Why Did You Lie?

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  Nói took the folded sheet of paper from his son. ‘Where was it?’

  Tumi pointed to the kitchen worktop.

  In the middle of the page was written: Why did you lie? The truth will out. ‘What is this rubbish?’ He could ignore one note with this sort of cryptic message and convince himself that it was a mistake. But two?

  Tumi shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t write it.’

  ‘I didn’t think you did.’ Nói put the note in his pocket with the other. It must have been delivered either before the foreigners arrived or while they were here, or it would have been lying on the floor beside the other note. The family hadn’t visited the chalet since mid-November and it certainly hadn’t been lying on the worktop then. He would hardly have forgotten such a peculiar message. ‘I expect the guests picked it up somewhere without understanding it. Maybe it’s some kind of weird advertisement.’ One more white lie could hardly do the boy any harm.

  ‘Advertisement? What for?’

  ‘Search me. But the note’s obviously nothing to do with us. Perhaps it’s the name of a play. Or a line from a poem.’ Was it possible that the message was part of some peculiar art happening or poem that the poet delivered to houses line by line? Such a thing wasn’t unheard of.

  They lapsed into silence and continued their search until they were sure the keys were nowhere in the chalet. Nói didn’t forget the notes, however, and while he was peering under the beds and running his hands along the shelves he couldn’t stop thinking about the strange messages. After checking all the likely and then the unlikely places, they gave up and decided to head home.

  On the way back to the car Nói went to check the barbecue in the hope of discovering what had upset the guests. He opened the heavy steel lid. On the rack inside lay a dead cat that looked almost exactly like Púki.

  Chapter 17

  23 January 2014

  Nína kept sneezing but had developed the knack of turning away from the shelves when the fit came upon her so as not to blow up even more dust. As always, once she was engrossed in a project, her physical discomfort ceased to bother her. She would have stayed where she was even if she had sneezed every time she drew breath. At last she had a solid lead: a name, a year and a month, more or less. Her neighbour from the ground floor had remembered them as best he could, and although he had been a little uncertain, Nína was almost sure he was right. She would deal with it later if it transpired that he was mistaken. Or that the whole thing was pure coincidence – which she refused to believe. The date the old man had guessed at fitted exactly with the witness statement Thröstur had given the police as a boy. Turning her head, Nína had seen the wall of the garden on the other side of the street. A grey, concrete fence, Thröstur had told the policeman. All that was missing were the phantoms of children perched there with notebooks, on the eternal lookout for cars. Ashen-faced, she had turned back to the man and carried on interrogating him.

  She had bombarded him with such a merciless stream of questions that the old man had backed further and further inside his flat, until the conversation that had begun by the front door had ended halfway down his passage. She could read in his eyes that he regretted ever having brought the subject up and for a while he seemed afraid she might try and shake the information out of him if he didn’t answer quickly and confidently enough. Even Berglind looked disconcerted, though she had the sense to stay out of it.

  The old man had mainly talked about the journalist Stefán’s suicide in the garage thirty years earlier. But Nína also learnt from him that the building already had a bad reputation at the time, as though past generations of children had come to a secret agreement, without the grown-ups’ knowledge, that there was something sinister about the place. For example, there had been a bicycle repair shop there that had closed down in the end because the children refused to take their bikes to it. The workshop owner had been forced to pack up and move his business elsewhere.

  Nína’s neighbour had no idea what basis the children had had for their belief, but the story had lived on among successive generations of kids in the area and even today a hint of their old fear of the garage remained. In the old man’s opinion, Stefán’s suicide must have had a lot to do with it, and now Thröstur’s attempt to follow suit. Perhaps the children imagined that the building itself forced people to kill themselves and were afraid of suffering the same fate.

  As the sisters were saying goodbye to the old man, Nína thanked him for removing the Christmas tree. From his expression she inferred that he hadn’t been responsible. Whatever happened, it was clear she had to sell the flat.

  Nína crammed yet another folder back onto the shelf. Nothing there. She pulled out the next and began leafing through it. Her movements were quick and deft, as she was practised by now. After fine-combing all the files labelled ‘Suicide’, she decided to widen her search in case the reports on Stefán’s death had ended up in the wrong folder. To hell with the fact that she had already gone through most of the files in the basement. She hadn’t been in possession of a name then, so it was perfectly possible that she had overlooked the relevant documents.

  According to her neighbour, the police had spent a good deal of time on the case. The widow had refused to accept that her husband had taken his own life and insisted there must have been another explanation: an accident or maybe something more sinister. She had threatened to go to the press, but the neighbour didn’t remember seeing anything about the incident in the papers. And anyway the widow had been in a state of collapse by the time the police finally closed the case.

  He didn’t know what had become of the woman but he doubted things had turned out well for her. A year after the incident she had abandoned her attempts to keep up the payments on the flat, not least because, shortly before her husband had killed himself, the tenant renting the garage had handed in his notice.

  The old man had talked to Stefán a week before he died. Stefán had knocked on his door to ask if he would be interested in renting the garage from them and admitted that he was dreading having to break it to his wife that their tenant was leaving as they were very hard up just then. His death must have been a terrible blow to the family finances. For all the old man knew, it might have been money worries that had led him to take this desperate way out.

  The widow’s sufferings were far from over, however. Her husband’s suicide left her almost incapable of working and she started drinking heavily. By the time the bank threw her out of the flat, the family was in a wretched state and the impact on her young son had been particularly cruel. If Nína hadn’t just listened to this tragic tale she would have been inclined to burst out laughing when the old man earnestly advised her to steer clear of alcohol, at least for the next year.

  If his account was to be trusted, the police must have written reports about the case. Nína went on flicking through the files, hardly taking in what she read but aware that subconsciously she was classifying the information with great care. This became evident when she finally came across the woman’s name. She gasped inadvertently, the dust-filled air leaving a bad taste in her mouth. Hastily she turned over the pages to find the next report, in the hope that other documents relating to the case would have been filed with it. Not so. Swallowing her disappointment, Nína focused on what she had found.

  She felt her lips moving as she read the file, as they had when she was a little girl learning to sound out her letters. The frisson was the same too; she wanted to ensure she didn’t miss anything. So she read the page again. And again. Afterwards she laid her hands on it, leant back against the wall and closed her eyes while digesting what the text had contained. Really, it was nothing more than a confirmation of what the neighbour had told her. There was no mention of Thröstur or anything to link him to the incident.

  The report was not classified as an investigation into a suicide. That was why Nína had scarcely given it a glance the first time she went through the files. It was just one of countless folders containing reports
about unfortunate souls who had suffered a raw deal. The recently widowed Thorbjörg Hinriksdóttir had telephoned to request police assistance at her home – not for the first time. When they arrived, it transpired that she was not in any danger: what she actually wanted was to discuss the death of her husband six months previously. When asked why she had requested police assistance, Thorbjörg responded that she was fed up with never being put through to anyone when she called and constantly being turfed out of the station. Nobody in the police would talk to her any more. The officers pointed out that wasting police time was a criminal offence but she refused to listen. The author of the report added that the woman had reeked of alcohol and that the empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays littering the flat were evidence of a serious drink problem.

  The woman wanted to draw their attention to what she described as vital information, but judging from the report this did not seem to include any new facts. It all boiled down to her conviction, repeatedly asserted, that Stefán had had no reason to kill himself and that the police had failed to prove otherwise. The officers pointed out that they could hardly be expected to do so; the job of the police was merely to rule out other eventualities and this had been done. The woman then claimed to be in possession of new information about the garage that she believed was relevant. When they questioned her, however, it seemed there was little substance to this. Shortly before his death her husband had apparently made a big issue of telling their son never to enter the garage or go anywhere near it. When the police tried to explain that this was understandable since the building had been full of dangerous tools on account of the workshop on the premises, the woman had blown her top and in the end they had fled under a hail of abuse and accusations of cowardice and a cover-up. The woman’s son had been nowhere to be seen. The report concluded that this situation could not continue and guidance was requested as to how officers should respond to further call-outs. It was also recommended that social services be contacted to check on the boy’s wellbeing.

  Some chance. She knew from experience that the right of parents to mistreat their offspring was much stronger than the child’s right to a safe and happy childhood. If the situation thirty years ago was anything like it was today, the boy had probably been left to fend for himself.

  The ticking of the clock on the wall was driving Nína crazy. Her eyes kept straying to it, only to be reminded how slowly time was passing. Her boss, Örvar, was playing the silent card to lure her into filling the awkward gap with some nonsense that he could then refute. But although there were countless things Nína wanted to say, she was not going to give in. She examined her nails, realised how dirty they were and placed her hands composedly in her lap. Then she looked up and made herself smile at Örvar, to convey the message that she could play this game longer than him if necessary – even if she did look as though she’d been dragged through a hedge backwards after her sojourn in the filthy basement.

  It worked. ‘There are a finite number of ways to commit suicide, Nína. Your husband chose a fairly common … way out. The documents in the basement go back decades and, quite frankly, it would be surprising if you didn’t come across another case that was similar.’

  ‘There are plenty of ways to kill yourself.’ Nína had to discipline her voice to stop it wobbling. She straightened her spine. ‘Are you seriously trying to tell me that it’s only to be expected that Thröstur should have attempted suicide in the same way and in the very same spot as a man who lived in his flat thirty years before, who was also a journalist? Are you saying that doesn’t surprise you at all? Two men of almost the same age, who aren’t known to have suffered any major setbacks that might explain their actions? Don’t you at least find it strange?’

  Örvar looked unwell; he seemed tired and couldn’t hide how much he wanted this conversation to be over. ‘Well, of course it’s a bit odd. But I don’t see what it changes. Do you?’

  ‘I’m just trying to point out that the incidents are weirdly similar and involve a worryingly large number of coincidences. In addition to the fact that when Thröstur was a boy he was mixed up somehow with the first suicide. Surely that must make you a bit curious?’ Nína tried to read her boss’s face. ‘It’s all right for me to look into this, isn’t it? Into why the other reports are missing, I mean? Judging by what it says here, there should have been lots of them.’

  ‘There could be all kinds of explanations for that. Perhaps they ended up in a file belonging to one of the old hands here at the station. Not everything finds its way down to the archives, I can tell you.’ He waved the report. ‘Nína, the affair was investigated at the time, you only have to read this to see that it received far more attention than it warranted. But nothing suspicious seems to have emerged, so the police would have turned to more pressing affairs. The idea of reopening the case thirty years after the event is utterly absurd.’ He replaced the document on his desk and pushed his face towards hers. Instinctively she drew back. ‘I promise you, Nína, we did everything in our power to rule out the possibility of any criminal involvement in your husband’s case. You can hardly believe we would fail to look after one of our own?’

  Nína had to choke back a laugh. The last thing she wanted was to mix up her formal complaint with Thröstur’s case; there was too much at stake, so she couldn’t speak her mind. She cleared her throat. ‘When Thröstur’s death was examined nobody knew about his connection to this old incident. So no one can have looked into it.’

  ‘Connection!’ The word emerged with the force of an expletive and Örvar pulled away from her again. ‘Why not let our imaginations run wild and try to picture what possible crime could be behind all this?’ He cast around as if searching for an answer. ‘Hmm. I just can’t think of any. Can you? If you can come up with a good idea I’ll put someone on the case immediately.’

  Nína opened and closed her mouth several times as if she had been ordered to imitate a fish. ‘I don’t have any theories. If I did, I wouldn’t have bothered asking you to reopen the case.’ The courage she had summoned up in order to confront her boss in his lair had now drained away. ‘I’m trying to do the right thing in the circumstances, by coming to you instead of conducting a private investigation. I’m well aware that I’m not neutral and would run the risk of over-interpreting things.’

  ‘Like now, I’m afraid.’ Örvar hesitated. To give him his due, he didn’t seem to derive any pleasure from speaking to her like this. Quite the opposite, in fact. ‘You’re on a wild-goose chase, Nína. You’re just putting off the inevitable – the need to deal with your own trauma. Unfortunately, the police’s limited finances mean we can’t help you in your search for something that doesn’t exist.’ He glanced at the calendar in his notebook. ‘Take some leave, Nína. You could do with it. I’ll find someone to take over in the basement.’

  Nína licked her dry lips. She did her best to maintain her composure, though she wanted to scream. ‘Maybe I will. Especially if I’m left with no alternative but to investigate the matter myself. Then I’ll need all the free time I can get.’

  Örvar seemed oddly thrown. ‘If you go on leave, Nína, you’re to do just that. You’re not to try and investigate anything.’ He coughed and snapped his diary shut. His bony hand lay on top of it as if he expected the book to spring open of its own accord. The gnarled vein in the back of his hand showed a rapid pulse.

  ‘I won’t be able to help myself. If no one else is going to look into it, I’ll have to do it myself.’ Sometimes it was best to be blunt.

  Her boss emitted a low sigh. ‘This is ridiculous.’ He shook his head. His eyes searched her face while his fingers tried to find some means of occupying themselves on the desktop. ‘There’s no chance this will turn out well, Nína.’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t believe my situation can get any worse.’

  ‘That’s what you think.’ The furrows in his face deepened and filled with shadows. ‘I’m going to suggest a compromise which I hope you’ll accept. It goes against the
grain but I’ve always had time for you. You’re conscientious and tenacious when you want to be, and you’ve often taken on more than your share. I want you to get over this and be yourself again, so I’m going to stick my neck out.’ Unable to resist the temptation, he lapsed into silence again, but Nína was not going to fall for that trick. What was she supposed to say? ‘Thank you so much’? After a brief pause he carried on: ‘I’ll look into it myself, though I doubt I can spare much time. Still, I’ll do my best. What do you say to that?’

  Nína wavered. This was not at all what she had been after. She had been hoping that the police would launch a proper inquiry. ‘OK. But I’m not going on leave. I want to carry on working.’ She would be in a better position to keep Örvar to his promise if she was at the station – and to carry on digging into the case for herself.

  ‘Fine.’ He couldn’t conceal his chagrin. ‘Fine. We’ll leave it at that then. For now.’

  Nína rose to her feet and picked up the report. ‘Thank you.’ She turned in the doorway and their eyes met briefly before she went out into the corridor. She rolled up the report and slapped it on her palm as she tried to bring order to her thoughts. One thing was clear: her boss’s shifty gaze and body language had indicated that he knew a lot more about the case than he was letting on.

  Chapter 18

  27 January 2014

  The blood-soaked sleeping bag lies in a crumpled heap on the floor. They sit huddled around, staring at it as if they expect it to speak if only it could find the right words. All they have been able to agree on since this morning is that they must stop the bag from blowing away, in case it holds the clue to Tóti’s fate. But an argument broke out over how to touch it, since none of them wanted to contaminate it with their DNA or fingerprints. Finally, Helgi took it upon himself to roll it up, armed with plastic bags on both hands. And now it is lying on the floor between them, as a reminder of what has happened.