He decided to bin them and assuaged his guilt by reflecting that there were unlikely to be any women poor enough to want dowdy, shapeless clothes that stank of mothballs and stale perfume. One by one the garments ended up on the bed until only the bare hangers remained.
Only after the clothes had gone did he notice the large yellow envelope right at the back of the wardrobe. As he extracted it, he discovered that it was quite thick. He debated whether to throw it away without opening it. But rather than recipes or ancient newspaper cuttings it might contain a will, title deeds or other important documents. It would only take a moment to flick through the contents.
Karl pushed aside the mountain of clothes to make room for himself on the bed. A few garments slid off but he ignored them. They were destined for the dump anyway. He pulled a sheaf of papers out of the envelope. Bingo. Adoption papers. Documents that were akin to sacred relics in his brother’s eyes. Whereas to Karl they were simply bits of paper that had transformed the brothers’ lives, removing them from their biological parents and placing them with the woman they had known ever since as their mother.
Naturally the papers dated from different times; Arnar had been adopted nine years before Karl. These looked like the originals, with signatures in blue ink and red stamps in the corner. To think of the efforts Arnar had made to track down this information at the National Register and various other institutions. All in vain.
Arnar had been informed that his situation was not unique; records were destroyed in exceptional cases. The fact that their mother had been a social worker and worked on child-protection cases may have been significant. Her job had included assessing whether children should be removed from their parents. Karl doubted she would have had to move mountains to push through the adoption, unlike those outside the system. The same would have applied in Karl’s case.
He felt a faint sense of trepidation, though his interest in his origins had long ago cooled. The identity of the boys’ real parents had been a forbidden topic. Their mother would probably never even have told them they were adopted – would perhaps have invented stories about their absent fathers – were it not for the fact that Arnar retained hazy memories that prompted him to question her again and again, with increasing urgency. In the end she had caved in and admitted that they were adopted, but not another word would she add.
One day at the breakfast table, shortly after Karl started school, Arnar had informed him in a loud voice that he was adopted. Karl hadn’t understood at first, but when he did he was glad because this meant he had a father after all. He would be able to inform his classmates and stop their speculation. But then Arnar had sneered at Karl that his parents hadn’t wanted him; that’s why he had ended up here. So there was no point in his dreaming of ever meeting them. His real parents had other plans and probably had new, better children by now. For once their mother had lost her temper with Arnar and assured Karl that it wasn’t true: his parents were dead. At six, he hadn’t known which was worse.
She would reveal nothing else, except that the brothers shared neither father nor mother, which pleased Karl no end.
Unlike Arnar, Karl hadn’t pressed her for any more information. He had accepted his mother’s statement that his parents’ story was better forgotten. He had interpreted this as meaning that they hadn’t been the kind of people he would want to know or be associated with.
Sometimes it was best to know as little as possible.
Cowardice was another reason why he hadn’t been as insistent as Arnar. He was afraid of the truth. It was bad enough feeling that you were useless at everything, but even worse to know that you had been useless from birth.
Arnar was a different story. He excelled at school and although he was a bit of a loner like Karl and had few friends, things always went his way. He won an overseas scholarship, graduated summa cum laude from a respected American university and was offered his pick of highly paid jobs at home and abroad. The time he had devoted at school to choosing the right career path had more than paid off.
He was living the good life and his origins could do nothing to alter the fact. He had proved himself.
In fact, Arnar’s only defeat in life was his failure to persuade his mother to tell him about his family. She hadn’t even promised to tell him later or at least to think about it. Her answer was always the same: ‘No, out of the question.’ No matter how often Arnar cited the law on a child’s right to know its origins, she wouldn’t budge, and since the information appeared to have been lost in the system, Arnar was forced to accept his repeated failures.
Karl smiled. He was holding in his hands the very documents his brother had been seeking all these years. It was in his power to give him the long-desired information. His smile grew.
Would he give Arnar the papers?
Would he hell! Arnar should have treated him with a little more generosity last night.
Karl returned the papers to the envelope. He wasn’t tempted to acquaint himself with their contents straight away. It would keep until he was in a better frame of mind. He had seen the names of his biological parents but felt no urge to look them up online. It could wait. He could do without any bad news right now. Though no way was he throwing them out. The knowledge that he possessed the papers and was withholding their contents from Arnar gave him a sense of triumph. He ran his fingers tentatively over the cold envelope, then stood up, feeling more pleased with himself than he could ever remember. The crappy old mattress yielded as he pushed himself up and more clothes fell on the floor. He’d pick them up later; there was no rush. He had already decided to skip tomorrow’s classes as well; it would give his teachers the impression he had been ill, especially if he turned up wearing a scarf. Nobody was ill for just one day. Although attendance wasn’t compulsory, his teachers might be more lenient towards him in the exams if they thought he’d been diligent in his studies.
There was a faint thud from the basement. Karl’s stomach lurched and all his self-confidence vanished in an instant. Putting down the envelope, he strained his ears. Nothing. But the moment he moved towards the door he heard the same noise again, slightly louder this time but not much more distinct. There was somebody in the basement, but the only way in was through the house. Unless the noises were coming from the shortwave receiver? But surely he had turned it off last time he was down there? Perhaps he had left it on, intending to go back later and listen. All he had to do now was switch it off.
The basement was in darkness. Karl tried to ignore the thought that this implied he had come upstairs yesterday evening with no intention of going down again. But he wasn’t some sad old-age pensioner, stuck in the same routine. He must have turned off the lights but not the radio. That was all there was to it. As he descended the stairs a broadcast started up. The moment he heard the familiar soulless voice he realised that it was tuned to the Icelandic numbers station. That wasn’t right. He clearly remembered forcing himself to stop listening to it for fear it would keep him awake in the night. The last thing he had listened to was a lonely broadcast from an amateur operator in Australia, late the previous night. He slowed his steps. ‘Hello?’ His voice sounded human and vulnerable, unlike the robotic tones of the shortwave transmission.
‘Hello?’
No reply. It was absurd calling out like this. If a burglar had broken in he was hardly likely to answer. And anyway there was no one to be seen and nowhere to hide. Well, an intruder could conceivably have squeezed behind the sofa but he would have to be on the skinny side. And it was equally ridiculous to imagine that a fully grown man could fit inside the cupboard at the back of the room.
‘Hello?’
No one answered. The amplifier continued to churn out numbers.
By the time Karl finally summoned up the courage to enter the room his heartbeat had steadied. He must be going crazy. Surely the burglar from last year wouldn’t come to the house a second time. There were far too many others to choose from, which had contents that were actually valuable. Thi
eves wouldn’t have a clue what the radio equipment cost, and even if they did, they would find it impossible to offload because the only buyers in the market for such gear would immediately recognise it as stolen goods. The group who practised this hobby was so small that a single e-mail to the club would be sufficient to put everyone on the alert. What an idiot Karl was to imagine the worst. Perhaps his conscience was punishing him for having thrown away those photos of Arnar. He would have to toughen up if he meant to excise his brother from his life like a tumour. Next time Arnar phoned out of a sense of duty or to ask him a favour, he mustn’t answer. He must be strong.
Karl reached over to the shortwave receiver. On the table in front of him lay a bracelet he didn’t recognise – a band of colourful beads with a silver elephant dangling from the clasp. There was no way it could have belonged to his mother. She had favoured jewellery made of large wooden beads in earthen colours, the sort of hippy shit that made him think of poetry readings and 1970s protest marches against the NATO base at Keflavík. This bracelet was far too cheerful. But it didn’t arouse any answering mirth in Karl. Somebody had been in the basement. Somebody who had no business in his house. His fear returned with a vengeance and the relentless stream of numbers hurt his ears.
‘Thirty-nine, eight, ninety-two, sixteen, twenty-two minus fifty-three, eight, three minus fifty-three, sixty-three minus ninety-two, nine, eighty-six minus seven, eight, twenty-five minus seven, forty-two minus eight, sixty-three minus ninety-two.’
Karl fetched a pen and paper. Absorbed in the numbers, he didn’t hear when the same dull thud that had brought him down here sounded again behind him.
Chapter 18
Sigvaldi sat watching his sons playing on the sitting-room floor with the old cars that had once so enthralled him and his brother. The cars showed signs of rough use, their bright paint chipped in places, the metal showing through. The shiny patches reminded him of the violent collisions that he and his brother used to stage when they had grown bored of pushing the cars around on the parquet. The frequent crashing sounds rising from the floor indicated that some things didn’t change.
Little Stefán, his younger son, glanced up. ‘When’s Mummy coming?’ He was only just four and seemed incapable of understanding what had happened. He was probably too young. He seemed to think that if he asked often enough the answer would change. The question grew no less painful for Sigvaldi with repetition.
‘She’s not coming, sweetheart. Remember what I told you?’ The answer now came automatically.
Stefán met his father’s gaze but seemed to look right through him as he slowly nodded, his face preoccupied. ‘I’m going to show her what I can do when she comes back.’ His small fingers grabbed a car and raised it aloft. ‘Look.’ He mimicked a noise that Sigvaldi knew was meant to represent the wheels spinning – he’d been given the same demonstration over and over again. Then the boy hurled the car away to crash into the wall next to a painting at the far end of the room. Normally Sigvaldi would have spoken sharply and told the boy off. But what did it matter now?
Bárdur, who was nearly six, raised frightened eyes to his father. He was unusually sensitive at the moment since he understood more than his younger brother. He also knew that if you threw toys at the wall, grown-ups were supposed to lose their temper. When they didn’t, something was very wrong. Sigvaldi made an effort to perform his paternal duty but couldn’t manage any more than: ‘Stefán. No.’ He hoped the boy would understand.
‘Come on, Stebbi. Let’s find Granny.’ Bárdur stood up and led his little brother out of the room, leaving Sigvaldi on his own. He watched them go, the same thought going round in circles in his head: how on earth was he supposed to cope without Elísa? The boys’ hair was too long and now it was up to him to take them for the appointment their mother had booked at the salon. Today. She had meant to take them today.
He remembered more things she had said she was planning to do while he was abroad. Everything she’d mentioned had only made him gladder to be going away. While she was tramping all over town with the kids he would be in the States, relaxing between conference papers. Swilling whisky in the hotel bar, trying out the sauna in the basement, taking in a round of golf with his colleagues, relishing the absence of snow and not having to start the day by scraping the windscreen.
There would be none of that now and probably not for the foreseeable future. He was a single father with three kids who he didn’t even know that well. Elísa had looked after most of their needs. He had ended up on the sidelines somehow, a full-time provider and part-time scolder. The household disciplinarian.
‘Has something happened?’ Sigvaldi heard his mother ask behind him. He turned for politeness’ sake, though all he really wanted was to go on staring at the wall where the car had struck it. He felt a sort of empathy with the plaster on suddenly receiving such a deadly blow.
‘No. Nothing.’ Sigvaldi studied his mother. She had always been a striking woman; tall and slender, with strong features that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Grecian coin, whether dark-haired and red-cheeked as she was in his memory or pale-complexioned beneath a mane of grey hair as she was now. But the shock had left its mark on her; she seemed on the point of buckling beneath the weight of her grief. He was aware he looked no better himself.
‘The boys are a bit subdued.’ She leant against the doorpost, her arms folded. ‘If you ask me, you should get up off that sofa and devote some time to them. Go into town, see a film, visit the zoo, buy them ice-cream. Anything. They need fresh air and a break from grief. Your grief. Obviously they’ll carry their own with them wherever they go.’
They stared one another in the eye without speaking, and Sigvaldi saw for the first time how alike they were. It was almost like looking at himself. Ever since he could remember people had been saying he had his mother’s eyes. He hadn’t been able to see it until now. Perhaps it was their shared pain that had pulled their eyelids down in exactly the same way. ‘It would do you good to drag yourself out too. We all have to get up and carry on. Whatever happens.’
His mother had always pushed him, possibly aiming too high at times. She had really gone overboard when he was slaving for his medical degree; you’d have thought he was a young soldier on his way to the front when he left the house in the morning during his exams. As if she didn’t expect him to return. But this time she was quite right. Sigvaldi forced a smile. ‘I’ll take them for a drive. I can’t really face the sweet shop or ice-cream parlour where I’d have to interact with other people.’ He added hurriedly before she could retort with some guff about ‘no man is an island’: ‘It’ll be better tomorrow. A little better. Then better still the next day, and the next. In the end it’ll become bearable. That’ll have to do.’ His back hurt from sitting hunched on the sofa. ‘Thank you for taking us in. I know we’re not easy company at the moment.’
His mother made a dismissive gesture. ‘Don’t talk rubbish. You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.’ Her face hardened. ‘Your father was saying there’s talk of taking Margrét into care. I sincerely hope you haven’t agreed to that.’
There was a toy car lying at Sigvaldi’s feet; he fixed his gaze on it. ‘I wouldn’t put it like that. The police are concerned for her safety. They’re worried it might leak out in the press that she was there that night. That she might have seen something.’
‘So what if it does? Do they think that’s the worst the child has to face? That people might start spreading rumours about her?’
It was the red car, the one he and his brother used to fight over. Both had wanted to play with it because it was a convertible with lightning bolts painted on the sides. He remembered that cool as the car looked, it didn’t actually move very well as one of the rear wheels was crooked and it had to be pushed along by hand. There was a moral there that the brothers had failed to learn: the things you desire most don’t always live up to expectations. ‘It’s not the gossip the police are worried about, Mum.
They’re afraid the murderer will come after her. That he’ll be scared she might identify him, so he’ll try and silence her. She’d be easy to track down here or at home. It’d be much harder if she was at a safe house.’
His mother gasped and her glamorous face crumpled. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Only what I was told. I’m incapable of inventing anything or embellishing what other people tell me at the moment. They want to take Margrét to a safe house. Temporarily, just until they’ve caught this sick bastard.’ He spat out the last word.
His mother opened and shut her mouth like a fish on dry land. Then shuddered and tried to get her bearings. ‘Who do you think did it? Some psychopath?’
Sigvaldi couldn’t answer that. On his way home from America he had racked his brain to think of anyone who could have wished her harm. But he couldn’t. Not friends, not family. They weren’t involved in any disputes, either with their neighbours or at work. Admittedly, he knew little about her job but she would have confided in him about any problems there. That was the sort of relationship they had. He remembered the police asking if either or both of them had been having an affair but couldn’t remember how he had replied.
It was easier to remember the first interview; the second was a blur.
You’d have thought they had timed it to coincide precisely with the moment when the finality of it had hit home. He had only just managed to stop himself slumping forward on the table, screaming, sobbing and tearing out his hair. The strain had been so great that it was a miracle he’d managed to answer any questions at all, and afterwards he was afraid he had come across as cold and detached. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. He’d known that if he allowed the least emotion to slip through, the dam would break.
The Legacy Page 20
