The Mistake

by Grant Nicol

  ‘Open your mouth without being asked a question and it’ll be the last thing you ever do. Give it a try if you want to die, dumbass.’

  He tried with limited success to wipe the blood from his eye as he was led along the side of the building. There was the occasional squawk of a seagull overhead but otherwise the place sounded deserted. Everyone was probably still on Christmas leave. Even if he was foolish enough to cry out, there would be no one around for miles to hear him.

  ‘Down there and mind you don’t fall in,’ Aron Steinn chuckled to himself.

  He shoved Gunnar Atli in the direction of a small set of steps that disappeared under one of the piers. There were containers stacked three high down the side of the wharf. Pools of water had collected all around them. Through the blood that kept running into his eye he saw a rat run from the protection of an empty wooden crate under a coiled length of heavy-duty rope. He felt his way down the steps with his feet, desperately trying not to lose his footing and wind up in the harbour. In his present condition he didn’t think he’d last very long once he hit the freezing water.

  ‘Stop there or you’ll go in, and I won’t be fishing you out,’ Aron Steinn said.

  Kjartan followed the two men down the short flight of steps that took them right to the waterline. There was a small platform at the bottom that must have been used to board small service vessels at some point but clearly hadn’t been touched in years. The railings were rusted and slowly falling into the harbour and the steps were worn smooth by the tide and as slippery as ice.

  ‘Now turn around and get on your knees.’

  Gunnar Atli did as he was told. He was kneeling with the water lapping over the top of the platform and around his legs.

  Kjartan appeared from behind Aron Steinn and folded his arms across his chest. This close to the water the wind was icy and ripped right through his clothes like they weren’t even there. Aron Steinn had nothing more than a t-shirt and leather vest on but didn’t appear to feel the cold at all.

  ‘Are you Gunnar Atli?’ asked Kjartan.

  Gunnar Atli nodded and swallowed hard. He could only guess at why they had taken him from the hospital grounds and none of the reasons he came up with were very appealing.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Kjartan.

  ‘No, I’ve no idea,’ Gunnar Atli said through the bloody saliva that had collected in his mouth while he’d been trying to breath.

  ‘My name is Kjartan Jónsson. You knew my daughter. She’s dead now, and the rest you should be able to figure out yourself. You’re going to answer my questions truthfully or my friend here is going to shoot you and kick you into the harbour where you’ll drown like a fucking cat. A kitty cat with a broken nose who can’t see very well and won’t even know which way it is he’s supposed to be swimming with a great big hole in him.’

  ‘Please, you’re mistaken.’

  ‘Why did you kill my daughter?’

  ‘What? No, I didn’t kill anyone. What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘I’ve already made one deal with the Devil this week and now I’m going to make another one. Do you want to hear what it is?’

  Gunnar Atli was shivering all over, he felt as if every ounce of warmth had left his body.

  ‘No. But you’re going to tell me anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Okay, here’s the deal. All I want to know is why you killed my daughter. If you tell me why you did it and admit what you did, then I’ll let you live. You’ll go to prison, I’ll make sure of that, but you’ll get to live.’

  ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong, I’m no killer. Whatever it is you’re thinking, you’re wrong.’

  Kjartan shook his head in disappointment.

  ‘Now you’re pissing me off and there’s only one way that will end and that’s with you getting yourself shot. Think carefully before you speak. And make sure you tell me the truth because if you don’t I’ll know and you’ll find bleeding to death from your stomach a really shitty way to die. That is if you don’t drown first.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve been told but I didn’t kill her. If Thorgeir told you I did he’s lying. The guy will tell you anything to get his own way, don’t you know that?’

  ‘Is that right? Do you want to know what else he told me? I found it all very interesting so I’m going to repeat it for you. He told me you were in a car accident quite some time ago. That was when you fucked your leg up, wasn’t it?’

  Gunnar Atli could feel his leg aching terribly with the cold.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what. There was someone else in the car, wasn’t there? Your girlfriend, the first one you killed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s right, I know all about that too.’

  Gunnar Atli threw some water in his face to wash the blood out of his eye and snapped his head up to look at Kjartan properly for the first time. He winced in pain as the seawater stung his eyes and the cuts on his face but still he stared up at him for several seconds before he replied.

  ‘Nanna, you’re talking about Nanna.’

  ‘That’s right. Nanna was in the car with you and what happened to her? What happened to Nanna?’

  ‘She died.’

  ‘That’s right, she died. Now what we really need to talk about is how she died.’

  #16

  Viveca was sure she’d heard someone at the front door but when she called out to her mother to go see who it was she discovered the house was deserted. She’d been locked away in her bedroom on the internet for the last couple of hours and hadn’t heard Renata leaving. Once upon a time her mother would have let her know she was going out and when she’d be back but those days were long gone.

  Grumping to herself she made her way down the stairs to the front door. When she looked out the window there was no one on the doorstep yet she could see a tall thin lady with long dark hair standing on the other side of the street. It was almost as if she was waiting for someone to come to the door because as soon as she saw Viveca at the window she turned and walked off without looking back. Viveca had never seen the woman before in her life but she had definitely been watching the house.

  Wondering why she had even bothered coming all the way downstairs she was just about to turn and stomp back up to Facebook when she noticed something lying on the doormat just outside the front door. It was a clear plastic CD case. She opened the door and picked it up for a closer inspection. There were two recordable CDs inside with something hand-written in black pen on them. The writing was very small and hard to read but she was pretty sure what it said. What the dark-haired woman across the street could possibly have to do with a girl who had been murdered the day before she couldn’t imagine but there was one way to find out. She bounded back up the stairs to her room, opened the CD tray of her laptop and slid the first disk in.

  ‘Good morning, Ísabella. How are you today?

  Goosebumps grew up and down her arms. It was an audio recording of a man speaking in a calm, deep voice; the most menacing voice she had ever heard in her life even though it was a voice she knew. A voice she knew all too well.

  ‘Don’t worry too much about the fact that you can’t see me because I can’t see you either. Well, not your face anyway. You’re probably wondering where you are and why you’re here but we’ll get to that all in good time. You will at least recognise my voice which may give you some sort of clue as to what has gone so terribly wrong for you. Although I would suggest that before you go blaming this bit of bad luck on anyone else that you take a long hard look at yourself. Because, as we all know, you are your own worst enemy.

  ‘You have not been entirely truthful with me. I am afraid that this was a serious miscalculation on your part and the fact of the matter is that you are now strapped by your ankles and wrists to my very special table. You will not enjoy being strapped to this table but that’s okay because you’re not supposed to enjoy it.’

  Viveca shrank back involuntaril
y from the computer as though it were a snake waiting to strike at her. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Nor could she understand who the woman was who had dropped the disks off, or why she had done it.

  ‘You cannot see me because your head is covered by a small wooden box that I have designed especially for this purpose. You will be feeling the after-effects of the drugs that have been pumped into you and probably won’t feel like talking for a while yet, but you will at some point. When you do, you may feel that screaming will assist you in your efforts to be found or rescued or to escape. It will not. It will only serve to annoy me and that is a bad idea, let me tell you that right now. That sort of behaviour will only get you pain, and lots of it.

  ‘But you may feel like screaming anyway, they normally do. Keeping quiet and compliant is a lesson you will learn one way or another. You can learn it the easy way or you can learn it the hard way but, and you can trust me on this, make no mistake, you will learn it if it’s the last thing you ever do and it might just be exactly that.’

  Viveca sat down on her bed and put her head in her hands. Was it some sort of sick practical joke? She doubted it very much, in fact she was sure it was real because of the way her skin seemed to be creeping up her arms as if it were trying to disappear under her sleeves.

  ‘You may be wondering how long you are going to be here and what will happen to you while you’re here. You are going to be here for a while. How long exactly I haven’t the faintest idea but it will be longer than you can imagine right now. So, you may as well get used to it whether you like it or not. You will have to learn to accept what you cannot change.

  ‘As for what is going to happen to you while you are here, we’ll get to that in a bit too. For the time being it is probably sufficient for you to understand that it will not be pleasant and you will not enjoy it one little bit. But like I said, that’s the whole idea.

  ‘You have listened and learned and used that knowledge to lie, to cheat and to get your own way at the expense of others, namely myself. Well, those days are over. Now you will listen and you will definitely learn a thing or two from me, mainly about discomfort and pain; and you will not get your own way, not today, not ever again. Like I said, better get used to it.’

  Viveca flinched when a noise from the front of the house disturbed her trance-like state. She ran to the window to check the driveway but it wasn’t someone coming home. It was just the wind blowing broken branches against the top of the house. She took a deep breath to calm herself but could still feel her heart beating so hard she thought it might jump through her chest to escape.

  Part of her wanted to turn the computer off and hurl it through the window to the garden below but she knew she had to hear it through to the bitter end.

  ‘The reason why you’re unable to speak or think right now is all about two things. The first one is sodium pentothal and the second one is phenobarbital. They are my friends, they will allow me to manipulate the hours you spend conscious and the ones you do not. They are not your friends. You do not have any friends left. You will be administered these drugs as I see fit and they will keep you under my control so that I won’t have to kill you straight away. We can have more fun together that way.

  ‘The general outlook for you living a long time now is not very good, let me tell you. The last girl who found herself in that box only lasted a week but that was because she refused to behave. One of them lasted almost a month but she was exceptional in her determination to stay alive. We’ll see what you’re made of during the next few days. There will be moments of distress for you along with moments of confusion and terror because the drugs will seriously impair your ability to remember what has been happening and this will confuse and upset you a great deal.

  ‘Another reason you cannot speak at the moment is the gag I have put in your mouth. Those things are pretty uncomfortable after a while but it is necessary while you listen to what I have to say. At some point I am going to take it out for a while. How long that is for will depend entirely on you. If you start to scream and yell and shout about what is going on and how you don’t like it and all that shit then I will put it straight back in.

  ‘You will need, and I can’t impress this upon you enough, to control the emotions and instincts that will tell you to scream for help because it will be a complete waste of time and it will only instigate pain.

  ‘You may not believe me yet about how much that sort of behaviour will hurt you but you will. After the first few times you will be left in no doubt how much pain I am talking about. It will make you wish you were dead until you understand that it will stop if you will just shut the fuck up. That is not to say that all the pain you will experience is avoidable. Far from it. Most of it will be administered just for fun. The pain I am talking about is the pain that will be caused by you opening your mouth when you’re not supposed to. Whether that pain exists or not is entirely up to you.

  ‘There are some other rules you need to know about too. You are not to speak unless you are asked a question and then it will be “Yes, sir” or “No, sir” and nothing else. I will not engage you in conversation because you will only waste my time by promising me that you will do absolutely anything for me if I would just let you go. I am not going to let you go but you will take some time to get to grips with this fact, they all do. So in the meanwhile you can save your tears and tantrums for someone else. I am not interested in them and they will only get you gagged and back in the box until you learn that no one cares about your petty little problems any more. You are all alone here and I am the only friend you will have for the rest of your life, however long that may be, so you better get it into your head that keeping me happy is the only thing you need to worry about from here on in.

  ‘Enjoy the rest of your day.’

  Viveca wiped a bead of sweat from her brow and waited for the sickness in her gut to pass. It soon became obvious that this wasn’t about to happen and she lurched to her feet and ran for the bathroom. She made it to the toilet just in time before she was ill like she had never been before in her life.

  #17

  Gunnar Atli really didn’t want to talk about Nanna and couldn’t for the life of him think why Bella’s father would either. It was in the past, the very distant past. The cold seawater had been lapping over his feet and around his knees until they had all but frozen. His sore leg ached as if it was about to fall off and his face felt as if it already had.

  ‘Tell me what happened to her, Gunnar Atli. Tell me what you did to her,’ Kjartan demanded in a quiet but menacing tone.

  ‘I’ve already told you, she died in the accident. I rolled the car and she went through the windscreen. Why could you possibly want to know about this?’

  ‘Because I know the truth about how she died. The truth you’ve only ever told one person before in your miserable little life and now you’re going to tell me as well.’

  ‘What?’

  Aron Steinn started to grin but in a twisted, menacing way. The more uncomfortable and panicky Gunnar Atli became, the more the muscled giant was enjoying himself.

  ‘What?’ Gunnar Atli repeated.

  ‘Say ‘what’ again and I’ll shoot you myself. Now tell me what you told Thorgeir.’

  Gunnar Atli looked down at the water lapping all around him and felt something else wash over him. Something dark and frozen that he thought he’d left behind on that snow-covered lava field nine years ago. He could feel it all the way through to his bones as he realised he had been betrayed by the one man he should never have trusted and now his fate lay in the hands of an angry, grieving father and a steroid-injecting lunatic with a gun.

  ‘When the cop arrived he found us injured and lying in the snow. My leg was broken and Nanna was all cut up after going through the windscreen,’ he paused to wipe the blood from his face and breathe through his mouth because his nose was no longer available for that particular job. ‘I held her hand as she died.’

  Kjartan started chuckling to
himself. He bent over, grabbed Gunnar Atli by the chin and lifted his head up so he had no choice but to look at him.

  ‘Now tell us what really happened,’ Kjartan demanded.

  ‘That is what happened. She died and my leg got all fucked up,’ Gunnar Atli yelled. There were tears welling in his one good eye, once again reducing his vision to next to nothing. Kjartan looked around them to see if they had attracted any unwanted attention yet but the container port and its surrounds were completely deserted. There wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere.

  ‘Lucky it’s the holidays, huh? Otherwise someone might hear me do this,’ Kjartan said as he took the gun off Aron Steinn, took aim and shot Gunnar Atli in his right thigh. He fell face first onto the platform as he tried to grab hold of his wounded leg. Kjartan signalled to Aron Steinn who moved carefully behind Gunnar Atli and pulled him up onto his knees again. His breathing was coming in short, sharp bursts now and he’d gone very pale. Blood from the wound ran down his thigh and mixed in with the seawater around him. It formed little rivulets that ran across the platform and disappeared over the edge and into the deep beyond.

  ‘Okay, okay, I’ll tell you the story. I rolled the car on purpose because she was going to leave me and I didn’t want anyone else having her. I thought we’d both die but I was wrong. All I did was fuck up my leg and send her through the windscreen but it didn’t kill her. It took me forever to get to her and by the time I did she was almost dead.’

  ‘Almost, but not quite, right?’ Kjartan prompted.

  ‘That was when I realised I’d messed up bigtime, she was cut badly and bleeding all over the place so I got hold of the biggest rock I could lift and smashed the side of her head in. I kept hitting her until I could see inside. Then I called the emergency services and pretended to have seen the crash. By the time the cop showed I’d passed out, I didn’t even expect him to find us in that storm. I thought I’d die out there too and they’d find us in the morning, frozen side-by-side. It would have been better that way.’