101
She saw Gunnar hesitate before handing her the green folder, and when she opened it she saw why. It was the post-mortem report on her father. She stared at the diagrams of the front and back of a body, and the injuries that had been marked on it; the injuries to her father. These were almost all to his head and throat. She closed the folder and handed it back.
‘I can’t read this,’ she said. ‘Tell me what it says.’
She swallowed the bitter bile that rose in her throat and took deep breaths, all the way down to her belly, to loosen the hard knot that had formed down there. Gunnar took the folder back but didn’t open it.
‘The cause of death was bleeding to the brain,’ he said, and Úrsúla nodded. She already knew that. ‘There was a great deal of bruising to the whole body, but chiefly to the head and neck, consistent with being kicked while lying on the floor.’
None of this was new. She had either heard it all before, or read it in news reports.
‘What is strange,’ Gunnar said, ‘is that there were several clear boot marks on his face, which the report says match the boots Pétur was wearing.’
‘They don’t get to wear shoes in the cells,’ Úrsúla said.
‘Exactly,’ Gunnar said, putting aside the pathology report and picking up another folder. ‘The police report – Boris got hold of it for me,’ he said. ‘It says that Pétur wasn’t made to hand over his shoes. It was an error, probably because Ari, who had been picked up at the same time, was making himself difficult. It doesn’t go into any more detail, but according to the court documents, these were police boots, the same as the police used at that time. The investigation found that Pétur had spent a night in the cells some months before, and a police officer had seen how bad his shoes were and had given him a pair of boots.’
‘OK. So the weird part of this is that they forgot to make Pétur hand over his shoes,’ Úrsúla said, lifting her feet onto the coffee table.
Nonni had taken the children to his mother’s so she and Gunnar had peace and quiet to talk, but she missed them and hoped they wouldn’t be long. She could well imagine spending the rest of the day as they had the morning, the four of them nestled together in one bed, where they could hug and whisper about anything that came to mind, and she could feel the warmth in her heart that had been absent for so long.
‘That’s right,’ Gunnar said. ‘It’s an odd mistake to make. What’s more, it seems to have been so busy that they didn’t manage the routine twenty-minute check on each cell that they’re supposed to carry out. So it was probably more like two hours that nobody looked in on them. But the really strange thing is that one of the officers on duty that night was Óðinn Th. Jónsson.’
Úrsúla’s throat felt very dry.
‘We have to speak to Pétur,’ she said. ‘We must be clear about what he meant when he called Óðinn Ari’s killer. We have to find out if there’s anything to all this, or if it’s just a wild accusation from a completely crazy man who may simply be trying to clear his name.’
Gunnar swept the documents together into a stack and stood up.
‘I’ll go for a drive and see if I can track him down,’ he said.
102
Marita sat in shock next to Kiddi on the sofa. The police officers from Reykjavík, a man and a woman, were both young and had serious expressions on their faces. The representative of the Agency for Child Protection, a heavily built local man – someone Marita felt it was just as well she didn’t know – sat on a kitchen chair to one side of them with a blank look on his face. It didn’t seem to be these strangers who were making Kiddi nervous, though; rather it was her own presence.
‘Does my mum need to be here?’ he asked the police officers at regular intervals throughout the interview. As time passed, Marita came to understand why. The male police officer did most of the talking, while his female colleague sat and watched mother and son, and jotted things down in a notebook. Kiddi had started by denying everything, until the police officer told him that they had evidence. They had found what they had been looking for on his computer’s hard drive.
‘You’re not as smart as you think,’ the policeman said. ‘It’s a lot harder than most people think to erase your trail from a computer. We have the IP addresses, and it’s clear that it had to be someone in this house. The family computer is clean; your father’s iPad is clean; and you’re the only one who uses your computer, aren’t you?’
Kiddi hung his head and Marita nodded. Kiddi always kept his computer in his room, and the one time that Marita had tried to use it, she had found it locked with a password.
As the interview continued, Marita found herself becoming increasingly numb. She sank into the sofa. She would have stood up and beaten the boy if only she had the energy; even with the police in the room. The anger inside her seethed and boiled, but it was a feeble fury, almost a hopelessness, and although she wanted to cry, she found that was also beyond her.
‘I wasn’t going to hurt her,’ Kiddi said. ‘I just wanted her to be frightened. For her to…’
He stopped and for a moment there was a deathly silence in the room. The police sat opposite them, waiting for them to break the silence. Marita took a deep breath and the words tumbled out of her in a confused order, her Faroese accent strong. The police officers watched her with their blank expressions.
‘You know that Jónatan, my husband … erm, Kiddi’s dad, was charged with rape. And it has to be because of that … Yes, that was earlier this year. And then somehow that went away. Or it was stuck in the system or something. Then this new minister picked the case up again, and it was in all the newspapers all over again, like the whole thing being raked over. And a lot that the papers said just wasn’t true. But Kiddi threatening the minister and wanting her to resign, that’s obviously just … Yeah. He must have thought he was doing something to help his dad,’ Marita said.
Kiddi leaped up from the sofa as if he had been hauled to his feet by an invisible wire that had been stretched to its limit.
‘Help him? I wouldn’t help him if I was paid for it! You’re always so fucking clueless, aren’t you? I was trying to help you. So the whole thing would be over, and you could go back to work, and people would stop judging you because of that arsehole you’re married to!’
103
The needle stung like hell as it pricked her nipples, but the best spells always demanded sacrifice. She had taken three drops of blood each from the index finger of her left hand and the ring finger of her right hand, and a drop of blood from each nipple. She mixed them together into a red ink in a disposable plastic sushi dish and dipped the point of her knife in it to carve a Helm of Disguise into the piece of charcoal. She had bought barbecue charcoal, the only kind she had been able to find. Now she just had to wait and see if the spell would work. It also called for blood from the brain of a living raven, but that was an extra ingredient to protect her from enemies. This girl from Tinder wasn’t exactly her enemy, even though she now wished she hadn’t helped Gréta reel her in.
She covered her nipples with toilet paper so blood wouldn’t stain her bra and examined the photocopy of the Helm of Disguise to remind herself of the lines. This was a more than usually complex rune, made up of eight circular runes, so she wasn’t certain that this little piece of charcoal was big enough for it. She also didn’t know what to do if the blood ran out. She didn’t have that much to work with. She had no idea how long the spell would work, and for that reason she had decided to prepare it in the toilets in the basement of the Harpa concert hall, so as to not waste valuable invisibility time walking there.
She would have needed a magnifying glass to see the rune clearly in the piece of charcoal, as by the time she had finished carving it into the surface, the rune’s delicate, complex lines seemed to have become a network of illegible scratches. But that didn’t matter, so long as it worked. Stella pressed the piece of charcoal against her forehead, then she left the cubicle and looked at herself in a mirror. Ins
tead of being printed neatly, the rune had left a mess of blood on her forehead. She could see herself in the mirror, but more than likely you’d always see yourself. The only way to be sure the magic had worked was to find out if other people could see her.
As she went up the stairs and towards the lower restaurant, a little man with a bald head almost walked into her. That might indicate that she couldn’t be seen, but she couldn’t be sure. There were so many men who expected women to make way for them. She continued up the broad staircase. Most of the events taking place in the building had to be over by now, so if Gréta and the blonde had attended any of them, they had to be having dinner by now. The blonde had said something about a concert and dinner at Harpa, and Stella hadn’t seen them in the buffet downstairs, so they had to be in the restaurant on the top floor. Gréta was classy, so nothing less than a pricy dinner would do, now that she had finally got herself a date.
The narrow staircase from the middle level up to the restaurant was closed off, so she jumped into the lift, where a smartly dressed couple were waiting to go up. The doors almost closed on her and Stella just made it inside; she wondered if the lift’s sensors maybe didn’t register invisible people. She checked out the couple on the way up, but they paid her no attention, either because they couldn’t see her or because they were so engrossed in each other.
She walked fast into the restaurant, and neither the waiter at reception nor the one who came towards her with a tray of drinks seemed to notice her. She dodged the one with the tray, went over to the buffet, which looked to have a Christmas theme to it, snapped off a piece of snowflake bread and munched it. If she were visible, someone would have stopped her by now. She took a piece of cold smoked lamb, which lay neatly sliced on a salver, dipped it in mustard sauce, and ate it. Her mouth watered at the sight of ceviche in the chiller, but she decided not to bother with it as all the ceviche she had tasted in Iceland had turned out bland in comparison to her mother’s. Instead she took a slice of reindeer paté, popped it in her mouth and went into the dining room.
Gréta and the blonde were at a table in the furthest corner. They weren’t facing each other, but had taken seats almost side by side, their backs to the room as they looked out over the harbour. As Stella approached, the intensity of the hot light in her head grew and she suddenly wanted to cry. She longed to turn and run, but steeled herself to continue. She had come here to see for herself what their relationship was like, to see if this was something serious or just a passing fling. She stood behind them and saw Gréta slip a hand under the table and place it on the thigh of the blonde, who leaned closer to her and whispered something Stella wasn’t close enough to hear. Gréta withdrew her hand and fidgeted somehow with it in front of her, and as Stella came right up to the table she could see the blonde leaning close to Gréta and gazing into her blouse. She had told Gréta to undo a button to give her a better view of her breasts. Stella edged slowly around the table and examined them. Gréta’s eyes glistened as she looked at the blonde, who had a dazed expression on her face, her eyes fastened on Gréta’s impressive cleavage.
‘I’m besotted with you,’ Gréta said to the blonde in a low voice.
Stella wanted to shake her head in disgust that she should say something so mawkish and stupid, after knowing the woman for only a few days, but there was a sincerity on Gréta’s face that stabbed deep into Stella’s heart. She was suddenly no longer able to hold back, and knocked their champagne glasses over, so that the bubbling contents spilled over the table, and mostly over the blonde.
‘What on earth…?’ she heard Gréta say, and saw her snatch up a serviette to dab at the blonde’s front.
Stella rushed away, out of the restaurant, down the closed-off staircase, then the broad staircase, down to Harpa’s ground floor, where she took to her heels. The frost had hardened so that her lungs were seared by the first breath of cold air, and now she finally allowed herself to weep. She could have been in the blonde’s place, sipping champagne and sampling the Christmas-themed buffet, in between basking in Gréta’s adoration and admiring her cleavage in anticipation. But instead she was alone and shivering in the bitter cold outside Harpa, badly dressed, invisible and with sore nipples.
104
Pétur had managed to lose the black car outside the kiosk that morning, and since then he’d kept away from the main streets. He’d lost it by setting off along Laugavegur, sauntering as if he was unaware the car was following him, then once he had crossed Snorrabraut and was sure that there was another car behind the black one in the narrow street, he had doubled back against the direction of the traffic, leaving the Devil unable to turn around and follow him.
Since then he had kept to the shadows as much as he could, sticking to pedestrian streets and narrow roads, sometimes clambering through snow-filled gardens to avoid the main traffic routes where the Devil could be waiting in his big jeep.
He felt pretty good as he ambled along the waste ground by the harbour, a Bæjarins Besta hot dog warming his belly along with most of a half-bottle of booze he had been able to cadge from some tourists, who seemed to hold on to their cash less tightly than the locals, who were themselves undoubtedly more giving when they went abroad. There was something about travel that made people generous. He remembered that from his own time in Denmark. He wished the city library would stay open longer in the evenings, as he wanted to go straight there and find a book of pictures of Denmark so he could recall that time of his life. Denmark was just one big garden where everything that sprouted from the ground was edible. The delightful girl he had followed there lived in the countryside, where she taught him to pick apples from the trees and find roots called artichokes that they cooked with the fish he pulled effortlessly from the stream every morning. What was odd was that he had been about to be on his way back to Denmark ever since he had returned from there, so many years ago he had given up counting.
Somehow or other he had found himself living from one moment to another; time became a roundabout on which one day was like the next one, which always felt the same as the one before. He and Ari had always been on their way back, about to escape the temporal roundabout. He was on his way to Denmark, and Ari on his way back home.
He had now made his way all the way down to the Grandi district. There was an acquaintance down here who had an old net store where he was sure he’d be allowed to take a nap. He walked along the quayside, looking down at the boats and the still water, in which the lights of the city on the far side of the harbour were reflected. The street lights seemed sharply defined in the frosty air, while the Harpa concert hall looked gloomy and forbidding, its lights facing the other way, towards the city. The light in the glass that faced Grandi was a reflection, as if the building was part of the sea, a kind of iceberg that had just broken free from the land. Through the dark mirror of the glass, though, he could make out the line of yellow light at the top of the restaurant where the smart set dined and drank.
Pétur glanced behind him as he heard a car approach, but it wasn’t the black car so he didn’t worry about it. His leg was killing him after all that walking, running and climbing over fences. He’d find a box or a bale of net to support it when he reached his pal’s store. He took out the half-bottle and was about to glug down what was left, but decided against it as it could be payment for shelter. Those who had a place to lay your head were normally more willing if there was a drop of something to share.
‘Pétur!’
The call came from behind him, and he felt the chill along his whole spine, like snow down your neck that melts and slithers all the way down your back. He turned and found himself looking into the eyes of the Devil himself. It hadn’t been enough to watch out for a black car, and he hadn’t realised that the Devil could wear a disguise. He had popped up from one of those little rental cars that tourists ran around in. This one was an innocent pearl white.
The Grandi quayside was dark and there wasn’t much life in the district at this time of day, so
there was no point calling for help. His leg wasn’t going to let him run anymore; at any rate, not quickly enough to escape the Devil’s clutches.
Sunday
105
While he never touched coffee himself, he knew how to make it good and strong. A spoonful for each cup and one for the pot, as his mother had taught him. By now the coffee had probably been in the jug too long, even though it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, as he hadn’t been able to find a Thermos and hadn’t wanted to disturb the family upstairs by rooting through the kitchen cupboards. He hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after the message from the police had reached him, and he had decided that Úrsúla would need a decent cup of coffee once he had given her the news.
He felt a stab in his guts when he heard footsteps on the stairs. He took a deep breath and focused his mind on the flow of hot air from his nostrils and over his upper lip. This calmed him, and he stood up as Úrsúla appeared in the kitchen. He poured coffee into a cup and handed it to her.
‘I have bad news,’ he said. ‘Pétur was found dead in the harbour last night.’
Úrsúla swayed, putting out a hand to the worktop to support herself, and dropped onto a barstool. She still had the cup in her hand, and she didn’t seem to have noticed that some of the contents had spilled onto the table. Gunnar picked up a cloth and wiped the surface clean.
‘At the moment it’s not known if he drowned, or died of other causes. There are marks on his body consistent with having been in a fight.’
Úrsúla nodded and looked thoughtfully down at the worktop.
‘So it’s too late to try and get hold of him,’ she muttered.
Betrayal Page 23
