Devil's Fjord, page 28
He was the same one sitting in the ferry office when she got to the big harbour in Tórshavn and told him she’d come for a job. They didn’t ask for much by way of paperwork so that night she found herself tidying her things in a tiny cabin, barely a broom cupboard, down in the bowels of the Jutland ferry, feeling the thing sway in the harbour as trucks and cars and caravans drove on board for the thirty-six-hour journey to Hirtshals. She’d never been to Denmark. It sounded like an adventure.
The ship was the biggest she’d ever seen, with restaurants and bars and even a cinema. Not that she saw much of that because most of the next day and a half was spent sweeping up vomit and piss from the gangways and clearing out bedrooms that had been ruined along the way. By the time she got to Jutland she could barely stay awake. There was a twelve-hour turnaround. The crew boss, a decent enough man she thought, said she could sleep in her little metal hutch if she wanted.
Or, she thought, she could just walk ashore. Into a foreign country where the money was different, people, the way they spoke, the way they lived. Where she knew not a soul.
She slept and didn’t wake until she heard and felt the trucks and cars coming back on board for the return to Tórshavn.
Four hours out from Jutland the work didn’t seem too bad. The sea was calmer, the number of drunks and sick people staggering down the corridors a fraction of what it was before. The boss man said Alba had more than worked her hours on the way out so she could have a break around ten in the morning. Two hours all to herself before another long stint on the run-in to Tórshavn. They’d pay her there. She’d have decisions to face. Stay on the ferry and try to pluck up the courage to run for real. Or crawl back to Djevulsfjord, let Silas kick the shit out of her again while Benji cowered and Jónas watched and laughed.
One more trip, she thought. One more brief bout of freedom and then she’d make up her mind.
She was on the stern deck, staring at the waves, the churning wake, the blue summer sea, the perfect sky, when a hand tapped her shoulder and asked if she had a light.
His name was Søren, from Aalborg via Copenhagen. He was young, so talkative she thought he was maybe making up for lost time. Funny too, and it struck her no one laughed much back home at all. Good-looking in a battered way, with a few tattoos she didn’t like and a blue-and-white hoodie bearing the name of Copenhagen’s football club. Most of all, the thing that attracted her to him was he looked lost. He didn’t have much idea why he was going to the Faroes any more than she understood where she might run trying to escape them. They went for a coffee. Not long after they smoked a shared joint by the railings, hair blowing in the wind, the weed, the first she’d ever tried, going straight to her head. She got her phone out and took some selfies with him, promising she’d get them printed out one day. He smiled for her, a nice smile. Then he screwed up his eyes and said he was just out of jail and she was so pretty. He couldn’t remember what it was like to be with a woman. He didn’t have money but he had a hunger and maybe she did too.
They had sex in her cabin in the fifteen minutes she’d left before going back on duty. It was frantic, grunting, panting, all hard and physical and so quick and desperate on both their parts. She found she liked that, liked him, liked the idea she’d just allowed a complete stranger into her after he begged so politely, with the soft, seductive heat of weed swimming all round them. If she’d said no he’d have shrugged, smiled and said OK. Which made him different from any who’d gone before.
She’d put her uniform back on and gone back to sweeping the corridors and changing the beds, still feeling the warmth of him inside her, giggling from time to time until the dope wore off. Somewhere along the way he’d said he’d been born in Vágar, left there with his sister when they were little. She must have told him she came from Djevulsfjord, not thinking it would matter. Just that one encounter had told her something about herself. Locked together in that tiny cramped cabin, mind racing into a hot dark space she’d never visited before, Alba decided there and then she’d go back to Djevulsfjord, if only for a while. Take comfort in watching Silas go about his surly business never able to guess what had happened that time she fled. And when he came for her, that quick, grunting, passionless embrace, usually with beer on his breath, she’d imagine Søren from Jutland in his place, tease out the minutes with that enticing dream.
When the ferry docked she scuttled out before the Dane could spot her, collected her wages, hid behind the fish market buildings until the Djevulsfjord bus came.
Silas hit her. She was expecting that. Then he pushed her on the bed and loosed his trousers and she was expecting that too.
The next morning a black-and-yellow bruise was growing beneath her left eye, not that she minded because Alba now had that interior knowledge that none of them could ever share. She’d run away. Weed in her head she’d taken a stranger inside her and relished every sweating second. Maybe if she was lucky his seed would take and she’d give birth to a different kind of son to the ones they bred in the place by the Skerries.
Two days after she got back, when Silas was behaving as if nothing had changed, she went down to the harbour to take him some food as he cleaned up the boat after the grind. The district sheriff was there, a miserable old bugger called Djurhuus who everyone hated. Trying to pick holes in the grind as usual, which wasn’t hard with Silas who never could get things quite right. As she handed over the sandwiches and flasks of coffee she heard Kaspar shout out her name.
When she turned to look her brother was there too, his big arm right round the shoulders of the man she never thought she’d see again.
Breathless, speechless, she watched as the two of them walked over the cobbles towards her.
‘Hey sister,’ Kaspar cried. ‘I got a surprise. Your friend from the ferry’s come to see you. All loved up he is.’
‘Hi,’ Søren said and looked round at the men staring at him.
He was an idiot, she realized. Maybe she’d known that all along.
‘Say something,’ Kaspar urged her. ‘He’s come all this way to see you.’
Sorry, was all she could think of.
‘Can we …?’ Søren shook himself free of Kaspar’s clinging grasp. ‘Can we talk?’
No, she thought. Too late for that.
Silas looked terrified. So he did what he always did when Kaspar was in that kind of black mood. He went back on his boat and started scrubbing at the deck. Djurhuus stared at the men by the quayside, shook his head and wandered off.
‘Alba …?’ Søren looked ever more desperate then.
You know what you’ve walked into, she thought. You know there’s no turning back.
‘Let’s take a little walk,’ Kaspar said pleasantly and put his arms around Søren’s shoulders again. ‘I got something to show you up on the Lundi Cliffs. That’s best for us all, sister. Don’t you think?’
‘Suppose,’ she said and that was the last she saw of him, though the memory of that frantic few minutes when the two of them locked bodies, half-dressed and wretched in their need still came back now and again.
His seed didn’t take. Which was all for the best. They’d only have got rid of that as well.
TWENTY-THREE
In the shack that was her home, empty of Benji now, empty of everything that carried some meaning, the two of them listened, Elsebeth in tears, Hanna beyond them altogether. Alba finished her story, then asked if they’d like a cup of tea or something.
They didn’t.
‘What happened?’ Hanna asked in the end. ‘What happened to my brother?’
Alba blinked at her.
‘Are you being funny?’
For a second Elsebeth thought the woman next to her might explode. Instead she said, ‘No. Not at all.’
‘What do you think happened?’ Alba asked. ‘Kaspar chucked him off the Lundi Cliffs. Came back here and couldn’t stop boasting about it. Told Silas.’ She shook her head. ‘Told me like he was doing me a favour. I was theirs, wasn’t I? Not meant to be shared with some foreigner. They all knew. All of them. Dad was furious. He put Kaspar on a boat to Reykjavik that same night and said he wasn’t ever to come back. Silas threw me out. Called me a whore. Not that it was the first time I’d got that from him.’ She stared at Hanna. ‘Not my fault. What happened on the boat … that was there. I never asked him to come here like he was going to save me. Men. They’re all the same, every last one of them. Think they’ve got a right somehow.’
‘Where did they put—?’
Alba cackled out loud, a little mad at that moment, and the sight of her chilled them both.
‘Oh for pity’s sake. Some detective you are. There’s a grave with my brother’s headstone next to Jónas in the churchyard. Ryberg laid your brother in there while all of us watched. Except for Kaspar who was on his way to Iceland.’
She ran a finger across the table as if drawing a map on the dusty surface.
‘Never show your face here again, Dad said. Kaspar didn’t like that one little bit. Only world he knows is this dump.’
Elsebeth’s phone buzzed. There was a message on it, from Tristan’s number.
Come home immediately. You and the policewoman. I need you here.
It didn’t sound like him at all.
‘When do I get my Benji?’ Alba demanded from the table. ‘I told you about your Søren. Only fair I get something back.’
And that was it, Elsebeth realized. The only reason Alba had spoken at all. It was to plead for a bargain. Give Hanna Olsen the truth about her brother and in return pray her son might soon return.
‘You could have told me,’ Hanna said.
‘You what?’ Alba’s face wrinkled up with disbelief and bafflement. She looked old. Just like her mother, worn down by years of labour and a hard life hidden away in the fjord the devil made beside the sea. ‘No I couldn’t. And anyway … what good would that have done? He’s dead. Like my Jónas. Only got Benji left now. Think of the living ones. Think of us. Of me.’
Elsebeth showed Hanna Olsen the message on the phone.
‘I want an answer,’ Alba demanded. ‘I want to know what you’re going to do.’
‘Did Aksel Højgaard know?’ Hanna asked. ‘About my brother? About Kaspar?’
Alba shook her head. She looked scared all of a sudden. Got up and stood in front of the door, arms stretched wide to stop them.
‘I don’t know nothing about that. I don’t … you won’t get me into trouble, will you? I never hurt anyone. I never did anything. Just want my Benji. OK?’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Hanna. ‘Get out of the way please.’
‘He was a nice man, your brother. I liked him.’
‘We have to leave,’ Elsebeth told her.
As they walked off she stood on the doorstep, arms folded, hair awry, face starting to go shiny with tears.
‘Don’t you go blaming me!’ she yelled after them. ‘I never led him on. He didn’t belong here.’ Her voice cracked altogether as they rounded the corner to the lane out to the tunnel and the cottage. ‘None of you lot do.’
TWENTY-FOUR
She rode pillion on Hanna Olsen’s motorbike up the hill. The Ace Capri was in the lean-to. But the cottage was empty. Elsebeth walked all round, Hanna with her, looking for some sign of him. There was just a jacket on the coat hook and the phone on the table. His message was still on the screen when she brought it to life. Once again she thought: it doesn’t sound like Tristan.
Hanna said she needed to go outside and make some calls.
‘I wouldn’t broach this with Aksel Højgaard,’ Elsebeth cautioned. ‘Not yet. Not over the phone. Not until we know … know what to do.’
Hanna nodded and said that wasn’t what was on her mind.
‘I’m going to phone my mum and tell her we’re pretty sure Søren’s gone. We’ve thought that for ages, of course. But you always kind of keep hoping. Best I …’
She sniffed, rubbed her nose, then walked outside.
Elsebeth checked her phone again. No more messages. Nothing on the laptop.
A cup of tea for both her and Hanna Olsen would be a good idea. What they’d heard from Alba Mikkelsen required careful consideration. She wasn’t even sure it was something for Tristan’s ears once they found him. Being the kind of man he was he’d simply march straight into Højgaard’s office and demand some answers. If they weren’t forthcoming he’d attempt to talk to someone else. Yet if Alba was telling the truth then the horror of what had happened in Djevulsfjord the summer before was shared among many. Perhaps not just those in the village itself.
And there remained the question of Jónas Mikkelsen and his brother, now in some kind of protective custody, held responsible for his demise. Where did those two fit in? Was Alba perhaps correct in believing the time had come to think more of the living than the dead?
The kettle was coming slowly to the boil, the rattling, rising sound of it comforting in the way such small, domestic rituals always were.
‘Hanna?’ she said, suddenly alarmed by a noise outside.
Perhaps one of the sheep, though the creatures had never made that sort of sound before.
‘Hanna,’ she repeated, going to the door, ‘I am making us some tea. We should sit down and consider this carefully. Tristan will be back soon I’m sure. If …’
There was no one there. Hanna’s prized motorbike had fallen off its prop stand and lay on its side by the pansies that ran down the front path, her helmet spilled awkwardly beside it.
I am not afraid. I never will be.
Elsebeth Haraldsen rarely had to say that to herself. She’d walked into the Árnafjall tunnel without feeling the slightest twitch of fear. Nearly died when she did that. All the same …
‘Hanna! Tristan!’
There was the noise again and the sinking feeling in her stomach told her where it came from. The shed. The bloody slaughterhouse where they’d let Baldur Ganting butcher one of their sheep, primarily because it looked like the only way the man might regain some sanity. Much like her boiling a kettle in the kitchen, killing one of the animals was a routine domestic act, carried out by rote, in his case a small sacrifice to the hard season to come.
‘Hello …?’
There was no answer.
Elsebeth went back into the house, found the cutlery drawer in the kitchen, and took out the longest, keenest cookery knife she could find. It was an old one, well worn by years of sharpening, a gift from her parents not long after they were married and were struggling with money.
It shook in her hands as she went back outside. It continued to tremble as she walked unsteadily towards the shed.
The door was ajar. There was power inside, a light switch just by the tool rack, one so well hidden you had to feel around with your fingers to find it.
She was still struggling to manage that when she heard Tristan cry out, his voice anguished and full of fear.
‘Elsebeth! No! Run, woman. Run and—’
A blow, a punch, a groan. He was hurt.
Your heart …
She was thinking of that and that alone when the light came to dazzling life and violence turned upon her, so swift and brutal the knife fell from her hands in an instant and Elsebeth found herself swamped by strong arms, by rope and curses, fists and fury, fast feet kicking her hard to the floor.
How long the painful struggle lasted she wasn’t sure. The carcass of the sheep swung above them, dripping dark blood onto Tristan’s trousers as he sat, hands bound, beneath it, Hanna much the same next to him, though now she sported a bloody nose and a swollen eye.
‘Elsebeth …’ he began, only to be silenced by the figure marching between them. From the ground the man seemed so tall his head appeared to stretch all the way to the smoke-stained timber roof. He barged into the dead sheep scarcely noticing, muttered vile curses under his breath in that coarse accent she’d come to think was Djevulsfjord’s alone.
‘Well. What have we here?’
Kaspar Ganting. A name on a headstone in the cemetery down the way, another man buried beneath it.
‘This will do you no good,’ Hanna cried. ‘I am a police officer. I have colleagues who will come looking—’
He roared. He lashed out with his feet. She shrieked at the shock and the pain.
Elsebeth caught her husband’s eyes glittering in the shadows across the rank space between them. Tristan had no idea what to do, any more than she.
Kaspar Ganting was breathing heavily. He stank almost as much as the cold mutton rocking to and fro. Then he turned on Hanna again, fought with her jacket, found her phone, took it out and marched outside.
‘Father …’
They could all hear him. Hear both the fear and the determination in his loud, strong voice too.
‘Father … I am here. Kaspar. Your son came back. He had to.’
A pause then and Elsebeth wondered what Baldur might be saying.
‘I had been meaning to tell you.’ Kaspar Ganting’s tone had taken on the pleading whine of a child now, a bad one. ‘Were it not for that stupid little shit Jónas and all this trouble …’
Again the halt in his speech, again her head trying to imagine the response at the other end.
‘Be that as it may,’ he said eventually. ‘I am at the slaughterhouse of that idiot new sheriff. We have work to do. You are required.’
Silence then. The door opened. He walked in, tapped the sheep carcass so it started oscillating between them, a headless lump of meat covered in muslin, flies buzzing round the gore-stained fabric.
Then he pulled something from his jacket. Elsebeth stared at it and felt lost. It was a whaling knife, the kind she knew so well now, long and slightly curved, the surface etched with a pattern just visible in the harsh fluorescent light from the tube set in the roof.
‘Work,’ he repeated as he stabbed the point of the blade hard through the fabric, deep into the mutton in front of him, time and time again.
