The Fire Pit

by Chris Ould

“Okay,” Annika nodded.

  Hentze picked up his dry clothes and went to the door before turning back. “And make sure no one tells Tausen or his lawyer that Juhl is dead. The longer they think Juhl can give us his side of the story the more likely it is that Tausen will tell us at least part of the truth.” He tugged on the door. “Not that I care much one way or the other right now, but still.”

  EPILOGUE

  I

  IN THE MORNING, HAVING PRESENTED HIS WRITTEN STATEMENT to Hentze, Mikkjal Tausen declined to make any comment regarding the death of Boas Justesen and Hentze didn’t press it. By then Remi had secured an extension to the arrest, which gave them enough time to put him on a plane and return him to the Faroes for more detailed questioning. After that, in all probability, he would be charged with Boas Justesen’s murder. Even now Tausen’s house was being searched and various items of clothing had already been seized for analysis. There was a decent chance that at least a few of these things would provide physical evidence to show that Tausen had been with Boas Justesen on the night of his death and the ensuing fire.

  Once he’d seen Annika and Tausen on to the plane – accompanied by a politibetjent from the airport unit – Hentze took the train into Copenhagen, using the time to re-read Tausen’s statement. In it, Mikkjal Tausen repeated and elaborated on the same basic story he’d told the previous evening, claiming that Oscar Juhl had accompanied him on two visits to the Faroes in 1973 and 1974. Tausen had introduced him to Boas Justesen there, who in turn took Juhl to two or three parties at the Colony commune at Múli.

  According to his statement, Tausen had no knowledge of any crimes being committed on the Faroes until 1976, when he’d discovered Thea Rask, drugged and unconscious at the hut by the lake at Vesborggård House. Confronting Juhl and appalled by the crime, Tausen then claimed he had enlisted Lýdia Reyná’s help to get Thea safely away.

  Of course, Tausen or his lawyer must have realised that this inevitably led to the question of why he had not immediately gone to the police, but this was partially addressed by Tausen’s admission that he had been wrong not to do that. However, at the time he’d been young and impressionable, he said, and when Oscar’s father, Ulrik Juhl, had arrived at Vesborggård House he had allowed himself to be swayed by the older man’s pleadings. Ulrik had said he would take care of everything; that Oscar was sick and needed treatment so he would do no further harm. And surely it was far better for that treatment to be given in a caring, confined environment at home rather than prison, Ulrik had said. He had the money to provide all the security and therapy needed for Oscar, so wasn’t that the humane thing to do?

  And so he had allowed himself to be convinced, Tausen admitted in his statement. That had been a mistake, he saw now, but at the time he fully believed that Ulrik Juhl was a man of his word, acting only out of love and concern for his son.

  Hentze didn’t believe it for a moment, of course. His own, more cynical and simpler interpretation was that Mikkjal Tausen had not gone to the police because he knew that his own part in Oscar Juhl’s crimes would come to light if he did. Instead, offered a handsome incentive to keep his mouth shut and leave the country to start a new life, Tausen had taken Ulrik Juhl’s money and gone to the United States without looking back.

  * * *

  At the Halmtorvet station Hentze attended a case meeting with Christine Lynge and several senior staff. There he outlined the case against Mikkjal Tausen for the murder of Boas Justesen ten days earlier, and also for his involvement in the deaths of Astrid and Else Dam in 1974. This time Hentze was more candid than he had been with Thomas Friis on Friday, but the bottom line was the same: apart from the connection between Tausen and Juhl in the 1970s there was no reason to think there had been any contact between them since, which meant the investigation into Justesen’s murder could be dealt with as a discrete case.

  In light of the previous night’s events Christine and her colleagues were happy enough to agree that the charge against Tausen was one for the Faroese to pursue on their own. Overnight a document had come in which indicated that Oscar Juhl could be a suspect for multiple killings over the last forty years. It still had to be properly assessed, Christine Lynge said, but the officer who’d compiled the report – a kriminalassistent from Aarhus called Thomas Friis – had made a strong case and if there was any substance to it they’d be looking at a major, nationwide investigation, which would only be complicated by dragging Mikkjal Tausen into the equation.

  With that much decided the meeting broke up and Hentze accompanied Christine back to her office.

  “Have you read his statement?” she asked, closing the door and waving Hentze to a chair.

  “Whose statement?”

  “Jan Reyná’s.”

  “No,” Hentze said, sitting down. “I didn’t know he’d made one. Was it last night?”

  “Yeh, before he went into surgery. It’s only a preliminary account but we needed something.” She lifted a single sheet of paper from her desk. “Basically he says he thought Juhl was going to kill him or the girl so he acted in self-defence. Which of course is exactly what any experienced police officer would say in those circumstances.”

  Hentze frowned. “You don’t believe him?”

  Christine gave him a look. “Hjalti, he shot the man twice in the belly and then again in the face. It’s hard not to interpret that as a deliberate act.” She dropped the sheet of paper on the desk and sat down.

  “Even though we know what Juhl was capable of?” Hentze said. “Christine, you saw that place. The man was a psychopath and the only reason Tove Hald is still alive is because of Jan Reyná.”

  “So you’re his advocate now?” Christine asked.

  “No, no more than I would be for anyone else in the same position,” Hentze said neutrally. “What does the Prosecutor think?”

  “Too soon to say. Given the circumstances and depending on Reyná’s full statement I think they’ll probably go along with self-defence for the time being – at least until the full investigation’s complete and the inquest’s been held.” She looked at him levelly. “Unless you know of any other reason Reyná might have had to kill Juhl. I’m thinking about his interest in his mother’s suicide. Because if he thought – rightly or wrongly – that Oscar Juhl had had a hand in that…”

  Hentze shook his head. “He hasn’t said anything about that to me. And as far as I know he’s never had any reason to question the original inquest verdict on her death.”

  Still not seeming fully convinced, Christine gave it a second, then put it aside. “All right, well I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what comes out at the end of all this,” she said. “God knows, there’ll be enough to deal with for the next few weeks. So what are you going to do now – go back to your islands?”

  “Not yet,” Hentze said. “I still have interviews to conduct relating to the deaths in 1974.”

  “What you already have isn’t enough?”

  “No, I want to be sure,” Hentze said flatly. “I want as much as I can possibly get.”

  II

  Thomas Friis knew his secondment to Copenhagen CID hadn’t gone down well with Asger Markussen. It wasn’t only because Friis had contacted the senior investigating officer in the Oscar Juhl case without authorisation, but also because it now looked as if his serial killer theory would be vindicated. However, whether he liked it or not, Markussen had made no attempt to block Friis’s temporary transfer to the capital and so, on the following Monday, Friis was in Copenhagen, visiting Tove Hald in Amager hospital.

  Tove had already been interviewed a few hours after she’d regained consciousness the previous day but she remembered almost nothing about events leading up to her abduction by Juhl; only leaving her flat for the Café Ismael to meet a whistleblower from Juhl Pharmaceuticals. Beyond that she had no memory until she regained consciousness in hospital.

  Having read her statement, Friis was certain that Juhl must have spiked Tove’s drink – or perhaps an item of
food – in the café when they’d met. He also believed it was probably the same drug Juhl had used on Helene and Maja Kruse in January, so the technical lab was investigating dozens of samples seized from Juhl’s various properties, trying to identify the substance. However, that wasn’t Friis’s area of interest at the moment and instead he restricted his questioning of Tove to her research into Vesborggård House.

  He found her responses – in fact her whole attitude – vaguely disconcerting. She had recovered well enough to be bossy and abrupt – even bad-tempered – and she often responded to his questions as if the answer should have been obvious to anyone with any intelligence. Nevertheless, she was a victim and Friis made allowances for that, especially when she told him about her visits to Lene Sønderby in Humlebæk.

  * * *

  The following day Thomas Friis knocked on the door of Lene Sønderby’s house, accompanied by a female kriminalassistent.

  “I believe you spoke to a young woman called Tove Hald last week,” he said when Lene Sønderby admitted them to her sitting room. “Did you tell anyone else that she’d been to see you and why?”

  “No. Why would I do that?” Lene Sønderby said, the denial overly aggressive, rather like the woman herself. “Who would I tell?”

  Friis ignored the question and said instead, “You may have seen in the news that Tove Hald was assaulted at a house in Brodby last Saturday, and that a man called Oscar Juhl of the Juhl Pharmaceutical family was shot and killed there.”

  “No, I don’t watch the news,” Lene Sønderby said, a very poor lie. “Besides, what’s that to do with me?”

  “Your husband, Dr Carl Sønderby, worked for Juhl Pharmaceuticals, didn’t he? As a psychiatrist.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when he retired, he had a company pension, which you still receive. From what I can tell it seems very generous: well above the norm, especially as he’d been in private practice for more than thirty years.”

  “I don’t see what business that is of yours,” Lene Sønderby said. “The pension is no more than I’m entitled to. Are you a tax inspector as well as a policeman? I don’t understand what any of this is about.”

  “All right, let me ask you a direct question then,” Friis said. “When your husband went into private practice, did he continue to have professional contact with any members of the Juhl family?”

  Lene Sønderby took a moment, then gave a terse nod.

  “And who was that?”

  “I… I don’t know.” She shifted in her chair, then more defiantly she said, “If you want to know look in the roof space. They’re all there: Carl’s records. He was always very clear that they had to be kept to make sure that the Juhls didn’t try to wriggle out of their responsibilities – their obligation.”

  “The obligation to pay your husband’s pension?”

  “Yes.”

  Friis nodded and stood up. “Could you show us, please?”

  In all there were seven plastic storage boxes in the roof space, containing papers, files and audio cassettes. Friis and the female kriminalassistent carried the boxes out to the car, filling the trunk and the back seat as Lene Sønderby watched silently from the sitting-room doorway.

  It took over a week for Thomas Friis to work his way steadily through the contents of the boxes, and as he did so he discovered that they all related to Dr Sønderby’s treatment of Oscar Juhl, which had started in December 1976. It was clear from the papers and tapes that Oscar Juhl’s father, Ulrik, had placed his son in private confinement on the family estate near Helsingør at that time, and had then employed Sønderby to cure Oscar of his psychopathic urges.

  The treatment – in the form of drug therapy and analysis – had continued until March 1982, when Oscar Juhl had managed to leave his confinement without much apparent difficulty. However, two weeks later Juhl had returned and in their next session he calmly described to Dr Sønderby how he had strangled and killed Nina Lodberg. From Sønderby’s notes it seemed that at least part of the reason Juhl had returned home after the murder was to talk about what he had done. He appeared to be fascinated by the moment of death and wanted nothing more than to analyse and deconstruct it from every angle, presumably safe in the knowledge that Dr Sønderby was the one person in the world with whom it was safe to do so.

  From Sønderby’s files it wasn’t possible to tell whether Oscar Juhl was more securely confined after killing Nina Lodberg, but in 1990 Juhl repeated the pattern of absconding and returning, this time after a month and having murdered two girls aged sixteen and eighteen near Vejle and Esbjerg. Again Sønderby’s therapy notes recorded the details beyond doubt, and – hardly a coincidence – the psychiatrist’s financial records also showed that he received a substantial increase in his consultation fees from Juhl Pharmaceuticals.

  By then it must have been obvious to Sønderby that Oscar Juhl was beyond treatment, much less a cure, but his notes continued to take an optimistic view of their regular sessions until, in May 1995, they ceased abruptly. Public records revealed that Ulrik Juhl had died from a stroke at that time and after several months and some litigation, Oscar Juhl inherited the majority share in Juhl Pharmaceuticals. Clearly, despite knowing of his son’s crimes, Ulrik Juhl had valued commercial continuity more highly than human life when he’d made his will.

  Public and financial records also showed that in September 1995 Dr Carl Sønderby gave up his psychiatric practice and took early retirement on a generous and regular pension from Juhl Pharmaceuticals. On his death nearly twenty years later, the payments had transferred to his wife and Lene Sønderby had continued to keep her late husband’s files safe in the roof space of her house.

  During further questioning Fru Sønderby steadfastly denied any knowledge of what her husband’s files contained, but to Thomas Friis whether she had known or not was a small issue. From what he’d already discovered and from the evidence he accrued later, Friis had the far greater satisfaction of seeing his theory about the serial killer vindicated beyond doubt. Oscar Juhl had killed fifteen people over more than four decades and no one had even suspected it except Thomas Friis.

  III

  A month after his arrest, Mikkjal Tausen was interviewed by a member of the Danish team investigating Oscar Juhl’s crimes, but refused to answer any questions. However, a few days later and at Tausen’s request, Hentze visited the prison at Mjørkadalur where he met with Tausen in an interview room. The man looked sunken and hollowed out, Hentze thought: the Arizona tan had long faded and his voice was dulled as they exchanged a few pleasantries. Tausen then handed Hentze a three-page handwritten statement.

  “I have nothing else I want to say,” he told Hentze. “I admit it. That’s all. Now I’d like to go back to my cell.”

  Hentze didn’t demur, but after Tausen had gone he sat in the interview room and read the document twice. In it Tausen stated that while he had worked for Juhl Pharmaceuticals he had helped to develop a drug called Resolomine which he had then provided to Oscar Juhl for “recreational purposes” while they were both at Vesborggård House. Tausen also admitted that following the murders of Astrid and Else during a visit to the Colony, he had been summoned by Boas Justesen and Oscar Juhl to help hide the bodies, doing so only under the threat that he would be implicated for providing the Resolomine the other two had used on their victims.

  This, so Tausen claimed, was the reason Boas had been able to blackmail him forty years later, threatening to uncover the bodies and admit to his guilt if Tausen didn’t help him find a treatment for his cancer. Unable to persuade a drunken Boas that there was no treatment on earth that could save his life, there had been an argument and a fight at the house at Múli, during which Tausen had strangled Boas to death, and then tried to cover his crime with a staged suicide.

  The confession was a ploy, Hentze was certain of that. By admitting to killing Boas – for which there was mounting forensic proof now anyway – Tausen was hoping to prevent the addition of Astrid and Else’s killings to hi
s charges. Hentze’s interviews with the residents at the Colony commune in 1974 hadn’t yielded any firm statements or evidence about Astrid and Else’s disappearance, so Tausen was probably gambling that the Faroes’ Prosecutor would have little appetite for a trial with no physical evidence and where the only two direct witnesses – Boas and Juhl – were both dead.

  And in that respect, Tausen’s gamble paid off. Three days after he received Tausen’s statement, the Prosecutor accepted the confession to killing Boas Justesen, and in December Tausen was sentenced to the maximum term: sixteen years. He would be nearly eighty before he was freed.

  The murders of Astrid and Else Dam were not officially laid at Tausen’s door, and although Hentze saw the practicality of that decision it didn’t sit right with him either. In his more cynical moments – which were more frequent these days – he was fully convinced that Tausen had not only been closely involved in the events at Múli, but also in those at Vesborggård House.

  But of course, there was no way to prove it, nor to fully make sense of all the conflicting evidence. It was possible that, as Tausen claimed, he had indeed suffered an attack of conscience when he saw what had been done to Thea Rask at Vesborggård House; maybe even enough that he’d helped Lýdia Reyná get Thea away, taking Oscar Juhl’s camera at the same time as some sort of insurance for their safety.

  However, in his private moments of dark storytelling, Hentze believed it was even more likely that Tausen had done nothing at all to help Lýdia or Thea – nothing except use his friendship with Lýdia to track her down in Christiania at Oscar Juhl’s behest; to reassure her, perhaps, and to find out how much of a danger she posed.

  But whichever way it had been – even as a mixture of the two scenarios – when the records of Juhl’s “therapy” sessions with Dr Sønderby had come to light, there was no longer any question that it was Oscar Juhl who had murdered Lýdia Reyná in Christiania. Juhl had described the killing calmly and in exultant detail to the psychiatrist over several sessions, each time marking it out as a moment of epiphany in his own warped view of his actions. It was his enlightenment, as he described it, but to Hentze it seemed that nothing short of an utter darkness could have descended over the man.