Forty Days Without Shadow: An Arctic Thriller

by Olivier Truc

  “Was that one of your reindeer?” asked Nina miserably.

  “Two of my reindeer.”

  “Two…”

  “A mother—one of my favorites—she was intelligent. She was in calf. It would have been born this spring. Don’t forget to tell them that in Alta.”

  Nina felt as if she might break down in tears. But she clenched her jaw, got a grip, stared straight ahead.

  “Aslak, I’m so sorry. You’ll be compensated for the two of them, is that right?”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “If you weren’t a Reindeer Police officer, I wouldn’t report the accident.”

  “But why not, if you can be compensated? The Reindeer Administration will ensure you get a fair deal, like everyone else.”

  “I don’t believe in your justice. I don’t believe in it.”

  “But you’re wrong. You’re entitled to fair treatment, the same as anyone.”

  “Am I? Really?”

  Nina felt a rush of sympathy. Aslak looked so embittered that it hurt her to see him. Almost without thinking, she placed her hand on his, then took it away again just as quickly. She was badly shaken, had no idea what to do next, only wanted him to go. She looked for some hint of a response in his eyes, but all she saw was the reindeer’s terror-struck gaze, clouding her vision. She buried her face in her arms, crossed on the top of the steering wheel, then straightened up again in her seat, feeling a little calmer. Aslak was holding something out to her in his hand. A small leather pouch.

  “It contains a pewter pendant. I made it myself. Carry it with you, and carry the souls of the reindeer with you. You must not feel guilty.”

  And without waiting for a reply, he opened the passenger door and disappeared into the darkness.

  21

  Monday, January 17

  11:30 a.m., Kautokeino

  News of the discovery of the ear had traveled all over the town and far beyond. Journalists were calling from across Norway. The roadblock at the crossroads had been lifted. Pastor Lars Jonsson had been talking with Berit Kutsi when the information reached him.

  “What a dreadful fate for Mattis Labba,” said the pastor quietly. “He was a sinner, but he was a poor, lost man. He lived his life far beyond the reach of the Gospels.”

  “His fate was perhaps not entirely his fault,” ventured Berit.

  “We must place our lives in Jesus’s hands, Berit; there can be no salvation without that. Mattis lived by the old superstitions. And no good can come of that for anyone, believe me,” he added with a cold, unsettling stare.

  Hurriedly, Berit took her leave. She climbed into her old Renault 4—a familiar sight and something of an attraction in town—for the short drive to Olsen’s farm, on the edge of Kautokeino. As a rule, she worked there every day, but Mattis’s savage murder had left her deeply affected, more than anyone could have imagined. She parked behind one of the barns, but stayed in her seat, reciting a prayer, eyes closed, before walking to the cowshed to feed the herd.

  Olsen had just finished a call to Rolf Brattsen when he saw Berit arrive. “God almighty. Dragging her feet, like always.”

  He was on the point of stepping outside to urge Berit to hurry up when the telephone rang.

  “We need to talk terms,” said a French-accented voice in Swedish.

  “Come to the farm straightaway. I have to get back to the council offices before noon.”

  Olsen forgot all about upbraiding Berit. Silently, he climbed the stairs to his bedroom, crossed to the back wall, and opened a low door leading to a built-in storage space. No one was in the house at this time of day, but he turned to check behind him with a suspicious look nonetheless. He bent down and stepped through into a small, dimly lit room cluttered with storage chests, rolled-up maps and documents, and old newspapers. He reached out to a small safe and carefully input the combination. Opening it, he took out a large envelope, smoothed it against his chest, closed the safe and the door behind him, and went back downstairs. He was just entering the kitchen when the Frenchman’s Volvo pulled up outside the farmhouse.

  Olsen greeted his guest on the kitchen doorstep and invited him to come in and sit down. He placed the envelope prominently on the table, to his right, and noted with satisfaction that Racagnal seemed unable to take his eyes off it as they spoke.

  “This is going to be difficult with regard to my company,” said Racagnal straightaway.

  “You’ll find a way to reassure them—it’ll be worth the effort, believe me.”

  “You have the map?”

  Olsen pushed the envelope slowly across the table. Racagnal took out the yellowed sheet of paper inside and unfolded it carefully. No doubt about it, this was a geological map all right. A real work of art, produced with all the care and skill of a bygone age, though Racagnal saw immediately that it was the work of an amateur geologist. He looked at the curving lines, the symbols and colors: the result of a painstaking land survey carried out sixty or seventy years before. It brought back memories for an old-school geologist like himself—someone who still knew how to work with a notebook and crayons, not like the rookies today, reaching for their computers at the first sight of a chunk of rock.

  “Interesting,” he said. “Granite layers…”

  He fell silent and pored over the sheet, lost in concentration. A geological map represented hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours of work on the ground. You had to know how to read the landscape, look beyond appearances, see what was invisible to the naked eye beneath the layers of soil, the vegetation, the moraines. Maps like this were irreplaceable; they contained a mass of fine detail, of the kind that had been eliminated little by little as mapmaking became increasingly modernized. Nowadays, no one paid much attention to that: people focused on the principal rock masses, nothing else. Judging by its appearance, this map was the result of direct observations and readings on the ground. It was dotted with numerous pinpoints, small nicks in the paper, cross-references. An original map based on things noted down in the field by one or more geologists, with an abundance of priceless information.

  A true geologist always looked for the original map, the very first one, the oldest, the one that smelled of sweat and times past, because a field geologist was always ready to note down the tiniest anomaly. And those anomalies were the sign of a true expert. Racagnal’s hunter instinct was aroused. With it came a rush of adrenaline and a sudden, vivid image of Ulrika, the young serving girl from the bar.

  He knew the complexity of the local terrain—typical of a region crushed under the weight of glaciers for thousands of years. He looked closely at the map’s captions and annotations, but nothing suggested a precise location for the survey. The corners and edges of the map were worn and stained, as if it had been handled a great deal. Someone had taken it out, over and over again. Trying to solve the mystery.

  “Where does the map come from?” he asked after a long pause.

  Olsen shot the Frenchman a look of undisguised suspicion. He didn’t have much time left before the mining affairs committee meeting, though it was very likely to be adjourned following the discovery of the ear. Still, he would have to lodge this blasted new application to prospect.

  “I inherited it from my father. He drew it.”

  Racagnal looked at him. “Who else have you shown it to?”

  “No one! What kind of a person do you take me for? My father told me on his deathbed that there was a huge gold seam indicated here. But the old fool never gave me the name of a place. Or he did it on purpose, the sly son of a bitch. That wouldn’t surprise me. Never wanted us to think food would drop into our plates from heaven.”

  Racagnal pointed to the map. “There are several places in the region with this type of configuration. And given that there are no place names, the only thing to do is go and look. Out in the field. See for yourself, test it out, get a feel for it, scratch the surface. There’s no other solution. You say aerial reconnaissance is forbidden in winter?”

  �
�Yes, thanks to the damned reindeer. Also because uranium prospecting is taboo around here; they don’t want people prospecting for radioactive areas from the air, or on the ground.”

  “And what do you think about that?”

  “I couldn’t give a damn about their uranium. I want my gold. So are you in or not?”

  Racagnal traced the broad curves with his finger, crossing the map, feeling the tiny pinpoints, the little nicks in the paper.

  “You see all the spots of yellow metal marked by my father, indicating gold. You see those?”

  “I see them,” said the geologist.

  But his tone suggested he could see much more than that. Olsen pictured a seam even more vast than the one he had imagined so far.

  “So you’ll say yes?”

  “Yes.” Racagnal’s decision was firm.

  “Well, I’ll get along to the council offices then,” said Olsen, brisk and businesslike now. “You’ll need to sign this, here, and fill in this form. I’ll do the rest. Everything has to be passed along to the Mining Administration. How long will you need to prospect and identify the right place, based on the map?”

  Racagnal looked at the farmer, scornfully. “Think we can do this with a click of the fingers?”

  “But you’re ready to go ahead, aren’t you?”

  “Now I need to check every geological map of the region, to see which ones correspond more or less to your father’s survey.” Racagnal was exasperated by Olsen’s tone. “And don’t try to tell me how to do my job.”

  The older man pressed his face close to the Frenchman’s, ignoring the pain in the nape of his neck. “You think we’re just a rag-bag bunch of peasants up here, good for nothing. Is that it?” he said, very quietly. “If you try and double-cross me, or fail to get the job done as quickly as possible, I can ask the right people to take a closer look into just what you were up to in Alta the other day.”

  He pushed his chair back and unfolded the press report on the rape of the Alta schoolgirl.

  “A good friend tells me you’ve a liking for little girls. You were in Alta that day, weren’t you?”

  “Think you can blackmail me?” Racagnal jumped to his feet. “I went to Alta to buy equipment. That’s all.”

  “Just sit down and shut up!” Olsen’s voice was raised now. “If you don’t locate that seam in time, we have a nice fresh statement from a little girl name of Ulrika, on the local police officer’s desk, right now.”

  “What the hell are you saying?”

  “Think we’re a bunch of hicks, do you? Well, see here, we can be quick off the mark, too. Now you get on and do your job. And if you play your cards right, you’ll get an exclusive share. Sole partners. And all the little girls you want. You’ve got a week. Like I said before, I can get today’s meeting postponed, but probably only for a week at the most. And you’re going to sign this piece of paper here, too. But that’s strictly between ourselves. A private contract that says I’m the owner of the land. And this is going to stay right here at home, in my safe, with little Ulrika’s statement and the little newspaper article all about Alta. So if anything happens to me, they can follow the trail all the way back to you.”

  “Don’t even think I can get this done in a week without a guide.” It was worth a try.

  Olsen softened. “The best guide around here—but he’s a difficult customer—is Aslak Gaupsara. He lives on the mountain. A wild man, but he’s a wolf hunter and a skilled tracker. Knows the region like the back of his hand. When you’ve collected your equipment, come back and find me here.”

  * * *

  Noon, Kautokeino

  To convince Brattsen once and for all, Olsen had let him into the secret of the gold seam and promised him a role as head of security at the mine, with a salary he could barely dream of, even if he was promoted to the top job at the station in Kautokeino. A small price to pay, the farmer told himself. At the same time, having a security chief all lined up for his gold mine, when the seam hadn’t even been located yet, made it seem almost real. Olsen felt the project was within his grasp, after decades of dashed hopes. But there was still the blasted missing link.

  He pushed the thought to the back of his mind. Lapland was vast. He had come so close, and then…

  He braked hard in front of the council offices. The police had left already. Idle layabouts.

  Olsen thought of his father. He had told Racagnal that his father had drawn the map. The Frenchman didn’t need to know the truth. He didn’t need to know that Olsen’s father had stolen it; that the fool had never managed to decipher the precise location. Throughout his youth, Olsen had seen his father set out on endless hikes, armed with a metal detector and that damned map. He had found bits and pieces, but never anything resembling the fabulous gold seam promised by the myriad yellow dots on the sheet.

  The four committee members were already seated around the table when Olsen took his place. As expected, the president—a member of the Sami People’s Party—opened the session and declared straightaway that he was asking for an adjournment in light of recent events.

  Around him, the others nodded their heads in silence. The committee president was a well-respected man locally, an elderly sage, and his opinion counted, Olsen knew that.

  “We still have some important decisions to take. The next Mining Administration report will have lasting implications for our town, for the next ten or twenty years. Many companies are interested in the region’s mineral deposits. We’re the richest in Europe on that score, and most of Sápmi remains unexplored, let alone exploited. We have to face facts: the pressures are huge. Because people know, or suspect, that vast deposits lie undiscovered out there.”

  Olsen found it hard to sit still. Discreetly, he turned from the waist, checking the reactions of the rest of the committee. He was the only non-Lapp. Which way would they go? Would the promise of riches prove too much for them? He hoped so.

  22

  Monday, January 17

  1 p.m., Kautokeino

  Klemet had spent hours searching through the handbook of reindeer breeders’ marks, checking certain pages several times over. He was forced to admit the evidence of his own eyes: the marks cut into Mattis’s ear were virtually identical to one of the marks registered to Olaf Renson. It was unthinkable, but the evidence was there on the page.

  To be absolutely certain, he needed the second ear. Only the two combined would confirm the owner’s mark beyond doubt. But why would the murderer insist on marking both ears, as with a reindeer? The act was a clear reference to the breeders and their world. The second ear was bound to turn up sooner or later.

  He headed downstairs to the Sheriff’s office, entered without knocking and sat down opposite Tor Jensen, slapping the handbook onto the desk, open at the relevant page. Next to it, he placed one of the pictures requested from the police photographer, showing the severed ear.

  Tor Jensen slurped his black licorice sweet, staring at the photograph and the diagrams of breeders’ marks. No need to spell it out. Klemet knew Jensen would understand perfectly what he was getting at. Jensen took another sweet, leafed through the pages of the handbook, paused, then continued dipping into his bowl of salmiakki.

  “So you think this is it? You think the cuts on the ear are a clue leading us to an individual breeder?”

  “What else?”

  Silence again.

  “Well, it seems logical enough, you might say. Except…Except where it falls down: you think the murderer wanted to implicate somebody? I don’t buy that.”

  Klemet said nothing for a moment. Then another thought occurred to him. “Unless Mattis—if it really is his ear—worked for the breeder whose mark this is.”

  The Sheriff whistled and threw himself back in his chair. He crossed his hands behind the nape of his neck and looked attentively at Klemet. “So the murder might be some sort of warning to a big-time breeder? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “I have no idea,” said Klemet.

 
“But who, in that case? That would represent one hell of an escalation in the tensions between breeders.”

  Klemet said nothing.

  Jensen continued, “So beyond his victim, the murderer would be targeting a wealthy breeder—Olaf Renson—and we would need to find out who has a bone to pick with him. Still, you’d have to be more than stupid to sign a murder like that. And there can’t be that many breeders seriously at odds with Olaf. Did Mattis work with him sometimes? And if so, when? Do you know something about that, Klemet? Is that it?”

  Klemet was on his feet. He left the room without saying a word.

  * * *

  2 p.m., Kautokeino

  Klemet had no desire to call Olaf. The Sami militant was no fan of his, dismissing the Reindeer Police officer as a collaborator. Searching online, Klemet was forced to admit that Renson’s name cropped up very little. He hadn’t been involved in even minor reindeer rustling for more than a decade. Nothing of note at all. The only thing that came close was a case involving two animals that had been hit by a small truck, as declared by Olaf. Their ears hadn’t been brought into the Reindeer Administration offices, as required by law, but Renson had claimed compensation nonetheless. The claim had been refused. Case closed.

  Klemet read through each report. A boundary dispute caught his attention—a fence torn down by a hot-tempered neighbor of Olaf’s. He read through to the end, but that was harmless enough, too, he decided.

  The last two entries featuring Olaf’s name included some more interesting material. Olaf had been investigated back when Johann Henrik had been shot at. Klemet shivered as he read that the weapon used had come from Olaf’s place. Johann Henrik had narrowly escaped being killed. Was he dealing with a vendetta?

  * * *

  8:15 p.m., Paris

  Nina Nansen had made it to the French capital and checked into her hotel, a small place on Place du Général Beuret, that evening. Henri Mons lived in the 15th arrondissement, near the mairie. She went to her room, called Paul, and arranged to see his father early the following morning. The old man was feeling much better and looked forward to meeting Nina. Actually, Paul said, his father seemed quite reinvigorated at the prospect of her visit. He had spent the last few days in his study and attic, rummaging through his archives.