The Killing Bay

by Chris Ould

  What had happened after that was known, of course: I’d been taken in by Lýdia’s sister and raised in the UK; that was all part of who and how I was now. And maybe that should have been enough. It had been until I’d come back, so why didn’t I just leave it: go back to the way things had been? It was a good question, and yet another I couldn’t answer. I just hadn’t.

  Hentze was looking at me speculatively, and I thought I sensed misgiving.

  “You think I’m on a hiding to nothing?” I asked. “You think I should leave it alone?”

  He shook his head, but only to negate the premise of the question. “No, I think you should look. There may be nothing to find now, but if you don’t try to find out, how will you know?”

  That was one of the reasons I liked Hentze: if he thought something was simple he saw no reason to embellish it further, just for something to say.

  We reached the cars, but as Hentze dug out his keys his phone rang. He looked at the screen and I saw a shift on his face as he answered. Before he rang off I already knew it was a work call.

  6

  AFTER CHURCH – WHICH HAD NOT BEEN WELL ENOUGH attended, she thought – Maria Hammer went home to collect the dogs as she usually did. She left Erik to make his own way when he stopped to gossip with the other men on the road.

  Still spritely at seventy, Maria covered the distance to her red-roofed house above Húsavík in five minutes and let herself in through the back door. Unlocked, of course.

  There was a pleasant smell from the oven, and after checking the casserole Maria changed her coat for a work-a-day waterproof, and her good shoes for a pair of short wellingtons. Then she clipped the Labradors to their leads, their claws impatiently scratching on the wooden floor, and headed out again, taking the footpath along the slope of the hillside towards the beach.

  Of course it was no great surprise that church attendance was not as great as it had been, Maria recognised that. These days people had other distractions, other concerns. These days people didn’t feel the need for God’s care as much as they used to. It was different when people’s lives were governed by the land and the sea – either of which could take a life without warning – and when God’s grace, or the lack of it, could be the difference between enough and too little. These days people had comfort and warmth and more than enough food. It was taken for granted, as if God had no part. “These days” was a phrase more often than not at the forefront of Maria’s thoughts.

  Beyond the last house Maria checked she had her whistle before letting the dogs off their leads, glad to be free of their tugging. They sprinted away across the hillside, intent on the scent of hares, real or imagined, and Maria surveyed the landscape. There was a wispy-edged veil of mist hanging halfway down the slopes of Heiðafjall, and when she looked inland the shallow V of the valley was foreshortened by the cloud.

  Walking down towards the beach, Maria located the white church but couldn’t see the road. There was no way to tell whether Erik had started for home yet. Quite possibly not. He was a gregarious man and people liked his company. Strange then, that when he stood behind the lectern in church as the reader, people visibly sagged. It wasn’t that he lacked belief in the words or didn’t choose his texts well, but that he wasn’t inspired. He had a dull reading voice, which became a monotonous drone no matter how hard you tried to concentrate on the words. Perhaps now that he was approaching his seventy-first year, Maria might be able to persuade him to stand down. Let someone else take up the reins, she could say; encourage someone younger to become more involved.

  At the narrow gap in the dry stone wall Maria looked back for the dogs and gave two short toots on her whistle, calling them closer. The dogs were well enough trained that they responded almost immediately, running to catch up and then pushing through the space to race out on the other side towards the beach.

  Maria followed on to the open ground where the rough grass levelled out near the foreshore. She walked at her own pace, knowing from experience how far to go before heading back in time to turn off the oven and to put the potatoes on to boil.

  Where the grass gave way to rocks above the beach Maria stopped. On the horizon she saw the distant white shape of the ferry, Smyril, heading south for Suðuroy. She watched it for a while, then turned back and started inland. Time to head home.

  It was the light blue of the bundle that caught her eye, standing out against the natural colours of stone and grass. It was on the ground, so it seemed – perhaps wrapped around something – in a small alcove formed by the stone walls of the three old storage huts. These days people would leave their rubbish anywhere, Maria thought with instinctive disapproval: they’d let someone else pick it up.

  Maria changed direction and made towards the huts. Their walls were irregular stone, put together without mortar, and on their low roofs there was uneven grass turf. No one used them these days, but they were maintained because they were old: maybe hundreds of years. Which was why, when she saw them, the words someone had scrawled on a wooden beam shocked Maria. Not just because of the words themselves, but because of the vandalism. Written in English, the words said “Fuck the Whales”.

  Was nothing safe these days?

  Maria lowered her eyes from the graffiti and looked further in to the alcove, gaze drawn to the light blue of the rubbish she had been seeking. Only now she saw that it wasn’t a discarded plastic bag or bundle of litter, but a sweatshirt on the body of a woman.

  The woman’s face was partly obscured by dark hair and a clump of weeds growing in the corner of the walls. What Maria Hammer did see, though – what drew her unwilling eyes – were the woman’s bare thighs, almost impossibly pale. Bare because her jeans and red lace panties had been pulled down to just above the knees, leaving her private parts exposed. Even more exposed because the woman had almost no hair there.

  “Oh, Lord,” Maria said, beseechingly, when she finally realised what she was looking at. “Oh, dear Lord.”

  And then the dogs came bounding in. They rushed up to the body, tails waving, sniffing interestedly at the exposed flesh.

  “Oh no, come away!” Maria shouted. “Come away!”

  Forced into movement, she took a couple of steps forward and grabbed first one dog and then the other by the collar, dragging them back several metres until she could fasten their leads again and get them under control.

  Only then did Maria cast another look at the place where the body lay. She had an urge to go closer again, to take off her coat so she could cover the poor woman’s legs and make her decent, rather than exposed like that to the world. But there was nowhere to secure the dogs, so she just held them, panting and tugging at their leads.

  And then, for no reason she could later satisfactorily explain to anyone, including herself, Maria blew her whistle. She blew it again, then again, in short, regular blasts. She just kept on blowing – peep – peep – peep – until, at last, somebody came to investigate.

  * * *

  There was no patrol car on Sandoy when the call had come in to say a body had been found. Fortunately Rosa Olsen on the control desk had had the sense to ring Martin Hjelm on his mobile. Martin lived in Sandur, where his wife ran a small hardware and general goods store, and although he was off duty he left immediately to drive the eight kilometres to Húsavík as fast as he could. He hadn’t bothered to change into uniform; everyone knew he was a police officer. For the next hour and a half he would be the only one at the scene.

  Hentze spoke to Martin Hjelm from the car, en route back to Tórshavn from the sheep pens. Martin had the area around the body secured, he assured Hentze, and yes he had made sure that life was extinct. It was pretty obvious. Okay, then; no rush. Hentze would be there in an hour or so, depending on the ferry.

  “There’s one other thing,” Martin said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I think she could be one of the Alliance people. She’s wearing a blue sweatshirt that looks like one of theirs – I mean, it’s the right colour –
but I didn’t want to disturb anything by trying to look for their logo on the back to be sure.”

  “No, you did the right thing,” Hentze assured him. “But do me a favour and keep that idea to yourself, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Hentze rang off. It would set the cat amongst the pigeons if she was one of the Alliance, he thought unhappily.

  He considered for a moment, but already knew that as inspector, Ári Niclasen would expect to be informed, so he put in the call.

  Ári answered on the sixth ring. He was up north on Kalsoy for a family gathering, he told Hentze – his wife’s family, he added quickly, as if he didn’t want Hentze to get the idea that his own family would live somewhere like Mikladalur.

  “Do we have an identity for the body?” Ári asked.

  “Not at the moment.”

  “All right, well you’d better go ahead and see what it looks like,” Ári told him, and Hentze heard a trace of annoyance in his voice: he wouldn’t like missing out. “Once you’ve assessed it we can go from there. I’ll start back as soon as I can, but it’s bound to take a while.”

  “Okay, no problem,” Hentze said, momentarily grateful that Ári had married a woman from the north.

  Hentze called in briefly at his home in Hvítanes to tell his wife, Sóleyg, what was happening and to quickly change clothes. It was a matter of professionalism and also respect not to turn up to a dead body in sheep-herding jeans.

  By the time Hentze got to the station in Tórshavn, Dánjal Michelsen was already there. Dánjal had worked in CID long enough to know what they’d need and he was already getting forensic cases out of storage. Then it was just a matter of organising half a dozen uniform officers to go with them and driving in convoy to Gamlarætt to wait for the ferry, ten minutes away.

  Someone had suggested using the Search and Rescue boat to get to Sandoy, and if Ári Niclasen had been there Hentze knew that was probably what they’d have done. But it seemed unnecessarily flamboyant to Hentze, and probably no faster once you took into account that they’d arrive without transport at the other end. No, some things dictated their own pace and couldn’t be hurried. The dead woman wasn’t going anywhere.

  * * *

  An hour and a half after he’d first got the call, Hentze was on the road beside Húsavík’s newly re-clad community hall, in a breeze spitting rain. Someone had had the foresight to open the hall, which was both good and bad. Good in the sense that it kept the concerned and curious villagers in one place and away from the scene; bad because it meant they had shelter and somewhere to sit and so were not inclined to go home.

  Hentze had stationed three uniformed officers at the access points to the flat promontory of grass beyond the football pitch just in case more sightseers turned up, then he’d gone over the basic facts again with Martin Hjelm. A woman called Maria Hammer had found the body and she had been taken home by her husband, suffering from shock. Martin was unsure precisely how many people had been to look at the body before he’d arrived, but he was pretty sure that no one had interfered with it. One man had used experience gleaned from TV cop shows and kept people away – once he’d looked for himself, of course.

  With that sorted out, Hentze sent an officer to Maria Hammer’s house to take a statement and then decided he might as well take advantage of the fact that a good number of villagers were gathered in the hall.

  “Let’s find out if anyone saw anything odd or suspicious around here in the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours,” Hentze told Dánjal. “Especially vehicles coming or going.” He fastened up his forensic oversuit and leaned on the car while he placed plastic overshoes on his boots.

  “Shall I send them away when we’ve done that?” Dánjal asked. With his short-cropped hair and tough-guy looks he was someone who could get rid of even the most determined busybody.

  “Ask them to go home, yeh,” Hentze said. “We’ll be here for a while so we’ll use the hall as a base. It will be good to have a place for breaks, especially if it starts to rain harder.”

  “Okay. I’ll see if there’s any tea or coffee in the kitchen.” Dánjal turned to go inside.

  “Dánjal?”

  “Yeh?” Dánjal looked back.

  “Find out if anyone took pictures on their phones. If they did, confiscate them as evidence.”

  “Evidence?”

  “We don’t need anyone putting photos up on the internet.”

  Especially if she was one of the Alliance people, Hentze thought.

  With a camera round his neck and a forensic case in his hand, Hentze set off towards the stone huts near the foreshore, deliberately taking the longest and least direct path. Two hundred metres, he estimated, if you took the shortest route, which you would if you were going there for any other purpose than his own. He assessed the ground as he walked. The rough grass was unlikely to hold any tracks but dogs might be useful. Later.

  He walked without hurry, scanning the ground. Saw nothing, but stuck to the mantra he’d had dinned into him in training: there is nothing to be gained from speed and many things that can be lost. Stop often, look all ways. What you see won’t harm the case, but what you miss will. Put everything else aside and just look.

  He paused to orientate himself again; changed direction slightly to go around the huts from the far side, still seeing nothing that didn’t belong there. The sea was to his left now and he could see the place as it had been described, where three stone huts formed an alcove.

  Just look.

  From this angle, this distance, he couldn’t see very much. A shape: a bundle of clothes perhaps. He took a photograph, looked again to be sure he’d missed nothing, then he went closer.

  He stopped again, three metres distant, looking at the ground around him first.

  There?

  A cigarette butt, fairly fresh. It was too soon to start picking up every scrap he came across until he had a better idea of the whole. Instead he opened the case, took out a marker flag and planted it in the ground near the butt.

  When he straightened up he let himself look ahead.

  Now, because he knew it was a body, that was what he saw. He couldn’t help that. But if you didn’t know – if you came across this scene when a body was the last thing you’d expect – well then, you still might not recognise it. Clothes, weeds, grass. He took another photograph and moved forward, watching where he stepped.

  Finally he was at the entrance to the square niche formed by the stone walls. Facing him, at head height on the wooden beam were the words “Fuck the Whales”. He put down the forensic case and photographed the graffiti first, although it was impossible to know whether it was relevant or not. Then he shot a dozen photographs of the body: a couple wide-angled to establish the scene, then close-ups, to make up a mosaic, capturing the situation exactly as he found it.

  When he’d done that he lowered the camera, took a couple of steps forward and simply looked. He noticed how the weeds were flattened near her feet, which were clad in leather boots: urban wear, not for hiking. Jeans, crumpled up where the waistband had been dragged down to her knees along with her panties. Lace, not utilitarian cotton.

  Her exposed skin showed no obvious signs of bruising or scratches and he noted that her blue sweatshirt was zipped up at the bottom, just a few centimetres, then open to show a black tee shirt beneath. There was a short tear in the black cotton and a dark stain around it about the size of a five kroner coin – blood almost certainly. Hentze assessed that for a few seconds, then examined her neck – what he could see of it above the rumpled hood of the sweatshirt. There were no marks there, just part of a gold chain visible against the skin.

  Her head was tilted to one side with long black hair across her face, some of it tangled in the weeds, probably by the wind. Hentze reached down and moved the hair back from her face, teasing it gently away from the plants. Her eyes were closed – defined by a little make-up, not much – and her skin had the waxy semi-translucence of death. Still no sign of injury.
She was in her early thirties, Hentze guessed.

  After a moment he raised the camera again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s my job.”

  7

  AFTER FIVE MINUTES WITH THE BODY HENTZE STEPPED OUT OF the stone alcove and called Remi Syderbø on his mobile.

  “Have you spoken to Ári?” Hentze asked.

  “About the body? Yes, of course. Are you there now?”

  “Yes, I’m with her.”

  A pause and then a measured, “How does it look?”

  “To be blunt, not good. That’s why I’m calling. I’m not sure when Ári will be here, but I thought you should know. There’s a stab wound in her chest and there are indications of possible sexual assault.”

  At the other end he heard an intake of breath.

  “Jesus,” Remi said.

  “That isn’t all,” Hentze said. “She’s wearing an AWCA sweatshirt and someone has written ‘Fuck the Whales’ on the beam near her body.”

  “What? Are you kidding?”

  “No.”

  “Jesus.” A moment’s thought. “Is there any ID?”

  “No. I’ve been through her pockets and they’re all empty. Not even a tissue. The thing is, several people from the village have already seen the body and presumably the sweatshirt. The logo is on the back, so it can’t be seen, but it’s a distinctive colour so it might not take long for someone to put two and two together and make a connection to the Alliance. And in light of everything else…”

  “Yeh, yeh, I understand,” Remi said. “We need to identify her as soon as possible then.”

  “I’ve taken a photo on my phone – just head and shoulders. I’ll email it across.”

  “Yes, do that.” In the background Hentze heard Remi moving. “I’ll put a team together here and go to the Alliance headquarters to see if anyone knows her. What are you doing now?”