Bogman (2 page)

Tobias began to like him even more.
 

“I’m thirty minutes from the office, fifteen minutes from the golf club. A hour to our summer house in Saeby,” said Norbert. “It’s perfect.”

Inge came out to greet them. She tutted and clucked over Tobias. “The first time I’ve cooked for you in ages and you have to go and look at a set of old bones.”

“If they’re as old as they think,” said Tobias, getting into his car. “I might be back in time for coffee and aquavit.”

2.

He was still some two kilometres from where the bones had been found when he drove over the crest of a hill and saw the police helicopter like a great lighthouse in the clouds, its beam sweeping across an expanse of flat, dark land. The horizon glowed faintly pink. He turned into a side road and bumped down an unmade track. A lone policeman stood where the track divided. Tobias rolled down the window, showed his ID and was directed left. The track petered out. Suddenly there were vehicles everywhere, parked at crazy angles. Katrine Skaarup, the fresh-faced recent recruit to the team was waiting to greet him.
 

“It’s a real circus, boss,” she shouted over the drone of the helicopter.
 

Tobias got out the car and looked around. The ground was lumpy and covered with rough grass, reeds and clumps of bushes. Half a dozen uniformed police were rolling out blue and white tape and pegging it at intervals around an area the size of a football field. The helicopter banked. The spotlight flashed across a black drainage channel, turning it into a white streak across the surface of the bog and illuminating two parallel lines of tape running towards a large white tent. A model aeroplane, painted yellow and white, its wings about a metre long, its undercarriage complete with neat black rubber wheels, rested between the lines of tape as though on a miniature, floodlit runway. Beside it, a man in a denim jacket was talking to a teenager who had some kind of tray harnessed to his chest. It took Tobias a few seconds to realise it was the control panel for the model plane. The man in the denim jacket was scribbling in a notebook. The teenager was gesticulating. A tall blonde in a red jacket and matching spectacles bounded purposefully towards them. A bearded man hoisting a television camera on to his shoulder scrambled after her.

The helicopter flew off towards the eastern horizon. The drone died away. Tobias blinked. His eyes adjusted to the gloom.
 

Katrine took her hands from her ears. “The guy who found the remains was flying a model aeroplane. He lost radio control. It crashed out there.” She waved towards the tent. “He was looking for a bit that broke off. He called the press and a television station as well as the police in Randers. Arsehole.”
 

She’s trying too hard, thought Tobias with quiet amusement. She’s beside herself with excitement and trying to hide it. Those little skips when she thinks no one is looking. What age was she? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? What had he been like at his first crime scene, at her age? Did he also try to sound offhand and professional without succeeding? Probably. He took a forensics kit from the dashboard locker of the car.
 

“He found a foot.” said Katrine. “A foot like a bog body foot. So he called every Tom, Dick and Harry. Police, newspapers, television.”

“Where is he?”

“Over by the Forensics van. He’s called Kenneth Skov. Inspector Haxen is talking to him.”

Tobias glanced over at the van. There was no mistaking Eddy Haxen’s skinny frame and mop of flaxen hair. He was talking to a stocky man in a leather jacket who had a remote control panel hanging from a strap around his neck.
     

“The television guys called a professor from the university,” said Katrine. “Which is just as well because he stopped them walking all over the place and contaminating stuff before Forensics got here.”

“Where’s the professor?”

Katrine looked around. “I can’t see him. He might be in the tent. The guy talking to Eddy has been flying planes here for a while. The other one is his nephew. It’s some kind of nature reserve but they’ve got take off and landing rights.” She giggled.
 

Tobias crouched to pull on a pair of overshoes and hide a smile. He stood up. The cameraman and the blonde in red spectacles sprinted towards him. Tobias ignored them. He stepped over a stretch of tape and tramped past the model plane towards the tent. The ground sucked at his feet. The tent glowed in the dusk. When he finally reached it and ducked inside, he was dazzled by a spotlight. When his eyes adjusted, he saw the forensics team – all four of them - on their knees examining a taped-off area around a slight hollow in the ground. He glimpsed a scattering of bones covered in what looked like spiders’ webs. A few metres away, Inspector Harry Norsk, the medical examiner, was standing over a folding table staring at a foot that seemed to be made of dark brown wood or leather, and a white skull. He greeted Tobias with an absent-minded wave.

“The foot is mummified. There’s a split in the skull. It could have been caused by a blow with something like a rock. But God only knows when. Could be anything between ten and two thousand years.”
 

“Is this one for us or one for the archaeologists?”

Harry shrugged. “I can’t tell at this stage. We could be dealing with a bog body or with something more recent. I have no expert knowledge of how the bog affects bone and tissue, or anything else for that matter. You’re going to need a forensic anthropologist.”
 

Eddy Haxen came into the tent.

“Hi, Boss. Will I let the plane buffs go? They seem shocked by it all.”

“Not too shocked to call up a television station,” said Tobias. “Where’s this professor?”

“Out there giving an interview to the press.”

Tobias tramped back across the bog to a pool of light in which stood the be-spectacled blonde pointing a microphone at a tubby man wearing the same blue protective clothing as the forensics team.
 

“Strictly speaking,” said the tubby man with the air of a lecturer addressing students, “this is mostly fenland, not bog. Like a lot of fens, it’s on the edge of a bog and it looks and feels like bog but there’s a crucial difference. Bog peat contains humic acid. It preserves body tissue. Bodies decompose in fen peat. It won’t mummify bodies. But it has a high chalk content. It preserves bones.”
 

A look of alarm crossed the interviewer’s face.
 

“Can we keep it simple for now, Professor Brix? Why were these bodies buried in the bog, or fen?”
 

“It was once assumed that some of them were sacrificial victims in a pagan, Iron Age ritual,” said the professor. “P V Glob famously posited that Tollund Man was killed in a ritualistic way.”
 

“So this a ritual killing?”

Now it was the Professor’s turn to look alarmed. “I’m not saying that,” he said. “I’m just explaining one theory about Tollund Man.”

“So this is another Tollund Man?”

“I’m not saying that either,” said the Professor.
 

“Have you found anything with the body? Anything from the Iron Age?”
 

“One of the forensic team found a metal coin or button with what looks like a laurel leaf design. A laurel leaf typically.....”
 

At which point Tobias intervened.
 

“Chief Inspector Lange from Aarhus Criminal Investigation Department. I must ask you to stop recording,” he said. “This is now a police matter. We can’t divulge any more details at this early stage of the investigation.”

The blonde gestured to the cameraman and turned her attention to Tobias. “Are you investigating an Iron Age murder, Chief Inspector?”

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with at the moment,” said Tobias, uncomfortably aware he was now on camera. “All I can say is that human remains have been found here. We need to establish how long they’ve been in the bog. That could take some time. There’ll be a statement in due course. Now I must ask you all to leave.”

He took the professor by the arm and led him aside. “I’m sorry, but we have to do things by the book. The forensics team know what they’re doing.”
 

The professor took a card from the breast pocket of his jacket and handed it to Tobias.

“Thanks,” said Tobias. “We’ll be in touch if we need you.”

The camera crew had packed up. The blonde called out, “Can you come into the studio, professor?”
 

She threw a challenging glance at Tobias. “Do you have any objection to that, Chief Inspector?”
 

It was now dark. Tobias shone his torch on the card.
 

Professor Johann Brix

Forensic Anthropologist

Department of Forensic Medicine

University of Aarhus.
 

“I’m afraid I do,” said Tobias.
 

He tramped back to the tent and said to Harry Norsk, “I think we’ve found our man.”
 

3.

It was nearly ten o’clock when he got back to his flat. He was hungry. He could almost smell the roast pork loin, the cabbage with juniper and garlic, the roast potatoes, Inge’s apple pudding. Too late for all that now. He went pessimistically to the refrigerator. A curled up lettuce, three eggs, a dried up slice of ham in an opened plastic packet, half an onion in cling wrap and a nugget of crumb-embedded butter on a saucer. He had the makings of an omelette at least. He cheered up. An omelette was a proper meal. It justified a glass of decent wine.
 

He laid the table beside the window leading to the balcony, adjusting the knife and fork to lie parallel to each other, equidistant from the sides of the table. He lit the single candle in the blue and white Royal Copenhagen pattern candlestick which sat in the dead centre of the table. The same candlestick had sat on the dining table in the house where he grew up. It had been ritually placed on the tiny fold-out table in the boat on which he spent endless weekends and holidays with his father after his mother died, because his father had not been able to bear being in the house without her.
 

He selected a bottle of Macon Villages from the temperature-controlled wine cabinet above the refrigerator, unscrewed the cap and poured himself a glass. He took a sip, swilled it around his mouth, savouring the taste before swallowing a mouthful. He took the omelette pan from a cupboard and began to cook.
 

He drank the Burgundy with the omelette. He washed up his plate, knife and fork and swept the remains of the lettuce into the compost bin. In the three periods in which he had shared his living space with a woman – including his ex-wife – he had found that they, not he, left dirty plates in the kitchen sink, scattered clothes about the bedroom, abandoned damp towels on the bathroom floor.
 
The last woman in his life, Anna, a librarian in Silkeborg, had tried to persuade him to move in with her. To live in her cosy house with its fat cushions and swagged curtains and scented candles everywhere. But on the occasions when Tobias had stayed there he had felt suffocated. He preferred the spareness of his own flat. She had called him a dried up stick.
 

He poured himself a second glass of wine and carried it out to the balcony. He could just about afford the mortgage on the flat. It was worth it to be right in the centre of Aarhus. To see, over the rooftops, the cathedral spire soaring into the sky. To see below him in the space between the back of his own building and the next street, the neat gardens and patios of his neighbours with their budding lilac and cherry trees, their bicycles and their pots of tulips, his ground-floor neighbour’s lily pond with its miniature fountain spouting from dawn to dusk. Thank God it was Sunday night. On Fridays and Saturdays there was always noise from the bars and cafes in the surrounding streets, sometimes making him nostalgic for the student life he had briefly glimpsed and left behind.
 

He watched his neighbour, Hilde, in the flat across from his balcony, moving about in her kitchen. He wondered if it was too late to telephone and invite her over for a nightcap. But that usually meant sex and he was enjoying being alone. He wanted to sip his wine and listen to music
.
Hilde was energetic and fun. She was married to the first officer on a cruise ship who was away from home for weeks at a time. She had exchanged glances with Tobias when they met in the street and, after several such encounters, had rung his doorbell on the pretext of asking him to help mend a fuse. He was both taken aback and aroused by the blatancy of her approach. She quickly abandoned any pretence of not being competent with fuses. She was more than competent in bed as well but she talked a lot and she liked Bruce Springsteen. Tobias was in the mood for something ordered and serene. Bach preludes, a Haydn sonata or a fugue by Arvo Part.
Something cool and cerebral but full of beauty too.
He stepped back into his flat. His phone rang. He picked it up and saw his daughter’s number on the screen.

“Hi, Agnes. What’s up?”
   

“Hi Dad. I saw you on the news. Another Tollund Man, maybe? Hey, that would be exciting.”
 

“Well,” Tobias sat down again at the table. “It’s a bit early to say. It’s not like Tollund Man. It’s a mummified foot and a pile of bones. We’ve no idea how long they’ve been there. We’ve sent the lot to a forensic anthropologist.”

“The fat guy who was interviewed?
 

“That’s the one.”

“And you really have no idea how long the bones have been there?”

“Not really.”

“It might be the work of a serial killer.”

Tobias laughed. “You’ve been watching too much television, Agnes.”

“Well I hope the poor soul had some love in his or her life, whenever it was.”

Tobias thought that was a good sentiment.

“So what else have you been doing, Dad?”

“Well, I’ve met granny Inge’s fiancé, Norbert Fisker.”

“What’s he like? Aunty Margrethe thinks he’s after granny’s money.”