by Chris Ould
“And – to be clear – we’re still talking about Oscar Juhl here?”
“Yes.”
Hentze nodded. “So what sort of evidence is it you think he could destroy or cover up?”
“His history,” Tausen said. “His— Whatever traces there are. After Vesborggård he was locked up – confined – by Ulrik, his father. Ulrik knew what Oscar was; he told me as much. He said Oscar would be – must be – locked up. He’d be treated, he said, to keep everyone safe.”
There was no doubting the passion behind Tausen’s words; it burned, Hentze thought, like a glimpse into hell. He let nothing show on his face, though. Instead, he took a sip of his coffee, then put the cup down with precision.
“What year was this, do you remember?” he asked.
“Of course. It was 1976.”
“And why didn’t you report these crimes at the time? If things were as you say why didn’t you tell the police?”
But even as he said it he could see the shift in Mikkjal Tausen. “No, I’m not saying any more without seeing a lawyer. I agreed to tell you who to look for, who to go to, and that’s what I’ve done. I want it on the record that I’ve told you what Oscar did, and that I’ll tell you as much as I know, but I won’t say any more now without a lawyer being here.”
Hentze gave it a moment, then nodded. “In that case, this interview is concluded,” he said. “The time is 16:19.”
He drew Annika’s phone towards him and stopped the recording.
“So what will you do now?” Tausen asked.
Hentze stood up. “Annika will take you back to the cell and I’ll make some calls,” he said, businesslike.
“To bring in a lawyer?”
“I’ll check what you’ve said,” Hentze said without committing himself. “Then I’ll let you know what’s decided.”
* * *
Hentze was still standing and obviously thinking when Annika came back to the office from Tausen’s cell.
“What do you think?” she asked. “You believe him?”
“All of that? No,” Hentze said. He dropped his empty cup into the bin. “I think he’s left out large bits of the truth, not least his own part in it all. There must have been more, but if he can distract us with a bigger, better story…”
He shook his head as if he was seeing the mess of Tausen’s assertions spilled on the floor at his feet. “How long till the plane?”
“Just under four hours.”
“All right,” Hentze said, deciding. “Let’s see if Hans Bering knows a lawyer who won’t take all day to get here.”
43
IN THE HOTEL I SHOWERED AND CHANGED OUT OF THE CLOTHES I’d worn for two days, then I stood by the window and watched the trains going in and out of the central station. Occasionally the pedestrians walking around the balustraded edge of the space caught my eye, but only briefly. The trains and the people had destinations; I didn’t. I was stopped; brought to a halt. I just stood there and looked until my phone rang.
“Hey,” Hentze said. “Can you talk?”
“Hey. Yeah. Did you find Mikkjal Tausen?”
“Ja, he’s arrested. We’re at Kastrup, for tonight’s flight.”
“Any trouble?” I asked.
“No, not so much.”
“Okay, well, I was going to call you when you got home,” I told him. “I thought you should know that I saw Thea Rask on my way back to Copenhagen. I showed her a photo of people at Vesborggård House in 1973 and she thought she recognised the man they called Mickey as a member of staff.”
“Was she sure it was him?”
“About fifty-fifty.”
“Okay, I see,” Hentze said, sounding pensive. “Did she recognise anyone else?”
“A few people, yeah: nurses and doctors.”
“What about someone named Oscar Juhl?” Hentze asked. “That was why I called you: to ask if Thea Rask had mentioned his name when you spoke before.”
“Do you mean Oscar Juhl of Juhl Pharmaceuticals?”
“Yes. You know about him?”
“I know his family owned or ran Vesborggård House,” I said. “And Thea recognised someone called Oscar who worked there. She didn’t know his last name, but I suppose it would be logical if he was Oscar Juhl. Why – what’s your interest in him?”
There was silence for a few seconds, then Hentze said, “Mikkjal Tausen has made a statement that Oscar Juhl was responsible for the rape of a girl at Vesborggård House in 1976. He also claims that Juhl was with Boas Justesen when Astrid and Else were killed at Múli.”
“You believe him?”
“No, not everything he’s said, but at the same time I don’t think he could have made up some of these things from nothing at all, so I think he may be telling some part of the truth.”
I thought that through for a few seconds. “Hjalti, listen,” I said. “It may have some bearing or not, but when Tove Hald wanted information from Juhl Pharmaceuticals, one of the people she met with was Oscar Juhl. At the time I thought he was in the meeting because there’d been a lawsuit over treatments at Vesborggård House, but if it wasn’t just that – if he was worried she might be looking for something else…”
“Ja. Yeh, I see.” Hentze sounded troubled. “Do you have any other information on Oscar Juhl: his background, anything else?”
“Not much myself, but Tove probably has reams of it, knowing her. Do you want me to find out?”
“Yes, please. How quickly can you do it?”
“Now if you want. I’ll call her and ask what she has. Let me put you on hold.”
“Okay.”
I did that, bringing up Tove’s number under missed calls. After five seconds it went to voicemail. I rang off and went back to Hentze.
“Hjalti?”
“Yeh, I’m here.”
“Tove’s not answering but I missed a call from her earlier today, so she may be busy.”
“Okay, in that case will you do me a favour and try her again later? Tausen says he will give more information about Oscar Juhl when he has a lawyer, but I need to decide whether what he says is credible enough to delay taking him back to the Faroes. There is only one flight tonight and by the morning my time to hold him will have run out. I don’t know for sure that I can get an extension.”
I could see the dilemma. “What’s Remi think?” I asked.
“He says we should get on the plane.”
“You didn’t want your promotion anyway, did you?”
He laughed drily. “No, but keeping my old job would also be good.”
“What time’s your flight?”
“Seven forty-five.”
I looked at my watch. “Okay, give me an hour. I’ll try to talk to Tove and see what she knows about Oscar Juhl. If it’s anything that could back up Tausen’s accusations I’ll let you know and you can decide how much you want to piss Remi off.” As I said it I picked up my jacket from the bed and went to the door.
“You’re sure that’s okay?” Hentze asked.
“I’m sure. I’ll call you back.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later I tried Tove’s number again as I climbed the stairs to her flat and got no response. I left a message this time then knocked on her door, half expecting she’d open it. Instead it was Kjeld in jeans and a tee shirt.
“Hi Kjeld,” I said. “Is Tove here?”
“Hi. Nej, she went out. She said you might come, though. Kom ind.”
He held the door wide and I went through to the living room. The TV was on, showing sports, muted, and there was a late-afternoon beer on the coffee table.
“Tove said you should call her if she wasn’t here,” Kjeld said following me in to the room.
“I’ve been trying,” I said. “It goes straight to voicemail so I think it’s switched off.”
Kjeld laughed and shook his head. “Tove’s phone? Nej, never, not even at night. She has spare power packs, too. Maybe it’s just a bad signal.”
He dropped down heavily
in an armchair and reached for his beer while I tried Tove again. The result was the same, though.
“What time did she go out, do you know?”
“Around midday, I guess. She said she was going to see a guy about something she’s researching for you. A drugs company, yeh?”
“Juhl Pharmaceuticals?”
“Yeh, I think so.”
His attention went back to the TV and I looked at my watch. Midday was nearly five hours ago. “Where were they meeting, did she say?” I asked Kjeld.
“A place called Café Ismael. It’s near the university.”
“And it was definitely a man she was meeting?”
“Yeh, she said he had information and wanted to talk off the record, you know? That’s what she said.”
That could be as straightforward as it sounded, I supposed: Tove could have set her phone to divert so they weren’t disturbed. But I also knew Tove well enough by now to know that if she’d left an instruction to call her that’s what she wanted me to do. There’d be that irritated frown if I failed to comply; which meant she should be answering her phone, and she wasn’t.
“Listen, could you do me a favour?” I asked, turning back to Kjeld. “Will you call the café and see if Tove’s still there? It’ll probably be easier if you do it rather than me.”
“Sure, okay,” he said, good-natured enough. “Let me find the number.”
I stared out of the window while Kjeld talked on the phone. There was some back and forth, an explanation and then another couple of questions before Kjeld said my name. I turned and he was still holding the phone.
“The guy at the café says Tove was there. I told him what she looks like and he remembers her because she was drunk: like, really drunk, yeh? Do you want to talk to him? His name’s Robert. He speaks English.”
“Yeh, thanks.” I took the phone. In the background I could hear café sounds: crockery and voices. “Hi, Robert? Listen, I’m sorry to take up your time but I’m a bit worried because my friend’s not answering her phone. Can you tell me when she left?”
“Maybe one o’clock or one thirty. We were busy so I’m not sure.”
“Do you remember who she was with?”
“Yeh, he was an older guy, maybe sixty years or a little more. He has to help her stand up and carries her bag.”
“Had she been drinking a lot?”
“Nej, I don’t know,” Robert said. “They weren’t in my section so I don’t know what they ordered.”
There didn’t seem to be any more I could get from this so I said, “Okay, thanks for your help. I appreciate it.”
“No problem. I hope you can find her.”
I rang off and handed the phone back to Kjeld who had obviously been following the conversation.
“You think Tove’s in trouble?” he asked. “You know she doesn’t drink, right? I’ve known her for three years and she’s never even had a piss beer.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So what do you think has happened?”
He was looking to me for some kind of insight or explanation. There could be several, but now that my concern had risen a notch, the one that loomed largest wouldn’t make him feel better. I was still resisting it, too, so instead of a direct answer I moved to Tove’s MacBook, which was charging on the table in front of the window. When I opened it the screen came to life.
“Do you know if Tove has any location apps set up on her phone – anything to find it if it’s lost?” I asked Kjeld.
“Yeh, maybe,” he said. “She has hundreds of apps, but…” He paused for a second, then made up his mind. “If you think she’s in trouble we should call the police.”
“Yeh, maybe,” I said. “Just give me a minute.”
I pulled out a chair and sat down at the MacBook. There was no log-in password and because I knew my way around my own Mac it wasn’t hard to locate Tove’s internet browser and then her iCloud homepage. That did want a password but it had been saved as an anonymised string and when I tapped that I was in.
I chose not to dwell on what that might say about Tove’s general safety awareness but instead clicked through various options in the Find My iPhone page, then waited as the software did its thing. It brought up a map screen which quickly narrowed itself down to Copenhagen, showing more detail until the grey dot on the screen was focused on the corner of Klosterstraede. Beside it there was the word “offline” and the time it had last been online, 13:37.
Behind me Kjeld came closer to look at the screen. I didn’t bother to tell him what he could see for himself, but after a second I went back to the list of devices at the top of the page and chose “all”.
Almost immediately the screen map pulled out to show a broader view of the city and I got two more dots on the screen, both green this time. One was named as “Toves iPad” and it only took me a moment to realise that it must be here in the flat, but the second was located about ten kilometres south, marked simply as “2nd iPod”. The last updated time was a couple of minutes ago.
I zoomed in on the second location and changed the view to a hybrid of satellite and map. “Do you know where this is?” I asked Kjeld. The view now showed the red-tiled roof of a building, which stood out against the grey ones nearby. It was the last building on a short road at the edge of a neatly gridded enclave that ran up close to the shore of the sea.
“No, I don’t know it,” Kjeld said. “It’s past the airport. I’ve never been there.”
There was probably some clever way to transfer the map to my phone but I didn’t know it and rather than waste time I took a photo of the screen instead. I zoomed in again on the name of the road – Strandvey – and took another, then I stood up.
“You’re going there?” Kjeld said.
“Yeah, to make sure she’s all right.”
He drew himself up. “I think we should call the police now.”
“Yeah, do that,” I said. “Call them and tell them you’re worried and explain why, but it could take some time so I’m still going to go.” I found a pen and wrote quickly on a stray piece of paper. “This is my number and this one is for a police officer called Hentze. If you don’t get anywhere with the Copenhagen police call him instead, okay?”
He frowned at the paper, then at me, caught by indecision. “Maybe I should come with you,” he said.
For a second I was tempted to agree because he was a decent-sized guy, and because it might have been useful to have someone who spoke Danish. But if my worst fears weren’t baseless, I wanted to cover my back.
“It’d be more use if you stayed here, talked to the police and kept an eye on that,” I said, gesturing to the MacBook. “If the location changes call me.”
And with that I started for the door.
44
FROM THE FLAT IT WASN’T A DIFFICULT ROUTE: ONE STRAIGHT road due south – Englandsvej – but until it broke free of the urban streets, car lots and industrial units alongside it I upset the well-mannered Danes by running several lights on amber and overtaking on cross-hatches and turn lanes. I was being pushed by my instinct, by the ideas I was putting together, and by an almost certain sense that too much time had already gone by; certainly too much to waste any more making phone calls.
Hentze would get it as soon as I told him, I didn’t doubt that, but this wasn’t his patch and even for him I knew it would take time to convince anyone else to take notice. A young woman goes out for a drink, has a good time and goes home with a man she’s only just met. Has anyone said that something looked wrong? Was there coercion? No, not at all. So she’d switched off her phone; there was no law against that: she was over eighteen and entitled to do what she liked.
That was what I hoped I would find. I’d live with the embarrassment if that was the case, but what I didn’t want to live with was the alternative version: that Mikkjal Tausen was telling at least some of the truth from his cell; that Thomas Friis had been right when he saw a link between Vesborggård House and his hibernating killer; and that Tove h
ad unwittingly disturbed the one person who could satisfy her desire to know what had been done; because he’d been there; because he’d had full run of a place for vulnerable people and access to drugs to make them even more so. Then and now, with periods of inactivity between, Oscar Juhl was the one common thread. Oscar Juhl was the one man who knew enough to draw Tove in.
When the road broadened into a dual carriageway I sped up even more. There was farmland beside me and the traffic ran faster, thinning out once I’d passed the E20 and gone through the tunnel under the airport. Half a mile beyond that I braked hard for the turn on to a side road signed to Søvang. Although it was a narrower road it was dead straight and fast for two or three minutes until I braked again, entering a residential plot where the houses were yellow and white and bounded by neatly kept hedges.
I was looking for a turn, alongside but not part of the neatly gridded streets up ahead, and I almost missed it, set back as it was and screened by the house on the corner. There was a sign, though – Strandvej – and once I’d hauled the car round I was on a single-track lane with an open field on one side and a few high-angled houses widely spaced on the other.
I kept my speed down now, peering forward. It wasn’t dark yet, but the half-light was greyed out by a soft drizzle which foreshortened how far I could see. Then, thirty yards short of the lane’s end, I came to a field gateway and pulled in on the small margin of grass there. I switched off the engine and picked up my phone to look at the photo I’d taken of Tove’s laptop screen. It wasn’t great quality, but I knew where I was now and I matched it up to what I could see. A house just behind me and off to the right was the last one directly fronting the lane; the one before me – red roofed – was down a short private drive beyond the point where the lane’s tarmac ran out.
I got out of the car and started towards the house, but then changed my mind after a couple of steps and went back to the car. Opening the boot I lifted the carpet over the spare wheel and searched for a moment until I found the tyre lever: a foot long with a socket head at one end and a flattened point at the other. I pulled it free of its clip; it was reassuringly solid in my jacket pocket as I set off briskly towards the house once again.