The Fire Pit

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Chris Ould and Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Faroese Pronunciation

  Prelude

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  THE FIRE PIT

  Also by Chris Ould and available from Titan Books

  The Blood Strand

  The Killing Bay

  THE FIRE PIT

  A FAROES NOVEL

  CHRIS OULD

  TITAN BOOKS

  The Fire Pit

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783297085

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783297092

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: February 2018

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  © 2018 Chris Ould

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  For Jens Jensen,

  Per Skov Christensen

  and Henning Munk Plum,

  without whom these books would be much poorer.

  Stora takk fyri, og tak.

  FAROESE PRONUNCIATION

  THE FAROESE LANGUAGE IS RELATED TO OLD NORSE AND Icelandic and is spoken by fewer than eighty thousand people worldwide. Its grammar is complicated and many words are pronounced far differently to the way they appear.

  Ø is a “ur” sound, and the Đ or ð is usually silent, so Fríða would be pronounced Free-a. V is pronounced as a w, and j as a y, so Hjalti is pronounced “Yalti”.

  PRELUDE

  Denmark, August

  IN THE SUMMER HEAT OF MID JUTLAND, THOMAS FRIIS DROVE IN his shirtsleeves, his suit jacket hanging from the hook in the back of his Volvo estate. Rather than put on the air conditioning he preferred to travel with the window down, enjoying the warm, buffeting air. He had a day’s leave, although he hadn’t told this to his wife, whom he’d left at home in Aarhus with their two sons. If the boys had known about his day off the only destination on the cards would have been Legoland, which was definitely not on Friis’s agenda.

  Thomas Friis was thirty-four, a kriminalassistent grade 2 with Aarhus CID. In the department he knew he was regarded as something of an oddity; not in an especially bad way – he was a decent detective, after all – but mostly because he was someone who chose not to try to fit in. He was a book man, people said: always investigating by the book, by the numbers; always in a good suit, shoes polished daily, clean-shaven every morning. In other words, dry, intellectual, dull.

  As the GPS showed he was nearing his destination Friis checked his rear-view mirror and slowed on the quiet country lane. As far as the eye could see on either side of the road there were fields of tanned wheat, gracefully following the soft undulating contours of the low hills, occasionally scarred by twin tracks of a tractor’s passage.

  On the verge up ahead he saw the small wooden sign beside the mailbox – “Karensminde” – and at the entrance to the farm track he pulled in and brought the Volvo to a stop. In front of him the track went down a slight incline, unbounded by fences between it and the wheat fields, and after five or six hundred metres it ended at a solitary house out of sight of the road. It was bordered on two sides by tall, dark-green poplars, perhaps planted as a windbreak or to give shade.

  Friis took all this in for a moment then reached for the thin manila file on the passenger seat. Inside it was Niels Jesper Kruse’s three-page statement, and although Friis had exactly the same document on the laptop beside him he preferred the portability and ease of reading from paper.

  I got to the house at about eleven thirty in the morning and as I turned in at the top of the track I saw a white van down by the house, next to Helene’s car. It was facing towards me and I didn’t recognise it. I couldn’t tell if there was anyone in it so I waited for a few seconds to see if it was going to move and come up the track, but when it didn’t I drove on. I went fairly slowly because there had been ice on the roads that morning.

  Looking at the track now, Friis had the same view that Niels Kruse had had seven months ago. In January the fields would have been empty, of course, and the poplars would have been leafless, but neither of those factors would have affected the view of a white van parked beside the house. Okay then, Friis could move on. He let the Volvo roll forward, and stopped in the gravelled turning area in front of the house.

  There was a stillness in the warm air when Friis got out of the car. Off to his right there were two small, wooden outbuildings, both black tarred, while the house itself was clad in white boards with yellow paint on the window frames. It looked well kept and neat, despite the fact it had been unoccupied since the winter.

  I parked near the van. It had a sign on the side, something like Sørensen Cleaning; I think that was it. I thought Helene must have called someone in to do the carpets or something so I didn’t think it was odd. I went to the house and in through the front door and I called out because I didn’t see anyone.

  There was no answer and I couldn’t hear anything so I went to see if Helene was in the kitchen. She wasn’t there, but there was a broken bowl on the floor and while I was looking at that I heard the van starting up outside. I went back to the hall and saw the van driving off very quickly and that was when I began to think something wasn’t right. So I looked in the sitting room for Helene and Maja – I looked in all the downstairs rooms, calling out – and then I went upstairs. That’s when I found them.

  There hadn’t been a problem getting the keys from the real-estate agent and Friis used them now, opening the white-painted front door as Niels Kruse had done.

  Inside, the trapped air was warm and smelled vaguely of wood and of dust. The hall, like the rest of the house, was now empty of furniture and personal possessions. Only the carpets, curtains and blinds remained in place, doing something to stifle the sound of Friis’s footsteps in the otherwise echoing space.

  Holding his laptop before him, Friis visited each room on the ground floor, looking from the photographs of the house as it had been found by the technical team to the rooms as they were now. In a few places marks in the carpets showed where a piece of furniture had been, but b
eyond that the house had been returned to a blank canvas, awaiting the imprints of a new owner.

  Having examined the ground floor, Friis took the curved staircase upwards. Upstairs the rooms had also been stripped bare, and in the master bedroom there was new, untrodden carpet, still smelling of lint. The original carpet had been disposed of, along with its blood stains. Helene Kruse had bled for some time before she died from the knife wound to her stomach.

  I found Helene first. She was on the floor beside the bed in our— in the main bedroom. There was… There was a pool of blood and… I knew she was dead. I just stood there in shock. I couldn’t move. Then I remembered Maja and I went to her room and that’s where I found her. She was on her bed, lying very straight – you know, not like she was asleep but stiff, like a doll. She didn’t have any clothes on and at first I thought she was dead, too. But then I realised she was breathing. I could just see her chest moving, so I went to her and tried to wake her up but she wouldn’t respond. She was unconscious and nothing I did made any difference so that’s when I called for an ambulance and the police. That was the first time I thought that was what I should do. I don’t know why I didn’t think it straight away, when I saw Helene, but I didn’t.

  The daughter’s room – Maja’s – was across the landing from the master bedroom. There were still traces to show where the posters of pop stars and Maja’s drawings had been stuck to the walls, and from the window seat in the dormer there was a pleasant view across the fields. The room would have been a nice one for a young teenage girl to have as her own, but as he looked round Friis became certain that it was also the place where the second murder would have occurred – the one the killer had set out to commit from the start.

  Maja had still been unconscious when she had arrived in the emergency department and the general consensus was that she had been drugged. Blood samples were taken and a thorough examination showed no physical injuries and no indications of rape or sexual assault. After two hours she started to come round and within six she was fully coherent and aware, although confused and very distressed when told what had happened to her mother.

  Helene Kruse was confirmed dead at the scene and the next day the results of the post-mortem showed that she had been stabbed once without signs of resistance. The cause of her death was blood loss and the technical analysis of the scene showed she had not moved or been moved after incurring the wound. This led to the conclusion that Helene, like Maja, might also have been drugged, but subsequent lab analysis could find little evidence to show what sort of drug had been used. Either the compound had been metabolised in the bodies of the two victims or had naturally broken down in a short space of time.

  And exactly how the drug had been administered was another puzzle. There were no puncture wounds on Helene or Maja’s bodies to indicate injection and Maja had no memory of events from that morning. However, both she and Helene had had milk with their breakfasts and both had recently drunk orange juice, which led to the suspicion that one of these liquids might have been spiked.

  Tests on the cartons and other food in the refrigerator eventually came back negative, but as someone who might have induced his wife and daughter to unwittingly ingest a drug, Niels Kruse became the prime suspect in the hours immediately after the killing. The fact that he’d been separated from Helene for six months – albeit on apparently good terms – also brought him under suspicion until witness statements and data from his cellphone established beyond doubt that he could not have been at the house for more than five minutes before calling for help.

  And that conclusion left the Billund CID with precisely no other viable leads. Technical could find no useful trace evidence of anyone else in the house; the white van marked Sørensen Cleaning couldn’t be identified, and no matter how deeply the investigating officers dug into the private lives of Helene and Maja they could find no one with even a tenuous motive to do them harm. After six months, the best they could come up with was the theory that this attack had been the work of a stranger who had somehow talked his way into the house, overpowered and/or drugged mother and daughter and then been disturbed by the arrival of Niels Kruse. It was a conclusion that satisfied no one, but unless a witness or informant came forward with new information it was all they had.

  After about five minutes in Maja’s room, Thomas Friis closed his laptop and went back downstairs. He didn’t believe anyone would come out of the woodwork to help Billund CID solve the case. What he did believe – what he was practically certain of now – was that there was nothing at all unprepared about the crimes at the Kruse house. They hadn’t happened by chance, the acts hadn’t been hurried and whoever had committed them had been forensically aware to the point of obsession. This, Friis was convinced, all went to show that the crimes at the house had been meticulously planned over weeks and probably months.

  And this planning and forethought wasn’t the only element that fitted the patterns in the cases Friis had been collecting over the last eight years. Maja Kruse was thirteen at the time of the attack, which placed her at the lower end of the age range of victims he was interested in, but even so she fitted all the other criteria. She was physically adolescent, slim, tall, had blond hair and didn’t wear glasses or have dental braces. She also had a familiar pattern to her family background: one absent parent, a relatively isolated home and a quiet, somewhat introverted social life. In other words, Maja Kruse came from a predictable household and had a largely predictable life. If Friis was correct, then all this meant that – had she died – Maja Kruse would have been the eleventh murder victim of one man.

  Outside in the heat and warm breeze, Friis walked round the house to the sound of the poplars. He looked at a copse of trees perhaps half a kilometre away on a small hillock and he examined the view from the house towards the road, going back inside and looking again from the master bedroom window. In all he spent about forty minutes in this manner before he got back in the Volvo and left.

  Once he’d dropped off the house keys with the real-estate agent he set off back towards Aarhus. On the main road there was a sign for Billund, and beneath it to Legoland. It made him feel guilty for letting his obsession win out over his children and he made up his mind that next time – on his next day of leave – he’d take them somewhere to make up for it. But not Legoland.

  1

  Faroe Islands, September Saturday/leygardagur

  ON THE HILLSIDE BELOW THE LAST REMAINING HOUSE AT MÚLI, Hjalti Hentze waited. There was a light rain in the air, not yet heavy enough to make a noise as it landed on the various pieces of plastic sheeting around the stone wall of the sheepfold.

  “You people have to stop killing each other,” Sophie Krogh said, somewhat muffled.

  “Yeh, you keep saying that,” Hentze told her.

  “Well, you keep on finding bodies.”

  “This one’s hardly anything to do with us, though, is it?” Hentze said. “I mean, it’s not recent. Jan Reyná thinks it’s been there for a decade at least.”

  “And he’s an expert is he?” Sophie asked, somewhat drily.

  Hentze didn’t say anything. It was hard to have a conversation with someone’s backside, which was effectively what he was doing. Sophie Krogh was on her knees, her head down by the hole in the base of the wall, peering in with the aid of a torch.

  Finally she wriggled backwards on the plastic sheet, then stood up.

  “So what do you think?” Hentze asked, glad to finally be face to face again.

  Sophie assessed the circular wall. “There are definitely remains in there still. We’ll assume that they’re human, given the skull was found nearby, so we’ll have to dismantle the wall by hand. There’s always a chance that something else is in the stones above the body – or below it, come to that.”

  “So you’ll call in a team?”

  Sophie shook her head. “We’re busy enough as it is. No, I’ll do the extraction myself if you can find me some muscle to help move the stones.”

  “How
many people?”

  “A couple should do. More than that and you risk missing something or just get in each other’s way.”

  “Okay, I’ll find a couple of guys who don’t mind labouring on Sunday. Any idea how long it’ll take?”

  She looked at the wall, then the sky. “A day – probably. Depends what I find. It’s too late to start now, though, and she’s not going anywhere, so I’ll record things as they are, then we can start first thing tomorrow.”

  “So you agree with Reyná that it’s a female?”

  “Based on the skull, yeh, I’ll give him that. But you’ll need to have Elisabet Hovgaard confirm it when we have all the bones. Do you have any sort of tent we can put up while we work?”

  “I’ll find something.”

  “Okay, tak. And you never know, if you’re lucky she’ll turn out to be a hundred years old and then you can forget it.”

  Hentze shook his head. “I’m never that lucky,” he said, then looked away as a waterproof-clad figure strode up the hillside towards them. She was a young woman in her twenties, red hair spilling out from her hood and her face flushed with the exertion.

  “Hi, hi,” she said, panting.

  “This is my friend Katrina,” Sophie said. “She wanted to see the islands so she flew out with me for a couple of days.”

  “It can’t be much of a holiday for you if Sophie’s working,” Hentze said. “Aren’t you bored?”

  “Actually, I think it’s really interesting,” Katrina replied. “I mean, I get to see what Sophie does all day. I think that’s exciting.”

  “Exciting? Oh, well, yes, I suppose so,” Hentze said, but he saw Sophie roll her eyes slightly as she turned to take a camera from a flight case on the ground.

  “Is it okay to look at the burned-out house?” Katrina asked then. “It’s not a crime scene or something?”

  “No, you can look,” Hentze said, “but don’t go too close. The whole thing’s unstable.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Katrina said. And to Sophie, “Meet you at the car?”