Tristan Haraldsen never brooded, never lingered on bad thoughts or allowed them to fester. He did what he could to manage them, then waited for the following day to offer new challenges and opportunities. None of this seemed an acceptable position any more. Jónas Mikkelsen, a ten-year-old village scallywag, was dead. His brother, older in years but not, everyone said, in mind, had already been judged guilty of his killing.

  It seemed an astonishing sequence of events. Unreal and quite wrong. Though in a sense all such questions were still academic. First they had to locate the absent Benjamin who, according to the Thomsens, could hide on the green hills around Árnafjall perhaps for days without being seen.

  These events were so foreign, so unlike any he’d ever before encountered, Tristan Haraldsen felt unable to process them in any meaningful way. Which was why he’d slunk away from the equally silent and pensive Elsebeth to the computer where idly searching round for facts to quell the doubts and fears and questions that kept running round his head was meant to offer some kind of comfort.

  He was halfway through something he’d found when the door opened and she came in.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked bringing the bottle of beer to refill his glass. Then she tidied away some spent paper by the printer, quickly scrunching it up and placing it in her pocket.

  ‘You can leave the rubbish here,’ he said. ‘I’ll empty the bin later.’

  ‘It’s alright.’

  ‘We require more ink. I didn’t know you needed to print something.’

  A pause, then she asked if he liked the beer.

  ‘You know I do, thank you,’ Haraldsen said, grateful for the break from the screen. ‘No need to linger. I feel tired but not sleepy. If you wish to go to bed …’

  She smiled and patted his head.

  ‘Tristan. By now you must know. Whenever anyone wants rid of me, I stay. What are you doing?’

  ‘Just … nothing.’

  He was so bad at lying. The guilt must have been written on his face.

  ‘You’ve spent a long time doing nothing.’

  Rumbled in an instant, as usual.

  ‘I’m sorry, Elsebeth. I thought I was taking you somewhere quiet and peaceful. And now …’

  ‘I was unaware you took me here. My recollection is this was a joint decision. Equal on both our parts.’

  He took her hand and squeezed it. Warm skin, getting wrinkled.

  ‘Funny,’ he told her. ‘If we’d had kids none of this would have happened.’

  The question seemed to interest her. Elsebeth pulled up a seat and sat next to him at the desk.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that if we’d been blessed with children I rather imagine we’d have stayed in Tórshavn. Where they were. We’d have been part of a bigger family. Instead of coming here.’

  ‘Here is different,’ she agreed. ‘The people seem more like … pieces of the same jigsaw. The same tribe. One getting ever smaller. Perhaps a little fearful of the future.’

  ‘Well put,’ he agreed. ‘As always.’

  Elsebeth was a reflective woman and never made her thoughts known quickly. So it took a while before she said, ‘So, I repeat my question. What are you doing?’

  ‘Nosing about.’

  ‘You’re the district sheriff. Your job’s a little one. We’re retired here, aren’t we?’

  ‘Not today. Or yesterday.’

  ‘They pay you a pittance to see the whales go to their end with as little pain as possible. Nothing else. You don’t work for the police any more. And when you did you were an office manager. Not an investigator. Also your heart—’

  ‘My heart’s nothing. I rather wish I hadn’t told you.’

  There she glared at him.

  ‘Of course you would have told me. I’m your wife. When you have something on your mind I’m meant to hear. So …’ She folded her arms. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Beyond the obvious?’ he asked. ‘A child dead? His brother missing? Supposedly his murderer? Or the one responsible for his death at least …’

  That look in her eyes stopped him. It was the same expression, one of concern and care and foreboding, he’d seen when he first told her the department medical officer had spotted a blip in his annual check-up.

  ‘There’s more to it than that.’

  ‘I hear him,’ Haraldsen replied in the gentlest of voices. ‘From Ganting’s longliner, the Alberta’s deck.’ His voice cracked. ‘I hear him still, love. Jónas Mikkelsen. And see him. That poor boy screaming in terror as he fell down the cliff into Freyja’s Pool. In that scream it’s like there’s a question—’ he tapped his head and the sandy hair turning grey – ‘in here. Asking … why?’

  ‘And you think you can find the answers? The district sheriff? The man who’s supposed to watch the grind and see it done the way it should be? Nothing more?’

  He thought about that for a moment.

  ‘I define my duties. Not some civil servant in Tórshavn. Or Aksel Højgaard. The plain fact is I was a witness to these events. In part their cause. I believe I have an obligation to try.’

  She picked up the beer glass and took a sip. Haraldsen knew when she disapproved of something. There was no need of words.

  ‘Move over,’ she said, budging him out of the seat as she reached for the keyboard.

  He’d minimized the page in question the moment she came close. She knew it too.

  She squeezed his hand again and said, ‘One of the reasons I love you is you’re the least devious person I know. That’s not the same as being a bad liar, by the way. Though you would be if you were so minded. I believe deceit is quite beyond you and that’s not something one can say of many men.’

  He stayed silent.

  ‘And now you’re nosing around about your neighbours. Which is not the Tristan Haraldsen I know at all.’

  ‘I told you. I hear him screaming! I see him tumbling down that cliff! And besides a child does not kill another child. It’s unthinkable.’

  She scowled.

  ‘Is it? If Jónas used to bully his brother something rotten like they say. If there was bad blood between them already … It may just have been a fight gone wrong. An accident. The boy went over the cliff …’

  ‘With a whaling knife in his chest? Some accident. I saw something. Someone. Not a child …’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ he blurted out with such vehemence he felt guilty on the instant. ‘A man.’

  ‘Or a woman?’

  ‘Possibly. Why do you ask?’

  She said nothing then.

  Haraldsen closed his eyes for a moment. It wasn’t just the scream. He couldn’t shake from his head a bloody, visual memory of the day before. The pod of blackfish in their death throes on the strand near the quay. The wives on the harbour cobbles close to tears demanding the menfolk end their agonies.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he confessed. ‘The way people think here, violence is a part of life. They kill the whales. They slaughter their lambs. Their chickens …’

  Her fingers brushed his hair.

  ‘It’s where meat comes from. They simply see what most of us wish to avoid.’

  That was true to an extent. Yet there was more to it.

  ‘I think there’s a feeling here,’ he said, ‘a belief, an old belief, that the way to deal with some intractable problems is to act and bring them to an end. To cauterize a wound. Or sever a useless limb. However painful that might be.’

  Haraldsen was aware this conversation was upsetting his wife. Yet it was important. Some things had to be said.

  ‘Benjamin did run away, didn’t he?’ she replied. ‘Why would an innocent child do that?’

  ‘A child’s as likely to flee out of fear as guilt, surely. I know we’re ignorant of parenting but surely we understand that? Or perhaps he was running to something, or someone, not away from it.’

  ‘What do we truly know of these things, love?’ she asked. ‘How many murders were there in the twenty-five years you worked with the police?’

  He’d thought about this already. Quite a lot. And checked it online.

  ‘Two. Both domestic. A couple of decades apart.’

  ‘Quite. And you were an office manager. They concerned you not a whit.’

  ‘Two reported murders,’ he added. ‘Both in Tórshavn. Where one could hardly hide such a dreadful act. Here …’

  He gestured at the window. No Northern Lights tonight. Instead the sky had cleared on the horizon, to reveal the last of a beautiful late sunset like a wild, imaginative painting, leaking golden blood into the sea.

  ‘Here’s supposed to be paradise,’ she said gently.

  ‘I’m sorry, Elsebeth. I can keep this from you no longer. There’s something you must see.’

  You’re not needed any more.

  Aksel Højgaard told Alba Mikkelsen that as they lifted Silas into the ambulance. She’d done as he’d asked. Gone and fetched what photographs she had of Benji, though why she wasn’t clear. Everyone knew what he looked like. And how many twelve-year-old boys would be out roaming the fells in the wild anyway?

  He’d wanted pictures of Jónas too and that she found even odder.

  ‘Why’d you need all this?’

  ‘Because I do,’ he replied. Højgaard flicked through the photos. Most were from the summer before, back when they were still a family, just. The boys on the beach. The boys at the grind. A handsome one of Jónas grinning on the sand, stark naked, giggling with his hands in front of him, trying to hide while she took the embarrassing photo.

  ‘I want them back.’

  ‘Noted,’ he said and pocketed the pictures.

  She just about found the courage to say, ‘They took my Jónas away and didn’t even let me see him.’

  ‘Best that way. What’s the point?’

  ‘He’s my boy.’

  Silas wasn’t conscious when they took him. Or if he was he didn’t make any effort to recognize her. He looked terrible. Broken limbs, blood everywhere.

  ‘I want someone to drive me there,’ she insisted. ‘Sørvágur.’

  ‘They’ve gone to Tórshavn,’ he said, watching the ambulance go.

  ‘Tórshavn then.’

  ‘And how will you get back? At dead of night?’

  Questions. That’s all anyone threw at her. She didn’t know.

  ‘They’re my family, Højgaard.’

  ‘Ask your father then,’ he said then climbed in behind the gurney and the medics before closing the door in her face.

  She did ask Baldur Ganting. The last thing on his mind was a trip to Tórshavn. The Alberta was damaged. As always he was thinking of the days to come, how to make money, how to save it.

  ‘Silas won’t be working for months. You know what that means, daughter?’

  ‘I am more worried about my Benji lost in the hills.’ About mourning for Jónas, poor, always-angry Jónas, dead, by his brother’s hand they said.

  ‘And what use is your worrying, girl?’ he snapped then went back to the longliner to look at the shattered deck and the gear they’d lost.

  She wasn’t much good at ordering her thoughts and there seemed so many of them to marshal. Which came first? Which last? What mattered more than something else? She’d no idea.

  None of this was her fault though Alba expected the blame anyway. That was how things worked.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ she asked in a voice so full of pain and weakness it sent the few locals still lingering round her scuttling elsewhere on the quay.

  She knew what most of them would say: work. That was Djevulsfjord’s answer to everything. Climb on a boat and find solace beyond the Skerries. Scour the hills for puffins to net or hare to trap. Beg Dorotea Thomsen for part-time pin money gutting chicks in her kitchen or boiling blubber for the distant middle-class people in Tórshavn and beyond.

  The only regular income she had was for cleaning the priest’s place, the manse next to the white wooden church. Doing his washing and ironing. Two and a half hours a week she got paid for that though often he managed to squeeze another hour out of her for nothing.

  Alba did not like Father Ryberg or the way he watched her, stroking his grey beard from time to time. She sat through his Sunday morning sermons out of duty alone. To miss them would be to incur his wrath. To make the men and women of Djevulsfjord stare at her even harder than they did most days. The lost woman. The single mother. The outcast.

  If it kept on like this maybe she could run away again. Catch the bus through the Árnafjall tunnel to Tórshavn like she did the year before. Not take a job on the ferry to Denmark this time. Maybe … maybe steal enough for an air fare somewhere. Copenhagen. Sweden even. Whatever that was like. There’d always be jobs cleaning for people too idle or too rich to do the job themselves. A hotel would surely pay a legal wage greater than Ryberg’s stingy thirty krónur an hour.

  How could that be worse than the life she had in the fjord, eking out a grim existence for herself and the two boys, one a tyrant, the other an idiot? The first now dead and the other probably headed for detention when they found him. Whatever the future held it looked like being one she’d end up facing on her own.

  Alba Mikkelsen had no illusions about herself. She was skinny, not bright. Attractive enough to get men interested provided she gave them what they wanted. Silas wasn’t the first in that regard. Simply the first who’d promised, in the white village church, to look after her, in good times and bad, through sickness and in health.

  That was a lie, sworn on the Bible. God was a man. On their side, not hers.

  Once they’d found Benji and told her she couldn’t be his mum any more – and that would happen, she felt sure – then she’d be free to take herself off wherever she felt like. Nothing left in Djevulsfjord to keep her there except pain, regret and misery.

  ‘Need money,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Can’t run without something in my pocket.’

  That’s what she’d done the year before when Silas belted her once too often, and as a result found herself mucking out cabins and toilets on the ferry to Jutland.

  ‘Need to … to …’

  She shook her head, tried to think straight. How could she even consider running? There had to be a funeral. Jónas going in the brown Djevulsfjord earth. He was an evil little bastard and doubtless got up to stuff Alba never knew about. But dead … that seemed impossible. Only the morning before, looking forward to mischief at the grind, he’d seemed so full of himself. As if he knew something was up.

  Her eyes welled up and she rubbed them with the back of her hand. You weren’t supposed to cry out in the street in Djevulsfjord. Weeping was for the home. For the bedroom. Preferably on your own.

  ‘If I’d known …’ she muttered through her tears and saw the way the people of the quay moved further down the cobbles. ‘If I’d have known!’ she cried.

  ‘Known what?’

  The old, familiar, taunting voice. Dorotea Thomsen was out, poking her nose in everywhere as usual. She came up close and bent her big and fleshy face to peer in Alba’s. ‘Known what those young sons of yours was up to?’

  ‘They were good boys in their hearts,’ was all she could think to offer.

  Dorotea folded her flabby arms in front of her chest.

  ‘Well, that’s not much use now, is it? No point you thinking about the past, Alba. Enough to worry you in the future, if you ask me.’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘Speaking of which I gather Silas isn’t likely to be out of hospital in weeks. Maybe he’ll be stuck in that wheelchair. Can’t work the boats again at all. You thought about that?’

  ‘My little boy is dead.’

  ‘I know. And the other one done for him. The past. Can’t change that. The future …’

  It was impossible to argue with the woman. The Thomsens as good as owned Djevulsfjord. If they wanted, they could cast you out like God did Satan when he made the place with his horny wing.

  ‘I did my best. I loved them both.’

  Dorotea Thomsen scowled.

  ‘Love. Can’t feed a soul with that, can you? Can’t light a fire. Can’t build a house on love. No use at all that frippery, child. Only trouble comes of love. You want strength and money and all that comes with them.’

  ‘I was their mum. That was my strength.’

  ‘Not enough then, was it?’

  Another time, in another world, she’d have walloped the fat old cow right there and then. Took out all the fury and the grief on her, nails scratching, fingers flying. But not in the life she’d been given. That was never going to happen.

  ‘A funeral’s going to cost,’ Dorotea added. ‘You talked to Lars Ryberg about that yet?’

  ‘He only died this afternoon.’

  ‘Got to go to Sørvágur for an undertaker. Those bastards will sting you good and proper too. Don’t matter if it’s a young ’un or someone in their dotage.’

  Dorotea took her arm for a moment and seemed to try her best to appear friendly.

  ‘I must remind you, girl. You signed a contract on those rooms I rented you. Two months’ notice. Money’s due whether you’re there or not. Two months. Paid weekly. I’m a businesswoman. Can’t afford to do favours. Still want my money come Monday, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You got work?’ It was the question she wanted to be asked.

  She chortled at that.

  ‘Not the usual. All the meat and blubber from the grind’s taken care of. We won’t be needing casual labour maybe not till spring.’

  ‘Then … how …?’

  ‘What about your mum and dad?’

  ‘My mum and dad are in hock to you up to their elbows already.’

  ‘Well …’ Dorotea Thomsen withdrew her arm and put a finger to her cheek. ‘Let me think on it. While I do I guess there’s only one place left then. Back in the days when people starved it was always the church they turned to. That’s where charity comes from. You talk to Ryberg. See if there’s any extra … duties he can offer.’ She sniffed the air, ready to go. ‘Good luck with that.’

  She watched her waddle off back towards their nice house by the harbour. The lady of the village. The one you never scorned. She was right though. A funeral would cost. No money coming from Silas for months ahead. All the dreams: a funeral for Jónas, a future for Benjamin if she could somehow think of one, a ticket out of Vágar if everything came to naught; all these things depended upon her having something no one in the world was going to give her.

 

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