Devil's Fjord, page 4
And here he was trying to kill an adolescent whale, failing miserably.
Ganting had led him to the nearest, a young specimen, moving sluggishly on the gritty sand, water spurting from its blowhole as it thrashed around, struggling to return to the sea. The Djevulsfjord man, as comfortable with the grind as it was possible to be, placed his hook in the blowhole and held the young whale tight on the shingle, beckoning Haraldsen to deliver the coup de grâce with his lance.
‘Now, man,’ he said. ‘Now! One swift blow. A hand behind the spout. Strike hard, strike deep. You’ll feel the spine stop your blade. Then push and snap it.’
The sounds around him – the dying wails of the pod falling on the beach, the men there, concerned the job would be done swiftly and without fuss – made his head spin. Haraldsen, not a weak man, gripped the spinal lance with both hands then tried to fix the point to the back of the blowhole as Ganting indicated.
He pushed but the spear sliced hard to one side through the creature’s shining black skin and seemed to enter nothing but flesh that gave and gave. The poor whale screamed. There was no other word for it. And Baldur Ganting swore.
‘You’re hurting the thing, Haraldsen. Put the creature out of its misery …’
‘I’m trying, aren’t I?’ the district sheriff cried. ‘I never asked for this …’
‘You want your meat but cannot pay the price to get it?’
‘I’m a town man. I told you …’
‘Strike! Strike right this time. Strike firm and stay centre for the spine.’
Another blow. The point slithered on the stricken whale’s torn and bloody skin, fell to the side once more and punctured nothing but tissue, soft and yielding.
‘Ach!’ Ganting bellowed. ‘I’ll not allow this pitiful blackfish such agonies.’
He reached over, pulled the spear from the little whale’s body, positioned the point between the two wounds Haraldsen had inflicted then raised his arms to gain some force and stabbed down with a brute, determined might.
‘Dammit,’ he grunted then took out his long knife. ‘I have to use this now, Haraldsen! You see? Only in extremis under the regulations, not for cruelty …’
‘Ja, ja,’ Haraldsen told him. ‘On with it, will you?’
The knife cut through skin, through blubber, through meat. The smell of blood and flesh mingled with the salt of the ocean. Gulls flapped overhead, made frantic by the slaughter. Ganting’s sharp blade sliced straight to the spine and severed it. Haraldsen watched as the little whale shuddered once, a spasm running through its whole body, then was still.
Blood from the severed artery began to spurt from the wounds. Gout after livid, pouring gout. He stood back and watched, gorge rising.
‘Is it gone?’
All around him the whales were dying. Most more quickly than his, though with no less blood. That final tremor through the long, black, beautiful body seemed to mark the end.
‘Ja,’ Ganting answered and left it at that.
‘And if I may go back to the shore now …’
‘There’s work to do,’ the man in the bloody yellow fisherman’s suit snapped at him. ‘No time for banter. If you can assist then do so. If not …’
A moment he thought about this. Then Tristan Haraldsen trudged out of the bloody water, through the crowd, to stand on the crimson beach in the midst of strangers, wondering where Elsebeth might be.
He glanced to his right. There were two boys there. Brothers he’d seen round the harbour before. The taller, stooped one stood silent, scared he thought, watching the younger wade knee-deep into the scarlet water with a whaling knife tight in his right hand. There the kid launched himself at another beached whale, a little one still wheezing on the pebbles, ignored at that moment by the busy men struggling to cope with the larger creatures.
Haraldsen could scarcely believe his eyes. The lad looked furious, stabbing at the whale himself with nothing more than a knife, slashing deep cuts into its flanks. Which would have been illegal in an adult, and was doubly wrong for a child.
‘Stop!’ he shouted.
He placed the lad now. A tyke who lived in a hut by the fishing sheds. The kid had begged some money not long before, in return for ‘watching over’ his motor caravan. He’d paid for ease of mind, not wishing to stir things with the locals.
Haraldsen looked again and felt once more a little sick. The boy wasn’t trying to sever the stricken whale’s spine at all. He was slashing wildly at its side, to hurt the poor thing. Red livid stripes, torn skin and blubber down to flesh, were appearing with each strike. If anyone else noticed they seemed too busy to care.
He waded back into the water, found the wild boy, gripped his shoulder and ordered him to cease this very instant.
It was as if Haraldsen wasn’t even there.
‘I said stop, child!’ he yelled and reached out to grab the kid’s arm as it came back for one more strike.
In that instant the boy looked at him with more hatred and malevolence in his dark young eyes than Tristan Haraldsen had witnessed in any creature, young or old.
A crude swear word and the blade came up. Haraldsen staggered back to the shore, clutching at his cheek. When he took away his fingers there was blood on them, and behind the familiar sting of a wound.
His cry of pain was heard. Someone came close. Then a familiar voice. Elsebeth. Through his shock Haraldsen could see she was with the policewoman, Hanna Olsen. Both of them stared at him, aghast.
‘What happened?’ Hanna asked.
‘The boy … the boy …’ He looked around. The child was gone, and so was his brother. ‘I saw him stabbing the poor whale. And then he cut me …’
‘Two of them?’ the policewoman asked, professional in an instant. ‘Like brothers?’
‘From that shack,’ he agreed pointing to the wooden lean-to by the boat sheds.
‘Jónas Mikkelsen,’ she said with a sudden viciousness. ‘That little bastard’s gone too far this time …’
Someone shouted, pointing to the fell-path to the Lundi Cliffs. Two small shapes there running up the zig-zag way.
‘I’ll fetch that little monster,’ Hanna swore. ‘Where’s their mother when you want her?’
‘No.’ Haraldsen’s arm came out to stop her. Elsebeth was removing a plaster from her bag. ‘It’s just a cut, isn’t it?’
‘You won’t need stitches, Tristan,’ his wife agreed, checking the wound.
‘And you’re off duty, Hanna. I’ve made a big enough fool of myself today.’
He glanced at the water. The sea was so red it was as if someone had emptied the arteries of the world into this little stretch of water down from the Djevulsfjord quay.
Baldur Ganting came striding out of the scummy surf towards them, his face like thunder.
‘I want no more trouble—’ Haraldsen began.
‘Was it that grandson of mine did this?’ Ganting demanded.
‘Grandson …?’
‘Ja,’ Hanna Olsen broke in. ‘It was, Baldur. I have asked you to control him so many times.’
‘If his mother and father can’t how shall I? But I’ll tan the little bugger’s hide when I catch him. I promise you that …’
‘Not for me!’ Haraldsen pleaded. Then more softly, ‘Not for me.’
He told them what he saw. The boy slashing dreadfully at the dying whale. The fury and madness in his face.
Elsebeth came and placed the plaster on Haraldsen’s cheek.
‘Let’s approach this with care,’ he went on. ‘Patiently. The child’s not well. I could see that. He’s a boy. The bad’s not born with him. It comes from somewhere. A sickness. Let’s not be rash.’
‘You’re a gentle type,’ Ganting told him. ‘I should have recognized that from the outset. Not forced you into the hunt as I did.’ He took off his seaman’s cap with bloodied hands. ‘I apologize.’
Haraldsen nodded.
‘And I should have refused when I could. I accept your apology if you’ll take mine.’
Two hands stained with whale gore met.
‘You’re an odd one to have in Djevulsfjord,’ Ganting declared with a puzzled shake of his head.
‘Ja,’ Elsebeth said. ‘But he’s an odd one anywhere if I’m honest.’
Haraldsen looked along at the bloody shoreline. Every whale seemed dead now. Perhaps embarrassed by this brief commotion the men and women with their knives were starting to look at the corpses on the shingle and measure out their skinns.
‘Let’s find those lads, wherever they’ve gone. Then we deal with this calmly, in good time, at our leisure and theirs.’
‘A gentle, kindly man,’ Ganting granted. ‘But I’ll go along with that. Let me get their father first. And their mother too if Dorotea Thomsen will excuse her from the kitchen.’
Haraldsen shielded his eyes against the sun and tried to catch those two little figures on the winding path to the cliffs where the puffin were trapped.
There was nothing there now. No sign of them at all.
Can’t be far away, he thought to himself, unaware how wrong he would be.
THREE
Just before seven, dusk began to fall like an ink stain seeping out of a sky that seemed to stretch forever. Within the space of an hour the Northern Lights emerged, casting their eerie, garish spectrum on the men spreading out to march across the many twisting paths on the Lundi Cliffs all the way to Selkie Bay. Faint at first, a hazy green streak like the contrail of a celestial airliner or the sweep of a giant child’s luminescent paint brush, the Lights stood over them all, majestic, distant, cold. But as night made its tentative descent the colours became more marked and the vault above the still and silent world more lurid. Icy blue sheets seemed to spread from just above the horizon to the very pinnacle of the firmament. Then a crimson stretch emerged behind them, a cruel reflection of the bloody water now leaching away on the Djevulsfjord strand.
High on the fell-path, criss-crossing the hillside yet again, Tristan and Elsebeth Haraldsen found themselves looking back to the bay. The stripped carcasses of dead whales lay half-sunk in the sea, ghostly white skeletons in the odd light, as if a museum had cast its natural history collection of bones upon the strand. The tide was coming in. Some of the corpses would vanish into the fjord as it retreated. Others would have to be cleared in the morning. The island had no predators to speak of, no foxes or wolves or wild cats. Only brown rats or dogs on the loose would be gnawing the last of the meat and blubber off the skeletal remains. Forty-nine blackfish, Haraldsen remembered. He was the district sheriff. They had to tell him that.
‘Tristan,’ his wife gasped as they came to a breathless halt at the top of a narrow and clearly little-used path back to the height of the cliffs. ‘Stop. Please.’
‘There must be somewhere we haven’t looked,’ he said.
She stood in front of him and folded her arms. The curious lights, green and blue and red, coloured the face he’d loved for thirty years, ever since they first met at that dance in distant worldly Tórshavn. The policewoman, Hanna Olsen, had accompanied them for part of their journey that evening before being called away to take a message from headquarters. At one point, trying to make conversation as the stars began to dot the sky, she’d asked how long the two of them had been married.
Without thinking, Haraldsen had answered, ‘Forever.’ And happy to be so, he’d added before she took his blurted-out statement the wrong way. There was a kind of logic behind the words too. He didn’t really remember the time before Elsebeth. Back then he’d only been half a man. It was only meeting her, marrying her, feeling the warmth of her presence in his life, that he’d finally felt himself something close to whole.
‘We’re on our own. Half-lost, and were one of us to stumble or twist an ankle God knows what the other would do. Now.’ She said this with her arms folded which was always a sign. ‘We go down that hill. Don’t we?’
There was no point in fighting a battle that was already lost.
‘If you say so, my dear …’
The search parties were growing larger by the hour. Men and women from villages through the tunnel. Police officers, on duty and off, called in by Hanna Olsen, among them, Aksel Højgaard. He and Haraldsen had been colleagues, not quite friends in the police where Højgaard worked as a superintendent with responsibility for Vágar, Djevulsfjord included.
Haraldsen should have guessed he would have turned out. The man was always curious, always looking to be a part of everything that went on. So it was hardly a surprise that they found him there at the foot of the path, with Ganting, Hanna Olsen and the boys’ father, talking by the harbour. Haraldsen was so exhausted after the long, strange day, he simply stared at his familiar face as if it was that of an intruder from a world they’d left behind.
‘Tristan,’ Højgaard said with a nod to Elsebeth too.
‘How did you get here?’ Haraldsen wondered.
He was a quiet, introverted chap who rarely smiled. About forty, tall, stiff-backed like a soldier, ambitious, a little cold, with a craggy face the women in the office deemed most handsome, almost like a TV actor. Not that there seemed much competition.
‘This is my patch, you know. I heard Officer Olsen put out a call on the radio.’
He looked up and down the cliffs in a way that suggested he was no stranger to the wilds of Djevulsfjord. Højgaard was a bachelor and had found his way into the bedrooms of a good number of Tórshavn ladies before he moved to Vágar, or so gossip had it. Not a man to be tied down.
‘Two boys missing in wild countryside,’ he added. ‘It’s scarcely a rare event out here.’ He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one. ‘The mother says Jónas has stayed away from home a bit of late, you know. Out on the hills. The weather’s good for September. There’s no reason to believe they’re in some kind of peril.’
‘This is enough,’ his wife said. ‘Tristan shouldn’t be exposed to this kind of strain. His heart …’
‘Don’t start, dear,’ Haraldsen insisted.
‘We’re going home.’
‘You may as well,’ Baldur Ganting said. ‘The lads will sleep out then slink back when they’re hungry. As Højgaard says. It’s not the first time. When I was their age I’d go out for nights on end on those fells. Part of growing up.’
Silas Mikkelsen, the boys’ father, was on the phone to someone on the cliffs. Their mother, Alba, had gone off with one of the other search parties scouting around the area near the tunnel.
‘How can I go home?’ Haraldsen asked. ‘This is my fault.’
Silas Mikkelsen finished his call and stared at him, his face narrow, sad, resigned in the odd evening light.
‘No one blames you, man. We know these hills and pathways. You don’t.’
‘Those lads are always a handful,’ Ganting added then popped a slug of snus under his top lip. ‘Jónas especially. He cut you …’
Haraldsen tore the plaster from his cheek. The wound didn’t even bleed.
‘It was a scratch. He’s a child. I want to—’
‘Go home,’ Ganting repeated, in the tone that Elsebeth had used earlier, one that brooked no argument.
Hanna Olsen was watching.
‘I think that’s a good idea, Tristan,’ the policewoman said.
‘And how long will you look?’ he wondered.
Aksel Højgaard’s eyes strayed to the cliff edge.
‘We’ll have people out here as long as the light lasts. Another hour or two. After that we resume in the morning when it’s safe. Your first grind today. It went well?’
‘It did,’ Ganting cut in before Haraldsen could object. ‘Very well indeed.’
Højgaard nodded.
‘Good. You’re here to look after the fishing when it happens, Tristan. Back in Tórshavn you sat behind a desk. Scouring these hills is a job for local men and those of us in the police.’ He frowned and Haraldsen realized: he was a good-looking fellow. He could see why the women liked to look at him. There was an air of solitariness about him, of mystery too. ‘The boys will doubtless turn up in the morning all shame-faced and sorry for themselves.’
‘I’ll tan their bloody hides when I get hold of them,’ Silas Mikkelsen grumbled.
Ganting, his father-in-law, stayed silent. There was a gloomy cast in his features Haraldsen found worrying. That and the fact the mother was absent entirely, clearly determined to be nowhere near her husband.
But he did as they said anyway. Taking Elsebeth’s hand, Haraldsen walked with her down the zig-zag path, back to the little cottage where he’d begun that day mowing the roof in his black pyjamas, thinking then how lovely this land was, how it appeared destined to be a paradise for the years ahead.
Lights were on in the village. Some, it seemed, had shunned the search parties to deal with their skinns. At the back of the Thomsen house the illumination seemed the greatest. Dorotea would be working there, Haraldsen imagined, driving on the small group of hired workers to handle the mountain of meat and blubber they’d soon be selling throughout the Faroes. Their own two per cent part of it probably. He’d declined every piece, insisting the meat go back into the communal pot for general distribution, much to the disgust of some of the locals who’d heard.
On a normal grind this would have been a time for celebration. He’d seen this briefly before when they travelled outside Tórshavn. Every door would be open, passers-by, complete strangers even, invited into the kitchen for fresh boiled whale flesh and beer.
