by Grant Nicol
‘You’ve got that right you stupid little fuck because then my daughter would still be alive.’
‘I thought she’d been sent to me. You know, like an angel.’
‘Well, she hadn’t been sent to you and she didn’t want anything to do with you either. And when she told you that, you killed her too.’
‘No, you’ve got it all wrong.’
‘She had her bags all packed and was ready to leave you behind. You couldn’t handle being rejected again so you killed her.’
‘She wasn’t running away from me, she was running away from him. He drugged her and raped her and was going to make her work for him, sleeping with all those guys to pay his mortgage.’
‘You talked her into moving in with you and it probably went okay for a while until she realised what a little creep you really are. That was when she decided to pack her bags and go, and she almost got away too. Admit what you did for once in your life. If you keep on lying to me it’s only going to get worse for you. Right now you might not think it can, but believe me, if you keep on lying I will put you through hell.’
‘I’m not lying to you. Nanna wanted to leave me for another guy and I did a terrible thing, but it wasn’t like that with Bella. She came to me looking for help but she was even more confused than I am. The girl had problems, big problems. She’d pissed Thorgeir off and he was going to kill her. You don’t know what he’s like, he’s a monster.’
‘Tell me what you did to her or I’ll shoot you again and this time it won’t be in the leg.’
‘I didn’t kill her, you’ve got to believe me. She stayed with me for three nights, that’s it, and then she just disappeared without as much as saying goodbye. She didn’t even take her bags or keys with her. I never saw her again, I swear. That’s the truth. I didn’t kill her and I don’t know who did.’
‘You fell in love with her because she looked like Nanna. You killed her and then you pretended to go crazy so they wouldn’t put you where you really belong.’
‘No, I never wanted to hurt her.’
‘You figured that since you got away with killing one girl, you’d get away with killing another. They both wanted to be rid of you and you couldn’t handle it. Not the first time around and not the second time either.’
‘No, I was just trying to help. You’ve got the two of them confused, can’t you see that? I was just trying to help.’
‘And how were you trying to help Nanna? She wanted to leave you for another guy so you drove her out into the middle of nowhere and beat her to death with a rock?’
‘I was very mixed up. You’ve no idea what it was like.’
‘So you took Bella in out of the goodness of your heart and you tried to help her out and when she didn’t want your help you had to stop her from leaving too, right?’
‘No, yes, I mean, I wanted her to stay, yes, but I didn’t try to stop her leaving. I didn’t even know she was going to leave. I don’t know how she died, she just did and I was the one who found her and now they want to lock me up for something I didn’t do.’
‘Isn’t that exactly what you deserve? To be locked up where you can’t hurt anyone else?’
‘No, I don’t deserve that. You can’t do that.’
‘Tell me then, Gunnar Atli. What do you deserve?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did Nanna deserve to die?’
‘No. No she didn’t.’
‘What about Bella? Did she get what she deserved?’
‘I don’t know.’
He pulled a picture of Bella out of his wallet and held it in Gunnar Atli’s face.
‘Do you even know which one this is? Did you even know who it was you were killing? Did you look at her and see Nanna, is that what happened? Did you look at my daughter and get the two of them mixed up? Because if you did that’s okay, all I want is to understand but for that to happen you have to tell me the truth and then I can forgive you. Did you see the wrong girl when you looked at her, is that it? Tell me why you did it and I’ll make this go away.’
Gunnar Atli couldn’t hold it together anymore, he just wanted out. All these years he’d been tearing himself apart inside because he was the one who should have died in the crash, not Nanna. He’d treated her no better than a dog that had been hit in the street by a driver who didn’t want the bother of looking after the mess he’d made.
He should have known it would catch him up one day. Sometimes it took a while, sometimes it took nine years. It was just the way of the world. For everything you took that didn’t belong to you, one day someone would take something back. Give and take was what it was all about. Everybody gave what they thought they could afford, and everybody took what they felt they were owed. Quid pro quo. Sometimes the scales evened up at the end of the day, and sometimes they didn't. Today they were going to stop swinging and come to rest for the very last time for Gunnar Atli.
‘I made a mistake,’ Gunnar Atli said.
‘That’s better,’ Kjartan replied.
‘I got confused. I know what I did was wrong but it was a mistake, nothing more.’
‘Admit what you did and I will forgive you.’
‘When I met Bella, I couldn’t believe it. I thought she’d come back to me.’
‘Nanna?’
‘Bella came back for me, she wasn’t going to leave after all.’
‘You mean Nanna? Nanna had come back for you?’
‘I made a mistake but she came back to me just like I knew she would. Sometimes when you make a mistake it can still turn out okay if you catch it fast enough. So you see, it doesn’t make any difference anymore because the only one I killed in the end was Bella.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said, the only one I killed in the end was Bella.’
‘That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear you say.’
Kjartan signalled for Aron Steinn to move out of the way and then he fired another round into Gunnar Atli’s stomach and watched him double over in agony.
‘It’s time for us to go our separate ways, Gunnar Atli. The world will be a better place without you.’
Gunnar Atli looked up at him through his one good eye, his face twisted in pain but flooded with relief. Blood ran through his fingers as he held them over the wound in his stomach. There was shame in his eyes, but there was acceptance too.
‘We all learn to live with our mistakes,’ he said quietly.
‘What?’ Kjartan demanded.
‘I said, we all learn to live with our mistakes.’
Kjartan put his foot on Gunnar Atli’s shoulder and tipped him backwards into the bay. When he hit the water he flung his arms out wide as blood poured from him in every direction. There was simply no fight left in him, like a fish that’s finally had enough and is ready to come above the waves. The water washed over his face as he rolled over in the swell and disappeared from sight.
‘Well, that’s one you don’t have to live with any more,’ Kjartan said as he stared down into the cold, dark water.
#18
‘Good evening, Ísabella. You seem to be awake again. As you will notice I have been forced to replace the box around your head as well as the gag in your mouth. It would seem that you are not ready for them to be removed. That was my mistake, I apologise. Sometimes I get a little carried away and attempt it ahead of schedule. You were obviously not ready for such freedom as was evident by how upset you became. No matter how many times I explain about the screaming and begging and threat-making they never quite get it into their heads that I am completely serious about the pain that I will inflict when they piss me off. You will now be in no doubt whatsoever as to my sincerity. Your legs in particular bore the brunt of my displeasure and you will find that they will hurt the way they do now for some time to come. I do not make idle threats, Ísabella. Don’t try my patience again. If you think that it’s impossible for you to be in more pain than you already are, let me assure you that you are very wrong.
‘I will hav
e a friend look at your wounds later. If we don’t keep them clean they will get infected. Not that I care particularly about the well-being of your legs but the smell will become offensive to me. It appears that you intend to be stubborn and are something of a slow learner so I will have to adapt my methods to your specific traits. I don’t think I will be able to take the box off again. Even when you need to relieve yourself I will leave it on. You must learn to behave yourself and I can’t think of any other way right now. As for the gag, I don’t see that coming out again apart from when you need to be fed and watered. If you don’t have something constructive to do with your mouth then all you’re going to do is blubber like you did yesterday. I guess it just takes longer for the reality of the predicament to sink in for some than it does for others.
‘Since I don’t know how much longer you’re going to be around, I thought it might be time for us to have this little chat while we still can. My daughter told me the two of you met at a wedding, your sister’s to be exact. I informed her that you had told me about your husband and son dying recently and suggested that it would be nice of her if, given the circumstances, she would look after you until you had got yourself settled. At first Viveca just laughed at me. I had no idea why of course. When I asked her to explain what she was laughing at she said it was impossible because you had neither a husband nor a child. She said that you were considered the town tramp wherever it is you come from and that no one would have you, let alone contemplate raising a child with you. Imagine my surprise upon hearing this and how foolish I felt.
‘You let me tell you about the anguish I went through over the loss of my son and you sat there and listened with that smug expression on your face. And all the time you were laughing at me behind my back. Didn’t you think I would hear the truth sooner or later, or do you just not care about things like that as long as you get what you want? I’m going to take a guess and say that I’m not the first sucker you’ve tried this shit with, but I can categorically state that I will be the last. Your days of toying with people are over. You probably didn’t think that much harm could come from leading people on this way. I wonder if you still think that to be the case or if you’ve had a change of heart.
‘There is no such thing as a small lie, Ísabella. If you tell little ones, you’ll tell big ones. People like you like to believe in little white lies because they make you feel better about not telling the truth. You may well think that the only mistake you made was getting found out but you’d be wrong. You let me believe that you knew the pain of losing a child. You accepted my charity and you kept your mouth shut because you were happy to play me as a fool. You took a calculated risk, you rolled the dice, you watched them come to rest, and you lost.
‘You have begun your last days on this earth and although no one can be sure yet just how many they shall number, I am in possession of three simple facts. They will not be many, they will not be pleasant, and you have told the very last of your little white lies.’
As the recording finally came to an end Grímur looked across the table at Viveca. She still looked as pale as she had when she’d walked in off the street with her laptop in her arms like a sick child. There could never have been an easy way for her to learn what her father had become but this had been a particularly distressing way to do it.
‘I don’t want to ever go back to that house,’ she said as she rocked back and forth on her chair. ‘Never again, you understand?’
When she’d first walked in she had taken quite some time to calm down but once she had she told him the story of the mysterious dark-haired woman who had dropped the CDs off at the house and he knew it must have been Adolfína. He wasn’t sure what the connection between her and Thorgeir was yet but they were obviously in it together somehow. Officers had been sent to her flat to arrest her but they found the place abandoned. Her clothes, money and passport were all gone. Where she had disappeared to was anybody’s guess but he suspected she’d already left Keflavík and chances were she was miles away by now. Her bank account with Arion Banki had been closed two days earlier and she’d taken enough cash with her to look after herself for some time. For an unemployed nurse she seemed to have been doing all right.
‘No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to. You’re safe now, there’s no need for you to worry about him any more. He can’t hurt you, he can’t hurt anyone any more. We’ll find somewhere else for you to stay if that’s what you want.’
‘Thank you, I can’t go back to his house. Not even to pick up my things.’
Thorgeir on the other hand hadn’t been quite so lucky. He’d received a phone call shortly after Viveca had taken possession of the CDs from someone they now assumed to have been Adolfína. According to eye-witnesses at the hospital he had flown into a furious rage, throwing a chair through his office window into the garden below and then locked himself in. By the time officers arrived to arrest him he had taken a handful of tranquilisers and washed them down with half a bottle of Chivas from his desk drawer. There was no way he could have successfully negotiated the enormous fall from grace that would have accompanied the revelation of what he really was.
He had kidnaped Ísabella Kjartansdóttir and imprisoned her in a dungeon somewhere, torturing and raping her before killing her and dumping her naked body where he knew the blame would fall on Gunnar Atli Davíðsson, and it had so very nearly worked. Grímur was relieved the case would no longer need to go to trial. No one wanted to have to listen to the details of what he had done to her. And from what they had just heard, she had not been the first to suffer such a fate. A search of all his properties would now take place until his secret lair was discovered.
One upside to it all was that they could now release Gunnar Atli, just as soon as they found him. According to Lilja Skaftadóttir he had been sitting at a table in the hospital grounds when the disturbance with the flying office chair had taken place. She’d asked the orderly keeping an eye on him for assistance and by the time they had dealt with that situation he was gone. The poor guy had probably feared that with his track record of psychiatric illness he would never get anyone to believe him. It was unlikely that a man walking the streets in a hospital gown with a bruised and swollen face would go unnoticed for too long though, but so far he had eluded all attempts to locate him.
‘How could he have pretended to be my father all this time while he was doing this?’
‘He fooled a lot of people, Viveca. It wasn’t just you. We’ve tracked down your mother and she’s going to be coming to see you soon. Maybe the two of you can work this out together. It’s been a terrible shock for her as well. You’re going to need each other’s support if you’re to get through this in one piece.’
‘I don’t want anything from her either. I’ve always felt as though I was imposing on their little club and stepping on their toes. That house was never a home to me because they were never there for me and that’s not going to change now. I never meant any more to either one of them than something they could show off to the neighbours. Hey, look at us. We’ve got a kid too.’
She had always felt that there was something terribly wrong with her family and now she knew what it was. She had spent all these years under the same roof as a monster.
#19
The next morning Grímur pulled up outside a guesthouse on the outskirts of the city centre. The weather had improved slightly; the sky had cleared and the wind had died away even though it was still easily cold enough for more snow. From the shelter of his car he could see Kjartan bringing his bags out onto the pavement. By the way he was moving he looked stiff and tired. It was possible he hadn’t been sleeping with all the pressure he’d been under. Grímur lit a cigarette and waited for signs that Kjartan’s departure was imminent before heading out into the cold. They caught each other’s eye as he hurried across the street. A look of surprise flickered across Kjartan’s face and was gone just as quickly as it had appeared.
‘Time to head home?’ Grímur ask
ed.
Kjartan shrugged and tried to look apathetic which didn’t take too much effort.
‘They tell me that Bella’s body will be released today. She’ll be home by this afternoon so I thought I’d better get going. There’ll be lots of things Helga and Abelína will need done at home, she’s already been on the phone wanting this and that sorted out. You know the way they are.’
‘We know who killed your daughter, Kjartan. We’ve been handed proof of who the killers were and we are in no doubt whatsoever this time.’
‘Killers?’ Kjartan’s eyes didn’t light up as Grímur had hoped they might.
‘That’s right. Thorgeir Alfreðsson and Bella’s upstairs neighbour, Adolfína Hallsdóttir. It seems Thorgeir was running a brothel out of the first two floors.’
‘You mean, Bella too?’
His response came just a little too quickly. The news didn’t seem to be having the effect that Grímur had expected. In fact, it didn’t seem to be having any effect on him at all.
‘Yes, as far as we know. We’ve just arrested a couple of girls on the ground floor. They were here illegally, of course. Nice girls, it seems a shame to get rid of them but that’s what we’ll do. Adolfína’s disappeared, she’d left Keflavík before we even knew she was gone. She landed in London yesterday and got a connecting flight from there to Morocco. Unfortunately, I doubt we will ever see her again.’
‘What about Thorgeir?’
‘He’s dead. Took an overdose after receiving a phone call from our mystery woman, Adolfína. It seems she told him that she’d spilled the beans and he decided it was better to go out on his own terms rather than stick around and face the music. He was dead before we got through his office door. Adolfína dropped off an audio recording at his house for his daughter to find. Then she rang and told him what she’d done before leaving the country for good. That’s what you call a cold-hearted woman.
