ONE

He was on the roof of their little cottage mowing the thick and umber turf, briar pipe clenched tightly in his teeth, happy and a little lost in his own thoughts, when his wife called from the front porch to say the killings were on the way.

‘Tristan! Grind! Grind! Are your cloth ears listening? All those cars a-tooting in the village! They are here! You must come! Come now, man. Oh, what a time to be mowing the roof! What will people think?’

A strong man of fifty-five. Not tall, not short. Not fat, not thin. Clean-shaven with a good head of sandy-coloured hair edging towards grey. It went with a friendly, freckled face, pale since Haraldsen was by trade and nature a man for the office, never the country. Eight weeks out of police headquarters in Tórshavn. A civilian latterly responsible for systems, newly-retired on medical grounds – his mild cardiac arrhythmia failed to pass the adjusted health diktats put in place by the government health officer – he had now only the part-time job of district sheriff for the fishing to occupy a few working hours each week.

‘I do not hear you moving, husband.’

It was a sunny September day. A brisk easterly wind from the Atlantic buffeted Tristan Haraldsen as he went about his work on the shallow turf roof of the cottage. Four fat sheep grazed in the back yard next to a flock of white-and-brown chickens picking for worms in the grass. Out on the water, framed by the two high cliffs on either side of the fjord, past the line of snag-toothed rocks called the Skerries, a small flotilla of multi-coloured boats dotted the bright horizon. Fishermen often gathered at the mouth of the snaking, narrow inlet to the Atlantic from which Djevulsfjord took its name, searching for cod, haddock, redfish and mackerel, anything they could catch and transport down to the market in Sørvágur for ready cash.

The vessels flocked together, like sharks slyly closing on the prospect of prey. This was the end of summer. The season the pilot whale pods were on the move, coming close to land. He was the district sheriff. It was time – the first occasion – to earn his keep.

‘Ja, ja, ja,’ Haraldsen cried, his attention still caught by the view.

‘And I shall be most cross if there is tobacco in that pipe of yours. The very thought you must go and mow the roof to suck on that thing …’

‘Elsebeth! Elsebeth! I am coming. Of course. The roof needs mowing. The pipe is empty. But I must dispose of the machine first. Mustn’t I?’

One hand on the shiny new rotary he’d bought for the move, Haraldsen edged towards the lip of the gently sloping roof. The timber cottage had stood on this gentle hill above the village for more than a century. The couple who owned it before were so traditional they’d let the chickens live inside, roosting on the open rafters above the living room, right next to the attic where the two of them were to sleep. One of the birds had pooped on Elsebeth’s head when they came to inspect the property. An omen, his wife had said giggling, then announced she wanted the place.

He was content with this on two conditions. The whole of the interior would be enclosed, none of it open to the rafters. The hens were to live in a coop outside which he would build himself, along with the new ceiling, every last piece.

They were the first jobs he finished when, the month before, they moved from the relative bustle of the Faroese capital to the remote village, a place they barely knew, on the western island of Vágar, an hour away by car. Not an easy drive either. Vágar was shaped like a dog’s head. Djevulsfjord sat stranded near the eye, accessible only by a lengthy sea voyage round the profile of the hound or a journey by road that ended after a damp-smelling single-lane tunnel cut through Árnafjall, Eagle’s Mountain, emerging close to their new home.

Prices in Djevulsfjord were as low as they might find anywhere in the Faroes. No one wanted to live in such a remote spot it seemed. The population had dwindled to fewer than eighty, scarcely any young couples or children among them. The modern world regarded it as too remote, too locked in the past. Tristan and Elsebeth Haraldsen, childless, with no living relatives to look after or look after them when the time came, relished the challenge. Besides, the lump sum from the police authority pension more than covered the modest purchase price. The small salary of the district sheriff gave them the freedom to travel if they so wished, something neither of them had raised since that early summer day they decided to move from busy Tórshavn to silent, beautiful Vágar and embark upon a new chapter in their lives.

‘Furthermore you must get out of those pyjamas,’ she added. ‘Why a grown man is wearing his bed things at ten o’clock of the morning is beyond me. I know you’re half-retired. But if one of the neighbours should see you. The district sheriff of all people. In this condition …’

The cottage lay above the small and straggly fishing village. A good ten-minute walk from the nearest house and the harbour where cars and bikes and people on foot now congregated like bees swarming on summer flowers. Even set as their cottage was, on the rise of a moderate green slope, it was not, it seemed to Haraldsen, a likely spot for a man to be seen from afar in his pyjamas.

Elsebeth walked out from beneath the cottage porch. The sight of her never failed to cheer him. She always said of late she wasn’t so slim as when he courted her at the Tórshavn dances. He didn’t notice. To him she was slender still and young too, just not as much as before. And her face was strong and beautiful, more so now she cropped her brown hair short, not long and girlish, the way it used to be.

‘I do not wear these things to go about what little business I have,’ Haraldsen informed her. ‘Only for the comfort of my own home.’

The roof was a tradition hereabouts and needed attention. In spring, he believed, daffodils would sprout and bloom in the turf above their heads. In early summer came daisies and buttercups and other wild flowers Haraldsen recognized but could not name though they must have died in the early August drought.

His pipe was empty, merely a comforting thing to suck on, with a familiar taste. The doctors had had their say about tobacco and in the end he’d listened.

His eyesight was clear and strong just like, he felt, his mind. He’d know if anyone was watching and might be offended.

‘I am waiting,’ Elsebeth declared firmly from below. ‘And so are your whales.’

‘GRIND.’

Jónas tweaked his brother’s arm so hard, so insistent he kept on until Benjamin screeched and pulled away from him.

‘Remember what that means, goat? Or you too stupid now?’

Silas Mikkelsen had thrown their mother Alba out of the house the summer before. When he did he was adamant there was no room for the brothers in the fisherman’s cottage he’d inherited at the edge of the village. So the youngsters had to move with her into the minuscule shack by Djevulsfjord’s harbour. The place was all Alba could afford since Silas was rarely forthcoming with the maintenance. In a sense it wasn’t a home at all, just a flimsy wooden lean-to tacked onto the sheds where the fish were boxed and the nets and buoys stored by the tiny and dwindling harbour fleet. The smell of dead, dry fish never left the place. In winter it was freezing. In summer the place felt like an oven.

‘Don’t call me goat,’ Benjamin Mikkelsen muttered.

‘Goats grunt and groan and stink. They’re thick and stumble everywhere. Goat.’

After that he leaned down and laughed in his older brother’s face. Ten and twelve. Eighteen months separated them on paper. But the divide seemed much greater, to them, to their mother, to all who knew the sad little family.

‘Goat. Goat. Goat. Goat …’

Benjamin punched him hard on the arm.

‘Mam!’ Jónas raced to the door and flung it open. Alba Mikkelsen was at the rickety table in the middle of the single room that was kitchen, living space and her bedroom with a little cot in the corner. She was a thin-faced woman with high cheekbones, twenty-nine but she looked older with prominent grey eyes, straggly blonde hair, rarely well-combed.

‘Mam. Benji hit me again.’

The accused walked out to take the inevitable blame, hands in pockets. All they had to sleep in was a tiny bunk. Jónas made him sleep on the bottom bed and liked to make a play of farting from the top.

‘Didn’t,’ he wanted to say. But it came out just as ‘dint’. He couldn’t talk well. ‘Learning difficulties’ the special teacher at school said. Couldn’t think straight, talk straight, walk straight. All the kids ragged him about it. He couldn’t much think of anything to say or do in return except hit them from time to time. They’d warned him about fighting twice, though on both occasions he’d come off worse. Going on the record the teacher, Mrs Blak said, and the police would get to hear if he kept on bashing people.

‘Told you before, Benji. Don’t hit your brother,’ Alba Mikkelsen said without looking up from the paperwork in front of her.

‘He spat at me too,’ Jónas added. ‘He—’

Her hand came out and slapped him round the cheek.

‘Shut up, child. Even if I believed you no one likes a tittle-tattle. And ain’t you the one who’s always ragging him? Why’s it always you complaining? Leave your big brother alone.’

‘He’s the one doing the hitting, Mam.’

‘Only ’cos you make him.’

Sometimes she found it hard to believe they were brothers at all. It wasn’t just that they seemed to hate one another. Their characters were so very different, Jónas smart as a shiny button, the other a slow, dim idiot, too quick to use his fists at times, not that he ever managed much in the way of damage. Maybe a baby got swapped out in the hospital in Tórshavn and she came home with the wrong one. Which had to be Jónas. Cunning, cheeky, mischievous, dishonest. Stupid as he turned out, Benjamin was the more loveable. His father wasn’t bright. Alba didn’t think much of her own intelligence. But the eldest … she couldn’t imagine what she’d do with him when he was older and needed to look for a job. You didn’t have to be clever to crew the boats but you couldn’t be clumsy and Benjamin could scarcely get through the week without breaking something or stumbling to the ground in the street.

Jónas had the same brown hair as Silas. The same round, red-cheeked, chubby face, one that, like him, would probably stay boyish even into their thirties. White, even teeth. The sturdy frame that came from fishing stock. Benjamin was fair and lanky, pop-eyed with a blank face bordering on gormless, crooked teeth that needed fixing, skinny in the arms and already starting to stoop.

Silas’s father was a widower who’d died at sea in a storm two summers previous. She was the daughter of Baldur and Eydna Ganting. Not that her parents had shown much interest since Silas walked out calling her all the names under the sun. The boys had to rely on hand-me-downs and charity shops for their clothes. Today, like most days, denim jeans and a checked lumberjack shirt for Jónas. Red shorts and khaki top for Benjamin. They could look sweet even if they weren’t.

‘I heard voices outside,’ Jónas told her. ‘They’re launching the boats. There’s a grind coming.’

‘Oh aren’t you the smart one?’ she yapped. ‘Do you think we’re all deaf here?’

No one could miss that noise. Cars and pickups turning up, honking their horns in delight. The hubbub was rising beyond the wooden shutters of their home. Summer in Djevulsfjord had been long and hot and poor. This was the first hunt to come their way in a year. No wonder people felt eager for blood.

‘You never told us, Mam,’ Jónas complained.

‘Because it’s a grind! You don’t need to be told. You’re fishing folk. It’s in your veins.’

‘Can I go?’ the boy asked.

‘Both of you,’ she said, nodding at his brother. ‘Take Benji with you. No fighting.’

‘But …’

‘You heard!’ she shouted. ‘I don’t want no complaints.’

He thrust his fists deep in the pockets of his threadbare jeans.

‘And if you see your father ask him for some money,’ Alba Mikkelsen added. ‘I’m reduced to cleaning up the witch Dorotea’s kitchen for brass. Tell him I need it for you. Not me. Which is true by the way.’

WITH THE QUIETEST OF grumbles Haraldsen took hold of the rope fastened to the mower, then lifted the machine out over the gutter, positioning himself diagonally, one foot down, one up, to take the strain.

‘Elsebeth! It would help if you stopped it banging against the windows. I am new to all this you know.’

In Tórshavn they’d lived in a modern house with grey tiles, good secondary glazing, all the modern conveniences. A settled urban couple who visited the countryside out of interest not necessity. This old-fashioned act of household maintenance, commonplace in Djevulsfjord where turf roofs remained popular, was quite new to him. The coming pilot whale drive would be the first he’d supervised too. It was important the job was performed well, on several fronts. The ministry had been precise about both the safety precautions required of fishermen and people on the shore. It was also adamant about the way the pod was to be killed. The modern world had intruded on their way of life and on occasion foreigners did not approve of what they found.

The whale hunt known as ‘grind’ was a bloody spectacle, shocking to those unfamiliar with it. Men and women from nations where meat was nothing but a lump of pink flesh in a supermarket carton had never witnessed – or wished to contemplate – the slaughter that preceded it. For the Faroese there was no such comfortable illusion. On scattered islands where food had often proved scarce, sometimes to the point of starvation, grind provided winter-long sustenance to be shared among the village according to a complex formula going back centuries. The dead whale carcasses would be beached and numbered. Each catch was to be marked up as ‘skinns’, about thirty-four kilos of blubber and thirty-eight of meat. Then, according to the sharing system set out in Haraldsen’s books, the skinns would be allotted to the appropriate households and boats. After that came the butchery when entire families, old and sometimes as young as three and four, would set about the dead pilot whales with their knifes, to carve the carcasses and take home their share.

It represented, perhaps, an anachronism in a world of invisible commercial butchery and food flown in from everywhere. But this annual piece of bloody theatre was also a fundamental element in the national sense of identity, one that grew stronger the more the foreign critics attacked it.

‘Haraldsen! Have you gone to sleep in those pyjamas?’

‘Thinking, dear.’

Nothing much happened in this part of Vágar when it came to crime. A little drunkenness. The occasional case of domestic violence. He’d heard a solitary policewoman patrolled the area from time to time. A stranger, the source of some gossip in the village since she’d been there only a few months. She was of Faroese stock apparently but her family had moved to Aalborg in Denmark when she was a toddler. Quite why a youngster would want to hide herself away on Vágar was beyond Haraldsen. This was a place for older people surely …

‘Tristan!’

He would make a phone call to introduce himself, he thought as he let the mower ride over the healthy turf of the roof then roll down towards the ground. A cry from below told him she’d got it. Then Haraldsen took one last suck on his pipe – the thing was banned indoors – and put it in the top pocket of his black pyjamas as he went for the ladder.

A bright red pickup was making its way up the snaking lane to the cottage. Tristan Haraldsen believed he knew his new job. He’d read every last line in the manual provided by the Ministry of Fisheries, gone with the assigned fleet foreman from Djevulsfjord for formal training in the government buildings in Tórshavn. This was the man behind the wheel of the pickup: Baldur Ganting, owner of the Alberta, the largest fishing boat in the harbour.

Haraldsen hurried down the ladder, came over and shook Ganting’s hand as the fellow climbed out of the cab. Elsebeth was shielding her eyes with her fingers, as if in shame.

‘You’re mowing,’ Ganting said in his gruff westerner’s voice. ‘In your pyjamas. Are you well?’

‘Never better! We heard the news. Whales!’

Ganting was staring at Haraldsen’s sheep as they came round the corner of the field, curious to see the visitor.

‘Where in God’s name did you get those sorry creatures?’

‘A nice man from Sørvágur sold them, at a very good price,’ Elsebeth said with a smile. ‘They are pedigree, I believe.’

‘Pedigree?’ Ganting shook his head then pulled a can from the pocket of his trousers. Snus. Chewing tobacco, imported from Sweden. He popped a wad beneath his top lip and looked at Haraldsen. ‘This is a decent-sized pod of blackfish from what I hear. Perhaps forty or more. Someone new to this …’

‘I leave the fishing and the blood to you,’ Haraldsen told him. ‘I’m there to see the rules are followed. Nothing more.’

He slapped Ganting on the arm. The fisherman was a hefty fellow. Taller than Haraldsen with a serious face, half-hidden by a grizzled brown-and-grey beard. He wore a blue canvas shirt and yellow oilskins. A long whaling knife that looked a hundred years old sat in a leather sheath on his left side, the curved blade clearly visible. On his right a marine VHF radio. It squawked then. Ganting answered, and spoke so quickly it was hard to catch the words.

‘Well then,’ he said when he was finished, ‘these whales are ours for the taking if we want them, Mr District Sheriff. All it awaits is a word from you.’

‘I’ll get dressed,’ Haraldsen said. ‘And consult the books.’

‘The books,’ Ganting muttered. ‘No time for books. If we’re to drive them we must know now. There’ll be every boat in Djevulsfjord needed for this job.’ A pause. ‘Are you happy with that, man?’

Haraldsen checked his email daily. If the ministry had cause to demand hunting be reduced in number or abandoned altogether the news would be communicated to every district sheriff throughout the islands. No such missive had arrived.

‘I am unaware of any reason why this opportunity should be allowed to pass,’ Haraldsen replied. ‘You?’

‘None at all,’ Ganting said and finally allowed himself a smile.

Haraldsen declared he had to go inside to change and make a telephone call. Ganting watched him leave, then doffed his blue fisherman’s cap to Elsebeth.

‘I apologise, Mrs Haraldsen. I’m a simple fisherman, rude of demeanour and manners too. I never wished you good morning.’

She laughed and said he was forgiven.

‘Grind, you see. It’s food. It’s money. It’s—’ he winked – ‘why we’re here. Will you be joining us now too?’

‘If I’m welcome,’ she said.

A moment he hesitated then said, ‘Of course.’

THE THOMSENS LIVED IN an old sea captain’s house just a few steps up from the quay. It was one of the few homes in Djevulsfjord with two floors. Dorotea had the upstairs front room set for tea. From there the place had the best view of the village. Out to the little harbour. Along the fjord to the Atlantic. She could see the long finger of grey cliffs that led on both sides of the water. The ridge on the left, the village side, on the way to Selkie Bay, was known as the Lundi Cliffs, lundi being Faroese for puffin. They were the point at which the dwindling foothill of Árnafjall, the peak that separated Djevulsfjord from the rest of Vágar, met the raging sea. A spider’s web of winding fell paths led up from the harbour to the cliff’s edge and ran round to Selkie Bay.

In season the men would go fleyging there, fishing the sky to catch puffins for the pot, stretching a hand net between two rods above the stone hides set there for this purpose, then trapping the little parrot-like birds in flight, hundreds on a good day. Dorotea Thomsen believed she prepared the best puffins in Vágar. Smoked. Stuffed with sweet cake, fruit and spices. Soaked in milk or beer then boiled. In the commercial kitchen she’d had her husband George build out back she would bring in hired help for long hours cooking the birds, selling them on in Sørvágur for a hefty profit. Sometimes she would do the same with gannet chicks which had a good market too once her team of local women, paid the very minimum, split the little fledglings end-to-end, took out the ribcage, head, neck, and stomach, then pickled the tiny carcasses in brine.

It was all sound income, for her at least. Especially the gannets if they could persuade some men to make the extra effort to hunt for the tiny chicks. Not that income was a necessity. Baldur Ganting may have possessed some social authority as the leader of the harbour fleet, but the money lay with the Thomsens. While most in Djevulsfjord struggled for a living, they never went without. George’s family had been a kind of aristocracy in the hamlet for a century or more. He’d inherited most of the good agricultural acreage along the fjord and running up to the mountain. Almost every smallholder in the area leased their fields and some their homes from the Thomsens and paid a steady rent or found themselves evicted. Dorotea ran the single village shop, a small business that sold everything from milk to batteries and rope from a converted warehouse near the quay. Between the two of them they had the monopoly of local commerce.

A good number of their tenants were in arrears that hard summer. But the sound outside the window, the horns, the hubbub of animated voices, told Dorotea Thomsen there was no need to worry about being paid. The premises out back were set up to process the harvest of the sea as well as that of the air. Whale meat and blubber aplenty when the grind warranted it. A tenant farmer too lazy or talentless to make his fields work might pay off a little of his debts by offering his portion of the skinn. There was a discount in such negotiations, naturally. A greater one than George Thomsen, a weak and over-generous man, would offer on his own.

Dorotea would put steel in his backbone then. As she had many times before.

At her window in the upstairs room she watched the growing commotion by the quay. The Mikkelsen boys came out, the smart one looking round, his chubby face full of curiosity and mischief. The stupid older brother followed, hands in the pockets of his red shorts.

‘Oh you little brats,’ Dorotea Thomsen murmured. ‘Who really fathered you, I wonder?’

‘Silas did,’ said a voice behind her. ‘Don’t you go telling people otherwise.’

Her husband had come upstairs and she never heard him. They were a childless couple which was how she wanted it. They had married out of convenience more than anything. She wanted a better life than her peers. He felt it appropriate for his standing to be attached to a wife and none of the local women he thought more comely seemed interested in sharing his bed, in spite of all the money and relative luxury that came with it.

‘You think so?’ she answered with a smile. ‘I would like more tea. There’ll be work to be done later. Bargains to be struck when that meat and blubber come our way.’

George Thomsen was a clean-shaven man of forty-eight, one year older than his wife. Thin and a little weedy. It was good he’d inherited, she always said, for a man like him could never make his own way on the sea or in the fields.

‘I don’t want you making them hate us any more than they do already.’

Outside, the sound of buzzing outboards was growing, like a swarm of frantic bees gathering over the silver water. Soon the district sheriff would arrive, a new one, a town man from Tórshavn. Once this incomer gave the signal the grind would begin.

‘I’ll endeavour to remember that. Tea, George. And brown bread with butter and strawberry jam.’ She held up her hands. They were big and strong, those of a fisherwoman which, if marriage into the Thomsen clan had not intervened, was exactly what Dorotea would have been. ‘Make sure that slut Alba’s earning her pay doing the pans for the kitchen. And those cutting knives too. Then we’ll be swimming in blood before long and where there’s blood there’s money.’

‘Ja,’ he grunted and went back down the stairs.

Dorotea pulled her chair nearer the window and gazed at the stone harbour with its single jetty, the whole now alive with people and boats stirring, large and small.

The Mikkelsen boys watched, the smart one tapping his right foot on the cobbles, always anticipating something.

‘Whose prick made that wicked little face?’ she whispered to herself. ‘I wonder.’

David Hewson is a former journalist with the Times, the Sunday Times and the Independent. He is the author of more than twenty-five novels including his Rome-based Nic Costa series, which has been published in fifteen languages. He has also written three acclaimed adaptations of the Danish TV series The Killing.

@david_hewson | davidhewson.com

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The paperback edition published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2021
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

First published in 2019 by Severn House Publishers Ltd,
Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2021 by Canongate Books

Copyright © David Hewson, 2019

The right of David Hewson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 83885 376 1
eISBN 978 1 83885 377 8

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Author’s note