‘I never meant to do real harm. None of us did. Surely?’

  ‘We didn’t,’ Højgaard agreed. ‘And what harm there was … it wasn’t to anyone that mattered, was it?’

  ‘That little bastard Jónas … he was the devil himself. The Mikkelsens. The Gantings. Jesus …’

  Højgaard was silent again.

  ‘What are you thinking now?’ the priest asked.

  ‘I am thinking of you, Lars. The man you must leave behind. His story. The narrative I will require to explain your disappearance. What fiction you invent when we get you out of here … that’s yours to make.’

  ‘I’ll send a postcard,’ Ryberg grunted.

  Højgaard gripped him hard by the collar. The glass fell from Ryberg’s fingers and shattered on the tiled fireplace next to the sooty ash from the papers he’d been burning.

  ‘Don’t think of that for a moment. If I hear from you again it will not be in your best interests. Now …’ He nodded at the stairs. ‘Go and find your case. The things you want to take with you. After that …’

  He smiled.

  ‘After that … what?’

  ‘We need to talk about the funeral. It will be your last. You should make it special.’

  The priest thought for a second then nodded and shuffled off for the stairs.

  Aksel Højgaard watched him go. He’d always liked the capstan seat. It was as well that Lars Ryberg had never got rid of the thing.

  Bending down to look at the side he could see that the heavy sisal rope was real. Nothing attached it to the centre except a loose knot, easily freed.

  Højgaard unrolled the thick cord loop by loop and wound it round his arm. There were footsteps across the creaky floor above him.

  The papers in the fireplace were ashes, records of christenings and funerals and other such trivia he imagined, most of it of no relevance at all. Among the blackened leaves stood the sooty poker Ryberg had been using. It looked as if it might have been fashioned from an ancient whaling spear.

  He took it and liked the way the thing hung neatly in his hand.

  There weren’t so many fish trays. The job would be done in twenty minutes. Dorotea watched all the time, arms folded, smug by the door, while her husband retired upstairs where the sound of radio music soon drifted out to the dank courtyard behind their house. This was, Alba understood, not about cleaning a few fish trays at all. It concerned cementing the relationship between them. Dorotea saying: before you simply owed me, now you’re mine.

  They were all peasants in Djevulsfjord anyway, beholden to the Thomsens the way folk in the village always had been. Alba had simply made the unexacting transition from serf to slave. All on the basis of a forged signature she could never deny because she was Alba Mikkelsen and the vicious woman watching her was right: no one would believe the estranged wife of a poor fisherman over the moneyed lady from the mansion.

  ‘Done,’ she said when the last blue plastic box was wiped clean.

  It was a statement. Not a question. Even slaves knew when to say no.

  ‘You got a big day tomorrow, Alba. Like I said. Don’t need to turn up here. I’m no tyrant. You can catch up on your hours at the weekend.’

  ‘Too kind,’ she grumbled, then stowed the mop and the clothes and the disinfectant in the outside shed and walked out without another word.

  The afternoon bus was just leaving for Tórshavn, stopping at Sørvágur along the way. When she was a kid she’d liked to sit in the fields with the black-and-white sheep outside the airport watching the planes come and go, wondering what the world was like beyond the grey-green landscape of Vágar. Once the school had organized a trip to Copenhagen and for a while she’d thought she’d be on it. Flying like the sea birds. But then Dad said they didn’t have money for the fare. So she stayed behind, the only pupil left in the classroom with Mrs Blak, a kindly woman who came from Jutland originally and didn’t seem to understand much about Vágar at all. Anyway, the child Alba had thought, if she was a bird at all it was a puffin, fated to flutter along the Lundi Cliffs on her little parrot wings until someone with their fleyging net, Silas or her dad or Kaspar, came and swept her out of the sky, down to the cold, hard earth. Then did anything they liked.

  What looked like the car belonging to Højgaard was parked up by the priest’s house. The rest of the village seemed deserted. It was that time of the afternoon. People were either out shopping in Sørvágur, tending their sheep, maybe braving the sea in a boat looking for a shoal, or just idling.

  ‘I will find you, Benjamin,’ she said to herself as she strode back to the shed where the three of them had lived inharmoniously since Silas kicked them out. ‘One way or another I will find you and we’ll leave this place together. We’ll have a life. I promise. I …’

  The door to the ramshackle hut was open. That was odd. She never locked it but she always shut it surely, even when her mind was in a flap after Dorotea Thomsen’s incessant bullying.

  Alba walked in and knew straight away what to look for. The money on the table. The two hundred krónur placed there like a set of handcuffs chaining her to the Thomsens seemingly forever.

  It was gone, of course. Some bugger had stolen their way into her shack and nicked it. She stared at the empty space it left and spat and cursed and tore her hair. Thought of running up the road to the priest’s house and finding Superintendent Højgaard. Yelling at him until he did something. But what?

  No one stole from other people in Djevulsfjord. It was unthinkable. Everyone knew everyone. You’d be able to see the guilt written in their familiar faces.

  So … who?

  She sniffed. She wiped away the tears. There was a smell in the room as well. A human one. Sweat and body odour. Something else too, a fragrance that was half-familiar.

  Alba looked around. What she saw there was so unexpected it took her a while to realize, to accept, it was the source. She got up and walked to the bunk bed where the boys had slept, Jónas on the top as he’d demanded, his tall, ungainly brother at the bottom. The smell of them, sweat and the rest, was still on the threadbare sheets and thin wool blankets. On the mattress of the upper bed there was a bouquet. Clumsily made, a circle of Lady’s Mantle, dark green leaves, pale green flowers, with a bunch of rose-pink ragged robin in the centre, the star-like flowers already shedding their spiky petals on the thin, worn sheet.

  A wreath gathered on the wild hills from Árnafjall. She knew that straight away. They’d grown up with these flowers as children. Picked them for their parents for birthdays in the summer. Pressed their petals into books to stare at in the long dark days of winter, reminders that the sun would come again.

  ‘Oh, Benji,’ she whispered, the tears starting to flow in a flood down her cheeks. ‘Why come here and run, boy? Why? Just stay …’

  The shack was at the end of the harbour landing. He must have sneaked in from the cliffs unseen then vanished.

  Around the room she ran, shouting it, bellowing as loud as her lungs would let her.

  Benji, Benji. Just stay …

  Her voice echoed off the dusty timbers, the tiny, grimy windows out onto the yard and the deserted harbour beyond. She ran to the door, looked round, saw no one. Raced to the cobbles by the harbour, looked back at the hills. Just green and grey and empty like they usually were.

  ‘Just come to your mum,’ Alba Mikkelsen whispered. ‘For God’s sake …’

  Back inside she sat at the empty table, wondering what he might do with the money. Two hundred krónur he couldn’t know how to spend, even if there was some place to use it.

  FIFTEEN

  Five strides into the Árnafjall tunnel and the place was cold, so black Elsebeth Haraldsen’s eyes hurt from the effort of trying to pierce the gloom. She fumbled for her phone and, after a few futile efforts, managed to turn on the torch app. It cast a white light ahead of her, weak, barely a beam and all it revealed was the green algae on the walls and the black tarred road. A few steps forward and she began to meet the detritus: cans of beer and soft drinks, a burger wrapper, crisp packets, a dead bird, and cigarettes, lots of cigarettes. Another dead bird. Then the sound of something scurrying away in front of her. Something small but not so small. She knew her fauna of the islands, they all did. No rabbits, they’d all been destroyed. No cats, the same since they wrought such damage on the birds. A brown rat or a mouse or a hare that liked the dark. They were the only three wild mammals that managed to survive the climate and the hunts.

  ‘A rat,’ she said out loud and the thing scurried away even further.

  Two more steps. The tunnel ended on the far side of the mountain half a kilometre away, hidden in shade at that hour. So the world beyond was barely visible, a circle cut in shadows, nothing more.

  Something moved and this was bigger.

  ‘Benjamin!’ she called in a voice she hoped was loud without being threatening. ‘Benjamin Mikkelsen! It’s Mrs Haraldsen here. The district sheriff’s wife. Please come out. I know you’re here!’

  She didn’t. She wasn’t sure of anything at all, whether it was wise to be going deeper into the narrow tunnel with just the puny light of the phone to pierce the dark. Then she leapt in shock, as if electrified, wondering what cold and clammy thing had touched her, fingers reaching up desperately to remove the thing from her bare neck. A drip of freezing water fell from the ceiling and ran down her right cheek.

  Some kind of plant or algae. That was all it was. Disgusting but quite innocuous.

  ‘Be sensible, Elsebeth,’ she told herself. ‘One more minute in here and then we’re done.’

  Something was moving again, too loud, too large to be anything but human.

  ‘Your mother’s worried sick about you, Benji,’ she called out. ‘We all are. What happened with your brother …’

  What do you say? What words were there?

  You didn’t kill him really. I don’t believe that even if everyone else does. The police among them.

  ‘We can put things right. But we have to talk to you. Your mum … and … Christ!’

  She didn’t like screaming. It wasn’t like her. But she couldn’t stop herself again. More freezing, stinking water had come down from above and she felt sure she heard a noise and this time there were footsteps, real and close, fast-moving.

  ‘Benji!’ she called.

  The torch showed nothing in its blue-white beam. The steps kept echoing around the narrow vein through the rock, both close, both far away, and she couldn’t begin to tell where from.

  ‘For pity’s sake child …’

  Somewhere near here Kristian Djurhuus had died, knocked off his bike by someone who never stopped. Drunk they said but left for dead. Perhaps injured, bleeding, whimpering all night long till they found nothing but a cold body in the morning, shrugged their shoulders, never came up with the vehicle that hit him.

  ‘I know you’re …’

  She could pinpoint him then. The steps were behind her, heading back to the village end of the tunnel.

  ‘Don’t run. Don’t run!’

  Elsebeth turned to follow and didn’t look behind.

  ‘Lights,’ Hanna Olsen ordered as the Ace Capri fell under the shadow of the peak then drove at a steady thirty kilometres per hour into the tunnel.

  ‘Oh.’ Haraldsen hadn’t been concentrating. His regime when driving was to take everything at a snail’s pace on the grounds that this usually allowed time and distance to correct his not infrequent mistakes. ‘Of course.’

  In truth his mind was anywhere but Vágar at that moment. He was thinking of routines and procedures in the police station in Tórshavn. How they were so fixed over the years that no one would much know how to deal with anything new or different should it come their way. Some months before he’d retired they’d had a visit from a very senior officer in the famous police headquarters in Copenhagen. A handsome, tall, rather theatrical man who’d talked of all the threats of the modern world – terrorism and money laundering, international mobsters and the smuggling of hard drugs – then waited as those assembled for the lecture asked questions.

  There were three only and all concerned his journey and how much he was appreciating the Faroes. The fellow had left not long after, scratching his head in amazement. No one had the opportunity to tell him: such things did not touch the family of green islands nestling in their corner of the cold Atlantic, or the people who lived upon them. They were apart from all the chaos and corruption of the modern world. Or thought themselves so. As to murder … the man mentioned the crime almost in passing, as if he assumed the taking of a life was a matter-of-fact occurrence for every police force around the world.

  But not in Tórshavn, and never in Vágar. At least, Haraldsen had thought with a sense of growing alarm, not that anyone knew.

  ‘Lights, Tristan!’

  God, they were already into the maw of the tunnel and he still hadn’t found the switch. There was a shriek from the left as metal met stone.

  ‘Lights!’

  He found them. The Ace Capri rolled a little then achieved some semblance of equilibrium in the centre of the narrow lane.

  ‘It is not,’ he declared for her amusement, ‘a Haraldsen vehicle if it has no scratches upon it.’

  Hanna Olsen didn’t laugh. She was thinking about her missing brother, he guessed. From their conversation earlier it was obvious this was why she came to Vágar in the first place. And now they would try to make an illicit journey into the network in Tórshavn in the hope of uncovering a little more about his fate.

  What would Elsebeth make of that? He was still aware of the coldness between them that morning. The feeling on both their parts that secrets had been kept. This was unwelcome, wrong, a subject to be dealt with frankly. Though not with a police officer around.

  ‘As agreed,’ he said, setting up a steady pace down the tunnel, ‘we will spend no more than an hour on this. If there’s something to be found that should be time enough. If—’

  ‘Tristan—’

  ‘I don’t wish to raise your hopes—’

  ‘Tristan. Your lights. They’re on dip. They should be on full beam in the tunnel.’

  ‘I was not aware I was here for driving lessons, young lady.’

  ‘Full beam!’

  Her voice was anxious and full of fear or so it seemed.

  He squinted ahead, did as she asked anyway, and turned the Ace Capri’s headlights up to full. Which was not much, if he was honest with himself. It was an old vehicle, much loved, a veteran of trekking all around the Faroes and a good part of Jutland too.

  ‘There’s someone there,’ Hanna said. ‘In the tunnel. Someone. Can’t you see?’

  ‘Benji!’ Elsebeth Haraldsen cried again then stepped out into the centre of the dark, dank vein beneath the mountain, blinking at the circle of daylight ahead. ‘Benji … stop.’

  Run, she thought. As fast as him? How could you? And whoever had been hiding in the shadows, desperate to avoid her, was surely younger, faster, more determined.

  She couldn’t help thinking of the dead district sheriff too, gasping out his final hours somewhere near. A man Inga Dam loved. A man she believed murdered though why the troubled sculptor of Selkie Bay had no idea. Though it did occur to her that perhaps the woman had more to tell than she’d revealed. Lost for what to do, Elsebeth stood close to the tunnel exit, shivering, wondering when Tristan would come back.

  ‘Mysteries …’ she murmured then heard something behind her: a familiar engine followed by the squeal of tyres on damp asphalt, the teeth-jangling scrape of metal against stone.

  When she turned the bright white lights were nearly on her, so close Elsebeth could think of nothing but to shield her eyes.

  There are monsters behind all this beauty and they will devour the innocent.

  It looked like one was here.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘Tristan?’

  Elsebeth was in bed, sprawled across the sheets, quite alone. Her head hurt. Her arm was in a sling. An annoyance, one she felt was unnecessary. She sat up, removed the stretchy fabric carefully, and rolled back her sleeves. Bruises, blue and yellow, ran down from her right shoulder to the elbow. She felt her head. A lump on the same side. The memories were coming back. Headlights in the depths of the tunnel, the screech of brakes, a sudden desperate urge to throw herself to one side which mostly worked …

  ‘Bloody hell, husband,’ she muttered, remembering those last moments and the paintwork of the Ace Capri. ‘You ran me down.’

  More images flooded back, as if somewhere in her head a valve had opened. Inga Dam in tears in her pale-blue timbered hut, talking about the dead district sheriff, marble powder running down her arms. Then the tunnel. A place, it seemed to her, that possessed some secrets. Which was why she’d entered. The smell of smoke and something else, a human stink. The sound of footsteps, running. A vague shape fleeing out into the bright daylight when she turned, not knowing a vehicle was coming from behind.

  ‘Tristan?’ she said again.

  She walked to the bedroom window and peered out. The thickest fog she’d seen in years had descended upon Djevulsfjord. It seemed to occupy the entire world beyond the glass, a grey-white brume so dense she couldn’t make out the chicken coops or the old slaughterhouse, so damp it formed a cloud of mist across the window panes. The light had that brightness about it that hinted the sun might burn through and, in the end, deliver a summer’s day. Or not. There was a saying they heard all the time in the Faroes: if you didn’t like the weather then wait five minutes for it to change. But the climate was always fickle. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it simply teased. Djevulsfjord, more than any place she’d known, seemed prone to meteorological uncertainty. The village might stay in this strange state of limbo all day.

  ‘But there’s a funeral coming,’ she whispered and just the thought made her feel down again.

  Jónas Mikkelsen’s. It was important they were there. It was important too that Benjamin, his brother, who was surely skirting the village, hiding in the tunnel, stealing eggs from time to time, was found before another tragedy occurred.

 

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