by Chris Ould
“For the record?” he asked, not hiding his scorn. I was too blind to see. Then he looked again at his watch. “I don’t think we’ll wait any longer,” he said. “Just to be safe.”
He crossed to an aluminium flight case on the tiled floor, then squatted and put the pistol aside while he took out a new syringe and a small bottle of liquid from the foam padding.
“Oscar, listen,” I said, aware how false it sounded to use his first name. “I meant what I said before. You don’t have to take this any further, okay? If you’re going to leave, do it now. Leave her alone. I can’t stop you. Just go.”
He didn’t look away or bother to reply as he inserted the needle into the bottle and drew down the clear liquid. I was too stupid to bother with any more, and as he filled the syringe I made the only decision I could.
I pressed my hands down on the arms of the chair, then stood up carefully, balancing my weight on my good leg, trying to ignore the angry protest of the other as the bones shifted again. I was dizzy and my face felt waxen and clammy, but once I was upright I remained standing.
The movement had taken Juhl’s attention away from what he was doing. “Sit down,” he snapped.
“I won’t watch her die,” I told him, and before he could reply I forced myself to take a step towards the door. I felt bone grate against splintered bone and my head swam.
“Do you want to die also?” Juhl’s voice rose at being defied. He left the syringe and reached for the pistol instead as he straightened up. “If you force me to do it I will shoot you now.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and with all the determination I could muster I dragged my useless leg forward again, ready to take another step for the door.
My whole body was tensed for the shot, but it didn’t come. Instead I heard Juhl stride towards me and I knew then what he’d do. He didn’t want me dead – not yet anyway – but it would be easy to barge an off-balance man to the ground, so as he raised a hand to push me I shifted my weight and threw myself sideways and towards him in a desperate lunge.
It was the only move I could make and as we thudded together I grabbed for his arms, hoping to pin them and drag or wrestle him down. A split second later the pistol went off, deafening in the small, hard space; burning the side of my ribs. But with the shock of the noise I felt Juhl instinctively pull back and when I realised I had my good leg beneath me again I forced the advantage, punching his body and at the same time pushing against him as hard as I could.
He clawed at the back of my head, but I hit him again and was rewarded by the sensation of toppling as he lost his balance and was propelled backwards beneath me.
He broke my fall with a thud when he hit the floor. The gun clattered on the tiles and I heard the dull, expelled sound of air from his lungs. His struggling stopped and if he was winded or stunned I knew I had a momentary opening, so I pushed myself up to a half-kneeling position over his torso, ready to pin him down if I could.
There was no need, though, because there wouldn’t be any more fight. His head lolled to one side. He was either unconscious or dead and I didn’t care which. I just knelt there, heaving breath until I heard the heart monitor bleep and came to my senses. Tove.
I went backwards, crawling on all fours, and heaved Juhl’s dead weight roughly on to his side and then further, so he slumped on his face. When I did that he moaned and made a half-conscious movement, but I ignored it and pulled my phone from his back pocket. The screen was cracked from corner to corner but it still came to life and I swiped it quickly, seeking out Hentze’s number, then pressing it hard.
It only rang once and then his voice was urgent and troubled. “Jan, where are you? I had a call from—”
“I need an ambulance now,” I said, cutting him off. “I’m in Brodby…” I struggled to recall the address. “Strandvey, the last house.”
“Ja, I have the address. I’m coming there now. Are you hurt?”
“Yes, no, it’s not me. It’s Tove. Get an ambulance, Hjalti. I need—”
There was a split second between the sensation of impact, the blazing pain and the yell I couldn’t stop when Juhl’s foot raked down my broken leg. And then for several seconds I lost all sense of anything beyond the surge of blackness that washed up through my head in thick, Indian ink waves.
When they finally started to ebb I was still for a moment, then jolted back to alertness by a movement beside me. I pulled my head round and saw Juhl hunched over, struggling to stand. He swayed dizzily, but then he seemed to shake his head clear. I saw him cast round and when his eyes fixed on something just beyond my left shoulder I knew what he’d seen.
He took a staggering lurch forward, attempting to get past me and the most I could do was throw myself on to my side, scrabbling for and then grabbing the gun on the floor. I felt Juhl’s foot kick my thigh as I rolled onto my back. He was standing over me, stooped, and at that moment I fired the pistol, braced for its recoil, then fired again.
In the small space the noise was deafeningly, stunningly painful and both rounds struck his belly. He was so close I couldn’t have missed, and I saw his mouth and eyes gape at the impact and shock before his legs started to buckle and he crashed down to his knees.
And then he just knelt there, not looking at me. He’d clasped his hands to his belly, and that’s what he stared at for two or three seconds before light seemed to dawn.
“Hvad har du gjort?” he asked, looking up.
His expression seemed hurt, as if I’d broken some trust, and when I saw that I felt a water-cold upwelling of hatred and disgust rise in my chest. I shifted the aim of the pistol, but not very much, and then I fired again.
45
“JESUS CHRIST.”
Despite himself, Hentze was stopped short. He’d stepped around the body on the floor with hardly more than a look. The man was so obviously dead that he warranted no further attention, but what stopped Hentze now was the almost motionless tableau of Jan Reyná cradling the naked young woman in a spa pool of bloody water. Against the dirty red of the liquid her skin was a marbled, blued white, and Reyná himself looked almost as pale, almost as deathly.
“Get her out,” Reyná said, his voice defeated and hoarse, as if any hope had been drained out of him into the water and all that was left were the hollow reeds of the words.
“Ja, it’s okay. Hold on,” Hentze said, galvanised again.
He was still holding Annika’s pistol, he realised, and immediately put it away, turning to Boel and Ipsen, the two PBs from the airport security unit.
“Go and bring the paramedics in as soon as they arrive,” Hentze ordered as he quickly stripped off his coat, and to Boel: “Come on, man, help me.”
Stepping up to the poolside Hentze experienced a split second of unbidden, instinctive revulsion as he sat down and swung his legs into the opaque water, not knowing what was beneath. He allowed himself no hesitation, though, and he dropped down into the waist-deep water and waded two steps to where Jan Reyná was standing. The man still hadn’t moved and Hentze realised now that he was frozen in shock.
“Jan? Jan, it’s okay, I’ll take her,” he said.
Hentze put an arm under the girl’s shoulders. She weighed almost nothing and might even have floated unaided, Hentze thought, but even so Reyná still held tight to her wrist.
“Jan, you need to let go,” Hentze said, more forcefully now, putting a hand on to Reyná’s. “I have her.”
Dully, Reyná seemed to drag himself back to some slight awareness. “Yeah. Take her.” He loosened his grip on her arm, revealing a narrow plastic tube, which emerged from a surgically straight slit in her wrist. Now it was released from compression, Hentze saw a slow globule of blood squeeze its way out of the tube.
Quickly Hentze covered the tube with his own hand and reapplied pressure, then he glanced up to locate Boel on the poolside, wading forward and taking Tove with him to the edge.
“Take her under the shoulders and lift,” he instructed Boel. “I’ll raise h
er legs. Then as soon as she’s out we need—” He broke off as two paramedics arrived, each carrying medical packs. “Here,” he called urgently, seeing the first paramedic pause beside the body on the floor. “He’s dead. This is where we need help.”
It all went more quickly then. Between them Hentze, Boel and the paramedics raised Tove Hald easily out of the pool and on to the tiles at its edge. The paramedics immediately started a calm, rapid assessment and with his responsibility for the girl lifted, Hentze turned back to Jan Reyná, who still hadn’t moved, although his bleak gaze was directed towards the activity on the side of the pool around Tove.
Hentze waded back to him two cloying steps. “Jan? It’s okay, they’ve got her now. Are you hurt?”
After a second Reyná seemed to refocus and nodded. “My leg. It’s broken.”
“Okay, then,” Hentze said, adopting the calm, practical tone he used for victims. “Here, lean on me, yes?” He positioned himself alongside Reyná, putting a supporting arm round his back. “Come now. I think we both need to be out of this, eh?”
* * *
Christine Lynge arrived fifteen minutes after the second ambulance had left carrying Reyná. It was fully dark now and Hentze was sitting damply on the back seat of a patrol car, speaking to Annika on his phone, but when he saw Christine approach he ended the call and stood up to meet her.
“So you decided to stay here and ruin my Saturday night,” Christine said, but there was next to no humour in the remark.
“It wasn’t what I had planned,” Hentze said. “Do you want to look?” He gestured towards the house.
“How many people have been through?” Christine asked.
“Me, two politibetjente and two ambulance crews – one for the victim, one for Jan Reyná.”
“Bloody hell,” Christine said. “Well, we’re not going to do any more damage after that, I suppose. All the same…”
She handed Hentze a pair of plastic overshoes and they moved down the side of the house to the door, which was propped open. “Have you searched the rest of the place?” Christine asked as they pulled on the overshoes.
“Not myself, no.” Hentze gestured vaguely to his soaked lower half. “I thought it was better not to. One of the politibetjente took a look, though. He says it’s more or less empty; doesn’t look as if anyone was living here.”
“Okay, well, Technical can go over it properly later then.”
They entered the house and went along the short corridor to the spa room at the end. Lynge paused there for a moment then stepped inside, watching where she put her feet.
Oscar Juhl’s body hadn’t been moved. It lay on the tiled floor in an irregular, congealing puddle of blood. There were two gunshot wounds in his lower abdomen, but clearly it was the third which had killed him, the bullet entering his face just below his left eye.
Christine Lynge assessed all this for a moment, then glanced at Hentze. “Jan Reyná did this?”
Hentze nodded. “So he told me: in self-defence.”
Lynge gave the body one further glance, then looked away. “How badly was he injured himself?”
“A broken leg – a compound fracture – and a possible gunshot wound to his ribs, but it’s more of a graze. He’s also in shock.”
“And there was only one weapon?”
“Yeh, a Glock pistol. I photographed it where it was, then moved it for safety.”
Christine turned to look at the pool. The water was a shade of mud red now and the tiles round its edge were streaked and stained the same colour where the water had dried. “So what was the situation when you got here?” she asked.
“Jan Reyná was in the water with the young woman, Tove Hald,” Hentze said. “He was holding her up and keeping pressure on a wound in her arm. Oscar Juhl had put a tube into a vein in her arm so it allowed the blood to flow into the water. Her heart stopped just after we got her out of the water but the paramedics managed to revive her. Even so, she has critical blood loss, so…” He let the rest speak for itself.
Christine nodded. “Do we have any idea how long she was in there?”
“Not yet, no. I would say for some time, though.”
“Right.”
Christine was still assessing the untidy mess of clinical equipment, DIY materials and the medical packaging left by the paramedics, but then she seemed to have looked at it enough and turned away.
“So what else did Jan Reyná tell you?”
“Not very much. As far as I can tell he broke into the house because he thought Tove was in danger and when he came into this room Oscar Juhl attacked him and broke his leg. After that…” Hentze shrugged. “Obviously there was a fight – a struggle – and Juhl was shot.”
“Three times,” Lynge said flatly, and then her phone rang. She answered it, listened, then said, “Okay,” and rang off. “Technical are here,” she told Hentze and cast a final look round the room. “What a fucking mess.”
* * *
Hentze opened the cell door without knocking to signal his presence. Inside, two chairs had been brought in for Tausen and the lawyer, a smartly dressed man in his forties named Timmermann. There was no table so Timmermann was making notes on a legal pad, which he was resting on an attaché case across his knees.
“Excuse me, this is a private consultation,” Timmermann said. “Who are you, please?”
“Vicekriminalkommissær Hentze, Tórshavn CID,” Hentze said, momentarily searching for his warrant card before deciding the hell with it.
“Okay, well, we’re in the process of writing a statement so you’ll have to wait for a while,” Timmermann said. “We’ve barely got started.”
“Good,” Hentze said flatly. “In that case you won’t have to cross out so many things when you start again.”
“Again?” Timmermann frowned up at Hentze, then glanced to the open doorway as Annika arrived and stood on the threshold. “What do you mean?”
Hentze ignored the lawyer’s question and looked at Tausen instead. “You might want to know that Oscar Juhl has been found,” he told him. “Because of that development you’ll be kept here until the morning and then we’ll make a decision about whether we take you back to the Faroes or hold you in Denmark while we assess additional charges relating to Oscar Juhl’s crimes.”
“Additional charges? What do you mean?” Tausen said, looking shaken. “How can you think…? For God’s sake, I haven’t seen him since 1976, so whatever he’s done, it’s nothing to do with me, is it?”
From the doorway Annika could see Hentze stiffen, and when he spoke again his words were more tightly angry than she’d heard him utter before.
“Nothing to do with you? Is that what you said?” Hentze asked coldly. “Well, if that’s what you think perhaps you should know that before he was stopped, Oscar Juhl had drugged a young woman into unconsciousness, then he’d tied her to the railings of a spa pool and opened a vein in her arm so he could watch her bleed slowly to death.”
“Now wait just a moment,” Timmermann said, starting to rise. “This is—”
“Sit down and be quiet or I’ll have you removed,” Hentze snapped at him with barely a glance. He took a step closer to Tausen, and pulled up his sweater to reveal the stains on the white tee shirt beneath. “Can you see this?” he demanded. “This is that young woman’s blood. From me it will wash off, but not from you, I think.”
Tausen recoiled, open-mouthed, as if he was afraid that somehow Hentze might rip off the shirt and hurl it at him.
“I have to protest—” Timmermann started.
“Don’t bother,” Hentze said. He let his sweater fall damply back into place and turned to the lawyer. “I’m done here. In fact, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure I can stand to be in the same room as your client any longer, so I’ll leave you to continue your consultation. Maybe you’ll be able to come up with an explanation for why Herre Tausen chose to keep silent about a psychopath like Juhl for the last forty years. I hope you can, because very soon there will be a
lot of people asking the same question.”
He gave Tausen one final glance, then turned on his heel and stalked out of the cell as Annika stood quickly aside.
On the hard plastic chair Mikkjal Tausen looked ashen and his shoulders had slumped, but as Hentze disappeared something galvanised him again and he rose to his feet.
“It’s not true!” he called after Hentze. “I helped the girl! Thea. I saved her! Ask her. She’ll tell you!”
There was no response but after a moment the door at the end of the corridor closed with a soft thud.
In the silence Tausen looked from Annika to Timmermann and then back to Annika again. “It’s not true,” he repeated, but now it was a flat, lifeless statement with no expectation of being believed.
Annika turned to the lawyer. “Let us know when you’ve finished,” she said and stepped out of the cell.
In the small office she found Hentze removing clothes from his case on the table.
“Want a coffee?” she asked.
“What I want is a drink,” Hentze said tersely. He tugged a clean tee shirt from the case, then looked in Annika’s direction. “Sorry,” he said.
Annika waved it away.
“I shouldn’t have shouted at the lawyer, either,” Hentze said, dispiritedly. “That wasn’t professional.”
“Oh, I reckon he’ll live,” Annika said. She studied his face. “Was it… very bad?”
“Bad enough,” Hentze said. He took a moment to consider. “I think it was just the sheer deliberateness of it. You’d kill a ram or a ewe more… more humanely than that.”
“Will she live, do you think?”
Hentze shook his head. “I don’t know.” He closed the case and put it down on the floor. “Listen, call what’s-his-name – Hans Bering – upstairs. Get him to send someone down to give you a break while I find a shower and change. I need to get rid of the smell of that place. After that— Oh, I don’t know. We’ll sort it out later, okay?”