by Chris Ould
The portrait was a good one, catching Jákup Homrum with an expression of openness but slight puzzlement, as if he couldn’t quite understand why he would be the photograph’s subject. There were three more of him, as if taken in rapid succession, but the first was definitely the best.
There was only one more picture, of an upturned palm against a background of what looked like the interior of a car. The red sleeve of a coat just edged into the frame.
“That’s it,” Oddur said. “Do you want to see them again?”
Hentze shook his head. “Was the last shot of the hand a mistake, do you think?”
Oddur shook his head. “Some photographers do that as a marker – a way of showing you’ve finished in one place. Like a full stop at the end of a sentence. It makes it easier when you’re scanning quickly through pictures.”
“Oh, right, I see.” He moved to look at the timeline. “So what we’re able to say now is that Erla was at Kaldbak between four and four thirty on Saturday. Well, that moves us forward a little, but still not close to her time of death. We’re still missing four hours or more and—”
He broke off and fell silent for a moment. Oddur looked up. “What?”
“We’ve missed something,” Hentze said. “The photos of Kaldbak were on Erla’s laptop – correct?”
“Yeh, and copied to her backup drive.”
“And the laptop was found in her room at the Fjalsgøta house,” Hentze said. “So therefore Erla must have gone back to the house after Kaldbak in order to transfer the pictures from her camera to the laptop. Otherwise they’d still be on her camera, which we don’t have.”
“She could have had the laptop with her and transferred the photos while she was out,” Oddur offered.
“Then how did the laptop get back to her room?” Hentze shook his head, convinced now. “No, she went back. So how come nobody saw her?”
He put the same question to Remi Syderbø five minutes later, who agreed it was worth talking to the other residents at the Fjalsgøta house again.
“Do you want to do it?” he asked.
Hentze shook his head. “It’ll probably be quicker for someone who’s already familiar with their statements. I’ll go and talk to Jákup Homrum at Kaldbak, if it’s all right with you.”
“Because she took his picture?”
“No, because she made a point of telling her friend Veerle that she was going to visit the Alliance lookouts and then she didn’t.”
Remi considered, then nodded. “Okay, sure.” He looked at his watch. “But can you be back by five? I’d like a case conference then.”
“Yeh, I’ll be there. This shouldn’t take very long.”
So now he was driving the fifteen kilometres from Tórshavn to Kaldbak, following the same route Erla Sivertsen must have taken on Saturday afternoon, and at roughly the same time of day.
He thought he was gaining a picture of Erla – incomplete, for sure – but still, something. And what had begun to colour that picture was a growing feeling that Erla Sivertsen had not been a straightforward person. True, there appeared to have been nothing overtly odd or strange about her behaviour – or indeed about the descriptions of her from those she had known. No one had described her as, say, reckless or unreliable or short-tempered, or any of a dozen different adjectives that might be used to point to a significant character trait. Instead she was liked; viewed as professional, dedicated and accommodating.
And yet…
And yet Hentze felt this was not the entire case. This was also a woman who might have been conducting an affair; who felt the need to use the apartment at Heimasta Horn to get away from her colleagues from time to time; and who had specifically said she was going to do one thing on Saturday afternoon, and instead had done quite another. This was what bothered Hentze most.
Ten minutes out of Tórshavn, he turned off route 50 and on to the narrower road that doubled back on the north side of Kaldbaksfjørður, with near vertical mountainside rising up to his left above the shore-hugging road. Four kilometres on, the village of Kaldbak was the end of the road; a scattered collection of perhaps thirty houses, a grass-roofed church and a small harbour, beyond which were a couple of warehouse-like buildings set on the promontory.
Hentze parked near the church and walked a little way up the road to a modest, rectangular house where several racks of drying fish were hung neatly beside the door under the roof’s overhang. The mailbox beside the door had two names: Jákup and Hansina Homrum, and it was Hansina who answered his knock. Early seventies, with round spectacles to match a round face.
“Hjalti, how are you?” she said, pleased to see him. “Come in, come in.”
Hentze stayed put on the mat. “I’m looking for the old man, is he here?”
“Of course not. He’s down at the harbour with his mistress. Where else? You can come in and talk to me, though.”
“I’d love to, but I’m working,” Hentze said.
Hansina chuckled. “Are you here to arrest Jákup?”
“I wasn’t planning to, but I will if you like. What’s the charge?”
“Neglect of his wife.”
“Right, I’ll run him in, then – or would you just like me to bring him home?”
“Oh, bring him home, I suppose. He has some uses – at least, when he’s here.”
* * *
The concrete harbour was small, with half a dozen boat sheds and perhaps twice that many boats in the sheltered, still water. They were all of the traditional Faroese design, wooden hulled with upswept bows and sterns. Most had rowlocks and oars, but all had the internal well for an outboard motor. Why make life any harder for yourself?
There was no sign of Jákup Homrum in the boats, but when Hentze turned the corner of the quay he heard a movement from the darkened interior of one of the boat sheds and stopped to peer in.
“Jákup? Are you there?”
Out of the gloom Jákup Homrum appeared, dressed in a blue windcheater and a fur-lined hat with ear flaps, both of which appeared to have been bought for a man at least three sizes bigger than their current occupant.
“Hey hey,” Jákup said jovially in greeting. “If Hansina’s sent you to find me you could have saved yourself the walk. I was just coming.”
“Not fast enough, according to her.”
“If she expects fast on my knees she’ll have to think again,” Jákup said. He moved stiffly to kick away a brick that was holding the door of the boat shed in place, then closed it up.
“I need to ask you a couple of questions,” Hentze said. “It’s for work.”
“Work, eh?” Jákup hung a padlock on the hasp of the door but didn’t bother to lock it. “What have I done now?”
They started to walk up the slope, away from the harbour. Hentze slowed his steps to accommodate the older man. “Two days ago – Saturday just gone – you were here when a woman called Erla Sivertsen came to the harbour. She took your photograph, remember?”
“Sure,” Jákup said. “There’s nothing wrong with my memory. Why? Is she in trouble for something?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” Hentze said. “She was found dead yesterday on Sandoy.”
“That was her?” Jákup stopped walking for a moment. “I heard it on the radio but I didn’t realise… Do you know what happened?”
“Yes, she was murdered,” Hentze told him. “But that’s not to go any further, okay?”
“Killed? Are you sure?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Poor soul. God rest her.” Jákup shook his head.
“I’m trying to find out about her movements before she died,” Hentze said. “Can you tell me anything about what she did while she was here?”
“Not much. She was taking photographs on the quay there,” Jákup pointed. “Then she stopped to look at my boat. We chatted for a few minutes and then she left.”
“What did you talk about?”
“I don’t know. The boat, fishing… She asked if I lived here and she sa
id she came from Suðuroy, I remember that.”
“Anything else?”
“No, I don’t think so. Have you talked to her friend?”
“Which friend?”
“Well I don’t know who he was, but she was with him before she came down to the harbour. I saw them together. Tourists, I thought, because they were walking round the churchyard.”
“Can you describe the man?”
Jákup shook his head. “Not really. They weren’t close enough for me to see him very well.”
“Tall or short; young or old?”
Jákup considered for a moment, as if trying to focus on a blurred image. “I suppose medium height – about the same as her. I wouldn’t say he was young. Middle-aged, maybe about fifty.”
“What colour was his hair?”
“Brown, sort of.”
“And what about his clothes – what was he wearing?”
“Some kind of raincoat,” Jákup said then, without hesitation. “Yeh, I remember that. Because I thought they didn’t look alike. She was dressed like a tourist but he looked more formal: city clothes, if you know what I mean.”
“I think so,” Hentze said. “And he didn’t come down to the harbour with her?”
“No. I don’t know where he went. I wasn’t watching like that. I saw them together and then a little while later she was on her own. I didn’t see him again.”
At the top of the slope Hentze took his leave of Jákup Homrum, sending apologies to Hansina that he couldn’t come back for coffee. He walked to his car and considered Jákup’s description of the man Erla Sivertsen had met. Not Finn Sólsker, he was certain. Good. Hentze had been afraid that this meeting of Erla’s might implicate Finn further. But it still left the question of who she had met and whether it was significant.
It needn’t be, of course. The fact that Erla had talked to someone at the church could be entirely coincidental. She’d met someone, they’d exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes, then parted; there didn’t have to be anything more to it than that. Until you remembered that Erla Sivertsen had come to Kaldbak despite saying she was going somewhere else. Then, you could say, the scales tipped a little away from coincidence and more towards something arranged.
Hentze opened his car and got in. Through the window he cast a look at the church and considered the churchyard for a moment, then started the car.
21
I’VE NEVER UNDERSTOOD ANTIQUES SHOPS. BRIC-A-BRAC, junk, second-hand goods, whatever you want to call it. It’s someone else’s cast-offs: stuff they didn’t want, so why would I want it?
Apart from a few used books I have three things that are old: a set of poker dice I took from a boy called Sean when I was ten, and two Corgi toys – a blue tractor and a yellow truck – from about the same time. That’s it. They’re in a box somewhere, maybe at the back of a cupboard.
So the Reytt Bátur shop on the corner of Magnus Heinasonar gøta was an emporium of stuff I didn’t want. I was in a minority of one, though. Tórshavn had been invaded by clusters of pastel-waterproofed tourists from a cruise ship in the harbour: Germans, by and large, with knots of Americans and French. It was the busiest I’d seen the streets, and despite the rain there was a slightly febrile urgency in the way they consulted maps and bustled from shop to shop, as if everything good might be gone before they got there or had to return to the ship.
I followed three of them to the Reytt Bátur shop but didn’t go much further than the threshold. It was poorly lit inside, although at the back of the room I could just make out a sales counter, topped by glass display units. Between it and me the aisles of dark wood furniture and worn leather chairs were narrow and already congested with tourists picking over everything from dusty wine glasses to old dolls and kitchen utensils. Their voices were raised and candid in the way people’s are when they know they’ll never be back and won’t be understood by the locals anyway.
I guessed that feeling safe in their own language was the reason they weren’t bothering to disguise their opinion of this plate or that trinket box, too. An American couple not far ahead of me were querying how much of this stuff was really “Faroeish”. Hadn’t they seen the same thing in a yard sale at home?
Behind the sales counter I caught a glimpse of a woman who might or might not be Eileen Skoradal. She seemed about the right age, but she was busy wrapping purchases and trying to explain money to a tourist.
Now wasn’t the time, I decided, backing out of the shop as another knot of foragers arrived. Instead I went to find coffee and Wi-Fi, smug that I wasn’t a tourist and wasn’t on a deadline.
I gave it almost an hour and two cappuccinos, sucking the internet connection at the Dugni café. They didn’t seem to mind. The tourists didn’t have time to stop for coffee, so apart from a couple who came in to look at the knitted goods in the window I was pretty much the only customer.
Google gave me nothing on the Colony at Múli and including the word “Faroes” in the search often led me down links to semi-literate posts on social media sites, all decrying the “barbaric slaughter” of whales. Nothing about the death of Erla Sivertsen, though. Apparently humans didn’t count for so much.
On a whim I checked the AWCA website and had some of my cynicism dispelled by an obituary on their home page. There was a decent photo of Erla in wet weather gear, looking happy against a grey ocean. Beneath that there were two paragraphs of text, which said simply that Erla Sivertsen had died on Saturday in her homeland of the Faroe Islands. After that there was a brief biography and mention of several photographic awards she’d won.
It was a tasteful and well-written piece by someone who had avoided over-sentimentalising. The fact that it said nothing about the circumstances of Erla’s death was telling, too. It might have been as much as they knew, but I doubted it, partly because there was also no mention of the fact that Erla had been here as part of the anti-whaling protest. That, to me, suggested that AWCA had been requested not to go into details.
Not that it would be hard to figure out what Erla had been doing, given the content of the site’s other pages. They’d opted for restraint in the obituary, but beyond that the story was different. The photos of the grind at Sandur were of the sort you’d expect and the editorial comments alongside them were filled with adjectival outrage that did little or nothing to inform. They were simply propaganda without subtlety or nuance. Killing whales was abhorrent; the Faroese killed whales, therefore the Faroese were abhorrent. I reckoned the average twelve-year-old would have got the idea in the first couple of sentences. After that it was simply patronising, repetitive and tiresome and I was sure that the person who wrote it hadn’t written a word of Erla Sivertsen’s obituary.
I read the obituary again, then I closed the browser. Whatever Hentze was doing on the enquiry, I knew better than to stick my nose in unless I had something to offer. Which I didn’t. Not that it stopped me thinking about it for a while as I finished my coffee. Old habits.
By the time I left the café the rain had come on harder and the last of the tourists were heading towards the harbour with the spoils of their retail raids. I put up my collar and made my way back to the Reytt Bátur shop.
Reytt bátur means “red boat”, but I was given a helping hand with the translation by the naïve-style painting on the signboard outside. Why it was the name of an antiques shop was still beyond me, though.
The building was an unattractive concrete structure, which had the look of something originally designed for utilitarian purposes. There were two floors of seemingly unoccupied offices above and the shop took up the ground floor, which might once have been some kind of showroom. Whatever the case, the place was empty of customers now; back to the way it normally was, I suspected: grey light from the plate glass and a few patches of brightness from lamps and wall lights.
I picked my way through the maze of precariously displayed bric-a-brac and when I got to the counter I spent a minute looking at various pieces of jewellery and metalwork while a
figure clinked a spoon against china behind a curtained doorway.
When she emerged the woman had two mugs of coffee in hand and was slightly surprised to see me at the counter, making a quick, apologetic smile.
“Hey, góðan dag,” I said. “Eg eiti Jan Reyná. Are you Eileen Skoradal?”
She looked to be in her early sixties; a fairly small woman, with elfin features and an easy-going manner, but when I spoke she took on the slightly confused look I was getting used to when I mixed basic Faroese and English. I’d probably have done just as well to stick with English, but the Faroese was sometimes a useful flag that I wasn’t just a tourist.
“Ja. Yes, I’m Eileen. Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” I said. “My mother was Lýdia Reyná. I was told you might have known her.”
She frowned for a second, putting it together, and then her face lightened. “Lýdia? Ja – yes, of course! You’re Jan?” She seemed genuinely pleased to have made the connection. “I can’t believe this.”
“I was hoping I could ask you a few questions about her,” I said. “If you have time.”
“Yes, yes sure. Can you wait for a moment? I made coffee for my mother. Let me take it and I can come back. Is that okay?”
“Sure, of course. Takk fyri.”
Leaving one mug on the counter Eileen Skoradal moved away, weaving adeptly through the aisles, towards a far corner of the room I hadn’t noticed before. Through the sea of furniture and objects I now made out an old woman – she had to be well over eighty – sitting under a standard lamp mostly covered in crocheted blankets. She was in an armchair and apart from her head the only part of her that moved were her hands, knitting with the regularity of a machine. Even when Eileen brought her drink she didn’t break off, but kept on clicking away as they spoke. It was almost hypnotic.
Rather than be caught watching them I turned and occupied the time by showing polite interest in the jewellery again: mostly silver rings and brooches with one or two gold and diamond rings in scuffed boxes. I was happy to look away when Eileen returned.
