The Fire Pit Read online

  “Do you have anything to say?” he asked, sitting down behind his desk.

  “No, sir, not really,” I said, keeping it formally stiff. “I’m just glad it’s finally been sorted. I think Claire Tilman’s been put through enough.”

  “Yes, well, maybe you should look to your own actions – and those of DC Scott – regarding that. Whatever the DPS says, I’m not happy with the way this was handled. At best you’ve dodged a bullet, so I think you need to seriously consider how you handled your team in this instance and whether lessons can be learned.”

  Kirkland had a streak of the vicar about him – a predisposition to sanctimony when an opportunity presented itself – but in a way I was glad he’d chosen to take to the pulpit now.

  “And you’ll do the same?” I asked flatly.

  He looked genuinely surprised, as if I’d contradicted his sermon from the pews. “Excuse me?”

  “You’ll be considering whether lessons can be learned about how you handled things, too?” I said.

  I’d put it in front of him, gift wrapped, but for a moment I could almost see him trying to make up his mind whether it was too easy. He wanted it, of course, but he was also suspicious. He was afraid it might explode in his face.

  “I think you’d better explain what you mean,” he said in the end. “When there’s an allegation of misconduct—”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “There wasn’t an allegation until you went to Matt Callaghan looking for dirt, and when he gave you a sniff of what might have happened you jumped on it.” I shook my head. “You knew the DPS would have to interview Claire, even in her state, but you were so keen to get something on me that you didn’t care. So after everything else she’d been through, Claire’s left thinking no one believes her and runs away from home, making herself even more vulnerable.”

  Kirkland made to speak, but I didn’t give him the space. “I reckon if anyone dodged a bullet it was you,” I told him. “And that was only because she was found before anything else happened to her.”

  To give him his due, Kirkland knew when there was no purpose in arguing a moot point. Besides, I’d just changed the agenda, but before he could formulate a response to that I went on. “I’d like to request a leave of absence,” I said. “Starting now, for a month.”

  I could tell he hadn’t seen that one coming, but he was nothing if not quick to adapt. “On what grounds?”

  “It’s a personal matter.”

  He thought for a second or two and I knew what the calculation was. If it was something I wanted and something he could deny, then he would. Besides, he’d want me where he could see me while he worked out his next move. He shook his head. “I can’t grant leaves of absence with the current workload, and obviously there are other issues we need to address here.”

  He looked for my response so I shrugged. “Okay then.”

  I took the ID lanyard from around my neck and my warrant card out of my pocket. In the time it took me to do that he’d already figured it out.

  “I won’t accept this,” he said.

  I put the IDs on the desk. “You’ll get it in writing,” I told him. “I’ll take holiday entitlement to cover notice, or put in a sick note. Whichever you want.”

  I’d hoped for a better reaction. Of course I had. That’s the point of making a dramatic gesture. But Kirkland was too good for that. It was the last thing he could withhold so he did, although it must have cost him to give up the satisfaction of a parting shot as I walked out. That was something, at least.

  On the way out of the station I passed Donna Scott, smoking by the handrail of the disabled ramp. I barely stopped, but it was long enough. “They can’t touch you,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. In the clear.”

  She looked relieved. “Thanks, boss.”

  I waved it away, already moving again.

  * * *

  By the time I got to Ben Skinner’s office – in response to his phone call as I’d started back to the flat – it was past five o’clock. I hadn’t expected to hear from him for another day or so at least, but given what I’d just done it was probably better that it was now, before word had got out.

  “I haven’t had time to get the whisky,” I said when he met me on the stairs once again.

  “Doesn’t matter. Come through.”

  It struck me that most of his previous bonhomie was gone, but some days are like that, especially in his job, so I followed him back to his office and Ben closed the door. “Where did the Leica come from?” he asked.

  “Like I said: it’s a family heirloom. It was one of the things my mother had when she died in 1976. I hadn’t seen it until today. Why?”

  He’d moved round his desk and now he sat down and shifted his weight in his chair. He gave me a brief appraisal. “You’d better look at the pictures.”

  He turned to his monitor screen and I moved forward so I could see it as well. “It’s not pleasant,” he said. “Just to warn you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He double-clicked a window and opened a photo viewer.

  It took me a couple of seconds to fully adjust to what I was seeing. Whatever I’d expected, this wasn’t it, and as my eye ran from one frame to the next I already knew it was one of those things you can’t ever unsee. You get hardened to various things as a copper, and to some you become more sensitised. This wasn’t one of the latter, but even so the cruelty of the images was shocking.

  The girl was naked, pale-skinned, dark-haired, aged between fourteen and sixteen. She lay on some kind of bench or rough table above a flagstoned floor. Her head was inclined to one side on the boards, her eyes open but vacant. The only hint that she was alive were slight shifts in her unfocused pupils between one photo and another, and in one shot a blink or a closing of her eyelids had been caught part way through.

  In each frame she seemed to have no reaction to the way she had been brutalised. The pictures became more specific, more intimate, more obsessed with the detail as they went on. They had a quality that seemed to reflect a desire to leave nothing to the imagination; to leave no possibility of doubt about what had been done. They celebrated it.

  I’d seen enough. I moved away from Ben’s desk and heard him clicking the computer mouse a couple of times, closing the file.

  “These are level-one images,” he told me then. “You don’t get much worse, but I’ve never seen anything at that level from before the mid-nineties when the web really got going; nothing ever from the seventies.”

  “Maybe some things never change,” I said flatly.

  “Yeah – only the way they’re distributed and the number of people who see them.”

  “So what do you need to do?” I asked.

  He thought about that. “I don’t know,” he said in the end. “I could put them into the system, on to the database, but you know how many thousand images we get every week – I mean, new stuff, some of it only a few hours old? If your pictures were made forty years ago there’s no chance of linking them to any paedophile networks active now. And the film stock is at least thirty years old, I checked.”

  “So?”

  “Have you any idea where they were taken, or who by?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t start to guess,” I said. “All I know is what I told you, except that the camera was in Denmark. That’s where my mother died.”

  He thought about that for a moment, then made a decision. “Okay, I’m going to log them as recovered images from an unknown source and that’ll probably be it.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But can you put them on a flash drive for me as well?”

  He gave me a sharp look and shook his head. “No.”

  “Ben—”

  “Listen, if this isn’t a case and they aren’t evidence, you could be on very dodgy ground if you were found with them. Technically it could be taken as possessing, making or distributing indecent images of a child. Besides, why would you want them?”

  “I don’
t,” I said. “But they are evidence if I try to find out where they came from.”

  He frowned. “In Denmark?”

  I could see how it didn’t fit together from the outside, so I said, “It’s a long story. My mother died when I was a kid, so I don’t know why she’d have had that film or where it came from. But if I try to find out – if I got a chance to identify the girl or who did that to her – I’d need something to compare.”

  Ben didn’t like it and there was no reason he would. It went against his instinct and probably a whole page of regulations, too. “So it’d stay off the books?”

  “Unless I find something. And you said yourself, no one else will bother.”

  He still didn’t like it, but he rummaged wordlessly in a desk drawer and took out a flash drive, which he plugged into his computer. He didn’t say anything as he did what was necessary, then pulled the data stick from its slot. He held it out.

  “It’s just one picture,” he said. “And you didn’t get it from me.”

  I nodded. “You want me to sign anything – a disclaimer?”

  “Fuck off. Just don’t copy it on to a computer.”

  “I won’t. Thanks.”

  He didn’t want thanks. I didn’t want the images that were now in my head, so that left two of us unhappy.

  I didn’t stay any longer than necessary when I got back to the flat: just long enough to go online, then write an email and make a couple of phone calls before I re-packed my bag. By midnight I was in a hotel at Heathrow. The first flight to Copenhagen was at six thirty.

  10

  Wednesday/mikudagur

  THERE WERE THREE MISSED CALLS WHEN I SWITCHED ON MY phone as I walked down the ramp from the plane. Two of them deserved to be ignored, so I did, but I tapped the screen to call Hentze back without bothering to see if he’d left a message.

  “Hey,” I said when he answered. “You called me?”

  “Yeh. Are you busy?”

  “No. What’s up?”

  “I need to ask you a favour,” he said. “The other day you told me you had the name of the man who was the leader of the Colony commune at Múli.”

  “Yeah, Rasmus Matzen.”

  “Do you have an address for him, too?”

  “It’s a place called Dannemare,” I said. “I’m going to see him this afternoon to ask him about Lýdia.”

  That seemed to throw him. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Copenhagen,” I said. “Kastrup. My flight just landed.”

  “Have you— You’ve been back to the UK?”

  “Yeah, it’s all sorted. No further action.”

  “So you’re no longer suspended?”

  “No, but I wanted to finish this now,” I said, leaving it deliberately opaque. “I got an email from Christine Lynge as well, so I’m hoping to see her later today or tomorrow. Thanks for arranging that, by the way.”

  “Nei, it wasn’t much,” he said. I could still hear him recalibrating. “But if you’re intending to speak to Rasmus Matzen in any case, would you do me a favour in return? Do you think you could ask him some questions for me?”

  There weren’t many reasons why Hentze would ask that, so I chose the most obvious one. “You’ve got an ID on the body from Múli?”

  “Yeh, from a missing persons report in 1974. She was a Norwegian woman called Astrid Hege Dam.”

  “And you can connect her to the commune?”

  “Yeh, I think so,” Hentze said. “According to the Norwegian report she wrote letters home to say she was at Múli, but we don’t have them so we don’t know why she was there or for how long. Of course, I could call Rasmus Matzen to ask him, but if you’re going to see him…”

  “I could ask face to face?”

  “It might be more… constructive. If you feel comfortable to do it.”

  “Sure, I’ll ask him,” I said. “I owe you that much for Christine Lynge. Hold on.”

  By now I’d emerged on to a wooden-floored mezzanine level with tall windows and benches. I took the nearest seat and fished in my bag for a notebook and pen. “Okay, tell me what you’ve got.”

  Hentze knew what I’d need and I wrote down the information he gave me without stopping him to ask questions. I filled a page with names, dates and what he wanted to know from Matzen. Some of it was questions I’d have asked anyway.

  “So are you thinking her daughter’s buried at Múli as well?” I asked when Hentze had finished.

  “It has to be a possibility, yeh,” he said flatly. “Sophie Krogh is looking for a second grave now.”

  I sensed that he wouldn’t be happy whatever the outcome, and I knew why. Finding something would be just as bad as finding nothing at all.

  Him and me both, then, although I didn’t say it.

  * * *

  At the east harbour in Tórshavn, Annika boarded the ferry to Nólsoy with a few minutes to spare. The regular car ferry was in dock for repairs, so its place had been taken by the Jósup, which only carried foot passengers but was faster once it had nosed out of the harbour and into the strait of Nólsoyarfjørður.

  The journey took just over ten minutes and it was choppy, the wind casting droplets of spray on the salted windows of the cabin where Annika sat and looked out. There was a freezer ship in the sound, its white hull stained by rust and showing no sign of life. Behind it, broken sunlight played across the hump of Eggjaklettur, rising to the south of the island’s only village. It was a good day to be out on the water.

  When the Jósup docked at the old quay Annika was the first to hop off, keen to do what she needed and not to miss the return sailing in an hour. A light rain blew in through the sunshine as she walked briskly around the harbour, then up the hill through the village, following the directions Gunnar Berthelsen’s wife had given her when she’d rung to make sure the ex-superintendent would be at home. Hildur Berthelsen had sounded like a good-natured, obliging woman, which seemed a little at odds with her husband’s reputation as an authoritarian. Although he’d retired well before Annika had joined the force, Gunnar Berthelsen was still quoted as a benchmark for any uncompromising attitude.

  On the crest of the road Annika found the yellow, foursquare house and her knock on the door was answered almost immediately by Hildur Berthelsen, as if she’d been waiting. She was a slight, withered woman with arthritic hands, and she greeted Annika warmly, inviting her in. The house smelled of dog and cigarette smoke.

  “I’ll tell Gunnar you’re here. Please, go through to the sitting room.”

  An old Labrador greeted Annika with a twitch of its eyebrow but didn’t rise from its bed beside the fireplace. The sitting room wasn’t large and it was made to feel smaller by the dozens of paintings on the walls. The largest of these hung over the fireplace and on first glance Annika thought that the picture had been in some sort of accident. Painted in bright oils, it showed a naïve-style view of a Faroese village encircling a harbour. It would have been pleasant enough, like many in the Tórshavn galleries, except that on top of this scene the picture was scarred by gouges in its surface, harsh strokes of paint, which looked as if they’d been applied with a stick. When Annika looked closer there was no doubt about it: the slashes and defacement were intentional and something about the violence of that made her vaguely uneasy.

  She was still looking at the painting when Hildur Berthelsen returned.

  “That’s Gunnar’s favourite,” she said, coming to stand beside Annika to appreciate the picture. “A collector in Los Angeles offered him half a million króna for it but he wouldn’t let it go.”

  “Really?” Annika said, glad her surprise wouldn’t necessarily be taken as disbelief that anyone would want to buy such a thing, let alone at that price.

  “Oh yes,” Hildur Berthelsen said proudly. “Gunnar has quite a following and he’s entirely self-taught.”

  “You mean your husband painted that?”

  “Yes, of course.” Hildur Berthelsen chuckled. “And the thing of it is that he’d never even
picked up a paintbrush until he retired from the police, and now it’s a second career. He works all the time. I say to him – only in joke – that if he’d got on to it sooner we could be living in Paris or New York now. Of course, he’d hate that. We both would.”

  She cast a last, admiring look at the picture, then gestured Annika towards the door. “You can go over to the studio now. He’s waiting for you.”

  Outside Annika followed a short path through untidy grass to a single-storey building – perhaps once a small cottage – of whitewashed stone under a red corrugated-iron roof. Beyond that there was a view over Nólsoy’s rooftops to the rocky shore and then the wide expanse of open sea to the east.

  She knocked on the worn wooden door of the studio and when she heard a voice from inside she worked the latch and went in. The place was a single, open room but cluttered by old tables strewn with tubes of paint, brushes, bottles, and the accoutrements of painting. The only clear area was one where a large canvas was supported by two easels side by side; an idealised picture of somewhere like Bøur or Gjógv, with grass-roofed houses and weatherboards rendered in yellows and blacks.

  “Come in. Close the door,” Gunnar Berthelsen said from in front of the picture. He must have been about eighty years old by Annika’s reckoning, but he gave little sign that his age was a limiting factor in anything he did. He was a heavy-set man of medium height who moved with determination rather than ease. His white hair was severely cut and he was dressed in green overalls which bore the marks of hand-wiping and accidental rubbing on wet paint.

  “Harra Berthelsen, I’m Annika Mortensen,” Annika said after closing the door. “Thank you for seeing me.”

  “I can’t give you long,” Berthelsen said. “I’ve work to do.”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll try to be as brief as I can, but I wanted to ask you about a missing persons enquiry from November 1974.”

  Berthelsen gave a dry laugh. “Are you joking?”

  “I know it’s a long time ago,” Annika acknowledged. “But a couple of things might make it stand out.”