Across the field there was a sound, like timber breaking. Then a brown pall drifted over and hung around them like a feeling cloud.

  Hands flailing, trying to stop himself, Tristan Haraldsen tripped over the burning, falling door, straight into the priest’s house and a cloud of smoke, flames licking close behind it.

  His throat closed on the choking fumes, eyes streaming, trying to hold a hankie to his face as he called out Ryberg’s name.

  A cloud of crackling, swirling grey fumes and ash swirled around him like a spirit rising from the earth. Like the breath of that damned celestial pig Hildisvíni, scorching Selkie beach because a mortal had spied on his mistress.

  Maybe this was stupid. But someone had to check and he didn’t see any volunteers among the locals. One quick look then he’d retreat outside to some kind of safety and the inevitable scolding from Elsebeth.

  ‘Hello! If there’s anyone—’

  As he staggered forward, as good as blind, his right foot banged into something trapped against the staircase, and with the way his confused mind was working he couldn’t stop himself reaching down to pick it up. Haraldsen stared at the thing as the smoke whirled around him. It was a blackened, sooty poker that might have been an old whaling spear once, designed for that spot behind the blowhole he could never find. A dark, fresh liquid very like blood, sticky when he touched it, stained the arrow point. But then as the quick revulsion of that discovery set in something worse struck, swinging against him out of nowhere, so unexpected he dropped the poker as if it carried an electric shock.

  ‘What the …?’

  Yet Haraldsen knew straight away what it was that had bumped into him lurching around the fiery hallway. The clammy touch of a pair of cold and naked legs suspended from the bannister above, chilly skin dashing against his cheeks.

  ‘My God!’

  His hands went up to protect himself from whatever creature hung there down the stairs.

  ‘Elsebeth,’ he whispered, shaking with the unexpected rush of fear.

  Something snapped. He heard the crack. Then the thing came away from whatever held it, fell down like a lead weight, taking him down to the floor in its dead white arms.

  He was shrieking, wailing, trying to get the grim corpse off him. Voices came, breaking through the creaks and groans of the dying house. Hands with them, dragging him out of the burning hallway, into the light of the dying day.

  ‘Ryberg,’ he said, lying on the grass, panting as Elsebeth’s worried face hovered above him. ‘I saw him …’

  A deafening explosion rocked the hot, small world. Haraldsen cricked his neck and looked. The cottage was expiring in a rush of livid flame, the timbers collapsing from the walls like fallen bones. And a dead man was still inside, sure to be incinerated in such a blaze.

  ‘I saw …’

  Lars Ryberg swinging from a noose as he hung from the bannister. A whaling spear with blood on it. The words wouldn’t come out so he looked at his wife as she bent above him, stroking his cheek. The taste of the smoke, vile and dusty, was deep within his lungs, so bitter and black the simple thought of it started a coughing fit, and then more choking until someone, he couldn’t see who, held out a plastic bottle and Haraldsen sucked desperately at the water.

  ‘We all need to get away from here,’ a voice he recognized as Baldur Ganting said. ‘It’s not safe.’

  Strong arms came back and lifted him away from the heat and smoke, away from the dark thing he’d found inside the priest’s house.

  ‘Elsebeth.’ He took her hand as they carried him. ‘I believe …’

  When the pall of acrid smoke diminished they stopped and gently eased him onto a raised mound of grass by the path back to the cemetery. Ganting, he saw, had been doing most of the carrying. Tears were running down his whiskery cheeks.

  ‘In there …’

  ‘No getting him out before that place went up. No point either. Man was dead. Rope around his neck. We all saw that.’

  ‘There was something else—’

  ‘Never mind the dead,’ Ganting cried, and thrust out his arm back towards the church. ‘Think of the living, man. Benjamin. My grandson. See.’

  There he was, next to the graveyard gate, holding the hand of his mother, standing very stiffly, as awkward and hunched and pale as Tristan Haraldsen recalled.

  ‘The lad came back,’ Baldur Ganting said, choking down a sob. ‘I knew he would. Never mind what that damned policeman reckoned.’

  ‘We need Aksel Højgaard.’ Haraldsen shooed away Elsebeth’s tut-tuts and whines about his heart. ‘There were … strange circumstances.’

  From the Árnafjall tunnel the sound of sirens rose like the shrieks of wild birds.

  ‘Fire engine’s here from Sørvágur,’ one of the crewmen muttered. ‘Late as ever.’

  ‘Højgaard …’

  Elsebeth knelt down in front of him and stroked his face. Her fingers were stained with soot and dust when they came away.

  ‘He’ll be here soon enough,’ she said. ‘Tristan …’

  ‘No.’ He clambered to his feet, angry suddenly, and anger was an emotion that was largely foreign to him. ‘Not soon enough at all.’

  TWENTY

  Two days later Tristan Haraldsen found himself in the office of Rasmussen, the chief superintendent in Tórshavn. Aksel Højgaard sat across the table next to his superior. In all the confusion and activity after the fire Haraldsen remembered little in the way of detail. Except that Elsebeth had, of course, insisted a doctor check him over.

  The heart. The bloody heart. After an hour in an ambulance the medic had said he’d inhaled a fair bit of smoke but otherwise seemed fine. Then he was ordered home where Elsebeth plied him with tea throughout a long and difficult night. She had more discomfort from minor injuries she’d sustained in the tunnel. But she was, of course, having none of it and fussed over him needlessly for hours.

  The following day seemed quite unreal. Police teams and the fire brigade set up operations in and around Ryberg’s house. Højgaard had allowed no one near. Alba Mikkelsen apart, none but the police and social services people had been given access to the young boy who’d emerged from the fells. He, it seemed, had not spoken a word to anyone from the moment Alba found him waiting in the cemetery by Jónas’s grave.

  So, forty-eight hours after another dramatic turn of events in Djevulsfjord, Haraldsen once again knew very little indeed. Elsebeth had stayed at home, expecting a call from the policewoman, Hanna Olsen, who seemed to be kept separate from the inquiries into Ryberg for some reason. Then Rasmussen summoned him for a meeting. With all the many doubts and questions fluttering round his head Tristan Haraldsen was all too ready to accept.

  He knew the chief superintendent from the years he’d spent in the back offices of the police service. A pleasant, rather slow chap, a stickler for rules and details who hated any disturbance of his daily routine. The kind of man who regarded the job as a matter of paperwork to be processed, an activity that did not deserve to be interrupted by unpleasantness from the outside world. He was notorious for introducing discussions of food into routine meetings, so much that in some quarters of headquarters he was referred to, mostly kindly, as ‘Head Chef’.

  Events had clearly taken their toll. Now he looked older, careworn and visibly upset. He had, he said, asked for Haraldsen to be there in his position as district sheriff as a witness for interview, not that the post carried any formal weight. This seemed strange. Perhaps, Haraldsen felt, the man wanted someone there as a buffer against the forceful presence of Højgaard.

  ‘Another dreadful occurrence …’ Rasmussen shook his head in disbelief. ‘I cannot ever remember such a thing in our green and beautiful isles. A priest with such filthy secrets …’

  ‘He was a Dane,’ Højgaard pointed out. ‘Not one of ours.’

  ‘And they send such beasts to us! The man should never have left Jutland. And to put him in that damned place.’ He groaned as if the pain were personal. ‘The sooner the people in that hellhole give up the ghost and go and live in civilization the better.’

  ‘It’s their home,’ Haraldsen pointed out. ‘The few that are left.’

  Rasmussen rattled off the names of a string of abandoned villages around the islands, then pointed out that progress meant giving up on the past, not trying to breathe life into the dying. It seemed a remarkably inapposite analogy to Haraldsen and perhaps the expression on his face betrayed the fact.

  ‘I will not argue with you,’ he said. ‘Since I’m here as some kind of witness perhaps you can tell me what’s happened.’

  Højgaard nodded and made his case.

  The official police position was simple and, it seemed to Haraldsen, very difficult to contest. The day before Ryberg died Højgaard had visited the priest as a result of information that had come to light during the search for Benjamin Mikkelsen. He’d warned him that he’d been made aware of the accusations which had dogged the man in his previous parish in Jutland.

  ‘Had I understood the full implications of this I would have acted differently. I merely wished to rule him out of any involvement with the Mikkelsen children.’

  ‘No need for apologies,’ Rasmussen said with a wave of his hand. ‘I see no fault on your part. The perpetrator is responsible for the deed. No one else.’

  There, Haraldsen thought. The blame was apportioned already, and directly to the dead.

  ‘Five, six years, the man’s been in Djevulsfjord and only now you find out?’

  The superintendent stared at him.

  ‘One doesn’t normally run background checks on a parish priest. When the Mikkelsen boys went missing I had to consider the possibility that they were running from some kind of abuse. That it wasn’t just the unfortunate incident when the youngest pulled a knife on you.’

  It seemed a plausible explanation.

  ‘What did Ryberg say?’

  Højgaard shrugged.

  ‘He didn’t deny his past. He couldn’t. I had the papers. When I pressed him on the Mikkelsen boys the fellow turned quite aggressive. I had to leave it there because we were still looking for the elder brother. But …’

  There was a folder of photographs on the desk. Højgaard picked it up and spread them out. Haraldsen didn’t want to look too closely. Most were of the charred remains of the priest’s house. Blackened timbers, half of the building an open shell now exposed to the elements. Then there was a second set. The dead Ryberg, burned as well, so badly it was hard to see him as a man any more. The corpse looked more like a scorched mannequin, twisted by the heat and flames into the same kind of agonized pose one saw in the dead caught in other conflagrations or one of those poor figures from Pompeii, trapped forever in lava.

  ‘It’s clear from what forensic evidence we have,’ Højgaard continued, ‘that he’d been burning documents in the fireplace. Most of them we’ve lost. There were some pornographic magazines. And this …’

  He retrieved a photograph, the top right-hand corner blackened by fire. But the rest was clear enough. It was a naked Jónas Mikkelsen grinning on a beach, his hands in front of himself, staring at the lens.

  ‘For the sake of the boy and the family,’ the superintendent went on, ‘I haven’t shared this particular piece of evidence with them. I think they’ve suffered enough. The boy’s dead. So is his abuser. I require you do not mention this, Haraldsen.’

  ‘Tristan?’

  The chief superintendent echoed the request obediently.

  ‘Why would I? Of course not.’

  Højgaard put the photo away and picked up something else.

  ‘Ryberg had air tickets to Thailand that evening. Foreign currency. A false passport. He’d shaved off his beard. The new passport …’

  Again, a charred document came out of the folder wrapped in a plastic evidence bag.

  ‘It uses an old photo from his Jutland days.’

  ‘The beast was clearly planning to flee,’ Rasmussen observed.

  ‘So why didn’t he?’ Haraldsen asked.

  Højgaard smiled in that sly, sarcastic way he had.

  ‘I cannot speak for the dead. But I imagine it may have been because, when I visited the fellow, I told him he was to make himself available for interview the following day. That he was a person of interest and was under no circumstances to leave Djevulsfjord. That if he tried I’d stop it and I’d throw him in a cell and want to know why.’

  Haraldsen could imagine Højgaard uttering every word of that, and enjoying each syllable.

  ‘As a result of which he killed himself?’ he asked. ‘Set fire to all the evidence? Hung himself off his own banister?’

  Højgaard tidied the documents away and with them the life of Lars Ryberg.

  ‘The rope was his. It came from the house. Again …’ He glanced at Rasmussen to emphasize the point he was about to make. ‘What I say should go no further from this room. I spoke to the mother. After the funeral Alba Mikkelsen went to visit him to sign off the church records.’ Højgaard sighed. ‘Ryberg attacked her. One last victim in Djevulsfjord, I imagine. They think that way, abusers. It’s like … a count. A tally.’

  That revelation made Haraldsen catch his breath.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She saw her son through the window and found the strength to fight the bastard off. Not long after he turned to the rope. The game was up.’

  ‘Good lord …’ Rasmussen could scarcely believe it. ‘I shouldn’t say this but thank God the man took the way out he did. The foreign papers would have made a meal …’ He shook his head once more. ‘We can keep this quiet? A local tragedy, Aksel. A simple suicide. The other details … they can stay in this room. That would be for the best. I gather Ryberg has no inquisitive relatives back in Denmark.’

  ‘For the sake of all concerned we should be discreet. I agree. Haraldsen?’

  ‘I saw … I saw a spear or something. A poker. I touched it.’

  The superintendent frowned.

  ‘We found no such thing. Though in the heat of the fire who knows. It may have been destroyed. Perhaps escaped our attention …’

  ‘There was blood on it. I swear.’

  The two police officers exchanged glances and Haraldsen realized then: he had been the subject of discussion beforehand. Perhaps there was more to his being there than he first thought.

  During a long night wrecked by dreams of blood and shrieks she couldn’t source Elsebeth Haraldsen had tossed and turned so much that in the end there was nothing to do but get up, go downstairs, make herself a cup of tea and sit there in a dressing gown, at four o’clock, staring at the laptop. Wondering whether to go back to the keyboard again and hunt for yet more secrets. The thing only seemed to prompt miserable discoveries, none of which made much sense.

  Kaspar Ganting. Kristian Djurhuus. Søren Olsen. Two men dead, one missing, perhaps the same. And now the priest of the hamlet they’d chosen for their retirement. Did something connect them all? Or was Djevulsfjord simply a place that had suffered an unfortunate year?

  The hours vanished. Tristan rose and before they could talk much got the summons to Tórshavn for reasons he couldn’t fathom. She asked him, as always, how he felt, whether he’d taken his medication, and received all the pat answers in return. Seeing him choking and gasping on the ground, gagging on the smoke and fumes, outside Ryberg’s house, she’d felt the sharp pain of his mortality. It was the first time that agonizing panic had returned since the police doctors told him he was headed for early retirement on medical grounds. He was such a kind and gentle man, so unsuited for Djevulsfjord she now realized. His heart. There wasn’t a lot wrong with it, she knew. If he was sensible it would barely affect him. Yet the idea that Tristan, her Tristan, was fragile in some way disturbed her. They were each other’s rock. They deserved a quiet, loving withdrawal from the world of work, a delightful, slow, uncertain stumble from middle to old age. The picture postcard which greeted them when they first ventured through the Árnafjall tunnel seemed to promise that too. And now …

  After she watched him drive off in the battered Ace Capri, Elsebeth attempted to distract herself with more tedious household chores. Cleaning, feeding the hens, trying to avoid the judgemental stare of the three remaining sheep, all of which refused to go near the blasted shed. That had now taken on sinister connotations she found difficult to ignore.

  The laptop stayed untouched. She didn’t dare. So the morning dawdled, without news from Tórshavn. Across the hill, on the path back to the village, Ryberg’s house was just visible, a blackened wreck. Charred timbers like the skeleton of an ancient whale rose from the field by the cemetery. No smoke any more though she could still smell some of it over the fresh tang of the salt breeze rolling in from the sea.

  Just after ten her phone buzzed and she half-ran to get it, desperate for news from Tristan. Instead it was a text message from Inga Dam.

  I am in New York. Which still is not far enough away from that cursed place. If you are still there you are bigger fools than I thought.

  She didn’t like being lectured. Any more than she liked Inga Dam. So her reply was less polite than it might have been.

  Miss Dam. I do not appreciate your tone. There are mysteries here which both my husband and I feel deserve unravelling. You may choose to run if you wish. We do not. When last we spoke I was under the impression you had told me part of your story. Not the whole of it. If that is the case then now is the time to speak.

  That felt good, not that she expected an answer.

  Still it came. Just a few minutes later.

  And what if my words might harm you?

  Elsebeth’s fingers flew on the phone.

  We are not children. We do not require protection. If you have something to say then say it.

  If this were face-to-face, Elsebeth thought, I would be screaming at this woman by now. Almost immediately an answer flew back and she could see those dusty sculptor’s fingers angrily sending it her way from across the grey Atlantic.

  You seem intent on burnishing your foolishness. Oh well. From my place in Selkie I have views you never see in Djevulsfjord. I notice things.

 

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