Devil's Fjord, page 23
A hearse. That was the name for the long black car that had rumbled out of the tunnel, Jónas in a box at the back. He remembered now. They’d had one when Grangran Ganting died and got put in the ground. One when Great Grandpa went the same way he guessed though he was too young to remember that.
‘Too stupid more like, goat,’ he found himself saying in Jónas’s guttural growl.
The voice had been following him round ever since the Lundi Cliffs. Sometimes it got so loud he had to stop and stuff grass in his ears until it went away.
‘I can stop that working too, big brother,’ it said.
Which was, Benjamin thought, true. The voice wasn’t Jónas. It was him thinking that way. Wondering if maybe his kid brother’s personality, or what remained of it inside his head, might wake up, alive and come and take possession of him somehow. There’d been stories like that they’d got told by the fire on long winter nights when the television wasn’t working and all they had to mess around with was books and their own imaginations. Ghostly tales, scary ones he’d listen to while Grandpa recited them. About demons and monsters and things that came out of the sky and the sea. Djevulsfjord had plenty of stories. Jónas used to make them up at night, lying on the top bunk in the shed. At least he thought they were made up. Sometimes they weren’t about monsters at all. They were about people, ones Benjamin knew, and he wasn’t sure whether they were real or not because they involved things, grown-up stuff he’d kind of heard about but didn’t really understand.
You do know what they do in bed, don’t you? When a man sticks it in a woman? When she start yelping like Mam does from time to time?
No, he didn’t. And he wasn’t sure he believed Jónas when he told him. There were so many stories, and some of them weren’t about what happened beneath the blankets either. Some were about whaling knives and blood and people getting killed. Except stories had endings and Jónas never did that with some of them. He just teased and taunted.
Then when Benjamin said, ‘What? You mean that?’ He’d say, ‘None of your business, goat. You’re too stupid to understand. I deal with the shit round here, me and Kaspar. You keep your dumb nose out of our business.’
Then Uncle Kaspar was gone and that was another time the long black car came with a shiny box in the back and people standing round a hole in the brown earth by the church, all sad faces saying nothing much at all.
He’d asked questions then as well and just got told to shut up by everyone.
Too stupid Benjamin Mikkelsen. Not your fault you was born with half a brain but the half that’s still left ought to be smart enough to tell you when to keep quiet.
Jónas said that quite a lot.
‘But you’re dead, brother,’ Benjamin whispered. ‘Not me.’
Dead and buried soon.
Thinking about that made his eyes sting again.
Flowers. There were always flowers around funerals.
He wiped his runny nose with the sleeve of his jumper. He was well filthy now and must have had the most awful stink about him after sleeping rough all this time. Two nights was the most he’d spent out on the fells before, and that always with Jónas and Kaspar along because Mam wouldn’t let him out on his own. Now he almost seemed to be living there, nicking food, picking wild berries, drinking the icy fresh mountain water. Peeing and crapping where he felt like.
‘Can’t live there forever, goat,’ Jónas-not-Jónas said. ‘Too thick and too scared for that.’
Flowers.
He sniffed away the snotty nose again then walked over to the patch of ragwort soaking wet from the fog and began to rip more blooms from their thin, sparse stalks.
What happened in the church Alba Mikkelsen didn’t really know. That thirty or forty minutes – she wasn’t sure how long it lasted – possessed the filmy unreality of dream, with no possibility one would ever wake from its listless, grasping clutches. The canned organ crackling out of the tinny speakers, the lethargic singing, Lars Ryberg saying his part in a bored, fixed drone as if he were reading a letter from the government, not a rite for the dead. Her father sobbing and trying to hide it, smelling of meat in the one threadbare suit he owned. Silas bent over in his wheelchair, eyes on the worn stone floor, lost to everything. And her mother locked in silent grief, unable to do much at all except stand when she was asked and mouth the words from the book.
There was no eulogy. Jónas, she imagined, would have hated one. Only a brief sermon from the priest. Something about how life was never fair, the small world of Djevulsfjord only a transitory illusion between a temporal existence and the next. The kingdom of a god she couldn’t imagine, any more than Jónas would. He’d have snorted at his own funeral, laughed and grown bored, slunk out the side door into the fog and the graveyard, mischief or worse on his mind.
You are not in that box, she thought. It’s just a broken sack of bones.
The real Jónas vanished into the hills for some reason with his big brother after jabbing a knife at the new district sheriff. Though there had to be more to it than that.
Alba turned away from the altar and the shiny coffin and scanned the pews behind her. All the faces she’d grown up with. None of them weeping except the sheriff’s wife, a stranger, whose eyes were tight on hers as she looked.
The music got louder. Ryberg said something about faith and trust and perseverance. Another hymn, the last one.
When the talk and the singing ended, three pallbearers from the undertakers marched in, glanced at her father until he worked out why and stood up.
Silas began sobbing out loud then, moaning about how he wanted to do it.
‘Can’t,’ Alba said, getting up and putting a hand on his shoulder just for a second. ‘Can you, Silas?’
Not a word came back, just the same dark hatred in his eyes she’d seen since the summer before when she briefly fled to the ferries, a fleeting moment of freedom that was never going to last.
The coffin was on their backs. Four men, one of them her father. Jónas was only a little lad. Two of them could have managed it.
Outside the fog was lifting. Through the mist she could make out the shape of Ryberg’s house across the fields and the low forms of the animals grazing by the path along the way.
Footsteps moving through damp grass.
Voices, low and saying things she didn’t want to hear.
Funerals. She didn’t know what they were for really. You never said goodbye to a child of your own. They lived inside you, nagging, whispering, taunting you if they were Jónas, saying, ‘How did this happen then, Mam? Where were you when I came out of that puffin hide, knife in my guts, rolling down the Lundi Cliffs to the rocks where Dad was, not that he helped either?’
The pall-bearers slowly lowered the coffin onto the grass by the gaping rectangle in the soil. Dad let go first. Put his sleeve to his eyes. Her mother went to throw her arms around him. While Alba stood there all alone, mind somewhere else entirely.
All around them were the headstones of the Djevulsfjord dead. The same names over the centuries. Ganting and Mikkelsen. Joensen and Poulsen, not that there were so many of them left after the young ones fled to Tórshavn for work that didn’t involve the cold and wet and boats. Thomsen, too, but only on the fancier graves that looked like little church steeples. Even when they were nothing more than dust that lot wanted to lord it over everyone, liked to show they had the money.
And Kaspar.
She had so many memories of her brother, growing up together in the same bedroom of the timber cottage down the road. Not something she’d wish on anyone else. Girls and boys deserved their privacy.
Kaspar.
His hair was blond, his face nothing like Dad’s. He had strong arms though and when it came to the grind he was always the first out on the strand, knife in hand, ready to spear a lance by the first blowhole.
Him and Jónas were thick as thieves. Silas used to watch them, forever gloomy and jealous at their closeness.
They were burying Jónas next to his grave. Which seemed kind of right.
More words from the priest. Then the people around her, all anxious to get this over with, began to walk away from the churchyard, back through the chilly mist to home.
When a big man died in Djevulsfjord, a fisherman, a skipper, they had a wake with beer and even a bit of singing now again. But not for a kid, and certainly not for Jónas.
A hand took her arm and she found herself face-to-face with Dorotea Thomsen. The last person she wanted to see.
‘You’re bearing up very well, Alba. I must say I admire that.’
Her husband, George, was lurking next to her, silent, shifty, embarrassed.
‘What am I supposed to do? Shout and scream and weep?’
‘Some would.’
‘Well …’ There was a purpose for this. There had to be. ‘What do you want?’
‘Father Ryberg asked if I’d have a word with you.’
‘Did he?’
‘Busy man. Said he couldn’t do it himself. Seems he needs you to go up to the manse. There’s paperwork to be done. Records to be filled out.’
‘You mean he wants his money?’
‘Oh, poppet.’ Dorotea stroked her cheek. ‘Don’t be so callous. Of course he doesn’t. We’ve seen to that. Haven’t we, George?’
Her man shuffled on his feet. Shiny shoes. Town shoes, too polished and new to fit in here.
‘All taken care of, Alba,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry yourself.’
‘A relative’s got to sign things off when someone dies,’ Dorotea cut in. ‘Best do it now. Get it out of the way. Then tomorrow we go back to normal.’
Normal.
What was that? How did it feel? Was there some way of telling it from anything else?
‘Alright,’ she said and nothing more.
NINETEEN
Not long after the burial ended with a few, unemotional words from Father Ryberg, the grey fog that had hung around Djevulsfjord all day was gone. It was almost as if the dour, silent nexus of grief around the cemetery had somehow repelled it. A child’s coffin was in the cold, dark ground, two burly sextons brought in from Sørvágur to shovel earth upon the pale pine lid. Alba Mikkelsen had watched every spadeful take him from her, no tears in her eyes, only bafflement and fury.
The Gantings, Baldur and Eydna, had stood beside her lost for words then, after one last, brief hug between mother and daughter, they shuffled off. Still Alba stayed there, staring at the brown earth and the flowers strewn upon it.
Elsebeth Haraldsen tried to talk to the woman since no one else did. She merely listened to her well-meant pleasantries and said, ‘Thank you. I have to see the priest now.’ Then went back to staring at the grave. And so the Haraldsens gave up.
Not a word had passed between her and Silas Mikkelsen in the wheelchair. Elsebeth, keen-eyed as ever, saw this and wondered if the two would ever speak to one another again.
‘Come, husband,’ she said to Haraldsen. ‘Let’s go home and I will make cocoa. There’s a chill out here.’
‘Cocoa,’ he repeated and she knew from the look on his face he was immediately associating the word with his black pyjamas. They were both praying for night to fall, for this long strange day to come to an end. And as always when one begged this of the hours they would fail to obey with a stubborn determination.
Hanna Olsen was waiting by the rickety cemetery gate. Aksel Højgaard breezed over and nodded at the three of them.
‘It’s good we were here,’ he said. ‘It shows the rest of us care.’
The young policewoman didn’t look quite right.
‘My brother was in Djevulsfjord. I have proof of it. A photograph of him down by the harbour, near the Ganting’s boat.’
He seemed unmoved.
‘Hardly the time to speak of this, is it?’
‘Did you know?’ she demanded. ‘After I reported him missing—’
‘Your brother was a criminal,’ Højgaard cut in. ‘He flagged up on our system as a serious risk.’
A pause then. They waited.
‘We found no sign of him.’
‘Kristian Djurhuus was killed,’ Haraldsen told him. ‘Kaspar Ganting died …’
The glazed look in the superintendent’s face told them he was already tired of this conversation.
‘Don’t overcomplicate matters, man. Accidents both. It was a grim summer in Djevulsfjord. I’d hoped they’d be spared more tragedy this year.’ He looked genuinely aggrieved at that moment. ‘I’m sorry, Hanna. I’m sorry I don’t have more to tell you. But that’s the truth. We looked. We found nothing. If he came here then he must have travelled through so briefly no one ever noticed. Visitors often do. Hikers. Walkers.’ He shrugged. ‘What more can I say?’
He pointed to the ambulance men wheeling Silas Mikkelsen back to their vehicle.
‘I’m going back to Tórshavn. I thought I’d see Mikkelsen to the hospital. Least we can do.’ He stared at her. ‘Go home. You seem unduly upset.’
‘I just watched a child buried.’
‘We’re police. We need to keep our distance. Tomorrow …’ He was thinking. ‘Tomorrow take a look around the hills. See if there’s any trace of the brother. I rather doubt …’
He didn’t go on.
‘Where do I meet the rest of the team?’ she asked.
‘You don’t. It’s just you.’
Then he was gone.
‘We will help, Hanna,’ Haraldsen said immediately.
She was staring at the grey-green expanse of Árnafjall, a vast and empty landscape that could consume anyone, young or old.
‘It’s hopeless,’ Hanna Olsen muttered. ‘Everything is. We’re lost here. Outsiders all of us.’
‘Højgaard’s right for once,’ Haraldsen told her. ‘Best go home. Sleep on it. We’ll talk tomorrow.’
Still she didn’t move.
‘Søren came here. If he left … where did he go?’ She shrugged. ‘I know. Back to Copenhagen. Or somewhere else. Back to his old ways. His old friends. And forgot all about me. His family.’
‘It’s possible,’ Elsebeth suggested.
‘And that’s the best I have to hope for?’
They had no answer. So they said their goodbyes until the morning and the Haraldsens walked home. Neither went near the meat shed from which a distinct odour of blood and meat was leaking. But Haraldsen dealt with the chickens and the remaining three sheep as best he could.
Cocoa was waiting on the table when he came in. It was five by then and the sun had finally defeated the haze, emerging harsh and bright over the blue split of the fjord, the grey teeth of the Skerries, and the endless verdant fells around them.
‘There were no eggs,’ he said as he sat down. ‘Taken again, I think.’
Alba walked the fields around the cemetery, staring up at Árnafjall, calling Benji’s name. Wondering if this was what it was like to go mad, to wander round like a crazed woman bellowing at nothing, hearing nothing in return.
Benji. Benji. Benji.
Silas gone for good, the boy was all she had left. Apart from her parents and that wasn’t enough.
Benji.
To hell with it, she thought, as she rounded the low hill back to the priest’s house. To hell with everything.
One son vanished. The other in the ground. Now some tedious paperwork to be gone through as if Jónas wasn’t properly dead without it.
She dawdled all the way to Ryberg’s front path thinking she’d rather be spending time skivvying for Dorotea Thomsen than dealing with the dry, sly priest. The front door was ajar. She knocked and walked straight in. There was a small suitcase at the foot of the stairs and a smell about the place, not unpleasant. Aftershave or cologne. She didn’t think priests wore them much.
‘Father …?’
Downstairs was empty but as she walked inside the small and frugal kitchen she thought she saw a shape flit past the window in the jungle that was the vegetable garden out back. The priest before loved that little patch. Ryberg, a man who preferred begging food from others to growing it, never bothered with the place.
‘Father …?’
He’d never be out there. Ryberg wasn’t an outdoors man.
‘Dorotea Thomsen said I was to come …’
‘Wait on me!’ yelled a voice from upstairs.
Why not? I wait on everyone else.
The front windows gave out onto the cemetery. It was empty now. The sextons must have finished their work and returned to Sørvágur. The path of fresh brown earth that marked her son’s grave stood out among the leaning headstones and the grassy mounds. Soon the busy grass and weeds of Djevulsfjord would plant their seeds and roots in that as well. By Christmas – Christmas without her boys, there was a thought – the last home of Jónas Mikkelsen would be much like the resting places of those around him. Two centuries some of them had been there, not that time mattered to the dead.
‘Alba.’
Ryberg’s voice made her jump. He’d come down the stairs so quietly she’d never even heard and now he was as close as the man had ever been. Too close. She stepped back into the living room. He followed, dogging every step.
‘You look different, Father.’
He did too. Baggy new jeans, a checked cowboy shirt, brown boots that were probably new.
‘Your face …’
He grinned and stroked his cheeks. They were pink and marked by a few razor cuts but entirely lacking the full salt and pepper beard that for her had been the man before. Now he looked … human. Frail. Like everyone else. The face beneath the whiskers seemed that of another man. Worldly. A little avaricious perhaps. Wanting something she recognized.
‘I decided to leave this hole,’ he said, taking a step towards her. His eyes fell on the old sofa behind them. Once again she thought she saw someone flit past the window. ‘Leave Djevulsfjord forever. Just some … ends to tidy up beforehand.’
‘Paperwork. To do with Jónas …?’
‘No.’ His hand went to her neck, his fingers closed round her throat. Then, as if he was scared too, he touched her hair, pulled on it gently for a moment. ‘No, Alba. Not that. Just something I’m owed.’
