I Remember You

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  ‘He feels bad where he is.’ She was clearly about to start sobbing.

  ‘Sara.’ Freyr scrubbed at his eyes. ‘You’ve got to stop this. There’s nothing we can do and nothing we left undone back then. You’ve got to face reality. Benni’s not coming back.’ His own voice finally cracked a tiny bit as he let his hand drop and opened his eyes. This obsession of hers had reopened the poorly healed wound in his heart so often that it was nearly gangrenous. Had he not made the decision to leave her, he would most likely have ended up drinking himself to death or destroying himself by some other means. All he wanted was to be able to go through the grieving process on his own terms, without constant interference from the delirium that gripped Sara. Before moving out, he had never looked forward to going home and had eked out his work as much as he possibly could. He still did, in fact, which said a lot about his pathetic little apartment which he was barely familiar with even after living there for six months. ‘You’ve got to accept it, for your sake and everyone else’s. And now I’ve got to say goodbye.’

  ‘He came to me in a dream. Benni feels bad where he is and he wants you to find him,’ she repeated.

  Freyr wanted to shout, but suppressed it. ‘Thanks. Talk to you later.’ He hung up, the same questions that kept him awake most nights running through his head. How could a six-year-old boy vanish without trace in broad daylight? Where was he? Why couldn’t he be found? Freyr stood up and stared for a moment at the ugly, awkward handset as if it held the answer.

  The old man’s frail body jerked spasmodically. ‘Would you like something for your cough?’ Freyr put down the patient’s chart.

  ‘Would one more pill make any difference?’ said the man in the white hospital gown, stretching his purple lips into a ghastly smile. As his gums had receded, his false teeth had long since become one size too large and they overwhelmed his face when they appeared like this in all their glory. ‘All right, then.’ He laid his trembling hand gently on his own chest as it moved up and down to the rhythm of his feeble breathing. ‘I swallow everything I’m given, my good man. But I think I’ve almost had enough.’

  ‘So you’ve said.’ Freyr knew as well as the old man that his days were numbered. He was in his late nineties and suffering from bowel cancer. Freyr, however, was too tired to discuss life and death with him today. ‘What a beautiful girl.’ He lifted a framed photo of a girl with dark plaits from the bedside table. ‘Is this your great-granddaughter, who was here earlier?’ As soon as he’d said it he realized this couldn’t be the case. The child in the photo was older than the little girl who had led her mother out of the room earlier that day.

  The man gave a short, rattling laugh. ‘Almost. You’re quite perceptive. The photo was taken of my granddaughter, Svana, twenty years ago. And now she has a little girl herself. Both of them are wonderful, they often come in to see me.’ The man’s watery eyes squinted as he looked at Freyr’s hands. ‘You’re not married?’ Another coughing fit prevented him from continuing his interrogation.

  ‘Divorced.’ Freyr grabbed his stethoscope. ‘I’d like to take a quick listen. That cough doesn’t sound so great.’

  ‘Does any cough sound great?’ The old man didn’t wait for a reply, but continued, ‘That’s a big mistake you’re making, my good man, if you plan to spend your life alone instead of remarrying. A big mistake.’

  Freyr nodded in agreement. ‘Well, hopefully I’ll put that right. I just need a woman. I’m not exactly beating them off with a stick.’ He pulled the covers off the man’s chest and unbuttoned his gown. ‘It’ll be a bit cold, but I expect you’re used to that by now.’

  ‘Svana, my granddaughter who was here earlier, she’s single.’ The man looked into Freyr’s eyes. ‘She’s a good and beautiful girl. And so is her daughter.’

  Freyr smiled at him. ‘I don’t doubt it. They’re probably too good for me.’ He looked at the big wall clock above the door. ‘I’m always working.’ He placed the stethoscope on the man’s speckled chest. ‘How old is the little girl?’

  ‘Three. Speaks perfectly.’ The old man stopped to cough, as Freyr instructed. ‘Her preschool was closed this morning, so our little cherub had the day off and wanted to visit her grandfather. Someone vandalized the place last night. A damned shame.’ The man stopped again and concentrated on breathing deeply, in and out, as Freyr asked. As soon as Freyr stuck the stethoscope back in his pocket he continued, ‘Unfortunately, some things never change. There will always be scumbags who get a kick out of spoiling things for others. There’s something particularly unpleasant about that kind of destruction. When I taught primary school here, the school was vandalized once. That was such a horrible day – I feel for the staff at the preschool if it was anything like that.’

  ‘I was called out there this morning and I saw the state of the place. I know what you mean.’ Freyr buttoned up the man’s gown and spread the blanket back over him. ‘We just have to hope they find the perpetrator.’

  ‘I don’t hold out much hope of that. They never found the one who wrecked our primary school all those years ago; no one’s ever cracked the case.’ The old man shook his head sadly. ‘Damn it, I can hardly remember anything nowadays, but I’ll never forget it. Everything that could possibly be damaged had been. In those days things weren’t so replaceable; you couldn’t just stroll to the shops and upgrade things as soon as they showed any sign of wear, so the damage wasn’t just emotional. The school and its staff bore the marks of the incident for several years afterwards.’ The old man succumbed to another violent coughing fit, then continued in a slightly hoarser voice, ‘They had to be sparing with the paint, so the graffiti showed through for a long time after. It wasn’t until the entire school was repainted that the letters disappeared.’

  Freyr was waiting patiently for the man to finish so he could move on to his next patient, but his story sounded uncomfortably familiar. He had tried to reach Dagný at lunch to ask whether there was any news, but without success. There was no way of knowing whether the investigation was making any progress or whether everyone was just as clueless as they had been that morning. Of course Dagný might have returned his call, but Freyr kept his mobile phone in his locker to avoid interruptions at work. Unfortunately Sara had figured this out and found a way to call the department directly. ‘Did you say something was written on the walls?’

  ‘Yes. It was completely incomprehensible. The vandal must have thought his message was clear, but he can’t have been in his right mind.’

  ‘What had he written?’

  ‘Just a few words, but the same ones repeated throughout the building.’ The old man cleared his throat but didn’t cough, much to Freyr’s relief. ‘Ugly was written on the wall of my classroom. Whatever that was supposed to mean.’

  ‘Ugly?’ Freyr exclaimed. The old man focused his watery blue eyes on Freyr. ‘Yes. I chose to interpret it as the man referring to himself and what he’d done. That helped me, having to look at it for all those years, even if you could only see a faint shadow of the word through the paint.’ The man pulled the cover all the way up to his chin. ‘I had a harder time coming to terms with what was written in the assembly hall.’

  ‘And what was that?’ Freyr was determined to end the conversation so that he could finish his shift, go home, take an ibuprofen for his headache and lie down. Still, he couldn’t resist asking; the events of the morning had had a deeper effect than he’d realized or was willing to admit to himself.

  ‘Dirty.’ The old man’s voice sounded stronger than before, as if the low baritone of his former years had returned. The old man seemed to notice this himself, and he struggled to sit up in bed. ‘In the assembly hall, of all places. No child should have to sit and look at that.’

  ‘Did you say “dirty”?’ Freyr thought he must have misheard the man. ‘Are you sure you’re not confusing this with what your granddaughter told you this morning about the preschool?’

  The old man gave Freyr a displeased, even indignant look. �
��Of course not. I was going to tell you that I remember this as if it happened yesterday, not this morning. Scribbled on the wall was this one word. Dirty.’

  Dagný’s expression when he told her was not unlike the old man’s, except that her displeasure seemed grafted onto her face. ‘What are you saying? That there’s a vandal who breaks into schools at sixty-year intervals?’ She shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t buy it. If that were the case, whoever was in the school last night would have to be at least seventy years old. That doesn’t fit. The old man must have heard about the “dirty” graffiti during the girl’s visit this morning.’

  ‘That’s not what he believed.’ Freyr tried to hide his irritation. As soon as he’d told Dagný the story, he’d realized how ridiculous it sounded. Still, he’d insisted, even though logic was on her side. It felt odd to be the one insisting on a story that was difficult to justify. That was usually Sara’s role.

  ‘No, but isn’t he in his nineties?’ Dagný allowed herself a rare smile. ‘I’d say he’s just a bit confused.’

  Freyr let his eyes wander over the packed bookshelves in the office. ‘Would you be willing to check whether there are records of the old case? It would remove any doubt about whether the man is confused or not. He seemed absolutely convinced that he was remembering things correctly.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how much work we have to do here? It isn’t just the healthcare system that’s suffered cutbacks. We have far too few employees and for the moment the break-in at the preschool isn’t a priority.’ Dagný lifted the stack of papers on the desk and let it thud back into place. ‘We’re investigating more cases than just this one. There isn’t much more we can do in this situation than speak to the people who seem the likeliest candidates, and if we’re lucky, someone will confess or we’ll nail him by his fingerprints. If that fails, we’ll have to hope that whoever did it will be arrested for something else entirely, and that his fingerprints will give him away. Either that or we might find he’s already on record. In any case, it’ll take quite some time to find out.’ She shrugged sadly. ‘There was such a mess of fingerprints in the preschool.’

  Freyr was sweating in his thick coat, but didn’t want to ask her to open a window for fear that the wind would blow the pile of papers onto the floor. ‘How much time are you talking about?’

  ‘One or two weeks. We’ll see how it goes.’ There was a note of surrender in her voice. ‘If the government had insured its property, this would be a matter for the insurance company and it would take over the investigation. But since that isn’t the case, it looks as though we’ll soon have to conclude our own investigation, unless new evidence turns up or we hear any rumours about the vandalism. As you can imagine, no one goes through old files in search of . . .’ She stopped for a moment, trying to work out what she wanted to say. ‘Well, I don’t really know what.’

  Freyr said nothing. He personally had no idea how sixty-year-old police reports could help them now. As he sat there on his hard, uncomfortable chair, he realized that Dagný was right; the crime wasn’t so serious that it necessitated a complex police investigation. The graffiti would doubtless be painted over, the damage repaired, and the case would be history. He decided to stop worrying about it; he wouldn’t take it too well if Dagný started lecturing him about medicine. He’d let her know what he heard – there was nothing else he could do. ‘Did something bad come up this morning? You left in such a rush.’

  Dagný frowned automatically and stroked her chin, as she did when she was pondering something or facing a difficult decision. ‘Oh, I might as well tell you. You’ll hear about it at work tomorrow morning anyway. I actually thought you knew already.’

  ‘What? I haven’t heard anything.’ Freyr had purposely buried himself in his work in order to shut out the lingering feelings his conversation with Sara had provoked, which meant he had completely missed the day’s gossip. The hospital might have been abuzz from one end to the other with stories without him being aware of it.

  ‘Someone committed suicide in Súðavík last night. The body was found in the church this morning when the priest arrived. We had to get there quickly.’

  ‘Was it a kid?’ Freyr hoped not, especially because young people’s suicides occasionally came in waves. In the eyes of some teenagers, there was something heroic about surrendering your life in the battle of adolescence. It only took one of them to sow the first seed of tragedy before others began to follow.

  ‘No, it was an older woman.’ Dagný took the topmost paper from the pile on the desk and read from it. ‘She was sixty-nine years old.’ She looked at Freyr. ‘Maybe she had trouble accepting the fact that she was a pensioner. Some people live for work. Or else she’d become seriously ill and didn’t want to deal with it.’

  Freyr nodded thoughtfully; ridiculously, it hadn’t immediately occurred to him that it might be a woman. Although only a quarter of suicides in Iceland were committed by women, there was nothing odd about such a thing occurring in the Westfjords, any more than anywhere else. There were between seventy and eighty suicides a year throughout the country, most of them in Reykjavík and its suburbs, but perhaps statistically it was the turn of women in the west. ‘Suicides more commonly involve older people, but although I obviously haven’t looked into this case, I’d say it was unlikely that the end of her career had anything to do with it. In general, it’s men who have difficulty accepting that. The woman’s relatives might know the reason behind it.’ Freyr slipped off his jacket. ‘Mind you, I would be interested to know why she picked a church. Generally, people choose to do it at home, or out in the wild when they want to protect their families from the additional shock of finding them dead. That location is fairly unusual.’

  ‘Maybe she was a devout Christian and wanted to be nearer to God when she died. Although she wasn’t a religious fanatic or anything like that; we learned that much from her husband. Of course, he could have been lying to us; if he were a fanatic himself, he might have a different definition of the term.’

  ‘So she was married?’

  Dagný nodded. ‘Yes. With three children and five grandchildren. Of course some of them have moved south, but they’re all alive. She wasn’t recently bereaved and grieving.’

  ‘But couldn’t the husband suggest any likely explanation? Did it take him completely by surprise?’

  ‘Apparently so. He was very shocked and seemed not to have had the slightest suspicion that something like this might happen. If he knew about any underlying depression or other illness, he didn’t share it with us. He did mention that she’d been a bit stressed and unsociable recently, but not enough to make a big deal about it. It was just a phase some people go through, which eventually passes – that’s what he seemed to think, anyway.’ Dagný looked Freyr in the eye. ‘But not this time.’

  ‘How did she die?’ Freyr didn’t know whether Dagný would tell him, though it didn’t actually matter since an autopsy would be performed on the corpse tomorrow.

  ‘She hanged herself.’ Dagný studied Freyr’s reaction. ‘And it can’t have been easy. The roof is quite high in that church.’

  ‘Right.’ Freyr knew that dying this way was ugly, recalling that those who chose this method to end their lives more often than not ended up with deep scratch-marks on their necks. They realized too late that while life might be no picnic, it was much kinder than death. ‘Did she leave a letter or a note?’ he asked, although he already knew only a quarter of those who chose to go down this road left behind goodbyes, since it wasn’t easy to explain such a decision – and probably sometimes there was nothing to say.

  ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss that.’ Dagný looked away.

  ‘I understand. I’ll stop asking questions. I just wanted to let you know what the old man told me; I thought it might matter.’ He began to put his jacket back on.

  Dagný leaned back in her grand office chair, which looked far more comfortable than the rickety thing that Freyr was sitting on. ‘You didn’t ment
ion if anything else was written on the walls of the old man’s primary school. Was there anything besides the word “dirty”?’

  ‘Yes. There was more. I don’t know precisely how many words there were, but the old man did specifically mention one that was written on the wall of his classroom: “ugly”. There might have been other words scribbled on the walls elsewhere in the school. I can ask him for more details if you want.’

  Dagný’s computer signalled that she’d received an e-mail, but she seemed not to notice. Her cheeks appeared redder than before, but when she spoke again after an awkward silence it was as if nothing had occurred. Maybe the room was just getting warmer. ‘Yes, yes. Go ahead and do that. It can’t hurt to hear what he has to say.’

  After Freyr had shut the door behind him, Dagný reached for a plastic file holder that had been lying next to the computer, upside down. She lifted the plastic and stared at the paper inside. Delicate feminine handwriting filled every inch of the page, scarcely leaving room for even one more letter. Dagný stared at the text as she picked up the phone, but glanced away from it briefly to select a number. ‘Veigar. Where are the old police reports stored?’

  Chapter 5

  The faded white wooden crosses lay side by side on the little kitchen table, their melancholy appearance contrasting with the spotted, tablecloth that was trying its best to make things look more cheerful. ‘They have nothing to do with the house,’ said Garðar, who hadn’t seemed too annoyed about having to put his shoes on again when he’d heard Katrín shouting from outside, but was now clearly tired of this topic. He would have chucked the crosses onto the pile of timber outside long ago if Katrín hadn’t objected. ‘You can see for yourself that the crosses have broken or been broken off graves somewhere and then brought here. If the graves had been where you found the crosses, the stumps would have been sticking out of the grass.’