The Last Refuge (21 page)

‘Yes. I did hear you tell him that. But I didn’t hear
you
tell
me
about it. Only now am I reading about it. Mr Callum, I must say, it does not read well for you.’

‘If I’d been found guilty of it then I’d agree with you. But I wasn’t.’

Samuelsen’s head fell into her hands, her hair hiding her face from view but not obscuring the exasperated sigh that escaped. When she looked up again she seemed ready for a fight.

‘Mr Callum, I may not be—’

The door pushed open briskly and a figure marched through. A small, slender woman with a mass of curly auburn hair tied behind her head. She was casually dressed in jeans and a T-shirt under a waterproof jacket, with white trainers on her feet. She was carrying a large black, plastic briefcase and a camera was slung over one shoulder. She looked at the lawyer and then at me.

‘Mr Callum?’ It wasn’t really a question. ‘I am Nicoline Munk of Copenhagen Police. I am here to examine you. I believe you have a cut to your right hand.’

Elin Samuelsen got to her feet, towering over the newly arrived forensics officer. ‘Can I see some identification please, Frøkun Munk?’

‘Sure.’ The young woman breezily flourished a photographic ID attached to a lanyard round her neck. Samuelsen made a show of studying it intently. ‘Okay. Go ahead.’

Munk opened her briefcase and slipped on a pair of latex gloves, then another pair on top of those. ‘You will agree to be examined, Mr Callum?’

I nodded.

‘Good. That makes it easier. You have showered today?’

‘Yes, I have.’

She frowned slightly. ‘That is not so good but it is to be expected.’ I wasn’t sure if her tone implied that I’d showered in order to hide something.

‘Your hand first, please, Mr Callum.’

I offered her my right hand, palm up. She came in close and took my hand in hers, her head just coming up to my chin. Something told me she was older than she looked. She could have passed for mid twenties, but that was unlikely given the seriousness of the case; nor did her brisk confidence suggest inexperience. She knew what she was doing – and I couldn’t be sure whether that was a good thing or not.

Munk snapped shot after shot of my palm, switching angles and checking the light as she did so. I looked at the cut as the flashgun fired and wondered what it was telling her. The cut was small but highlighted in red, the skin sliced where I’d pulled my hand away. It was already trying to stitch itself together, but not in time to save it from Munk’s lens. She dropped a small right-angled measuring scale onto my hand, next to the cut. I could only guess at what she was going to compare it to.

Seemingly satisfied with her photographic endeavours, she delved into her case again. My finger and palm-prints were taken. My fingernails were scraped. A swab was dabbed into my inner cheek and DNA presumably extracted. She worked her way round me, plucking at my clothes with tweezers, like those birds that pick parasites off the back of hippopotamuses, carefully depositing fibres into a clear plastic bag.

Elin Samuelsen was fussing almost as much, edging round us like a worried mother hen. I could see her anxiety growing – probably in inverse proportion to her faith in my innocence.

‘Frøkun Munk, you do know that my client has not been charged with murder. He has only been arrested and held in connection with the incident. And that at his own request.’

Nicoline Munk looked up at her, an amused look on her face.

‘Miss Samuelsen, I am about to ask Mr Callum to strip naked so I can examine him fully. Do you wish to remain for that?’

My lawyer reddened slightly and retreated. ‘No, I . . . no. That will not be necessary. Although it should be witnessed. I will ask one of the local officers to be in the room.’

Munk shrugged casually. ‘As you wish. I’d have stayed if I was you.’

Samuelsen blinked furiously, unsure how to take the remark. I thought she was going to come back with some retort, but she snapped her mouth closed and left the room in search of a policeman. I was sure I saw a hint of a smile on Munk’s face as she did so.

A few minutes later, a far from happy cop, the fat Klettskarð, appeared in the interview room. Seeing a man strip didn’t appear to be top of the list of things he wanted to be doing. Munk, on the other hand, seemed to be positively enjoying the discomfort she was causing. At one point she whistled a jaunty tune under her breath and smiled ironically at me when I looked at her question-ingly. My paranoia extended to thinking that she was deliberately distracting my train of thought, to make it easier to get what she wanted. If only I knew what that might be.

I stood there, naked, vulnerable, not knowing if there was something to be found on my person that would incriminate me, not knowing if I had even done anything criminal in the first place.

‘Do you get sent to the Faroes often, Frøkun Munk?’ I asked, borrowing the form of address I’d heard Samuelsen use.

She answered without looking up. ‘I came once with my parents when I was fourteen. It was rainy and cold and we spent all our time hiding out in cafes or marching over wet hills looking for puffins. I hated every minute of it.’

Half an hour later Klettskarð and the other cop who had escorted me from the fish farm, Olsen, led me out of the interview room in handcuffs. Olsen went in front while Klettskarð took my left arm in his meaty hand. We had only made a few paces along the white-walled corridor when we met two figures coming the other way.

The Danish sergeant, Kielstrup, was followed just a couple of paces behind by Martin Hojgaard. His face fell when he saw me, embarrassment and guilt etched all over it. His mouth jammered half open as if to speak but clamped shut again. Hojgaard was halfway through the door of another room when he stopped.

‘I am sorry. I have no choice. I must tell them what I know.’

Inspector Nymann was now standing behind him, but made no attempt to stop Hojgaard from speaking to me. My landlord and boss, decent man that he was, was being used, and I knew that the timing of our meeting was no accident.

‘It’s okay, Martin. It’s not your fault. Tell them everything you need to.’

He smiled, awkward and grateful.

Nymann stepped aside to let Hojgaard through, his eyes on me until the door closed.

Tell them what I know
, those were Hojgaard’s words. The nightmares, the shouting, the cries of murder, the fight with Toki, the reek of alcohol that I must have worn in the car that morning. None of it would serve me well.

The cops led me out of the station into the yard on Jonas Broncksgøta. The same white Mondeo was parked in the corner where we’d left it earlier, and we headed towards it. Klettskarð opened the rear door and made me duck my head as I got in.

The fat cop then got into the driver’s seat, but his partner didn’t join him in the front. It was only then that I realized the front passenger seat was already taken. I saw the fair hair and the upturned collar of the raincoat, then caught sight of the horn-rimmed glasses in the rear-view mirror.

Inspector Broddi Tunheim turned in his chair, a welcoming smile on his face.

‘We meet again, Mr Callum. I hope our friends from Denmark were kind with you. Now, we are your taxi drivers. The Danes don’t know the way, and anyway, they are too busy trying to catch a murderer. It is left to me to fulfil the duty. I could have sent Rógvi along with Demmus, but he has had a long day. And it will give us the chance to catch up again. You don’t mind, I hope.’

Klettskarð put the car into gear and we moved off.

‘We are going to Mjørkadalur,’ Tunheim continued affably. ‘You know it?’

I shook my head.

‘It is at the top of the mountain Sornfelli. Very beautiful. It used to be the American radar station in the days of the Cold War, when we feared we would be bombed by the Russians. Now we don’t fear the bomb and the Americans have gone home. The radar station is now the jail.

‘Sornfelli is twelve kilometres from Torshavn . . . how is it you say it . . .
as the crow flies
. However, in Faroe Islands the crow must follow the road and climb the mountain, so it is twenty kilometres away. That is good. It will give us time to get to know each other. Tell me about Glasgow.’

‘What?’

‘I have never been. They say it is a wild place. Much drinking and fighting over football. Is that right?’

I wasn’t sure I wanted any part in this conversation, and that obviously registered on my face.

‘Come, Mr Callum. Tell me. I’m interested.’

I sighed and capitulated.

‘Glasgow isn’t like that. Yes, people drink and yes, football leads to fights, but there is more to it than that.’

‘Tell me. Please.’

‘Look, why are we discussing this?’

Tunheim ignored the question. ‘I read that the football match, the big Glasgow one, the Celtic and the Rangers, is like no other in the world. Is it?’

‘It can get interesting.’

‘And you have gangs. They can be very violent, I hear. Especially with knives.’

I stared back at the devious prick before slumping back in my seat and turning to look out of the window. Nothing this guy said could be taken at face value.

The police car wound its way onto the ring road – houses and shops going by in a blur – and in just a few minutes we were high above the town and climbing ever higher into the hills. Tunheim was humming irritatingly, the volume going up and down so the noise couldn’t easily be consigned to background static.

After a while he turned to me again, as if seeing me for the first time.

‘I have another Faroese saying for you. It is from
‘Hdvamdl’,
a poem in the words of Odin. I think you will like it:
Td id 0lidfer inn, fer vitid lit.
It means, when the ale goes in the wit goes out. It’s true, no? Alcohol, wow. I like it, but, oh boy, it can make you do crazy things. You agree?’

‘I guess so.’

‘You know it. Let me try another proverb on you, Mr Callum. You know how important a part the
grindaknivur
plays in our culture. It is the knife to kill the whale and the knife to eat it with. Every adult male in the Faroes has one, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. So the proverb is
Knívleysur madur er Uvleysur madur.
It means a man without a knife is a man without a life. You understand? It is how important a
grindaknivur
is to a Faroese man. The Danes, they don’t understand this so they don’t question it. Me, I know it only too well, so it bothers me. I am a strange one, Mr Callum. When I start wondering about things, I can’t stop.’

I stared out of the car window, seeing my own face, drawn and anxious, staring back at me. What would Karis make of that face? I wanted her to touch it, console me, kiss me. Did she even know I’d been arrested? Damn it, every man, woman and child in the Faroes probably knew it.

We hit the base of the mountain and began to wind up, the car taking sharp bends at an uncomfortable speed, the steep drop below us only kept at bay by the occasional low barrier. Tunheim gave an intermittent and unasked-for commentary on our progress.

Sornfelli was eight hundred metres high and the road that we were taking only existed because it once held the radar station. As he had said, Mjørkadalur was now an abandoned relic of the Cold War, a former stepping stone in a ring of early warning radar systems that fringed the Arctic Circle on the lookout for Russian attack. In retaliation, the Russians used to keep a warship offshore with its missiles trained on the Faroes, something that scared the shit out of the locals for forty years.

The higher we wound, the more I understood Tunheim’s claim that this was the perfect hiding place for a secret radar station that everyone knew existed. The mountain peak and the valley below were regularly covered in fog. You could be standing on top of the place and still not see it. In the half-light I saw ridge behind ridge, successive shadows fringed with mist and dappled with cloud. We had come to the roof of the world or, so far as I was concerned, to the end of it.

Finally Tunheim said something in Faroese and Klettskarð slowed the car to a halt. It was only when I followed the direction of the inspector’s outstretched arm that I saw it, camouflaged against the terrain. Below us, perhaps thirty feet down a slope to a levelled-off area, sat five separate buildings huddled together against the wind. All five were long and low, with turfed roofs, dark timber walls and barely a window to be seen. The four at the front partially obscured the longer one at the back. They were bleak and uninviting, shivering in the mountaintop wind.

Behind and beyond the cluster of anonymous structures, peaks rose and fell, sweeping down in rutted greenery towards the fjord below, both sides of the ravine plunging towards the still, black water. Inches above us, the clouds hung around in gangs and plotted.

In front of me, Tunheim had the window wound down and looked at the buildings for an age, shaking his head slowly. ‘This is Mjørkadalur. The jail. It’s not much to look at, is it? The view from here is wonderful, but of course you cannot see it from inside. And do you know, if you go up the mountain just a little further, fifty metres or so, to where the radar domes used to be, then, on a clear day, you can see almost all the islands of the Faroes.
You
can’t go up, of course. And you will see nothing but four walls.’

He took off his glasses and slowly wiped them clean, letting the sounds of the mountain fill the silence in the car. The wind sang a dirge and some unseen birds croaked their indifference. Other than that, there was only the uneasy sound of freedom.

His spectacles seemingly cleaned to his satisfaction, Tunheim turned in his seat and regarded me mournfully. I wondered if he was going to try to shed a tear.

‘Mr Callum, you could spend a very long time in those buildings down there. At the moment there is no other prisoner. There will be only you. Solitary confinement. A few days in there and Torshavn will seem like Las Vegas. Have you ever been to Vegas?’

‘Yes. Once. I lost a fortune.’

‘You are not a very lucky man, Mr Callum. I suggest you let me try to help you help yourself. Once you are inside that place, I can do no more.’