The Fire Pit

by Chris Ould

  “Well good luck with that,” Christine said. “I’ve never had any faith in people’s consciences prompting them to do the right thing, especially if they’ve got away with something for years. Maybe things are different out there in the Faroes, though: everyone wants to come clean.”

  Hentze noted again that her reference to the Faroes could be seen as mildly disparaging, but he decided he was being too sensitive.

  “Well it’s certainly not Copenhagen,” he said. “I can’t complain about that.”

  Christine chuckled. “Are you homesick for the rain and the wind already?” she asked, gesturing to the now sunny window.

  “No, no, I think I can stand it for a couple of days. Of course, if it takes longer than that…”

  “I’d better get you sorted out as quickly as possible, then. What do you need?”

  “Well, a car to begin with, if you have one free: I need to get to Dannemare. After I’ve spoken to Herre Matzen I may also need to borrow a desk so I can access the CPR records, depending on what information I get.”

  “Well, I think we can manage that for an overseas colleague,” Christine said, standing up and moving to her desk. “Where are you staying, by the way?”

  “The Euro Hotel.”

  “Really?” She winced. “Couldn’t your department have had a whip-round and got you something better, or was the idea to make sure you didn’t stay away any longer than necessary?”

  “Oh, it isn’t so bad,” Hentze said. “It’s central at least.”

  Christine chuckled and picked up the phone. “That’s the Hjalti I remember: always ready to see the bright side of things – even after a night in the Euro.”

  * * *

  By the time he was on the road the rush hour had started, something Hentze was unused to, unless you counted the occasional snarl-ups at the end of Bøkjarabrekka first thing in the morning. As a result, it took him longer than he’d anticipated to leave the city behind and so it wasn’t until just after ten that he pulled in at Rasmus Matzen’s house, where a rack of pumpkins was displayed by the roadside beside an honesty box.

  The fact that there was no car at the house and that he hadn’t been able to find a phone listing for Matzen and so call ahead made Hentze fear that he might have a long wait if the man wasn’t at home. The lack of response to his knock on the front door reinforced that, but going round to the back of the house he discovered a man in his sixties digging manure into a section of recently turned earth. It was sunny and the man was stripped down to a tee shirt, showing deeply tanned arms and the lean, muscled physique of someone who was used to manual work.

  “Herre Matzen?” Hentze asked.

  “Yes?” Matzen broke off from the digging and straightened up, wiping soil from his hands as Hentze introduced himself.

  “I need to talk to you about the Colony commune at Múli,” Hentze said, coming straight to the point. “The remains of two bodies have been found there. One has been identified as Astrid Hege Dam and the other, we believe, is her daughter, Else.” He waited to see Matzen’s reaction, although he knew that Jan Reyná’s previous visit ruled out any element of surprise.

  Matzen shook his head, as if to distance himself from the subject. “I didn’t know anything about that until an English police officer came here the other day. His name was Reyná and he said someone on the Faroes had asked him to talk to me about Astrid.”

  “That was me,” Hentze acknowledged. “But since then we’ve gathered new information so I need to ask you some more specific questions. Do you have any objection?”

  “Would it matter if I did?”

  “Well of course I can’t force you to talk to me,” Hentze said, noting Matzen’s slightly prickly tone, although it was perhaps not surprising. “But – to be clear – I’m simply trying to find out what happened to Astrid and Else. There’s no implication that you or anyone else is under suspicion.”

  “No? Well, I’m glad to hear it,” Matzen said, although he didn’t sound particularly convinced.

  He stuck his spade in the ground and stepped off the dug-over soil, gesturing Hentze to a wrought-iron table and chairs beside a shed: a small suntrap. “You’d better sit down, I suppose. I’ll tell you what I can.”

  “Thank you,” Hentze said. “It would be a great help.”

  Once they were seated Matzen took out a tobacco pouch and rolled a cigarette while Hentze opened the cardboard folder he’d brought from the car. He slid out two photographs, placing them on the table so Matzen could see them.

  “As I said, we know Astrid and Else were living at the Colony commune in September 1974. You do remember them, yes?”

  Matzen paused in his cigarette rolling to glance at the photos, but it was clear that he didn’t need them to prompt his recollection.

  “Yes, I remember,” he said.

  “So what can you tell me about them?” Hentze asked, taking out his notebook and pen.

  According to Matzen, Astrid and Else had come to the commune at a time when almost half the residents had already left. The growing passive resistance of the local population, problems with self-sufficient living and other factors had all contributed to the fall in the Colony’s numbers and it was clear that unless something changed it would be hard, if not impossible, to stay through another winter. However, it wasn’t their policy to turn people away, Matzen said, so Astrid and Else were welcomed in, given two rooms in the lower house on the hillside and told how they could best contribute to running the place. The fact that Astrid fell and injured her arm a few days later meant she was restricted in the help she could give for a time, but for all that she was very willing and enthusiastic.

  “To tell the truth, I remember her best because she was one of those people who had an idealised idea of what we were trying to do,” Matzen said. “You saw it a lot in those days: people who thought that if they joined a community like ours all the concerns of real life would be magically taken care of. They didn’t realise that in many ways it was much harder to live like that. It still is.”

  “It doesn’t sound as if you had much time for her,” Hentze said.

  “No, that’s not true. I— To tell the truth, I was more concerned about the Colony’s future. There was a lot of pressure on me by then.”

  Hentze noted that Matzen had used the phrase “to tell the truth” twice now but he said, “What sort of pressure?”

  Matzen made a dissatisfied sigh. “All major decisions were supposed to be taken as a group, but there was a lot of factionalism and in the end someone had to take charge. I didn’t want the project to fail, so I was trying to organise things so we could survive through the winter, but some of the others were only concerned with petty things: was there hot water, whose turn it was to do this thing or that.”

  “I get the picture,” Hentze said with a nod, more interested in bringing the conversation back to specifics. “So do you remember if Astrid was friendly with anyone in particular?”

  Matzen shrugged. “She was friendly with everyone. Like I said, she was very enthusiastic. She had lots of energy.”

  “So there were no arguments or bad feeling between Astrid and anyone else that you recall?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Did she have a sexual relationship with anyone while she was there, do you know?”

  Matzen shook his head. “I didn’t keep track of her sex life or anyone else’s,” he said. “Why would I?”

  “So it’s possible that she did have a relationship.”

  “Like I said, I don’t know.” Matzen made a slightly irritable gesture. “People could do what they liked.”

  “Okay,” Hentze said, jotting a brief note, then turning the page in his notebook, as if moving on. “So what can you tell me about Astrid and Else leaving the commune? That was what you thought at the time – that she’d left?”

  “Yes, of course,” Matzen said. “I don’t remember the details, though. Like I said, I had a lot of things to deal with so I don’t know who to
ld me or what they said about Astrid and Else. All I remember – all I thought until the Englishman came – was that they’d left because they’d had enough. There was nothing odd about that – only perhaps that Astrid hadn’t said goodbye – but I had no reason to think anything had happened to them.”

  “And do you remember when that was? I mean, when you found out that Astrid and Else had left.”

  Matzen shook his head. “No, I’ve no idea. I suppose it must have been in October, but I don’t know for sure.”

  “And when did the commune officially come to an end?”

  “November, the first week,” Matzen said. “We made the decision and people started to leave. There were five or six of us left at the end – the last ones. We closed things down and then the owner of the land gave us a lift to Tórshavn in an old van and we got the ferry to Denmark. It was a rough crossing and we were all seasick for most of the time, I remember that.”

  “The landlord – the one who gave you a lift – that was Boas Justesen?”

  “Boas, yeh,” Matzen said, as if the name had been eluding him for a while. “I was trying to remember what he was called. Have you talked to him, too?”

  “No, that hasn’t been possible. He died recently.”

  Hentze watched for Matzen’s reaction to that, but there was hardly any. “Oh. Right. I’m sorry to hear it. He was a decent guy. Even when a lot of the local people wanted him to evict us, he wouldn’t.”

  “Did he spend a lot of time at the commune?”

  Matzen considered. “No, I wouldn’t say a lot, although he came out to see how we were getting on from time to time. I think we were something different and he liked the atmosphere. And I remember he gave us some advice on the sheep – with the shearing and lambing; slaughtering, too.”

  “Right,” Hentze said, acknowledging that this was nothing unusual. “And I was told that he attended some parties and celebrations there, too.”

  Matzen nodded. “Yeh, yeh, he did. There were more of those the first year, not so many in the last.” And as if the significance of that fact wasn’t lost on him, Matzen took a final puff on his cigarette, then dropped it and ground it out with his boot.

  Sensing that the other man might be preparing to draw things to a close Hentze said, “Thank you, that’s all very useful, but the other thing that I’d like to get from you now is the names of people who lived at the commune in those last few months. I need to interview them and ask the same questions I’ve asked you.”

  Matzen pursed his lips. “Well, I can probably remember a few names,” he said, as if he didn’t want to commit yet. “But apart from a couple of people I don’t think I’ve seen anyone from the Colony for at least twenty years, probably thirty.”

  “Are there any records from that time?”

  Matzen gave a sardonic laugh. “You mean like a school register? No. We went there to get away from all that.”

  “What about a diary or photographs – something that might jog your memory?” Hentze pressed him. “It may be forty years, but this is still a murder case, so I do need to know who was there.”

  The word “murder” brought Matzen’s focus back to the present. “You think someone at the commune killed them?” he asked.

  “I think it’s possible, yes,” Hentze said with a definite nod.

  Matzen chewed that over for a moment, then made a decision. “I never kept a diary,” he said. “But there are some old photos. If you want I can look them out.”

  “If you would, yes,” Hentze said.

  Matzen heaved a sigh, then stood up. “You’d better come into the house.”

  28

  AT KORSØR, I PAID THE TOLL AND DROVE ON UP THE CONCRETE causeway incline towards the twin towers of the Storebæltsforbindelsen bridge, which spanned the fifteen kilometres from Zealand to Funen. But for all its high-vaulted, sweeping lines and the triumph of engineering it undoubtedly was, I was more preoccupied by the engineering of my own logic and whether that would prove able to take any weight.

  It was simple enough: Thea Rask had absconded from Vesborggård House in October 1976 and Elna Eskildsen had seen Lýdia with a teenage girl in Copenhagen a week or two later. Those were separate facts – two nails in the wall – and I’d linked them together with a chain of possibilities, the coincidence of places and the presence of a girl. In the abstract the chain seemed solid enough, but in reality I also knew it was possible – even likely – that I’d allowed myself to see cause and effect where there was none. But either way, I needed to know, and if it turned out that I’d driven this distance for a five-minute stop – an enquiry, an explanation and then an apology – that was all right. Like I’d told Hentze the previous night, it was my last lead. If Thea Rask wasn’t the girl who’d shared the flat in Christiania with Lýdia and me, then I had nowhere to go after this; I could rest.

  I left the E20 south of Odense, following the ring road around to the west to the suburb of Snestrup where the roads became a warren of housing estates, all low-rise bungalows, neat hedges and paved pathways. The further I went the more claustrophobic it felt, but I knew that was me, not the place.

  Finally, the satnav brought me to the house on Windelsvej: yellow brick, nondescript and with a car on the drive. Its rear door was open and as I approached a man in his fifties came out of the house carrying a cardboard box full of paperback books. When he caught sight of me I raised a hand.

  “Hi, goddag, can you help me?” I asked. “I’m looking for Thea Rask. I was told she lived here.”

  “Ja. Yes, she does. I’m her husband, but she’s at work now.”

  Hampered by the box’s weight, he carried on to the car, putting it inside. “For charity,” he said, as if it needed explanation.

  “Right.” I nodded. “Do you know when Thea will be back?”

  “No, I’m not sure.” He gave me an appraising look. “Can you say why you want her?”

  “My name’s Jan Reyna,” I said. “I think Thea might have shared a flat – an apartment – in Christiania with me and my mother, Lýdia, back in the 1970s.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “The seventies? That’s a long time ago.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t remember much about it, that’s why I came to find Thea,” I said.

  He gave me another assessment, then said, “If you like I can call her and find out where she is.”

  “Sure. Tak. That would be great.”

  “Just a minute. Jan Reyná, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  He took a mobile from his pocket and moved away, for privacy I assumed, although there was no need. I waited, looking out over the road and the neat, well-kept houses and a couple of minutes later he came back.

  “Thea’s at the church office,” he said. “If you’d like to go there she says she will meet you. Just follow this road to the end and go to the left. There is a car park. You can walk from there.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome,” he said.

  Back on the street I moved the car the short distance as he’d directed, finding the car park empty except for two vans with electrician’s logos down their sides. Not far away the church was a square, red-brick building, somewhat imposing in the centre of neatly manicured grounds, but instead of heading towards it I followed a path which was signed kirkekontoret. It took me fifty yards or so to a more modern building, low-roofed and set beside a main road. It had the look of a day care centre or doctor’s practice, an impression that continued beyond the double doors, in a lobby with noticeboards, posters and photographs hung on the walls. Beyond that there was a central hall with a wooden block floor but there was no one in sight so I lingered to look at the photos on the noticeboard marked Kirkens Personale. I hadn’t got very far before my attention was distracted by the sound of brisk heels on the hard wooden floor.

  She wasn’t what I’d expected, although I had no real idea of what I thought she’d be like. She was tall with strong, lean features and stylish black-rimmed glasses to
match crow-black hair which she wore long and straight over the shoulders of a grey wrap-around cardigan. As she approached me, raising her hand, the greatest impression I got was one of immediate energy and purpose, matched by her stride.

  “Hi. Are you Jan? I’m Thea,” she said.

  In the final couple of paces I knew she was assessing whether she could see any familiarity in my features, but I couldn’t tell whether she found some or not. For my own part I sought any similarity between her and the girl in the photos from Lýdia’s camera and I thought I saw some; not enough to be certain, but enough.

  And then she was in front of me, offering another smile and her hand: long fingers, two silver rings.

  “It’s good to meet you again,” Thea said as we shook hands. She had a firm businesslike grip. “Povl told me you’re here because of Lýdia, yes?”

  “Yes. I hoped you might be able to tell me something about her,” I said. “You were living with her – with us – when she died, is that right?”

  “Yes, yes, I was,” she confirmed, almost as if she’d expected me sooner. “So I can tell you what I remember, but let’s go to my office.”

  We crossed the hall towards a door marked with Thea’s name and a child’s picture of a cross taped above it. Inside the room was modern, with exposed brick walls and the usual minimalist desk with Ikea bookshelves behind it, but the rest of the space had been deliberately softened by vibrant wall hangings, a chintz sofa and a couple of armchairs arranged in the way that chairs often are when moments of intimacy might be at hand.

  Thea directed me towards these, closing the door. “I must tell you that I have to make a home communion visit later, but for a little while I think we’re okay. Please, take a seat.”

  I recognised the tactic of establishing a limit, just in case it was needed. I’d have done the same thing in her place and I took the chair facing the window while she sat down opposite me, sitting erect but not stiff.