by Sara Blaedel
“Just like an ordinary chat,” said Jonas, then sank back into the cushions when he realized his seventy-five-year-old friend had no idea how that worked, either.
“In reality, it’s just a long cordless telephone connection,” Louise said.
She shushed Flemming and Jonas, who practically talked over each other to explain how easy-peasy it all was.
“Don’t even explain it,” she said. “Just make sure you install Skype and that there’s a camera on Melvin’s computer.”
He had one of those. She’d seen it in his living room, and Jonas had told her that he used Google and sent e-mails.
“And then you two can get it up and running, and find out if Jette even has a Skype address.”
Suddenly it was long past Jonas’s bedtime, and Melvin made his way back, too, after having received instructions to set up Skype the next day.
“He’s one hell of a find,” exclaimed Flemming as Louise came in with two cups of freshly brewed coffee.
She nodded and handed him a cup.
“Melvin’s been living down there the whole time. I just didn’t realize he was him. If you know what I mean.”
Out in the kitchen, Louise’s cell phone started to ring. She glanced at her watch. It was almost twelve thirty, and she had to ask Suhr to speak louder when she realized it was him.
“Fire,” said the lieutenant, “and I’d like you to come down here immediately. It’s Fasting-Thomsen’s boathouse and warehouse out on South Pier, and after they put out the fire they discovered the bodies of two people burned to death.”
“Who burned to death?” Louise asked holding her cell phone to her ear and putting on her coat.
Flemming had picked up the chocolate wrappers and coffee cups in the living room and had come out to the entryway, where his jacket hung on a peg.
“We don’t know. It’s only been an hour since they got the fire under control enough that they could go in. The boathouse was completely consumed with flames, every surface burned, so the firefighters didn’t get in on their first attempt. They had to go back to the hoses before they could manage it. Now they’ve been inside, and in a little room in the very back of the boathouse they found two partly charred corpses.”
“I didn’t think anyone was allowed in there,” said Louise. “Ulrik didn’t want them down there and had gotten the attendant to toss them out. How far along are you?”
“I’ve just been called. It was only after they discovered the victims that Bellahøj decided to hand the case over to our fire department. But you’re familiar with the boathouse, and you know who was staying down there, so I want to have you along.”
She walked over to the door into Jonas’s room and looked in. He lay asleep, so she wrote him a note and laid it on the floor beside his bed. They’d made that arrangement when he moved in, but this was the first in all the time he’d lived with her that she’d been called out at night. Louise hoped she’d make it home again before he got up for school.
“Would you like to ride together, or do you need to use your own car?” asked Flemming.
He’d also been called out for the on-site inspection, which would happen as soon as the head of emergency operations and the crime technicians were ready to let others go inside the burned-out buildings.
“I’d better take the Saab,” she said and stuck the car keys in her pocket.
* * *
There were hardly any cars on the road. Louise turned down past The Lakes and drove across Little Triangle and farther on toward Kalkbrænderihavnsgade. As she passed Nordhavn Station, she was hit with the smell of burning, sharp and penetrating.
The smoke appeared like clouds against the night sky. She saw the fire trucks from a distance and parked a good stretch off, so she wouldn’t be in the way.
The whole great big warehouse reeked of dense soot, and Louise walked hesitantly past the firefighting vehicles that were parked in a long column. An emergency worker conducted her around them, after she’d shown her police badge, then with both his hands up gestured to a cab to get the driver to pull up a little.
There were shouts through the darkness. Louise had difficulty seeing where she walked, and groped along behind the fire trucks.
The fire-damping operations continued in full swing, and between two vehicles she saw several firefighters coming out a side door of the burned warehouse. They walked back to the emergency department’s active fire trucks, which still pumped water. The fire hoses droned on, but it seemed like they’d gotten the fire under control. There weren’t any more flames.
Everything was heavy and wet. Soot particles struck Louise in the face and stuck there. She’d gathered her hair in a bun and hidden it under a plastic cap. Boots, overalls, and extra jerseys she always had lying in the back of her car.
Louise hadn’t been on South Pier before, but from what she could tell through the dark it was a mixture of new and old buildings. In along the quay there were two new properties built of glass and steel. The renovation of the entire waterfront was also beginning to make its way out to the northernmost parts of Copenhagen Harbor.
As she came around the warehouse and walked over to the back end, where the explosive fire had nearly turned the little boathouse into splinters, she greeted Frandsen, chief of the Center for Forensic Services. She let him lead the way through the cordoned-off areas, where his people were at work securing foot and tire prints around the burned-up wooden building.
Here the devastation was clearly much more serious than it was at the warehouse section, where the building didn’t look to have taken so much damage before the fire was put out.
“Is Suhr here?” she asked.
“I haven’t seen him yet.”
The whole area was lit up by the technicians’ floodlights. The scene lay in an unreal and deeply contrasting light, where what was dark was coal black, and what was lit up was dazzlingly white. The mist from damping down the last remains of the fire clung to the night air and settled on her skin.
Frandsen put his hand on Louise’s elbow and led her forward, steering her around the technician’s chalk marks on the asphalt so they wouldn’t ruin anything.
“We can’t really get started on the technical investigation until tomorrow, when there’s decent light,” said the chief, who had an unlit pipe in the corner of his mouth and spoke through clenched teeth. “But I’m very eager to secure the outside clues tonight, so we don’t risk having everything vanish if it decides to rain tonight.”
Louise stepped carefully amid the glass shards, pieces of wood, lathing, and sheets of roofing that were spread around the asphalt quay as if an explosion had blown it all into the air. The smell attacked her nose. She greeted Åse. The lab technician was already at it with her camera, and her overalls were black and sooty.
Again, she had to take out her police badge and show it to two regular officers to be allowed through the last cordon all the way up to the house, even though Frandsen already held the strip of plastic up for her.
She tried to avoid the pools of water the fire hoses had left behind, and felt broken glass crunch under the soles of her feet.
The lieutenant was nowhere to be seen, but she spotted Flemming, who stood ready in overalls with his bag in his hand.
“I’m going in now,” the medical examiner said when Louise reached him.
Just then, Suhr came walking around the corner of the boathouse. He had his hands in the pockets of his thick jacket and greeted a couple of his colleagues before joining Louise and the others.
“Do we know what caused the explosion?” she asked.
Suhr shook his head and drew his shoulders up, so the thick collar of his coat surrounded his ears. It was cold and a little breezy; the wind came in from the sea and had free rein.
“Anything’s possible. They’re wooden buildings and old as shit. If there was a gas cylinder lying around or fuel cans for the boats, it wouldn’t take much. Once it was lit, it’d go quick,” he said, gesturing with his hands to
the charred boards spread about them. “But we’ll see if we can find out who the victims were. It’s an odd place to be on such a raw night.”
Louise nodded and thought about the boys who’d hung out in the boathouse. Since Homicide hadn’t been involved in the case surrounding Signe’s party, she didn’t assume Suhr knew that their colleagues from Bellahøj had already been in contact with the boys.
Louise told them what had happened two weeks earlier.
“They at least have the names and numbers of the party crashers,” she said.
“Then it’s not far-fetched to think it may be a couple of them lying in there,” Suhr said.
He waved her with him over to the vice commissioner, who led the initial investigation.
Louise greeted him and handed him the business card that the young officer from Bellahøj had stuck in her hand that Saturday when they’d parted ways at the hospital. She’d had it in her pocket ever since.
“He’s at least been in touch with several of them,” she said, stepping aside for a technician who wanted to take another floodlight into the boathouse. “They’ve been in for questioning, and there are photos of them.”
A gust blew in from the water and the vice commissioner had to yell.
“I’ll send duty officers out to the station to get the names right away.”
He turned and disappeared behind the building, where it was sheltered and calmer.
“Lucky for us,” said Suhr and pulled his collar up. “So at least we have something to go on.”
Louise nodded. Fire victims could be nearly impossible to identify unless you had at least a suspicion of who they were.
She followed Suhr back to the boathouse.
26
The walls and ceiling had been wood constructions. The extreme heat had made the wood swell and flake, so it now looked like burned crocodile skin. The beams were blackened, and fallen debris lay everywhere, but the technicians had cleared a useable path through the drenched ash and charred pieces of wood.
The window frames were empty because the glass had been blown out in the explosion. A wire dangled from the ceiling where a lamp had hung. The shade was burned away and the bulb had exploded in the heat. Only the socket and copper wiring, which had been insulated by the plastic outer coating, now remained.
“There are fragments of clothing under the corpses,” the medical examiner told them as he finished his examination.
He stood up and pointed to an area on the floor underneath the charred bodies.
“I think those are mattresses. Most of it was burned away, except for right there where the two of them were lying.”
He took a step back so the police around him could see the mattress remains.
“Is there anything to suggest violence?” asked the lieutenant and walked a little closer.
“Not immediately,” said Flemming Larsen, stretching his back. “I found soot in their nostrils and soot particles in their mouths, which suggests they were alive when the fire broke out. But the fire’s done so much to them, it’s hard to make out details. I can tell you more after I’ve autopsied them.”
Louise stepped carefully over two chair legs, which were left behind when the rest of the chair burned up. She could see why Flemming shook his head doubtfully. There wasn’t much left to see of the two corpses. They were severely burned, their skin blackened, some parts completely charred. And they lay in piles of burned scraps of what remained of the mattresses.
Suhr stepped forward and bent over the corpse that lay farther back, up against the wall. He pointed to a gash that ran across its stomach.
“Could that be a knife stab?”
Flemming Larsen bent over.
“No, that’s a burst from the heat,” he said and shook his head.
Louise saw how the skin of the two corpses had burst in several places and made long tears.
“They’re lying in a classic fencing pose,” the medical examiner continued, pointing to their bent arms.
She’d never seen it so clearly before. Exactly like a fencer who’s ready to fight, with one arm bent and the sword raised, and the other arm bent to hold his balance for the thrust. Even the slightly bent knees.
“That position sets in when the heated muscles contract,” Flemming explained, adding that it occurs after the person is dead.
Louise bent over and studied the charred corpse. Face, hair, clothes: Everything was burned away. The skin was burned and cracked like pieces of wood in a fireplace after the flames had died out. She took a step back and looked at her watch. It was past two o’clock. She was impatient to have the names and addresses of the youths that Bellahøj had been in touch with. The lieutenant had already called and woken up Toft and Michael Stig. One of them was to stay at the site of the fire, while the other had to help track down the youths, so they could get going quickly on an identification.
“So far there’s nothing pointing to a crime,” Suhr said.
Ash particles fell on his shoulders like drizzling rain.
“It’s tragic and sad, but these two were probably lying here smoking—maybe got stoned and forgot to put their ends out properly. And then the mattresses caught fire. And since everything in this shack’s made of wood, it didn’t take the fire long to spread.”
Louise nodded. She knew smoking was the most common cause for fires. Last year, around forty people had lost their lives that way, and it was unlikely that these kids were responsible-minded enough to install smoke detectors in their clubhouse, Louise thought and looked around. The boathouse had been an absolute fire hazard. The two boys hadn’t had a chance to get out from where they were sleeping in the back when the whole thing exploded around them.
“We’ll know more when Frandsen and his techs find out where and how the fire started,” Suhr continued, then turned to Flemming Larsen. “When do you figure the autopsy will be done?”
It wasn’t long before Friday’s schedule of autopsies, so Monday at the earliest, thought Louise. But she heard Flemming say they’d be autopsied tomorrow at ten.
“Will you go out and be there for the autopsy?” asked Suhr.
Louise nodded and carefully straddled a fallen ceiling beam.
“We may not be talking about a crime here, but it’s still something of a coincidence that the fire should happen right after we find out that Nick Hartmann had his goods here in this building,” she said.
They left the boathouse and stood looking out over the harbor in the dark of night.
Suhr nodded and they started walking back to their cars.
“Anyway, it doesn’t make much sense to put the two things together,” he said. “The explosion obviously happened in the boathouse. If someone started the fire on purpose, they couldn’t have known beforehand what the wind direction and wind strength would be like. And so, they couldn’t have known with certainty that the flames would reach the warehouse.”
Louise shook her head. He was right.
“But there’d be a pretty good possibility for it,” she said.
The fire trucks were gone, and just two passenger cars from the emergency team remained in the harbor lot.
“Possibly, but having said that,” he continued, looking at her, “why would someone kill Hartmann and then wait several weeks before burning down the warehouse with his replica furniture inside?”
Illogical, conceded Louise.
“Looking at it the opposite way, I can maybe see a connection,” he said. “The furniture in there must represent a pretty high value, so it would clearly make more sense for someone to kill him and afterward steal the shit and line their pockets.”
They’d nearly reached the warehouse before he shook his head and looked at her.
“I doubt there’s a connection between the furniture and the fire,” he said.
He waved at Toft and Michael Stig, who came walking up to join them.
“But we must find out if the kids who came here knew anything about Nick Hartmann and what he was up to in the buil
ding next door. It’s certainly possible that they had contact with each other, or saw who’s been in and around the warehouse.”
“They’d just turn a blind eye to it!” said Michael Stig and shook his head.
His hair was still wet. It didn’t surprise Louise that her colleague had managed a quick shower before heading out the door.
Toft, on the other hand, still had flattened-out pillow hair.
“What about all the furniture that was in there?”
Suhr shrugged his shoulders.
“The techs will be looking into that as soon as they have the lamps set up so they can go inside. They’ve only just finished damping the fire, so we don’t know how widespread the damage is in there.”
“Which of you wants to stay here and see what we get out of the warehouse, and which of you wants to track down the kids who stayed in the boathouse?” Suhr asked and looked at his three investigators.
Willumsen was noticeably absent, but that was nothing new. It was only in the most extreme circumstances that Suhr chose to wake the lead investigator, and it wasn’t in order to spare him that he wasn’t hauled out of his bed in the middle of the night. Willumsen wasn’t fit to have his night’s rest interrupted. He’d be, if possible, even more surly, and most of them would rather not have to deal with that.
“I’m going, and Toft’s staying,” said Michael Stig after conferencing with his partner. “But we’re going to a bowling tournament tomorrow afternoon in Haderslev, so we’d like to catch a little sleep before we drive over there.”
Louise sighed.
“We’ll see about that,” Suhr said dismissively.
He nodded to two journalists, then brushed them off by saying he had no comment on the fire.
“But the ambulances,” one of them tried, only to be silenced when the lieutenant raised his hand in the air and told him to call tomorrow.
Then he turned to the vice commissioner, who’d come over to them.
“These are the addresses of the five we have in the report,” he said and passed some slips of paper to Suhr. He added that there were also cell phone numbers for most of them. “We’ve already called around, but only one of them answered.”