On A Small Island

by Grant Nicol

  ‘What you’ve heard is right,’ I said. ‘There was a note found in Jóhannes’s mouth, which the police haven’t told anyone about. The text of it I found written down in Jóhannes’s flat in his own handwriting after he was killed. I don’t know how, but he had come across it before he was murdered. It was similar to the one found in Mosfellsbær, and the one left in my sister’s office the night she disappeared. They are all quotes from the Book of Daniel about King Nebuchadnezzar and his bad dreams.’

  I had finally made an impression on Stefán Jón. The look of shock on his face wasn’t faked. I pulled my mobile out and went through my photos until I’d found the picture that I’d taken of Elín’s office wall.

  Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared

  and wrote on the plaster of the wall.

  Stefán Jón jotted it down in his pad nodding to himself intently as he did so. As he busied himself making his notes I wondered how many of his interviewees he brought home with him. I would have asked him but I didn’t really want to know the answer.

  ‘If I found a Bible online do you think that you could find the other two messages for me?’

  Stefán Jón pulled his laptop out of a satchel and waited for it to power up and connect to the Internet. When he had an online copy of the Book of Daníel ready for me to peruse I found the part that had made up the note that Inga Björk had showed me.

  I had a dream that made me afraid.

  As I was lying in my bed,

  images and visions that passed

  through my mind terrified me.

  ‘There’s one more,’ I told him and found the passage that I had seen in amongst the chaotic mess of Jóhannes’s belongings. The very same one that Björn had told me about; the one that had been left in his mouth as he lay dying.

  Let him be drenched with the dew of heaven,

  and let him live with the animals.

  ‘I have no idea what these mean but there has to be something linking each one to the next, don’t you think?’ I asked hoping that Stefán Jón, who was still writing furiously in his pad, might be able to see something in them that I couldn’t.

  When he’d finished writing he looked at me again with that intense air of concentration that he seemed to carry about with him.

  ‘I’m not big on coincidences,’ he began. ‘With these, though, now that I look at them all laid out in front of me like this, there’s more to them than coincidence. They’re a message of some sort. Someone is trying to say something in a rather passive way. The notes are saying something but it’s the actions that they accompany that are telling us the real story.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said. Since Elín disappeared I had entertained so many conflicting theories that I had been getting myself confused. I was ready for someone else to point the way.

  ‘The first note that appears does so at a veterinary clinic that your father deals with. The note is left in place of drugs that are taken and then used in the commission of a terrible crime.

  ‘We cannot be completely sure that the very same drugs were used in the killing of Jóhannes and the horse, but let’s assume for the time being that they were. At the scene of this crime the second note is left. You find the same note in the dead boy’s room and then yet another when your sister simply vanishes into thin air.’

  ‘Now that you put it like that... ’ I began, not really knowing what I made of it all. The way he had laid it all out made it sound simpler and yet more complicated than ever before.

  ‘What the hell do you make of it all?’ I asked. ‘Because I’m more confused now than before we started talking.’

  He smiled a gentle, slightly self-conscious smile suggesting that perhaps I wasn’t the only one.

  ‘If we look at all these things together there has to be one thing that connects them all. A common denominator. Whatever it is has to hold the key to what’s going on. The key to what we don’t as yet understand.’

  ‘And that common denominator is?’ I really wanted to know.

  He looked at me in a way that left me feeling a little colder than it should have. He had a theory somewhere behind those dark brown eyes of his and it was slowly but surely working its way out to meet me.

  ‘I think it’s your father.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘No, I’m not sure about anything. It’s just a theory but he’s the only common thread running between all three events.’

  ‘It’s not just because he wanted to shoot you this morning, is it?’

  It was the first time I’d heard him laugh.

  ‘I would like to think that I’m beyond such petty reasoning.’

  ‘And to think you were saved by a girl in her underwear.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’

  It was my turn to laugh then, the first time I had laughed in quite a while and it did the trick. I don’t know whether he had planned the whole thing or not but I never made it back to Hafnarfjörður and Stefán Jón never made it back to work.

  CHAPTER 15

  Really rather early the next morning I sneaked out of Stefán Jón’s bed and looked about the room for my clothes. He slept right through my clumsy dressing and I had to steal the exact fare for the bus out of his change bowl next to the front door, thereby doubling my feeling of helplessness. I wasn’t at all used to getting around without my car but I wasn’t going to wake him just to demand a lift home. So before shuffling down to the bus station I left him an IOU and a brief note explaining that I had left, but not why.

  A few short blocks of struggling through the wind brought me to the Hlemmur Bus Station from where I would be able to find my way home to Hafnarfjörður and my car. During the twenty minutes that I had to wait for the next bus to arrive I contemplated going into the Central Police Station next door. I figured that if Grímur had anything to tell me he would have done so already and I was hardly the flavour of the month with him any more as it was. I decided not to aggravate the situation any further and just head back to Dad’s place. I suspected Grímur’s silence only hid the fact that they were getting nowhere fast. If Elín was going to surface of her own accord she would have done so by now. The fact that she hadn’t filled me with a sickening fear that I wouldn’t see her again.

  When I got home I found Dad asleep in his bed. Not wanting to disturb him I showered and then took the horses out for a ride one by one even though it was still dark. It was almost nine by the time he made himself visible, which in itself was rather odd. He wasn’t prone to lying in or unnecessary resting but he looked fine and happy enough to see me when I came back.

  ‘This is a pleasant surprise,my girl. What has you up so early this morning? Someone kick you out of their bed?’ he chuckled to himself.

  Although his witticism was remarkably close to the mark, I didn’t want to let on about my night with someone who was, after all, a reporter for a major national newspaper. The last thing he needed was any further encouragement. It was better to let him think whatever he liked and leave it at that.

  ‘Never mind that, what has you sleeping in all day like this? You would almost think you had been feeling a little under the weather lately.’

  He turned and looked at me as if he suspected there were something wrong with me instead.

  ‘That’s enough of your cheek, young lady. There’s nothing wrong with me. I just fancied a lie-in this morning. Aren’t I entitled to one every now and then? It’s not as if I lead a life of leisure like yourself.’

  ‘I’ve just been wondering, that’s all.’

  ‘Wondering what?’

  ‘Why you really wanted to sign the farm over to me now instead of waiting until further down the line. It’s the timing of it that’s got me thinking. Why now? Why not in a year’s time or five years, for that matter? What’s the rush?’

  He looked at me long and hard before replying, the machinery of his mind clearly ticking over furiously.

  ‘What is it you suspect, Ylfa?’

  ‘I�
��m afraid there’s something wrong with you you’re not telling me about.’

  The turmoil began to surface in his eyes once again and then just as it reached the surface, it was gone. Back down to the depths from which it had risen as if it had never been there at all. Someone could almost mistake it for a trick of the light. If you didn’t know him better than that.

  ‘I’m fine, my girl. It’s just as I said before. I want to make sure that it’s you who gets to decide what to do with all this when the time comes. Whenever that may be. There’s no need to worry about that yet, though. I’m not planning on going anywhere anytime soon, I can assure you.’

  I didn’t really have any choice but to leave it at that. I didn’t believe him entirely but whatever it was that was bothering him he wasn’t about to tell me.

  ‘Okay then, but if something was wrong you’d tell me, right?’

  ‘Not everything in life has a hidden meaning, you know, Ylfa. Sometimes things are just what they appear to be and nothing more. I just don’t want any nasty surprises down the track, that’s all.’

  ‘Okay, Dad. If you say so.’

  I had never been less convinced of anything in my life.

  It was time to talk to Kristjana and see what she made of it all. If necessary we would come back together and demand he tell us. If he was sick or even worse then we deserved to know. I knew that once I told Kristjana about my suspicions she wouldn’t let up until she had received a satisfactory answer from the stubborn old fool. In that respect they were definitely cut from the same cloth.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘if you’re lying to me, I’ll never forgive you.’

  Something in his eyes told me that he knew that already. Whether he cared or not was another thing altogether. You can try to scare people into doing the right thing but it didn’t mean they would. Not in my experience, anyway.

  CHAPTER 16

  Sometimes it’s easy to get a bad feeling about things. Far too easy. You get an idea in your head that something’s wrong or that something’s going to happen and the next thing you know it is, or it has. This was one of those times.

  By the time I’d arrived at Stýrimannastígur I had convinced myself that Dad was dying and just wouldn’t tell me. I had left Hafnarfjörður with something of a suspicion and had arrived back in town with the cold hard certainty stuck hard and fast behind my eyes.

  When Kristjana didn’t answer the doorbell I decided to let myself in with my own set of keys. If it was all right for her to do it, then it was all right for me. She was probably just out at the shops picking up a few things and would be back soon. I certainly didn’t feel like standing around in the cold waiting for her.

  Her flat was tiny like mine but was insanely tidy. The girl was a neat fetishist of the worst type. Every time I visited her it hit me just how traumatising my apartment’s constant state of upheaval must be for her. She was as uptight about the place’s appearance as I wasn’t about mine. And it showed.

  One thing I couldn’t place amongst the delicate arrangement of her living room was her beloved cello. It was possible she hadn’t picked it up from Harpa yet but it was unlike her to go very long without it. She stayed closer to it than most mothers did to their children. I took my shoes off at the door, took a seat on her couch and put my feet up.

  She wasn’t answering her phone either, which was slightly odd in itself. She usually only ignored it when she was practising and as far as I knew she always practised at home.

  She had a chair positioned next to the front window expressly for that purpose from which she could watch the world go by on Stýrimannastígur as she played Haydn, Bach or Mozart as her whims took her. Sitting atop her specially appointed chair was a small stack of sheet music. Presumably whatever it was that she wanted to learn next or had just finished learning.

  Boredom must have overtaken my more rational side as I decided to have a look at what it was she had been practising. In hindsight I wish I had never got up from that sofa.

  The top sheet of music was not Haydn or Bach, nor was it Mozart. It wasn’t even music. It was a proclamation. An announcement. A warning that no matter how worried you were about one thing or another, there would always be something else waiting just around the corner to completely take your breath away and drain you of all hope. It wasn’t Dad’s health I was worried about any more.

  His face turned pale

  and he was so frightened

  that his knees knocked together

  and his legs gave way.

  I read the typed page over and over again until I screamed and tore it in half. I ripped it again and again and again as if by destroying its message I could erase what it was trying to say to me. I dialled Stefán Jón’s number and waited for his voice.

  ‘Hello, Ylfa. Where did you disappear to?’

  ‘I’m sorry about that but it’s happened again. She’s gone too, Kristjana’s gone. She’s been taken from her flat and they’ve left a note behind again. It’s Stýrimannastígur 16, Apartment 2. You’ve got to get over here as soon as you can.’

  The rest of the words stuck in my throat and he told me that he’d be there as soon as he could. I hung up wondering what anyone could have possibly done to deserve this. I saw the terror forming in my father’s eyes again. From the dark pools to the surface and back again. A man who had never been afraid of anything in his life. What had he seen with those eyes that had filled him with such dread? Something evil on its way into our life?

  I could hear the window panes straining against the force of the wind. From somewhere out there I heard someone curse as they were blown off their feet. The storm from the west had finally arrived just as they said it would. What could Kristjana possibly have done to bring this upon herself? Up until now I hadn’t figured her as part of all this. My sweet, naive sister had never done anything in her life to threaten anyone else. I sat down on her sofa, put my head in my hands and waited for help to arrive.

  It seemed to take forever but eventually they showed. Stefán Jón was the first to arrive and assured me that the police were on their way as well. One by one I watched them enter and walk around the flat, taking notes and talking to each other but it felt like another world they were operating in, one as distant from mine as another planet.

  Grímur looked at the pile of shredded paper in his hands and grimaced yet again as if by facial expressions alone he would be able to turn back the clock and reconstruct what I had so effectively destroyed.

  ‘I really wish you hadn’t done that, Ylfa.’

  Stefán Jón had appointed himself as go-between for me and Grímur and seemed determined to stand up for me now that I was unable to or simply no longer cared. The bottom line was that I just couldn’t be bothered with the police any more.

  ‘I’m sure she didn’t mean to do it. Try to imagine the strain she’s under right now,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be thinking rationally either.’

  The wind was now blowing so hard outside it sounded as if it was trying to get in through the walls and windows at us. As I sat and stared out of the window I could see men in safety harnesses and hard hats get out of a 4-wheel drive across the street. Someone’s roof had come loose and the corrugated iron was dangling from the building like a flap of skin that needed to be trimmed off or stitched back where it belonged. The 4-wheel drive belonged to a search and rescue team from Hveragerði, some twenty-eight miles to the east of Reykjavík. I could hear one of the men yelling to one of his companions on the other side of the glass. I could hear people talking behind me as well but I didn’t want to turn around. I no longer wanted to know what they had to say. As soon as I possibly could, I would leave. I had to get out of there before I lost my mind.

  ‘She’s destroyed what could potentially be important evidence,’ Grímur continued. ‘I know you don’t see it as a particularly serious matter but I can assure you that it is.’

  ‘The poor girl’s upset, can’t you see that? She’s not in any sort of a state of mind to
be held responsible for her actions. She’s in shock,’ Stefán Jon continued in my defence.

  I loved the fact that he was sticking up for me but I was sick and tired of listening to them argue with each other.

  ‘When she’s ready to talk she can explain herself. Until then I suggest you mind your own business. If she doesn’t start talking soon, I may be left with no alternative but to arrest her.’

  Grímur was getting angrier by the minute.

  ‘You can’t do that, she’s done nothing wrong. Can’t you see that she’s just very upset? It’s only natural. All she needs is a little more time to collect herself and she’ll be fine.’

  ‘She looks fine to me. She’s not helping anyone like this, least of all herself.’

  There were arms placed around me from behind. Comforting is probably what they were supposed to be but all they did was make me feel more trapped than I already did.

  The men across the street got a ladder off the roof of the 4-wheel drive and leant it up against the building with the injured roof. They had bandannas tied around their faces to protect themselves from the freezing wind. I finally turned around and looked at the men behind me. Grímur was the first of them to address me.

  ‘Can you tell me why you tore up this piece of paper, Ylfa? You must have known that wouldn’t be a good idea.’

  ‘Take your time,’ Stefán Jón added as if by thinking about it I would be able to satisfactorily explain myself when all I wanted was my family back.

  ‘It’s really cold out there, can’t you see that? She’s not here and she’s not coming back here. She’s freezing to death out there somewhere. I tore that piece of paper up because they’ve got my sister and I want her back. These notes are mocking you and your inability to help me. My sisters are missing and some crazy bastard wants you to know that he’s smarter than you all are. So why can’t you do anything apart from prove him right?’