The Last Refuge (25 page)

‘No. I am sure you are not. So what do you think happened to Aron Dam? Or was it you? You know that all of Torshavn, all of the Faroe Islands, thinks it was you.’

‘I don’t know what happened to him. And as for the people here, I’m sure that they do think that. I’ve seen the looks I’ve been getting. They’ll keep thinking it till they find out who really did it.’

Gotteri nodded thoughtfully. ‘You need to hope that the Danish detectives are looking for someone else as well as you. If they only think it is you then you could be the only person they find guilt for. Hey, I saw the forensic expert in court. Wow. She is hot, no? She can take my fingerprints anytime.’

My mind skipped to standing naked on the cold floor of the police station interview room, Nicoline Munk examining me. I decided to spare Gotteri the image.

‘Yeah. But that’s not really the issue, is it? I need her to do her job. I need her to find something at the scene of the crime – maybe she already has – and I need to her to match it to someone. Someone that’s not me.’

I could hear the stress in my voice and Gotteri couldn’t have failed to notice it. There was anger underlining every word. I took a bigger swig at the beer and held it in my mouth for a while before letting it slide down my throat.

‘You were pretty drunk that night. Everyone who was in the Natur says so. Where did you go when you left the bar?’

I’d answered this question from Gotteri before, and I could feel the heat rising in me as he pushed me to do so again.

‘I went home. And that’s where I’m going now if I still have one.’ I drained the last of my beer and pushed it back across the table. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

‘Stay!’ Gotteri urged me vehemently. ‘Have another. You must need it after being locked up in that place. And I could do with some company that isn’t Faroese.’

‘No. I’m going.’ I got to my feet to prove the point. ‘I need to find out if I still have a place to live, and there’s more chance of the Hojgaards letting me stay on if I don’t turn up drunk.’

‘Okay, okay. But I’m going across the Postman’s Walk to Gásadalur this afternoon. If you don’t want to drink it’s the best place for you to be. Come with me. Clear your head. And it might be better to be out of Torshavn. Let things cool down.’

Serge had talked about Gásadalur before, telling me about the trek across the mountains to the tiny village and the spectacular waterfall that plunges off the edge of the cliff into the sea. It seemed that the one person I wanted and needed to see didn’t feel the same way, so maybe the next best thing was to get away from it all. On these islands, Gásadalur was about as far away as I could get.

‘Yeah, maybe. What time are you leaving?’

He put his glass down. ‘Now. I’ll drive you as near to that home of yours as I can get by road and you can get changed out of those court clothes. Okay?’

Nothing was okay. Neither inside my head nor out. I chose between the seemingly lesser of evils.

‘Okay.’

Chapter 35

I approached the Hojgaards’ shack feeling like a thief in the night. The key in my pocket wasn’t doing much to ease my muddled conscience, not least because I couldn’t be sure it would still fit the lock.

Gotteri sat in his car at the top of the road awaiting my return, having urged me to hurry so we could begin the drive out of town. The Frenchman was obviously anxious to get me away from Torshavn, and there was an edge to his constant questioning that bothered me. Maybe I’d just had all the interrogating I could handle for one day.

There had been no sign of anyone at the Hojgaards’ house and I’d breathed a silent, cowardly sigh of relief at the realization. If I had been evicted from my home in the hills, I’d rather find out by the door remaining locked than by Martin or Silja telling me in person. My relief was as much for their sake as for mine, as they didn’t deserve to be put through such an awkward encounter.

I was relieved to find that the shack looked reassuringly the same, as if I’d expected it to have been reconstructed in my absence. It felt a lifetime since I’d last walked out its doors, rather than the few days that had actually passed. It remained securely fastened into the hillside, a rock in a storm.

Breathing deep, I thrust my hand into my pocket and turned the key through my fingers, glad of the feel of it. There wasn’t much that I was sure of any more, neither my past nor my future; not my relationship with Karis or even my own innocence. If I still had one thing to cling onto, one piece of certainty, then maybe the world would stop whirling round my head. I needed the key to turn in the lock. I needed this ‘shitty little house on the hill’ – Aron Dam’s taunt flashed disturbingly through my head – to be the place I could be safe in.

There was a shake in my hand by the time I got to the end of the path and was confronted by the locked door. I knew I couldn’t take much more and had to have something go my way. I wouldn’t have blamed the Hojgaards, not for a second, but I was praying they hadn’t evicted me in my absence.

Even as I manoeuvred the key into the lock, I considered my options if it didn’t turn. Depressingly, my gut instinct was that the best of those options was Mjørkadalur. I realized I’d rather return to the four white walls of the jail than take up residence anywhere else on the islands. Except, of course, with Karis. That, I would have taken in a heartbeat, but it wasn’t an alternative that seemed to be on offer.

One more breath. Turn the key to the right. Wait. Hold breath and pray. A click. A click. Breathe.

I stood for a moment, silently thanking the Hojgaards and the few lucky stars that looked down on me. This, at least, was something. I pulled the door back and stepped inside, immediately seeing that my blessings were scarce and easy to count.

The place had been turned over. Clothes were strewn across the bed. Drawers were half open and one sat on the floor. The sheet had been taken from the bed and shoes that had lain underneath the bed were now in the open. Toiletries had been moved around the sink. Everything wore the air of having been turned upside down and dropped back in more or less the same place.

I should have expected it, but had probably been so worried about whether I’d even get inside that I hadn’t considered that the police would inevitably have ransacked the place looking for evidence. Evidence. Was there any? I sank onto the edge of the bed and was suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that I didn’t know.

The little house could be crossed from end to end in a couple of strides and yet I didn’t know it or myself well enough to say if it held something that could condemn me.

My head was in my hands when I heard the distant beeping of a car horn repeatedly calling for my attention. Gotteri’s impatience broke the spell I’d put on myself and I got to my feet and grabbed some of the clothes that had been left on the bed. I quickly stripped out of the borrowed court suit and dressed for an escape to the wilds.

Even the one place I had counted on to be a refuge wasn’t safe from the doubts and paranoia that were eating away at my mind from the inside.

Chapter 36

Gásadalur was a village on Vagar, the north-westerly island where the airport was. Gotteri drove as far as Bø, where he parked the car and we stepped out into light rain carried on a sharp easterly wind. I could barely hear him, even though we were just a few feet apart. I wasn’t sure that was such a bad thing.

He had battered my ears all the way from Torshavn – about the village, about Karis and Aron Dam, about the Danish cops and the price of beer. Serge liked to talk a whole lot more than I liked to listen.

There was now a road all the way to Gásadalur but that wasn’t the way Gotteri wanted to play it. The road was still relatively new and he preferred to reach what he was going to photograph by hiking there the way it had been done for hundreds of years. It was known as the Postman’s Walk.

Three times a week, the postman had made the steep two-and-a-half-kilometre walk across the mountains and the moor to deliver mail to the villagers. Then he’d make the walk back again. At least his mailbag ought to have been light, as there were only ten houses in Gásadalur. I guessed there were more back in the day, but Gotteri didn’t seem to know.

This lasted until 2006, when the government finished blasting a tunnel through the mountain rock and out the other side. For the first time in its existence, Gásadalur was connected to the rest of the world and not separated by a treacherous ocean and steepling cliffs to one side, and the mountain peaks to the other.

Their isolation was so treasured by the villagers, however, that when the road tunnel was originally opened, it was locked by a gate and only the villagers had a key. They had now, reluctantly it seemed, let outsiders use it too.

The white arch that disappeared into the mountain was a thing of wonder, an unblinking eye set into the island itself and surrounded by hillside, brown earth, greenery and stone. We peeped into its belly and saw the road disappear.

The path was steep and strenuous to begin with, but thankfully it evened out after the first hill. Still, we took a breather at what Gotteri told me was
Líkstein
, the ‘corpse stone’, so called because people had rested there when carrying a coffin from Gásadalur, which had no churchyard, to the village of Bíggjar.

Further on we passed a spring called
Vívd
, which supposedly produced blessed water and gave eternal youth to whoever drank from it. I wasn’t remotely sure that was something I wanted, but still gulped gratefully from its waters. Finally, at the mountain’s peak, we looked down at the village way below us, its lush green peppered with houses, the new road bursting out of the hillside towards it.

‘This is better, though, is it not?’ Gotteri roared at me above the wind. ‘The way it was meant to be. Walking. Like the postman!’

The rain had come and gone and threatened to come again during the hour and a half we’d hiked from the car. I’d lost my footing a couple of times and the clouds that were gathering in the distance spun dark grey and rolled in our direction. Ahead of it was a fog that inched nearer and grew thicker with every step we took.

‘If God had meant us to walk,’ I shouted back at him, ‘he wouldn’t have given us four-wheel-drives. Did the entire twentieth century pass you by?’

I could see his mouth open in laughter but heard nothing. Then he shouted some more.

‘I know you don’t mean that, my friend. If you had wanted motorways and cars and the rat race, you would have stayed in Scotland. You didn’t. You left so that you could do things like this. And to run away from whatever demon it is that is chasing you.’

I ignored him, looking west to where the fog was rolling in. I couldn’t see far.

Undaunted, Gotteri pressed further. ‘Scotsman, are you ever going to tell me why you came here? I know you have a past that you wanted to leave behind. Why not tell me what it is?’

I looked blankly over at him and shouted to be heard. ‘Forget it, Serge. There’s nothing to tell.’

‘Come on, man! I am here in the middle of nowhere with someone who might be a murderer. Don’t I deserve an answer?’

I pressed on down the steep mountainside ahead of him, forcing Gotteri to quicken his pace to keep up. I didn’t know the path but I could follow it. If I left him behind that would be too bad.

We picked our way down, scrambling here and there until we were back on flat land. The wind had dropped now and the fog had closed right on top of us, just sitting there refusing to budge, and I couldn’t see any further than a few feet in front of me. Going on was madness, but going back would be just as crazy. We had to get to the village and sit it out till the fog cleared.

Gotteri kept his questioning going from a distance. From what I could hear, he was getting more belligerent, more desperate for an answer with every attempt.

‘Where did you go when you left the bar? Why did you leave Scotland and come here? What is your secret? What have you told the police? Did you kill Aaron Dam? Just tell me. Did you kill Aron Dam?’

I pushed on faster to get away from it, sick of the words that came after me.

‘Come on. I give you one last chance. Tell me, Callum!’

My stride lengthened, mindless of the rocks or irregularities in the path. I had to get away from Gotteri as much as I had to get out of this fog or to the damned village.

‘Stop there, Callum! Do not move. I mean it!’

I took one more step, partly out of sheer momentum, partly because I wasn’t going to do what Gotteri told me. Then the tone of his voice filtered through to me. It wasn’t threatening. It was warning.

I stopped.

‘I mean it,’ he repeated through the porridge-thick fog, his voice cold. ‘Do not go any further.’

‘Gotteri, what the hell is this? Are you—?’

‘I’m trying to save your life. Stand still and listen.’

At first I thought he meant listen to him, but when he said nothing more, I tuned in to the wind whispering a dirge through the fog. Beyond that I could hear the cry of a seabird, even though there was no chance of seeing it. What else could I hear?

To my left, maybe ten yards away, was the sound of running water. No, it wasn’t running. It was
rushing
. Then further off, somewhere below my feet, I heard it roar again. We were on the edge of the cliff.

‘My friend, I estimate you are maybe three or four feet away from walking off the edge of Gásadalur into the ocean. Maybe less. The ocean is two thousand feet below us and so are the rocks.
Now
are you listening?’

Chapter 37

‘You’ve got my attention.’

I turned my head but couldn’t see Gotteri through the gloom. Was that him there? A darker shade of grey against the light?

‘Do not move. Not even towards my voice. The wind and the fog make it deceiving. You could as easily walk off the cliff.’

I could feel my heart thumping and my mind flashed back to my roped descent down the bird cliffs at Vestmanna. I didn’t fancy repeating the exercise without a rope. ‘Okay. What do you suggest we do?’

‘We sit down and we wait. Unless you want to take the chance of going the wrong way?’