The Last Refuge (26 page)

‘That’s the best you’ve got? We sit down on the edge of a 2,000-foot-high cliff when the wind is blowing and a storm might be rolling in?’

The ghost of a laugh came at me from the ether. His voice was different; he was not making any attempt to charm. ‘
We’re
not sitting on the edge of a cliff. You are. I’m at least ten feet further away. Your choice.’

Swearing under my breath, I crouched down, slowly dropping until I sat. The ground was rough and damp but it was solid. Cautiously, I reached out one arm then the other, patting the earth as far as I could reach all around me. Comfortingly, I didn’t hit fresh air.

I shuffled round inch by inch until I faced where I thought Gotteri was. Engineering the fog that trapped us was beyond the Frenchman’s powers, but leading us to this spot didn’t seem like an accident. I didn’t know what he wanted but I was sure I didn’t like the situation.

‘You know the weather here better than me, Gotteri. How long until this might clear?’

‘Who knows, my friend? It could be five minutes or five years. I’m thinking not too long though. Long enough for us to have a chat.’

A gust of wind hit my back and scared the shit out of me. Instinctively, I grabbed the earth beneath me, clutching at straws of grass.

‘Why are you so keen on having this chat, Serge? Why so many questions?’

‘It is good for me to know these things. It keeps me safe. I am a man who likes to know what is going on.’

Maybe it was the wind. Maybe it was the fog. But Gotteri wasn’t quite where I thought he was. Had he moved or had I faced the wrong way in the first place? His voice came at me cold again through the soup.

‘What have you told the police, my friend? They must have asked you many questions about that night. They will not believe simply that you got drunk and went home. Would you believe that? Did you do that?’

Those were two wildly different questions. Would I believe that I’d gone straight home if I were the police? Almost certainly not. But was that what I had done? I was getting closer to an answer with every night that passed. All I had to work out was the difference between imagination and reality.

As I hadn’t yet done so, I ignored Gotteri’s question. ‘I told the police what happened. They checked it out. I’ve been released. What else can you want to know?’

He laughed. ‘Everything. I live here. You know how few foreigners there are. A thing like this happens . . . they look at me differently too. They know I am your friend and they think “Hey, maybe he was part of it. Maybe the Frenchman killed Aron as well”.’

‘And did you?’

It seemed Gotteri didn’t like that question so much. The lack of a response encouraged me. ‘Did you, Serge? You’re full of questions about what I did and didn’t do. Where were
you
that night?’

He came back at me in quick, angry French that I couldn’t keep up with. I realized they were probably the first words of his own language that I’d heard him speak. I’d hit a nerve that had launched him into a kind of Tourette’s. After a brief lull for thought, he tried to change the subject. His voice was different though, lower, colder, harder.

‘Tell me about Scotland, Callum.’

What was this?

‘It rains a lot. We eat too much junk food and drink too much whisky.
Wha’s like us? Damn few and they’re aw deid.
’

‘Not the tourist stuff. Tell me about the kids who got hurt.’

He might as well have reached through the fog and slapped me across the face. My mouth hung open stupidly as I tried to make sense of what he seemed to know. And how he knew it. My heart and my anger raced each other round my body as I considered the possibility that it might be a good thing if one of us, either me or Gotteri, went off the edge of that cliff. How the hell did he know anything about what had happened?

‘No more, Serge. I am not speaking again until I can see your face.’

A bitter laugh. ‘You like my face that much?’

‘No. I need to be able to see it to punch it.’ I meant it too. ‘Now shut the fuck up. I’m done here.’

Gotteri inevitably tried a few more times, stabbing at me with questions to which I did not respond, until he finally gave up. Not that he went silent. Instead he sang. Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, Je ne Regrette Rien’ began straining over the breeze, his surprisingly tuneful but still surreal rendition the only thing to be heard apart from the water.

It took maybe half an hour, time enough for the chorus to be repeated, but finally the fog thinned until I could see him, lying flat on his back a few yards away, continuing to sing. I turned my head, and although the fog had not cleared completely, nearby I could see the land falling away into nothing. As he’d said, the edge was no more than four feet away.

Another ten minutes and the fog was gone completely and still not another word had been shared between us. Gotteri was sullen, as if the fog had been his ally and he missed it already. He got to his feet and moved off, giving a brusque wave of his arm for me to follow him.

We quickly walked around the village, a compact huddle of black-tarred houses and outbuildings standing on muddy paths. The remoteness of the buildings was accentuated by their smallness and the space between each one. The wind whistled round protectively, singing or howling as it turned corners, invading further with every passing minute.

Gotteri and I kept our distance from one another, staying yards apart but taking the same circuitous route round Gásadalur’s minuscule metropolis. People here had lived on the edge of civilization and only belatedly had been given a connecting tunnel to the rest of humanity.

Having given me the guided tour, Gotteri walked back sulkily towards the cliff. We walked parallel to its edge, not daring to get remotely close, as the wind was blowing hard and driving devilishly back towards the village. At least this time the sun was shining and there was no doubt where land ended and oblivion began. A sheer drop. One step too far would lead to certain death.

Gotteri walked until we were on the opposite arc of the cliff, facing back towards the waterfall and the village. Not saying a word, he dropped his equipment on the ground and glared at me before taking out his camera and lenses. I took it we had arrived at the point where he was intending to work.

I turned back and saw why we’d stopped where we had. The view was mesmerizing.

The waterfall ran to the edge of the cliff top and plunged two thousand feet into the fierce green of the ocean. It arrowed straight down, a brilliant white rush against the dark grey of the basalt, hurtling through the air until it crashed gratifyingly, wet to wet.

Below, dark caves burrowed into the rock, eerie recesses of gloom behind the curtain of falling water. Above and behind the village, the mountains created an intimidating backdrop of vertical greens and browns. The little black houses seemed insignificant dots dropped onto a landscape alien to them. The land and the sea were bigger and more permanent than anything made of timber and pitch.

I was so lost in the sight that I wasn’t aware of Gotteri moving off, camera in hand. He eventually crossed my eyeline and I saw him stalking the cliff edge carefully until he lay down flat on a bare bit of scrub ten feet or so from the drop. His lens pointed towards the cliffs opposite, where hundreds of puffins had made their home on a succession of tiny ledges on the face of the rise. The little birds, their blacks, reds and oranges just visible, were dwarfed by their surroundings, but together they dominated the rock face.

I could feel the wind slapping the back of my neck, forcing me to brace myself against it and take an involuntary step forward then a protective one back. The wind rushed over Gotteri, speeding on beyond his prone body, his blond hair fluttering as it passed.

The wind raced on, faster than ever, towards the waterfall. I consciously moved a step further from the edge, fearful of the gale’s force. Gotteri was clinging to the earth, his camera surely shaking in his hands. Then it happened.

The Gásadalur waterfall, a creation of nature, was also at the whim of it. It dashed headlong from the top of the cliff and launched itself down towards the ocean, but failed to get there.

Instead, it lifted out and up in an arc, back on itself. It became a water rise, a celebration of the strength of its creator, a phenomenon that was somehow even more dramatic and spectacular than the waterfall had been when plunging to the sea below.

As I watched, open-mouthed, the wind threw the waterfall back until it crashed way back onto the cliff top, one force of nature being overcome by another and sent back to start again.

Chapter 38

Gotteri and I trekked back over the Postman’s Walk at the same time but far from together. We were maybe ten yards apart but it might as well have been miles. He seemed to march with a seething resentment, striding out with his mouth tight and eyes staring fiercely ahead.

My own anger was simmering. The only thing that undercut my umbrage about his questioning was that I wanted the same answers. I walked in internal turmoil, furious at him for not believing me and yet incapable of placing that same faith in myself; incensed at him for asking about ‘the kids who got hurt’, but just as troubled by how they got hurt in the first place.

We climbed in silence, not a word passing between us until we reached
Líkstein
, the corpse stone, and we both had to stop grudgingly for a rest. Gotteri was side-on to me, so I was able to watch him without him having the same advantage, simply because I had done so first. He knew I was looking though, and it infuriated him further.

Suddenly, he couldn’t stand it any longer and snapped his head round, glaring at me. ‘You said you would talk to me when the fog cleared. When you could see my face. Well now you can see it. So talk!’

I drew in more lungfuls of breath, making him wait. ‘Why are you so desperate to question me, Serge? Why so keen to know where I was, what I remember, what the police know? Why drag me up here, miles from anywhere, in order to do it?’

He bristled. ‘Callum, I . . .’

‘I don’t want to hear it, Serge.
You
tell
me
why the hell you’re so interested, or we finish this right here. You keep saying how I’m your friend. Friends don’t interrogate each other.’

He took a step towards me, jaw clenched, and I was sure he was going to attack. We stared back at each other, standing on the top of the world, each seemingly ready to throw the other off the edge.

I saw the green sward of Gasadalur, behind and way, way below him, and felt the other me itching to hurl him back down the path. Maybe Gotteri saw that in me too, or maybe he just sized me up and didn’t fancy the odds. Either way, he fashioned a snarl to his lips and waved an arm dismissively in my direction, before storming past me down the hill again, back towards Bø, where we’d parked the car.

‘Not so keen on answering questions as asking them, are you Serge?’ I shouted at his back, taunting him as he walked. ‘Fine. Don’t say you didn’t have your chance. Interview over.’

An arm thrown haughtily, furiously, into the air was the only reply I got. I followed in his wake, forming a wordless procession down the mountainside.

By the time we hit ground level and Gotteri’s Skoda was in sight, he was maybe fifty yards in front of me, his speed no doubt fuelled by continued indignation. I saw him pull open the car door, clamber up into the driver’s seat and slam the door shut behind him.

I was there in under a minute, inwardly dreading the long drive back that would inevitably be made even longer by the brutal silence that would ensue. Maybe I would broker some kind of peace, maybe I would try to change the subject altogether and force myself to talk about his photography or football or the bloody weather. Maybe.

As my hand reached for the passenger door, I heard a roar of acceleration and a squeal of tires. I was grasping at thin air as the car shot forward and ground its way across the rough terrain and back onto the road. Open-mouthed, I watched it disappear from view in seconds.

A sudden, overwhelming silence enveloped me as I stood alone at the foot of the hill, the last strains of the car’s engine just a ghost on the wind. I was surprised enough to laugh out loud. I laughed loud enough and long enough that I had to wonder not just how the hell I was going to get back to Torshavn, but also whether I was losing my mind.

Chapter 39

The driver who stopped to pick me up on the road back into town clearly had no idea who I was. It’s doubtful that he’d have stopped for a hitchhiker if he’d known him to be a murder suspect. It was only after a mile or two, when my language and perhaps my accent fully dawned on him, that the penny dropped.

I watched a look of dawning realization pass over the man’s face and saw his eyes grow wide as he stared resolutely at the road in front of him. Conversation was at a minimum after that and he dropped me off in Torshavn at the first opportunity, no suggestion at all of driving me up Dalavegur as had previously been mentioned. Instead he pulled up in front of the ferry terminal, applied the handbrake and sat looking nervously ahead until I took the hint, opened the door and got out.

‘Thanks.’ I barely got the word out before he was moving again, leaving me behind almost as quickly as Gotteri had. I might even have found it funny but for my continuing doubts about the sanity of laughing out loud at the mess I was in.

Instead, I walked. Into town and up. As I climbed the steep incline of Dalavegur, I considered taking the coward’s way out again and just going straight back to the shack without having to face the Hojgaards. I could take the fact that my key still worked as a sign of acceptance and hide myself inside. It was tempting but wrong. Although I couldn’t be sure what kind of reception I’d get from the Hojgaards, I knew they were good people, decent above all else.

However, they also had to live among their friends, and harbouring someone accused of murder might well be asking too much. I remembered Martin’s words. If I caused trouble, he’d said, then I’d bring shame on him. It was the last thing I wanted to do.