Seven or eight, including family,” Hentze said, resisting the urge to take a second piece of cake. Instead he followed Annika to her desk and pulled a chair round so he could sit down. While she ate he gave her a summary of what Mikkjal Tausen had told him. It wasn’t much more than they’d already assumed: confirmation that Justesen had spent time at the Colony commune, and had seemed familiar with the people there.
“So now tell me how you got on with Gunnar Berthelsen,” Hentze said as Annika wiped her lips with a tissue.
She shook her head. “I didn’t,” she said. “He made it clear I was interrupting his work and when I told him why I was there he got very tetchy. He said he didn’t remember any enquiry about Astrid and Else and that he wouldn’t have dealt with it anyway.”
“That could be true,” Hentze allowed.
“Yeh, but he still didn’t need to be so hostile about it.”
“Well, maybe it’s not surprising,” Hentze said thoughtfully. “I mean, if there was a murder while he was in charge and we start looking into it now, Gunnar may think it will reflect badly on him or his reputation.”
“How could it? If no one knew what had happened…”
“I don’t know,” Hentze said with a shrug. “Gunnar’s a difficult devil at the best of times. Did he say anything else?”
“No, not really. I asked him if there’d been any incidents involving the people from the commune and he said not. I had to push him to get even that much, though. He clearly didn’t want to talk about it, which struck me as strange.”
“Oh? In what way?”
“Well more often than not old people can’t wait to tell you their war stories, or how it was better back in the old days, can they? Usually you have trouble getting them to stop. But not Berthelsen. He couldn’t get rid of me fast enough.”
Hentze thought about that, weighing it up. “How long were you with him?” he asked in the end.
“Maybe five minutes. He was painting – if you can call it that. More like doing violence with brushes.”
“Apparently it sells well.”
“Yeh, so his wife said. She was sweet. What the hell she’s doing with him…”
“Just be glad you didn’t have to work for him,” Hentze said.
“Did you?”
Hentze nodded. “Only for a short time. We overlapped by a couple of years when I was first out of the academy.” For a moment he was thoughtful again and then he stood up. “Well, since Gunnar was a dead end, let’s go at this from the other direction. See if you can find out whether Astrid has any family still alive and what they know about the time she went missing. Can you do that? I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Sure, of course,” Annika said. “Where are you going?”
“To see Elisabet. The toxicology results on Boas Justesen came in but I want her to interpret them for me.”
* * *
For once they met away from the mortuary, in the hospital café where they sat with coffees by one of the tall windows overlooking the hillside and away from the other patrons of the place. Making precise cuts with a fork, Elisabet Hovgaard dissected the large slice of funeral cake Hentze had brought along as a gift.
“From the medications he’d been prescribed for his cancer, and the fact he was an alcoholic, the results were what I’d expect,” she told Hentze. “Morphine, heparin, paracetamol and alcohol. Nothing else worth speaking of. The level of morphine was pretty high, but given the level of alcohol in his blood it’s quite possible that he took an accidental overdose.”
“When you say overdose, do you mean he just took more than he should, or that it was the morphine that killed him?” Hentze asked.
“No, no, he died as a result of asphyxiation from the hanging. There’s no doubt about that.” She paused and gave him a quizzical look. “Are you treating this death as suspicious?”
“Well I wasn’t until you asked me that,” Hentze said. “Why? What’s on your mind?”
Elisabet cut another cube of cake, but then put the fork aside. “I suppose it’s just that if Justesen had simply died in the fire I’d believe that he simply passed out and left a cigarette burning. But it’s the hanging that bothers me. The morphine in his system probably wouldn’t have impaired him, but he had a blood alcohol content of 0.36 which is enough to floor the majority of people.”
“Isn’t the effect of alcohol relative, though?” Hentze asked. “We all know that one person can drink several beers and show no effect, while another will be practically u
nder the table. And Justesen had been a hard drinker for years, so isn’t it possible he had a much higher tolerance than you or I?”
For a moment Elisabet looked as if she was reconsidering, but then her resolve seemed to harden. “Hjalti, listen. Even if the man could have stood up – which I doubt – he probably wouldn’t have remembered why he’d done it, never mind thinking clearly enough to stand on a chair and put a noose round his neck.”
“But there’s nothing to prove that he couldn’t have done that, is there?” Hentze asked reasonably.
“Prove? No. But I’m telling you what my experience says about what he’d have been capable of with that level of alcohol in his blood.”
“Right,” Hentze said. “So, if I understand it correctly, you must think that someone else was involved in his death, even though there’s no evidence of that.”
“I don’t know,” Elisabet said, and he could tell from her expression that she hadn’t expected him to press her quite so hard on the matter. “But I just don’t believe he would have been capable of killing himself in the way he’s supposed to have done.”
“Good,” Hentze said with a nod. “I’m glad you’re so sure.”
Elisabet looked puzzled. “What? Why?”
“Because when I tell Remi that we need to open a second murder case I might have to call you in to shoulder the blame.”
“Are you— So you agree it’s suspicious?”
“From what you’ve said, sure, of course,” Hentze said. “And if Justesen wasn’t capable of killing himself then it can only mean he was murdered. I just wanted to see how certain you were. Sorry.”
“You’re a rat.”
“Yeh, I know. But I did bring you cake.”
Elisabet gave him a look. “So, will you change the enquiry?”
Hentze weighed it up. “I’m already walking on thin ice by pursuing the Astrid Dam case so Remi will probably have apoplexy when I tell him, but I don’t think I’ve got any choice.”
“Well if the facts support it…” Elisabet said, but then waved it away. “But what really concerns me is that if Boas Justesen was murdered, then the person who did it is still walking around. They could do it again.”
