The Last Refuge (33 page)

‘You do understand, Mr Callum, that you are better off talking to me than to the Danes?’

We were in an interview room – actually probably the only room that happened to be available – in the little police station at Miðvágur on Vagar. Tunheim, of course, knew the cop in charge and was related to him in some way that I couldn’t follow. Whatever their connection, it guaranteed that no word of our meeting would leak back to Nymann and Kielstrup. That suited both of us – except for one little thing on my part: it took me an hour further away from Nils Dam, an additional sixty minutes during which I could do nothing about whatever state he was in.

‘Yes.’ The words fell limply from my lips. I sounded defeated for a good reason.

‘Good, Mr Callum. Good. We are in some trouble, you and I. It is good that you realize it.’

Tunheim’s raincoat hung over the chair behind him, his shirt open at the neck and his tie slung low and to the side. He sat back in his chair and regarded me wearily. He was a laid-back and patient man but I knew I was testing that patience.

‘So where is it? Where is the knife?’ Tunheim was pulling his right hand distractedly through the stubble on his face, making him look tired and older.

‘I don’t know. I wish I did.’

Tunheim rubbed at his eyes before getting to his feet and opening a small window located above head-height on the far wall, which admitted the room’s only natural light. He stood in front of it for a moment, enjoying the breeze on his face, then went over to where his jacket was slung over the other chair and fished around in the pockets. He emerged with a packet of cigarettes, a lighter and a guilty expression.

‘Are you allowed to smoke in here, Broddi?’

He flinched at my use of his first name. Apparently the opportunity for informality had passed with the discovery that the knife wasn’t where it should have been. Now it sounded like I was using it to prove I had something on him. Maybe I was.

‘No, I’m not allowed to smoke in here, Mr Callum. And neither is anyone else, so don’t bother asking for one. You know, I’m not so worried about my friend Berint catching me as I am my wife finding out. She would kill me, and there’s been enough of that, do you not think?’

Back by the window, Tunheim’s lighter spat once, then again. He drew deep on the cigarette, with the fervour of a man deprived. He filled his lungs then sighed contentedly.

‘So who could know where the
grindaknivur
was hidden? I do not think someone found it by accident. I cannot believe in such a co -incidence.’

I’d been thinking of little else since we’d discovered its absence. That and Nils Dam were wrestling for space in my head. The man and the knife were rolling around until he inevitably had it inside him and I could see him in front of me, gasping for life, begging for air.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t mention it to anyone. Why would I have done? I thought it might—’

‘You thought it might put you in prison?’ Tunheim blew smoke in my direction. ‘You know that you were interfering with a murder investigation? Now, I’m not a big-city homicide cop, as you know, Mr Callum, but I know enough to know that is very serious. Just trying to hide the knife is enough to put you in prison.’

I nodded slowly. ‘Yes. And I’m not a policeman,
Broddi,
but I know that withholding information from the principal investigating officers is pretty serious too.’

Tunheim inhaled some smoke and held it in his mouth, sucking in his cheeks and staring at me. He slipped his glasses off and was wiping at them with his shirt before his mouth opened again and let the last gasps of the smoke slip free.

‘I am a simple man, Mr Callum. A small policeman on a small island. I live a quiet life and don’t expect much. But I have a guilty secret. I watch lots of American crime programmes on my television. It drives my wife
crazy
. But it is good because I learn things. Like language. Let me try something . . .’ He shoved his glasses back on and looked at me. ‘Don’t fuck with me, Mr Callum. You fuck with me and I will fuck with you.’ A long pause and a stare. ‘Did I get that right?’

‘Close enough.’

‘Good. Now, who knows about the knife?’

‘I told you, I don’t know. I
did not
tell anyone. I couldn’t have told anyone, even if I’d wanted to.’

Tunheim dragged a hand through his hair as he took another deep draw on his cigarette. ‘Okay,
John
. Why don’t you tell me some other stuff then? Why don’t you tell me about Liam Dornan?’

My heart sank. This wasn’t what I needed. My mind’s eye saw Liam sitting next to Nils Dam, both with their heads slumped forward. Both dead. I had to get out of here and back to Torshavn.

‘Broddi, I haven’t smoked in twenty years. How about we both break the law and you give me one?’

He hesitated. ‘Like a last cigarette for the condemned man?’

‘Something like that.’

Tunheim threw me the packet and I took one from it. It was clenched between my lips when I joined him at the window. ‘Let’s see if I remember how to do this.’ I dipped my head and he fired his lighter. I inhaled and the smoke hit the back of my throat, causing me to cough ridiculously. It stung but I liked that, deserved it.

I was nodding my head, eyes shut. Memories of nervous smoking behind the school bike-shed, pals on guard-duty to warn of approaching teachers. Teachers. I’d never have thought back then that I’d become one of them. And of course, I never should have.

‘Liam Dornan was a pupil in one of my English classes.’ I blew out almost as much smoke as I’d exhaled. ‘He was the class clown. A really bright kid, that was the annoying thing. He could have been anything he wanted to be, but all he wanted was to show off, act the big man, make everyone else laugh and make me look as bad as possible.’

I took another artless draw on the cigarette.

‘I tried with him. I really did. I took him aside and tried to talk to him. Man-to-man kind of stuff. I’d been where he was. Rough area of town. Ran with some bad kids, did some stupid stuff, used my fists rather than my brains. I told him all that and he threw it back in my face. Laughed at me. What did I know? Nothing, as it turned out.

‘I just couldn’t get through to him. So I tried coming on tough, threatening him with this and that, but I knew I could really do nothing. Even the threats gave him more power. I wanted to knock his head off. I called his parents in but they couldn’t care less. Not their problem when he was in school. That’s what I was getting paid for.

‘And of course the worse he played up and got away with it, the more the other kids thought they could do the same. It’s the way of it. So they got louder and more out-of-hand. I came down on as many of them as I could, but it is like putting out forest fires. While you’re busy extinguishing one, another’s bursting into flames behind your back.’

I sucked on the cigarette, drawing the smoke down my throat and letting it singe my lungs.

‘So one night I was walking home. I’d met an old friend and had a couple of pints, not enough to make me drunk. I was cutting through a housing scheme, a bit of a suicidal short cut, but the beers told me it was okay. I heard some kind of scuffle, the kind of thing that makes your blood run cold when it’s that time of night and no one else is around. It was the sound of feet, kicking. And a muffled scream. I stood still, listening. Then I heard it again. I knew the sound well enough: someone was getting a doing.

‘A bit of me told me it was none of my business. Probably just kids. But I went to look anyway. I got halfway round the side of a building when this guy came out to meet me. They’d obviously heard me coming and he was the advance party, sent to scare me off. I knew him. A big waster known as Chilli Ferguson, who had left school about four or five years before. And he obviously knew me.

‘He was all, “Hey, teacher man. Here’s a lesson for you. Get to fuck.” I didn’t. I pushed past him, but a couple of yards later, I saw him. Liam Dornan. Lying on the ground with three guys standing round him. I recognized all three of them, all ex-pupils from the school I taught at. Shug Faulds, Tam Taylor and Chick Welsh. Real bad guys. I saw at least two knives glinting in the moonlight. Welsh was still swinging a boot into Liam’s guts.

‘Of course, I went to help, but Ferguson was behind me and put a knife to my neck. Just held it there. Faulds and Taylor turned to me as well. Basically they told me it was none of my business. That Liam was getting a kicking because he had it coming, because he was a cheeky wee shite. That if I hung around then I’d get what he was getting and he’d get it worse. They’d stick him. Stab him. And if I went to the cops then they’d make sure Liam died.

‘He was looking at me. Pleading with me with his eyes. He tried to beg me, but Welsh just kicked him in the stomach again. I walked away. They were sniggering as I left. When I close my eyes I can still hear the sound of it. Those little bastards laughing at me while Liam squealed.’

I exhaled hard, ridding myself of the breath that was curdled up inside me, and replaced it with a lungful of nicotine. Tunheim watched me calmly, taking it all in.

‘I walked away. Maybe a couple of hundred yards. The whole thing eating at me. Hating myself. And then I couldn’t take it. Couldn’t do it. I knew those guys well enough to know they were bad bastards. Liam was a troublemaker and a pain in the arse, but the others . . . they were serious. I turned and I ran back. There was a plank of wood lying on the ground and I picked it up, ready to use it. But they were gone. All of them. Liam too.

‘The next day it was on the news. A boy found dead. Beaten up. Stabbed and tortured. Liam Dornan. I threw up when I heard it.

‘When all the details came out, I threw up again. He had fifty-four separate knife wounds on him. They had set fire to his feet. They had pulled out fingernails. They had beat his face so that he only had one eye left. They had broken all of his fingers. One at a time.

‘He was a kid. He was one of my kids. They tortured him then they killed him. And I didn’t stop them.’

There was a tear trying to leak from my eye but I fought it back. I didn’t have the right to cry. This hadn’t happened to me: I had no right to feel sorry for myself. Tunheim could see my struggle and in his eyes there was a sympathy that I hated.

He took a final draw on his cigarette, extinguishing the end with his fingers before throwing the stub out of the window.

‘A sad story, Mr Callum. Very sad. And I feel your pain. But I need to tell you that I have a friend in the police in Scotland. An inspector like me. He came here two of the times the Scotland football team came to play the Faroe Islands. Your team did not win. I wanted to know more about what happened next in this case. Information I could not find on the Internet or from newspaper reports. So I asked him. He didn’t know everything about your case but he knew another officer that did, and I got him to ask for me. Perhaps you will want to remember that before you tell me what happened next.’

If Broddi Tunheim was my only ally, I had no need for enemies. There was a clock on the wall behind his head, and I kept looking at it, making mental calculations about how long Nils had been left on his own, how long it would take me to get back, how quickly I could get out of this room. Tunheim would notice soon enough. He would wonder why I was so anxious.

‘What happened next was that I got a phone call. A muffled voice warning me that if I went to the cops then I’d die and so would those around me. I went to the police anyway. Ferguson, Faulds, Taylor and Welsh were arrested and eventually put on trial. My windows were broken, my mother was threatened and my little sister was scared shitless by some thug wearing a hoodie and a scarf over his face. I still testified. But it wasn’t enough. They were acquitted on a lack of evidence. After all, even if it had been them that I’d seen with Liam, even if I’d seen anyone at all, I couldn’t be sure what happened after I ran away. That was what the defence said. They walked free.’

Tunheim had found another reason to clean his spectacles, breathing on them and wiping them cleaner than clean. ‘Mr Callum, that is the information that I got from the Internet. I want to know what happened to the kids that killed Liam.’

‘They weren’t kids!’ I was shouting at him. ‘They were grown men. Sure, they were old before their time because of what they did and the environment they were brought up in. Maybe it wasn’t their fault that they were like that. But it was their fault what they did to Liam Dornan.’

Tunheim nodded thoughtfully, a hand raised in apology or a request for calm. ‘Okay. Okay. So tell me what happened to them.’

‘They were set free. They laughed as they walked out of court.’

I heard his tone change. Impatience. Rising anger. ‘And
then
?’

I took a last look at the clock over his shoulder. It was six hours since I’d left Nils Dam.

‘The four of them were later attacked. Separately. They got off lightly.’

Tunheim sighed. ‘One had his knee broken and it was said he would never walk properly again. The second never went to the police or hospital, but was found bound, locked up for hours in darkness. The third went to hospital with internal injuries that left him urinating blood, and also had a broken ankle. He said he fell down some stairs. The fourth was found tied up and gagged on the very spot where you saw Liam Dornan. Local teenagers found him tied up, knew who he was, and beat him.’

‘Like I said, they got off lightly.’

‘My friend in Scotland, he says that the police there think you did that to those men. In fact, they are sure that you did. Did you?’

I thought of Nils Dam, strung up by his wrists, perhaps freezing to death, maybe dying of thirst.

‘No,’ I told Tunheim. ‘I have no idea who did it.’

Chapter 52

On the drive back into Torshavn after our very unofficial interview in Miðvágur, Tunheim continued to press me for information, albeit in his usual obtuse way. He was clearly worried about the hole he’d dug for himself by keeping things from the Danes. I could have consoled him by letting him know the size of the hole that I myself had dug. A man-sized hole that was getting deeper with every minute I was away from it. But I couldn’t say a word.