by Grant Nicol
‘I advise you to leave now before the police arrive, I understand Lilja has already called them for me. It is not for the likes of us to make such decisions. If someone needs to be evaluated for the good of their own psychological health, well, that’s what we’re here for. We can’t operate this hospital with patients under threat of physical violence or worse, it just won’t work that way. You must try to understand that.’
In the distance a siren sounded as if to reiterate the impending arrival of the authorities. Kjartan shuffled his feet in the snow and gathered his thoughts, he was in no great hurry to leave just yet.
‘If that had been your daughter and you’d had to look at her as she lay on that cold metal table, all cut up and broken beyond repair, then what? If that had been you instead of me, tell me, what would you want to do?’
‘I would want to find the man responsible, of course, but I would pray for justice to be done rather than attempt to take the law into my own hands. Men like Gunnar Atli are destined to be judged by a higher law than you or I. Be careful not to confuse yourself with Him.
‘For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Time for you to go, please remember what I have told you.’
The police siren had stopped nearby but no officers were visible just yet. Kjartan could hear voices and footsteps approaching though. He turned and disappeared slowly through the snow-covered grounds, with Thorgeir’s advice ringing in his ears.
#12
Grímur received the call at 8 o’clock the next morning. Thorgeir and his wife Renata had agreed to talk to him although the meeting had been set up through their daughter, Viveca. The fact that at least one of them had met Bella when she first arrived in Reykjavík was of interest to him. He didn’t know of anyone else she’d met other than her upstairs neighbour, Adolfína and the man who may just have killed her, Gunnar Atli. It was possible she had dropped a clue of some sort as to why she’d left Leirubakki in such a hurry. Of course she may not have mentioned it at all but still, he had to try. It was going to be hard to unravel the story of what she’d been doing with herself unless he could find people who had met her no matter how fleeting their interactions had been.
He arrived at the house at 9 o’clock sharp and when Viveca welcomed him he could tell straight away she wasn’t as perky as she had been the previous day. He put it down to the fact that her parents were both back in the house and decided that while he had her to himself in the living room for a minute or two he would ask her a few quick questions.
‘Tell me more about Bella at the wedding. Her family say they don’t know why she would have run away but you know how families are. Sometimes they can’t see what’s going on even when it’s right under their noses.’
‘Tell me about it. I really don’t remember too much about her that night to be honest. I think Abelína had told her to introduce herself to me so she’d know someone when she got to town and so we had a bit of a chat. I gave her my number and address but I was kind of halfway out the door at that stage and she was pretty trashed, so I kept it quick rather than spend half an hour talking about a load of rubbish. You know how people get at that time of the night.’
‘Sure, did she call you after that?’
‘I got a few missed calls from her when I got back from the wedding but I’d had a pretty big fight with my parents and didn’t answer my phone for about a week after that. She must have given up trying to call and just come looking for me instead.’
‘What was the fight about?’
‘Same old shit. I don’t appreciate anything they’ve done for me, bla, bla, bla and just because they’re adoptive parents doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have the same respect for them as real parents, bla, bla, bla. Like I said, same old shit that we’ve been arguing about for years.’
‘You’re adopted? How old were you when that happened?’
‘Five.’
‘So they’re all you’ve ever known then?’
‘Pretty much. My real mum died when I was small so I don’t remember her and Dad was never around.’
‘Do Thorgeir and Renata have any other children?’
‘They had a son, Anders but he died really young. They don’t like talking about it very much. After that happened they tried to have another kid but just couldn’t for some reason. That’s when I came into it, I guess. Lucky old last resort, that’s me.’ She giggled a little when she said that. ‘I shouldn’t be ungrateful but everything would be a hell of a lot easier if they’d just chill out a bit. Sometimes I think they go out of their way to drive me crazy.’
Grímur smiled to himself as Thorgeir and Renata made their way into the living room with cups of coffee for everyone. Thorgeir took a seat opposite Grímur as Renata passed coffee cups around. He looked anxious to get the meeting over with.
Viveca moved to a seat a little further away as she tried to blend into the background. Her plan seemed to work well as Thorgeir instinctively took centre-stage.
‘Nice to see you again, Grímur. Have you many questions for us? Unfortunately we both have rather busy days ahead.’
‘That suits me fine, I’ll get right to it,’ Grímur said as he opened his notebook.
‘We don’t mean to rush you, it’s just we’ve an awful lot on our plate,’ Renata added.
Grímur could understand how Viveca struggled on occasion to deal with the two of them and how disagreements could end up with her walking out of the house. There was something phoney and thoroughly irritating about both of them. When they’d discovered they weren’t able to have any more children the news must have come as something of an embarrassment. Viveca had probably been taken on board as a quick-fire solution and had slowly grown unhappy with her ceremonial place in the family. He glanced in her direction but she was messaging someone on her phone.
‘That’s quite all right, I’m a reasonably busy man myself. What I wanted to talk to you about was when Bella came here looking for Viveca. I need to know a few things; what she said, how she looked, that kind of thing. Anything at all that you can remember might be useful. I’m trying to piece together what she did with herself once she got to Reykjavík, as well as why she left Leirubakki in the first place. Did she give a specific reason why she wanted to see Viveca or do you think it was just a social visit?’
Thorgeir gestured towards his wife as if to suggest that she should be the one to field that question. She looked sideways at Grímur and fidgeted with her coffee cup a little before answering.
‘She didn’t say exactly why she wanted to see Viveca. Just that they’d arranged to meet up with each other. I told her that while it sounded like a lovely idea, Viveca had taken us all by surprise and run off with that dreadful boyfriend of hers. She has a terrible habit of doing that when things don’t go her way. Haven’t you, dear?’
She turned to see if her daughter was going to respond but Viveca was too busy with her phone to notice anyone else. Renata turned back to Grímur and shrugged as if to say there was only so much she could do with what she’d been given.
‘She didn’t mention anything about why she’d come here in the first place?’
‘Nothing at all, I thought she might have been looking for somewhere to stay but all she asked about was Viveca and when I told her we hadn’t the faintest idea where she was, she just left. I’m afraid I can’t really be of any more help to you.’
Thorgeir cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention as he straightened his tie and finished his coffee.
‘If the girl fell in with a bad crowd here in Reykjavik I think you can safely assume it had very little to do with her visit here. I’m no expert on such matters but I would have thought the people she spent time with just before she died would be of more interest to you than those she met in this house,’ Thorgeir said.
‘Thank you for the observation, Thorgeir. As we both know, the person who best fits that description is presently resting in one of your hospital bed
s. If he were available for questioning it is more than likely I wouldn’t be wasting your valuable time. It’s important we cross everyone she had contact with off our list, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing our jobs properly. Thank you both for your time though, I’ll leave you now to get on with your day.’
‘Our pleasure, Viveca will show you out,’ Thorgeir said as he got up and left the room.
There was something about the guy that was just too smug. He was really full of himself. Viveca got up and walked him to the door still holding onto her phone but looking a little more relaxed now that Thorgeir was out of the room. It had started to snow again but it was much lighter than the day before, the flakes barely more than fleeting whispers as they drifted across the front lawn.
‘I’m sorry about him, he can be a real pain in the arse when he feels like it. Unfortunately that’s pretty much all the time.’
‘I have no trouble believing that,’ Grímur agreed.
Viveca scrolled through the messages on her phone looking for something she was obviously struggling to locate.
‘If I had any brains I’d delete these things every now and then but I can never seem to get organised enough. Half of them I’ve probably never even read. I know I should have showed you some earlier and everything but I didn’t really think about it until now.’
‘Think about what?’
‘Bella sent me a bunch of messages. They were all ‘why aren’t you picking up your phone’ sort of thing, so after a while I just stopped reading them. They’re probably just going to bore you but they are from her I suppose. Now she’s dead I feel you should see some of them. There were loads though so I’ll just show you one or two maybe.’
The garage door opened slowly and Thorgeir’s black Mercedes backed out of it and down the driveway. He didn’t bother acknowledging either of them as he turned onto the street and accelerated away.
‘Straight back to work I see,’ Grímur noted.
‘Yip, he doesn’t spend much time here. He’s always working; sometimes he doesn’t even bother coming home.’
‘He just sleeps at the hospital?’
‘That’s what he tells Mum. I think he’s seeing someone else.’
Grímur had to smile at the way she said it. She really couldn’t have cared less.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘He says he has to work all these nights but I’m sure he’s got a place somewhere else where he shacks up with another woman, I can just feel it,’ she looked up from her phone and shrugged. ‘It’s just a feeling I get but I’m pretty sure I’m right.’
‘Your mother doesn’t suspect anything?’
‘I think she does but it’s all just part of the deal they have with each other.’
‘The deal?’
‘Yeah, you know, like when two people are married for the convenience factor. They’re both getting what they want out of the deal but one of them might want a little extra and the other one won’t say anything because that might fuck up the rest of the deal, the part they like.’
‘I see,’ he said even though he wasn’t entirely sure he did.
‘Here’s some of them now. Like I said, they pretty much all say the same thing. See what I mean, some of them I haven’t even looked at. That’s how bored I got with receiving them all. Why she wanted to get hold of me so badly I’ll never know. You would have thought that she’d get the message and just give up. Here’s one I didn’t read.’
Viveca went silent for a second or two and then looked up at Grímur.
‘Shit,’ she whispered.
‘What is it, Viveca?’
She held the phone up so Grímur could read the screen.
I’ve done something stupid but I’m not sure what. He’s REALLY mad at me but I don’t know what I’ve done. What should I do?
‘Who’s she talking about?’ Grímur asked.
Viveca looked at the screen and shook her head.
‘I haven’t a clue,’ she said.
‘And you’ve never seen this message before?’
Viveca shook her head. She looked as if she was about to cry.
‘It’s got to be someone you both know, Viveca, please think. How many guys could the two of you possibly know?’
‘That’s the thing, we don’t know any of the same people. We’ve never had anything to do with each other before the wedding, or since for that matter. The only people both of us would know would be Abelína, and her parents.’
‘Kjartan and Helga?’
‘That’s right.’
#13
Thorgeir was running late yet again. She wasn’t going to be happy. Not that she’d been terribly happy about anything much of late, but this was not going to help one little bit. The fickle whims of the fairer sex were still something of a mystery to him even after all these years. So many of life’s conundrums had unravelled themselves before his very eyes during his years exploring the human condition, but the female enigma was not one of them.
There were plenty of parking spaces on Barónsstígur so he took one right behind Hallgrímskirkja, in the shadow of the Lord. The white blanket that had covered the city over Christmas was slowly melting away in spite of the light fall that was still coming down. The roads were bare of snow but plenty still remained in the shadowed gardens up and down Leifsgata. He let himself into his building on the corner and jogged up the stairs to the second floor. After a courteous knock on the door he took a second to tidy his hair even though he wanted it to look as if he’d rushed over as fast as he possibly could. Adolfína opened the door and looked at him with something that might best be described as an unamused sneer.
‘You’re late,’ she said as she threw the door wide open and turned her back on him. Thorgeir grinned to himself and closed the door as he stepped inside. Her flat looked impeccable as it always did and he wondered how she managed to be so irritable when she had it so good. Perhaps it was the lack of things to do that got under her skin. He would get a little grumpy himself if he didn’t have anything to do with his time and she didn’t really have all that much to fill her days with any more. He waited for her to turn and face him but it seemed that she was ignoring him for being late again.
‘Unavoidable business, I’m afraid. That irritating policeman was asking questions about Bella.’
‘Did her father come to see you?’ Adolfína asked.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact he did. He arrived at the hospital in the guise of a reporter, asking all sorts of questions about our friend. You were right, he does seem to be letting his emotions run away with him at the moment. If he’s not careful I can see him getting completely carried away. Can’t you?’
‘Speaking of running away, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Isn’t it time we reviewed our plans? I’m getting itchy feet. This time I want you to do something about it rather than just making a whole lot of noise about nothing much in particular.’
‘Don’t tell me that’s what you dragged me here for? I have a full schedule today and I’m already running late. Do we have to do this now?’
As soon as the words were out of his mouth he realised he’d made something of a miscalculation but it wasn’t really in his nature to dwell on such things. She turned around slowly and glared at him.
‘I didn’t mean it like that, it’s just I have so much to do already,’ he said. ‘Can’t this wait for another time? We can sit down over dinner one night soon and discuss it rationally. When I have time to discuss it.’
‘When you have time to discuss it? How important you make me feel. It’s good to know how significant to you I am in the grand scheme of things. I think it’s time we talked seriously about leaving. I have a bad feeling and it isn’t something we can keep putting off forever. You may think you can but you can’t, not really. It’s time you made good on your promise to take the two of us away. It’s not like I haven’t held up my end of the bargain.’
‘Adolfína, my love. I am well aware of your feelings regarding o
ur ongoing arrangement here but you’ve got to understand that I…’
‘All I understand, Thorgeir is that you’re still with her two and a half years after telling me that it was as good as over. Those were your exact words. I don’t understand what’s holding you up. Which is it, the musty old wife you can’t stand the sight of anymore or that brat of a daughter who spends her life ignoring you?’
‘Look, you know you mean more to me than either of them but it’s not that easy to just walk away from a life you’ve spent forty years meticulously constructing.’
Adolfína sized him up with her oh-so-very blue eyes until he could feel himself trying to shrink away from her and disappear into his clothes. He felt like hiding but there was nowhere to turn to in the little flat.
‘One day there’s going to come that one question you can’t find the right answer to. That one finger pointed your way that won’t point anywhere else no matter what you say. What are you going to do then? All we have to do is leave now while we’re still able.’
‘You make it sound all so dramatic. It’s not like we’re on the verge of wreck and ruin and you’re not in a position to be making demands of me,’ he said, suddenly finding the anger within him escaping without consideration or consent. ‘I don’t understand why you can’t just be happy with what we’ve got.’
‘Because it’s not sustainable. We both knew this wasn’t going to last forever and if you’re not prepared to call it a day sooner rather than later then you’ll ruin everything we’ve worked to achieve. Tell your wife you want a divorce, pay her what she’s due and be done with it or I will make you so very, very sorry. I’m running out of patience, Thorgeir. It can’t always be about what you want.’
