I Will Miss You Tomorrow

by Heine Bakkeid

  My leg is turned in towards land and my head is safely cushioned by the seaweed, with seawater gurgling its way up between the rocks from below and washing over my face. Shivers course up and down my spine as I struggle to break free.

  ‘What the hell just happened?’ I gasp, exhausted, when at last I have hauled myself up on to safer terrain. I am on the rocks, crouched on all fours like a soaking-wet dog, gasping for air. The jetty has vanished into the darkness. Nothing remains behind me but loose fragments of concrete, clinging to the mangled, rusted reinforcement bars sticking up out of the bedrock. The underwater shapes are gone too, as if they were never here and I have just woken from one of those dreams that feel almost real.

  I lie flat on my back with my face turned to the sky. Snow flurries hurtle past and the darkness has settled like a lid over the island. Eventually I notice a faint rattling from the boathouse door not far off.

  Mustering all my strength, I strain to magic away the pain in my face and head until I can get to my feet and make my way in that direction. I hunker down in front of the door and make an effort to peer in underneath it through a chink at the bottom.

  I stand up again and use my fingers to fumble for the padlock. A new padlock is fastened to the door, and I walk over to a pile of materials and pick out a piece of metal flat enough to wedge between lock and door.

  The timber creaks as I press the metal down and pull it towards me until one of the planks breaks loose, along with four thick nails, and the whole door bursts open, almost propelling me down on the pebbly shore as the wind takes hold of it. I squeeze into the boathouse without even trying to close the door behind me.

  Once inside, I can make out the contours of a brand-new standby power supply system in boxes, with only the exhaust unpacked and placed in the middle of the floor, beside several metal lighting masts connected to an outdoor jacuzzi. Five brand-new diving suits hang from hooks along one wall.

  The length of transparent plastic sheeting that I had used to wrap the corpse has blown in under the door and attached itself to the standby power supply exhaust system. The wind tugs at the plastic, making it rustle and scrape on the motor parts and the concrete floor. I walk further inside and bend down to pick it up.

  I lift the plastic closer to my face, aware of the foul smell of decomposing flesh, skin, muscles and intestines that lingers in the plastic folds. The impression of the dead body is still visible, where flaming yellow threads of blood and body fluids form the outline of a human being.

  I fold up the plastic and jam it tightly under one of the exhaust system pipes. When I phone Bjørkang no one answers.

  Neither Arnt nor Harvey picks up the phone either, and soon after that, my mobile runs out of battery. I decide to wait here in the boathouse until help arrives, and find some packing cases against the rear wall to clamber on to. I’m chilled to the bone, and have a splitting headache from my fall on the rocks. My body aches, my cheekbone throbs, and my legs feel numb.

  I fish out the water bottle from my rucksack and lodge it between my legs as I scour my pockets for the bag with my blister packs, loose tablets, dispenser and capsules, then toss the pills down my throat and lean back against the wall with my arms hugging my body. I close my eyes and try to focus on the wind outside.

  SUNDAY

  CHAPTER 21

  Somewhere beyond the boathouse I can hear the roar of a boat’s engine. I slide my fingers out of my jacket sleeves, scramble down from the packing case and walk outside. Here an ochre-yellow fog has materialised through the sporadic snowflakes still swirling in the air. The thudding of the outboard motor grows louder, and through the snow I can see an old man in a motorboat heading towards the lighthouse.

  ‘So you’re still alive?’ Johannes yells. His boat slides into position, parallel to shore.

  ‘Only just,’ I say, trembling with cold, and stand still in front of the concrete remnants of the jetty demolished by the storm overnight, while Johannes works the boat closer.

  ‘What the hell?’ he exclaims when he catches sight of the stumps left behind by the jetty. ‘Where’s the rest of it?’

  ‘Disappeared some time last night.’

  ‘Harvey contacted me on the walkie-talkie and asked me to come out and pick you up as soon as the weather permitted. A number of the mussel poles had come adrift during the storm and were floating out to sea. He’s still out there. They say there’s going to be another gale not long after daybreak, so we’re short of time.’

  ‘Have you seen anything of the local police chief?’

  ‘Bjørkang? No, why should I? It’s only half-past four, you know. The servants of social democracy don’t get up for another few hours yet.’

  ‘I spoke to him last night,’ I tell him, climbing aboard as soon as he comes alongside between the projecting reinforcement bars and heavy chains rattling roughly at the water’s edge. ‘They were to come here as soon as they got their hands on a boat.’

  ‘Well, maybe they had more important things to do.’ The old fisherman starts to reverse the boat out. The skies above us are darkening again. ‘You’d probably have managed there for a while yet, if you had to.’

  ‘I found a woman in the sea.’

  ‘Oh?’ Johannes spits through his front teeth as he adjusts the steering and puts the boat in gear. The boat starts to work its way forward across the choppy seas at a halting speed. ‘Are you sure it was a woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where is she now?’ he asks, seemingly unruffled, as if I’m talking about an unloved hamster or a stranded goldfish.

  ‘Someone came up out of the water and took her away.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A man.’

  Johannes nods dourly to himself as he steers the boat around a huge drift of seaweed and plastic debris swirling agitatedly around on the swell below a rapidly changing sky.

  ‘The Sea Ghost is a corpse without a face,’ he ventures without preamble. ‘A dead fisherman who drifts around on the sea or sails in a half-boat with tattered sails. A warning of death and despair.’

  ‘Does it ever happen to dress up in a diving suit and crawl on land to return the dead to the sea again?’ I try to laugh, but the laughter sticks in my throat. The wind grabs the last ragtag snowflakes and starts to chase them across the surface of the sea.

  ‘No,’ Johannes answers. ‘He doesn’t do that.’ His face is hard and there is a network of purple veins just below his skin.

  ‘Didn’t think so.’

  It is five o’clock when the boat smacks against the pebbles on the beach at Skjellvik. I jump on to dry land and help Johannes to drag the vessel up and into the boathouse. We begin to walk along the road to the far end of the bay, where an old house with flaking paint sits in the open, exposed to wind and weather from the mouth of the fjord beyond.

  ‘Do you have a mobile phone I could borrow?’ I ask, once Johannes has kicked off his boots in a hallway that smells of cod liver oil and honey, and pulled on a pair of thick grey socks. ‘Mine’s run out of power.’

  Johannes points. ‘Use the landline in the living room. That’s cheaper. And I’ll lend you a battery charger.’

  The parquet flooring sticks to my sweaty socks. I put my own phone on to charge before locating the landline and calling Bjørkang’s mobile number.

  It is switched off.

  ‘Do you have the number for his sergeant, Arnt something-or-other?’

  ‘Eriksen. Arnt Eriksen. Look in the phone directory.’ Johannes hands me a local directory and then sits down in a chair, covering his legs with a tattered patchwork quilt. ‘But if you wait for a while, we can contact them on the walkie-talkie instead.’

  ‘The walkie-talkie, yes, good idea,’ I mumble. ‘Rasmus had one too.’

  ‘Who?’ Johannes looks quizzically at me.

  ‘Rasmus,’ I repeat. ‘The Danish guy out at the lighthouse.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the simplest way. Costs nothing, you know,’ he nods. ‘Completely free.’ />
  ‘Radio hamsters – screech, scratch, crackle!’ I say, taking a seat on a burgundy sofa from the fifties.

  ‘What did you say you were?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  Harvey is first to answer on the shortwave network. He is still out at the mussel farm and says he’ll come as soon as the mussel poles have been secured.

  After I’ve spoken to Harvey, I phone the police in Tromsø. They haven’t heard anything from Bjørkang, or about any boat requisition or picking up someone from a lighthouse during the night. I explain about the woman in the sea and the person at the other end asks me where she is now. I tell him that someone in a diving suit came up out of the sea and took her with him back underneath the waves, and the policeman sighs and asks me to call the local police office when it opens. Then he hangs up.

  Johannes goes out into the kitchen and returns with a mug of coffee for me, and takes his with him when he goes out into the hallway to get dressed. ‘It’s blowing up again,’ he says from the hallway. ‘I need to go down to the shore and secure some of the boathouse doors, but I’ll be back shortly.’

  Pulling my feet up from the cold floor, I lean back in the hard, old-fashioned sofa and try to find some kind of restful position. ‘Do you think they set out last night, and something happened to them in the storm?’

  ‘No. Just lie down and relax for a bit, won’t you?’ Johannes says placidly. ‘You look as if you need some rest.’

  I can see in his eyes that he is not as calm as he is keen to appear, while he stands in the doorway gazing from me to the sea outside the window. In the end he turns on his heel and disappears through the front door. I fall asleep almost at once.

  CHAPTER 22

  On the radio, a local weather forecaster announces that a gale is expected, with gusts of up to 140 kilometres per hour in exposed areas throughout the afternoon. People are asked to stay inside during the storm and avoid traffic and bridges if possible. The long-range forecast predicts a fresh area of precipitation moving northwards. The intense low pressure, combined with the full moon, makes a spring tide likely, with an estimated water level of up to one and a half metres above the norm.

  ‘Yes, that’s something,’ Johannes says when I open my eyes and look around. He has placed the walkie-talkie on the table beside that day’s edition of the local newspaper, together with a greasy paper bag of doughnuts. ‘The last time there was a spring tide I had to pump out the cellar and dig up all the drains around the house. A real brute. And impossible to set out nets. They fill up with all sorts of shit, you know.’

  ‘What time is it?’ I haul myself up and put the cup of cold coffee on the table.

  ‘Eleven a.m.,’ Johannes says. ‘You were miles away. Didn’t want to wake you – it looked like you needed the rest.’ He reaches to take a doughnut before pushing the bag across to me.

  I help myself to one, dip it into my coffee and take a bite. My mouth feels numb. The taste of coffee rouses the tiniest taste buds on my tongue to tell me how foul this is, at the same time as my stomach reminds me that something needs to get out before anything more can get in. ‘Has anyone phoned?’ I ask, putting the doughnut back on the table beside the cold coffee.

  ‘No,’ Johannes answers. ‘But I spoke to Harvey a while ago. He’s on his way over.’

  ‘And the police chief?’

  Johannes bites a doughnut in two. ‘No.’ He crams the other half into his mouth and puts the steaming coffee to his lips. ‘Nothing.’

  I switch on my mobile and see that Ulf has called five times. There is also a text message from Anniken Moritzen, asking me to visit her at her office when I get home to Stavanger. I pour out a fresh cup of coffee before I phone the local police station. A voice message there recites opening times and explains that all enquiries outside those times must go to police headquarters in Tromsø.

  But at police headquarters in Tromsø there is no one who can tell me where the local police chief and his sergeant are to be found, and the woman at the other end has no wish to join me in wondering why neither of them is in the station or answering the phone.

  ‘Fucking idiots.’ I put the mobile on the table.

  ‘Mhmm,’ Johannes smacks his lips, wiggling his toes inside his woollen socks in sheer delight and hugging his coffee cup as he uses his tongue to clean his mouth. ‘There are so many of them too,’ and he smiles with amusement, blinking so that his bushy eyebrows bristle like spines on a thorn branch. Johannes’s mop of grey hair is cut short at the nape and combed back over the crown. He looks like an adventurer of the type you see in black and white photographs, the ones who ventured out to discover all sorts of things in Arctic regions before the world wars.

  ‘Many of them?’ I ask tartly, sipping my coffee. ‘Police or idiots?’

  Johannes is on the point of answering when there is a loud knock at the front door, followed by heavy footfalls in the hallway. The next minute, Harvey appears at the door with a forced, weary smile on his face.

  ‘There you are, then.’ He rubs his hands together, as if to get the circulation going.

  ‘There’s coffee in the kitchen.’ Johannes draws the bag of doughnuts towards him. ‘And doughnuts.’

  Harvey disappears out to the kitchen. ‘You made it ashore,’ he says on his return. He picks out a doughnut and sits on the sofa beside me. His clothes are damp, and tufts of hair stick out in all directions. His face is greyer than I can remember, and his lips narrow and bloodless.

  I give a silent nod.

  ‘What a night,’ Harvey comments, shivering. ‘Some of the mussel poles had drifted almost all the way across to Steinholmene on the other side when I got hold of them. Had to just tie them to ones that were still standing, and weigh them down with an old millstone I found on land. I’d rather sort out all the mess when the weather improves.’

  ‘The southerner says he found a woman in the sea last night.’ Johannes luxuriates, stretching his toes out again, before getting to his feet and crossing the room to switch off the radio.

  ‘Oh,’ Harvey grunts. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t the Danish bloke?’

  ‘He says someone came and took her after he’d hauled her out,’ Johannes goes on calmly. ‘Someone who came up out of the sea.’

  Harvey’s gaze alternates between Johannes and me and then, shaking his head, he peers at me over his coffee cup. ‘Had you been at the bar cupboard, eh?’

  ‘Did you see anything of the police chief and his sergeant?’ I ask, ignoring the insinuation about my booze habits.

  ‘Bjørkang? No. What do you mean? Are they out now?’

  ‘They were supposed to pick me up from the lighthouse last night, but never turned up.’

  ‘By the way, we need to let them know that the whole jetty broke free last night and is now drifting somewhere out in the fjord,’ Johannes interjects. ‘It would wreck your boat, you know, if you drove straight into it.’

  ‘Have you phoned?’

  ‘There’s no answer. Not at home or at the office.’

  ‘Neither of them?’ Harvey sits further forward on the sofa, his eyes more alert.

  ‘No.’

  Harvey picks up his mobile phone and selects a number from his contact list. ‘Answering machine,’ he says, disconnecting. ‘Have you tried to call the Skjervøy office?’

  I shake my head.

  Keying in the police station number, Harvey starts to pace the room. After a while, he hangs up and comes back to sit on the sofa again. ‘You didn’t hear any boats last night?’

  I shake my head. ‘Nothing at all, apart from the sound of a trawler engine late yesterday afternoon. Why do you ask?’

  ‘The local police chief on Skjervøy says that the boat has been berthed in the marina at Blekøyhamn for the past few weeks. He hasn’t been in contact with Bjørkang, Arnt or Tromsø over the weekend and knows nothing about picking anyone up from the lighthouse last night.’

  ‘I don’t like this,’ I say, draining my coffee cup in a single draught. �
��Is it far to this marina?’

  Harvey stands up. ‘I’ll drive.’

  CHAPTER 23

  Sheets of rain come lashing at Harvey’s car as it speeds through puddles and slushy ditches, close packed on either side of the road. Harvey has to take his foot off the accelerator to avoid skidding on the slick surface.

  ‘This is going to turn out badly,’ he says, while the vehicle toils up a steep hill with trees swaying violently in the wind. ‘Really badly. And I have to go back out to the farm and find some way of attaching the sinker weights in case they break adrift again.’

  ‘Aren’t you scared?’

  ‘Fuck, yeah, I’m scared,’ Harvey exclaims. ‘But what can I do? If I lose those mussel poles, that’ll be the end for next year.’

  ‘Do you think Arnt and Bjørkang are out there? In the storm?’ The waves crash over the pebbles on the shore, and the threads holding dry fish heads smack against the frame of a fish rack down below the road. Somewhere in the midst of the grey weather I can make out Blekholm and the roof of the keeper’s house.

  ‘No idea,’ Harvey says as we crest the summit and continue along the road towards the centre of Blekøyvær and the marina. ‘But even if they are, the ambulance is an all-weather boat.’

  I notice my body is still aching from its exertions on the rocks the night before, and my anxiety about the events of the past twenty-four hours, the sense that this is just the start of something, grows hugely with every minute that passes.

  ‘What does the boat look like?’ I ask once we finally turn off on to a minor road leading down a steep incline to a woodcrafts shop and a grocery store.

  ‘Bright yellow,’ Harvey replies as the car rolls slowly past people stooped and scurrying, hopping over puddles and quagmires between the shops and vehicles in the car park. ‘With a white crane on deck.’

  We continue to another car park in front of the marina, where a boathouse with a sign proclaiming Blekøyvær Coast Association stands in front of a horseshoe-shaped stone pier.