Ever since he’d woken up he had been enveloped in silence and a chilling sense of loneliness. Now that he had removed all his mother’s clutter, the place felt bleak and cheerless, like a stage that had yet to be dressed. The windows seemed larger since he had torn down the curtains and without the nets the world outside looked drab and desolate.
Most of all he missed the pot plants that had withered and died, one after the other, since he’d stopped watering them. It wasn’t hard to identify with them. Without the plants, the ugliness of the furniture was unrelieved. And the paler patches on the wall where the pictures and decorations used to hang looked like shadows of the past.
It was too late for regrets – he was stuck now with this stark version of his home. The bulk of the ornaments, curtains, paintings, pictures, old electric appliances, flower pots, decorative china and other superfluous objects had gone to the dump. In the end it had taken three trips, with the car filled to bursting each time. The staff had watched in astonishment as he threw away one perfectly good item after another, and on the second visit his attention had been politely drawn to the charity bin provided by the Good Shepherd. Red in the face, he had moved to another spot and disposed of the remainder there. On his last trip the member of staff in question hadn’t been around so Karl had chucked the rest of the contents in the general skip. It had felt so much more final.
Now the empty flat echoed, the naked walls making it feel as though he were rattling around in a metal container. Not that he generated much noise; now that his mother’s radio and the clunky TV had been disposed of, and he had no one to talk to, he existed in almost total silence. He didn’t like the solitude, although he should have been used to it by now, but his attempts to get hold of Börkur and Halli had been unsuccessful: Börkur’s phone just rang unanswered; Halli’s seemed to be dead. Every now and then he nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard knocking sounds from the basement, but when he went down to check, there was nothing to be seen. In the end he had persuaded himself that the sounds must be coming from outside and stopped being scared witless when he heard them. But he hadn’t actually gone out to see if there was anything knocking against the wall; he was too afraid of finding nothing there.
The ringing persisted, sounding, if possible, even more peremptory. Perhaps it was a sign that it was the last ring before Arnar gave up. Karl’s hands felt clammy. He longed to hear a voice, a human voice, the voice of someone who actually wanted to talk to him. If he wanted to communicate with strangers he could go down to the basement and seek out other lonely radio hams. No doubt he would be sitting there now if the equipment wasn’t a continual reminder of the creepy numbers broadcasts. Then there was that bloody knocking too. It was bad enough hearing it from upstairs; up close, in the basement, it was unbearable.
The ringing seemed to be fading out. Karl couldn’t afford to dither a moment longer. He snatched up the receiver.
His brother sounded surprised, as if he’d been expecting someone else. ‘Hello, Karl?’
‘Yeah.’ He did his best to sound indifferent, neither angry nor pleased. He had to convey the message that he couldn’t care less about his brother.
‘I was about to hang up. It’s Arnar. Have you just got in?’
‘What? No. I didn’t hear the phone.’ Karl immediately regretted not having grasped the proffered excuse and lied that he had just walked in the door. You couldn’t fail to hear the phone anywhere in the house, as Arnar was well aware.
‘I see.’ Arnar let a pause develop and Karl pressed the receiver closer to his ear. Silence in America sounded no different from silence in Iceland. Oppressive. But it didn’t last long. ‘I just wanted to check you were OK after our last chat. You know.’ There was no need for him to elaborate.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, I just wanted to check you hadn’t misunderstood. It may have sounded like I didn’t want you to come over.’ Arnar was uncharacteristically hesitant and his tone of voice kept changing, as if he didn’t know how to be nice and was struggling to strike the right note. ‘Anyhow, that wasn’t the intention.’
‘I never thought it was. Like I said, it was you who misunderstood me. I’m not interested in trekking all the way over to the west coast.’ This feeble lie sounded no more believable now than when he had resorted to it during their last conversation. ‘No worries.’
‘OK.’ Arnar’s relief was so obvious it was almost embarrassing. ‘By the way, one question.’
‘What?’ Karl considered hanging up. The receiver felt uncomfortable pressed against his ear like this. The blood had rushed to his face when it dawned on him that Arnar hadn’t even tried to encourage him to come over. If he hadn’t chucked out the big mirror in the gilt frame that used to hang above the phone, he would have been able to see his scarlet face. He fixed his eyes on the white rectangle the mirror had left behind.
‘Have you been through Mum’s stuff?’
‘Yes.’ Better restrict himself to monosyllables so as not to betray his anger and hurt.
‘Did you find any papers or documents?’
Karl hesitated. For the first time in their relationship he had the upper hand and he wanted to use it to his advantage. ‘Yeah. Loads.’
‘Loads?’
‘Yeah, a whole pile of all kinds of old papers.’
‘Have you been through them?’
‘Yeah.’
‘All of them?’ Arnar obviously couldn’t bring himself to ask the burning question. With so much at stake he wanted to defer any potential disappointment.
‘Yes, all of them.’ Karl had no intention of making this easy for him.
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘And … did you find any adoption papers? My adoption papers?’ Yet again Arnar had revealed his self-centredness; he couldn’t care less about Karl’s origins. He was the only one who mattered.
Karl took a deep breath, then, grinning to himself, he said: ‘No.’
‘No?’ There was no disguising Arnar’s disappointment. Nor the embarrassing wishful thinking contained in his next questions. ‘Nothing else? No letters, certificates, that sort of thing? It doesn’t have to be formal records of adoption.’
‘No, nothing.’ Karl grinned to himself again. ‘Nada.’
‘I see.’ Arnar fell silent as if he needed time to digest this disappointment – and total defeat. ‘Send it all to me anyway. I want to look through it myself in case …’
Karl leant back and raised his eyes to the ceiling. What luck that he had answered. He couldn’t have ended his relationship with his brother on a better note. ‘Oh, I threw it all out,’ he said casually. ‘Yesterday. You should have rung sooner.’
‘Threw it out? Where? In the bin?’
‘No, I took it all to the dump. All the papers too.’ Karl closed his eyes. ‘There’s no chance of finding them now. They’ll have gone into landfill with the rest of the rubbish. Though maybe you could ask where they threw that day’s stuff and try looking for yourself – if you were in the country. I doubt it would do any good, though.’
‘I see.’ Arnar sounded like a completely different person. The smug, bullying note had left his voice, which had dropped to little more than a whisper.
‘Was there anything else? I’ve got to get on.’
‘What? Oh. No.’
‘Well, so long.’ Karl hung up. He no longer felt lonely or jumpy. Quite the reverse – he felt bloody great. It was like sinking back into a comfy sofa when you’ve just taken a drag on a big fat joint. So this is how winners felt. A guy could get used to this.
The envelope lay on the kitchen table with the documents arranged around it. Karl had carefully laid them down, one after the other, after reading their contents. Although the names had been omitted from some of the papers, he had gleaned enough information to know who his and Arnar’s real parents were.
His own parents’ names told him nothing: Gudrún María Gudjónsdóttir and Helgi Jónsson. Like everything el
se connected to him, the names were neither impressive nor memorable, just ordinary. He regretted having given in to his curiosity but it had been too tempting to discover the kind of information about his biological family that Arnar was so desperate for on his own account. When Karl drew the papers out of the mustard-yellow envelope he had imagined that for the rest of his life he would walk a little taller, feel a little more reconciled to his lot, in the knowledge that he alone possessed this information. Now, however, he wished he could wipe the knowledge from his memory. But that wasn’t how it worked.
The fan in his cheap laptop whirred into life as if to prompt him; remind him that he had to finish this now that he had started. Karl ran his hands through his hair. His palms came away shiny with grease. As he studied them, it occurred to him that either Gudrún María or Helgi must have been faced with the same hands every day. Broad, flat nails, unnecessarily long ring fingers, thick thumbs. They must have come from somewhere.
Pushing the papers aside, he pulled the laptop towards him, keeping his eyes on the black keyboard instead of looking at the screen as he usually did. For some reason he didn’t want to see the names materialise letter by letter. He never normally looked at the keyboard, so only now did he notice how badly the letters had faded. The M had completely disappeared and so had half the S. Only small white lines remained of the A and R. It was a bit like his memory of his adoptive mother; her features were growing ever hazier and he could no longer remember her voice. Since there was no recording of her speaking, her voice had been quite literally obliterated from the universe.
Raising his eyes to the screen, Karl began his search. Like Arnar during the phone call, he had decided to stall a little. He would hunt for his brother’s parents first. That way he could continue for a few more minutes in blissful ignorance of his own depressing origins, while clinging to the hope – against all reason – that they might not turn out to be so bad. After all, his mother had presumably kept them secret to shield him from the ugly truth.
Mind you, from what he remembered, their mother had been more focussed on withholding information from Arnar. Perhaps that was because he had been more insistent than Karl, yet he had a hunch that that wasn’t the reason. Arnar’s origins must have been worse than his own, so it seemed logical to dig around for his family first. It would lessen Karl’s own pain to know that others had worse to contend with. He would just have to discipline himself not to blurt the secret out, however terrible it was. Far better to hug the knowledge to himself for the foreseeable future than to fling it in Arnar’s face in order to savour his shock. His brother wasn’t the type to dwell on disappointment and before you knew it he would have bounced back and be walking tall again, towering over Karl – more intelligent, more smugly self-satisfied than he deserved to be. No prehistory could be sufficiently devastating to crush Arnar for long – Karl must never forget that.
But there was another reason why Arnar’s background was of more interest to him now than his own sorry history. According to Arnar’s birth certificate, his mother was called Jóhanna Hákonardóttir. The box following her name contained an eight-digit number; there were no ten-digit ID numbers on the document because these hadn’t yet been introduced in 1983 when Arnar was born, but the number had struck Karl as familiar. He was convinced that the same sequence had been broadcast over the radio the previous evening – he remembered scratching his head over it for ages because it resembled nothing that had hitherto been transmitted by the station. After the broadcast had ended, he’d searched for the eight-digit sequence but nothing had come up. It was almost certainly the same number, though, and to make sure Karl had even gone to the trouble of fetching his notes from the basement. He was right: Arnar’s mother’s old social security number had indeed been read out.
It was no good trying to persuade himself that it was a coincidence. The chances of a random eight-digit series coinciding exactly with this woman’s number were sufficiently remote, even without the additional fact that the ten-digit series in a previous broadcast had tallied with his own ID.
There was no avoiding the conclusion that the person responsible for the broadcasts had deliberately drawn him and Arnar into his or her dark designs. Karl couldn’t begin to fathom what it all meant. Perhaps he could unravel the mystery if he could find out something about this woman.
None of the numbers broadcast so far had been linked to Arnar’s father, whose name, according to the birth certificate, was Thorgeir Bragi Pétursson, so Karl was less interested in him.
The search shed little light on the matter. It threw up 30,000 results but the women with the same name listed at the top were still alive. He repeated the search with Jóhanna’s birth date and this greatly reduced the results. Among them was the notice of her death. She had died on 12 February 1987 at her home on the farm of Gráhamrar in the Hvalfjördur district, aged twenty-three. She was described as a housewife and that was it. There was no mention of a husband or son, or of any surviving relatives or in-laws. An obituary turned up by the search engine provided no further details. The name underneath was Thorgeir Bragi Thorhallsson, Arnar’s father, but he had made do with sending in a poem that didn’t seem immediately relevant.
O Lord, I pray, keep watch upon
My poor beloved little son;
Grant that he may sweetly sleep;
Grant that he may never weep.
Benedikt Th. Gröndal
Given the subject of the poem, Karl would have expected to see a reference to their son Arnar, but no. The decision to put him up for adoption must already have been taken and the only possible interpretation was that this Thorgeir Bragi had declined to take in his son.
Where was the scandal? The photo of Arnar’s mother that accompanied the obituary showed a perfectly ordinary-looking young woman. It was a rather bad passport picture that appeared to have been taken in her teens; her childlike face prompted Karl to work out how old she would have been when she gave birth to Arnar: nineteen. Could that be the dreadful secret? That she’d had him so young? What a let-down. That wasn’t remotely scandalous. Disappointed, he closed the obituary.
The window containing the death notice reappeared. Karl was about to close this as well when towards the bottom of the screen his attention was caught by the heading of another death announcement. Hákon Hákonarson had died on the same day as Jóhanna, 12 February 1987, also at home in Gráhamrar in the Hvalfjördur district.
Karl sat back, frowning at the screen. Hákon must have been Jóhanna’s father; Arnar’s grandfather. But, as with his daughter’s death notice, there was no mention of any surviving family. He appeared to have died alone and friendless like her. On the very same day.
Karl turned next to the newspaper archives to see if there were any reports of an incident that could have caused both their deaths. His immediate thought was a house-fire or a car crash, though the latter explanation didn’t fit with the information that they had both died at home. An avalanche? None was reported, although he scoured the papers for the weeks either side of 12 February. A shroud of secrecy seemed to hang over the deaths of father and daughter.
Before giving up altogether, Karl decided to find out more about Thorgeir Bragi Pétursson, Arnar’s father. Perhaps he could ring him and ask him about Hákon and Jóhanna’s deaths, though that would be risky. What if the man was suffering from remorse and wanted to contact Arnar? His fear proved redundant, however, since it transpired that Thorgeir had died two years previously. Unlike the mother of his child, he had left behind a large family: a wife, sister, parents, four children and several grandchildren. As a result, there were lots of obituaries from which it was possible to learn that he had been born, raised and lived out his life in the village of Akranes, on the other side of Faxaflói Bay from Reykjavík. Although the cause of death was not stated, the authors of the obituaries made frequent references to a difficult illness and gruelling battle. There wasn’t a single word about Jóhanna or Arnar.
Karl shut down the
computer. He wouldn’t find the answers online. The most likely source of further hints would be the numbers station. It was ten to five. He stood up and hurried downstairs. When the broadcast commenced on the hour he intended to be ready and waiting, armed with pen and paper. His own past would have to wait.
In the basement, the faint knocking began again.
Chapter 23
There was an unusual hum of activity at the station. The focus of the inquiry had shifted from the murder scene to the incident room, as the majority of the data collected in the course of the investigation was now in-house. As a result, most of the team were present, almost every desk was occupied and people were tapping away at computers on all sides. The rattling of keyboards didn’t quite drown out the other sounds but it formed a constant, purposeful backdrop whenever conversation ceased. The atmosphere was more like that of a newsroom than CID; the smell of coffee hanging over it all only enhanced the effect.
The midday sun crawled over the horizon and shone directly through the huge picture windows, making it almost impossible for people to see their computer screens. In consequence, many of the blinds were drawn and the resulting gloom gave the impression that it was much later in the afternoon. For most of them the day’s work was half over, whereas for Huldar it was only just beginning. The leader of the investigation had to arrive first and leave last. It was an unwritten rule. If he went home at four it would convey the message that it was all right to slacken off the pressure, and the next day the team would start drifting away by 3 p.m. He had even cancelled a dentist’s appointment made six months ago for fear that it would detract from his colleagues’ dedication. His urgently overdue haircut would also have to wait.
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