Betrayal

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir

  ‘Hello?’

  Boris, his police contact, was on the line. Gunnar had been waiting for the call and went out onto the steps, keeping close to the wall where the porch around the door sheltered him from the worst of the snow; it had now eased off, merely falling from above instead of being driven sideways by the storm.

  ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘The old guy’s been let out. They let him go around lunchtime, so it could well be him who dropped the note in her letterbox.’

  ‘I guessed as much,’ Gunnar replied. ‘I’ve sealed up the letterbox now, so we’ll see what happens.’

  ‘The police reckon the old guy was just looking for somewhere to shelter from the weather when he got in her car. He seems to be a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, so they don’t see much point in charging him or taking out an injunction. If he keeps on pestering her, we’ll just have to talk him out of it.’

  28

  Úrsúla felt a stab of guilt in her belly as she silently reproached herself for the kiss, and no less for the feelings that welled up inside her when she was close to Thorbjörn. What on earth was wrong with her, being so emotionally numb towards Nonni, who she had loved and trusted more than anyone alive, while burning with passion for a man she hardly knew? Lying in bed with Nonni, close to him and in the warmth of his body, was so comforting, so safe, that she failed to understand herself.

  If she were to apply a little pop psychology to herself, she was sure she’d find that this was some form of PTSD, manifesting itself as a bizarre lack of feelings for the people who she knew deep inside she loved the most. It was as if a disconnect had appeared between her mind and her body, between emotion and good sense, so that what she knew seemed to have no effect on what she felt in her heart. Now, deep in her heart, she felt a pulsing joy, the extra beat that Thorbjörn had set ticking and which she resented. There would be no more meetings. She had given in to temptation and she was determined not to go near the man again. There was too much at stake and the thought that she might hurt Nonni was heartbreaking.

  She gazed at him as he sat in bed with his tablet in front of him, going through his emails. So that they could move home, he had resigned from a good position at the university in Geneva, taking on part-time teaching at the economics faculty at the University of Iceland. This was so that she could regain her balance in a safe, quiet, familiar environment.

  These days he used reading glasses, and as they were cheap ones he had bought at a petrol station, they didn’t fit and slipped down his nose, making him look cute as he tilted his head back so he could see the screen through them. He sensed that she was looking at him and glanced down at her.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, and she swallowed the lump in her throat; he wasn’t asking a big life question about their marriage or her emotions. He was asking how she felt after seeing the note – the death-and-the-devil message that had been waiting for her when she came home.

  ‘Oh, fine,’ she replied. ‘I’m with the police on this: it’s not worth making a drama out of it with charges and whatnot. The poor old boy just isn’t right in the head.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Nonni took off his glasses. ‘You reckon the note came from him – the bum who was in the boot of the car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Úrsúla didn’t think twice. She simply took it for granted that the note had come from him. ‘I don’t want him charged or anything like that, but I’m not sure I agree with the police – that he was just looking for somewhere to get out of the weather. And I think the note today proves that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that he seems to have some unfinished business with me. Not with just any woman, but me in particular. I had the feeling when he jumped out of the car that there was something he was looking for.’

  Nonni put the tablet aside, clearly disturbed by what she said.

  ‘Don’t even start thinking like that,’ he said, his voice grave.

  ‘Ach, well. I know,’ Úrsúla said. ‘But with the note today—’

  Nonni interrupted her.

  ‘It’s understandable that men like that trigger an emotional response in you, what with your father and all that, but you really have to make sure that you don’t become an enabler. Don’t start to feel sorry for some nutcase who could be dangerous.’

  ‘I know,’ Úrsúla said. ‘I know.’

  She shifted closer to him and pushed him back in the bed so she could rest her head on his shoulder and breathe in the scent of him. Contentment suffused her as she was surrounded by the warm security of his presence, and in response she instantly felt a new burst of guilt. But this was mixed with another and even more disquieting feeling, which grew the more she paid attention to it. This was her intuition that the street bum in the boot of the car knew her.

  She tried to think back to the moment she had opened the boot and he had burst from it like an uncoiled spring. Had he called out her name as he leaped at her and sent her flying into the damp snow?

  Had he called her Úrsúla?

  Wednesday

  29

  It seemed there would be no respite. Now the whole thing had resurfaced, just as they seemed to be getting things back on track. Kiddi had raged into the kitchen, his voice still breaking, going from bass to falsetto, as he yelled that he was never going back to school, and this fucking house could go to hell. Right now, Marita was almost ready to agree with him.

  She scrolled through the news on the internet and saw that tomorrow there would be interviews with Rósa, Katrín Eva’s mother, and with the newly appointed interior minister, Úrsúla Aradóttir. So this tension would continue for the rest of the week. She emptied her coffee into the sink. Since Kiddi had burst out of his bedroom and banged the laptop down on the table in front of her, it had gone cold.

  She refilled her cup with hot coffee, added a dash of cream and sighed. She’d drink her coffee while she mustered the courage to call the school and let them know that Kiddi was ill. Then she’d have to call the bank and let them know she wouldn’t be coming to work. Sitting in the cashier’s booth and watching people divide into two groups was unbearable. There were those who knew nothing, or behaved as if nothing was amiss as they waited for their numbers to be called. Then there were those who ignored the numbering system and either chose a different cashier or made their way straight for her, to tell her that they were on her side; that it was all the fantasy of an attention-seeking teenage girl, and that Jónatan was a good man who would never do such a thing.

  Then she’d have to call her mother back home in the Faroes, tell her the whole story and ask her to let Klemens stay with her a few more weeks. It wasn’t because she was concerned he’d find something out, or because the nursery-school staff weren’t wonderful; it was more because she doubted her own ability to cope with what the four-year-old might get up to. The day the police from Reykjavík had arrived to take Jónatan’s statement, Klemmi had thrown a tantrum. Normally she could calm him down fairly easily, but this time she had barely managed to stop herself slapping the boy’s face. His demanding presence had become unbearable, now that she hardly had the energy to keep herself going. And now Kiddi really needed her full attention as he was old enough to understand perfectly well what was going on.

  Marita scrolled back through the news coverage. The circumstances were described in the same words across every media outlet, as if they were simply copying each other. The story was that the victim had been babysitting the police officer’s four-year-old son one evening when he came home late from a shift. He had offered her beer, and as she was unused to alcohol she was soon drunk. The policeman was then supposed to have forced her to have sex with him. The girl had gone home, half dressed and in tears, and from there to the health centre with her mother, after which police officers were called in from Reykjavík to handle the accusation of rape. To a stranger who didn’t know Jónatan and Katrín Eva, it might all sound very plausible.

  But she remembered that evening c
learly, and it hadn’t been anything like Katrín Eva had described to the police. Coming home from the annual work get-together, Marita had met Katrín Eva in the doorway, and while the girl was clearly in a hurry, she had been neither in tears nor half dressed. She had been wearing that huge parka of hers and had said hello to Marita as they met at the door. Marita had asked if Klemmi had been good and Katrín Eva had said that he had, and that he had fallen asleep some time ago. Then they had said goodbye, Marita had taken off her shoes and her coat, fetched herself a glass of water and gone into the living room where Jónatan was asleep on the sofa, still in his uniform. She had lifted his feet, waking him up, and had sat on the sofa to drink her water while she told him about the skits that had been performed at the staff party. She didn’t recall that he had been under the influence, although she couldn’t swear that he hadn’t had any beer. He listened to her account of the party, sniggered at one or two of the jokes that she repeated for him, and yawned. His feet were bare and lay in her lap. She had slipped a hand inside one trouser leg and ran it over the hairs on his shin, feeling his warmth.

  Marita closed the laptop and picked up her phone. It was almost eight-thirty and she had finished her coffee. She would have to brazen it out with the school secretary and the receptionist at the bank, both of whom would act as if nothing untoward had happened, but of course both would know something had. She took a deep breath and tried to calm down as the hand that held the phone began to tremble.

  30

  Úrsúla should have remembered that Thorbjörn worked through the night and worked fast. But she hadn’t expected his article to appear online until the next day. Now all the other media had picked it up, and an interview with Rósa, the mother of the rape victim, was set to appear the following day. Thorbjörn had also booked an interview with Úrsúla so he could give her side of the story and explain where in the system the case was. Eva had pushed the interview to as late in the day as she could to give Úrsúla time to prepare.

  Freyja, the secretary, put her head around the door to tell her that Óðinn had arrived.

  ‘Show him in, please,’ Úrsúla said, and gestured to Eva to stay where she was. It would be better to have her present for this conversation.

  Óðinn held his smartphone in front of him as he came in and held it up for her as he sat down.

  Thorbjörn’s headline could be seen on the screen: ‘Police Rape. Fifteen-Year-Old’s Case Lost in the System’.

  ‘What’s this supposed to mean?’ he asked.

  She didn’t even try to pretend to be surprised. Óðinn was an experienced official and knew all the system’s horse-trading tricks.

  ‘I need to respond to the media to explain just where in the system this case is, so I’m asking you to make a formal status request.’

  Óðinn nodded and opened his mouth as if he was about to say something, but Úrsúla forestalled him.

  ‘Immediately. This happens right away.’

  ‘I see,’ he said and stood up with a sour smile on his face. He hesitated, as if he had something more to say, but said nothing, turned on his heel and left.

  This wasn’t the way Úrsúla wanted things done, but she needed him to learn the lesson – to take on board that he wasn’t to sweep cases under the carpet because they could turn out to be an embarrassment for the minister.

  ‘Óðinn,’ Úrsúla said before he disappeared through the door. ‘Just so you know: you don’t need to shield me. I can take no end of flak. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that people get their grievances handled by the authorities. I promised the girl’s mother that I would examine the case and I want it examined.’

  He turned in the doorway, looked at her for a moment and nodded. She could see that he was hurt, that by using this stratagem she had humiliated him, but she had needed to do something to kick-start this case, which seemed to have been repeatedly stifled.

  ‘Was that all right?’ she asked Eva as the door closed behind Óðinn.

  She nodded her agreement.

  ‘A reasonable mixture of firmness and explanation,’ she said. ‘But this is going to be all over the media, so that promise about taking flak is going to be tested.’

  ‘I can take it. Transparency is a good thing,’ Úrsúla said. ‘I made the promise on the first day in the job to look into this case, and I don’t break my promises.’

  She had hardly finished her sentence before Freyja showed Thorbjörn in and Úrsúla felt the guilt overwhelm her, along with a rush of desire. She was about to break a promise; the most important promise she had ever made.

  31

  Gunnar was startled to see the minister looking so miserable. She sat in the passenger seat next to him with her phone in her hand, reading something on the screen that clearly wasn’t pleasant.

  ‘Something wrong?’ he asked.

  They were on their way to the opening of some exhibition of ancient legal texts in the National Library, where she was to give a speech. But now she wasn’t looking at all cheerful, and every drop of blood seemed to have drained from her face.

  ‘It’s something you should probably take a look at,’ she said and handed him the phone.

  He slowed down and looked for a space that had been cleared of snow. The piles of it were that deep each side of the street, if he were to pull over he would have trouble freeing the car again, spinning its wheels in the drifts.

  He finally pulled into a bus stop, took the phone and read the fine detail of what ‘bitches who stick their noses where they’re not wanted’ can expect. The description was both foul and showed a level of imagination regarding how a female body could be abused; in particular, Úrsúla’s body. The sender was fossi@gmail.com. That could be just about anyone.

  ‘Keep hold of that,’ he said, handing the phone back. ‘We’ll let the analysts at the commissioner’s office see it. That’s a direct threat.’

  Úrsúla nodded, shut her phone and dropped it into her pocket.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked before pulling away again.

  ‘Yes. Sure,’ she said and took a deep breath. ‘It’s just unsettling.’

  He set off into the traffic again, inching along the icy roads as he tried to work out how to tell her to protect herself from such messages, without appearing to be telling her what to do.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to let your assistant filter your messages?’ he said cautiously. ‘Most ministers do that. There’s no need for you to read that kind of filth.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She appeared to be thinking it over. ‘Eva does filter my mail, but I check it as well. Maybe I shouldn’t.’ She stared out of the passenger window and seemed to be talking to herself. ‘But isn’t it better if I’m aware that someone has such a deep hatred for me? Isn’t it better to be prepared?’ she asked, and turned to him with a look that showed her question was sincere. It was obvious that this aspect of the job was something she hadn’t been prepared for.

  ‘Eva and I will collect all the hate mail and threats, and we can pass them over to the commissioner’s department. They’ll produce a monthly digest for you and they’ll be in touch with me if there’s anything in particular that I need to watch out for. That makes the risk analysis more realistic, and you don’t have to read the filth.’

  She hummed to herself and looked out over the city’s lake. It’s surface had frozen and thawed several times in the last few days, so it had taken on a sheen that made it almost luminous in the midday brightness.

  ‘I suppose it’s part of the job and I ought to just get used to it,’ she said. ‘I should have known digging into a rape case would turn up something like this. It’s as if some people can’t hear the word rape without their hatred for women boiling over.’

  ‘True,’ Gunnar agreed. ‘In the profiling course I was on we were taught that there are two social issues that can send people completely insane with anger: sex crimes and immigration.’

  ‘Shit,’ Úrsúla said. ‘So I’m going to have all the racists coming after me
as well when I start getting involved in immigration? That’s where my expertise lies – it’s the main reason I agreed to take on the job, to try and get those issues into some sort of order.’

  At the Skothús bridge he decided to take a right turn, go over it and along Suðurgata to avoid the worst of the traffic, which was all keeping to the main roads, as the side roads hadn’t been sufficiently cleared of snow. The ministerial 4x4 was on nail tyres, so it would cope where less well-equipped family cars wouldn’t.

  ‘This kind of hate mail simply goes with the job,’ Úrsúla said, again sounding as if she were talking to herself.

  Gunnar took the turning off the roundabout and the car sped up the slope to where the National Library sat, immovable.

  ‘It’s not just the job,’ he said, recalling what he’d learned about high-risk groups. ‘Women in this kind of role get double the hatred. That’s something else I picked up on the course. Powerful women arouse some extremely odd emotions in people.’

  32

  Stella had shredded everything, tied the bag closed and was on the way out with the rubbish when her phone rang. She stopped by the door and fished her phone from the waistband of her knickers, where she had stowed it because there were no pockets in her grey tracksuit trousers.

  ‘Gréta, again.’

  ‘Hæ Gréta,’ Stella said and barely managed to stifle a yawn. The woman had cooked a three-course meal the day before yesterday, and given her leftovers to take home, so she couldn’t make it obvious how dull she found her.