The Fire Pit Page 3

“My guess is a knife or blade,” Sophie said. “It needs to be properly examined, though. I’m not an expert, but Per Olesen and his team at Roskilde could tell you.”

  Hentze stood back. “And if it is a cut mark, what would that say? What would it mean?”

  “It’s on C4, a cervical vertebra, here,” Elisabet said. She pointed to her neck just to the rear of her jaw. “Which could be consistent with her throat being cut, the same way you can kill a sheep.”

  For a second Hentze had to remind himself that the dumpy, often good-hearted woman before him was as unfazed by discussions of death and its causes as he was by a break-in or a domestic dispute.

  “So we must suspect murder,” he said. “Not just from the possible cut mark, but also from the way she was buried.”

  “Sorry, Hjalti,” Elisabet said.

  Hentze gave a resigned shrug. “Never mind. I’m sure one day I’ll ask a question and someone will tell me I don’t need to worry, everything’s fine.”

  Sophie laughed drily. “You’d better not come and work in Denmark,” she said.

  * * *

  From the hospital Hentze drove the short distance to Tvørgøta, which lay halfway up the slope of land that enfolded Tórshavn in the crook of the bay. Officer Annika Mortensen’s flat was in the top half of a house, accessed around the back and up a flight of grey metal steps. By the door there was a solitary pot containing a lemon tree about a metre tall. It didn’t have any fruit.

  Hentze knocked on the door and waited. After half a minute he knocked again, calling out, “Annika, it’s Hjalti.”

  This time he was answered by an indistinct call from inside. It sounded like, “Hold on.”

  A minute or so later Annika Mortensen opened the door. She was dressed in pair of sweatpants and an oversized cardigan and was wearing her hair down. It also seemed a little more swept forward than usual, although this did little to hide the dressings on her forehead, right cheek and on her neck. Her left hand was bandaged as well, all the result of a burning mixture of petrol, diesel and oil. The same stuff had so badly injured the girl carrying the explosive device that she’d died twelve hours later; if Annika had been closer in her pursuit it was possible she would have been severely injured or killed, too.

  “Are you hiding?” Hentze asked when Annika glanced warily at the steps behind him, as if she suspected he might be the scout for a larger raiding party.

  “Yeh.” Annika nodded.

  “From who?”

  “Start with my mother and go on till you get to Heri,” Annika said. She stood back and held the door wider. “Come in. I’ll make tea.”

  “I’d prefer coffee,” Hentze said, following her inside. He knew about Annika’s herbal teas.

  “Sorry, I don’t think I have any.”

  “Well it’ll have to be tea then, I suppose. Thanks.”

  Annika made tea while Hentze prowled the sitting room. He felt slightly remiss for not coming before, although he had visited Annika in hospital the day after the incident. Since then, though, there had been an almost constant procession of paperwork to be dealt with, which had only increased now that he was covering Ári Niclasen’s job.

  “So, how are you feeling?” he asked when Annika carried two mugs in from the kitchen. The aroma they gave off was reminiscent of Chinese herbal medicine and when Hentze took a tentative sip it tasted like it, too. He put it discreetly aside.

  “In myself, fine,” Annika said. “I’m going to see Hans Lassen tomorrow about coming back to work.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeh I am,” Annika said, sounding a touch jaded. “I mean, it’s not like I’m ill. Apart from this” – she gestured with her bandaged left hand – “I’m perfectly well, and I’d rather be doing something than sitting around here. I don’t suppose Hans will want me out on patrol while I still look like an extra from The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb but I could man the control room.”

  It was one of the things Hentze liked about Annika: she wasn’t one for self-pity, and if she said she’d do something you knew that she would. That same attitude was at least partly responsible for the burns she’d sustained a few nights ago.

  “Well, if you’re set on coming back you could come in to CID,” he told her. “We’re one short at the moment, so there’s a gap.”

  “You mean because of Ári?”

  “Mm, sort of,” Hentze said. “It hasn’t been generally announced yet, but he’s moving over to the Prosecutor’s office, so I’m standing in until Remi sorts out a permanent replacement. Anyway, that leaves an opening – if you want it.”

  “Yes, yeh, of course,” Annika said. “But you do know I’ve already applied to Copenhagen CID, right?”

  “Sure, yes, I know. Have you heard back yet?”

  “No, I think it’ll be at least another couple of weeks.”

  “So you could think of this as a dry run until then. And if you want it I’ve got a case you can look after.”

  “Which case? I mean, not that I’m being picky.”

  “It’s the woman’s remains from Múli. Has Heri told you about it?” Heri Kalsø was her boyfriend and another uniform officer at the station.

  “Yeh, a bit,” Annika said. “Do you know who she was yet?”

  “No, still unidentified, but it looks pretty certain she was murdered – not just because the body was concealed, but because she was buried face down and naked. Her throat may also have been cut.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.” He considered Annika for a second. “So that’s what you’d be working on: finding out who she was and how she came to be there.”

  “Who else is on the team?”

  “Just you. Because of the age of the skeleton and the death of the most likely suspect, Remi’s not keen to expend a lot of manpower on it. People are busy enough after last week, so that’s understandable, I suppose, but this woman has already been forgotten for years, so I think the least we can do is give her what attention we can.”

  “Yeh, of course,” Annika agreed. “But if it is murder, shouldn’t you give it to someone more experienced?”

  “Of course, but beggars can’t be choosers, can they?” Hentze said, his tone light. “So, what do you think – are you interested? You can do all the legwork and then I’ll take the credit.”

  “Sure, of course. I wouldn’t expect anything else.” Annika grinned. “Thanks, Hjalti.”

  Hentze waved it away, then dug in his pocket for a flash drive which he tossed across to her. “This has what we know at the moment, so you’ll be able to do your homework before tomorrow. We’ll talk it through then.” He glanced at his watch and stood up. “I have to go. Ári scheduled about a dozen meetings this week and I haven’t been able to cancel them all yet, so…”

  “So you have to grin and bear them?”

  “Well, I have to bear them at least,” Hentze said.

  Annika followed him to the back door and held it as he went out of the flat. “By the way,” she said, “I meant to ask you before, is Jan Reyná still around? I haven’t seen him since the explosion.”

  “No, he had to go home.”

  “Oh. Right. But he was okay?”

  “Better than he would have been if he’d drunk your tea,” Hentze said, pursing his lips in distaste. “If you bring it into CID I’ll have to send you back to uniform. Detectives only drink coffee. That’s the first rule.”

  Annika laughed. “Thanks for the tip. I’ll remember.”

  “Good. I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” Hentze said. “Eight o’clock.”

  4

  IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON WHEN I OPENED THE DOOR OF THE flat and pulled my holdall awkwardly after me, letting the door close itself. The air inside was suspended and stale and there was the sweet scent of a browning apple in the fruit bowl. The light from the windows seemed grey and worn out, as if it, too, had been trapped. You see it a lot as a copper, places where time has been stopped and where nothing has been touched for days, week
s or months. Even so, it was odd to view the place more like a crime scene than a home, although it had never really been that. It had been intended to be temporary after the divorce, but somehow I was still there after eight years.

  I dropped three weeks’ worth of mail on the counter that divided the kitchen from the living room, and left the holdall where it was. I went to the bathroom, then the bedroom, then back to the living room. I opened a window a couple of inches, then checked the answerphone display but didn’t pick up the handset despite sixteen messages blinking at me.

  I was home, but I wasn’t. I looked out of the window over the stepped skyline of roofs and block buildings. The first thing I’d noticed outside the airport was that the landscape was constrained wherever I looked: everything parcelled, divided, confined. The once-known had become foreign and I didn’t feel that I fitted here or anywhere now.

  I turned and looked round the flat. I could still feel the momentum of travel and when I considered all the dull practicalities of restarting my interaction with this place I knew the black dog was stirring. It was too soon to come to a rest so I picked up my car keys and let the door slam again as I went out.

  * * *

  The car had a thin coating of dust, which I took to show there hadn’t been much rain while I’d been gone. The water jets and windscreen wipers created a double arc through the grime and I left it at that, adjusting to driving on the left again as I navigated the side streets as far as the ring road and headed west to the leafier suburbs where the sprawl of the city hadn’t entirely subsumed older, smaller villages into its red brick and greyness.

  The traffic hadn’t reached rush-hour proportions yet and muscle memory took me out to Wingfield without major hold-ups. Off the main road this was a place of avenues and closes: the place where I’d been brought up; not much changed and not a bad place for that. At the end of Peter and Ketty’s road I used the turning circle, then I came back and stopped beside the drive of the house.

  Peter, my uncle and adoptive father, answered the door and we hugged on the step before he stood back, appraising me. Even in retirement he still managed to look as if he was only on a day off and tomorrow he’d be back to solicitor’s business. Only the slight Parkinson’s tremor in his left hand gave the lie to it.

  “So, how are you?” he asked, as if his own appraisal wasn’t enough without my own verdict, too.

  “Okay,” I told him. “Fine.”

  He nodded and ushered me inside. In the kitchen Ketty was preparing a meal, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt that might have looked unnaturally optimistic on a woman ten years her junior, but with her well-cut grey hair and Faroese looks they just seemed effortlessly stylish. She was my mother’s sister so it had always been tempting to think there would be some similarity between them if Lýdia had still been alive, but from what I knew about Lýdia now I doubted that would be true.

  Ketty and Peter always ate early so Ketty’s first order of business was to ascertain that I would stay, that I’d eat, and that I should know she had to go out to her knitting group later. After that she kissed my cheek and put her arm around me for a few seconds. She’d never been an overly tactile or expressive woman: too practical and down-to-earth for that. Childhood grazes and cuts warranted antiseptic and plasters, and sympathy for as long as they took to apply; adult wounds like divorce were self-inflicted and she wanted no part. Sum tú reiðir, skalt tú liggja: as you make your bed, so you can lie.

  In reality she wasn’t quite as chilly as that made her sound, but she was tough and to the point – maybe more so the older she’d got – so I was prepared for an interrogation as she tended to the cooking. But for once she was uncharacteristically forbearing, perhaps because she believed it was only her insistence that had made me go back to the Faroes: a last chance to make peace with Signar, my father. She’d got her way, even if the outcome hadn’t been what she might have wanted. Perhaps she thought she should give me a break now.

  There was still one question that couldn’t be avoided, though.

  “Did you speak to Signar in the hospital?” she asked, lifting the lid of the casserole dish to stir it.

  “A little.” I didn’t say it had been barely six words. “It was the right thing to do,” I added. “You were right about that.” I could give her that much, even if it was less than the truth.

  “Good. I’m glad if you think so,” she said with a short nod. “These things, they should be done.”

  She covered the pot again and gestured to the cutlery drawer. “Set a place for yourself at the table, then we can eat.”

  We ate in front of the window that overlooked the garden and I was glad of the distraction that eating provided. It let me space out or divert the questions Ketty still had: who had I met, where had I been and what had I done? Peter, perhaps wisely, didn’t say a great deal.

  What I told them was heavily redacted, in part because to go into detail would have taken too long, and partly because I knew Ketty’s main interest was in people, not events. So I talked about the people and places she’d know or know of. She hadn’t been back to the Faroes for more than twenty years – the last time for her father’s funeral – but she still had an expatriate’s bond to the place. She tutted when something I said made her realise that something had changed in Tórshavn, as if the place had obviously gone to hell in a handcart because of her absence. I was almost prepared for her to announce that she’d have to go back and tell them the error of their ways, so she surprised me when she rose from the table at the end of the meal and said flatly, “Well, I won’t see it again.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  She made a pragmatic shrug. “Why would I want to? Just to sit around talking to people and saying how things have changed for the worse? No. It’s not my business any more.” She picked up a plate, as if that put an end to the matter, and then turned to Peter. “You can get Jan to help wash the dishes. I need to change.”

  Peter and I decamped to the kitchen as bidden and a few minutes later Ketty came in wearing a jacket and looking Scandinavian smart. She was carrying a cloth bag full of knitting. “I won’t be late,” she told Peter, then touched my arm briefly. “Come back again soon.”

  I told her I would and she was gone. Ketty was like that – the sort of person who goes away to figure things out.

  After we’d finished the dishes Peter took two beers from the fridge, and we carried them outside because it was still fairly warm and I had a pack of duty-free Prince in my hand. We sat at a wrought-iron table on the patio amongst the pot plants Ketty favoured for their neatness. I struck a light to the first cigarette from the pack and leaned back, finally beginning to relax.

  “When did you start smoking again?” Peter asked.

  “I haven’t, not seriously.”

  For a moment he seemed to debate whether to challenge me about it, but then said instead, “So, you survived the family reunion.”

  “More or less.”

  “Ketty was glad you went. You know how she is. She might not show it, but she was worried that you’d regret it later if you didn’t.”

  “Well it wasn’t much of a reconciliation,” I said. “I don’t think he knew who I was.”

  “Oh. I see. I’m sorry.”

  I dismissed it with a gesture. “It doesn’t matter. In some ways it might even have been better that way.”

  I drew smoke and flicked ash towards a plant pot. “Listen, can you tell me something? How well did you know Lýdia?”

  Peter accepted the change in the subject without apparent reservation and considered it for a moment. “Not well,” he said in the end. “I met her for the first time when Ketty and I got engaged. And she came to the wedding, of course. She would have been about fifteen then, I suppose. After that I don’t think I saw her again until she left Signar and brought you to England.”

  “In ’75?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever find out what was behind that – her leaving Signar, I mean?”
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  He thought about that, as if deciding on the best way to sum it up. “I think your father wanted a traditional wife,” he said in the end. “And Lýdia didn’t like the constraints.”

  “Was he abusive?”

  “I don’t think so; not physically, as far as I know. Domineering might be a better word, but that’s only my impression. Lýdia’s English wasn’t as good as Ketty’s and she never really talked about what had happened – not to me.”

  I took a pull on my beer. “While I was in the Faroes I saw Lýdia’s medical records,” I told him. “And I talked to a couple of people who knew her before we left the islands. From the sound of it her behaviour was pretty erratic. I think she might have been suffering from bipolar disorder, or something like it.”

  He thought about that, and I could tell that the solicitor’s habit of not passing judgement hadn’t left him even after three years of retirement. “I don’t know enough about that sort of thing,” he said in the end. “She was certainly… impulsive. When she came here she didn’t seem to have any plan: she just arrived and then you were only here for a few months before you went off to Denmark. That was the last time I saw her before she died.”

  “Did you know she’d tried to kill herself before, on the Faroes?”

  “No.”

  Which meant Ketty didn’t know either, I assumed.

  “So you had no warning when she died in Copenhagen,” I said.

  “No, nothing. The first thing we knew about it was a phone call from the police there. They said Lýdia was dead and they were calling because Ketty was listed as her next of kin.”

  “Not Signar?”

  “No. I don’t know where they got the information from – maybe her passport – but Signar wasn’t mentioned. You were in a foster home and they said they needed a blood relation to take responsibility for you, so we flew out late the following day. It was harder to arrange things like that in those days.”

  I knew most of the rest: not from memory but from what I’d been told in the few instances when I’d asked Ketty about it. They hadn’t been many because I’d always instinctively known it wasn’t something either Ketty or Peter felt comfortable with, perhaps because they thought I should be protected from it. But I was as close now as I’d ever been to the subject, so in the end I trod out the cigarette I’d almost forgotten and sat forward a little.