On A Small Island

by Grant Nicol

  He would have to be intrigued by the card though. As long as he actually got it, that was.

  By the time I got back to the flat, I was exhausted. Possibly more from the nervous energy I had been expending than anything else. I hadn’t planned on falling asleep on the sofa and got a real shock when my phone woke me up. I checked the caller ID and saw that the number was withheld. I answered it anyway.

  ‘Hello,’ I said as confidently as I could. I wasn’t convincing myself so I doubted that I would have sounded any different to whoever was on the other end.

  ‘Hello yourself. What the fuck do you think you’re playing at, you stupid little girl?’

  It was Aron; my visit to his house had had the desired effect. It had got a response out of him.

  ‘I want my sister back. What do you think I want?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know where that stupid bitch is and if she’s got any brains she’ll keep it that way. You girls must have some sort of death wish.’

  ‘I know all about what she was trying to do to you and I know you’re the reason she’s gone missing. If you just tell me where I can find her we can forget about all that other nonsense and get back to our lives the way they were before but if you’ve done anything to her I will go out of my way to see that you are ruined.’

  He almost laughed when I said that but this time it was him that didn’t sound too convincing.

  ‘If you ever come anywhere near my house or my family again... ’

  He took a deep breath as he tried to compose himself. I kept silent and waited for him to continue.

  ‘What the hell were you thinking? If you’re looking for trouble you are most certainly going to find it. I know exactly who you are, Ylfa, and you had better remember that. If something has happened to Elín, it had nothing to do with me. She probably just got what was coming to her.’

  ‘I have a copy of that tape myself, Aron, just you keep that in mind. If you don’t tell me where she is I’m going to make sure that a lot more people get to see it. Your wife, just for starters. Does she have an email address, Aron?’

  ‘Don’t try to fuck with me on this, young lady. If you do, you will simply disappear.’

  And with that finality, he hung up on me.

  CHAPTER 12

  I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do next but I wasn’t about to let that rich, arrogant man get away with treating me that way. In his business life he was probably very used to getting his own way but that was all about to change. I was convinced he and his hairy biker friend were the ones behind Elín vanishing off the face of the earth, and I had in my possession the proof necessary to make people believe me. Elín may not have known what she was doing when she embarked on her ill-advised foray into the world of extortion and blackmailing but she knew what she was doing when she sent me that email. There was no way I would be dismissed as easily as that again.

  I spent the next few hours doing a bit of editing on my laptop with the footage that Elín had attached to her email. What I came up with was a very short film, which didn’t show much more than Aron Steingrímsson rolling off my sister and walking out of the room once he had finished his business with her. I tried to edit it so that there was no unnecessary frontal nudity involved but in order to get a good shot of his face it was unavoidable. It was imperative that whoever watched my five-second creation would be able to pick out his face and easily identify him. Anyway, the whole idea was to make it as embarrassing as possible for him.

  My next job was to write a cover letter and send it to my intended target, or targets. The threat I had hinted at about sending it to Aron’s wife was probably my first choice but I had no idea what the poor lady’s email address was. As such, I was forced to come up with another plan. One that would force Aron to answer some very tricky questions. Ones he couldn’t simply brush aside and ignore.

  I found the general enquiry email address for the country’s biggest newspaper, Fréttablaðið, and attached my little masterpiece to it. I left the recipient in no doubt as to who the naked man in the film was just in case they thought it was some sort of hoax and explained that the woman he was with was my sister and that she was missing, presumed kidnapped.

  I told them I was convinced that Aron was responsible for her disappearance because of their affair and the fact that she had attempted to blackmail him with the full-length version of what they were just about to watch. I also said that if they were interested in the rest of the story all they had to do was contact me and I would fill them in. I left my mobile as a contact number and signed off. Just before I sent it I felt a small pang of guilt that I might wind up helping a newspaper make its money but the need to expose Aron overrode it. I had no idea who read the incoming emails for the newspaper but I was confident that it would eventually find its way into the hands of the right person.

  Once that was done, my next stop had to be Grandavegur again. I wanted to see if the hairy biker who had almost run me over outside Elín’s offices on Borgartún was still around. If he was, I had some fairly pressing questions for him. As far as I could tell, he could quite easily have been the last person to see Elín before she disappeared and if that was the case, then I needed to talk to him. He could quite easily know exactly where she was also.

  After checking the house on Grandavegur and finding that there was no one home, I parked at the end of the street nearest Álagrandi and waited. The end I was sitting at was the only entrance to the street, the other being a dead end, so I would have a good view of everyone coming or going. I had stocked up on coffee and a couple of sandwiches on the way and settled in to wait for any signs of the motorbike man or any other visitors to the house. Eventually, though, boredom started to take its toll and I reclined the seat to make things more comfortable for myself.

  Unless he arrived on foot I would still hear anybody approaching and even if he was walking I was sure that I would see anyone passing the car. There were few people out and about on the footpaths and only the occasional car passed either into or out of the street. At one point I got out and went for a walk back down the end of the street, just to stretch my legs more than anything else. I peered through the big glass doors at the front of the house once more.

  The place looked completely uninhabited; even the bottles and ashtrays that had been visible the other night had been tidied up. It was possible that whoever I had seen talking to Aron in there had only been a temporary visitor and had cleared out as soon as he had been paid for his dirty work.

  About five and a half hours later I decided I was wasting my time and decided to head back to Vesturgata. My legs were getting stiff and I badly needed to use the toilet after my large coffee. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might not be the only one doing a bit of covert detective work but it probably should have. If I was so interested in Aron and his henchman then it would make sense that they had taken something of an interest in me and what I was up to. I had taken Aron’s bluster and rhetoric with a pinch of salt and had thought that he had just been trying to scare me off. But, if he was responsible for kidnapping Elín then it made sense that he would go to pretty much any lengths to protect his own interests.

  As soon as I walked into my flat it was obvious that I should have taken him much more seriously. Someone had broken into it while I had been staking out the house on Grandavegur and their investigations within my home had been somewhat thorough. My living room had been turned upside down, my canvasses tossed about the place like playing cards strewn across a table top. I checked the rest of the flat to see if anything was missing or if they had just decided to mess the place up a bit. They had emptied every drawer and every cupboard but the only thing I couldn’t find was my laptop. That was definitely gone.

  If anything else had been taken, its absence would only become clear a little further down the line. I didn’t have the energy to do anything more than a rather perfunctory clean-up. To get the place right again would have taken me all ni
ght and it was more important that I got some sleep. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who was responsible for my flat being invaded and I wanted some rest before I made my point to him early the next morning in a way he would never forget.

  I rang work and blew off my shifts for the rest of the week. My supervisor Kristrún wasn’t at all happy about my late notice; she was already struggling to cope with the extra demand that the festival brought with it every year. On top of that, most of the staff had already taken the week off to go see the bands rather than working but when I explained everything that had been going on she relented.

  I was up again before most of the city would have risen from their beds but that was the whole idea. I showered and fixed myself a coffee before once again ignoring the state of the living room and heading back out of the front door. I was used to the place looking like a dump anyway. I had a destiny with an address halfway up Túngata and the mess in my flat would once again just have to wait. Getting even was the only thing on my mind and it just couldn’t wait.

  Once again I sat in my little car and waited for something to happen. As I had no idea what time Aron and his household rose in the morning I thought it would be a good idea to arrive as early as I could and just wait. The only problem with that logic was that I once again found myself waiting, and waiting, and waiting for something to happen. The first sign of movement I saw was the automatic garage doors opening and Aron driving out in his Mercedes. I noted the time – 6.45 a.m. – for future reference, and let him get on his way to work. It wasn’t him that I wanted to talk to, anyway.

  I was going to take a more indirect approach this time around. If I really wanted to hurt him, it was his family that I was going to have to go after. Eventually, the rest of them showed. At around 8.30 a.m. the garage doors opened once again and the two kids and his wife got into a Volvo and headed off to school. I thought about following them but I didn’t really want to know where the little ones went to school. What I wanted was to speak to his wife, Róshildur. So I waited patiently for her to return, hoping that she didn’t have anything too important to do on the way home. About twenty minutes later she reappeared and waited for the automatic gates at the end of the driveway to open.

  It was the opportunity I had been waiting for so I launched myself out of the car and made my way hurriedly across the street to her. She saw me approaching and had a slightly puzzled look on her face as I waved at her. She pulled the car into the driveway but then got out to see what it was that I wanted. I made my way through the gate onto the driveway and tried my best to give her a convincing smile. She did not, however, look at all convinced.

  ‘Hello, I was wondering if I could have a word with you.’

  My greeting elicited no noticeable response from her so I simply continued.

  ‘My name is Ylfa Einarsdóttir and I think we need to talk. Would it be okay if I were to come inside for a few minutes?’

  That managed to get her to raise one of her eyebrows slightly at least.

  ‘Would you mind telling me first what it is that you think we need to talk about, Ylfa?’

  I nodded vigorously as if I thoroughly understood her need for an explanation before I launched into my diatribe. All the same, what I really understood was that she should have been sitting down before I told her about what her husband had been getting up to with my sister and why I very much wanted to see him go to prison.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, a little background information was needed here to put her in the picture but not so much that it would scare her off.‘My sister Elín went missing recently and as it turns out, she knows your husband.’

  The eyebrow raised itself a little higher. She suspected already that she was not going to enjoy where this was going. She couldn’t possibly have had any idea just how much she wasn’t going to like it, though.

  ‘Your husband called me yesterday to tell me that he doesn’t know where she is but I think he’s lying. He threatened me and told me to leave him alone otherwise something might happen to me too. When I got home last night someone had broken into my flat and stolen my computer. There’s something on that computer that he doesn’t want you to see. He was having an affair with my sister and she made a tape of them together.’

  I stopped there to see if the implication would sink in. Róshildur crossed her arms and stared at me. Still she wouldn’t say anything so I had no choice but to continue.

  ‘I know he knows where Elín is and isn’t telling me. All I want is to see her again and to know that she’s all right. She’s not the best person in the world but she doesn’t deserve anything terrible to happen to her either. She’s made some bad decisions, plenty, in fact, but nothing good is going to come of him harming her in any way.’

  ‘Young lady, you are obviously out of your mind. I want you to leave now and if I see you again anywhere near our house I shall have no hesitation in calling the police. Do you understand me?’

  I looked at her imploring her to see the sense in what I was saying but there was no hope of that occurring, not in the short term at least.

  Once again I probably sounded like a crazy woman and the only way that she was going to believe me was if she saw it with her own eyes. Hopefully in tomorrow’s morning paper.

  ‘If he doesn’t want to talk to me about where she is I will send a copy of that tape to every newspaper and television station in the country one by one until your husband is ruined. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Get away from me, you vile creature,’ she hissed. And with that she got back into the Volvo and drove it into the garage, closing the door behind her.

  I had tried being reasonable and it hadn’t worked. I wasn’t going to be ignored again. This family was going to have to listen to me one way or another. As the electric gates closed behind me, I strode up to the front door and started pounding on it as hard as I could. I started screaming at the top of my lungs that she had better come and open the door. Of course she didn’t. Only a truly mad woman would have.

  I told her that her husband was a fraud and that I had seen him having sex with my sister with my own eyes. I said it nice and loud so that the neighbours would have no problem hearing me. I told her that unless she let me in they would be on the front page of the papers tomorrow and that I wouldn’t stop until either I had my sister back or they were both the laughing stock of Reykjavík.

  It took a lot less time than I had anticipated for the police to show up. I guess if you’re rich then you get things to happen for you much more quickly than other people do. Two officers got out of their car and walked towards the driveway gate, which opened miraculously before them much as the sea once parted for Moses. As they walked up the driveway I tried hard to find a smile but I seemed to be all out of them and the expressions on the faces of the two police officers seemed to say that it was not a smiling matter that they were here for anyway.

  They told me that they had received a complaint from several members of the public about my early-morning behaviour and that they would like me to come with them. I told them that I seemed to have got all the yelling out of my system but they assured me it would still be a good idea if I went with them. Nothing about their demeanour suggested that they were kidding so I decided that I should probably do as they said. The option of running for my car and making an improbable getaway was likely to be yet another poor choice in a morning already full of them.

  When I got into the back of their car I told them that all they had to do was talk to Detective Grímur Karlsson and he would tell them who I was and that I was all right. I was just under a great deal of pressure at the moment but it would pass and then I would be okay again. The one driving started to laugh and I asked him what was so funny.

  ‘It was Grímur who told us to take you back to the station and that we shouldn’t listen to a thing you said.’

  As they turned the car around and pointed it back towards the downtown area I could see the figure of Róshildur standing at one of the upstairs windo
ws. She didn’t look as relieved as I thought she might to see me leaving. It was possible that I had given her something to think about after all. I had certainly given it my best shot.

  CHAPTER 13

  Grímur looked spectacularly unhappy to see me, just about as unhappy as a man could look. He walked into the interview room I had been waiting in for what felt like an hour but was, according to my phone no more than twenty minutes, and took a seat opposite me. He drummed his fingers on the table while staring at me. I was determined to play the aggrieved victim for as long as possible so I just stared back and waited for him to talk.

  ‘I thought that you were a little bit smarter than that, Ylfa. That crap you pulled this morning isn’t going to achieve anything, you know.’

  ‘He had someone break into my flat and steal my laptop. He’s kidnapped my sister and you aren’t doing anything about it. What do you expect me to do?’

  ‘What I expect you to do is let us do our jobs and not make a nuisance of yourself in the meantime. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, is it?’

  ‘You’ve seen the tape Elín made. You’re well aware of just how much Aron has to lose by her making life difficult for him and yet you’re not doing anything about it. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s happened to her. Why is it me in here answering your questions and not him? Just because he’s rich doesn’t mean he’s not a criminal.’

  Grímur held up one of his hands as if to signal that he’d heard enough. He was shaking his head too and looking at me as if I were a silly young girl.

  ‘What we don’t need here is you trying to tell us how to do our jobs or you telling Aron and his family, or anybody else for that matter, what they’ve done with your sister. There is noevidence whatsoever that Aron or anybody associated with him is responsible for Elín going missing.

  ‘We know that she had planned to leave the country and that she failed to make her flight but that doesn’t mean that she was prevented from doing so. On the evidence of her recent behaviour it would be safe to say that she has been acting in an unpredictable manner of late and that her actions have been the result of some seriously questionable judgements.