Fatal Isles Read online

  *

  The last Saturday of September. She’d met up with Marike, Kore and Eirik at The Rover for a pint before commencing the traditional oyster eating. Marike had been in a foul mood after a failed firing that had destroyed two weeks of work; something had gone wrong with the new glaze she’d had such high hopes for. To make matters worse, Marike Estrup hated oysters, a fact she’d announced in an unusually thick Danish accent. Over time, they’d all grown used to her quirky mix of Doggerese and Danish, and they had discovered that Marike’s accent served as a kind of Geiger counter, gauging her mood; last night, the readings had been off the charts; it had been almost impossible to understand her northern Jutland hissing.

  Kore and Eirik, on the other hand, had been in a terrific party mood. Two days earlier, their bid on a house in Thingwalla had been accepted and the two men had spent Friday night worrying about mortgages, arguing about décor and engaging in make-up sex. They’d spent all day Saturday in bed, planning the move, the subsequent housewarming party and growing old together, nestled in a cocoon of bright expectations.

  Karen had had a productive Saturday, which had begun with her driving to the DIY store in Rakne. Pleased with herself after sealing seven windows, changing the hinges on her tool-shed door and spending almost half an hour on the phone with her mother without raising her voice once, she’d studied her still-tanned friends in the gentle twilight of the pub. Her own pale skin had made her look tired, almost sickly, which Kore had heartlessly pointed out.

  ‘Sure, but it’s my turn next,’ she’d countered. ‘I should be heading off on Monday or Tuesday at the latest.’

  She’d had just a few days off at the start of June, and worked the rest of the summer. While her colleagues were on holiday, she had wrapped up an investigation on her own, written the final reports, tidied up and held down the fort with the aid of temporary staff from the outer precincts. When coyly asked if she wouldn’t mind waiting to take her annual leave in the autumn, Karen had been careful not to let on that it, in fact, suited her perfectly. She has accumulated well-needed martyr points, which she can trade during the dogfight over Christmas and New Year’s leave.

  Contentedly slouched in one of the armchairs at The Rover, she’d announced to her friends that three weeks of holiday lay before her and that she was going to spend the greater part of that time in north-east France while darkness and cold slowly engulfed Doggerland. There, on the farm in Alsace, where she owned a measly portion of the land and vines, she was going to sit around with the others, Phillippe and Agnés, discussing the harvest and comparing it to other vintages.

  But first, she was going to celebrate Oistra.

  As always, the annual oyster festival began in the harbour, where locals and tourists crowded in between the stands. The oysters hadn’t had time to fatten up properly yet, but the first Saturday after the autumnal equinox was the start of a long season and a big celebration was in order. Piles of edulis and gigas shrank and were restocked at a feverish pace while money changed hands and fresh barrels of porter and sweetgale-seasoned Heimö liquor were rolled out by brewery workers, grunting loudly. Sweet black bread with butter was the only traditional accompaniment, crucially important as it kept people from passing out from hunger and intoxication, which is why it was provided for free on the night of the festival, while ads for the festival’s sponsors covered every spare surface.

  In other words, it was the same as every other year.

  Merry and jovial as the mood may be, however, Oistra would usually claim its fair share of victims through drunkenness, fights and the occasional food poisoning. What was not part of the tradition was the recent addition of street food and cheap wine served in paper cups, as was regularly pointed out in outraged letters to the editor from signatories such as ‘Preserve our Doggerian heritage’ and ‘Disappointed Seventy-Two-Year-Old’. The entertainment side of the festival had also improved according to some people – and gone to the dogs according to others. In the past twenty years the folk musicians had had spirited competition from local and international rock bands, excruciating talent competitions, the racket from temporary carnival rides and the shrill shrieking of children.

  Last night, Kore and Eirik had scarfed down at least a dozen oysters each and Karen half that before they even left the harbour. Marike had watched their tilted-back heads and greedily open mouths with revulsion.

  ‘Molluscs are not fit for human consumption. They can make you terribly ill,’ she said with a mouth full of pulled pork, which made her even harder to understand.

  ‘It’s this shit that’ll make you sick, not the oysters,’ Kore had countered, completely unperturbed, before downing his last bit of Heimö liquor and chucking the plastic cup in a bin while making an inadequate attempt to suppress a burp.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, pulling a face. ‘It’s time for something decent to drink.’

  They had continued the evening with a customary pub crawl, during which glass after glass of wine had been accompanied by even more oysters. For the sake of comparison, some of the bars along the promenade served French belons in addition to the local variety; Doggerian custom prescribed patriotic but good-natured booing every time someone ordered the foreign rivals. And it was at the third pub, Café Nova, just as Karen had ordered a glass of Chablis and two belons, that she felt hot breath against her ear and heard a deep voice.

  ‘Detective Inspector Eiken, looks like you’re willing to put just about anything in your mouth.’

  She’d slowly turned to the Head of the Criminal Investigation Department and smiled.

  ‘Oh no, Smeed, you’re not that lucky.’

  But an hour and a half later, they’d been in a double at Hotel Strand. What had happened there was something she was now approaching in the same way a person lifts up a rock and looks in horror at what’s wriggling underneath. She squints at the sun and the shiny asphalt. Alcohol had played a part, naturally. The generally festive mood, too; after all, it wasn’t the first time Oistra had led to sexual mistakes followed by deep regret, or, in the worst cases, divorce. Yet even so, she can’t remember a faux pas ever making her feel as remorseful as she is now.

  Karen glances out at the sea while the road turns gently to the north. The mist has cleared; the sun is already halfway up the sky; the choppy sea is sparkling. A few great black-backed gulls are cruising on the updraughts, looking like they’re contentedly digesting their food and chatting idly, rather than scanning the waves for more fish. She rolls down her window and breathes in the salty air. I’m simply going to have to call the head of HR and ask for a transfer, she decides. Maybe there’s a vacancy in Ravenby, or even Grunder, tedious though that would be.

  Work had hardly been frictionless, she reminds herself. One by one, her female co-workers had left the department under their previous boss. Eva Halvarsson had given up hope of ever advancing from constable to inspector and had requested to be transferred to the uniform division, while both Anniken Gerber and Inga van Breukelen had relocated to the Frisel district. Karen had clung on, less out of doggedness and tenacity and more because she couldn’t face starting over. Not again. But mostly because working as a detective inspector was an effective way of keeping her mind off things she was desperate to forget. Together with about a dozen male and nowadays two female colleagues working at the Doggerland CID, she is responsible for investigating all violent crimes on the Dogger islands: Heimö, Noorö and Frisel. The decision to centralise was made eleven years ago and met with strong criticism from the local police districts, but the protests had subsided as the crime resolution rate went up. Unfortunately, the number of violent crimes had gone up, too, which meant the number of unpunished offenders had stayed constant. And that Karen was able to keep her mind from straying into unwanted territory.

  Even so, her qualifications had been questioned when she was first hired – that her degree in criminology from the London Met would offset her lack of ‘dog years’ as a patrolling officer had not convinced
her old-fashioned colleagues. But Karen’s work performance had, in time, silenced that criticism. Even so, Jounas Smeed’s respect for her as a criminal investigator had, from the moment he became head of the CID, felt grudging, as though he found any recognition of her competence difficult. Instead, he’d immediately established something he himself defined as ‘a relaxed jargon between us coppers’ as the prevailing tone in the division. The rewards had been instantaneous. Relieved to have a boss who didn’t care about discipline and deference, Karen’s male colleagues had embraced Jounas Smeed and gleefully taken his policy of ‘banter’ to intolerable lengths. Karen had grown used to the constant jokes, delivered in the form of little barbs and digs. Or rather, out of self-preservation, she’d learnt to ignore Johannisen’s inexhaustible rebuking of feminists and women drivers and Jounas’s recurring laments on how impossible it was to understand how women think. She doesn’t dignify any of it with so much as a comment. She knows silence speaks louder than protests. Knows that bored yawning is more provocative than loud objections. She’s learnt to tune it out, refuses to show her exasperation, well aware that taking the bait will only make it worse. But mostly, she does it because she’s noticed that it gives her more power. Jounas Smeed needles her by constantly, trying to get a rise out of her; she needles him even more by not obliging him.

  And now I’ve gone and shagged the bastard, she thinks. Goddamn it!

  *

  And, she realises, as she spots the signs announcing the Langevik exit, she knows exactly why they ended up in bed together. It was their power struggle, the ongoing battle between them, that had made them both throw out the rulebook last night. Fuelled by the alcohol, their mutual urge to get the upper hand, had morphed into a pathetic seduction game where both of them had viewed themselves as the clear victor. Intoxication had undone all the rational counter-arguments, had dismissed all the warning bells and instead created a sudden physical desire. A spark that had died as quickly as it had flared up.

  The sex wasn’t even good, she thinks, not without a level of schadenfreude. Mostly an endless and tedious series of positions, each more uncomfortable than the last, probably aimed to impress. At least the prick was agile for his age. More agile than me, she admits.

  She glances in the rear-view mirror, turns on her indicator light and exits. The ramp toward Langevik is paved, true, but the speed limit is forty here and she law-abidingly slows down to just below that. For a moment, she looks away from the road, up toward the steep ridge where wind turbines loom. The rotors spin at an even pace; she can hear the swishing through her rolled-down window. The windmill park runs all along the Langevik Ridge and was, when it was built six years ago, the subject of vigorous protest. The residents of the village down by the seashore had organised meetings; there had been petitions on every shop counter in town as well as between the taps at the local pub. Today, the protests have long since died out and it’s been many years since the windmills were a topic of conversation among the villagers.

  Karen studies the tall, white towers. There’s something soothing, almost beautiful about the revolutions of their slender white arms. Personally, she never had anything against them, not even when the protests were at their most strident. But since a pint of good beer has always been high on Karen Eiken Hornby’s list of things that make life bearable, she had dutifully signed her name on every petition; refusing would have made the village’s only pub fall silent, would have made every face turn away. But, of course, every attempt to stop the park had been futile; one after the other, the tall white towers had been erected along the Langevik coast and Karen hadn’t minded; the sound of the turbines only carries to her house when the wind is straight out of the south-west. But here, just below the turbines, on the gentle slope where the houses are few and far between, seemingly randomly scattered across the slope where the Langevik River meanders down toward the sea, there is a constant whine.

  A hundred and fifty yards further on, in a garden sloping steeply down toward the river, there is a movement; a middle-aged woman is trudging up the path from the old washing jetty towards her house. She’s dressed in a drab bathrobe and has wrapped a towel around her hair like a turban. Karen feels a shudder of unease before she can push down the instinctive feeling of guilt. Granted, there are a thousand reasons she shouldn’t have slept with Jounas Smeed, but Susanne really isn’t one of them. They must’ve been divorced for ten years by now. For a moment, she contemplates honking in greeting, in accordance with town etiquette, but she decides not to. In the current circumstances, she has absolutely no desire to make herself known. Besides, Susanne Smeed doesn’t seem to notice her; her eyes are firmly on the ground and she looks like she’s in a hurry. She’s holding her robe firmly closed and is walking briskly, determinedly. She’s probably cold after her morning soak; the water can’t be very warm this time of year.

  The knowledge that she’s almost home makes her relax; she feels exhaustion take an increasingly firm hold of her. She stifles yet another yawn and blinks hard a few times. Just then, a cat crosses the road, head down, every inch a predator, alert and prepared to defend its prey, which is dangling helplessly in its mouth. Karen feels adrenaline rush through her when the seatbelt tightens as she brakes hard.

  ‘Not the time to relax,’ she whispers. ‘You know what can happen. If anyone knows, you do.’

  She continues down the gently sloping road toward the town centre. Here, houses line both sides of the road, but there’s still not a soul to be seen. She slows down even more and turns onto the long high street. The outside serving area of Langevik’s only pub, The Hare and Crow, is a jumble of furniture. There are still glasses on the tables and a handful of gulls are flapping about among discarded oyster shells. True, there’s no need to stack and chain chairs and tables overnight here, like the bars have to do in Dunker, but the pub’s owner, Arild Rasmussen, usually tidies up before closing. It would seem Goodman Arild snuck too many unfinished drinks in the kitchen last night, celebrating Oistra just like everyone else.

  She slowly drives past the health clinic, passes the corner shop, the closed-down post office, the shuttered hardware shop and the barely surviving supermarket. The old fishing village on the east coast of Heimö is on life support, surviving mostly on the remnants of a historical willingness to go out and protest. But the public demonstrations are growing increasingly tame, choice and price are enough to make most people forget their principles and set their course for superstores and DIY stores. Only Arild Rasmussen’s business seems to thrive; The Hare and Crow is still busy most days of the week.

  At the end of the high street, the road rounds the old fish market and runs along the harbour. Karen follows the sharp bend and slowly continues down the narrow gravel path between the sea and Langevik Ridge. White and grey stone houses climb the slopes; along the shoreline on the other side of the road, jetties and boathouses jut out into the water. Everything testifies that Langevik, just like all the other coastal villages in Doggerland, had been once populated mainly by fishermen, sailors and the occasional pilot. These days, most of the waterfront properties are owned by IT technicians, oil rig engineers and the occasional arts worker. Behind the simple, grey stone exteriors, wood-burning stoves and tea kettles have been replaced by induction hobs and espresso machines. Karen knows more and more of the boathouses are being turned into extra living space; instead of large rowboats with room for four or six rowers, their weather-beaten façades now hide comfortable sofas in all-weather artificial cane. Their owners spend mild summer nights there, sipping wine, enjoying their magnificent ocean views, without having to worry about broken nets or whether the damn seals have stolen half the catch this time, too.

  And maybe she would have done the same, if she could afford it. Karen Eiken Hornby isn’t nostalgic by nature. On the surface, most things still look like when she was growing up, and yet nothing is the same. And that suits her just fine.

  *

  She turns into the steep driveway of one o
f the last houses and notes that she’s going to have to fill in the trench by the gate if she wants to avoid bumping her head on the roof of the car the next time she bounces into her garden. With a sigh of relief, she kills the engine and sits motionless for a few seconds before opening the door. Exhaustion washes over her again and her legs feel like lead as she walks up the slope to the house. She breathes in deeply, filling her lungs with the smells of approaching autumn. The air is usually a few degrees colder here than in Dunker, and there’s no doubt the summer’s quickly coming to an end. The birch trees are already turning yellow and the rowan by the tool shed is red with berries.

  An enormous, fluffy grey cat is lounging the stone steps by the kitchen door. When Karen comes closer, it rolls over onto its back, stretches out to its full length and yawns, showing its pointy fangs.

  ‘Good morning, Rufus, no mice today again? What use are you?’

  Next, the cat is up, rubbing against her legs, and before Karen has pulled the key out of the lock, he has slunk inside.

  She throws her handbag on the kitchen table, pulls her jacket off and steps out of her shoes in one motion. Then she opens the cupboard above the sink, takes out two painkillers and washes them down with a glass of water while absentmindedly stroking the cat, which has jumped up on the kitchen counter. The sound of increasingly imploring meowing cuts through her headache while she looks for a tin of cat food. The second she puts the bowl down the caterwauling dies down instantly; she feels her shoulders drop. She should install the cat flap she bought, tonight. Even though there are plenty of mice and at least two outbuildings for Rufus to patrol, he apparently prefers to eat in a more dignified manner in the kitchen and spend his days on the living-room sofa. Where he lived before he came limping up her driveway last spring, she has no idea. The notices she’d put up on telephone poles and slipped into people’s mailboxes yielded nothing. The vet had reattached his ear, neutered him, splinted one of his legs and put a cone on his head so he wouldn’t lick the ringworm medication. Apparently, the ragged cat had come to stay and she was now forced to admit their war of attrition was over: Rufus had triumphed.