“Let me decide.”
“So, you do know that Maryann was pregnant when she… disappeared.”
Just this morning the Countess had read about the pregnancy in the autopsy report. It had surprised her and raised a few questions. She said, “We know that, and it makes us wonder a little.”
“Why is it so strange?”
The Countess could have bitten out her own tongue. Allinna Holmsgaard did not need to know anything about the tampon, but now the revelation was hard to avoid. The Countess vainly tried an evasive manoeuvre.
“Things don’t work that way between us. I ask, you answer. Not the other way around. Tell me about… ”
The sentence faded out, the professor had guessed the reason for the Countess’s surprise. The finger drumming stopped, and she said in distress, “Maryann’s pregnancy was not proceeding normally. She was bleeding, although she shouldn’t have been, and was flown to Holsteinsborg for a closer examination but there was nothing wrong. She was menstruating when she died, is that it?”
“Yes, that’s how it was. Do you know the child’s father?”
“No, I don’t. That is what I thought might interest you. You see, the whole thing was very mysterious, almost cloak and dagger, and Maryann did not want to come out with it when she finally found out. His name, that is.”
“Maybe you should start from the beginning.”
“Yes, of course. Maryann got pregnant about ten weeks before she died. It was by a geologist who was staying at the base for a few days while he waited for good weather, so he could continue on to Thule. They fell in love, just like that, like you read about in romance novels. Or in any event, Maryann did. I have my doubts about what it was like in reality for him. His name was Steen Hansen, he maintained, but that was a lie-”
The name struck the Countess like a blow from a hammer. Her jaw dropped and then her glass too. The stem broke, and wine spilled over the table. Allinna Holmsgaard asked worriedly, “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”
The Countess pulled herself together. With all her strength she tried to repress the dry female voice that was suddenly echoing in her head. Hold on to Steen Hansen, Baroness. Hold on to Steen Hansen, Baroness. The psychic’s words, and even on the phone they had been unnerving. Now it was much worse.
“No, it’s nothing, just go on.”
“So, I did not find out that the name was false until later, but there were other strange things about him… things that didn’t seem right. I remember that we women said that we had never seen such a well-dressed geologist. They usually resemble something they dug up. It was unusual besides that the Americans provided an aircraft for him alone when the weather cleared up. We speculated like that without really getting into it very deeply. There were always all sorts of stories in circulation, it was a way to pass the time.”
She poured a little water in her empty wine glass and drank it.
“But then Maryann found out that she was pregnant, three or four weeks after he had left, and abortion was ruled out. She’d had an abortion once before, and mentally she couldn’t take it. So she wrote a letter to the father. She did not have his address, only his name, she thought, so she addressed the letter to GGS, where he said he came from.”
“GGS?”
“Greenland’s Geological Surveys, it was under the Greenland Ministry at the time. The department was housed on Øster Voldgade along with the other geological institutions. Today GGS has merged with its Danish sister organisation. Well, the letter was returned, no one knew any Steen Hansen apparently. Maryann was down in the dumps for a couple of days, but then she thought of writing to the base commander at Thule. That was not normally something you did, but on the other hand, what else could she do? She explained the situation and asked that he forward her letter to Steen Hansen, if he could. She also sent a picture of him. It was just a snapshot, but all in all her persistence paid off because two weeks later Steen called her. Yes, he was married and had a child, the jerk, but he had backbone enough to contact her.”
“Why didn’t she want to tell you his real name?”
“I don’t know, she didn’t want to say. I recall that it irritated me. We also nagged her about that, but there was no getting her to budge. And then she disappeared, of course, and after that I had a really bad conscience because maybe she had gone away by choice, if you understand.”
The Countess understood only too well.
“Still, for a long time I hoped as I said that she would come back. Things did not really add up because she was simply not that depressed. She withdrew into herself, but two days before her trip to the ice cap we talked about baby clothes and that sort of thing. But that’s really all I wanted to tell you, and I can’t see how it will help you very much.”
“Maybe it will, maybe not. This fake Steen Hansen, what did he look like?”
“Very ordinary. Light hair, crew-cut, not that tall, in his early thirties. The truth is, I don’t really remember him. I only spoke to him a few times.”
“Any distinguishing features?”
“Not that I remember, apart from his hair that is. I mean, he was probably the only Danish man who had such short hair. All the others at that time had long hair, at least below the ears. Oh, yes, and… there was actually one other thing about him, now I remember it. He talked in an unnaturally high voice like a girl’s, a falsetto it’s called. Someone called him the Castrato… well, as a nickname, that is. Everyone got a nickname, even after a few days, and… ”
The Countess tuned out the professor’s words for a moment. She had never before known a witness, twice within a minute, give her information that almost made her fall off her chair. This time, however, she subdued her reaction and admonished herself that the lead about a voice was subject to interpretation and had to be backed up, and that could be damned hard to do. She concentrated again on the conversation.
“Is there anything else you know about him?”
“Well, he gave her his cap, but that probably doesn’t have any great significance.”
“Just tell me.”
Allinna squinted briefly and then said serenely, “Well, he had one of those knitted caps with interlaced fleur-de-lis in different colours. His mother had made it for him, he said, but that was definitely not true because there was a manufacturer’s tag inside. Well, whatever, Maryann loved that cap, and so he gave it to her.”
“As a memento?”
“Yes, maybe. She was very happy about it anyway. Personally I thought it was hideous, too many colours in it. I recall that once she was standing in front of a mirror with it on, and I must have commented on it. And then she said something along the lines of it probably could attract a few males if ever she was short of money for rent. Well, that was only in jest, but she wore it a lot, and I know that she had it on when she disappeared because I brooded about that for days afterwards. For me it made her disappearance even sadder, though that doesn’t make any real sense.”
The Countess nodded; she had seen the cap herself. It was lying beside Maryann Nygaard’s corpse, and quite involuntarily she thought that Allinna Holmsgaard had been right-it really wasn’t very pretty. She dropped the subject and asked instead, “And you have no idea why he used a false name?”
“No, unfortunately. Maryann maintained that he really was a geologist, and he was there to negotiate some sensitive concession agreements with the Americans on extraction of underground minerals. At first that didn’t sound completely off the wall. There were a number of disagreements between Danish and Greenlandic atomic power opponents on the one hand and GGS and Risø on the other. This visit allegedly concerned extraction of uranium and perhaps thorium from the Kvane field in Narsaq, and the subject was sensitive to say the least, but… well, it wasn’t logical. I mean, what was he doing in Thule in that case? The American Air Force was not involved in mining operations, and Thule Airbase is almost two thousand kilo-metres from Narsaq.”