by Chris Ould
“So everyone here gets a share?” I asked, indicating the spectators further away.
“Ja, if they live on Sandoy. Each home is on a list, but you can be taken off if you like – if you don’t want a share.”
“Do many people do that?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps more now, but still not so many.”
“Have the protesters made any difference?”
He shrugged. “Only to themselves. Now they will all go home with a criminal record for interfering with the grind. That’s the law.”
He said it flatly, as if things were as they should be, and then – as if he’d reached the end of his conversational reservoir – he shifted.
“So, have a good day,” he said in that abrupt way the Faroese sometimes have of taking their leave.
“Takk. You too.”
He headed off and I watched the men in the water for a few minutes longer, until I started to feel cold. Then my mobile rang. It was Fríða, who said she was heading for the harbour to find Finn. I told her I’d meet her there and stood up to shake sand off my coat.
Instead of walking back along the beach, I opted for the easier route via the road. It was lined with parked cars and at the far end I saw a knot of bedraggled and handcuffed protesters being held beside police vehicles. As I got closer I recognised a couple of the uniform cops, but they were preoccupied with the task in hand so I gave them a wide berth as they started to load the protesters into a van.
Most of what I knew about the Alliance – as the Faroese usually called them – came from dinner-table conversations, but it was a slightly vexed subject and one many people preferred to avoid. From what I could tell, though, the AWCA volunteers had publicised their campaign well since their arrival about two months ago. They’d stirred up a flurry of interest and concern in the international media, especially on the internet, with pictures of bloodstained seas and dead whales featuring heavily.
As a result the Faroese had suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves being vilified as barbarians and murderers for their traditional whale killings, while the AWCA protesters presented a well-managed image of themselves as the would-be saviours of defenceless wildlife. Whenever and wherever there was a whale drive, the Alliance had vowed they’d be there in force to stop it. The whole thing had promised to be very dramatic – and then it wasn’t, because no grinds had taken place.
As far as I could tell it was unusual for there to have been no whale sightings at all during the summer, but if the islanders had missed out on their catch at least it meant there were no protests. The only real conflict had consisted of a few drunken confrontations in bars and some petty vandalism to the protesters’ boats, and I got the feeling that most of the phlegmatic Faroese had rather hoped that would be all that happened. If so then when the Alliance left in October the whole chapter could be written off as what the Faroese call “a storm in a glass”.
There didn’t seem to be much chance of that now, though. When I reached the road junction and turned towards the harbour, a police van passed me with several bedraggled and downcast protesters inside. Still, I supposed the locals could count themselves one up over the activists. The grindadráp hadn’t been disrupted in any significant way and, despite all their big talk, the Alliance had only been able to field minimal opposition, rather than the promised massed ranks.
The village of Sandur seemed deserted as I made my way through it to the neighbouring harbour: even the Eldhús shop and the bakery were closed and the only sign of life were a few passing cars. It was a different story at the harbour, though. Here it was noisy and crowded as boats came in with whale carcasses and men on the quayside directed operations to bring them ashore. I stood and watched from the corner of the dock for a while, keeping an eye out for Fríða, but when I couldn’t spot her I wandered out past the fish-processing sheds towards the far end of the harbour where a couple of decent-sized boats were tied up.
Near the end of the dock half a dozen whales were already laid out on the tarmac and a man in his late fifties was using a wickedly sharp knife to cut rectangular openings about a yard long in their bellies. He’d already done this to some and their intestines spilled out in pale pink coils through the incongruously angular holes.
A few yards ahead of me a tall, dark-haired woman in a red storm jacket was taking photographs of the guy’s handiwork with a long-lensed professional-looking camera. It wasn’t until he finished sawing away and straightened up that the man realised he was being photographed. When he did he clearly didn’t like the discovery and he barked out a couple of words at the woman.
Even though it was in Faroese I could interpret his tone – first annoyed and then demanding – as he stepped away from the carcass. The woman lowered her camera and said something I couldn’t hear, but it had no effect. The man became more insistent and started towards her, pressing his point.
It was none of my business, but a copper’s instinct and the fact that the man still had the knife in his hand made me change direction and quicken my step. I reached them just as the man came to a halt in front of the woman and gestured at her camera, making a demand: hand it over. That much was clear.
“Hey,” I said, leaving it somewhere between the Faroese greeting and a caution. I looked to the woman. “Everything okay? Hvussu hevur tú tað?”
The expression on her face was set somewhere between determination and uneasiness. She was gripping her camera firmly to her side but when she turned towards me I sensed her relief at having someone else there.
“Yeh, thank you,” she said.
The guy shot me a black look then said something in Faroese – a repeated demand – and gestured at her camera with his knife. I tensed a little and weighed up the threat. Fifty-fifty.
“Listen—” I started to say, but was cut short by a short, stolid man in a yellow sou’wester who came towards us all at a brisk trot. He was in his early thirties, unshaven, with a woollen hat on his head and he might have cut a vaguely comical figure if it hadn’t been for the fact that he was built like a bulldozer. From the way he swung his arms you knew there was a lot of muscle under his coat.
This guy said something to the one with the knife, then planted himself firmly in front of him, apparently undaunted by the knife or the man’s grievance.
Now the older man turned his resentment and grievance on the newcomer. He spoke and gestured indignantly for several seconds, as if he’d been wronged, but none of it cut any ice with the bulldozer. He wasn’t here to debate and he wasn’t moving. Instead he just shook his head and said something final: take it or leave it.
Outnumbered now, the older guy took it. With some well-chosen words aimed at the woman he turned on his heel and stalked back to his whale.
We none of us moved for a couple of seconds, just to be sure, then the woman shifted and spoke Faroese to our bulldozer friend. I got the sense that she knew him, but her thanks seemed to embarrass him and after a short, mumbled reply he started to lumber away. She looked after him for a moment – seemingly slightly amused – then at me.
“Thanks for your help,” she said. There was a faint trace of American overlaying the natural Scandinavian in her accent.
I shrugged it off. “You’re welcome, but I think your friend had more effect than me.”
That amused her again. “Høgni? Yeh, he’s a sweet guy.” Then she held out her hand. “Erla Sivertsen.”
“Jan Reyna.” We shook hands. She was about thirty, I guessed; a heart-shaped face lightly tanned, as if she spent time outdoors.
“Maybe we should move on,” I said, glancing at the whales.
“Yeh, I think so.”
As we walked along the quay she finally released her hold on her camera and let its strap take the weight.
“So what was the problem?” I said, gesturing back.
“Oh, nothing much,” she said as if it wasn’t an entirely unusual occurence. “He just didn’t like having his photograph taken.”
“That was al
l?” I asked.
By way of explanation she briefly opened her jacket to show me a blue AWCA sweatshirt beneath.
“Oh. Right,” I said.
“He thought I’d post his picture on the internet to show ‘the whale murderers’ at work.”
“Will you?”
“Sure, maybe,” she said. “But not with that caption. I’m usually more subtle than that.” She smiled and changed tack. “Are you English?”
I nodded. “More or less. I was born here but I left when I was small: too young to remember it.” It had become something of a litany over the last couple of weeks. Enough that I was considering having cards printed to save myself having to repeat it whenever the question came up.
“So are you local or…?” I left it open.
“Faroese, yeh,” she confirmed. “I’ve been away for a while, too, though.”
“Are there many Faroese with the Alliance?”
“No, I’m unique.” She said it with a slightly self-deprecating smile. “The only one ‘betraying my country’.”
There was a slight undertone to that, but I couldn’t quite read it.
“So are you here to visit family?” she asked.
I nodded. “My cousin on Streymoy.”
“Ah. Okay. Who is that? I might know them.”
“Fríða Sólsker.”
“Yes, yeh, I know Fríða,” she said, surprised but pleased to make the connection. “But I haven’t seen her for a long time. How is she?”
“Fine. She’s around somewhere. I’m supposed to meet her at her brother’s boat, but…” I gestured at the size of the task. There were at least two dozen boats of varying sizes in the harbour now. I had no idea which was Finn Sólsker’s.
“It’s called the Kári Edith,” Erla told me. “Over there.” She gestured towards the end of the quay where a black-hulled boat with a white wheelhouse was tied up, slightly apart from the others that were towing whale carcasses in. Erla didn’t seem to want to take any more photographs, so we strolled around the harbour together in the direction of Finn Sólsker’s boat, chatting a little, watching the activity. On the quayside a JCB was being put to use as a crane, raising the whale bodies suspended on straps and ropes from their dorsal fins, then manoeuvring them round and lowering them down on the tarmac.
What struck me most was the scale of it all: the size of the whales, and their number. There was a strange incongruity and fascination in seeing these bodies out of their element – incised and dissected, then measured and recorded. The knots of people who stood around to watch accepted the whole thing matter-of-factly, as they might assess the meat counter at the Miklagarður supermarket, and after a time even my own sense of the event’s strangeness began to fade. There’s only so much you can take in.
Finally we turned the corner on to the quay on the seaward side of the harbour and as we approached the Kári Edith I spotted Fríða standing with a man and a woman. I took a guess based on what Fríða had already told me and reckoned they were probably her brother, Finn, and his wife, Martha.
I was proved right when Fríða spotted us. She came over to greet Erla warmly in Faroese and exchange kisses, then turned to me and said, “Okay, come and meet Finn and Martha now.”
I still wasn’t entirely used to the interconnectedness of family that the Faroese take for granted, but I sensed that introducing me to her brother and sister-in-law was another part of Fríða’s plan to reconnect me to my roots. By now I knew better than to resist, so I put on my best sociable front.
Finn Sólsker was about six feet tall, dressed in work jeans and a traditional sweater, with a roughly trimmed beard. He shook my hand but kept his greeting to a nod and a neutral “Hey.”
Martha was warmer. She was a full head shorter than her husband, with a ready smile and animated features.
“You know my father,” she told me after we’d worked our way through some general pleasantries. Her English was slightly stilted, but still way more impressive than my mangled and mispronounced Faroese.
“Do I?” I queried.
“Ja, sure. Hjalti Hentze. He told me you worked with him to find out who killed the man at Tjørnuvík.”
Like I said, there’s an interconnectedness in the Faroes, so I shouldn’t have been too surprised. And it was typical of Hentze that he hadn’t mentioned it. He wasn’t that sort of man.
“He said you knew a lot about murders,” Martha went on.
“Yeah, well, in England we have a few more than you do, that’s all,” I told her.
“Maybe. But he says you have a good police eye.”
I laughed. That sounded like Hentze, but I didn’t need to say anything more because Finn shifted beside her and had another subject in mind.
“So, I hear you also had to be a police officer with Arne Haraldsen,” he said.
“Sorry, who?”
“At the whales over there. Høgni told us. He said Arne had a knife.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, getting it now. Then I shook my head. “I didn’t have to do very much. When your friend Høgni came along the guy changed his mind.”
“Yeh, Høgni’s useful like that,” Finn agreed. Then he gestured across the harbour. “So, what do you think of this now you see it – the grind? Are you for it or against it?”
“Finn,” Martha cut in, slightly reproachful, as if he’d been impolite. He hadn’t, but I also knew why he was asking.
“I’m neutral,” I told him. “But I thought I should see it.”
“And now you don’t like it?”
I could tell from his tone that he wasn’t satisfied with my fence-sitting, so I shrugged. “To be honest, not much,” I said. “I wouldn’t go to an abattoir for fun either, but that doesn’t mean I won’t eat a steak.”
“Abattoir is the slaughterhouse?”
“Yeah.”
He nodded. “Okay, I see. It’s a fair comment.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the slightly patronising tone, but I was prepared to put some of it down to translation. As it was, Martha took the opportunity to cut in. She said something in Faroese to Finn, then turned to Fríða.
“Will you and Jan come back to the house? The children will want to see you and you can stay to dinner.”
Fríða sounded apologetic. “Sorry, we can’t. Jan’s arranged to collect a car from Tórshavn, so I think we should catch the next ferry back.”
I shook my head. “Don’t worry about that. You should stay if you want to. Just give me a lift to the ferry and I’ll catch the bus into Tórshavn.”
It was a convenient way out. I didn’t want to stop Fríða spending time with her family, but I didn’t really feel like several hours of small talk and perhaps Fríða knew me well enough to intuit my feelings because she didn’t demur.
“Okay,” she said. “If you’re sure.”
Erla had been keeping a slight distance, checking photos on the screen of her camera, but now, like me, she appeared to see a convenient exit strategy.
“I can give you a lift if you like,” she said. “I need to go back to Tórshavn, also.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said. “If you’re sure it’s not out of your way.”
4
IN THE CONTINGENCY-PLANNING ROOM OF TÓRSHAVN’S police headquarters, Hjalti Hentze surveyed the list of the arrested Alliance protesters that Hans Lassen, the uniform inspector, had just handed to him. He listened, too, while Lassen described the protesters’ unexpected tactic of wading into the water in an attempt to drive the whales away from the beach.
“They’ll need dry clothes, then, I suppose,” Hentze said when Lassen had finished. “If they’re to be locked up for the night.”
“Yeh, it’s arranged,” Lassen confirmed. “We have forensic suits they can change into until their own clothes are dry. We’ll also have to arrange for food: hotdogs, at least.”
“Are you sure? A lot of them are probably vegetarian.”
“Vegetarian? Dammit, yeh, you’re right. It better be pizza then: pla
in cheese. Bloody hell.”
While Lassen searched through the phonebook for a pizza delivery service, Hentze scanned the list of names again. Three Americans, four French, two German, two Spanish and a Pole. It was a very mixed bag, but they’d always known that it probably would be if it came to arrests.
Plans for how they would deal with the Alliance protesters had been drawn up soon after they’d announced their intention to come to the islands back in May. At press conferences and on their website the Alliance had claimed that three hundred volunteers would come to take part in direct action at every grind and it was a threat that had caused ripples up through the government and as far as Denmark. If true it would be nothing less than an invasion – or so people thought: a threat to peace and order and God knew what else.
So plans had been made at high-level meetings. A special task force of SWAT-trained police officers was formed, extra vehicles were sent over from Denmark and a naval frigate had been on permanent patrol around the islands for weeks. The ship was rumoured to have two or three dozen special forces personnel aboard, although Hentze had seen nothing to support that.
And even when the number of protesters arriving on the islands had proved to be far fewer than the Alliance had originally claimed, the contingency plans had remained in place. There was no telling what tricks the Alliance might have, and no one wanted to be caught out, least of all the politicians.
The way Hentze saw it, though, the politicians had already been caught out – by smart propaganda and effective PR from the Alliance. And until today the absence of any whale drives had made the whole thing moot anyway. He just wished it had stayed that way: not because he was required to do very much, but just because life would have been simpler if it had. Now everyone had been stirred up all over again and he seemed to be the only one who didn’t find this new drama even a little exciting.
A few minutes later Remi Syderbø, the CID chief, came into the office while Hentze was still transcribing names into the computer. Remi had been closeted in a meeting with Andrias Berg, the Commander; a couple of prosecutors and an unnamed official – a Dane – for the last half an hour and now it seemed that he’d come to hand down their decisions.
