Why Did You Lie?

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  Thorbjörg sits up a little more so that she can see out of the window. It feels better to have life before her eyes while she is listening to this tale again. She can’t bring herself to look at her son. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Thröstur told me the article was about a journalist who was thought to have committed suicide in the garage.’ Helgi hesitates a moment, then carries on. ‘He said he had a theory that he’d been murdered, just like you always thought. He said he’d come across an article in the newspaper archives that Dad had been writing, about a paedophile. I didn’t mention that I was connected to the case – I was speechless. And at that point I didn’t mean to do anything bad.

  ‘Bad things have a way of creeping up on you,’ says Thorbjörg consolingly. Outside it has begun to snow and she can’t see anything but the huge flakes floating down past the window.

  ‘It turns out the paedophile rented the garage from you to run a bike repair shop.’

  Thorbjörg closes her eyes. In those days only children and teenagers had ridden bikes, so the customers of the repair shop had mostly been innocent little things. They must have brought their buckled mudguards, tangled chains and broken gears right into the monster’s lair. ‘We didn’t know,’ she said. ‘The man came with the building when we bought it. I remember how surprised I was to come across some children’s bikes he’d left behind when he moved out. No one fetched them. Now I understand why. The poor little souls who owned them!’ The snow is coming down heavily now. ‘I remember him well. A young man, bit of a loner, didn’t talk much. His name was Ívar, I think.’

  ‘That’s right. He doesn’t talk at all now.’ Helgi’s voice is as monotonous as when he embarked on his account. As if he were reading announcements from the Directorate of Fisheries. ‘Thröstur told me Dad had almost finished his article and that it would have been groundbreaking because no one wrote about child abuse in those days. But it never appeared because the editor thought the suicide indicated that Dad hadn’t been in his right mind. What if the article had been wrong? So it never appeared in print and the paedophile got away with nothing but a fright.’ Helgi pauses in his account. ‘But Thröstur told me that Dad made the mistake of confronting Ívar, who naturally packed up and disappeared off the face of the earth. Almost.’

  Thorbjörg tries to connect this with what she remembers from those days. When Ívar had announced out of the blue that he was leaving and then decamped, she had been livid, grumbling about it endlessly, unaware that her Stebbi had been the cause. They couldn’t afford to lose the rental income, so her fury was understandable. But could she have been so unreasonable that Stebbi didn’t dare tell her what lay behind it? From what she remembers, she doesn’t think so, but perhaps she has glossed over the memory. Would it have changed anything if he’d told her? The story would probably have ended the same way, but the police might have listened to her if she could have pointed the finger at Ívar. Still, there’s no point wondering what might have been. It’s hard enough for her to take in what actually happened.

  ‘Then the thunderbolt struck. Thröstur told me he’d found a photo of Ívar among the old papers and it had jogged his memory. He realised that the man in the picture was the same guy who had threatened him and his friends when they were kids, sitting outside the garage, writing down car numbers. They’d seen the man in the picture go into the building and come out again looking shifty. Ívar had clocked them, gone over and threatened them with dire retribution if they told on him. So they’d kept quiet, even when the police interviewed them all separately. They were too scared to tell.’ Helgi clears his throat. ‘I just saw red. In front of me was a man who’d held our future in his hands but was too gutless to do the right thing. If he’d told on Ívar I wouldn’t have grown up as the son of the man who hanged himself and the woman who almost drank herself to death.’

  ‘What do you mean almost?’ Thorbjörg turns back from the window and stares blankly at the wall opposite her bed.

  ‘Thröstur told me he wanted to write the article to make up for the fact that he hadn’t told the truth. He’d suppressed the memory and even bought the same flat without realising that it came with the garage he’d been sitting outside as a boy.’ Helgi snorts. ‘He said he realised now that Ívar had played a part in Dad’s death and wanted to make up for having perverted the course of justice. He was planning to expose Ívar and let the court of public opinion tear him apart. As if that would make everything all right again. He seemed to have no idea of what he and his friends had done to us, to me and you. He didn’t even mention us. If he had, maybe I’d have reacted differently.’

  ‘The police didn’t tell me about those witnesses.’ It was easier to remember that than think about what Helgi was telling her. ‘I bet I could have forced the truth out of the little wretches.’

  Helgi doesn’t listen. He continues his account as if his mother hadn’t spoken. ‘I suggested we stage the hanging, so I could take a picture of the moment before the stool was kicked from under him – and the idiot agreed. He knotted a noose and climbed up with it round his neck. He had his back to me so his face wouldn’t show in the pictures, so all I had to do was kick away the stool. And that’s how it ended. I left and no one got in touch or asked me anything.’

  ‘And the others?’ Thorbjörg sounds even hoarser than before. She longs to ask Helgi for some water but doesn’t want to interrupt his story. She’s desperate to hear it again to make sure she hasn’t misunderstood.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt them. Not at first. Of course they were all equally guilty, the other two even more than Thröstur, in fact. He said they’d refused to comment or even acknowledge what they’d done for the article, whereas he was intending to admit it publicly.’ Helgi shrugs his shoulders casually, as if they’re discussing the weather. ‘I just meant to remind them and give them a chance to correct their past mistake. I sent them some letters I knew they’d understand, but nothing happened. No news, no investigation. Nothing. They were completely unrepentant. Then I began to see things in the right light. Although the business with Thröstur was a mistake, I soon realised that it was fated to be. You can’t go around destroying other people’s lives without suffering the consequences. It shouldn’t work like that. So I saw that it was wrong to let the other two escape scot-free when Thröstur had got his just deserts. After all, he was more like a repentant sinner. The only problem was that Thröstur hadn’t mentioned their names.

  ‘How did you find them out?’

  ‘Do you remember the good cop who sometimes came round to visit us? That guy Örvar?’ Thorbjörg nods. ‘I went to see him and said I’d really like to read the reports about Dad. I asked him very nicely and thanked him sincerely for how kind he’d been to us at the time, when nobody else would listen. He fell for it. Asked me to come back the following day as he’d have to search for them in the archives. When I arrived he handed me the reports and said I could have them. Most of the old files were about to be thrown away so it was lucky I’d come when I did. But he told me to keep it to myself. He wasn’t really supposed to hand them over unofficially like that but in the circumstances – since they were about to be chucked out anyway – it would be simplest for everyone if I just took them. That’s how I found out the names of the other two witnesses, and it wasn’t hard to track them down. He doesn’t seem to have told anyone. Not yet, anyway.’

  Thorbjörg wants to swallow but her mouth is dry. Alas, she didn’t misunderstand anything. ‘There’s no point going on with the story. It’s too late now.’

  ‘I’m going to tell you anyway. I want to; I need to talk about it and you’re the only person who understands. After that I promise never to mention it again.’ Helgi continues his account without giving her another chance to object. ‘As you of all people should know, I’m used to handling alkies, so I went round for a drinking session with Lárus. I’d made contact with him, pretending to have received the same kind of letters as I’d sent him, and that his name had come up in one of them. He was
eager to meet me and I made sure he knocked back a hell of a lot of booze. We talked a load of nonsense; he was almost incoherent and all I had to do was put forward the odd stupid theory about where the letters might have come from. When he passed out, I injected a solution of pills dissolved in spirits into his abdomen through his belly button. Then I waited till he croaked. No one caught on, and I suppose that may have made me a bit careless. Two dead and no repercussions. I should have been more careful.’ For the first time since Helgi began his tale, there is a shade of regret in his voice. ‘I killed the wrong people. A couple of foreigners. I’d been watching them from a distance for several days and I wasn’t to know they weren’t the right people. How could I have known?’

  ‘I don’t know, Helgi dear. I don’t suppose you could.’ Thorbjörg is beginning to wonder if this is a dream. Or a nightmare. Soon she’ll wake up and find nobody sitting in the chair and her son still estranged from her. It would be the better of two evils.

  ‘I waited for my chance, hung around the neighbourhood for several evenings and followed them up to the holiday chalet where they spent three days. Teased them a bit by catching a cat near where I lived that looked like their pet, killing it and putting it on their barbecue. Unfortunately their own cat was always inside – it would have been better to have used the real one. I didn’t get to witness their reaction, as I’d hoped, but it had the desired effect because they fled back to town. I passed them coming from the opposite direction, turned round and followed them home. When the bloke went out again shortly afterwards I seized my chance, rang the bell and the woman opened the door. Before she could say anything I shoved her. She fell, hit her head and was dazed. It didn’t really matter because I’d decided to make it look like she’d fallen downstairs. It’s a two-storey house, you see. After I’d dragged her up to the top and pushed her down a couple of times the bloody man came back. He’d only gone out to fetch a pizza. And he spoke English.’

  ‘Those poor people. I do hope they didn’t have children. You could have done the same to a foreign child as Ívar did to you. Do you realise that?’

  Helgi clearly doesn’t want to hear this, as he ignores his mother’s interruption. ‘I ended up having to kill him too. With some scissors I found in a bathroom upstairs. I dragged the woman into the bedroom and laid her on the bed, then hid behind the door. The man searched the whole house for her then finally came into the bedroom to see what was wrong with her, and I stabbed him in the back. Again and again, until finally he stopped breathing. I left them there and pulled the curtains so nobody could see in. Then I took the house keys away with me and came back that night to get rid of their bodies and remove anything that appeared to belong to them. I didn’t want the owners of the house to suspect anything. Luckily it was near the sea. I brought an old rubber dinghy and my rifle from home, lugged their bodies on board in the dark and tied a few rocks to them to make sure they wouldn’t float. When the dinghy had drifted far enough out I shot a hole in it and it sank. Did you know I was a hunter?’

  The question is bizarrely ordinary compared to all that has gone before. Of everything he has poured out it’s the only detail Thorbjörg would have liked to hear. If only he had come here and told her about himself, what he’d been up to for the past few years and what he did for fun. He could have left out the rest. Every sentence, every syllable. ‘I just can’t listen to any more of this, Helgi dear. I feel so bad when I do because I’m terrified you’re going to be found out.’

  ‘I won’t be. Weirdly, no one seems to suspect me. Everyone’s so satisfied that Ívar’s the bad guy that they have no reason to consider any other angles. No one’s put two and two together and worked out that I’m Stefán’s son. They all just see me as the victim who was lucky to escape with his life. You’re probably the only person who could give me away. And I’d understand that. I never really meant to get away with it. There wasn’t any plan as such. You just have to play some things by ear.’ Helgi smiles at her but his eyes are dead. ‘Of course it’s a pity that four people died who didn’t deserve it. The foreign couple, the husband and the carpenter at the lighthouse. I thought he was Ívar. They’d swapped places in the night. That was me being careless again. I was stressed because I thought we were going to be lifted off shortly. I’d sent the guy some letters and tormented him slowly but surely about what was to come. He was the only person I seriously wanted to kill. But not by pushing him over the cliff. That was too good for him.’

  ‘He was the only one who deserved it, Helgi. Those other people were different. Do you understand that?’ Thorbjörg doesn’t know why she feels this matters. It’s too late now. But he doesn’t hear what she says; catches the words but not their meaning. When he resumes his account it’s as though there has been no interruption. As though he had merely paused to draw breath.

  ‘When I first tracked Ívar down I stalked him for a while and even struck up conversation with him in a bar when I saw that he was drunk and off his guard. He told me he was going out to a lighthouse to do some maintenance work and like a typical drunk he started insisting I come along. He was supposed to be going alone and when I was given permission to go too, I thought it would be no problem. Once we were out there on the rock I could overpower him and force him to pay for what he had done to us. With interest. But it didn’t work out like that. We weren’t alone after all, and I made a mess of things.’

  ‘Yes.’ Thorbjörg has almost lost the power of speech. All she can say is ‘yes’ or ‘no’. She can’t begin to form a coherent sentence.

  ‘But because the idea was to throw myself off the cliff once I’d tortured and killed Ívar, I had to deal with the third witness the evening before we went out to the lighthouse. I only had Saturday to do it, and it didn’t turn out too well. Not at all the way I’d planned. I’d been watching the house in the hope of finding some clever solution to the problem of catching her alone but that didn’t work out. Luckily I still had the keys to the house, though, so that made things easier.’

  Spare me, thinks Thorbjörg and her wish is granted. When Helgi starts speaking again it is about Ívar.

  ‘I took a satnav to the lighthouse with me, which I’d taken from the house because I thought it belonged to the foreigners. The woman’s watch, too, and some of the letters I’d printed out. I put them in Ívar’s bag when he wasn’t looking. Pretty clever. I reckon that was what finally convinced the police of his guilt.’ His expression is proud, as it had been that time he came home with his school report, the spring after his father died. She had barely glanced at the string of A minuses, commented in an offhand way that she used to get straight As herself, then put down the report and lit a cigarette. He had never shown her his marks again after that and she had never shown the slightest interest in his school work.

  Helgi hasn’t touched her since coming into her hospital room. He doesn’t do so now either when he suddenly leans close to her and whispers: ‘To tell the truth, I’m a bit worried about the policewoman, Thröstur’s wife, and that Örvar who gave me the reports. They might put two and two together. Everyone else is satisfied that Ívar was responsible for all the killings.’

  Thorbjörg suddenly finds her voice. ‘She doesn’t know anything, so there’s no need for you to worry about her. And surely he doesn’t either – if they had any doubts, they’d have said so by now.’ She tries to disguise her despair. She’s had enough; this has to stop.

  ‘I’m not so sure.’ Helgi stands up, wincing as the wound in his side catches. ‘I’m not at all sure.’ He smiles his mirthless smile again. ‘The policeman who interviewed me whispered in my ear that she’s involved in some kind of dispute with a colleague she’s lodged a complaint against. He sounds like a total shit. It occurred to me to find out his name, in case I need to take steps to deal with her. It’s extraordinary how easy it is to make people think ill of someone. I’m sure suspicion would fall on him if anything happened to this Nína. At any rate, I can make certain it does.’

 
He goes to the door, then turns to say goodbye. ‘Dad was going to take me on a hunting trip the weekend he died. I haven’t looked forward to anything since then. Not a thing. But I think I’m ready to now.’ He stares at his mother in surprise, as if he’s only just noticed the state she’s in. Then he limps out, calling to her in parting, without looking back: ‘Hope to see you later.’ He closes the door behind him.

  Thorbjörg doesn’t feel able to share the sentiment. To think she had been under the impression that she had been going through hell recently. Now the day of reckoning is well and truly here. Now she will have to pay for all the tears, disappointment, humiliation and heartache she caused her son. But she can’t feel sorry for herself. It’s only what she deserves.

  Fifteen minutes later the door opens and out comes a man of around Nína’s age. She smiles at him but he doesn’t seem to notice her and limps away, one hand pressed to his side. It strikes her as odd that he should be wearing a dressing gown. She raises her eyebrows, rises to her feet and enters Thorbjörg’s room. The woman is gazing up at the ceiling, her belly as distended as it was the last time Nína saw her.

  ‘Hello. Remember me?’ Nína smiles awkwardly at the woman, who turns her head slowly towards her. ‘I won’t bother you for long. I just wanted to say a few words.’ The woman’s expression is not what she had been hoping for. The yellow eyes stare wildly at her as if Nína had threatened to set fire to her pillow. ‘I’ll come back later if it’s a bad moment.’

  ‘Yes, that’d be better. I need to be alone for a while.’ The hoarse voice trembles a little and the look of terror intensifies, as if she fears Nína more than anything else in the world.