Now, however, it looked like she had taken matters into her own hands. And, tragically, she had chosen to do so on a day when a strong wind had started blowing from the west.
As Jens Horder explained how he had searched the shore the officer felt the father’s terror and envisioned the foaming waves crashing on to the beach like grey-white explosions in the dark. He had a daughter the same age as Liv. He, too, had been out last night and heard how the wind tore through the high street and seen how every now and then the fast-moving clouds would reveal an icy moon. To imagine a child alone at sea underneath that moon – your own child…
He studied Jens Horder, who he hadn’t seen much of in the last few years. Once, way back when, they had sat in the same little schoolroom, but after his father’s sudden death it hadn’t proved possible to make Jens attend regularly, and one day he simply stopped turning up. Since then the school had moved to new and better premises and the teaching staff had expanded. The officer’s own daughter would be starting school soon.
He had caught only the odd glimpse of Jens Horder’s young daughter, whom he kept mistaking for a boy, in the pickup truck with her father. It had caused him to reflect on how isolated a life she must live on the Head. For that same reason he had toyed with the idea of driving up there with his own daughter to say hello. Just to see how they were. People on the island valued their privacy, and it was well known that the Horder family especially didn’t welcome visitors – but even so, seeing as they had a child? Judging by the size of the girl in the pickup truck, he had surmised that the children would start school together.
But it was not to be.
Jens Horder told the police officer that he had eventually found the dinghy further up the coast, where the island meets the sea with big boulders and a steep slope up to the forest. His heart broke when he spotted the empty boat wedged in between two big boulders, having apparently drifted eastwards with the current. The stern was under water. Not far from there he had seen one oar in the waves, which had sucked it out into the darkness, only to hurl it back to the shore like a lost lance. At least that was how the officer imagined the scene. The current in that location was known to be dangerous.
Horder had managed to free the dinghy from the stones but lost it again when the current pulled it back out. He had called out for his daughter over and over, he said, and he had shone his strong torch at every inch of coastline. But there were no footprints anywhere to give him even the slightest hope that a child had crawled ashore.
He had searched the whole night until the sun had finally risen but had found nothing but a painfully familiar rabbit-skin glove which had been washed ashore. Again, the police officer could imagine the scene: how the glove had looked at the water’s edge, dark and glossy, like a drowned animal. The black despair that must have consumed Jens Horder when he realized its significance.
At last the desperate father had given up his search and returned to his wife with the devastating news. And now he was standing in front of the officer in his old coat, wrapped in woollen scarves and a shabby cap which looked like something from another age. His face was sunken and pale, and the beard he had grown in recent years made him look considerably older than he was. Not least because both his beard and hair had become remarkably grey this winter. The police officer had noticed it when he had bumped into Horder just after Christmas. People were even talking about it in the village store. How Jens Horder had suddenly gone grey.
And now this.
His prematurely aged hand clutched a small leather wristband.
‘We need to send a team out to look for her,’ the police officer said in a voice alien even to him. ‘I’ll contact the mainland right away. Perhaps they can dispatch a helicopter.’ He could see from the anguished face in front of him that his words did not rouse any hope at all.
‘I know my daughter,’ Jens Horder said. ‘If she was alive, I would know.’
He was a man who knew with absolute certainty that he had lost his only child. He hadn’t come to report her missing; he had come to report her dead.
When the police officer realized this he experienced a moment of all-consuming despair, as if he were the grieving father. He tried to pull himself together and play his role with the calm that it demanded. But everything he did or said felt wrong. In an attempt to show his sincere sympathy, he accidentally smiled. It was totally misplaced. It was a smile that had gone astray, and it was doomed because it didn’t belong in this moment. It had no place faced with this man and his tragedy.
But Jens Horder saw it.
‘Is your mother still visiting you, Jens? I saw her in town just before Christmas,’ the officer said, while the smile was dragged into a muddy darkness like a fawn in quicksand. His usually steady hand shook as he scribbled down a few lines on a notepad. Presumed drowned. North beach. With his other hand he tried to hide his trembling chin.
‘No, she went back. Before New Year.’
They dispatched a helicopter. People searched everywhere along the coast and in the forest, down along the Neck and the northern part of the main island.
Meanwhile, Liv Horder sat as quiet as a mouse in a locked skip behind her father’s workshop. Hidden behind cardboard boxes and tyres and newspapers and magazines and toys and sand bags and sacks of salt and sinks and blank cassette tapes and broken tools and gas flasks and crispbread and paint and bags of sweets and second-hand clothing and stacks of books and piles of blankets and things, all of which someone had lost and briefly wondered where it might have gone before soon forgetting all about it.
The parents didn’t want a memorial service. Nor did they want to be contacted by compassionate, nosy people from the main island, or a visiting psychologist who wanted to help them process their grief.
The parents wanted to be left in total peace.
And when the authorities’ envoy finally left, with a certain degree of horror at the messy conditions under which the poor girl must have lived, calm descended on the Head once more. Jens Horder put up a barrier where the gravel road took a sharp bend to the left before it continued a fair stretch up towards the house. And next to the barrier he put up a post box and a slightly bigger wooden box.
No entry read a new sign.
Not: No trespassing. Just No entry. That meant absolutely no one.
Should someone decide to defy the sign and follow the path around the barrier, they would soon encounter a tripwire, just one of many traps which from now on would safeguard the Horder family against unwanted intrusion.
These were bright months, despite the winter being as black as night. No one sent official letters about Liv having to start school. No one asked questions about the envelope from M which hit the bottom of their post box at the end of each month, regular as clockwork.
Jens Horder continued to pay any bills which, if left unpaid, would attract unwanted visitors. People noticed him when he turned up at the post office. Not because he drew attention to himself, he pretty much didn’t open his mouth, but because an unpleasant smell lingered about him, and his clothes bore evidence of not having been washed recently.
In the past people had admired his beautiful if rather odd shirts, which his wife made for him. And when the chemist’s mother, right up until her death, insisted that the back of Jens Horder’s shirt matched that of her missing slip, it was attributed to the old lady’s increasing dementia. After the tragic drowning accident, however, people only ever saw Jens Horder wear the same faded, grey sweater which was badly in need of washing and defluffing from pilling and wood shavings, just as his corduroy trousers were in desperate need of patching. He no longer changed his shoes but seemed comfortable in a pair of old rubber wellingtons whose shafts, for reasons unknown, he had rolled down, but he never bothered kicking the mud off before stepping inside. The cap was the same as always, even though a compassionate farmer had given him a new one.