The Fire Pit

by Chris Ould

  * * *

  The entrance to Vesborggård House that I’d examined on Street View had changed. The beech hedges on either side were still there, but there were no gates now, and what had once been a gravel drive was a deeply rutted track made by the comings and goings of heavy, large-wheeled vehicles. I didn’t need to be able to read Danish to understand that a temporary signboard just inside the entrance was announcing a new development of apartments. The artist’s impression of the place left no room for doubt.

  From the road it wasn’t possible to see more, so I backed the car up a short way, then pulled on to the verge and went in on foot. The ground was fairly dry on the edge of the track and in the distance I could hear some kind of construction work, but until I came to the brow of a low rise I couldn’t see its source. Another hundred yards or so further on, I got a view of a scarred landscape where one building had been demolished and another was in the process of construction, not yet risen much above the foundations. Surrounded by churned earth and littered with building materials, it looked a long way from the idealised picture on the sign at the entrance.

  But whatever the state of the place, you couldn’t argue with the location. Beyond the site where the original house must have stood there was an open view to a large, spreading lake, its grey-green waters glistening and its shores lined with trees to the east and west. On the far side there were fields of lush grass, some dotted with cows, others scattered with round bales of straw on cut stubble.

  I followed the track down towards the construction site until it levelled out, then cast around for someone who looked as if they might be in charge. There were five or six men at work and a JCB was digging a trench but no one paid me any attention until a guy of about forty emerged from a Portakabin. He was dressed for the office, except for a pair of muddy safety boots and a hard hat bearing a company logo.

  “Hi, kan jeg hjælpe dig med noget?” he asked, looking my way.

  “Taler du engelsk?” I asked. “Are you in charge?”

  The shift of language didn’t faze him by much. “Yeh, can I help?”

  “If it’s okay I’d like to look around,” I told him. “I lived here for a while when I was young.”

  That made him frown a little. “At the house?” he asked with a gesture.

  I shook my head. “No, in the grounds somewhere, I think. My mother worked here.”

  “Oh, okay,” he said. “I understand.” Then he chuckled. “You know this was a place for people, er… sent because they did the wrong things, yeh? So I thought maybe…”

  “Yeh – an easy mistake,” I agreed, matching his smile. “I’m Jan Reyna.”

  “Henning Skov. I’m the architect here.”

  We shook hands and I nodded to the building works. “So is there anything left or has it all been knocked down?”

  “You’re looking for memories?”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “I might have left it a bit late by the look of it.”

  “Yes, for the big house,” he agreed. “But it was very ugly. The staff houses are still here, though.” He turned and pointed towards a narrow road going into the woods. “If you follow the road it’s about five minutes to walk. The guy who built the big house didn’t want them in his sight when he admires his view.”

  “Just the way it should be,” I said, making sure he heard the irony. “So it’s okay if I look?”

  “Sure, why not? But maybe don’t go inside. A lot of the roofs are rådne – rotted. It isn’t safe.”

  “Tak. I’ll stay out.”

  “If you don’t come back in one hour I’ll send someone to the rescue.”

  With that he moved off and I went the way he’d indicated, following an old tarmac track round a bend and then through the woods, more or less on the level. Now that the sun had come out it wasn’t an unpleasant place for a stroll; easy walking and quiet away from the building work.

  As Henning Skov had said, it was a five-minute walk and near the end of it the track rounded a protective hummock of land. Beyond that I found a cracked concrete yard, surrounded on two sides by cheaply built chalet units and on the third by an older, more utilitarian-looking brick building. Near the centre of the yard a burned-out car sat on its rims and between it and me there were rusted oil drums and various pieces of decaying furniture scattered around.

  I walked a few paces on to the yard and looked in through glassless windows and past broken doors, making an unhurried circuit of the place in all its decay. The weeds and young trees growing from the concrete reminded me a little of pictures I’d seen of Chernobyl – nature reclaiming concrete and brick. Despite the dilapidation it wasn’t so hard to imagine what the place would have looked like forty years ago, but if Lýdia and I had lived in one of the chalets – which seemed at least possible – there was nothing to tell me which one. Of course not. I wasn’t even sure what difference it would have made if there’d been a plaque on the wall. If I was looking for memories there weren’t any here, but I’d guessed that from the start. And last night Tove had been wrong, I decided, giving the place one final look. The past isn’t fixed; it decays and crumbles away the further you leave it behind. History is only its bones.

  Heading back I smoked my first cigarette of the day and when I got to the main building site I spotted Henning Skov standing with an older guy – a workman who talked with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Just out of politeness I went across to say thanks and that I was leaving.

  My arrival interrupted their conversation and Henning Skov looked mildly expectant. “Did you find anything you remember?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But I was pretty young. I just thought I’d take a look as I was passing.”

  The older man said something, which made the ash fall from his cigarette.

  “This is Jeppe,” Henning Skov said. “I told him you used to live here and he says he’s sorry for you.”

  “Because he thinks I’d done something wrong?”

  “Nej, not so much.” Skov gestured back towards the main road. “Jeppe lives in Hårby, the village that way, and he says everyone knew this was a bad place. Nobody wanted it here.”

  “He means when it was a clinic?”

  “Yeh, I think so.”

  “So why was it bad?”

  Skov turned and put the question to the man called Jeppe who took the cigarette from his mouth and tossed it away before answering. It wasn’t the short reply I’d expected, but went on for more than a minute, supplemented by gestures.

  “He says that before it was closed there were stories about what happened here,” Henning Skov translated for me. “And one time the police made an, er… investigation. They were looking for a girl who was lost from Brørup, another village about five kilometres away. It’s an old story in this area,” he added, not a translation this time. “No one knows what happened to her. What’s the word? Yeh, a mystery, right?”

  “What year was that, does he remember?” I asked casually.

  More translation.

  “He says it was 1976,” Henning Skov said in the end.

  “Inge-Lise,” the older man said then, this time speaking directly to me. “Inge-Lise Hoffmann. Hun var en ven af min søster. Den samme alder.”

  “Her name was Inge-Lise Hoffmann,” Henning Skov said. “She was a friend of Jeppe’s sister. The same age.”

  “She come. Here,” Jeppe said with a definite gesture at the ground so there’d be no mistake, then spoke to Skov in Danish again, still with the determined note in his voice.

  “He says the girl told her mother she was coming here to see her brother who worked in the garden. Then, after that, she was not seen again. But it’s only a story – gossip, yeh? Nobody knows. The girl wasn’t found so…” He shrugged expressively.

  I could guess what he meant. Out here in the sticks an old house used as some kind of clinic or rehabilitation centre was bound to have provoked suspicion from the locals, especially if one of their number went missing.

&nbs
p; Jeppe said something else and I heard the word politi, but this time Henning Skov gave the impression that he’d gone as far with this distraction as he wanted to go.

  “Ja, ja,” he said to the older man, then made an apologetic gesture to me. “I’m sorry, we have to do some work now.”

  “Sure, of course,” I said. “Thanks for your time.” I nodded to Jeppe. “Tak. Hi.”

  He gave me a vaguely dissatisfied look, but returned the nod.

  I started back up the track towards the road and the car. I was almost there when Tove called.

  “You don’t reply to your emails,” she said, straight to the point. “I sent you the translation of the report at six thirty this morning.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “But thanks. I’ll look at it.”

  “I also said in the email that I had found some information about Vesborggård House,” Tove said, still sounding reproving.

  “Don’t you sleep?” I asked.

  “Sleep? Yeh, of course, four or five hours a night when I have nothing better to do.”

  “Really? You must be a riot to live with.”

  “A riot?” she queried, flat but clearly perplexed.

  “A lot of fun.”

  “Oh.” There was silence, as if she was assessing that as seriously as she might if I’d asked her the square root of fifteen, then she said, “Because I don’t sleep very much you don’t think I would be easy to live with?”

  She sounded genuinely puzzled and perhaps a little surprised by the idea and I knew the joke had misfired, which made me feel bad. “Listen, no one could be worse to live with than a police officer,” I told her. “And I have an ex-wife to prove it. What did you find on Vesborggård House?”

  The shift back to something more concrete refocused her again. “It’s as you thought,” she said. “It was a place for people with behavioural problems but it was closed in 1977. Just the same, I think you have found something, too.”

  “I don’t follow,” I said. “Found what?”

  There was a second’s pause, as if she was readjusting her explanation for the mentally deficient. “Because it closed so long ago there is nothing to find out about it from public record websites, but a search for the name brings up results from 2004. There was a legal case that was reported in the newspapers – that’s how I found it. Fourteen people who had been treated at Vesborggård House claimed they had been injured – harmed – by the treatment they received there, but before the case went to court it was stopped.”

  “What sort of treatment?” I asked.

  “I don’t know that yet. I’m still finding out.”

  “But you think there was something dodgy – suspicious – about the place?”

  “No, I don’t know that either,” she said. “I still have more reading to do, but if you come here I can show you what I have. It will be easier than talking on the phone. You can come either now or this evening. This afternoon I have a tutorial meeting.”

  “Let’s make it this evening,” I said, deciding not to tell her where I was in case that led to more questions.

  “Okay, I’ll send you my address,” Tove said. “It will be an email,” she added, as if she still had doubts about my trustworthiness in that area. “So, I’ll see you this evening. Hi.”

  She rang off.

  In the car I dug out my notebook. Old habits die hard: the habit of looking for patterns or commonality, for example; the muscle memory that sometimes intuits a possible connection between one thing and another without any real substance, but still prompts the most basic question, What if? But however you try to answer that what if? you need caution as well. Guessing and supposing are toxic; they taint whatever they touch. If you don’t know enough for a theory, don’t make up a story instead.

  All the same, I considered the name I’d just written down in my notebook, and beside it the date: 1976. I had nothing that even came close to a theory, just a loose bag of facts, but when I put the notebook away and started the car I still had What if? in my head. Just enough.

  20

  IT WAS AN HOUR’S DRIVE FROM TÓRSHAVN AND BY THE TIME Hentze navigated the narrow, boulder-lined causeway between the islands of Borðoy and Kunoy there was a flat, grey drizzle from the low-hanging clouds over the sound. He met no other cars in the unlit tunnel beneath Galvsskorafjall, and in fact saw no other vehicles once he emerged into daylight again and followed the straight road along the western coast of the island to Kunoy village.

  The place was made up of three discrete settlements, the first comprised of a dozen or so houses set back above the road, the second clustered around the church and the road down to the small, concrete quay. Here the road narrowed to a single car’s width and Hentze drove on more slowly between the buildings. He emerged on the far side and ascended the incline until, a couple of minutes later, the tarmac came to an end at the third settlement.

  He left the car by the verge and walked the last few metres to a red-roofed, white-walled house, which bore a date stone over its door: 1918. There were net curtains inside the windows of the undercroft and no sign of life, but from a stone shed attached to the house at the far end Hentze heard the sound of sawing and followed it as far as a pair of open doors.

  Inside the shed, under two strip lights, a man dressed in overalls and with a woollen hat on his head was cutting a long section of wood with a handsaw. His movements were practised and deft and around him the workshop was tidily laid out with a variety of woodworking machines and a long bench down one wall. At the far end of the space there were several shelf units holding hand-crafted wooden toys and puzzles of the sort you could find in the upmarket design shops in Copenhagen.

  Hentze didn’t speak until the man finished sawing the plank, but when he made the last cut Hentze scuffed his foot on the gravel. The man looked up.

  “Hans Jákup Olsen?” Hentze asked.

  “That’s me,” Olsen said. “What can I do for you?”

  He put the wood aside and dusted his hands down as he came towards the entrance, as if visitors weren’t exactly unknown, but not entirely expected either. He had a roughly trimmed beard and light grey eyes, which gave Hentze a briefly appraising look.

  “My name’s Hentze. I’m a police officer,” Hentze said. “Do you think I could ask you a couple of questions?”

  Olsen stopped in his tracks. “No. You can fuck off,” he said with a gesture. “I don’t talk to the police.” With that he turned on his heel and strode briskly back to his bench.

  Hentze gave it a moment, then entered through the open doorway, coming to a halt a few paces from Olsen. “Listen, I can appreciate that you might not have had the best of experiences with the police in the past,” he said. “But nevertheless I do need to talk to you.”

  “The best of experiences?” Olsen repeated contemptuously. He took a step forward, baring his teeth and pointing to where one was missing. “Here. You see that gap? That was your mates at the station. So, yeh, you’re right, it wasn’t the best of experiences.”

  “Did you lodge a complaint?”

  “A complaint? Pah! A long way that would’ve got. You all look after each other, I know. It’ll be the same now as it was forty years ago.”

  He turned away and moved back to the bench where he picked up a length of planed timber.

  “Okay, listen to me, Harra Olsen,” Hentze said. “I wasn’t in the police at the time you’re talking about, but things are different now. And I’ll be straight with you: the reason I’m here is to do with the case you were questioned about then. I believe the rape of Sunnvør Iversen may be linked to another crime at the time. I don’t know for certain, but if you weren’t involved in what happened to Sunnvør, wouldn’t it help clear the cloud you’ve been under if we found out who was?”

  Olsen made a dismissive snort. “It’s too late for that now. I’ve had to live with the black looks and the behind-the-hand comments. I barely made a living after it happened, no one’d hire me. Mud sticks, I’ll tell you that for free.
No smoke without fire, is there?” He picked up a pencil and started marking up the wood using a set-square.

  “As I understand it, your car was seen at Norðdepil about the time that Sunnvør went missing,” Hentze said. “And I was told that you lied about where you were.”

  “I didn’t lie,” Olsen said without turning his head.

  “Then who did?”

  Olsen made a hard, definite mark on the wood, then looked up as if he wanted to settle this once and for all. “All right, listen,” he said. “I was having an affair with a woman called Anna in Norðdepil, okay? That’s where I was when the girl went missing, and that’s why my car was there. I lived in Leirvík back then, so I drove out to Norðdepil, but I always parked on the road and walked down the hill to Anna’s house. That way I thought none of the local busybodies would notice the car.”

  “And that’s what you told the police officers at the time?” Hentze asked.

  “Of course. But when they went to see Anna she denied the whole thing. Her husband was there – just got back from a spell out at sea – so she lied. She said I’d been to the house once, two months before, to hang a door and she’d never seen me again. And then my wife – cow that she was – she said I’d been acting suspiciously when I got back to the house that evening. She said that because she knew I’d been shagging somebody else and she was mad about it. So that was me fucked, right?”

  Olsen hefted the wood in his hand, then crossed to a circular saw. He switched it on and while he fed the wood through the machine Hentze considered what he’d said. With hindsight it was easy to see that Olsen’s apparent lack of an alibi would have made him suspicious to the police at the time, but even so it was hardly an overwhelming indication of guilt.

  The keening of the saw didn’t last very long and when Olsen switched it off again Hentze said, “Did the police officers at the time have any other evidence against you?”

  Olsen tossed an offcut of wood into a barrel. “They said they could match some ropes in my car with marks on the girl’s wrists,” he told Hentze. “And they said that because there was an empty bottle of vodka in my shed that I must’ve got her drunk.” His voice was bitter. “It was all shit. The ropes were for tying wood to my trailer, and I used that bottle to keep linseed oil in, but they didn’t care. They hadn’t found anyone else, so they thought they could pin it on me.”