by Chris Ould
Hentze considered. “What about Boas Justesen, the owner of the houses at Múli?” he asked in the end. “Did he feature in any of this?”
Uni Per shook his head. “I don’t think so. Some people thought he should tell the Colonists to leave and he didn’t make many friends when he wouldn’t, but he always was an awkward bastard. I only ever met him in passing, but that was enough.”
Hentze nodded at the familiar description. “And do you know what happened to Sunnvør Iversen?” he asked.
Heinesen thought back. “I think she and her parents moved away – maybe to Denmark, I’m not sure. As far away as they could get, I suppose.” He shrugged and shifted his tall frame in the chair. “So, do you have a suspect for Astrid Dam’s death, or is this just a fishing trip?”
“Are you asking as a reporter?”
Heinesen laughed. “No, no, not any more. Still, you don’t stop being curious.”
“Well at the moment I’m still a long way from looking at suspects,” Hentze said. “After so long, even getting information about the commune isn’t so easy, so I appreciate your help.”
He put his coffee mug aside and made to stand up. “I’d also be grateful if you’d keep our conversation to yourself.”
“Sure, of course,” Uni Per said. “These days I only write poetry anyway. It’s not very good but at least I don’t have to check any facts.”
18
Thursday/hósdagur
IN THE PRE-SUNRISE GLOOM HENTZE TOOK THE FIRST FERRY OF the morning to Nólsoy. It was too soon to tell yet what sort of day it might turn out to be, but the clear sky in the east seemed reasonably promising, he thought as he walked up the hill from the harbour.
At Gunnar Berthelsen’s house there were lights on inside despite the fact it wasn’t yet seven thirty, but even so Hentze tempered his knock on the door. He didn’t want it to seem that he thought anyone needed to be roused from their bed.
Gunnar Berthelsen opened the door dressed in jeans and an old sweater. He had slippers on his feet and from his freshly shaved cheeks Hentze guessed that he’d been up for some time.
“Good morning, Gunnar,” Hentze said.
Berthelsen scowled at him for a moment, until he put a name to the face. “Hjalti Hentze, right?”
“That’s right. Do you have a few minutes to talk to me?”
“At this hour? What’s the idea: to get a person out of bed and catch him off guard?”
“Were you in bed?” Hentze enquired mildly, but didn’t pursue it as the answer was obvious. “May I come in?”
“Well you’re here aren’t you?” Berthelsen said and walked away from the door.
Hentze followed him through to the kitchen where Hildur Berthelsen was washing the dishes from breakfast.
“Good morning,” Hentze said when she looked round from the sink.
“Will you leave us alone?” Berthelsen said to his wife, without any explanation for Hentze’s presence. “We need to talk.”
“Oh. Yes, all right,” Hildur Berthelsen said, obviously at a loss. She looked to Hentze. “Would you like coffee? There’s some brewing.”
“Yes, thank you,” Hentze said with a polite nod.
“I’ll do it,” Berthelsen told his wife. “You go and get on.”
“Oh, well, if you’re sure.” She still seemed a little uncertain but made her way to the door.
“So, why are you here at this time of the morning?” Berthelsen said, his back turned as he tended to the coffee pot. “What couldn’t wait for a more civilised hour?”
“Actually it was just a matter of practicality,” Hentze told him. “So I can get the next ferry back and not have to hang around half the day.”
Gunnar Berthelsen grunted. “Well, that was your first mistake, right there,” he said, bringing the coffee pot to the table. “You should always let your suspect think you’ll spend as long as it takes to get answers, otherwise all they have to do is spin out the time.”
“You could be right,” Hentze acknowledged. “I don’t think that sort of tactic is needed here, though. Either you’ll tell me what I want to know straight away or you won’t tell me at all. Whichever way it goes, I’ll be on the ferry.”
Berthelsen grunted again, as if he couldn’t be bothered to contest the logic of that any further. Instead he waved Hentze to a seat at the cloth-covered table, then poured two mugs of coffee, both black.
Hentze accepted the drink. “Thanks.”
“So come on, spit it out,” Berthelsen said. “What’s this about? More to do with the missing Norwegian woman at Múli, is that it?” He shook his head. “I didn’t know anything about it yesterday, and today I still don’t.”
“Actually, that’s not what I wanted to talk about,” Hentze said. “Or, at least, only indirectly. The reason I’m here is another historical case: Sunnvør Iversen. I don’t know if you’ll remember, but in 1974 she was abducted from near her home in Norðdepil and raped. She—”
“Yes, yes, you don’t need to list all the details,” Berthelsen said, cutting him off. “What about her? If you’ve read the case records you know everything there is to know.”
“Yes, that’s what I’d hoped, too,” Hentze said. “But last night when I went to look for the file I found it was missing, along with some others from the same period.”
“What are you saying – that I’m a suspect for that?” Berthelsen asked with a frown.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Hentze said with no trace of the lie. “Should you be?”
Berthelsen didn’t answer immediately. Instead he reached for his coffee mug and took a thoughtful sip. Finally he looked back at Hentze. “So you want to know what was in the file, is that right?”
“It would help if you could tell me what you remember, yes,” Hentze said, taking out his notebook and a pen.
“Well, I can tell you this much,” Berthelsen said. “It was one of the most shocking cases of my time as a police officer: the worst I saw here, that’s certainly true. I leave aside what they do to each other in Denmark. That much you expect.”
“Shocking in what way?” Hentze asked.
Berthelsen drew a slow, considering breath. “Because of what had been done to her,” he said then, his voice flat. “She was covered in bruises and there were marks from a rope on her wrists. She’d also been brutally raped. The doctors who looked after her when she was found… They said the only good thing about it was that she had no memory of what had happened. She had been drugged – although with what they couldn’t tell us – and they kept her sedated for more than a week afterwards so she would have time to heal.”
Hentze made a couple of notes. “When was this?” he asked.
“April 1974, the first week.”
“And how long was she missing?”
“From the Friday afternoon to Saturday morning. A search party found her at about nine o’clock on the hillside near Depil at Húsadalur. She was wearing just her dress, barefoot and wandering.”
“And she had no idea at all what had happened to her?”
“No. As I said, it was the only good thing.”
“So how did the investigation progress?”
“It didn’t, not for a while,” Berthelsen said. “We had nothing to go on. Of course, we interviewed people in the area to find out if they had seen anything odd or suspicious, but there was nothing.”
“Did the interviews include the people at the Colony commune at Múli?”
“Yes, of course. I think we talked to everyone on the north end of Borðoy, and Viðoy, too. There was nothing.”
“But eventually you did have a suspect, didn’t you?” Hentze said.
Berthelsen gave him a sharp look, but then nodded.
“Who was that?”
“His name was Hans Jákup Olsen: lived in Leirvík. A carpenter.”
“And why was he a suspect?”
“Because he owned a car similar to one which had been seen near Norðdepil on the day Sunnvør went missing. He also
lied to give himself an alibi, which then fell through. So we brought him in, ran tests on his car and questioned him for two days, but in the end the Prosecutor said we didn’t have enough evidence to make a charge, so he was released.”
Hentze looked up from his writing. “Did you think he was guilty?”
Berthelsen shook his head. “That wasn’t for me to say, was it? The Prosecutor didn’t think so, so that was that.”
Hentze heard the lie in this because of Berthelsen’s apparent acceptance of the decision. In his experience, men like the ex-superintendent did not simply kowtow to a prosecutor’s negative assessment, especially if they thought they had a good suspect for an offence such as this.
“So you never found the man who did it?” he asked.
“No.”
“There were no other suspects – at the Colony commune, for example?”
“No.”
“So, six months later, when there was an enquiry about Astrid Dam and her daughter, Else, what did you think? Had you any reason to link their disappearance with what had been done to Sunnvør Iversen?”
Shifting his weight, Gunnar Berthelsen set his jaw. “As I told Officer Mortensen, I don’t remember any enquiry about them. It would have been dealt with by a sergeant or inspector.”
“Yes, it was,” Hentze confirmed. “It was Kass Haraldsen.”
“Well, there you go, then.”
“Yes,” Hentze acknowledged. “But what I’m curious about is why you rang Kass yesterday and told him he shouldn’t remember it.”
Berthelsen snorted. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not to me, no.”
“Because we missed it, didn’t we?” Berthelsen said, as if Hentze must be dense. “At the time, in 1974, there were two murders and we knew nothing about them. We were obviously told that this Astrid Dam and her daughter were missing, but we failed to realise they were dead, and as a result whoever killed them has been walking around free ever since.”
“And that’s the only reason you wanted the missing person report forgotten?” Hentze said with a frown. “Because you didn’t want anyone to think you’d slipped up?”
“Your reputation may not mean anything to you,” Berthelsen said stiffly. “But as far as I’m concerned I still take pride in the job I did for forty-two years. Did it well, too. So, no, I don’t relish the idea that now some people will take the opportunity to say that, whatever else I achieved, we overlooked two murders.”
Hentze noted the fact that even in admitting this, Berthelsen had said we and not I in respect of who might be held responsible for the omission. Still, it made sense now and he had the answers he needed. He closed his notebook.
“So what are you thinking? Do you have a suspect?” Berthelsen asked, as if he took Hentze’s action as a sign that the questioning was over.
Hentze shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t discuss ongoing cases,” he said. “But of course, if I need more information, I’ll be in touch. Thanks for your help, Gunnar. And for the coffee. Don’t get up; I can find my way out.”
Outside Hentze started back to the harbour. Pride, he thought as he let the downhill slope of the road quicken his steps. It was rightly listed as a sin, and it was something he was as prey to as the next man. It was the reason he had not asked Gunnar Berthelsen the obvious question, which was whether – knowing what he now knew – the ex-superintendent could think of any common factors between Sunnvør Iversen’s rape and the probable murder of Else Dam.
Hentze had not asked because he, too, had his pride and he would rather see things for himself than give the old man any possible opportunity to salve his reputation at this late date. Not that he really thought Gunnar Berthelsen would have had any insight, then or now, but it had been petty not to ask, all the same.
* * *
First thing on Thursdays there was a team meeting in CID. It was something Ári Niclasen had instigated and Hentze saw no reason to change it. Unlike most of Ári’s other meetings it actually served a useful purpose, giving the detectives an opportunity to air cases and share problems or frustrations. People spoke freely, which was something Hentze liked, and as acting inspector it was a much easier way to keep tabs on what everyone was doing, rather than monitoring dozens of emails and reports.
A good portion of the department’s work was still concerned with the events of the previous week, but slowly the more usual business was returning to the fore. Dánjal Michelsen was looking into the dumping of several chemical barrels; Sonja and Oddur were working on a series of break-ins; and there was also a potential fraud case, a theft from a boat and a domestic abuse. The case of Astrid Dam’s murder was there, too, but as he’d promised Remi, Hentze didn’t involve the others beyond giving them a brief summary of where things stood.
Afterwards, though, he called Annika aside and told her what Berthelsen had said regarding Sunnvør Iversen. As he did so he wrote up the most salient details on the whiteboards in Ári’s office.
“So, let’s assess this for a minute,” he said, standing back. “Astrid is dead. She was almost certainly murdered and Boas Justesen had some involvement in that. Right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Then are we still happy to believe that Else was also attacked and killed at about the same time as Astrid, given that she hasn’t been seen since?”
“I don’t see any real alternative,” Annika said.
“Okay, in that case we now have two attacks on young girls in the space of six months,” Hentze said. “First Sunnvør Iversen in April, and then Else in October 1974. Could it be coincidence that two girls of about the same age were attacked within ten kilometres of each other a few months apart?”
Annika scanned the board. “It could, but I don’t think so,” she said. “Violent crimes against children are still very rare, right? And the same would’ve been true forty years ago, so it doesn’t seem likely to me that there would have been two attacks so close together unless they were connected. What does the case file on Sunnvør say, do you know?”
“It doesn’t,” Hentze said flatly. “It doesn’t exist – at least not that I’ve been able to find.”
Annika frowned. “How’s that possible?”
“I don’t know.” Hentze shook his head. “It’s not the only file missing. There seems to have been a clear-out of records from that period, possibly when we moved offices from Jónas Bronks gøta. However, Gunnar said they did have a suspect for Sunnvør’s rape, although in the end no charges were brought. His name’s Hans Jákup Olsen: he lives at Kunoy now.”
“So if he and Boas committed the attacks in 1974 and they got away with it, that would have given Olsen a motive to silence Boas now,” Annika said. “And Kunoy’s what, twenty kilometres from Múli?”
“About that,” Hentze said with a nod. “Not so far that you couldn’t get there, set a fire and be home again in under an hour, that’s for sure.”
19
AN HOUR’S DRIVE FROM COPENHAGEN I CAUGHT THE SEVEN o’clock ferry from Sjællands Odde. The ship was a squat, twin-hulled affair, which pulled out of the harbour just as a weak sun started to rise across the water. Even at that time of day the ferry was busy, but I found a pair of high-backed seats by a window away from the main lounges and let myself doze, cut off from the people around me by the dull noise of the engines and – like as not – by the general mien of a man who didn’t want company.
I’d been awake since just after four, disturbed by the trains passing six floors below the hotel window. The sound of their wheels was clanking and hollow, like someone slowly and deliberately rolling an oil drum down the road with a loose brick inside, but it wasn’t just the trains that kept me from sleep, or brought me out of it.
Down in the place where there should have been rest there was an undertow now: strong and insistent and hard to resist. I didn’t remember what I saw there, but the underlying restiveness made sleep less reassuring, and when I woke up I usually felt more exhausted than before: as if I’d spent
the time swimming hard against currents and tides.
So in the small hours I’d given up on sleep and made coffee instead, reassessing whether the decision I’d made to go and look for Vesborggård House was still sound. I’d used Google Maps to find the address from Lýdia’s letters to Elna Eskildsen, but the Street View images hadn’t shown anything more than the entrance to some kind of estate, the rest obscured by trees. If I went and looked for myself I could get there and back before evening. That was the plan, but the reason for going was less definite.
From Elna’s description of the last time she saw Lýdia it sounded as if she’d left her job at Vesborggård House on the spur of the moment, and by now it was fairly obvious that that was Lýdia’s way. She would leave one place without warning and alight in another for a few months, then move on again. I remembered nothing about it even though I’d been with her, so I couldn’t help wondering whether this behaviour was simply down to periods of mania, or if it was more symptomatic of a deeper unrest or dissatisfaction.
There was no way to know and by now I no longer expected that visiting the places we’d been would trigger a memory or even a dim recollection from childhood. Going to look at Vesborggård House would only be an exercise in curiosity; a way to kill time while I waited for Tove’s translation of the police report into Lýdia’s death. It was sightseeing, then, nothing more – like visiting the Little Mermaid or the Tivoli Gardens. The only difference was that I’d be the only one looking.
