Devil's Fjord, page 16
A hand touched her shoulder from behind. Elsebeth leapt in shock then turned to face whatever had come out of nowhere to find her.
‘What the hell do you want?’
It was the woman. Red hair. Furious face. A kind of knife in her hand, covered in what looked like putty and white dust, a smock over her skinny form, one that ran down to her knees and was covered in stains of paint, blue and yellow and scarlet.
‘This is my home!’
Courage, Elsebeth told herself. She was not in the habit of being intimidated, least of all by someone who sneaked up on you unseen.
‘At least I am only looking from the outside,’ she said as calmly as she could. ‘At least I don’t walk through your door and print out menacing messages for you to find. Like a coward.’
It was a palette knife in her hand. Blunt. Part of the woman’s work she guessed.
‘What do you want?’
‘To talk. Is that so much to ask?’ She nodded at the bay. ‘Out here if you wish. But talk we will, Miss Dam. I will not leave till we have words.’
‘Nothing in the records? That can’t be possible?’ Haraldsen said when the superintendent’s Ford had vanished past the black-and-white sheep that lined the fields around the airport. ‘I worked with files. It was my job. I’m sure … I’m damned sure.’
It was rare for him to curse and she seemed to pick this up immediately.
‘Damned sure of what?’
‘There are files in Tórshavn. I’ve read them, Hanna. Only last night.’
‘Oh …’ She raised her cup in a toast. ‘Sneaking. I see. You could go to jail for that.’
‘I know. I could show you how to access them too,’ he suggested. ‘It’s not hard. They’d been archived, for sure.’
‘Archived. Is that normal?’
This thought had occurred to him too. It was for closed cases. All the same some record of the original incident would usually have been left for the local officer to view if it was needed.
‘In all honesty I’m not sure. It may simply be an oversight.’
‘Two oversights,’ she pointed out. ‘In that office you just attended there’s not a word about your predecessor. Or Søren either. Who came here around that same time.’ She took out her phone and tapped at the screen with busy fingers then held it up for him to look at. ‘I mean here. Vágar. Can you see?’
It was a young man with long fair hair much like hers. A vacant face, Haraldsen thought, with the expression of someone who wasn’t quite sure of himself. Though that was, perhaps, a lot to try to glean from a single picture on a phone.
‘Selkie,’ she said. ‘The black beach.’
‘It’s not the only black beach around.’
‘It’s Selkie,’ she insisted. ‘I’m telling you.’
Then he listened to her story. About Søren Olsen, her kid brother, eighteen months her junior. Haraldsen was not happy to hear that his first impression had proved correct. The poor lad was lost for a while, messed up in the drugs scene in Copenhagen, on the fringes of the criminal world on the mainland. Hanna had paid for a trip to Vágar to help him out. He’d never come back.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why Vágar?’
‘It’s where our parents came from. I thought …’ Her eyes misted as they turned to the grey sea running out to the pale horizon. ‘I thought that might help him.’
He touched the phone again.
‘Did the picture he sent you have a location on it? They usually do these days.’
‘No.’ She looked impressed he’d asked that question. ‘Mostly they did. But not that one. Not any of them that he sent me after he got off the ferry.’
‘So perhaps he didn’t want to be found.’
‘Perhaps …’ She came close and gripped his arm very tightly. ‘What, in my position, would you do?’
He knew the answer she expected.
‘I would find someone who’d believe you.’
Hanna Olsen raised her empty mug and chinked it against his.
‘This window you have into the police network. The files. Your archives.’
He understood what was coming and dreaded it.
‘You want me to look for your brother? For Søren?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And I want to be there when you do.’
Elsebeth, he thought.
A web was closing round them. Himself, his wife, Hanna Olsen, perhaps Alba Mikkelsen and Baldur Ganting too.
‘Tonight,’ she insisted. ‘We will sit down together and see what we can find.’
‘I don’t know …’
She took his hand and squeezed it.
‘Good people. I saw that from the start.’
THIRTEEN
Højgaard was in a place he had to visit from time to time, always briefly which suited both men in the room. It was the office of Chief Superintendent Rasmussen, his immediate superior, a bureaucratic fellow in headquarters at Tórshavn, fond of his uniform and the comfort that came from knowing he was of a rank to avoid the cold and wet and inconvenience of duty outdoors.
In theory Rasmussen headed the chain of command over Højgaard and the whole of Vágar. He could direct any investigation personally on the ground if he so wished. In reality he was simply a man behind a desk, a bureaucrat Højgaard kept informed as he saw fit, and that as rarely as possible. The appointment of Hanna Olsen apart – something Rasmussen had waved through while Højgaard was on holiday – the running of police operations on the island was something he was happy to leave to the immediate officer in the field. In this respect Højgaard had served him well. No trouble came to his desk, no complaints, no loose ends, no difficulties that required effort to resolve.
Detail was something Rasmussen found quite inconvenient. It was, he was fond of saying, a modern blight upon the service, quite unnecessary for the efficient supervision and running of a methodical police force. An amateur chef who liked to interrupt case meetings with his latest recipe, he often compared operations of all kinds to the preparation of a meal. Too much seasoning, too many ingredients, too much forethought only went to spoil the dish, hiding the principal element, disguising it with fripperies. It was like making curry out of fresh blubber. Or dowsing salted winter lamb in a drizzle of French herbs. The point was lost, the heart of the matter camouflaged in needless complexity. The people of the Faroes were simple folk at heart, Rasmussen frequently declared. That innocent lack of complexity and clutter was both their strength and the basis of their island character. To treat the men and women of even sophisticated Tórshavn as if they were the boulevardiers of Copenhagen or Oslo was to misread their unique disposition, unspoiled as it was by cosmopolitan and international airs.
This was a fond lecture of his, frequently delivered. Højgaard had learned long ago to nod and agree with such advice, before thanking the man for his sagacity.
Today, though, he was not going to hear it. Events on the island across the water had reduced Rasmussen to near despair. He was aghast at the news from Djevulsfjord, a place he’d visited once only in his fifty-eight years and found not to his taste in the least.
‘Tell me this again, Aksel,’ he begged after Højgaard ran through his version of events. ‘I can scarce believe it.’
After the second recounting he said, simply, ‘Jesus.’ Then pulled a bottle of the local akvavit out of his desk and poured himself half a plastic cup. The strong aromas of caraway and cardamom wafted across the room. Højgaard declined to join him on the grounds he was driving.
‘And who,’ Rasmussen asked, ‘would dare to stop you if you weaved around the road a little on your way home? I’m not ignorant of your reputation and your power around there. Still …’ He swigged at the clear liquid. ‘If you so wish …’
The matter of the dead Jónas Mikkelsen had, Rasmussen declared, disturbed him more than any case in all his thirty-four years with the Faroes police. To Højgaard’s inner amusement, he’d looked ready to throw up when he was faced with the morgue photos of the savage injuries to the young boy. Even without the grisly proof of Benjamin Mikkelsen’s handiwork, the very idea of what had happened seemed fundamentally upsetting to him, like a tear in the steady, quiet life of the island.
Murder was so alien he had never encountered it in his entire career, since both the distant killings of years before had fallen to another officer. Even instances of serious assaults were rare, and usually involved drink, a fractious foreigner or both. The news Højgaard had to import was, he declared, ‘just plain wrong’.
‘Nevertheless,’ the superintendent had to point out, ‘that is the news. And we must deal with it.’
‘No. You must, Aksel. More up your street than mine. I can’t … I can’t begin …’
It wasn’t just that the culprit was a twelve-year-old child, albeit one from a deprived background in a remote village few ever thought about let alone visited. A good part of Rasmussen’s concern was somewhat broader and decidedly less emotional. It had to do with public relations and something he talked about obsessively from time to time: image. It was bad enough that the islands were getting a vile press from foreigners for the grind with all the accompanying blood and slaughter, a rite they failed to understand both from a practical point of view and a cultural one. If the media were to latch onto a salacious tale about child fratricide in the normally quiet islands the few flights to the little airport in Sørvágur would be full of inquisitive foreign journalists. Reporters. Rasmussen hated them. They never looked for the good in life, only the bad. Every last one would wish to dump ignominy and hatred on the little nation in the North Atlantic, a distant, solitary country that was happy if it managed to avoid publicity altogether.
‘I want this matter dealt with,’ he ordered. ‘Killed. Silenced. The only bloody foreigners who are welcome here are the ones who spend their krónur then bugger off. Tourists or businessmen we don’t want them hanging round long, certainly not if they’re hacks sniffing round for dirt to dig. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Perfectly,’ the superintendent replied. And if the small search efforts were to bear fruit and find young Benjamin Mikkelsen alive?
Rasmussen’s face creased into an unpleasant snarl and he muttered a low and uncharacteristic curse.
‘What am I supposed to do with the boy?’ Højgaard asked. ‘What do you recommend?’
‘I recommend you get the murderous little thug out from under our noses immediately,’ Rasmussen pointed out in a rising falsetto. ‘We have no institution on the Faroes to care for homicidal children. How could we? Why should we? Such creatures have never before existed. Bloody Djevulsfjord …’
‘Not that we know of, sir …’
‘This is the Faroes. We’re not that kind of people. Ship the little sod off to Denmark. Or Norway. They have experience of that kind of monster. Not us. Ye gods!’
‘If we find him. The hills are endless. The weather will close in before long. For my own way of thinking …’
Rasmussen waited, fiddling with the shiny buttons on his uniform, then, when he could wait no longer, asked, ‘Your own way of thinking …’
‘I have a feeling … an instinct … We won’t see the child again.’
‘Let us hope you’re correct. I know that sounds a terrible thing to say …’
‘I doubt any on Djevulsfjord would disagree with you there. They are … practical people. Perhaps it’s the place. The fact they’ve nothing but the boats and the fishing to sustain them and that not so much these days. They’re not in the habit of chasing after lost causes. Better to bury the dead and get on with things.’
Rasmussen looked shocked by that and said something about the wickedness of some of the wilder places in Vágar and beyond.
‘Not that there’s anything the likes of us can do about it,’ he added. ‘We’re police officers not moral guardians. If their priests and their own consciences can’t point out what’s right and what’s wrong they should not expect the likes of us to do it for them.’
‘Perfectly put,’ Højgaard agreed.
‘This funeral? Tomorrow you say?’
‘It will be.’
‘Not an hour too soon. Get the mite in the ground. Tell the family to keep their traps shut. I will deal with the local rags. We’ll bury Jónas Mikkelsen tout suite and make sure he stays that way. Agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ Højgaard said and got to his feet.
‘If I never hear of that blasted place again I’ll feel all the better for it, Aksel. I won’t be sitting in this chair much beyond Christmas, you know. There’ll be a successor. The seat is largely in my gift.’
He walked to the door, opened it and held out his hand.
‘A quiet life is all I ask. You will do your best to deliver that, won’t you? It will be in both our interests.’
A message came in on Højgaard’s phone. It was from the two men who’d spent the day trudging the heights of Árnafjall. While Rasmussen watched and listened he called back. There was, they said, no sign of Benjamin Mikkelsen anywhere. One more hour he ordered. Then they were to go home and await instructions.
‘Very good,’ Rasmussen said when he was off the phone. ‘We have better things to do than chase a wayward child across the fells of Vágar.’
Outside, as Højgaard walked off to his car, there was a second phone call, one he’d been half expecting. It was from Ryberg. The priest, it seemed, was worried.
Inga Dam’s cottage was, unlike its owner, quite fetching. The interior timber walls were painted a range of pastel shades all variations on the ocean’s blue. Photographs of animals, mostly threatened ones, Elsebeth thought, were everywhere. Gentle music, some kind of Nordic folk instrumental, was playing in the background. By the windows of the front studio stood a massive marble slab half-worked, the surface covered in chisel marks, the floor around littered with stone shards and dust.
‘What’s it going to be?’ she asked since it was impossible to tell from the shape.
The sour look on the woman’s face told her this was the wrong question.
‘What it is now. A piece of stone. Only different. What do you think?’
Elsebeth blinked and told herself to maintain an even temper, hard as that might turn out.
‘May I sit down? May we hope to have some kind of reasonable conversation even if it may never be described as amicable? I didn’t come here for an argument.’
‘Then why?’
‘For … illumination. On both our parts perhaps.’
She sniffed at that, muttered something Elsebeth couldn’t hear, then ordered her to take a seat by the long window and vanished into the kitchen. A few minutes later she returned with two cups of a herbal tea, the scent exotic, quite unlike anything Elsebeth had ever known.
‘It’s unusual …’
‘Forget about the tea. Small talk. I don’t do it.’ She nodded at the ocean. Her short red hair was dusty from working on the marble, just like her fingers. She didn’t seem to notice or if she did to care. ‘There are pods out there. You see them? Free and wild those blackfish are. If your husband and those monsters in Djevulsfjord get their way it won’t be long before they’re stripped and bloody carcasses on the beach.’
Stay calm, she told herself. Do not rise to the bait.
‘A young boy’s missing. His brother’s been found dead. I think they have matters other than fishing to occupy them at the moment.’
Inga Dam sipped at her tea and said, ‘Violence breeds violence. Blood breeds blood.’
‘Is the life of a poor child not more important than that of a poor dumb whale?’
The woman held her mug very tightly and stared at her in astonishment.
‘Of course not. The blackfish choose nothing but to swim in the ocean. We are sentient beings. Rational supposedly. We make ourselves this way. Those children were raised by parents in that damned place round the bay. Not that a soul in Tórshavn cares what goes on behind Árnafjall, do they?’
‘Those boys did not choose to be born there, Inga.’
It was time to address this woman by her first name, whether she liked it or not.
‘True … Elsebeth.’
Djevulsfjord had been left to find its own way in the world. And if the world could come to understand what that way was …
Then what? Elsebeth wondered. Who cared about the lives of a handful of fisher folk in a little hamlet quite remote from everyday life even in Sørvágur? Who, in the busy world, had the time? Or the reason?
‘My husband was handed the job of district sheriff because his heart problems were deemed too serious to allow him to continue working for the Tórshavn police. He didn’t ask for it. I am starting to think he doesn’t want it. Baldur Ganting—’
‘The Gantings …’
At the mention of the name the mug went down. Inga Dam picked up a chisel and hacked off a chunk of white marble. Angrily. With force.
Elsebeth didn’t follow.
‘Baldur seems a decent man,’ she said. ‘A sad man. A man made by difficult circumstances I dare say. A hard life. Losing his son Kaspar. Now his grandson and the other lad missing.’
Inga Dam just stared at her, nothing on her pale face that Elsebeth could read.
‘Ganting virtually forced Tristan to try his hand in the grind,’ she went on. ‘He didn’t want it and he won’t do that again. Nevertheless his job is district sheriff and he will try to do it honestly. That’s how my husband is. I worry about his health so the last thing I want is someone entering our house and leaving unnecessary … vile threats for him to find. I …’
She couldn’t go on. The very thought of it was making her too angry for words.
The chisel struck the stone again. Clumsily this time. Inga Dam missed the intended point and the blade shifted round, caught her near the wrist. She yelped with pain. A splash of blood marked the pure white marble.
‘That needs washing. And dressing,’ Elsebeth said immediately and got to her feet.
‘You’ll be a nurse now, will you?’ Inga Dam spat at her clutching the wound, quick tears in her eyes. It looked long and deep.
