Betrayal

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir

  73

  The astonishment on the man’s face was entirely genuine. Nonni had answered the knock on the door and the man had asked for Úrsúla, so Nonni had called her and disappeared back into the kitchen to finish preparing lasagne. Úrsúla had asked the man if there was something she could help him with and now they stood in the doorway, staring at each other.

  The man was middle-aged, with thinning hair and wearing a very thick, orange down jacket.

  ‘Didn’t you send me a message?’ he asked.

  Úrsúla shook her head.

  ‘Do we know each other?’ she asked, looking the man in the face.

  Now he shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. This must be some misunderstanding,’ he said, turning to leave.

  But Úrsúla stopped him. ‘Could I see this message that I’m supposed to have sent you?’.

  The man looked awkward. ‘Well, you see … actually, no,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t from you, then, well, it’s embarrassing.’

  He went down the steps, but when he placed a foot on the icy pavement, he slipped. He managed to regain his balance without falling, and glanced at Úrsúla and apologised again.

  ‘It’s a misunderstanding,’ he said, plunging his hands deep into his coat pockets.

  ‘Where did you see this message?’ she called after him. ‘On Facebook, or an email, or what?’

  He didn’t stop making his way carefully over the icy pavement, but he half turned to reply, ‘On Tinder.’

  Úrsúla stood speechless on the steps and watched him disappear. She went inside, shut the door and dug in the hall cupboard for her coat. It was furthest in, behind the children’s coats, as for once she had been home before them. She dug out the mobile phone that she had intended to leave there, on silent, for the evening and found Gunnar’s number.

  ‘A small problem,’ she said as soon as he answered. ‘There was a man here just now who said he had received a message from me on Tinder. He was very surprised when he saw Nonni and even more surprised when I had no idea what he was talking about. I guess he was expecting he was coming over for sex.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Gunnar asked.

  ‘Yes, yes. I’m fine. But this is just so weird. I don’t really want to be on Tinder, sending messages to men all over town that I know nothing about.’

  She tried and failed to force a laugh. She wished she could see a funny side to this, that she could snigger and tell everyone the story of the stranger who had come to her door with something particular on his mind, but it felt too humiliating.

  The thought that someone was sending strange men messages in her name that were, as the man had said, embarrassing, was deeply disquieting. She felt a stab of apprehension: she would have to tell Nonni. There was no way that he would see a funny side to this.

  Wednesday

  74

  ‘You’re joking, surely?’ Úrsúla said for what must have been the tenth time since Gunnar had appeared in her office to hand her an envelope of printouts of the Tinder profile that someone had set up in her name.

  ‘Someone put a lot of effort into this, setting up a Facebook page that looks like your personal page, and then using that to set up the Tinder profile.’

  ‘And no prizes for stylish prose,’ Úrsúla said.

  ‘No,’ Gunnar agreed. ‘The use of language is very similar to what we’ve seen in the rape-threat emails from Fossi. It doesn’t need much sleuthing needed to figure out it’s the same individual.’

  ‘What do we do about this?’ Úrsúla asked. She was less than keen on more awkward visits from hopeful men knocking at her door.

  ‘I’ve already had the accounts closed, both on Facebook and Tinder, and I’ll do my best to keep track of any new profiles that are set up in your name. But the only solution is to find the person responsible for all this, to find Fossi. Boris and co. have all the information, and hopefully they’ll get some results soon.’

  ‘The Coast Guard’s waiting for you,’ Eva said, her face appearing in the doorway.

  Úrsúla got up from the sofa.

  ‘Thank you, Gunnar,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how I’d manage without you.’ She had often meant to tell him how much she appreciated having him at her beck and call, considering her initial doubts about whether she would need him.

  Gunnar smiled and went to fetch the car, and she weighed the envelope of Tinder profile printouts in her hand, wondering whether or not to take it home to show it to Nonni. She decided against it. He would take it personally, and he had already been through enough, so Úrsúla dropped the envelope in the bin, grabbed her coat from its hook and went to find Eva.

  ‘I’m all ready for the Coast Guard,’ she said, and they set off together. As the lift doors shut behind them, Eva handed her a sheet of paper.

  ‘It’s the report on the rape case that you wanted checked. You might want to call the mother yourself with the bad news, as you made a personal promise to look into it. The police have decided to drop the investigation.’

  75

  Despite the dry suit, the cold enveloped Úrsúla and her senses were swamped by the sea so that she felt she was sinking, even though she knew that the lifejacket and flotation suit would keep her afloat. The salt water had made its way inside the mask and stung her eyes, so she had to fight to keep them open and pay attention to what was happening around her. Somewhere in the water close by was one of the Coast Guard crew, who had jumped out of the boat ahead of her; and above them hovered a helicopter, which was preparing to winch them both to safety.

  The downdraught whipped up the waves, turning them into a mist so that sea water rained all around them. Úrsúla had not been fully able to take on board what she was experiencing, her thoughts still dulled by the phone call she had forced herself to make to Rósa, the mother of the girl who had made the rape accusation. So only part of her attention had been on the Coast Guard team as they explained the rescue procedure and helped her into the dry suit.

  The girl’s mother had wept while Úrsúla read out the report the ministry had received, stating that due to numerous shortcomings, the investigation would be dropped.

  ‘How can the rape kit get lost between Selfoss and Reykjavík,’ she had sobbed. ‘How can they be so careless with something that’s so important?’

  Úrsúla had only been able to reply that she was deeply sorry.

  ‘You promised me that you’d bring that horrible man to law,’ the mother had said, and Úrsúla felt as if she had been punched in the belly. It was completely true that she had made a promise. She had pledged that she’d ensure justice was done. It went without saying that there could hardly be justice when the case would not even be investigated.

  ‘I’m truly sorry,’ she repeated.

  She said the same words again before the conversation ended, and now she muttered them again as she lay on her back, clad in a dry suit under the salty rain whipped up by the helicopter’s rotor blades, and waited for this demonstration, clearly intended to impress the minister, to come to an end.

  The diver was winched down from the helicopter, which was deafening as it hovered directly above them. He dropped into the water next to Úrsúla, swam over to her, fastened the two of them together with some sort of harness and waved to the helicopter. They were instantly lifted into the air above the sea. The harness strapped around her pressed so tight that she felt she could not fill her lungs properly, and there, in the weightlessness between sea and sky, she allowed herself to yell as loudly as she could with the little air left in her chest. But her screams were drowned out by the thunderous din of the helicopter and as she was pulled on board, she was exhausted.

  Someone strapped her into a seat, took off her helmet and mask, and handed her a towel, which she used to massage her chilled face and hair. She was startled by a sudden flash of light. She didn’t feel this was the ideal moment to be photographed, her face stiff with cold, eyes red from the salt water and her hair left in a mess by the helmet.

  She blin
ked a few times before her vision returned and saw that the flash had come from the smartphone in Adolf’s hand, as he sat, wearing an overcoat and a scarf, in the seat opposite her, a malevolent smirk on his face.

  76

  ‘It’s fucking creepy, buying trash,’ she said to the guy, who just grinned and took the bags, chucked them onto the back seat of his wreck of a car and gave her a couple of one-thousand-krónur notes.

  Stella stuffed the cash in her pocket and set off determinedly towards the bus. She would use the time she’d have to wait between buses at Mjódd to buy a snack of some kind for her mother. She could scoff down a whole bag of paprika chips before dinner without denting her appetite, and another one after. This seemed to be one of the few things that genuinely brought her pleasure. She neither thanked Stella, nor offered to share, just as if she had become a small child. Stella liked to watch her work her way through the chips, every now and again pausing to lick the paprika dust from her fingers and lips.

  Half an hour later she had bought the chips and smoked a cigarette outside the bus shelter at Mjódd. It would be another ten minutes before the bus showed up. It was too cold to wait outside, so she ambled around the waiting area, checking out the people waiting to be carried hither and thither. In Iceland only kids, old people and the poor used buses. Everyone else travelled around in their cars – the smarter the car, the better.

  ‘It’s the car that makes the man,’ Guðmundur had said. She and her mother had thought that funny, but it was something special to be driven around the city in such a cool car. That had only lasted until she had accidentally spilled a carton of juice over the back seat. She shook the memory off. Visits to her mother inevitably brought back thoughts of Guðmundur, even though she would have preferred to erase him completely from her memory, along with the screams, the scoldings and the beatings.

  She noticed the television in one corner. Gréta had just appeared on the screen. The news had begun so Stella went closer so she could hear. The volume was set so low that she could hear no more than a murmur over the loud chatter of the teenagers on the far side of the waiting room and the hiss of the automatic doors that endlessly opened and closed as people came in and went out.

  She stood beside a blue-haired woman and peered at the screen. The woman was obviously trying to make out the content of the news programme, but Stella simply stared at Gréta, who appeared between news items, looking the viewer in the eye as she said something that Stella couldn’t hear. Gréta’s hair looked fantastic. She had been to the hairdresser and completely changed her look. Now her hair was short one side and almost down to her shoulder the other. It suited her.

  Stella wouldn’t have objected to sitting right now at Gréta’s kitchen breakfast bar, knocking back French paté and beer, or any of the foreign delicacies that seemed to accumulate in Gréta’s kitchen cupboards. She also wouldn’t have minded another faceful of Gréta’s tits. A jolt of excitement passed through her at the memory, although she knew the pills were what had made the experience so powerful. This wave of contentment was just fake. There was no magic there, just ordinary chemistry.

  77

  The last few days had been lost in the fog of forgetfulness, which to Pétur meant there had been enough to drink. He’d managed to wangle his way into this lovely house with Eddi, who had forgiven him; they had agreed that something neither of them could properly remember simply couldn’t have happened. Eddi had wheedled his way into the terraced house where this woman lived, and there had been a stocked bar and a full fridge when they arrived. The woman was lonely and afraid, so for her it was a comfort to hear them singing when she emerged from her doped sleep. Eddi crawled into bed with her now and again, while Pétur lay in a hot bath and recited verses to himself. He wasn’t sure how long they had been there, but everything that could be drunk had been finished and the fridge was empty, and now he was sitting, watching TV, absently munching on chocolate biscuits, long past their sell-by date, that he had found at the back of the cupboard.

  His heart leaped as Úrsúla appeared on the screen wearing some kind of outdoor suit and with a huge helmet under one arm. There was a helicopter in the background and some smiling men wearing the same sort of overalls. He stared at her and felt the gnawing guilt creep up his throat like bile. He had completely forgotten his responsibility, his battle with the Devil, and judging by the look in Úrsúla’s eyes, she had to be completely within his power. Her eyes were dull, tired and sad. The eyes never lie; even when the body is a slave and the soul in chains, the eyes always tell the true tale. It was obvious that the Devil had enslaved her soul.

  ‘And what’s next on the minister’s agenda?’ the reporter asked in a jovial voice. This was clearly one of those light-hearted items that were so important for every news bulletin.

  ‘I’m going shopping, and then cooking for the family,’ Úrsúla replied. ‘It’s not every day that I can tell my children about such an exciting day at the office.’

  She smiled, and Pétur could see a trace of the original, unspoiled soul, the face of the child who laughed and shrieked when he and her father had joked with her or sung her a song. Then the news bulletin was over, and Pétur got to his feet. The item had been recorded in the afternoon darkness, so it hadn’t been that long ago. If he was quick, he’d have a chance of catching her. Having spent so much time in the boot of her car, he knew exactly where she normally shopped for groceries.

  78

  ‘I was going to give you full marks for that piece of PR,’ Eva said. ‘And then it turns out you really are going to cook dinner for the children.’

  Úrsúla laughed. ‘I’m not always devious,’ she said.

  They walked together from the helicopter hangar and over to the car park. There was a bitter tang of fuel in the frosty air, and somewhere in the background the chug of heavy machinery at work could be heard; compared to the roaring dim she had endured for most of the day, it seemed like a mellow undertone.

  ‘It’s exactly that human side, or maybe we should say the feminine side, that you need to show,’ Eva said. ‘You need to let yourself laugh more often, show a milder side in television interviews, and put some emphasis on being a mother and a wife, not just a minister.’

  Úrsúla sighed. ‘So is that really how far we’ve come? The men are supposed to come across as decisive and women as mild? Is that it?’

  ‘Well,’ Eva began, and stood still, so Úrsúla knew that a long explanation was coming. ‘Women in politics have to appear decisive to be respected. But if they fall short, and negativity appears, then that same decisiveness instead triggers hatred. Now you’re in the position in which the media has tasted blood, so you’ll have to work to overcome the general impression that’s being formed that you’re a harridan who tramples over everyone, including innocent street people. So you need to appear mild and smile more. A smile always disarms the opposition. That interview just now was perfect. Really, it was.’

  ‘All right. I hear what you’re saying and accept it. I’ll bear it in mind.’

  The ministerial car pulled up next to them, and Eva shook her head.

  ‘I’ll take a taxi home,’ she said with an arch smile. ‘You can go shopping for the family and be a perfect wife and mother for a change.’

  Úrsúla laughed as she got into the car, and as she shut the door behind her, she remembered what she had meant to ask Eva, and rolled down the window.

  ‘Eva,’ she called after her; she turned and bent down to the window. ‘Would you speak to Adolf and make sure he erases that picture he took of me in the helicopter. I was like a drowned rat when he took it; it would be just like him to spread it around.’ Eva nodded. ‘And maybe you could also find out why he was there at all?’

  ‘I asked the Coast Guard guys and they said that he’s been their main point of contact at the ministry, so they decided to invite him along. I’ll tell him to erase the picture.’

  Úrsúla lay back in the seat. She was exhausted, and all the exertio
n, and the hot cocoa the Coast Guard team had given her after, had left her with a feeling of relaxed wellbeing. If she were to close her eyes, she would be asleep immediately.

  ‘Are you OK with stopping off at the shop on the way home?’ she asked Gunnar. ‘I have to cook tonight as Nonni’s teaching a course until half past seven.’

  79

  Gunnar didn’t even have time to curse himself for letting Úrsúla have her own way and walk from the car to the shop alone before he was hurrying after her. As he ran he pressed the button on the hands-free communicator that connected him to the car’s emergency radio. She had wanted him to park some distance from the entrance, as she felt it would be odd to pull up right by the door in the gleaming-black ministerial car. In fact, he had agreed with her, as it could look out of place, but now, as he raced across the car park in the hope of reaching her ahead of Pétur, who had come running from the other direction, he bitterly reproached himself. What the hell had he been thinking?

  ‘Úrsúla!’ he called out, instinctively rather than because he had thought things through.

  She turned towards him and his voice, her back to Pétur, who grabbed her from behind, lifted her off her feet and spun her round, just as Gunnar took hold of him. He caught Pétur in a headlock, gripping one arm and twisting it high behind his back to force him to crouch down. This pushed Úrsúla to her knees, as Pétur was still holding on to her with one hand. She managed to pull herself free and stood up.

  The old man yelled an endless litany that could hardly be understood, about her father and the devil. In fact he seemed to be indicating that Úrsúla herself was the devil.

  Gunnar clicked handcuffs onto Pétur’s wrists and holding him in a restraint posture, he used the communicator to call for police assistance. Úrsúla’s breath came shallow and fast, clouds of vapour formed in the cold air around her head and lit up like a halo in the glow from the shop’s lights.