Fatal Isles Read online

  ‘Five years, at most. I won’t have our children grow up on Heimö,’ she’d told him.

  And after just two months in their flat in Gaarda, with a view of the drug peddling at the playground below their kitchen window, Lise had discovered she was pregnant and given him yet another ultimatum.

  ‘We either buy a house somewhere else or I’m moving back home.’

  Two rooms upstairs and two on the ground floor on a south-facing plot of land in Sande turned out to eat up the entirety of the pay rise that had accompanied Cornelis’s promotion, as well as preclude any attempt at saving, but Lise was content. And every night, when Cornelis sees his very pregnant wife on the sofa, balancing her teacup on her enormous belly, looking pleased, he knows the house was worth every shilling.

  Confused, he now looks around at his colleagues.

  ‘There’s a big gravel pit a mile or two north of Moerbeck,’ Karen explains. ‘A deep, water-filled gravel pit,’ she adds.

  ‘And,’ Karl puts in, ‘even if they were to fish the phone out before it dies, I’m not sure what we could get out of it.’

  ‘But we can request the call log from the operator, right?’ Astrid says.

  Cornelis nods.

  ‘The prosecutor has requisitioned them and TelAB is working on it.’

  ‘Wow, so maybe those lazy sods will actually deign to pull their fingers out within a couple of months,’ Karl sneers and throws down his pen so hard it rolls across the table and falls to the floor with a faint jingling sound.

  No one around the table says anything; everyone knows Karl is basically correct, though he may be exaggerating somewhat. TelAB is hardly known for their eagerness to cooperate or swift compliance.

  ‘We’ll have to keep on them,’ Karen says. ‘Does anyone else have anything else?’

  Headshakes all around.

  ‘All right, then let’s call it a day. I have a short meeting with Viggo Haugen and Dineke Vegen tomorrow morning at eight, but it shouldn’t take more than half an hour. So we’ll meet back here at eight thirty. And call me if you turn up anything before then.’

  25

  It’s completely dark; headlights sweep this way and that across the large car park, looking for free parking bays. The temperature has plummeted during the day and the almost summerlike warmth has been replaced by a cold, steady drizzle. Unprepared islanders who have spent the day shivering in inappropriately light clothes have hurried home to attics and basements to dig out coats and hats.

  Beyond the rows of cars loom the bunkerlike buildings of the Grenå Mall, home to two competing superstores, a large DIY shop, a furniture store, plant nurseries and all the major clothing retailers, as well as Karen’s reason for making the trip here this evening. Judging from the packed car park, the locals haven’t let the cold or last weekend’s festivities dampen their appetite for consumerism. That being said, she can’t recall a single visit to Grenå, on any day, at any time, that didn’t come with long lines, screaming children and clenched teeth behind giant trolleys.

  After two crawling laps around the car park, Karen finally spots a Nissan reversing out of one of the bays. With a skill that most likely comes across to the other driver as sheer rudeness, she manages to slip into the desirable spot by slamming on her brakes and reversing fifteen feet. Filled with equal parts dread and bloodlust, Karen Eiken Hornby strides toward the furthest illuminated bunker.

  *

  Within thirty minutes, she has managed to heave a big box onto the cargo bed of her Ford Ranger and shuts the tailgate with a bang. She shudders and climbs in behind the wheel with a heavy sigh. Driving home is going to be a slog in this weather: visibility is virtually zero; as soon as she leaves the motorway, she’ll be unable to avoid the potholes.

  That’s all the excuse she needs; she reaches toward the glove compartment. The door is stiff; she gives it a practised whack with the heel of her hand and notes that she remembered right; there’s an unopened packet of cigarettes she’s forgotten to throw away. Was it last Friday she bought it? It feels like ages ago.

  Without much effort, she suppresses a pang of guilt, leans back and inhales the smoke. She sits motionless in the dark for a few minutes, watching headlights track back and forth, as cars look for somewhere to park. A shivering homeless man walks around, begging for trolleys to return so he can collect the coins from them and buy himself some more beer. Most of the shoppers who have just finished unloading their bags seem grateful not to have to bring their trolleys back, but one woman is clearly having none of it. Karen watches their exchange through her windscreen like a silent film, and has no difficulty imagining the curses hurled by the homeless man as he ambles away, shoulders pulled up under his soaking jacket. The woman looks after him until he’s far away enough, then gives her trolley a shove that makes it roll away and into a lamp post, jumps into her Mercedes and drives off.

  ‘Fucking bitch,’ Karen mutters, taking one last drag before putting the cigarette out and the key in the ignition. Then she pulls a couple of cigarettes out of the packet and carefully places them on the passenger seat.

  As she drives up alongside the homeless man, she rolls down her window and waves him over. She hands him a fifty-mark note and the rest of the cigarettes.

  ‘You should get out of the rain, you’ll get pneumonia,’ she says and shudders when his freezing hand touches hers.

  Before she exits the car park, she glances up at the rear-view mirror and sees the top of the big box in the cargo bed over the seatbacks. Viggo Haugen is probably going to fly off the handle when the invoice arrives, but she’s willing to take on that fight.

  26

  Karen is greeted by a familiar mix of warmth, soft voices and a faint smell of mould when she pushes open the door to the Hare and Crow. Langevik’s one remaining pub is less crowded than usual. Only about twenty patrons are seated at the tables, but the backbone of the establishment is seated along the bar as usual. By their own estimation, the three regulars guarantee the profit margin that keeps the Hare and Crow afloat. The three familiar backs belong to Egil Jenssen, Jaap Kloes and Odd Marklund, whose by-now fairly ample behinds cover the greater part of their stools. All three of them born and raised in the village, all three of them once active in the fishing industry: Jenssen and Kloes as cod fishermen and Marklund as a manager at the Loke factory where he supervised the peeling and packaging of shrimp.

  Karen hesitates for a moment before walking over to the bar. The moment she sits down next to the old men, she’s going to be forced to listen to them gripe about how the village is going to the dogs, the closing of yet another shop, the invasion of the cufflink people from Dunker, not to mention Marklund’s usual rants about the terrible turn the Loke factory has taken, and the bitter fact that the shrimp are now being shipped to Latvia, Poland and Tunisia to be peeled and put in brine. On the other hand, these three big-bummed gentlemen constitute a bottomless well of information about everyone and everything, and for once, she’s come to catch up on the village gossip.

  ‘Hiya, Arild,’ she says, slapping the counter. ‘Any news on tap today?’

  Arild Rasmussen looks up from the till with a sour expression. Clearly, he doesn’t appreciate allusions to the pub’s meagre selection. That the bars in Dunker serve all kinds of beers these days doesn’t impress Rasmussen. The recent explosive expansion of the local microbrewing industry may admittedly have passed the Hare and Crow by completely, but the pub’s offerings do reflect the Scandinavian, British and Dutch demography of Doggerland, and Rasmussen feels that’s enough. The Hare and Crow’s patrons can choose between Carlsberg, Heineken – and Spitfire or Bishop’s Finger, but never both at the same time. The rare customer who prefers wine can choose between red and white. These options are presented by Arild Rasmussen in such a brusque tone that any intention to ask inconvenient questions about country of origin or vintage is inevitably nipped in the bud. On the other hand, not a lot of people come to the Hare and Crow to drink wine or eat food, although Ar
ild Rasmussen is actually capable of throwing together a perfectly nice lamb stew.

  The recipe’s from his wife, Reidun, whose unique blend of schlager singing and salty curses would frequently stream out from the kitchen until eight years ago. The Rasmussens fought non-stop for the thirty-two years they served lamb stew and beer at the Hare and Crow, sometimes so fiercely the sound of ‘you evil sow’ and ‘you useless old goat’ from the kitchen had the patrons shifting uncomfortably in their seats and glancing at their watches.

  And yet, the locals worried Arild wouldn’t be able to run the business on his own after Reidun suffered a stroke one lovely day in May. Was the last pub in the village going to go the way of the now shuttered quayside pub the Anchor?

  After Reidun’s stroke, the Hare and Crow stayed closed for eleven days, but then one morning, Arild turned the sign over once again and opened his doors. The menu was less ambitious; other than the lamb stew, it consisted primarily of pre-cooked fish croquettes with peas and mashed potatoes and pre-cooked burgers with French fries. It’s said Reidun still barks orders from her bed in the flat above the Hare and Crow, where she and Arild live, but no one knows for sure.

  Be that as it may, the taps at the Hare and Crow are always clean and the price of a pint is still a shilling lower than in Dunker.

  *

  Now, Arild picks up a pint glass and cocks an eyebrow.

  ‘The usual?’ he asks, putting his hand on the Spitfire tap.

  Karen nods. Instead of bringing her glass to her favourite spot in the back, next to the fireplace, she pulls out one of the stools and hangs her handbag on one of the hooks under the bar. Arild Rasmussen puts down a cardboard coaster with the Shepherd Neame logo on it and puts her pint on top. Karen thanks him with a big smile. There are only two ways of making Arild Rasmussen talk: flattery or getting him to have a glass or two himself.

  ‘You’ve gone all out,’ she says with a nod toward the tables, which are decorated with plaid runners and green glass tealight holders.

  ‘You noticed, did you?’ Rasmussen mutters. ‘Bought some new things for Oistra,’ he adds, trying to hide a pleased grin.

  ‘Looks really nice, proper posh,’ Karen tells him and inhales some foam from her glass.

  The three regulars have listened to their brief conversation with poorly concealed curiosity. Now Jaap Kloes turns to Karen.

  ‘So, a visit from the town bobby, eh? Or maybe I should say bobette?’

  Karen notes that as usual, Kloes manages to squeeze several insults into one sentence. But she’s not offended; in here, people big themselves up by doing others down; it’s tradition. And once you peel away the jargon, there’s not really much malice there.

  ‘Well, I’ve actually been a detective inspector for quite a few years now,’ she says and smiles regretfully. ‘But I understand it’s hard for you to keep up with all the changes, old man; first women’s suffrage and now women police officers and even detectives – what is the world coming to?’

  Kloes mutters something under his breath and quickly turns back to his pint while the other men guffaw cruelly.

  ‘Eiken one, Kloes nothing,’ Odd Marklund says. ‘You’re on fine form tonight, Karen lass.’

  ‘Don’t get excited, I’m not staying long,’ she says. ‘A pint or two and some gossip’s all I’m after. You won’t mind helping me out, will you?’

  ‘You want to know about the Smeed woman, I take it?’

  Karen nods and takes another sip. Then she wipes the foam from her top lip with the back of her hand.

  ‘So, what can you tell me about Susanne? I want to know everything.’

  *

  It takes roughly thirty minutes for the four men in the bar to add considerably to the picture. The three regulars and the pub owner were unanimous in their assessment: Susanne was a prickly, bitter wretch with a well-developed ability to rub everyone around her up the wrong way. While Karen is irked by the judgemental, condescending tone of the men’s descriptions, she has to admit the picture confirms her own impression.

  And maybe Susanne had been like that as a child and teenager as well; Karen has nothing but a hazy, very vague memory of her from back in those days. A fair-haired girl who lived on the other side of Langevik. The three-year age difference had been an effective barrier, at least to Karen’s mind. When Susanne started first grade, Karen had moved on to middle school and while Susanne was in middle school, Karen had already tasted the joys and challenges of high school: new subjects, new teachers and – most importantly – the boys in the higher grades. All permeated by a thrilling feeling of finally being an adult. She had been preoccupied with her own shortcomings, the awesomeness of other people and wondering whether Graham in the ninth grade liked her or not. She’d had no time for the babies in the lower grades.

  Even though she and Susanne had grown up only a mile or two apart, the distance between them had been enormous and, for some reason, it hadn’t diminished with age. They knew each other by name, said hi and exchanged a few words whenever they would run into each other as adults, but that was all it had ever been. Until that time four years ago.

  Soon after Jounas was appointed the head of the CID, Karen and Susanne had ended up in line next to each other at the plant nursery one day in early April. While the queue inched forward at a snail’s pace, it became impossible not to exchange at least a few words. With a firm grip on a trolley full of pansies, Susanne had replied monosyllabically to Karen’s attempts at conversation. And then, after a long awkward pause, she had blurted out:

  ‘You should be careful, Karen. Jounas has always gone after women who . . . well, women like you.’

  Then she’d turned her trolley around, made an excuse of having forgotten something and walked back in among the shelves of seedlings and potting soil. Karen had paid and driven home with two plum trees and an unsettling feeling she knew what kind of women Susanne was referring to.

  The unanimous picture of Susanne Smeed being painted at the Hare and Crow this evening is that although she used to be a ‘pretty little thing’, over the years, she had become a pariah.

  ‘She complained about absolutely everything,’ says Jaap Kloes. ‘Buses idling, the road association’s accounting, speed bumps by the school, her neighbours’ kids. And according to the missus, she was no different at work; neither carers nor managers could bear being around her. The only thing that can be said in her defence is that she kicked both up and down, I guess. A nasty fucking bitch, if you’ll pardon my French.’

  ‘Just look at the shit she stirred up about the windmill, for instance,’ Egil Jenssen adds. ‘We were obviously all against it from the first, but in the end, people accepted there was nothing to be done about it.’

  Especially the people who were handsomely compensated for their land and made a small fortune. But Karen says nothing.

  ‘I get that it riled her when they built those turbines,’ Kloes continues. ‘Her land was right next to them. But she wouldn’t bloody let up! Constant nagging, letters to the papers and the council. Did she really expect them to take the blasted things down again once they were built? Just because they bothered her?’

  ‘Pretty tragic, actually. One lonely woman waging war on both landowners and the power company; she didn’t stand a chance,’ Odd Marklund says, shaking his head slowly.

  Unlike Jenssen and Kloes, Marklund has a note of pity in his voice when he talks about Susanne. Karen’s not surprised. Odd Marklund proved himself to be both courageous and mindful of others when Karen had her first summer job on the shrimp-cleaning line at the Loke factory, where he’d been the manager. Unlike the over-zealous shift manager who, with poorly concealed glee, constantly docked workers’ pay for sloppiness, Odd Marklund had approached leftover shell fragments with equanimity.

  Which was why Karen hadn’t been surprised to learn Marklund had been laid off by the giant fish company a few years later. Norwegian investors had demanded the Dogger factory be streamlined; any part of the proce
ss not handled by a machine was a threat to their profit margins. At fifty-six, Odd Marklund had been made redundant.

  He knows exactly what fighting against something bigger and infinitely stronger entails. Who could be in a better position to empathise with Susanne Smeed’s futile struggle against the wind energy company Pegasus?

  And Susanne was hardly the only one fighting; equally incendiary fights had been legion in the past few years. The debate leading up to the parliament’s decision twenty years ago to save Doggerland’s economy and secure the future growth of the islands by allowing a massive expansion of wind power and the export of electricity to northern Europe had raged for a long time before burning itself out. Over time, resistance, appeals and delays had melted away because the most powerful landowners saw their bank accounts grow as they were compensated for the appropriated land.

  The expansion has undeniably come at a cost. The bird life in large parts of the archipelago has seen a dramatic decline, and there are still rumours alleging the power company has people on their payroll tasked with clearing the dead birds from around the turbines. But it’s rarely talked about now. And the power company is making obscene profits, but on the other hand, the state’s stake has also ensured two decades of economic growth. Given that, most islanders seem willing to overlook the fact that half the profits end up lining the pockets of venture capitalists.

  Susanne Smeed was clearly of a different opinion. She seems to have been literally tilting at windmills. And yet, judging by what Karen has just been told, she hadn’t even owned the land in question. Karen signals with a nod to Arild Rasmussen that she’d like another pint.

  ‘So you’re telling me she was fighting the landowners? I thought Susanne’s family owned everything up to the ridge?’

  ‘That and much more. The whole of the ridge plus a sizeable chunk of the forest on the other side,’ Arild replies. ‘And it would all have been hers if her father hadn’t sold it. Per Lindgren managed to sell off every last bit of land he inherited from his wife, hectare by hectare.’