The Girl in the Ice

by Lotte Hammer

  “No, for God’s sake, that’s more than enough.”

  “Well, looks like . . . whoever he is . . . your colleague . . . was right. Now I’ve forgotten his name again, God help me—I have a thing about names, they get away from me. But he also said you probably wouldn’t be too enthusiastic about the coverage. Don’t you like the press?”

  “If you mean in theory, then yes. I don’t especially care for crime reporters, though.”

  “But the press made you famous, I understand.”

  “Famous? Nonsense. I’m not famous.”

  “Well known then.”

  “That’s rubbish. I am neither well known nor famous.”

  Simonsen stamped lightly on the ice to emphasise his words and almost toppled backwards when his foot slid out from under him.

  “If you say so, but somehow or other you must have made yourself really unpopular in Germany, since it’s said the German Chancellor herself sentenced you to a spell in the freezer instead of letting you take your Caribbean holiday.”

  Strangely enough Simonsen found he didn’t mind being teased by the Greenlander, maybe because the little man radiated so much friendliness once he had opened his mouth. And maybe because Simonsen secretly felt a little proud of the way his presence had been formally requested.

  “All complete nonsense,” he asserted, unconvincingly.

  They stood there in a silence broken only by stifled laughter from Egede. Simonsen decided it was time to change the subject.

  “I understand you’ve had the opportunity to see the victim?”

  “Yes, yesterday, as I said. We had to make sure of what we were dealing with, but I haven’t done anything out here other than look at her and then put up the barricade.”

  He nodded over towards a circle of iron spikes hammered into the ice around the body. Red and white striped crime-scene tape had been wound between them.

  “It took us about half an hour to get those in. The ice is like stone, and they are clearly unnecessary out here, but I had strict orders to cordon her off.”

  “Is she a Greenlander?”

  Egede’s cheerfulness vanished abruptly. “Why do you ask that? Does it make any difference?” he asked sharply.

  “It’s a serious crime whatever her nationality. But that apart, it makes a world of difference when it comes to chains of command and jurisdiction. Besides, I have a hard time understanding how I can contribute to a case where a local woman from a community I don’t know has been killed.”

  “She’s not a Greenlander, she’s Danish. And with respect to jurisdiction, that’s not something you need worry about. You can consider yourself the leader of this investigation. All parties to it are in agreement on that.”

  “All parties? I didn’t know there were more than two.”

  “Three. But as I said, there is no dissent as to leadership.”

  “You’re saying the Americans are involved too?”

  “I thought you wanted to wait for the details until you’d seen her.”

  “Yes, well, with a little luck that will be soon. It looks as if they’ve passed the first phase.”

  Simonsen took out his cigarettes again without really meaning to. Feeling guilty, he slid the pack back into his pocket unopened. Shortly afterwards a technician came over to them. She was Danish, and moved slowly and laboriously, taking infinite care over where she put her feet. Maybe she believed if she did not touch an old footprint in the snow she would win the lottery on Saturday. Simonsen did not recognise her.

  “We’re just about done. If you’re going to wake up Arne Pedersen, it’s time. And be careful over there, it’s very slippery.”

  She pointed towards the crime scene. Trond Egede nodded amiably, he would no doubt walk carefully. Simonsen thought that it was slippery everywhere, and ignored her.

  CHAPTER 2

  The woman in the shallow grave in the ice was on her knees. She was half-naked, dressed only in panties and an undershirt that was torn in front and pulled down below her bare breasts. Her ankles were tied together with duct tape and her wrists attached to her thighs with further tape. Her long, black hair was hanging loose and reached to the middle of her back. A plastic bag was pulled over her head and tightened around her neck in a knot. Behind the plastic a grotesquely gaping lipstick-red mouth and her wild wide-open eyes revealed that death had not come easily. Konrad Simonsen felt nauseated by the sight. She had an athletic build and was no more than twenty-five or so. Around her meltwater trickled and pooled in the bottom of the depression in the ice to which her knees and feet were still attached. To the right of her body were her clothes: trousers, jacket, and a cap artfully knitted in shades of blue, violet and green.

  The three men took their time. Arne Pedersen and Simonsen moved around slowly, peering down at the woman whose face was more or less on a level with their feet. The Greenlandic constable remained standing. It was as if none of them wanted to break the silence and disturb the others’ concentration. The female technician had returned, leaving her three colleagues warming up in the plane. She stood a few steps away, shivering. At last she became impatient and asked, “Is there anything I can help with? Otherwise I’d really like to go back and have some coffee before we bring her up.”

  The question was mostly aimed at Simonsen, but he seemed distracted so it was Pedersen who answered.

  “The grave she’s lying in, is it naturally formed?”

  “According to my Greenlandic colleague that’s not the case.”

  “So it’s been cut down into the ice by someone?”

  “According to my Greenlandic colleague that’s exactly the case.”

  “Why has the grave melted?”

  The woman was unsure.

  “That I don’t know, I think it’s global warming.”

  “But why here, where she is?”

  The technician threw up her hands and shrugged; Trond Egede answered for her.

  “There are a number of meltwater puddles in the area, although they’re not common round here. The ice is actually building up hereabouts, while by the coastline it’s decreasing. There is no obvious reason why she is kneeling in such a melt hole. It could just be chance. First she was buried, then the melt hole formed. If the technician says the grave is man-made, you can safely assume he’s correct. He knows what he’s talking about where ice is concerned.”

  The woman nodded in agreement and added, “Exactly.”

  Simonsen sent her back to the plane, ignoring Pedersen’s look of surprise and subsequent question.

  “Why did you snap at her like that, Simon? There was no reason for it, and besides I wasn’t finished.”

  When Pedersen did not receive an answer from his boss, he sought the explanation elsewhere. He looked at the corpse and said, “This is pretty disgusting, and also inexplicable. We’re several hundred kilometres from the nearest inhabited area. In the middle of nowhere, as they say. It’s like a classic locked-room mystery turned on its head—the all too open room.”

  “I know who she was, and how she got out here,” said the Greenlander.

  Pedersen turned to Egede in surprise.

  “And you’re just telling us that now?”

  “I didn’t think you wanted to hear any information before you’d seen her.”

  “It’s only my boss who has these purist notions. Personally I prefer all the facts as soon as possible, but you weren’t to know that. Okay, let’s hear it.”

  But Simonsen held up one hand and stopped them there.

  “In a little while. First I need time to think.”

  Pedersen did not try to conceal his concern.

  “Is something wrong, Simon?”

  “I told you, I need a minute to myself. That can’t be so hard to understand surely.”

  Most people would have backed off then, but not Pedersen. He ignored his boss’s tone of voice and said firmly, “No, it’s not hard to understand. Just like it shouldn’t be difficult for you to comprehend why I asked if there’s
something the matter. Well, is there?”

  Simonsen pulled his scattered thoughts together. No doubt about it, the Countess, or his daughter Anna Mia, or maybe both of them, had talked about his health condition behind his back. The Countess was one of his closest co-workers. Her name was actually Nathalie von Rosen, but everyone called her the Countess. Everyone except his daughter, who insisted on using her real name. The Countess was also quite possibly his girlfriend, though he couldn’t as yet figure that out. In fact, neither of them could.

  He supposed it was not so surprising that the two women in his life should discuss his state of health. There was cause for concern over it as the doctor had made clear the last few times Simonsen had consulted him.

  “As a matter of fact, I’m not well,” he admitted now. “But don’t worry, my health won’t affect the case.”

  He turned away from them but had barely taken a step before Pedersen blocked his way and looked him in the eye. They stood that way, toe to toe, for what seemed like an eternity, until Pedersen finally stepped aside and let him pass.

  When Simonsen was ready to be briefed, the Greenlandic constable pulled a notepad from his inside pocket and removed one glove so he could browse through his notes.

  “Her name is Maryann Nygaard. She was a trained nurse and worked at the now closed American base in Søndre Strømfjord, where she was employed through a Danish company, Greenland Contractors, which specialised in recruiting Danish civilian workers for the American bases in Greenland. I believe there was an undertaking from the US government to Denmark that all civilian personnel at the bases in Thule and Søndre Strømfjord should be Danish. But don’t take my word for that. There may be exceptions I don’t know about. In any event, Maryann Nygaard had a job there as a nurse from March 1982 until her disappearance the following year, on the thirteenth of September 1983.”

  Simonsen, who seemed to have calmed down after his outburst, queried, “In 1983? So she’s been lying here for twenty-five years?”

  Only Pedersen, who knew him well, could hear that he was still not quite up to speed. There was something seriously wrong here. Their Greenlandic counterpart answered the question.

  “Yes, she has, and if it hadn’t been for climate change, she could easily have been lying here for thousands more, until one day she slid into the fjord inside an iceberg.”

  “Do you know her age?” Konrad pressed him.

  “She was twenty-three years old when she was killed, but beyond that I don’t know much about her. I’ve spoken with the colonel in command then at Thule Airbase—a man I know well, by the way, and have liaised with before—and he’s promised to get more information to me as soon as possible. He’s usually pretty quick, given the notorious bureaucracy of the American armed forces. Of course in the event of a case being opened by them it could take years to process, but there’s nothing to suggest that will happen.”

  “You mean, so long as there were no American soldiers involved?”

  “Exactly, and I don’t believe there were.”

  Pedersen butted in, “How far away was this Søndre Strømfjord base?”

  “Is, the base is intact, only the Americans are gone. In round numbers, three hundred kilometres to the south-west.”

  “Then why is she here?”

  “There’s a good explanation for that, but perhaps you’d like to see a couple of pictures of her first?”

  Without waiting for an answer he unfolded a piece of A4 paper from the back of his notebook.

  “The colonel sent these over last night. I don’t know if they come from the US or his own personal files. They kept the pictures for identification purposes, in case she was ever found. It’s standard procedure when someone goes missing.”

  Again it was Pedersen who interrupted.

  “Does that happen often round here . . . people disappearing?”

  “Yes, unfortunately it’s not uncommon, especially in the winter. Greenland is a big country, and in certain conditions if you wander off course then it’s far from a given you’ll be found again.”

  They moved in closer and studied the photographs. The top one was a portrait that showed a smiling young woman who barely resembled the one in the hole below them, apart from her long, black hair. Below the portrait was an informal picture of the woman, taken in summer while holding a trout in front of her with both hands. The pose was meant to be humorous as the fish was small enough to be held easily in one hand. A lock of her dark hair was caught by the summer breeze and drifted behind her like smoke.

  Simonsen studied the bottom picture thoroughly. When he was done, he grimaced and asked, “So what brought her out here?”

  “It was her work. Have you ever heard of the DYE stations?”

  Both men shook their heads.

  “They were a kind of radar outpost from the base in Søndre Strømfjord. There were five such stations, simply designated DYE-1 to DYE-5, and three of them rank among the world’s most isolated places, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest settlement. All five were built in the early 1960s as part of the American atomic early warning system, a chain of radar stations from Alaska across Canada to Iceland that were supposed to detect Russian bombers and later intercontinental missiles. The first four DYEs are spread along a line that roughly corresponds to the northern polar circle, starting with DYE-1 on the west coast at Sisimiut over the ice cap, and finally DYE-4 on the east coast at Ammassalik. DYE-5 is an exception, pretty far north of the other DYEs and, as I said, over three hundred kilometres from the base in Søndre Strømfjord. I have no idea why it was not built in a line with the others. Maybe there is a perfectly reasonable explanation if you’re a radar engineer or maybe it’s a military secret, who knows?”

  Simonsen asked, “How big was it?”

  “Not very big in circumference, but high. You can see a few pictures when we get back to Nuuk. It wasn’t pretty.”

  “What does DYE stand for?”

  “As far as I know, it comes from the Canadian town of Cape Dyer on the east coast of Baffin Island towards the Davis Strait. Cape Dyer was also part of the radar system, but I’m not sure about the linguistic connection. In any event, all five DYE stations were taken out of service in the late 1980s. The technology was antiquated by that point as Russian rockets could then be tracked better from satellites. The first to be shut down was DYE-5—that was here where we’re standing—and unlike the other four it was removed completely. That was down to some desk decision or other in Copenhagen about not compromising Greenland’s wilderness. The Americans were told to clean up after themselves so to speak, which they did quite effectively as you can see—or perhaps I should say, don’t see. Later the Self-Government had to reverse the procedure so that the other DYEs were allowed to remain more or less as they were, and today two of them are used occasionally by climate researchers overnighting on the ice cap.”

  “Was it only Danes who were stationed on these outposts?”

  “The agreement between Washington and Copenhagen allowed the station to be mixed. But the DYE commander and the radar operators were always Americans.”

  “Did the Danes have security clearance?”

  “Yes, of course they did, though the process wasn’t that thorough based on all the stories I’ve heard over the years about the DYE employees. There were, shall we say, some characters among them—not exactly the sort you’d encourage to wander around a top-secret installation today. In fact, though, the information they could have passed on was probably quite limited. The American Army can rightly be blamed for a lot of things, but being lax about national security is definitely not one of them. Especially not in the middle of the Cold War.”

  Simonsen nodded his agreement without completely understanding what the man was talking about. Then he asked, “How many employees were there at a radar station like this?”

  “It varied from DYE to DYE. At DYE-5 there were twelve Danes on six-month periods of service. After that they were supposed to be relieved, but often th
ey simply switched to serve a further six months at another DYE. That was one of the reasons many of them became noticeably strange. Some of them were out on the ice for years. At the same time they earned a very respectable salary without having any way to spend the money. When they finally got back to civilisation, things often went very wrong for them.”

  “And Maryann Nygaard was one of these workers?”

  Pedersen sounded sceptical. It was hard to imagine a pretty young woman isolated for six months with eleven men.

  “No, no, that wouldn’t have worked at all. Out here there were only men, but in the American Army there are many crazy rules—and here I’m quoting direct from the colonel himself, who knows what he’s talking about. One of these rules, which was strictly observed, was that once a year all medical equipment on a base should be inspected by a doctor or nurse. So on the thirteenth of September 1983 Maryann Nygaard came out here on such a medical inspection. The work itself was done in a couple of hours and required no contact but when it was time to leave no one could find her. She was missing and remained so, no matter where the men searched. Finally the helicopter had to fly back without her.”

  Simonsen interrupted. “Do you know the time of day? I mean, was it dark?”

  “No, I don’t know the time, but I expect there will be a comprehensive report available once we get back to Nuuk. I have people working on this there, and they are doing the same in Thule. The Americans have promised me a list of all the men who were at DYE-5 at the time of her disappearance.”