The Girl Who Died

by Ragnar Jónasson

  Listened.

  Heard the incidental noises in the house, the roaring of the wind outside. A storm had blown up during the night and she was grateful, hoping that the noise of the weather would drown out the sound of anything else that might be lurking unseen in the darkness.

  Una didn’t know what time it was; it could have been anything from the middle of the night to just before dawn. There was no telling from the light at this time of year since the morning was as black as the night, and in this little village the new day wasn’t heralded by the hum of traffic as it had been in her old home in the west of Reykjavík.

  It had to be admitted too that the sitting-room sofa wasn’t particularly comfortable. Maybe she should just go back upstairs to the attic, since it was clear that the downstairs rooms provided no protection from the haunting. But then an alternative occurred to her: she could sleep in Salka’s bed. Her room had a comforting atmosphere and Salka didn’t seem to have sensed the little girl.

  But she didn’t move, just lay there with her eyes closed and her mind racing, brooding over the fate of the little girl who had died more than half a century before. Una didn’t even know her name, let alone how she had died, but it must be possible to find out since it was bound to be common knowledge in the village.

  What happened? she wondered, or perhaps whispered aloud. What on earth happened to you? As she asked the question she had a disturbingly powerful sense of the girl’s presence again, and was sure that if she opened her eyes she would see the small figure, vividly real, in her white dress.

  Una tried hard to distract herself by thinking about something else, tried to relax …

  XIV

  She opened her eyes wide.

  She could hear footsteps.

  It was still dark; she couldn’t have slept long, probably only dozed for a while, her mind still full of questions about the ghostly girl, and now …

  A door creaked in the hall, sending a shiver of pure terror down Una’s spine. She lay rigid, her eyes slowly adapting to the darkness, her breath caught in her throat, and heard them again – footsteps, coming nearer. She couldn’t move, couldn’t look round.

  With a creak, the sitting-room door began to open – even though Una was still half drugged with sleep, she could tell it was really happening. She braced herself to hear the lullaby start up again, all her muscles taut with fear.

  Light shone into the room from the hall.

  ‘Una,’ a voice said softly, and she almost jumped out of her skin.

  She sat bolt upright on the sofa, jerking her head around. How ridiculous to have believed, even for a second, that it was the ghost.

  ‘Hello, Salka,’ she said, embarrassed. ‘Nice to … to see you. I … I’m so terribly sorry.’

  Salka seemed to have aged years in a matter of days.

  She lowered her head. ‘Thanks,’ she said quietly. Then asked, frowning in puzzlement: ‘What are you doing down here, Una?’

  ‘It … it was so cold upstairs. Sorry, I just crept down here during the night. I hope that’s OK?’

  ‘Of course. It’s fine.’ There was a brief pause, then Salka said: ‘You didn’t come to the funeral.’

  ‘I … I didn’t want to impose,’ Una said, conscious of how feeble this sounded. ‘You’ve all known each other so long. I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome.’ She immediately regretted her choice of words.

  Salka nodded but didn’t comment.

  ‘Is it still night?’ Una asked, pushing back the duvet and getting to her feet.

  ‘It’s nearly morning. I had a bad night, I just couldn’t sleep, so I decided to drive home. To see if I could … could cope with being here for a while.’ Salka’s face was drawn; her eyes were dark with exhaustion.

  ‘I understand,’ Una said gently. ‘I’ll go upstairs now and let you get some rest.’

  ‘I … I …’ Salka stammered. ‘Actually, I’m not sleepy. Would you mind sitting with me for a while? I’ll make us some coffee.’

  ‘Of course. Coffee sounds great right now. But why don’t you rest while I make it?’

  ‘No, don’t worry, I’ll do it,’ Salka said. She disappeared into the kitchen.

  Una took the duvet off the sofa, ran upstairs to the attic with it, and came straight down, still in her nightie.

  The coffee dispelled the last vestiges of sleep. There was a lengthy silence that Una didn’t like to break. She waited for Salka to make the first move.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if I’d come back,’ Salka said at last. ‘I wasn’t sure if I could bear to come back here, to the village, to this house. But it’s not like I have any other choice, and I think it would probably be a good idea to try to get back into some kind of routine.’ Her words emerged, slow and halting, and it was plain that she was struggling to hold back the tears.

  ‘Yes … I understand,’ Una said inadequately.

  ‘I don’t know when I’ll be able to start writing again, but it’s not like I have much else to do here, and you have to begin somewhere. And if I do decide to move, I’ll have to clear up, pack away her things …’ Salka’s voice broke, but after a brief, choked pause she went on doggedly: ‘In spite of everything, it feels good to be here, at least for now – as if she’s near, with her room next door, and everything just as it was.’

  Silence fell again.

  ‘Do they still not know what happened?’ Una asked.

  Salka shook her head. ‘No, only that it was liver failure. It’s impossible to understand.’

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come – to the funeral, I mean.’

  ‘No need to apologize. It was a beautiful service. There were lots of people there.’

  Una sipped the hot coffee, fighting back the urge to ask Salka about the girl in the attic. It was absolutely the wrong moment, yet she couldn’t think of anything else to say, and, who knows, Salka might even welcome a chance to talk about something other than her tragic loss. ‘Do you remember when we talked about the ghost?’ she said.

  Salka nodded.

  ‘I feel like it’s getting worse. Have you never noticed anything?’

  ‘No,’ Salka replied, but Una wasn’t entirely persuaded by her tone.

  ‘The whole thing’s so strange. First it was like a bad dream, but now it feels more real, more tangible.’

  Salka didn’t react.

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What was the girl’s name?’

  For a moment it seemed Salka wasn’t going to answer, then she said: ‘Thrá. I thought I’d told you.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s an unusual name.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so …’ Salka trailed off.

  ‘I was wondering, do you by any chance know what happened?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She died.’

  ‘Do you know how?’

  ‘What does it matter?’ Salka asked, glaring at Una, her voice abruptly sharpening. ‘It was, what, nearly sixty years ago.’

  ‘I was only wondering,’ Una said awkwardly.

  ‘I invited you to live here out of the goodness of my heart,’ Salka said with sudden vehemence. ‘You have no reason to stick your nose into my family’s private history, Una.’

  ‘No … no, of course not.’

  Salka stood up. ‘I’m going to bed. Maybe it would be best … maybe it would be best if we could find somewhere else for you to live before this evening.’

  Without another word, she left the room.

  They had told her that if she confessed, she would be released from solitary confinement immediately. So she had confessed. For a while she had even started to believe in her own guilt, but now the doubts were beginning to stir again. Nothing had changed; she was still confined in the cramped cell, alone in the world, utterly broken. The bastards hadn’t kept any of their promises, but from time to time they dragged her off for further interviews, perhaps more out of habit than necessity now
, because she couldn’t tell them anything else. They repeated their former promises that this would soon be over; that she would be spared this torment once she had been charged and from then on the case would proceed in a conventional manner. She could live with that, she thought; it was the isolation that was killing her.

  They told her about the two men who had been involved with her in the murders of Hannes and Hilmar, gave her a detailed description of how the three of them had dumped the bodies in the lava-fields. She could picture the scenes, exactly as they had been told to her; see herself taking part in the murders, then driving the bodies south along the coast, and helping to fling them into a fissure. Yet it seemed, from what she had been told, that their bodies still hadn’t turned up. They had even taken her out to the endless dark lava-fields of the Reykjanes Peninsula and asked her to point to the exact spot, but she couldn’t because they had never told her where it was.

  In spite of this, she had done her best to please them by pointing at random and trying to focus, to think. If it was all true, if she and her two associates had really murdered Hannes and Hilmar, she ought at least to be able to recognize some landmarks that would help the police to locate their bodies. Perhaps this was the last piece of the puzzle that they had been waiting for, the key that would finally put an end to her ordeal.

  XV

  As she made her way shakily from the sitting room up to the attic, Una felt as if the walls had come to life and were screaming at her, as if they were heaving in time to her own intakes of breath. She had no idea what had just happened. Why would Salka do this to her?

  Naturally, Salka had gone through a terrible experience, so perhaps that was the explanation. Shock and grief had left her a bit unbalanced.

  It hit Una with a sickening blow that now she really was alone and friendless in the village. Everyone was against her, and perhaps they had been all along. She had been thrown out on her ear; rendered homeless from one minute to the next. It felt as if the walls were pressing in on her and, when she reached the top of the stairs, she hardly recognized her little flat any more. She had been living there for more than four months, but had it ever really been home ? And where was she to go now? Was there any reason for her to stay on in the village – with only one pupil – now that the only person who had wanted a teacher brought in from outside had turned against her?

  Tired though she was after her bad night, Una immediately got busy, taking out her cases and her belongings. Either she could get in her car and go straight home to Reykjavík or she could knock on Thór’s door and ask him for help. She would have liked to ring first, but that was out of the question as the phone was downstairs in Salka’s part of the house and she had no intention of setting foot in there again.

  Una tore her clothes out of the wardrobes and dumped them in a heap on the bed, in a state of high emotion. There was some food in the fridge; should she leave it behind? And several – actually rather a lot of – empty wine bottles that she hadn’t yet got round to throwing away. It would probably be best to take them out to the car as well and dispose of them discreetly when she got back to Reykjavík. But for that she would need more plastic bags.

  She lined up the empty bottles on the floor, almost without thinking what she was doing, then paused. She needed a bit more time to think before she took an irrevocable decision. She decided to venture out in the cold and walk up the hill to the farm. Thór and Hjördís must be up by now, since they would have to feed the sheep. After surveying her belongings, she sank down on a kitchen chair for a moment and drew a deep breath. Outside, the wind was raging, but inside the house there was no sound at all. There, in the midst of the quiet, she became aware of a peculiar sense of loss. It wasn’t Edda she missed but the other girl who had died.

  Thrá, where are you now?

  Thrá.

  It struck Una that Thrá was the only one in the village who had ever cared for her.

  XVI

  The morning was pitch black, with no grey rim on the horizon to suggest the approaching dawn. When the nights were at their longest like this, the winter darkness seemed heavier and more difficult to bear than anything Una had experienced in the city, the few lights in the village only serving to heighten the unrelieved murk beyond.

  Defying the buffeting wind, which made it hard to snatch a breath between gusts, she battled up the slope to the farm, peering for the light of its windows through the inky blackness. As usual, the guesthouse showed no signs of life, so she headed to the main house. Only when she got there and was standing at the front door did she stop and wonder what she was going to say to Thór.

  ‘You’re becoming a regular visitor,’ Hjördís said drily as she opened the door.

  Una had been fervently hoping that Thór would get there first. ‘What? Me?’

  Hjördís nodded, her expression unreadable.

  Una was stung by the unfairness of this. She wasn’t a ‘regular visitor’ and it wasn’t as if anything had happened yet between her and Thór, not really. She was struck by the paranoid fear that they all wanted to get rid of her, not just Salka. Maybe it would be simplest to do what they wanted and leave. The children could easily be home-schooled again, Una thought, then mentally corrected herself: ‘the child’, not ‘children’ – there was only one pupil left. But she wasn’t accustomed to giving up. She’d always been the determined type, with a considerable amount of willpower, except, she admitted to herself, where drinking was concerned. Once she started, it was as if the alcohol sapped her of all her drive.

  It had been the same when her father died; she had lost all her energy and her ability to concentrate and had fallen behind at school. Everyone had said they understood: the teachers, her mother, her friends. No one had dared criticize her.

  ‘I’ll fetch him,’ Hjördís said shortly.

  It was only too obvious that Una wasn’t welcome here. It occurred to her to turn round and leave. She would go and finish packing, then get in her car and head back down south. To Reyk-javík and home.

  ‘Hi.’

  She snapped out of her thoughts to see Thór standing at the door. In spite of her fears, the familiar smile was there, lurking behind his beard and eliciting an answering smile from her.

  ‘You’re up early,’ he said. Then, apparently noticing her distress: ‘Let’s step outside. It’s a while since we went for a walk up to the old air station, isn’t it?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, far too long.’

  He already had his coat on, ready to go. Putting an arm round her shoulders, he gave her a quick hug, before letting go almost immediately, as if he didn’t want to go too far. As if he wanted to keep a certain distance between them. ‘Come on, then.’

  Her spirits rose a little.

  Neither of them spoke for several awkward minutes as they followed the same path up to the ruins as before, staggering from time to time as they were hit by powerful gusts of wind. These were no conditions to go for a walk in, but Una felt she could endure anything for the sake of having a chance to speak to Thór in private.

  ‘Salka’s back,’ she blurted out at last. She hadn’t meant to speak first but the silence between them was becoming oppressive. She had to break it somehow.

  It was too dark for her to see his expression and, as usual, his voice gave nothing away: ‘I wasn’t expecting that – not this soon. In fact, I doubted she’d come back at all. I thought she’d want to make a new start somewhere else.’

  ‘She may move away; she’s not sure.’

  ‘How did she seem? Was she bearing up OK?’

  ‘Yes, fairly well, I think, in the circumstances. But our conversation was very strange. She wants …’ Una broke off, her voice threatening to crack, then, controlling it, said: ‘She wants me to move out.’

  ‘She wants you to move out?’ he repeated in a neutral tone. Una had been expecting a stronger reaction. ‘And go where?’

  ‘Either home or somewhere else in the village. I don’t really know how to take it. Whet
her it was just something she said in the heat of the moment – after all, she must be shattered – or whether she’s deadly serious. And …’ She heaved a deep breath, the icy air filling her lungs.

  Thór shot her a glance. ‘You know it’s thanks to Salka that you got the job here? She fought to get them to hire a proper teacher.’

  ‘Do you think I’ll be sent home?’

  ‘It’s a bit late now.’

  ‘I’d like a chance to finish the school year, even though Kolbrún’s the only pupil left.’ For a moment Una allowed herself to think that her teaching this term would have been less of a trial if Edda had been the one to survive … Then, turning her mind away from this ignoble sentiment, she filled the awkward silence by putting the question that she had come here to ask: ‘I hear that you and Hjördís have a spare room where you sometimes put up tourists …’

  ‘Yes,’ Thór said. ‘Hjördís’s farmstay.’

  Una said quickly, before he had a chance to add anything else: ‘You’d get some money for putting me up – not from me but from the local authority. Salka told me they pay her something.’

  ‘That’s not the issue,’ Thór said, though Una guessed it probably would make a difference for them. Here in the village the fishermen clearly earned a decent wage, but for the others it must be a struggle. ‘But, sure, of course we can sort something out. I’ll have a word with Hjördís. We won’t send you back to Reykjavík. Not yet, anyway.’

  Although it was a relief to hear his answer, it occurred to Una that she wouldn’t have minded having an excuse to give up and go home with her tail between her legs. No one would have blamed her, not after the tragedy before Christmas.

  ‘But you need to understand …’ Thór hesitated mid-sentence, which was unlike him. ‘You need to understand that nothing can happen between the two of us. It’s a long story, but it’s just … We can’t …’

  ‘It’s all right, I know,’ she replied hurriedly, trying to keep her cool, though this unexpected development had thrown her a little. ‘Because of Hjördís.’ It was a shot in the dark.