by Grant Nicol
‘Slow down, Dad, what are you talking about?’
‘I’ve got to give the horses their worming medication as soon as I can. There’s been worms in their droppings and I’ve been meaning to do it for some time. I need you to pick up the de-wormer for me from the lady who gets that sort of thing for me.’
‘Where is it you want me to go?’
‘Mosfellsbær. Her name’s Inga Björk.’
I grabbed a pen and took down the address as he rattled it off. There was little, if any, point in protesting. I had nothing else to do until I had to go to work later now that Baldvin had gone, with the possible exception of some painting. Unfortunately, the next subject I wanted to paint had already left for work himself so that idea was going to have to wait whether I liked it or not. Resigned to my fate as a delivery girl I assured Dad that I would get straight out there and pick up his worm medicine.
‘There’s no rush,‘ he said, meaning the exact opposite. ‘You’ll need to pay her too. It will be 10,000kr give or take. I’ll reimburse you as soon as you come out to the farm.’
I cursed my bad luck and vowed to pay more attention to who was calling before answering my phone in the future. It seemed to be bringing me nothing but bad news. After a quick shower I filled my travel mug with fresh coffee and headed north out of the city towards Mosfellsbær.
Inga Björk’s address turned out to be an unassuming little building that looked like it was part office space and part storage facility. If it had been a bit bigger you might have called it a warehouse but as things stood that would have been overstating it somewhat. The large car park outside had only two cars in it. One was feasibly Inga Björk’s while the other had an overly serious-looking man leaning against it smoking a cigarette. As I made my way to the front door he briefly eyed me up and down before returning his attention to the cigarette.
As I entered the front office a slightly flustered yet very attractive woman signalled for me to take a seat. She was in the middle of a tense conversation on the phone so I sat down and waited for her to finish. She was having a heated discussion about her insurance policy with the people who had supplied her with it.
It seemed that whoever she was talking to didn’t feel like giving her any assurances over the phone about when she might be getting her money. She eventually hung up without achieving what she had wanted and turned her attention to me.
‘Sorry about that, bloody insurance companies. Are you here to look for fingerprints?’
As she waited impatiently for my reply her eyebrows lifted themselves as far up her forehead as they could without actually leaving her face.
‘I’m not here for fingerprints. I’m just here to pick up an order for my father. He told me you rang him earlier about something he’s been waiting on. All I know is that it has something to do with worming the horses.’
She seemed to be thinking furiously about something but I wasn’t sure quite what it was. It could have been my father but no one thought about him that hard any more.
‘Einar Dagsson? The Moxidectin, wasn’t it? He normally sends his grandson to pick these things up.’
I had to smile at that. I wanted to correct her but didn’t consider it necessary considering the day she seemed to be having. It did no harm at all for Jóhannes to be thought of as part of our family.
‘Yes, Jóhannes. He fell off one of the horses and couldn’t make it today.’
‘Jóhannes, yes. That’s no problem. There’s nothing seriously wrong with him, I hope,’ she said.
A smile worked its way onto her face and reinforced what a good-looking woman she was. I could picture Jóhannes really enjoying these trips to pick up Dad’s bits and pieces from her.
‘Nothing more than a twisted ankle, I believe. He should be up and about again in no time.’
She nodded as if this were a satisfactory outcome and disappeared through a door, which presumably led to her supplies. When she reappeared she was holding a plastic bag filled with syringes full of de-worming gel for the horses.
‘This lot only arrived yesterday. Luckily it wasn’t taken in the break-in. You might have seen the police officer outside. He’s waiting for the forensic technician to show up. That’s who I thought you were. Whoever it was got into the building and disabled the alarm somehow. I’m still very nervous.’
‘I can understand that.’
‘I only noticed something was wrong when I saw the note. Otherwise the theft might have gone unnoticed for days. When I arrived today I thought I must have forgotten to turn the alarm on last night but I’ve never done that before. Now the insurance company thinks that as well and doesn’t want to pay up. The thieves left a note behind in place of the things they took. It’s all a bit strange, really, slightly creepy, don’t you think?’
‘Definitely. What on earth did they steal and what did the note say?’
I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to break into a place that sold veterinary supplies. Maybe Icelandic farmers were harder up than I thought. As for leaving a note behind in place of the goods, that was just weird.
‘Syringes, scalpels and most disturbingly a whole box of Ketamine vials. Enough to tranquilise a whale, almost. Everything you would need to operate on an animal except the sutures to stitch it back together again.’
‘Ketamine? You mean the stuff they take as a party drug – Special K?’
‘It’s basically the same thing but when vets use it it’s in a liquid form. It’s a barbiturate; you inject it as a tranquiliser to sedate animals that are to be operated on. When it’s used illegally as a party drug, they heat it up so that it becomes a powder so they can sniff it or whatever the hell it is they do with it.’
‘And what about the note? They didn’t say they’d be back later to pay for it, I imagine.’
‘No, it’s been a long time since I’ve read a Bible but it looked like a passage from it.’
‘You don’t remember what it said, do you?’
She smiled and pulled out her phone. I didn’t understand what she was smiling about until she held the mobile’s screen up for me to see.
‘They told me not to touch anything but they didn’t say anything about taking photos, did they?’ she said as quietly as she could.
‘Want a look?’ she asked rather redundantly. My boring errand for my father had just taken on a much more interesting perspective. I leant in closer to the screen to get a better look at the photo of the message.
I had a dream that made me afraid.
As I was lying in my bed,
the images and visions that passed
through my mind terrified me.
‘Is that supposed to be some sort of clue?‘ I asked laughing. ‘Surely it has to be some sort of joke.’
Inga Björk just shrugged as if to suggest that my guess would be as good as any she could offer.
‘To be honest, I don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to be. I just hope that whoever it was they don’t come back any time soon. In the wrong hands that stuff could be deadly, and my guess is that it’s now in the wrong hands.’
I paid her what Dad owed her and told her I hoped her day improved. She rolled her eyes at me and snorted as she handed me the change and the receipt, suggesting that she considered that possibility highly unlikely.
‘A bad start can only be a sign of things to come, I fear, and as starts go they don’t get much worse than this,’ she said and got back to her work.
Outside the detective was still leaning against his car looking impatiently at his watch as he lit another cigarette. A fourth car pulled into the car park and a man hurriedly got out of the vehicle carrying a metallic briefcase.
‘You took your time,’ the detective said churlishly.
‘I had to hunt around for that Bible you asked for. It wasn’t as straightforward as you might think. I bet you don’t have one just lying about the house,’ the technician replied.
‘The last time I had any use for a Bible was when I saw my ex-wife o
n my last birthday,’ the detective offered without any sign of humour in his voice.
‘When I told her what I wanted for a present she told me to pray for one instead. The owner’s inside waiting on you. I told her you’d dust for prints and have a look around.
You never know what might show up, though. Even the clever ones make mistakes. They got into the place and past the security system no problem at all. If they’d bothered to reset it on the way out she may not have noticed anything was amiss at all, except for this.’ He waved a plastic evidence bag with the note that had been left behind by the thieves in it.
‘Maybe they had their own set of keys.’
‘No, she’s the only one with a set. She’s never even had another set cut for another employee, apparently. It’s a one-woman show. They took knives, needles and some sort of drug. What that all amounts to, your guess is as good as mine.’
The technician handed the detective a Bible and made his way inside to see Inga Björk.
I acted as if I wasn’t paying any attention as I put Dad’s bag in the back of the car and then pretended to check some non-existent messages on my phone. I typed the passage into my phone so I wouldn’t forget it.
I had a dream that made me afraid.
As I was lying in my bed,
the images and visions that passed
through my mind terrified me.
Much later that night, after another dreary shift at the downtown bar I had studied art for five years at university to wind up working at, I finally got back to the passage.
As I lay exhausted in my bed I searched on my laptop to see if it was in fact as biblical as it sounded. It was.
It was from the Book of Daniel. Chapter 4, Verse 5, to be precise. King Nebuchadnezzar seemed to be having trouble sleeping and was having bad dreams about this and that.
Even though they were vivid and clear to him he was unable to comprehend their meaning, apart from an overwhelming sensation that they were a portent of evil. I knew how he felt.
It seemed a rather odd thing to leave behind at a crime scene. A riddle or some sort of clue to the thieves’ real intentions, perhaps. If they had wanted to get away unnoticed it would have been remarkably easy for them to do so and yet they had chosen to leave a cryptic message in the one place that would cause their crime to be noticed. Perhaps they were trying to throw the police off their trail by giving the crime a religious overtone it didn’t really have. Either that or they were doing just the opposite and pointing them in the right direction. Maybe even in a weird way they were hoping to get caught. Either way they were obviously not quite right in the head. Perhaps they had been having bad dreams as well. Eventually, I closed my eyes and waited for mine to come again.
CHAPTER 5
My night’s sleep passed uneventfully, undisturbed by any visions of woe that were yet to befall our family and in the morning I decided to pick up where I had left off the night before. With the Book of Daniel.
King Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams were indeed troubling him. Tortured by their constant presence his sleeping hours had become a source of great consternation. He sent for his wise men and told them to interpret the dream for him or face certain death. But as he would not share the contents of his dream with them, they were unable to do as he had demanded and were all sentenced to a fiery death. Daniel, on the other hand, rather than look within himself for the answer, prayed to God for help and the mystery was subsequently revealed to him in a vision. He then told the king what his dream was and explained to him that it signified things that were yet to come.
The next dream the king had was of a giant tree growing in the middle of the land. Once again he called Daniel to his side, this time asking him to explain the tree and its significance. The tree was able to shelter all the beasts, feed all the creatures and yet in the dream the king had been told to cut it down. To trim off its branches, strip its leaves and scatter its fruit on the ground.
I was contemplating the implications of what he had been told when my laptop informed me I had a new email waiting for me to read.
I opened my inbox to see what the rather timely distraction was. My anticipation faded to disappointment when I saw it was from Elín. Initially, I suspected it might be a spineless way of telling me she had changed her mind about Kristjana’s concert.
The title of the email suggested otherwise. It was: Just in case. I had to wonder, just in case of what?
Hello Ylfa,
I thought that as a precautionary measure I would send you a copy of this. Just in case anything happens to me. This way you will have a record that only you will be able to access.
Just in case you thought that I might be reneging on our agreement to see our sister together, I am not. I will see you at Harpa as promised. I am in fact quite looking forward to what will be a rather special occasion.
Spoiler alert: If you don’t want to watch me having sex then I strongly suggest you don’t open the attachment on this email unless you really have to.
If that time comes, you will know it.
I have made a secret recording of lover-boy and me having sex in an attempt to convince him to do what I am about to ask of him. On the off chance that he doesn’t acquiesce to my demands of his free will, I will use this recording as leverage to change his mind.
As much as my behaviour will cause him considerable distress, the thought of his lovely wife seeing firsthand what he has been doing with me will surely be sufficient to make him see things my way.
See you soon,
Elín
Blackmailing someone was a dangerous business at the best of times. I assumed that whoever this man was, he might just have enough money to give into Elín’s demands without missing the cash too much. The problem was that if that was the case, then he also had the wherewithal to make life difficult for her. Possibly even very difficult. There was no way that he was going to take this sort of extortion attempt lying down. From what she had already told me, she knew she would have a fight on her hands. There was also a very real chance that she might end up in court. At least when the time came I assumed that she would know plenty of good criminal defence lawyers. Something told me she might just need one.
Without opening the attachment I cast my eyes back to the Old Testament text on my screen. I was starting to identify with the emotional turmoil of King Nebuchadnezzar. I was also having visions of terrible things coming my way. Even if they didn’t come directly at me I was sure to be caught in the maelstrom that accompanied them and sucked down under their waves.
Possibly there was a Daniel somewhere in my life who would be able to explain my concerns to me. If not then I was going to have to learn to cope with my confusion and discontent in my own way. There wasn’t a time in my life that I could remember, anyway, when I didn’t have something to worry about that concerned Elín either directly or indirectly. Part of me wished she would make good on her threat to leave, and the sooner the better. She had to realise that with Reykjavík being such a small town she would hit black ice sooner or later with this little scheme of hers and wind up in a ditch. More than likely with her head in a puddle and her knickers around her ankles. Whatever the price of happiness was for Elín, it seemed inevitable that it would be too much for her to bear and she would end up miserable in any event. Whatever it was that she was so desperately trying to run away from, chances were that it was inside of her. Changing her location was unlikely to make her happy unless she could address the problems that raged within.
As I was re-immersing myself in the Book of Daniel another email arrived demanding my attention. This one was from a legal firm I hadn’t heard of before informing me that my father had decided to sign the deed to his property over to me and that my signature was required on some legal documents. They wanted to know when would be a suitable time for me to sign them at their offices in Hafnarfjörður.
Before I could digest the fact that Dad had done this without so much as mentioning it to me, my phone rang. I picked
it up, making a point of checking the caller ID as I did so. It wasn’t a number from the phone’s address book and as a general rule I don’t normally take calls unless my phone recognises the incoming number. And then, only if I want to speak to the person. It was possible that this was from the solicitors in Hafnarfjörður so I took the call.
The man on the other end of the line identified himself as Detective Grímur Karlsson of the Reykjavík CID. He said he remembered seeing me in a car park in Mosfellsbær recently and that he had something to tell me. I could hear him sucking on a cigarette and could instantly picture the plain-clothes detective leaning against his car outside Inga Björk’s office.
I couldn’t for the life of me think what he might want. It was possible he was just routinely following up on Inga Björk’s recent visitors or maybe she had told him about showing me the note and he wanted to have a quiet word about that.
I told him I remembered seeing him there also and asked him what he wanted. I hoped I hadn’t broken any laws with my online research into King Nebuchadnezzar and his nightmares.
‘There has been an incident at your father’s farm in Hafnarfjörður, Ylfa. A very serious incident, I’m afraid.’
My heart sank in my chest as I found myself unable to breathe or form words properly.
I took a deep breath. ‘Is he all right?’
‘Your father is okay. More than a little shaken, it has to be said, but alive and as well as can be expected under the circumstances. I’m afraid I cannot say the same for the other resident of the property.’
I took another much needed breath and then absorbed what he had actually said.
‘Jóhannes?’ I mumbled to myself as much as to Grímur.
‘We received a call from a man delivering feed for the horses to your father’s property. When he arrived he made a rather disturbing discovery in the stables. It appears that there was a serious assault on the young man who worked there resulting in his death sometime in the early hours of this morning.’
