Devils fjord, p.30
Devil's Fjord, page 30
‘They are ordinary. They are small and poor and scared.’
That shrug again.
‘The place is an anachronism. Lift the stone that covers it and all the world will see what unpalatable truths lurk beneath. You, of all people, should thank me for sparing them that. Truly. You got a glimpse of it after all.’
‘So you will ignore what happened to Søren Olsen? To Kaspar Ganting? You refuse to dig up a grave …?’
‘We don’t do that kind of thing.’
‘You will not interview Baldur Ganting and ask what became of his son?’
The man opposite laughed and shook his head. Haraldsen understood the message immediately: don’t be so naive.
‘The son is in the churchyard and has been for more than a year. There’s not a soul in Djevulsfjord who’ll tell you otherwise.’
‘You know that’s not true.’
A pause and then he said, ‘What’s true is what I say. What I report. Then it’s done with. Think of it, man. Think of the consequences. Do you want Ganting to go to jail? What might that mean for your precious little village? For Alba Mikkelsen? Who would benefit? Perhaps …’ He looked out of the window. The boats of Sørvágur were busy as always. ‘Perhaps I should ask the people there which they’d prefer. My way or yours. Which do you think they’d choose?’
A part of that, at least, was true. If Ganting went to jail, Djevulsfjord would surely suffer. So would the man behind the desk.
‘I have a proposition for you.’
That he hadn’t seen coming.
‘You? A pen-pusher? The man who failed as district sheriff? A proposition for me?’
‘I have a proposition. A bargain if you like. Elsebeth is a party to it. As is Hanna Olsen, whose brother was murdered in that place, as you well know. Nor was he alone in dying an unfortunate death.’ He paused to make sure this next was understood. ‘Not that you can lay the blame for everything at the door of Djevulsfjord. Now, can you?’
Aksel Højgaard simply gazed at him from across the desk, playing with the top of his pen.
‘I see you are listening,’ Haraldsen added. ‘That, I believe, is a start.’
In the shop, George at the counter, his wife vanished, Elsebeth reached over, took Alba’s skinny arms in her hands and looked her straight in the face.
‘This isn’t charity. Far from it. This is work. You can move into my cottage. Plenty to do there.’
Alba glanced at Hanna Olsen and asked, ‘What about Søren? Her brother? What I told you? I mean …?’
That was a question they knew would come, and hearing it was like a spell being broken. A name read out loud. Exorcized, a little anyway.
‘Søren’s dead,’ Hanna told her. ‘Nothing I can do to change that. Nothing anyone can do. Besides, that’s my business. My loss. Not yours.’
She screwed her eyes tight shut for a moment, close to tears and said, ‘I’m sorry. So sorry. I didn’t ask your brother here. You can’t fight this place. Don’t you understand?’
‘Alba.’ It was George Thomsen, his voice breaking. ‘Listen to me. You’re your own woman. Don’t belong to anyone but yourself. You’ve had enough misery in your life and all of us here added to that in our way. If you want to go off with these ladies … You have my blessing. I’ll do what I can to help. Forget that …’ He glanced at the office door. ‘Forget that woman in there. She’s not going to push you around anymore. Me neither. I should have … should have done this years ago.’
There was a touch of police in Hanna’s voice just then, hard, firm, incontestable, as she said, ‘You make this decision now or we leave you here. Now or nothing.’
‘I can’t … can’t live in a big place like that. Not on my own. Bigger than Mum and Dad’s house. I just can’t.’
They’d been expecting this.
‘Perhaps you won’t have to,’ Elsebeth said.
As he drove the battered and somewhat asthmatic motor home over to Sørvágur, Tristan Haraldsen had planned in his head what he intended to say when he sat down to face Aksel Højgaard. Everything depended upon the man’s reaction. There could be no lacunae into which the superintendent might retreat, no fault lines, no foggy uncertainties.
A narrative lay behind everything. An incomplete one he had to admit, since they had no way of asking questions of the key players. Kaspar Ganting could no longer answer to what he’d done to Hanna Olsen’s brother. Lars Ryberg hadn’t lived to confess to whatever lies he’d invented to allow Søren Olsen to occupy the space beneath the Djevulsfjord sods and a headstone carrying the name of his murderer.
Benjamin Mikkelsen had yet to say a word about what had happened on the fells, and how his brother Jónas had come to act as some kind of go-between with his uncle Kaspar and someone else, Højgaard he felt sure, not that he could prove it. But that last grim and frightening episode in the killing shed would remain with Tristan Haraldsen and his wife forever. He would, he thought, remember every word spoken there, and the way in which Kaspar Ganting blurted them out as they lay tethered, trussed, waiting to die.
And the words he’d spoken in the ruins of Ryberg’s house. Holding the damned poker fashioned out of a whaling spear.
I heard you were looking for this.
From whom? Not Baldur Ganting or anyone else he could think of in Djevulsfjord. The father’s ignorance of Kaspar’s presence in the hills was obvious from his reaction in those last moments before the two men vanished, not long before the roar of a single shotgun blast.
One other thing in the shed too, spat out by Kaspar in his desperate state.
Haraldsen folded his arms, leaned back in the chair, confident in himself now, and said, ‘I dealt with that bastard Ryberg when the man told me he was going to go pouncing on her.’
Højgaard’s eyes narrowed and he said, ‘What?’
‘You heard. That’s what Kaspar said when he wanted his father’s help killing us. What man was that, do you think, Aksel? Any ideas?’
The pen. He couldn’t stop clicking it. A rare sign of discomfort. Perhaps a small omen of hope.
‘Are you well? Elsebeth said your heart was weak. Perhaps your mind’s in much the same state too.’
‘You know what happened that night. You know what happened last year. You are the puppet master. The monarch of this realm of yours. If—’
‘I have no complaints on my desk,’ the superintendent replied, sweeping it with his hand. ‘No reports of anything. What do you speak of?’
‘We never made a complaint. Not me. Not Elsebeth. Not Hanna Olsen either. Not yet—’
‘Officer Olsen has resigned her post. I’ve let her go early. She seemed … unsuited to work around here. I believe she’s returning to Denmark.’ He frowned. ‘It’s a shame she ever left.’
‘What was the point in telling you anything?’ Haraldsen asked. ‘You’d have chucked our words in the bin. Just like Søren’s disappearance. Just like Kaspar’s supposed death on the Lundi Cliffs …’
Højgaard pointed to the clock.
‘I’m a busy man. Make this quick then go.’
‘Hanna’s brother met Alba on the Jutland ferry. He came to Djevulsfjord wanting to see her. Kaspar killed him. You helped them cover that up. To keep your precious record in Vágar clean. You were the king. There was no place for a stain upon your domain.’
The pen clicked three times in rapid succession.
‘Your evidence for this?’
‘Ryberg helped you. Baldur, his wife, perhaps others too. Then my predecessor Djurhuus found out and tried to pass on his suspicions to Tórshavn. I imagine …’ He was on guesswork here and he hoped this wasn’t too obvious. ‘The intelligence … you managed to intercept it somehow. Or ridicule it. Rasmussen is a gullible man. Was it hard to ensure it never went any further?’
‘I repeat, your evidence?’
Not yet. Not yet.
‘And here is one more interesting thing. Baldur exiled his son to Iceland as soon as he learned what he’d done. Told him never to return. Yet one week later Kristian Djurhuus dies in the Árnafjall tunnel. Mown down by someone you do not seem to have tried very hard to catch.’
He waited for a response. In vain.
‘I wonder why, Aksel. I wonder …’
Højgaard pushed the office phone across the desk.
‘If you wish to report these fantasies to Tórshavn feel free. I’ve nothing to fear.’
‘Oh I’m sure you haven’t. You’re a careful man. A powerful man. Vágar belongs to you. No crime on your patch. Nothing untoward save for a village slowly dying, populated by people few care about anywhere else.’
‘You should go.’
‘Kaspar waited for me in Ryberg’s house. He knew I’d been looking for that bloody poker. He said so himself. Just a few hours after I told you and Rasmussen I’d seen it here.’
That, at least, seemed to give him pause for thought.
‘Hard to call a dead man into the witness box.’
‘He told his father too. What I said. “I dealt with that bastard Ryberg when the man told me he was going to go pouncing on her.” The man. You are the man, Aksel. You were the one that young rascal Jónas Mikkelsen was talking to, the go-between for his fugitive uncle on the fells, desperate to go back home, not knowing if he dared. You were the one who said Kaspar had to keep hiding on those fells until you’d allow him …’
No answer.
‘Though I imagine that would never have happened. You’d have killed him too. Like you murdered Djurhuus. Did Kaspar suspect what you had in mind? You dispatched him to deal with Ryberg. Though I imagine he was too wary to meet you face-to-face.’
‘Dead,’ Højgaard repeated. ‘All dead, no tales to tell. Apart from Baldur Ganting. Who’ll never say a word in court to anyone. As I said, he’d be the first in jail if any of this were true. He knows the cost to that damned place of his.’
‘You must have been furious when young Mikkelsen cut me and ran off into the hills with his brother. Something finally you could not control. How inconvenient.’
‘Enough of this …’
‘I could bring these walls tumbling down around your ears.’
Højgaard’s face was set like stone.
‘If these flights of fancy of yours had any merit that would be a very dangerous thing to threaten, wouldn’t it?’
Haraldsen nodded in agreement.
‘Oh, that I do not doubt. Were I like Kristian Djurhuus. A man alone, apart from a difficult lover who lived here only occasionally. But there are three of us. One a police officer. You may be king of Vágar, but even the king can’t kill us all.’
Nothing but the nervous and rapid click of a pen.
Then the man opposite him sighed and asked, ‘What, precisely, do you want?’
There, he thought. That was it.
‘Relax, man. I didn’t come here to threaten you. But to offer a bargain. A generous one in the circumstances.’
Three more taps on the desk. Haraldsen pulled out his old pipe and sucked on it. He could detect the smell of sweat, perhaps his own.
‘Do it then.’
It felt as if he were standing on the edge of the Lundi Cliffs, looking out over the precipice, gazing at the endless sea.
‘Elsebeth and I are returning to Tórshavn. Retirees. If it comes to it we’ll have nothing to do but stand outside police headquarters every minute of the day, holding placards, handing out leaflets, calling everyone we can think of. Hanna Olsen, your former colleague, has agreed she’ll be there with us. I doubt Rasmussen would appreciate such a spectacle. More to the point, the international media would surely be interested in the idea that our little corner of paradise is, in fact, steeped in blood, and not just that of blackfish alone. When they ask, I will go through the timeline of all the evidence we have. Circumstantial it may be, and in places lacking in verification. Nevertheless it exists in some quantity and there will be interesting elements to support our suppositions in the archives, Aksel. You’re a careful man but no one can bury everything. You, of all people, must know the weight of accusations will, one day, become unsupportable. Your wear your precious crown so lightly. We could dash that thing from your head in a month or so I reckon. All those years of building up this empire of yours. This fiefdom full of folk you can control. Wasted.’
There was no answer.
‘You seem lost for words, superintendent.’
‘What do you want?’ Højgaard asked again.
He hesitated. No need for haste.
‘The bargain, you mean?’
‘The bargain.’
‘Such a small thing. A gift that means nothing to you and everything to someone who craves it.’
‘What?’
Haraldsen sucked the pipe once more, then stashed it in his pocket.
‘Benjamin Mikkelsen must be removed from wherever you’ve sent him and returned to his mother. To live with her without interference. The lad didn’t kill his brother. Kaspar did. We heard that, as good as. When he was ranting about murdering us too. Perhaps …’ He stared hard at the fellow across the desk. ‘Perhaps running errand boy between you and Kaspar on those hills gave the lad ideas his uncle didn’t appreciate. Perhaps poor Jónas asked too much. Either way his brother deserves better than you’ve offered him. Allow him home now. Then you will never hear from us again. That’s all.’
Aksel Højgaard stuttered, ‘I–I do not have the power.’
It was Haraldsen’s turn to laugh.
‘Oh, come, come. You have the gift of life and death here and use it when you wish. But if I’m mistaken we’ve nothing left to discuss.’
Haraldsen got up to go. The man was at the door before him.
‘You’re a strange one, Tristan. To risk so much for people who wouldn’t lift a finger for you or yours.’
It seemed an odd comment.
‘That is the nature of charity, surely. If there’s reward in it then the thing is nothing more than self-interest. Let the boy go home. We will leave you here untouched. Elsebeth and I will enjoy our retirement in Tórshavn and never think of Djevulsfjord or this office again. Which given the blood on your hands is an offer that frankly you don’t deserve.’
Højgaard frowned, scratched at his cheek, then pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.
‘The rules do not apply to you, Aksel, do they?’
‘The rules are what I make them. Just like this place. You tread on dangerous ground, Haraldsen. This wife of yours. The Olsen girl. None of you can prove a word of it.’
‘Perhaps not.’ He smiled then winked. ‘All the same … the three of us will stand out in the street night and day screaming our heads off until someone or something silences us. No proof, but by God we will hurt you in the trying.’
He reached for the door.
‘A bargain,’ Aksel Højgaard said quickly as he stepped forward to block the way.
For the first time in all the years Tristan Haraldsen had known the man, there was a note of pleading in his tone.
It was George Thomsen who broke the long and awkward silence.
‘Tell you what, ladies. You three go sit at that table we’ve got out back. Sun’s on it now. I’ll bring you some tea and biscuits.’
It was chilly in truth but they wanted out of the shop. Sitting listening to the sea, the sound of men working on their boats, the occasional putter of an engine, was a good enough way to pass the time. Alba had no more questions. Perhaps she was afraid of the answers that might come if she pushed for them too hard.
As an old kettle came noisily to the boil inside, Dorotea slunk across the cobbled landing, back to the big house. A worm had turned, Elsebeth thought. Long years of doubt and guilt and frustration, brought to the surface by the cruel fate of Alba Mikkelsen, had finally made George Thomsen rebel against his wife’s relentless tyranny. There was decency and goodness in Djevulsfjord. It was just hidden sometimes, and different in a way no outsider could fully comprehend.
When he came out he had three chipped mugs of stewed English Breakfast on a tray along with a tin of Royal Dansk shortbread.
‘I meant what I said, Alba,’ he said, opening up the biscuits. ‘You owe us nothing. You’re free to do what you like. I think …’ He sniffed and looked at the grey ocean, anything but her at that moment. ‘I think what’s happened in this place of late is bad enough as it is. No need to make it worse. We need a quiet time now. No … incidents.’
‘Incidents,’ Hanna Olsen repeated, and the hurt was there, unambiguous inside that single word, as clear as the cry of the gulls hovering over the distant Skerries.
‘Too much hurt already,’ Thomsen added as he handed round the tin. ‘Wasn’t always this way but Djevulsfjord’s dying, day by day. Mostly we try to ignore that. I imagine you people coming from the outside think we’ve got lots in the way of choices. There …’ He blinked and it wasn’t the wan September sunlight that did that. ‘There you’d be wrong.’
Ten minutes later the tea was finished. No one had touched a piece of shortbread. Not a word had been spoken.
Elsebeth Haraldsen’s phone rang. She walked round the corner to take the call.
‘Is Alba there? With you?’
Haraldsen stood by the Ace Capri, keys in hand, watching two boats from the Sørvágur fleet make a careful exit from the harbour like dancers trying to work out their moves.
‘Close enough. Hanna too.’
‘Close enough to hear?’
‘Not quite.’ She sounded puzzled. ‘We wait, husband.’
‘I know. I know.’
A bargain. That was what he’d offered Højgaard. Implicit in the word was negotiation. One side always gained but gave back too. It was only to be expected. Though the price on their part was one he had never seen coming.
‘Alba will take the cottage? There’s no impediment?’
‘Not if they give her back her son. What hold that awful Thomsen woman had over her is gone.’
‘Benjamin can come back on Friday. The social people may want to keep an eye on the two of them naturally but …’
