Devil's Fjord, page 18
‘No—’
‘You saw her sign, George. Didn’t you? And let’s face it like all the Gantings she’s barely literate. No one’s going to argue.’
‘No!’ Alba cried.
‘Husband …’
George Thomsen didn’t say a word. He looked terrified. Perhaps by both of them.
‘This is a legal document,’ Dorotea told her, folding the paper and putting it into her pocket. ‘I’m doing this for your own good, Alba. I’ll see the funeral happens. I’ll get your father’s boat back in the water. You, in turn, will pay me back.’ The chuckle again. ‘For years to come. Now …’
Alba blinked. She couldn’t think of anything to say. Any way to object.
Dorotea Thomsen placed two notes on the table. Two hundred krónur. More than twice the money Alba had in her possession just then.
‘It’s for your own good. Just to prove it’s meant in good faith I’ll give you this as a signing-on bonus.’
‘Didn’t sign …’
She just smiled.
‘I know you won’t go telling stories. You’re not that daft. Who are they going to believe? You or me?’
She wanted to say it again: tomorrow I have to bury my boy. But there didn’t seem any point.
‘By way of thanks I’ve got a stack of filthy fish trays out the back of the kitchens from the grind. I’d like them washed and scrubbed clean. Can’t leave stuff like that around for long. Do that and you never get rid of the stink. Waste of money.’
She banged her clenched fist on the notes on the table.
‘Two hundred krónur, Alba. When did you last have that much in your pocket?’
‘When I was working the ferry out of Tórshavn. When I was …’
She wanted to say: happy. But it wouldn’t come.
Dorotea was smiling so hard it looked her fat face might break.
‘That worked out well, didn’t it?’ She clapped her hands. ‘No time like the present. Those trays won’t wash themselves. But take tomorrow off if you want. Like you said. Things to do.’
Inga Dam rode her motorbike the way she doubtless approached life. With a deliberate recklessness, devoid of thought for others or the consequences. Elsebeth clung on tightly from the pillion seat, arms around the woman’s waist as they took the winding path from behind Selkie up to the heights of Árnafjall. Perhaps, she thought, Inga wanted the shortest route to Djevulsfjord, one that didn’t involve the circuitous journey round the peak and through the tunnel. Or she was hoping to see something along the way. If the latter was the case they were both disappointed. There was no sign of Benjamin Mikkelsen or any search party out to find him, not by the stone puffin hides set like ancient graves along the broad path that crossed the cliffs, the tracks that led up to the cave networks beneath the mountain heights or on the pale sweep of beach before the Skerries.
Close to home, as they lurched across grass and gravel, Elsebeth’s phone buzzed and, with tenuous fingers, she managed to read the message there. It was Tristan, apologizing for his lateness and lack of communication. She was not encouraged by the unusual vagueness of his tone. Ever since the grind the little village, and their own lives, had been affected by something she failed to comprehend except that it was dark, unwelcome and malevolent. Almost as if the slaughter on the strand had somehow cursed them all, an idea she was not going to broach with the woman clutching the handlebars and twisting the throttle in front of her, since Inga Dam would, without doubt, concur.
To Elsebeth’s surprise they sped right past their little cottage, the sheep grazing at the back, chickens pecking round the wire-fenced pen. A picture of rural bliss that no longer rang quite true. She’d assumed that was where Inga was taking her, but no. Another three hundred yards and finally they were on asphalt, headed for the shady entrance to the Árnafjall tunnel, a dark place only just wide enough to take the Sørvágur bus and if you met that halfway through it was wonderful fun to have to reverse to let it past. More than half a kilometre long and she hated every second of being inside it, feeling the weight of all that rock above pressing on your head.
The bike came to a halt on a patch of mud close to the tunnel mouth. Inga Dam kicked down the stand, leaned the machine to a halt and leapt to one side, dragging her helmet off as she did so.
A car drove past. Aksel Højgaard was behind the wheel. He glanced at the pair of them, no smile, no expression on his face whatsoever.
‘The superintendent seems to have much business in Djevulsfjord,’ Elsebeth observed.
‘His own. None of any good to other folk I’d warrant.’
There were shiny tears in Inga Dam’s eyes. They must have been there all the way. Now they did look like anger.
‘Why are we here?’ Elsebeth asked when it became apparent the woman was going to say nothing more without some kind of prompting.
She strode to the entrance and stopped a couple of paces before the darkness began. Afraid to go further, Elsebeth thought. Which was curious because she doubted there were many things Inga Dam was scared of.
‘This was where they killed him. A year ago.’ She kicked a pebble into the darkness and listened to its dying echo. ‘Not long after another grind. Kristian hated those damned things. Hated everything about this place.’
‘Except you.’
That startled her.
‘Except you, Inga. I’m sorry. I assume you’re going to tell me what happened. I assume that’s why we’re here.’
The woman’s eyes stayed on the burrow through the mountain, nothing else, as she spat out her story. Elsebeth listened, not believing at first. The idea Tristan’s predecessor had been killed – accidentally or not – on their doorstep seemed incredible. Incredible too that Tristan had never even known how the man had died. That no one in Djevulsfjord had so much as mentioned it in the time they’d been here. It was as if Kristian Djurhuus had never existed, which was, Inga Dam thought, what they wished to believe.
‘They hated him,’ she went on. ‘All of them. They hated the way he made them follow the rules. How he wouldn’t turn a blind eye when they wished it. Not my Kristian. He was a good man. An honest man. A man of the world. That was why they detested him most of all. He wouldn’t do their bidding. Not like …’
She stopped, her gaze still set on the black mouth in front of them.
‘Not like Tristan, you mean?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘His job is almost a sinecure. A favour to a retiree from the civil service. All he has to do is see the grind carried out according to the rules. As far as I’m aware – as far as he is – that’s what he did. You may not like the hunt. I don’t myself. But it is legal. What else are we supposed to do?’
She came up very close, helmet in hand. There was a hardness to her, and it didn’t just come from spending her working day attacking marble with the blade of a sharpened chisel.
‘You think these people care about the law? About anything but themselves?’
‘They don’t seem to care much about young Benjamin Mikkelsen so I don’t—’
‘I was in Paris when they ran him down. I didn’t even know he was dead until I came here two weeks later. I thought … I thought Kristian had perhaps found someone else. I was barely around for him. Why shouldn’t he?’
Elsebeth held out her hand.
‘I will tell my husband what you’ve said. If we work together—’
‘Then what? Kristian’s dead and gone. That policeman Højgaard couldn’t care less. He says it was just an accident.’
‘Perhaps it was …’
There was contempt in her face at that moment and it stung.
‘He knew something. He’d found out something about this damned place. He wouldn’t tell me. I think he thought it was too … dangerous.’
Elsebeth Haraldsen felt cold at that moment. It was as if they all stood on the edge of the Lundi Cliffs like young Jónas Mikkelsen. One step forward and you began to tumble. One step back and the view ahead, which was important, perhaps vital, might disappear.
‘Come and talk to us. To me and Tristan. He’ll be home soon. That police officer, Hanna Olsen, will be with him. She’s not from here. If only—’
‘You need to leave,’ Inga Dam snapped. ‘I know this place. Too well. There are monsters behind all this beauty and they will devour the innocent. The fools. The gullible.’ She held up her hand in the shape of a gun and pretended to fire it in Elsebeth’s direction. ‘You and your husband, I fear, are all three.’
There was nothing Elsebeth Haraldsen could think of to say.
‘I’m going straight to Sørvágur. There’s a flight out to Copenhagen this evening. I will be on it. If you had any sense you’d join me …’
‘How can we?’
‘It’s simple. You do it. You’re like the rest of them here. Shackled to something you never question even when it’s a myth. A brazen, perilous lie. Well. It’s your grave. You lie in it …’
She climbed on the bike, kicked the thing to life, put her helmet on, looked once in Elsebeth’s direction, shrugged and then rode off.
Back the direction they came. Not through the tunnel which was surely the obvious way to go.
Elsebeth was not afraid of the dark. Nor of ghosts or the memory of a man she’d never known. According to Inga’s own version of events Aksel Højgaard had been adamant the previous sheriff had died in an accident, a hit-and-run, something which was rare in the Faroes but scarcely unknown.
‘I will not be frightened out of my home by anyone. Never.’
She walked to the mouth of the Árnafjall tunnel. The place was unlit. There was surely no need for anything but the headlamps of the small amount of traffic that used it. But she had her phone with her and there was a way you could use that as a torch if you wanted.
Two steps closer she took until she began to smell the narrow vein through the rock. Damp and diesel. All the same it was close to their house and someone, they assumed the lost Mikkelsen lad, had been nearby the night before, stealing eggs from their chicken coop.
Then something else stopped her and it took a moment to realize what it was.
Smoke, she thought. Tobacco. The same black leathery smell she’d met in the puffin hide on the Lundi Cliffs.
Højgaard parked his unmarked police car next to the graveyard. A meandering path led to a gate in the fence by one of the many fields the Thomsens rented out to whoever could afford them. On the other side stood the priest’s two-storey home.
He walked past a small flock of quiet, timid sheep, on into Ryberg’s small, unloved garden. A spiral of dark smoke was working its way from the chimney up towards the fading sky. The back door was open. The priest was in the downstairs living room, in front of a dying fire.
‘You took your time,’ the man complained.
‘It is my time, Lars, after all. A police officer’s got lots on his plate.’
Ryberg looked half-mad.
‘The game’s up. I’m burying the Mikkelsen brat tomorrow then I’m off.’
Højgaard took two steps into the room and looked around. Ryberg had been here for five years. The priest before him, a more friendly man, a bachelor who loved the sea and fishing, had managed almost a decade before he returned to Denmark. That one had worked on Baldur Ganting’s boat for nothing but the smallest share of the catch. So enamoured had he become of the ocean that he’d decorated this room in its honour. An old ship’s wheel sat on the wall above the fireplace. Photographs and paintings of fishing expeditions and the grind were pinned to every spare inch of space on the striped, fading purple wallpaper. Ryberg was simply too lazy to remove them. Next to a large leather armchair a small capstan had been turned into a coffee table. Around it, still intact, was a length of heavy sisal rope.
Højgaard sat down in the adjoining chair and poked the thing with his toe.
‘I’ll never understand why you didn’t redecorate this place. Put your own stamp on it. Being a bachelor I imagine—’
‘Don’t screw about now,’ the priest snarled. ‘I’ve burned everything. Papers. The lot. Nothing comes back to me if this shit gets out.’
‘Was that really necessary?’
‘Who knows? I want out of here.’
‘What?’ Højgaard snapped his fingers. ‘Just like that?’
Ryberg came away from the fire, waving his pale bony hands.
‘Yesterday I nearly had my way with the Mikkelsen girl. She didn’t much like me trying. But next time I may not take no for an answer. You want that?’
Højgaard’s face fell, so quickly Ryberg stepped back a pace.
‘Oh, Christ. You idiot.’
‘She’s been waggling that bottom of hers around this place long enough without me touching it. Why shouldn’t I enjoy what everyone else does?’
‘If you’d wanted some company you only had to ask.’ Højgaard thought about this. ‘Oh, I see. You think this is a way of shutting the door behind you. Making me give you what you want.’
‘If that little whore started to blab your bosses might wake up finally. They could pull me in. And if they do that … I talk.’ The priest winked. ‘Man of God. Not cut out for lying. There. I made your decisions for you. Get me away from this hellhole before I do something to Alba Mikkelsen that makes her run screaming to Tórshavn.’
Højgaard sighed.
‘For pity’s sake, Lars. Do you honestly think anyone in Djevulsfjord willingly calls us about anything?’
‘I believe …’
The priest fell silent as Højgaard leapt to his feet. The two were around the same height and the same build. But the superintendent was a few years younger and possessed the natural aggression of his trade.
‘It’s unwise to threaten a man like me,’ he said and jabbed a hard finger at Ryberg’s black priest’s jacket.
‘The walls are falling, Aksel! Benjamin Mikkelsen’s still out there on those hills. He knows something. He must. I can sense it.’
Højgaard laughed.
‘Best ask the man upstairs then. You’re the fellow for that.’
‘Don’t taunt me.’
The policeman nodded.
‘No. That would be wrong. Here …’
He walked to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of cheap whisky there and poured a large glass.
‘Drink up, Lars. That always helps, doesn’t it?’
‘You bastard!’
‘Drink, I said!’ He held out the glass until the priest took it in his shaking hands and with his uncertain lips gulped at the amber liquid. ‘You’re a weak man. You always were …’
‘Everyone’s weak in this hellish place except you. I want out of here. For good. No one coming after me either.’
‘Drink,’ Højgaard said more gently. ‘You’re a terrible worrier. Perhaps it goes with the job. I have everything in hand. You’ll get what’s outstanding. All debts will be honoured.’ He clapped his hands. ‘The ones you owe as well. By which I mean tomorrow. The funeral. You have to be there.’
More of the cheap booze from the garage in Sørvágur went down Ryberg’s throat.
‘Do I?’
‘If the village priest flees this place the night before a burial people will be asking questions everywhere. More so than if Alba Mikkelsen started screaming rape. The sooner that Mikkelsen kid goes in the ground the better.’
‘And when you find the brother?’
Ryberg blinked and looked at the ashes in the fireplace.
‘None of your concern.’
‘Jesus, Aksel! I’ve risked a lot for you. I could lose everything.’
‘But you won’t. Trust me, Lars.’ Højgaard took his arm in a tight and certain grip. ‘You can’t run now. After the funeral. Then …’
He smiled and fell silent.
‘You’re thinking,’ said Ryberg.
‘I’m always thinking. You want Alba Mikkelsen, don’t you?’
‘I’ve not had a woman since I took a weekend off to Aalborg. That little whore cost me plenty—’
‘Spare me the details. Tomorrow, get your things. Put them in a little case. What money you have. Passport. ID.’
The priest was looking at him like a hungry dog, waiting on food.
‘They could still come after me.’
‘They have to find you first. And Father Lars Ryberg will be gone from the face of the earth. I will organize a new you. Someone with money. A way out. A way you can start afresh.’ He squeezed Ryberg’s arm. ‘Imagine that. No Djevulsfjord. No Vágar. A new life, a new name, new opportunities somewhere a long, long way from here.’
‘Where?’
‘Where do you want?’
He thought for a second and said, ‘Bangkok.’
‘Bangkok it is,’ Højgaard replied without a moment’s hesitation.
The priest’s grey face broke with a rare smile.
‘You mean it?’
‘Every word. I never let people down. Haven’t you noticed?’
‘I knew I could rely on you,’ Ryberg said, taking Højgaard’s right hand and pumping it up and down. ‘And yourself?’
‘What about me?’
‘What will you do?’
A shrug then the policeman said, ‘Why should I do anything? You’re leaving. Fleeing they’ll say. All blame will come the way of Lars Ryberg, a man who paraded himself as a priest. A man who’s vanished from the face of the earth …’
‘I am a priest.’
‘You were. Tomorrow we’ll put an end to that nonsense.’ He reached forward and stroked Ryberg’s heavy grey bristles. The man recoiled. ‘Shave off that beard. As soon as you’ve buried that kid.’ Højgaard nodded towards the hall and the staircase. ‘Whatever money you have …’
‘I’ve hardly enough to get me to Sørvágur. I’m in hock to that Thomsen bitch.’
Højgaard groaned.
‘Dorotea Thomsen is the last thing you need worry about. Find whatever you want to take with you. Like I said, pack your passport and ID. That way I can persuade my superiors you’re travelling under your own name. We’ll make sure you’re not.’
Ryberg looked both grateful and ashamed.
