by Chris Ould
“Yesterday, after lunch.”
“Do you remember what time?”
Veerle shook her head. “Not exactly. About two thirty or three o’clock I suppose. I’d been to the supermarket and when I got back Erla was working at the table in the kitchen. We had coffee and a sandwich together and a little later she said she was going out.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“I think she said she would go to some of the lookout positions. She took her camera bag. She never went anywhere without that.”
“The lookout positions are where you’re keeping watch for the whales?”
“Yeh.”
“Okay. Can you tell me what Erla was wearing when she went out?”
Veerle thought back. “Jeans, an AWCA sweatshirt, and her red waterproof coat. She also had on a hat. It was grey, woollen.”
“Okay.” Annika wrote it down. “And she didn’t come back after that? You didn’t see her again?”
“No.” Veerle shook her head.
“Were you here all the time? I mean, could Erla have come back while you were out somewhere?”
“I didn’t go out,” Veerle said. “Not till the evening. I cooked the meal for us – all of us in the house. We take it in turns. But Erla had said – she said she didn’t know when she would be back, so not to worry about food.”
As she said this Veerle looked as if she was deciding whether or not this memory was enough to warrant another overwelling of tears. In an effort to divert that, Annika shifted to more practical questions.
“So what time did you go out in the evening?”
Veerle swallowed, rubbed her eyes. “About half past seven or eight. I don’t know exactly. We— We just went into the town.”
“Who was ‘we’?”
“Me, Lukas, Marie, Dieter: everyone from the house. We got back about midnight, maybe a little after that.”
“That’s early for a Saturday night in Tórshavn,” Annika said. “You must have left just after things got going.”
Veerle nodded. “When it gets busy there’s sometimes trouble – because we’re AWCA,” she added in case Annika didn’t understand.
“Yes, I see.”
Annika scanned her notes. She was ready to wrap this up now. “The only other thing I need to ask is about Erla’s private life,” she said, looking up to Veerle again. “What can you tell me about that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, who was she most friendly with?”
“I— It’s hard to say. She was friendly with everyone. Not just here in the house, but everyone in AWCA. She was that sort of person. She was easy to talk to, you know?”
“Did she have a boyfriend?”
“No, I don’t think. She never said so.”
“Okay.” Annika made a note. “And was there anyone she didn’t like – anyone she might have had an argument with?”
The question seemed to trouble Veerle for a moment, or at least to make her uncertain. “Do you mean in AWCA or…”
“Anyone.”
“Not in AWCA, but…”
“Yes?”
Veerle hesitated, then said, “On Friday, after the grind on Sandoy, there was a Faroese man. I wasn’t there but Erla said she’d had an argument with him. He wanted to erase pictures from her camera because they showed him cutting up a whale. But it wasn’t… she said it wasn’t a big deal. She made a joke about it. She said if the whale hunters’ dicks were as long as their knives they wouldn’t be a problem.”
Veerle gave a half-hearted smile, which Annika returned sympathetically. “Maybe she’s right. And this argument happened at Sandur?”
“Yeh, I think so. It must have been there.”
“Okay,” Annika said, writing it down. “Do you know what Erla did with the pictures she took?”
“I don’t know. I suppose she would have put them on to her computer: maybe a hard drive. She always said she was paranoid about making copies in case she did something stupid like spilling coffee on the computer.”
“Good, okay,” Annika said. “Stora takk fyri. You’ve been very helpful – very brave.”
“It’s… I can’t believe that… that she’s really gone,” Veerle said. She stood up and turned to look out of the window. “She was a really good person, you know?” She began to weep again.
Annika took a moment, then rose from her seat and more out of convention than empathy, she moved to put an arm round Veerle and give her a small, encouraging hug. But as soon as she did so Veerle made a small noise of pain.
Annika stepped back. “Oh. Sorry,” she said.
Veerle shook her head. “It’s just my bruises. A few days ago I fell – in the boat. I’m okay.”
“Okay, come then,” Annika said. “I think we could all use some tea.”
* * *
When Veerle was settled in the kitchen with tissues and tea Annika went upstairs to find Oddur. Erla Sivertsen’s room was at the top of the house, with sloping eaves and a single bed. The furniture, like that downstairs, was utilitarian and vaguely tired. The room was tidy and without clutter, though, and showed little sign of the person who’d inhabited it.
With surgical gloves on his hands, Oddur Arge was standing over an open drawer, searching under the bras and knickers. He was a rather lumpen man of deceptively plodding appearance and when Annika cleared her throat he looked up, vaguely embarrassed.
“Don’t say anything,” he said.
Annika shook her head. “I wasn’t. Listen, have you found a computer or hard drives?”
“Yeh, a MacBook Pro.” Oddur gestured to an evidence bag on the bed, which contained the computer. Beside it in another bag was a portable hard drive. “Looks like top of the range: 15 inches. Nice bit of kit.”
Oddur was the technical guy when it came to electronics and he had an enthusiast’s comprehensive knowledge of makes and models.
“Anything else?”
Oddur closed the drawer. “Photographic stuff: lenses, a flash gun. Nothing significant so far. Have you finished with the people downstairs?”
“Still waiting for a couple to come home. About the computer, though: one of the girls – Veerle – says Erla Sivertsen had a row with a man who was cutting up whales on Sandoy after Friday’s drive. She took photos apparently, so it might be worth checking the laptop as soon as you can to see if we can identify him.”
“Okay, I’ll do it when I get back,” Oddur said, then looked around the room. “Unless we start pulling up the carpet and taking the furniture to pieces I can’t see that there’s anything else here.”
Annika waited while Oddur collected the evidence bags, then closed and locked the room. When they got downstairs they found Veerle Koning with a tall man whose dark hair and beard had the effect of making his complexion seem pale. He wore black combat trousers and boots below an AWCA fleece and he was damp from the rain.
“This is Lukas,” Veerle told Annika. “I’ve told him what’s happened.” She put an arm through his and nestled up against him, as if he would be her support in this difficult time. He was a good five or six years older than his girlfriend, Annika decided.
“Hey, how are you?” Annika said.
Lukas Drescher gave her a stiff nod. “Do you have any more information about Erla?”
“Not yet. We’re still trying to find out about her last movements. Would it be okay if I ask you some questions?”
“Sure, of course.” Then he looked to the side as another man opened the front door and came in. “This is Peter Jessen,” Drescher said.
Jessen was about Annika’s age and wore nothing to show he was one of the Alliance. His hair was long and held back in a loose ponytail and his thin features reminded her of a hawk.
“Hey,” Annika said. “Do you live here also?”
“Nej,” Jessen said flatly in Danish.
Annika switched languages. “Are you with AWCA?”
“You want to question me too?” His tone made it sound as if he a
lready knew it would be a waste of time.
“If you knew Erla Sivertsen, then yes, someone will need to speak to you,” Annika said, keeping her tone coolly professional.
The man called Jessen chose to ignore that. Instead he eyed up the bags Oddur was holding. “Are you giving someone a receipt for those things you’re taking?” he said.
“They’ve all been logged in my record,” Oddur told him.
“Do we get a copy of that then? We don’t know what you will do with them. It could be anything.”
“A property list will be available to Ms Sivertsen’s family if they request it,” Oddur said flatly. Then he turned to Annika and said in Faroese, “You want me to stay and deal with this one?”
“No, it’s okay.” She turned to Jessen. “If you would go to the kitchen? I’ll be with you in a minute… Thank you.”
10
I’D AGREED TO MEET MAGNUS BEFORE GOING TO HIS MOTHER’S house. It was to be an escorted visit, although he hadn’t put it like that. Instead he’d said it could be difficult to find the house, so perhaps we should meet in the car park outside the Eik bank on Heiðavegur.
After the cancelled sheep drive I’d driven back to Leynar and changed, eaten a sandwich, then looked in on Fríða for a few minutes before heading to Runavík. She was pleased I was going to see Magnus and his mother, and although she didn’t say as much I guessed that she saw it as another step forward on my reconnection programme. I didn’t disabuse her of that notion, although connecting in a brotherly way with Magnus was not my motive for going.
What was in my head, and what I thought about on the drive to Runavík, was my finished translation of the stiff, cream-coloured cards that made up Lýdia’s medical records; the pre-printed boxes for dates, symptoms, comments, diagnoses all filled in with blue or black fountain-pen ink.
Of course, the sensible thing would have been to ask Fríða to translate it all for me, instead of spending hours with an online dictionary and making semi-educated guesses. And maybe I would ask her later, just to check what I’d found, but I’d wanted to see it for myself first. For some reason that had seemed important.
So what did I have?
My mother: Lýdia Tove Reyná, born 21 June 1953 on the southernmost island, Suðuroy. On the medical cards I’d traced a sporadic list of childhood ailments and illnesses: mumps, measles, chickenpox; nothing remarkable. Aged eleven, a broken wrist; aged twelve, a chest infection. Then nothing for three years. A healthy girl, I assumed, until in July 1968 – aged fifteen – there were four appointments over three months.
In the doctor’s notes for that period I found the word sinnisrørdur, which could mean rough, troubled, or unsettled. And there was – or seemed to be – anxiety, insomnia and restlessness. That was how I interpreted it, anyway. I couldn’t make out what had been prescribed, but it seemed that something had; to be taken at night. Perhaps sleeping pills.
Then, a year later, the word sinnisrørdur again. And a different prescription in different handwriting. And perhaps this medication had worked, because there was nothing else for three years. Her next appointment was in August 1971 and I knew what it was for without translation. At eighteen, Lýdia was pregnant.
I suppose I’d always known she was young when I was conceived. She must have been, given our relative ages when she died: I was nearly five; she was twenty-three. Still, when I looked at the record of her pregnancy, so close to childhood ailments, it struck me how young she was to have fallen pregnant.
Fallen. An odd word for it. Fallen from grace; fallen for an older man. The latter was certainly true; the former, as well, I supposed, if you cared to look at it that way. I wondered how it had played out with family and neighbours in the conservative, godly Faroese community of the time. When Lýdia and Signar had finally married she’d been seven months pregnant: not something easily disguised.
The doctor’s records made no note of the delivery – where it had happened or who had attended – perhaps because it had been uneventful, or because it had taken place at home. There was no way to tell. In fact the final record card had only one other entry, dated 5 September 1973. It said simply “Ørsted Sjúkrahús”.
I knew sjúkrahús meant hospital, but there was nowhere called Ørsted in the Faroes. I could only assume, then, that it referred to the only place called Ørsted that Google had thrown up. It was in Denmark, which might fit with some of the other things I knew. Whatever the case it gave me a start on the questions I had for Sofia Ravnsfjall.
* * *
I was early by accident rather than design, and instead of just sitting in the car I got out and walked across the car park as far as a concrete wall. From there I had a view across the mist-obscured water of Skálafjørður: everything an almost uniform grey except for the four-square orange structure of the oil rig, planted like some industrial fairground attraction in the middle of the sound, yellow lights randomly dotted around the superstructure.
Then Magnus arrived, driving a dark blue Mercedes, which he turned and then waited for me to get in. I was expecting him to lay down the ground rules, like you might for a prison visit: no mobile phones, no prolonged physical contact, no unchecked gifts – and he did, after a fashion.
“Kristian has gone to Denmark,” he told me. “My mother believes it is to look at a new business opportunity.”
I nodded. “When did he go?”
“Two days ago. He may take a holiday also.”
A long holiday, I guessed. I wasn’t surprised. Even though there were no criminal charges against him, I couldn’t see it being easy to carry on as if nothing had happened. Better to absent himself, lick his wounds. Not that he had any real injuries: others had suffered those.
Magnus drove back along Heiðavegur, and then turned up the hill, along a series of roads that took us up higher until we were on a road with no others above it and a commanding view over Skálafjørður.
It seemed appropriate to Signar’s nature that he’d chosen to live up here, but the house wasn’t as imposing as I’d thought it might be. It was a decent size, but with nothing to mark it out from the others nearby. White with a grey roof and a balcony across the front, it seemed pretty modern.
Magnus led the way to the side of the house where a disability ramp led up to a door. He’d told me before that his mother had arthritis and I guessed that the ramp was for her benefit. He knocked on the door and entered, calling out as he did so.
When I’d visited Signar in hospital – my only visit – I’d been surprised by how much he’d changed in the twenty-five years since I’d seen him last. A man grown old. I had no younger image of Sofia Ravnsfjall to compare with the woman Magnus introduced to me now. Despite her being my stepmother – in a purely technical sense – we’d never met, so all I could see was a small woman in her late seventies. She had white hair, neatly permed, and a rather beady, bird-like manner; enhanced perhaps by the fact that she was dressed for Sunday, in a black skirt and a high-necked white blouse.
The introductions were stiff and awkwardly formal – half-Faroese, half-English – but Sofia shook my hand and directed us through to a sitting room with rugs on the wooden floor and heavy dark furniture. Then there was the formality of making tea, which Sofia insisted on doing herself despite the fact that she leaned heavily on a walking stick. When it was done she summoned Magnus to carry the tray to a coffee table in the centre of the room while she finally settled herself in a tall, high-backed chair; the sort for elderly people with mobility problems. I couldn’t help thinking that with Sofia Ravnsfjall in it, it was somewhat throne-like.
“Magnus says you wish to talk about your mother,” she said then, her English slightly stiff.
“If that’s all right. Whatever you can tell me.”
“Do you wish the good picture or the truth?”
“Mama…” Magnus said, but let it trail away when she gave him a look.
“The truth,” I said.
Sofia nodded. “Lýdia was a difficult woman,”
she said. “For everyone who knows her. That is the truth.”
I took that as it came. I hadn’t expected her to sing Lýdia’s praises. How many second wives would speak favourably of the first?
“How well did you know her?” I asked.
“Not very well,” Sofia said with a shrug. “I have spoken to her perhaps two or three times. But that does not make it that I don’t know how she was.” She added the last part as if anticipating that I might dismiss her claims.
“So in what way was she difficult?”
Sofia Ravnsfjall considered that, then shifted a little. “She thinks of herself. In what she does. All the time it is what she wants to do. You understand?”
“You mean she was selfish?”
Sofia looked to Magnus. “Sjálvsøkin,” he said.
“Ja,” she said. Then to me, “With no thinking – no thoughts for others.”
“You mean for Signar?” I asked.
“Ja – and also for you.”
“Me?”
Magnus cut in. He spoke Faroese but I knew from the tone of it he was trying to divert her, or at least soften the tone of what she might say. But Sofia Ravnsfjall was no less assertive with her eldest son than she was with a stranger, and when she’d finished with him she looked back at me.
“I am the old woman,” she said. “I do not spend time for sweetening heilivágur – the medicine. You understand?”
“Did you ever have time for that?” I asked her, guessing the answer.
She snorted. “Nei, not so much.”
“Okay, so tell me.”
She assessed me for a moment, then looked to Magnus and began to speak in Faroese.
It was clear that Magnus didn’t relish being the interpreter for what his mother was saying, and I guessed that Sofia Ravnsfjall could probably have said what she wanted to say without a translator. So maybe it spoke something of her relationship with Magnus that she put him through it. Whatever the case, Sofia spoke with an assurance that trucked no demur.