Margit Sandemo - The Ice People 08 - Under Suspicion

From the farthest spot of the meadow by the cliff projection, a low cry could be heard:

“It looks like there’s something here too!”

They removed the squares of turf carefully. Here it was much more difficult to see what had happened. Time had passed by and the bodies had rotted away.

“It’s too dark,” complained Mattias.

“Yes, now it’s too dark,” repeated the bailiff. “We must continue our investigation of the corpses tomorrow.”

“Yes,” agreed Kaleb. “But we can dig up the rest of this patch this evening. Just to be on the safe side.”

After an hour, the whole patch of meadow had been dug up. There were four female corpses. Despite a series of test digs here and there, no more bodies were found.

Four deceased. One recently, one earlier this spring. The two others must have been interred over the winter. One of them probably from last autumn, the other perhaps dating back to last summer. Who were they? Where did they come from? Who was their slayer and how were they killed?

Mattias and Kaleb were standing with Are, Brand and Andreas, discussing the two most recent finds, when the bailiff called them over in a low voice. They walked over to him. He stood bent over the woman who had been killed most recently.

“Look here!” he said. “What do you say to this?”

He had removed some earth from one hand of the woman and pulled out a dirty piece of string.

“This was tied to her hand,” he said. The string was long and trailed on the ground.

Are took hold of it. “Knots,” he said.

“Tying together nine different pieces of string,” added the bailiff sternly. "Well, that shows us the types that we’re dealing with!”

The others were feeling extremely ill at ease.

“You must keep this to yourself,” said Are in a cautionary tone of voice. “If this gets out, the whole village will turn hysterical. We’ve had enough witch trials here. Your werewolf story is better!”

“But this is irrefutable proof,” protested the bailiff. “And yesterday we caught a witch in the neighbouring village. Witchcraft is rife.”

“We’ll investigate the case carefully tomorrow. This evening we should avoid stirring up more fear, or people will take the case into their own hands. Put a guard here tonight and send all the others home.”

The bailiff gritted his teeth and acquiesced.

Night had long since fallen by the time the large crowd went back towards the village. Jesper was not in the throng. His small farm was situated deep in the forest so he hadn’t noticed the fuss. The Night Man hadn’t appeared either.

Everyone went home to sleep. Well, so they thought. Not everybody went to bed. A few shadowy figures lay in wait by the crossroads until they caught sight of their victim: the Night Man.

Finally, they had good reason to attack the executioner’s hated assistant. Who else could the werewolf be? And he was, after all, the one who lived right next to the meadow.

They placed their hands over the Night Man’s mouth to muffle his screams.

Early the next morning when Andreas was on his way to the smith with a horse, which had lost its shoe, he found a miserable figure lying in the ditch. Although the man was in a terrible state, he recognised immediately that it was the executioner’s assistant. Andreas bent down and tried to lift him up.

“Run home and fetch the cart and another horse,” he said to the stable lad who was with him. “There’s still life in him. Afterwards go over to the smith with this horse and then to Mattias. Ask him to come to the hut by the edge of the forest. I’ll drive Joel Night Man home.”

While Andreas waited for the stable lad, he sat by the roadside, gazing at the wounded man. His thoughts were grim. The find yesterday evening in the dead woman’s hand had shocked his entire family. He knew how vulnerable they were in this. For the moment, the bailiff was the only one who knew about it, but if the rumour spread to the village ...

He looked at Joel Night Man. It was quite obvious that this crime had taken place last night. It was equally obvious that it had to do with the events in the meadow. People had found a scapegoat, somebody to take their revenge out on. But the popular mood swung very easily. If they found somebody else to strike, they could do all sorts of terrible things. ‘This is just the beginning,’ he thought. ‘Just the beginning...’

Chapter 2

When Hilde Joelsdatter had fed the animals - just one cow, three chickens and a cat - she returned to the small, dark hut.

She took off her dress and stood in her slip while rinsing her face and hands in a wooden bowl. Her movements were slow and absentminded. Then she tidied up in the room that served as a living room, kitchen corner and her bedroom. Her father had the only chamber there was in the house to himself.

She could see that he hadn’t come home yet. The neighbouring village had called for him the day before. Some cow carcasses were to be buried, which was also one of the Night Man’s many duties. He had reckoned on being back by evening, but he hadn’t managed that by the look of it.

Hilde replaced the violets on the table with some bird’s-foot trefoil.

‘I believe it’s my birthday today,’ she thought. ‘Maybe I should bake a cake to celebrate it? No, I’d better not.’

She used to do this when she was younger, and her father had said it was a waste. So she had stopped that. Anyway, twenty-seven was nothing to celebrate, was it? She had better forget all about it. Her fingers gently caressed the delicate petals of the flowers and she gazed into the distance.

The years had passed and she didn’t know what had become of them. They had disappeared without a trace. Once she had had dreams and yearnings and wept during the lonely nights. Now she no longer wept, and the dreams were forgotten.

She reminded herself of her mother’s words on her deathbed: “Stay with Dad, Hilde! You’re all he’s got now. Be a good daughter to him.”

And Hilde had promised and she had really tried. Only it was difficult sometimes because her father was never satisfied. He would never notice when she had done something nice in the house, the little that was possible, and he never appreciated her daily care. If there was no beer or schnapps left, he would take out his frustration on her, saying that he couldn’t understand how she could be so absent-minded.

He railed against all the injustice he had to endure: what so-and-so had said, how they looked down on him. But someday he would show them. He really would! He remembered old insults that went back many years and he would chew on them like old meat bones. Always the same old complaints mixed with new offences. And Hilde was damn well going to listen to it all. If she said yes or no at the wrong point, he would fly into a rage and be grumpy for several days, finding fault with everything she did.

Hilde was lost in her own thoughts. Her promise to her mother had been sacrosanct. She would never dream of breaking it but... Her thoughts went back to the years that had passed by. Dismal, each and every one of them. Her mouth twisted into an unconscious, bitter smile.

Once her father had had a colleague from Christiania visit him. He was an executioner’s assistant like him. Filthy, getting on in years, and horrible to look at. In those days, lonely as she was, had she not thought of him at night? Just because he was a living human being, the only man she had seen for many years. How poor and lonely could a person become?

Hilde had no mirror, not even a window pane to see her own reflection in. All she had was the pond down in the valley, so she didn’t really know how she looked. Not all that bad was how she felt at the age of eighteen. Now she had stopped even looking in the pond.