The Fire Pit

by Chris Ould

  Elna looked at her empty mug. “No, I don’t think so,” she said.

  It was the first time I’d sensed anything other than the straight truth so I said, “Are you sure? I’d like to know because I think she may have been suffering from bipolar disorder – manic depression? I’m trying to understand what led up to her killing herself.”

  The reference to suicide made Elna shift and she turned it into pouring more coffee from the pot. We were drinking it black. “It’s hard,” she said. “To think of her now. Even in a short time she was in Christiania we became very close. Lýdia was my true friend, but I think maybe it was the first time she can do what she wants to do, so she did everything at once: always going from one place to another to see people and do lots of things.”

  “It doesn’t sound like she had much time for childcare,” I said.

  “Nej, nej,” Elna said to negate the idea. “She was a good mother. Always. She loved you. I know that.”

  “But while she was working or off being busy, I was with you?” I asked. It wasn’t hard to guess.

  “Ja, nearly all of the time.”

  “And you didn’t mind?” I asked. I felt vaguely guilty that I couldn’t remember her from that age.

  She laughed, as if the idea was absurd. “No, of course not. It was what I liked the best. To go with you out to the river or in the trees, or to do cooking: all sorts of things. Like my own. And if I sat down for a moment to rest you would straight away run to find a book and then you would say, ‘Elna, Elna, read me a story in Denmark!’ That was always the way you would say it. That I loved.”

  She laughed again, until a more serious look crossed her face. “But sometimes I think I should have told Lýdia what she is missing, you know? Perhaps I should have said to her to slow down. Perhaps if I had…” She trailed off. “I feel wrong for that.” To punctuate the thought she reached for a tobacco tin on the oil cloth and sprang its lid.

  “If she was manic I don’t think it would have made any difference,” I told her. “But thank you.”

  She looked up. “For what?”

  “For being honest,” I said. And then, because it sounded too solemn to my ear, I added, “And also for reading me stories.”

  “You are very welcome,” she said with a faux-serious nod, then laughed and pulled a cigarette paper from its packet.

  “So how long did we stay with you in Christiania?” I asked.

  “A few months, maybe six. I thought you would stay for longer, but Lýdia had been told of a place in the country where there was a large house – a clinic of some sort – and a job for someone to clean and to cook. There were places to live for people who worked there, she said. And she didn’t like the city so much any more because there were drugs in the freetown, and some trouble, too. It wasn’t always so safe in those days, so she decided to go.”

  “Do you remember where this place was – the clinic?”

  She frowned. “No, I don’t remember the name,” she said. “But I may be able to find it. After you left we wrote letters to each other – Lýdia and me. I think I still have them somewhere. I can look.”

  “Tak, that would be great,” I said.

  “There aren’t so many,” Elna said, as if she didn’t want to get my hopes up. There was a distant, unhappy look in her eyes. “Afterwards it was a hard thing to hear what had happened. I wish I had known sooner where you were, who you were with. But it was not until a long time that I knew, and then it was too late. But I have thought often what happened to you. And if— If things could have been made different, I…”

  She shook her head and turned away. I realised that she was fighting off tears.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” I said, caught off guard.

  She raised a hand to her face so I wouldn’t see, but I thought I understood. There’s no way to know – either as a child or an adult – what emotional roots you plant just by sharing time with someone. But I realised now that my four-year-old self must have planted them deep in Elna Eskildsen while she looked after me in Lýdia’s absence. Like my own, she’d said. Not a figure of speech. I kept quiet for a while.

  Finally Elna won herself back, stiffening her shoulders. “When you left Christiania I cried for a week,” she said. “But you were Lýdia’s boy. I knew this. So.”

  Then we heard the sound of a car engine outside. “That will be Rasmus,” she said.

  12

  IT HAD ALWAYS SEEMED UNLIKELY TO HENTZE THAT BOAS Justesen’s funeral service would be a well-attended affair, and so it proved. Apart from the hearse and the funeral car there were just two other vehicles in the Fuglafjørður church car park. The coffin and mourners were already inside and Hentze entered the church just before the service started.

  The woman Hentze took to be Justesen’s great-niece, Selma Lützen, and her husband sat in the front row of pews. They were accompanied by a distinguished-looking man in a dark suit, and by a tall, elegant woman, her blond hair in a plait. Behind them were a handful of people, amongst them the young man Aron Hallur who rented the upper part of Justesen’s house, and the proprietor of Toki’s café bar, who might well have been mourning the loss of his best patron.

  Hentze himself sat to one side and several rows back and did no more than look solemn and thoughtful. He did not join in the prayers and, wisely, there were no hymns. In the high-vaulted modernist interior of the church any singing by the small group, however lusty, would have been lost.

  The sunshine falling on the light wood of the church’s interior did nothing to make the small turn-out a less depressing reflection of Boas Justesen’s passing and it was clearly a struggle for the pastor to find anything very uplifting about his life. She chose to focus on his early years working on the sea, and then on the courage with which he had faced illness and the challenges of his last months, naturally failing to mention that the main source of this courage had been found at the bottom of a bottle. No one seemed to mind that the service was short, and once it was concluded the undertakers returned to the coffin to carry it out. Hentze didn’t join the small party at the graveside, instead seeking out a grey-haired man from the small congregation who had stayed by the church for a smoke.

  “Did you know Boas well?” Hentze asked, declining the proffered pack of red Prince.

  “Since school,” the man said. “Tell the truth, I never liked him that much. You’re not supposed to say these things, I know, but he was an arsehole so I never had a lot to do with him if I could help it.”

  “So why come to his funeral?” Hentze asked, genuinely curious.

  The man shrugged. “Not sure, really. I’ve been to two others in the last year: both blokes I grew up with. Seems like we’re all suddenly dying off. And it’s not like we’re old – I mean, not old old – but all the same it makes you think. Maybe that’s why I came: to focus my mind on the fact I might be the next one. That’s something we should all think about, eh?”

  “I suppose so,” Hentze concurred.

  The man took a last drag on his cigarette and trod it out. “Well, have a good day,” he said, moving off.

  Hentze did not attempt to detain him with any more questions.

  * * *

  In the basement of the church a small meeting room was set out for a wake that was clearly over-catered. There were enough cakes and pastries for at least thirty people, and all of them had obviously been made by a baker rather than put together in somebody’s kitchen.

  Without the cover of numbers or the background noise of multiple conversations, Hentze knew it was unlikely that anyone would be particularly candid about the man they had just buried, so after paying his respects to Selma Lützen and her husband, he approached the prosperous-looking man who’d been with them during the service. This was Mikkjal Tausen. And he was in his early sixties, Hentze guessed, about the same age as Boas Justesen.

  They shook hands and Hentze noticed that although his Faroese was still fluent, Tausen’s accent and pronunciation occasionally showed signs that he
had spent a long time speaking American English.

  “This is Sigi – Sigrun Ludvig,” Tausen said, introducing the woman beside him. She was at least twenty years his junior; good-looking and wearing a black designer dress.

  The woman smiled easily at Hentze but then her gaze drifted past him, to the people hovering near the food.

  “We’re going to have nearly as many cakes as we started with,” she told Tausen with some concern. “I’ll try to get people to eat more.”

  “Okay, thanks, love,” Tausen said.

  “Your wife?” Hentze enquired lightly as Sigrun moved away.

  “No, at the moment we’re just dating,” Tausen said. “I’ve been married twice – both times in the US, both a mistake for one reason or another. So after the last time I thought that was it: no more romance. But I met Sigi the day I arrived here. She works for Müller’s, the letting agency, and when she showed me the house I’m renting in Rituvík we hit it off immediately. To tell you the truth, she’s the main reason I decided to stay for longer than I originally planned.”

  “I see,” Hentze said. “So you’re only on a visit?”

  “At the moment. But if things go well… You never know, do you?”

  “Do you mind if I ask what you do in America?”

  “I’m retired now – well, semi-retired. I trained as a chemist, but in the States I got into manufacturing polymers – plastics – and specialist mouldings. I’ve done well, I’ll make no bones about that, enough that I can step back a little and make the most of life. If I’d known Sigi was here I would’ve come back years ago.”

  He glanced appreciatively at Sigrun, then looked back at Hentze as if remembering his manners. “Listen, I should thank you for coming,” he said. “I appreciate it, especially as I gather that Boas didn’t always have the best of relationships with the police.”

  “No, well, that’s water under the bridge,” Hentze said. “And in the circumstances…”

  “Yeh, yeh, of course.”

  “And as well as paying the department’s respects, I was hoping to find out a little more about Boas,” Hentze said. “Although I realise this might not be the best time.”

  Tausen looked around the barely occupied room, as if it made his point for him. “Please, ask away,” he said. “I don’t know how much I can tell you, though. I hadn’t seen Boas for forty-odd years until just recently.”

  “You were cousins, is that right?”

  “Yeh, on my father’s side. But we weren’t close. I didn’t see much of him, even before I left for America.”

  “But you knew him in the 1970s?”

  “Yeh, I’d see him in Klaksvík on Saturday nights. He liked a drink even then.”

  Hentze nodded to acknowledge the fact that Boas Justesen had set his path early. “So would that have been around the same time that the Colony commune was renting his land out at Múli?” he asked.

  “Yeh, I suppose so,” Tausen said.

  “Do you know if he had much to do with the people there?”

  Tausen gave Hentze a slightly reappraising look. “Are you asking because of the grave they found there?”

  “Yes, in part,” Hentze admitted. “We still can’t be sure when the person was buried or how they died, but it seems possible that it might have been while the commune was there.”

  “And you think Boas might have been involved in some way?” Tausen sounded sceptical.

  “Well, it’s too early in the investigation to have any theories,” Hentze said. “We don’t have enough information, which is why I was asking about it.”

  “Well Boas did go there,” Tausen said. “In fact, I went with him once myself. I was on a visit home from Denmark and there was a party of some sort – a birthday, maybe. As I remember, Boas seemed to know the people pretty well. I think the – what would you call it? – the free spirit of the place appealed to him. It was certainly very different to the rest of the islands at the time.”

  “Oh, in what way?”

  Mikkjal Tausen hesitated for a second, as if debating the wisdom of being candid. “Well, everything was very relaxed there – laid back as the Americans would say. And I don’t suppose it hurts now to say there was some hash and home brew. So, with a few pretty foreign girls, too…”

  “Yeh, I see,” Hentze said. “So do you think Boas was a regular visitor to the commune?”

  “No, I don’t know,” Tausen said. “He certainly could have been – he was the landowner, after all – but he wasn’t the sort to be involved in someone’s death, I know that. Like I said, he was more interested in the free and easy lifestyle.”

  “I don’t suppose you remember the names of anyone who was living there, do you?”

  Tausen shook his head hopelessly. “No, not after this long. I think most of the people were Danish, maybe a few other nationalities, but I really can’t remember any more than that. Like I said, I was living in Denmark and then I went to the States. I didn’t see Boas again until a few weeks ago, when I came back. It was quite a shock.”

  “Oh? In what way?”

  “Well, just the state he was in, what with the drink and the cancer. To be honest, I felt sorry for him. He’d done nothing with his life, he had no one to care about him and he was obviously afraid of dying alone and in pain. I think that’s why he chose to kill himself when he did, rather than go on to the end.”

  “Did he ever say anything that struck you as odd? Anything about Múli or the commune?”

  “No, nothing like that. He just seemed depressed and very bitter about life.”

  They were interrupted by the owner of Tóki’s approaching to take his leave, and once that precedent had been set it didn’t take long for the few other people in the room to start doing the same thing: a welcome relief.

  Hentze left Mikkjal Tausen to his duty, but at the door Sigrun Ludvig intercepted him with a pair of cakes in confectioner’s boxes.

  “Please, take these back for your colleagues,” she said.

  “That’s kind of you, but…”

  “No, please. I insist. They shouldn’t go to waste.”

  “Okay, well, thanks. I’m sure they’ll be appreciated,” Hentze said.

  He accepted the boxes, but back at his car he found there was no way to secure them, so he placed them in the footwell hoping he wouldn’t have to make any emergency stops as he set off back to Tórshavn.

  Apart from the cakes it hadn’t been an entirely fruitless expedition. The confirmation that Boas Justesen had indeed spent time at the commune made the link between him and Astrid Dam stronger, but it wasn’t enough to show any connection to her death. For that, even as a hypothesis, he’d need to find someone who had lived at the commune and could give a first-hand account of Astrid Dam’s time there. It was asking a lot after all this time, but without it Hentze couldn’t see many other routes forward.

  13

  FOR SOME REASON RASMUS MATZEN PUT ME IN MIND OF A preacher: dark hair with wings of grey at the side; tall and rangy and with a slightly uncompromising bearing. Elna took me outside to make introductions as her husband unloaded trays of plants from the back of an old Citröen van and he broke off from the work to shake my hand. However, in contrast to the warmth of Elna’s recollections, Matzen was distinctly reserved when Elna prompted him to think back forty years. I got the impression that he was the sort of man who didn’t like things sprung on him out of the blue and preferred time to consider what he would say.

  “I need to take the rest of these things to the tunnels,” he said once Elna had paraphrased our own conversation. He turned to me. “You can come if you wish. We can talk at the same time.”

  His tone was still slightly reserved and I wasn’t sure how much he’d be able to add to what Elna had told me already, but I remembered Hentze’s request, so I accepted. I climbed into the van for the short drive down a rutted track away from the house. We passed several subdivided plots of land growing cabbage and pumpkins and I asked a couple of questions about the cr
ops, but neither one engaged Matzen beyond two or three words so I decided to let him make the running in his own time.

  At the end of the track, about two hundred yards from the house, there were two large polytunnels. He backed the van up to the entrance of the first one and we got out. I thought he might start unloading immediately once he’d opened the back doors of the van, but instead he put his foot up on the bumper and took out a tobacco tin to roll a cigarette.

  “So Elna has told you all about Christiania?” he asked, as if to establish the parameters of what he needed to say.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said. “But I’m interested in the Colony, too. Elna said she wasn’t there very long, so I wondered what you could tell me about it. Why was it that you chose to set up a commune in the Faroes in the first place?”

  He gave a dry laugh. “That was easy. It was Danish but a long way from Denmark: in the middle of nowhere. That was what we wanted. We were going to start a new way of life.” He lit his cigarette and now that he’d found a foothold on the past he appeared to relax a little. He rested against the back of the van and described how the group of idealistic young people had left Denmark and sought a fairer and simpler life on the Faroes; how the commune had operated; their attempts to grow crops and projects like building a greenhouse and keeping sheep and a cow.

  It was the good life, as he described it, and – if you believed him – the days had been idyllic. Twenty-odd people living together, sharing a dream; putting their backs into honest and simple labour without thought for the self, but only for the good of them all.

  But I’d been out to Múli when the sun wasn’t shining and my knowledge of the reality tempered the rosy-hued picture Rasmus Matzen was painting. And because of that a warning bell rang: the instinct for when the person in front of you thinks that the more they keep talking the more you’ll buy into their vision. It’s what they want.

  “So why did it fail?” I asked, not so much to puncture his balloon, but because I was interested to know.