The Girl Who Died

by Ragnar Jónasson

  XXXVI

  ‘What are … what are you saying?’ Una’s heart was pounding. She felt faint. She couldn’t have heard right. Had Thór really said that Hilmar was sitting in front of her? Hilmar, the man who had vanished at the same time as Hannes … The man for whose murder three young people had been sent to prison?

  ‘Hilmar Thór,’ he said. ‘My name’s Hilmar Thór.’ Letting go of her hand, he stood up, went over to Hjördís and put his arm round her shoulders. ‘And Hjördís here, is my sister, or half-sister, rather. The farm belonged to our father.’

  Hilmar Thór.

  ‘You mean … You mean you’ve been here since … ever since you went missing … or deliberately disappeared?’ She could hardly take it in. Was it possible that she was sitting in front of the man whose fate had been a mystery all these years? Then, following hard on that came the thought that he had watched without saying a word while three innocent people went to prison because of him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘I fled out here as soon as I guessed what was coming. I knew my sister would take me in. I’d never lived here myself or had much contact with Hjördís, so I thought it was unlikely it would occur to them to look for me here. As you’ve probably worked out by now, I live here in the main house with my sister, not in the guesthouse. I lied to you about that. Sorry. I never thought I’d end up staying here all these years or that the case would blow up like that. The whole thing just escalated until, in the end, I felt it was too late for me to come forward. And all this time I’ve been living with the knowledge that my life is in danger. That’s why I grew the beard, just to be on the safe side.’ He stroked his thick facial hair. ‘The truth is, I’m still frightened – scared to death of the guys behind it all. You don’t know what they’re like, Una; what they’re capable of. But they never thought to come looking for me here, not until Patrekur showed up.’

  Una frowned as she tried to recall the photos of Hannes and Hilmar, which had long been familiar to everyone in Iceland after being splashed all over the papers for years on end, but the beard made it hard to fit Thór’s face with that of the man who had disappeared. At least she understood now why he had struck her as oddly familiar the first time they met.

  As if reading her mind, Thór went on: ‘That’s why I was a bit pissed off the first time we bumped into each other. I didn’t know if it was a good idea to get to know you, in the circumstances …’

  ‘Was Patrekur searching for you?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, well … actually, it was Hjördís he was looking for. Those men have kept up the hunt for me all these years. They wanted to finish the job. And somehow they finally got wind of the fact I had a half-sister living on Langanes. I don’t think Patrekur knew I was hiding out here, but he may have had his suspicions.’

  ‘Salka rang and warned me,’ Hjördís chipped in, suddenly finding her tongue.

  Una, remembering that phone call, saw it in a completely new light. Salka hadn’t been ringing just to let Hjördís know about the visitor. She had been warning her. And this begged another question:

  ‘Does Salka know?’ she asked Hjördís. Then she raised her eyes to Thór, who was still standing with his hands on his sister’s shoulders: ‘Does she know who you are?’

  It was Hjördís who answered: ‘Everyone in the village knows … everyone except you, that is. There was no way of hiding it and we sometimes needed their help in protecting my brother, like when the TV film crew turned up here. You see, Una, they grew up together, the four friends: our dad, Guffi, Gunnar and Kolbeinn’s dad. It was their village, as you might say, and people take care of their own here. We stick together. Salka stood by us too because her grandparents were from Skálar, and they say the villagers covered for her grandmother back when her daughter died.’ She paused: ‘That’s why Guffi … all of us … were against you coming here. It was Salka who forced it through. She wanted the kids to have a proper teacher and felt it was worth taking the risk. She didn’t see why you should ever find out the truth about Thór … My main hope was that you two would never meet but, of course, that was unrealistic of me, and anyway, that hope was dashed the very first evening, wasn’t it? When you ran into each other …’

  Una nodded. She took a mouthful of coffee, feeling in need of fortification. It was almost cold.

  ‘I … I can still hardly believe it,’ she said, with a catch in her voice. ‘None of you wanted me here and … and now it turns out you were all lying to me the whole time.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that,’ Hjördís replied grimly, ‘but we didn’t trust you.’

  ‘It would have been better if you hadn’t put two and two together in connection with Patrekur, Una,’ Thór said, and although his tone didn’t change, she shivered. She found herself wondering if she was safe there with these two. They had revealed a terrible secret to her, and if she kept quiet about it she would be complicit in keeping innocent people behind bars. Could she live with that? No wonder Thór and Hjördís weren’t confident that they could trust her.

  ‘Yes, that bloody picture in Morgunbladid,’ Hjördís said.

  ‘I almost didn’t see it,’ Una said in a small voice. ‘The papers didn’t come.’

  Hjördís’s expression betrayed all that needed to be said and Una realized that her suspicions had been correct; it hadn’t been a coincidence at all. ‘Morgunbladid …’ she said slowly. ‘The paper that never arrived …’

  Hjördís and Thór exchanged glances and, in the end, it was Hjördís who answered: ‘Gunna got rid of the papers for us. You’d told her your suspicion and she warned us and Guffi too. We hoped you’d leave it at that.’

  ‘Then Salka lied,’ Una said, more to herself than them. ‘She lied to the police that the visitor hadn’t been Patrekur.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Hjördís said coldly.

  ‘I don’t understand how you’ve got away with it all these years. Somebody must know he’s here. In a village of only ten people …’

  And then it struck her – the fact that had completely passed her by. She counted them up in her head: Salka and Edda, Guffi and Erika, Gunni and Gunna, Kolbeinn, Inga and Kolbrún … then Hjördís and Thór. Eleven people. There were eleven people living in the village, not the official ten. Damn it, how could she have missed that?

  ‘Quite easily,’ Hjördís said. ‘Or at least it was quite easy, until that murdering bastard turned up here, searching for my brother to kill him.’

  Patrekur.

  The question hung in the air. Una hesitated, drew a deep breath, listened to the silence for a moment, then asked: ‘So where is he? Where is Patrekur?’

  XXXVII

  Una’s only answer was more silence.

  ‘Where’s Patrekur? I know you two know what happened to him. If you don’t want me to report you, you’ll have to tell me the whole truth.’ In her heart of hearts, Una already knew she wasn’t going to betray Thór. Her best course of action would be to throw in her lot with him and the villagers. She liked him, maybe she was even a little in love with him. The brother and sister had entrusted her with a potentially deadly secret. If she informed on him, she could be putting his life in danger. If he was murdered as a result, how would she be able to live with herself?

  ‘He had an accident,’ Hjördís said at last.

  ‘He’s dead?’

  Hjördís nodded.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was going to deal with him myself,’ Hjördís said. ‘When Salka rang, we couldn’t be sure it was him, of course, but Thór took the precaution of going into hiding. But the moment he turned up at the door I guessed who he was. He asked if he could stay and I said I could give him supper and a room for the night. His manner wasn’t at all threatening at first; I expect he wanted to scope out the place before he did anything.’ Hjördís paused to take a deep breath, then continued: ‘I decided it would be best to get rid of him permanently and just hope that no one outside the village knew he’d c
ome here. But my plan went wrong, and that night he pulled up a chair where you’re sitting now and put his cards on the table. He said he was looking for Hilmar Thór. He said he knew I was his sister and threatened to kill me if I didn’t tell him where my brother was. I managed to grab a knife and hold him off for long enough to escape from the house, and that was when Thór took over …’

  ‘Really it was self-defence,’ Thór said, speaking up for the first time. ‘I had to protect myself and my sister. The bastard deserved to die and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘What happened?’ Una repeated.

  ‘I was listening from the cellar. When I heard him threatening Hjördís, I grabbed a piece of wood, ran upstairs and hit him. Things couldn’t go on like that. And once he’d seen me, that was it. After that there was no hope that we’d be left in peace.’

  Una was finding it hard to breathe. Thór had more or less admitted to murder, yet behaved as if it was no big deal. Justified it by claiming he’d been saving himself and his sister and that the dead man had had no right to live …

  Una tried to put herself in his shoes; in the situation of a man who had been on the run, in hiding, for all these years … Who’d finally been cornered and struck out in self-defence. Who was she to judge what was right and wrong when it came to the shadowy underworld he was mixed up in?

  She took stock of what she had learned. Patrekur was dead. He’d been murdered the night before the Christmas concert. After which the brother and sister had coolly turned up to church as if nothing had happened.

  ‘What did you do with him?’ Una asked, swallowing.

  Hjördís glanced at Thór.

  ‘I put him in his car and … and drove it to the edge of the cliff in the middle of the night, then pushed it over. Hjördís followed me so she could give me a lift back. As you know, you can reach the main road from our farm without being seen from the houses down by the sea.’

  ‘And … are you confident they won’t find him?’

  ‘Well, fortunately no one’s looking for him up here. The sea will take care of the rest. All we can do is hope for the best.’

  Another silence fell. Una felt a growing disquiet. The events the brother and sister had described seemed so unbelievable and yet were so terrifyingly real. A man had been killed, but somehow Una hardly cared. She was merely glad that the reckoning had resulted in Patrekur dying and not Thór. How she regretted now that she had ever called the police.

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ She let out a long breath. ‘I have to go now. I need time to think about all this.’ She got shakily to her feet.

  ‘You won’t betray us,’ Hjördís said, half rising, with a look of sudden menace.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ Una reassured her, realizing, as she said it, that this was the way it would have to be. She looked Hjördís steadily in the eye, sensing that there was almost nothing this woman wouldn’t do to protect her brother. And then Una remembered what Hjördís had said: I was going to deal with him myself.

  ‘Hjördís,’ she said. ‘What were you going to do? How were you planning to deal with him? You said you’d had a plan that didn’t work out …’

  Hjördís hesitated. ‘I … I was going to poison him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t know quite what effect it would have but I made a strongly seasoned stew for supper and left it on the table. I laid a place for him, then made myself scarce. Thór was hiding in the cellar. I’d told Patrekur that supper was included in the price of the room. But I didn’t want to be there in case he got suspicious because I wasn’t having any stew myself.’

  ‘So … what went wrong?’

  Hjördís faltered. ‘I just don’t know. I think he ate the food. At least, the plate was dirty when I came back later. But he seemed fine, as if it hadn’t affected him at all.’

  ‘What did you give him? What kind of poison? It wouldn’t necessarily have worked straight away.’ Una had a flashback to her medical lectures.

  ‘Paracetamol. It was the strongest thing I could find in the cupboard. A hell of a lot of pills, crushed up in the stew. I’d heard somewhere that it’s dangerous in large quantities.’

  Una nodded and took a sip of the cold, bitter coffee. ‘Yes, that’s right. But I don’t think it would take effect immediately. I’m fairly sure it would take …’ She broke off in mid-sentence.

  She felt hot and cold, then faint, as if the whole room was spinning.

  As the days passed, one after another, in the monotony of prison life, Björg had come to recognize the importance of hope.

  Days, months, years …

  A faint spark of hope could keep a person alive even when it seemed certain that there was no way out.

  That’s what made days like this one so difficult; when the despair was there waiting to ambush her the moment she opened her eyes in the morning, when she felt so crushed by futility that she couldn’t move, couldn’t get out of her hard bed, couldn’t eat, couldn’t speak. On those days the isolation seemed all the more oppressive, her loss of freedom impossible to bear.

  She was overwhelmed by the urge to give up; she didn’t have the energy to keep fighting, to keep tilting at those windmills, at those people who had locked her up, against their better judgement.

  Yet, through all her despair, she knew, or rather trusted, that things had to get better.

  That maybe tomorrow would be a better day.

  XXXVIII

  Una closed her eyes and waited for the spell of dizziness to pass. She felt sick.

  When she opened her eyes again, the faintness was gone. The half-siblings were still sitting there, in the kitchen of their family farm. Everything appeared depressingly old and shabby: the screamingly yellow kitchen units, the table, the chairs, the chipped white coffee mug on the table in front of her.

  The faces of brother and sister were grave. They both had murder on their conscience, and yet, Una thought, the act had been, to some extent, excusable. And from their demeanour she sensed that Patrekur’s death didn’t weigh that heavily on them; they felt they’d been justified in defending themselves. She studied them, first Hjördís, who stared stonily back at her, then Thór, whose gaze slid away from hers.

  They haven’t a clue what they’ve done, Una thought, a chill suddenly running through her flesh. She would have to break it to them. There was no question of sparing them, even though she thought that Thór at least would be devastated.

  They haven’t a clue what they’ve done …

  XXXIX

  Neither Hjördís nor Thór spoke. They seemed to be waiting for Una to finish what she had begun saying. She was still standing there, her words hanging in the air.

  ‘I … I think,’ she said carefully, ‘it could be quite a while before an overdose of paracetamol would take effect. I’m not sure, but I’d guess, um, about twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Twenty-four hours?’ Hjördís obviously hadn’t made the connection. ‘So if we’d waited, he might have died after all?’

  ‘That’s not the point, Hjördís. It wasn’t Patrekur I was thinking of.’

  ‘Oh, then what are you talking about?’

  Una didn’t speak. She reached for her mug and finished the cold coffee, bracing herself for what had to be said. ‘It was … It was Edda I was thinking about.’

  ‘Edda?’ And then she saw the blow fall as first Hjördís, then her half-brother, cottoned on. Hjördís exploded to her feet, shrieking: ‘No, not Edda … no, no … no!’ She subsided into her chair again and buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking, utterly distraught.

  ‘I learned enough during my medical studies to remember that paracetamol poisoning causes damage to the liver. And it was liver damage that caused Edda’s death.’

  Hjördís’s face was frozen. ‘It’s not possible …’

  ‘The incident in the church happened about twenty-four hours after you made the meat stew, Hjördís. And you told me you thought he’d eaten some, didn’t you? Th
at there had been a dirty plate on the table.’

  ‘Yes, I just assumed – I didn’t ask – but, now I come to think of it, he said he’d gone for a lie-down in his room. He didn’t mention the food at all … didn’t thank me …’

  ‘Edda used to eat with you sometimes, didn’t she?’ Una asked, although she already knew the answer. She had a clear memory of her first evening in Skálar and Salka telling her that Edda was never home but always off somewhere, helping herself to food at their neighbours’ houses. Even up at the farm, Salka had said.

  Una now remembered that the evening before the concert in the church, the evening Patrekur had knocked at the door, it had been just the two of them, Una and Salka, at supper. Edda had been out somewhere, as so often, but they hadn’t found it in any way odd.

  Hjördís nodded and raised her eyes, her face ashen. ‘Yes, she was always round here, coming and going as she liked, eating with us. We usually knew she was here, but sometimes … sometimes she used to help herself to food from the fridge … coming round without us even being aware …’

  ‘So that’s what happened,’ Una said, speaking more to herself than to them. ‘A terrible mistake, an accident – and Edda paid the price.’ She felt suddenly sorry for Hjördís.

  All life was sacred, that’s what Una had been taught, but the reality wasn’t always quite so clear cut. Things were rarely black and white; they were much more likely to be shades of grey. In the great scheme of things, Edda’s life had been worth so much more than Patrekur’s.

  He could stay in his watery grave – that was nothing to her – and she was already sure in her own mind that she wouldn’t do Thór and Hjördís the disservice of betraying them to the police.

  She asked herself again if she could keep quiet about the other secret, the secret of Thór’s real identity. In that case there were three innocent victims, the three people who were still locked up in prison for their supposed role in murdering Hilmar. She knew what her father would have wanted her to do, what her conscience was telling her to do – the right thing, which meant going to the police. But for once Una resisted. She would delay making a decision until she’d had a little more time to think. After all, she told herself, she didn’t want to do anything to endanger Thór.