Devil's Fjord, page 21
Haraldsen muttered something she couldn’t interpret.
Elsebeth glared at him.
‘I am tired of being in the dark, Tristan. I’ve shown you what I know. Proof Hanna’s brother was here. I’ve told you what I learned from Inga Dam about your predecessor. We have never hidden matters from one another …’
‘You don’t need to say it—’
‘But …’
‘Hanna?’
The policewoman got Haraldsen’s message, stood up and grabbed her jacket.
‘I’m supposed to be on duty,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait outside if you need me. There are calls I can make.’
When she was gone Elsebeth took her husband’s hand.
‘Thank you for breakfast—’
‘I could have killed you last night. And here you are going on about food.’
It occurred to her that marriages did not always thrive on frankness. What was left unsaid was sometimes as important as confidences shared. They had spent most of their adult lives together, happily too. But was it possible a part of that contentment lay in keeping one’s private thoughts hidden at times? When Haraldsen was tempted to be impulsive she was usually inclined to allow it, unless the limits of common sense were about to be breached. Equally she was, at times, a little too cautious, to the point of being excessively faint-hearted. Not that he would mention it, just get on with things behind her back and overlook her surprise if the results became known.
It had to be said.
‘We’ve never much argued, Tristan, have we?’
‘Happily, no,’ he agreed.
‘Perhaps we should have. Perhaps we allowed matters to remain silent when they deserved an airing.’
He smiled and in that shy, small expression she saw the nervous young man who had first asked her onto the floor at that dance in Tórshavn, a distant place in a distant time.
‘The time has come,’ she said, ‘for us to be candid with one another.’
He tapped the pipe on the desk as if it still contained tobacco.
‘Tórshavn wasn’t so bad, was it?’
‘Not at all. I will happily go back there. With you.’
‘Except we’re both as quietly stubborn as a pair of timid mules,’ Haraldsen added. ‘We must find Benjamin Mikkelsen first. We must try to understand what happened to him and his brother. And his uncle too. And my predecessor, Kristian Djurhuus.’
She was puzzled he’d stopped there so she waited. But still he didn’t go on.
‘And …?’ she asked.
‘And?’
‘And young Hanna Olsen’s brother, of course. You can see how cut up she is by his disappearance. Perhaps it is coincidence. Perhaps this is all a set of strange coincidences. The fellow just happened through and moved on elsewhere. But we must ask, Tristan. Mustn’t we?’
His eyes strayed to the laptop. Then she understood. They had been seeking answers already. That, as much as the picture of Søren she’d shown them, was the cause of Hanna Olsen’s tears.
They sat there in silence until a voice from behind sounded, loud and firm.
‘I will tell Elsebeth,’ Hanna announced, returning to pull up a third chair at the table. ‘If you are finished with your private talk. I didn’t listen to that. Rest assured. But I assumed this would come round to me in the end.’
SEVENTEEN
The boy thought he knew this world, every path, every stone, every cave and crevice in which to hide. But the fog had descended overnight while he slept dry and quite warm beneath a covering of bracken in the mouth of a narrow gallery carved into the side of Árnafjall not far from the tunnel. Now it was hard to discern what was just a few feet in front of his face.
It had taken him a while to find his way back to the plot behind the cottage that belonged to the district sheriff. But the chicken coop there was sufficiently far from the house for him to sneak in without being heard. That morning, thanks to the mist, everything was even easier. Benjamin had crept through the grey-white cloud, opened the coop gate, wandered inside the hen house, picked up the bird nearest the door. Its feathers were warm and had that same delightful smell he remembered from Grandpa’s place. Two eggs there. He took them, snuck out to the lee of the mountain by the tunnel, cracked them one by one and swallowed each raw.
‘Jónas,’ Benjamin Mikkelsen murmured to himself, thinking about his dead brother, ‘I never did no stealing with you. Watched though. Watched plenty while you nicked things. And the rest.’
The taste he’d got used to now, so much he was beginning to like it. You could live off eggs like this for ages, that and water scooped from clean puddles on the hills. Sleep in the caves beneath warm bracken.
The clot of the last yolk was still raw and snotty at the back of his throat. He thought about that for a moment and nearly gagged.
‘Didn’t need you anyway, brother,’ Benji said, his voice muffled by the thick damp cloud. ‘Don’t need no one now. Not even Mam.’
‘Then why’d you sneak back into the shed and leave them flowers, stupid?’
It wasn’t Jónas talking. He knew that. At least he felt pretty sure. It was another part of him arguing back, the way the devil whispered in your ear. The grim-faced priest with his horrible beard had warned them all of that, time and time again. Djevulsfjord. Devil’s Fjord. It didn’t get that name by accident.
‘Why’d you take that money on the table then, goat? If you ain’t no thief—’
‘To stop him having it! You listening?’
Course not. It wasn’t Jónas. Just a voice in his head.
‘And anyway,’ the devil who sounded just like him added, ‘autumn’s coming and winter then. And a twelve-year-old idiot ain’t living on these hills alone in all that rain and muck and snow.’
‘I’ll find Mam when I want to,’ Benji whispered and felt something stinging in his eyes. The fog. It had to be.
There was the sound of an engine somewhere near. He closed his eyes, told himself not to be so stupid as to talk to his brother. Who was dead. Benji knew that. Knew what dead meant and what came after.
The sound. Growing up in Djevulsfjord he’d heard them all. The rattle of an outboard on a dinghy spotting a shoal off the Skerries. The deep, warm rumble of Grandpa Ganting’s boat the Alberta, a proper ship that went further and caught real fish, big fish that sold for more if only they could find them.
Other sounds too. Bedroom noises from Mam and Dad’s room in the timber cottage Silas had inherited by the sand spit along from the harbour. Sometimes happy. Sometimes not. Sometimes halfway in between and those he couldn’t comprehend at all even though Jónas seemed to and always had a wink and a pinch to go with them.
Sometimes they happened while Dad wasn’t at home and Mam kept the door all closed and locked, telling the kids to get the bloody hell out of there, play on the beach, make Dorotea Thomsen’s life a misery, try to con a few coins out of any tourists stupid enough to think Djevulsfjord was a place worth visiting.
Noises.
He knew this one now. It was a vehicle, not a car, something larger, coming along the tunnel, its engine slow and echoing against the walls.
Benji swallowed down the last of the raw egg, edged along the slope and perched behind a rock, unseen to them all but close enough to see through the fog. There’d been a commotion here the night before. Screams and later the blue light of a doctor’s car. That hadn’t stopped at the sheriff’s house long. So either someone croaked or they weren’t sick at all.
Little enough traffic came through the tunnel most days. The buses, the school transport, a few cars and vans. Never seen a convoy.
Curious and a little frightened he watched. First out was a police car, all marked up, the hatchet-faced officer all the village hated and feared, Højgaard, at the wheel. By his side was what looked like a large bunch of flowers set in a circle. It took Benji a moment to work out what that was: a wreath. And then a longer moment to put two and two together and realize what it might be for.
The next thing to come through was an ambulance, one that had windows on the side, and through them he could see a face that was pale and bleak, blind to everything by the looks of it.
‘Dad,’ he whispered.
One more thing left. He just knew it.
Little heart pumping, damp, cold fingers clinging to the rock hoping it would hide him, Benjamin Mikkelsen worked his way round closer, determined to see.
The vehicle that appeared like a ghost through the grey mist was not quite a car, not quite a van. Long and black with open windows behind, two men in dark clothes, serious-looking sorts, the kind you got in hospitals or prisons he imagined, were seated blank-faced in the front.
Behind them, perched atop shiny silver railings, was a pale and shiny box, more flowers on it. Not many.
Jónas never liked flowers. Never liked anything really except causing mischief. Which he was so good at in the end it took his life.
The fog was really stinging now and the taste of the raw egg at the back of his throat had turned vile.
Benjamin stumbled back to the hillside, caught his foot on a stone, tripped up, fell headlong onto the damp grass, threw up there, all slime and mountain water spewing out of him in a warm and noisome stream.
He didn’t know how long it took him to come round. To get his head back after a fashion. But when he did he looked around and saw where he’d fetched up. It was a patch of ragwort, just like the flowers he’d found for Mam the time he’d snuck back home the day before and took the money from the table. For safe-keeping that was all.
Fingers cold and shaking he began to pick them.
They were burying Jónas. His brother.
‘Burying both of us, goat,’ said the voice in his head.
The three of them sat in front of the laptop screen not knowing what to say. Here in words and pictures, signatures on police reports, photographs of crime scenes, witness statements, forensic diagrams, medical reports and phone records, was a picture of Hanna Olsen’s younger brother. The face on Inga Dam’s wall, smiling by the harbour in Djevulsfjord as if he was about to become part of Baldur Ganting’s crew. A handsome, strong fellow by the looks of it though the mugshots depicted someone else, a scowling thug, hard eyes on the camera, burly arms scarred with loud tattoos.
Haraldsen, like Elsebeth, was an only child so the idea of siblings was somewhat foreign to them both. Nevertheless he thought it understandable that a sister would see her own brother differently to the rest of the world. But quite so much? Even if they meandered apart, in the slow drift that happened when their parents separated, or so she claimed.
But then Hanna had said many things. And now he didn’t know quite what to believe.
Frankness, he thought. That was a promise to his wife, one that could not be broken.
‘I didn’t say this when we chanced upon these records, Hanna. You seemed too upset. When we spoke yesterday you told me your brother was a troubled young man. A decent lad who fell in with bad company in that hippie, druggie place they have in Copenhagen. Well …’
The document on the screen was a court record from Copenhagen, four years before. It told of the arrest and conviction of Søren Olsen on a charge of attempted murder. The details were so unsavoury Haraldsen found himself shivering as he read them, unable to connect the picture of the man painted here with the quiet, decent young policewoman they had come to know.
‘He seems to have fallen very far,’ Elsebeth whispered, following every line as he ran down the report. ‘And with great enthusiasm.’
According to the document Søren was the ringleader of a drugs and prostitution gang in the city. They’d begun a vendetta with a rival outfit. A fight had ensued in which he’d come within a whisker of stabbing a man to death. Only the swiftness and professionalism of the Copenhagen medical service had saved the individual’s life, and Søren from a manslaughter charge.
‘Three years,’ Haraldsen said with a shake of his head. ‘All that and he gets three years …’
‘He got more than that,’ Hanna replied with a bitterness she didn’t care to disguise. ‘That was what he served.’ Her tone lightened a little. ‘What he was allowed to serve after I spoke up for him. Probation too offered to help him, along with others. Rehabilitation. A life away from Copenhagen. It was the city. The people. If he could only escape …’
‘Not him?’ Elsebeth asked.
The comment hit home.
‘Do you not think we’re made as much by the places we find ourselves? As much as we’re created by ourselves?’ Hanna replied. ‘More so for the damaged, and Søren was damaged. No fault of his own. I shouldn’t need to remind you both of this. Here. In Djevulsfjord.’
‘Your brother almost murdered a man,’ Elsebeth said.
‘When he might have died himself if he’d done nothing! The issue of self-defence …’
An argument was starting. That was the last thing Tristan Haraldsen wanted. He let the two women go to and fro for a little while then grabbed back the laptop and rattled the keys again.
‘You’re missing the point,’ he said when they paused briefly for breath.
‘We are?’ demanded Elsebeth.
‘Søren was sufficient a criminal for the records people in Tórshavn to pull his records when he was reported missing. And then …’ He typed in Søren’s name again. There really was just this one file. ‘Then nothing. Nothing. It’s like Kristian Djurhuus. Almost as if he didn’t exist. Do you think they looked for him at all?’
It was a practical question for two practical women who were not so different in temperament.
‘They must have done something,’ Elsebeth declared. ‘A man goes missing. A foreigner, it doesn’t matter a jot. If Hanna here reported him—’
‘I did,’ Hanna said. ‘And Aksel Højgaard knows about his case. He taunted me with it.’
‘What?’ Haraldsen asked.
‘It was as if it was a joke. He said they looked into Søren’s visit and found nothing. As far as he’s concerned he passed through and then went elsewhere.’
Haraldsen closed the laptop. It was all too depressing.
‘Perhaps he’s right. And we find ghosts at every turn. Benjamin Mikkelsen is out there, still alive as far as anyone knows. We must see his brother buried then find that boy and—’
Hanna reached for Elsebeth’s phone and stared at the photo there. Her brother was wearing a hoodie, blue and white, with a logo on it.
‘Football,’ she said. ‘He got crazy about it when he moved to Copenhagen. Went to every match he could.’ She put the phone down. ‘Went crazy about lots of things.’
There was a hammering on the door.
‘Haraldsen!’ It was Baldur Ganting’s booming voice. ‘I am come about the sheep.’
The fog seemed paler and less dense. Enough that it was obvious enough what the man was carrying: a set of knives.
‘Baldur,’ Haraldsen said, quite worried, ‘are you alright, man?’
‘Fine talk from a fellow who mows his roof in his nightclothes. Those sheep of yours …’
Hanna asked for Elsebeth’s phone, found the photo of Søren and stepped forward to show it.
‘What is this?’ he asked. His voice was strange and that wasn’t just the fog distorting it. Something had happened to Baldur Ganting. The events of the last few days, the funeral in a few hours … ‘Why are you showing me a picture of my dead son? I got enough on my plate already. A grandson still out on the fells and no one’s finding him in this weather. Why?’
‘The other man here,’ Hanna asked. ‘This one.’
He peered at the photo, shook his head and asked, ‘Who’s he?’
‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ she replied.
Again he seemed befuddled.
‘A tourist or someone. I don’t recall. One day last summer. The visitors find their way here. Walk round from Selkie, from Sørvágur some of them the mad fools.’
‘He was my brother,’ Hanna said. ‘No one’s seen him since.’
‘What?’
‘No one’s seen him since.’
‘The sheep …’
‘I am asking a question, Baldur Ganting! I am a police officer here and I may take you into custody if I feel like it.’
‘Hanna …’ Elsebeth placed a hand on her arm. ‘Please.’
‘They know something! All these bastards in Djevulsfjord. They know something and keep it to themselves. My brother …’
To their relief and perhaps hers Hanna Olsen’s police phone rang at that moment. Just the sound of it seemed to make her recall who she was, why she was there.
‘I know, Højgaard,’ she said, a little flustered. ‘No I’m not at the church. Something came up.’
A loud and angry voice was audible from the phone as she held it from her ear. Then she announced in a low, hurt voice she had to go, embarrassed by the outburst.
‘The sheep …’ Ganting repeated as she left.
‘Not now, Baldur,’ Elsebeth said.
‘Now is the only time we have.’ He lifted the knives and screeched one blade against the other. ‘This weather is talking to us. Saying autumn is coming sooner than any of us thought. You got to kill and bleed those animals and salt them for the winter. Otherwise they’re no use …’
A butcher, Haraldsen told him. He’d take them to a butcher in Sørvágur as he’d said already.
Ganting seemed to take this as a personal slight.
‘We don’t go giving them people work and money when we don’t need to! They’re robbers for folks like us. I can get one of your beasts slaughtered in that little house of yours right now, hung up to bleed then salt her myself when she’s dried.’ He stood up very straight as if to make himself appear more serious. ‘The rest I’ll do later. Here’s the bargain, Haraldsen. You got four sheep. I do all the work and provide the salt in return for one of them.’
‘Not now!’ Elsebeth cried.
He hesitated and for a second they thought they’d won. But then, voice cracking, he said, ‘I got no boat. No money. No beasts of my own save the chickens. A lifetime of debt owed to the Thomsens. I need a sheep to salt for winter mutton else God knows what … God knows … You cannot come and live here if you don’t have the guts to kill a thing from time to time.’
