Trap

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir

  As she spoke the words, Sonja realised what she had lost with Mr José’s death. He had been going to speak to Adam. He had been going to make sure she got Tómas back. But now it was down to Nati.

  ‘Get some towels,’ she said, suddenly in action mode. ‘A whole lot of towels, and black rubbish bags.’

  Nati disappeared while Sonja was left alone with the man who had made her suffer. It had never occurred to her that one day she would be standing and looking down at a dead man under such circumstances, but as it had to happen, it was just as well that it was Mr José. Without him, her world had become slightly less dangerous. He wouldn’t frighten her or torment her ever again.

  She sat down on the arm of the sofa and let out a deep sigh. She felt dizzy and the sensation came over her that she was being carried away on a violent stream, was floating down a rushing river, unable to resist. Mr José was trouble. Alive or dead, he was always trouble.

  61

  It turned out that the Voice of Truth’s name was Marteinn and he lived in a basement flat on Grettisgata, one of the residential streets in the downtown district close to Laugavegur, mostly lined with small, traditional-style timber houses clad with corrugated iron in various colours, so the street would have looked like a rainbow if it were not for some planners in the 1970s allowing hulking concrete blocks to be built between the wooden buildings.

  The smell that hit María as the door opened was so sharp that she almost pulled her scarf up to cover her nose.

  ‘I don’t normally invite anyone in,’ he said, pushing his smudged glasses further up his nose. His shoulders were dusted with dandruff, which had snowed from hair that had probably not seen a pair of scissors in at least a couple of years.

  ‘That’s all right,’ María said with relief, as she had no desire to brave the stench in the apartment. ‘I just wanted to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘Who did you say you work for?’ Behind the grimy spectacles María could make out the suspicion in his eyes.

  ‘The special prosecutor’s office,’ she said. ‘We investigate financial crimes connected to the banking crash.’

  ‘I know what you do,’ he said. ‘But I can’t tell if you’re corrupt or honest. Are you honest?’

  His eyes narrowed and María smiled.

  ‘I think I’m honest,’ she told him. ‘At least, I’ve made every effort to work according to the rules, and I don’t take any money other than my salary. On the other hand, the nature of corruption is such that it’s not easy to tell if you’re working for someone’s individual interests or in the interests of society as a whole.’

  It was an entirely honest answer. She knew too little about Finnur, where he stood in politics, who his family were and exactly how he had obtained the recordings of the calls between Agla and this Ingimar. It could well be that there were shady motives behind his determination to investigate the matter.

  ‘Hmm.’ Marteinn looked her up and down once more, as if he thought he might notice something he hadn’t seen before. ‘So why are you interested in what I know about Ingimar?’

  ‘I’m investigating his links to Agla Margeirsdóttir, who I imagine you’re aware is waiting to appear in court on charges of market manipulation. I’m managing that investigation.’

  ‘Agla laundered money for Ingimar,’ Marteinn said.

  ‘O-kaaay,’ María said, drawling out the second syllable in the hope that he would continue unprompted. She didn’t much enjoy talking to strange people like this.

  He remained silent as a woman holding a young child by the hand walked slowly past on the street. As the entrance to his apartment was on the side of the building, there was little danger that the woman would hear their conversation, but Marteinn´s silence bore witness to his paranoia.

  ‘What money?’ María asked, when the woman was out of sight.

  ‘Ingimar is Iceland’s aluminium kingpin,’ he added and stared at her as if waiting for a reaction.

  ‘The aluminium kingpin?’

  She stared at him questioningly, and this seemed to be the moment he had been waiting for. He suddenly opened up and the words gushed out of him.

  ‘Yeah, didn’t you know? Everyone knows that. He’s the one who has managed the aluminium producers’ contracts with the government and brokered deals for them that are so favourable that nobody is allowed to know just how favourable they are. So why are these contracts so secret, eh? Because they’re so favourable – to the aluminium producers. Do you know how they treat their workers in China? Before the crash the smelters paid for energy, but the agreement with the state, which Ingimar brokered, dictated that the state reimbursed the energy costs while the aluminium companies were finishing their “establishment investments”. But companies like this never finish paying for their establishment costs. They keep on sending invoices. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were still invoicing the government. Iceland’s politicians are idiots. Thank God for the currency controls that keep it in check, for the moment at least. Not that I have any belief in God. Religion is a drug for halfwits. But before the financial crash, Agla and Jóhann Jóhannsson made sure that the bank hid the trail of money that streamed out of the country. Isn’t that money laundering? The currency controls ought to stop it, shouldn’t they?’

  María shrugged. She felt as if an avalanche had rolled over her.

  ‘Do you have any evidence to back this up?’ she asked. ‘Or is this just a theory?’

  ‘That’s the thing with these people. You can never prove anything.’

  ‘Misconduct can often be proved,’ María protested. ‘But that needs documents. It’s not enough to come up with wild theories.’

  ‘Wild theories?’ Marteinn retorted, suddenly agitated. ‘I’ll give you all the proof you need.’ He spun on his heel, back into the apartment, then turned and pointed a finger at her. ‘Wait here,’ he said and María nodded humbly.

  There was no chance that she would sneak in behind him. She would die before she would step inside this rat hole that Marteinn inhabited. The smell told her that he wasn’t in a hurry to empty the rubbish bin, and there was no certainty that there was room for another person in there. The hall on both sides was lined with tall stacks of newspapers, leaving only a narrow passage between them.

  ‘There you are,’ he said, returning with a thick folder that he held out to her. ‘Here’s all the proof you’re going to need.’

  María took the folder. ‘What am I looking for?’ she asked.

  He sighed as if she were a dim student and he were her patient teacher. ‘Look through the annual reports,’ he said. ‘You’ll see what I mean.’

  María thanked him, said her goodbyes, and had hardly set foot on the steps outside when he called to her.

  ‘Remember, you didn’t get this from me,’ he said. ‘If they know that, then you’re putting me in danger.’

  ‘What kind of danger?’ she asked.

  ‘If I wake up in a psychiatric ward, doped to the eyeballs, then I’ll know you were the one who grassed.’

  María stopped herself from sniggering until she was in the car. This visit hadn’t yielded all that much, but it would be as well to take a look through the folder. Any information about the mysterious Ingimar Magnússon would be welcome.

  62

  Sonja used one towel after another, watching them soak up the viscous, dark-red fluid.

  ‘More,’ she told Nati. ‘Get more towels.’

  Nati hurried away and returned with another stack of towels. Sonja took them from her and told her in a determined voice to go and make sure there was nobody in the building, and if any of the servants were in the house, to send them away. She balled the blood-soaked towels and stuffed them into a black rubbish bag, relieved to see that the flow of blood from the corpse seemed to have stopped. Maybe the body had lost all its blood. She debated whether or not to pull out the knife that was still sticking out of Mr José’s chest, but decided against it. It was as well not to touch the knife at all. She could
feel her heart pounding so hard that she was sure that she was about to faint. She dared not touch the corpse, half-convinced that if she did so, Mr José would jump to his feet and lock his hands around her neck again.

  A strange blend of disgust and sympathy filled her thoughts. The iron-tinged smell of blood left her feeling nauseous, and at the same time she couldn’t help but feel a touch of sympathy for the person lying dead in front of her. At one time Mr José had been a little boy, and it was as if the innocence of a child had once again taken up residence in his body. There was a vulnerability in his face that she had not seen in him when he was alive.

  Sonja shook her head as if to remind herself to shake off this sentimentality. She could not afford to be thinking of vulnerable little boys now, because that would lead her mind to Tómas, and she was certain that if she started to think about her son, she would not be able to finish this task.

  She groaned quietly, and clenched her teeth together, then continued to press the towels down on the blood, to soak it up more quickly.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Nati whispered behind her, and Sonja surprised herself by having an answer at her fingertips. It jumped into her mind, as if it had been waiting for just this occasion. Maybe that was exactly what had happened, and for an Icelander, the cold option was always one that was closest to home.

  ‘You’re going to go online, order the biggest deep freezer you can find and have it delivered.’

  ‘And then what?’ Nati wailed. ‘I can’t keep him in a freezer for ever.’

  ‘Not for ever,’ Sonja said. ‘Just a few weeks.’

  Unsure of herself, Nati hesitated, and Sonja could see that she was close to breaking down.

  ‘Go on. Do as I told you,’ she said sharply, trying to inject authority into her voice. It was enough having to deal with a corpse in a pool of blood without needing to cope with the hysterical wife as well.

  Nati left the room and Sonja sat on the sofa, pinching her arm. Wasn’t that what people did when they wanted to be sure that they were awake and not in a dream? The pain in her arm was clear, so there was no doubt that there would be no easy escape. This was no nightmare, but cold, hard reality; her reality. She’d done everything she could to flee, to keep herself and Tómas out of the reach of the man in this house, but it seemed his arms stretched everywhere. She’d been grabbed and pulled back in, right to the centre of the web. But what she found here was not what she could ever have expected.

  The vast pool of blood had become another vast problem to be solved. She would approach this in the same way she did everything else that life had thrown at her up to now. With practicality. With pragmatism. It wasn’t as if she had been the one who had murdered him. There was no need for her to feel the slightest guilt over this man’s death. She drew a deep breath and then sighed.

  She would do what must be done.

  ‘The freezer will be here after two o’clock,’ Nati said as she tiptoed back into the room. ‘What do we do now? What can we do?’ she moaned, the horror close to taking complete control of her body.

  It was then that the animal that had been present in Sonja’s mind since the first time she’d seen it all those months ago seemed to open its jaws. She could almost hear its hungry growls coming from somewhere in the house, telling her the solution to the most bloody of problems she’d had to face.

  ‘When he’s completely frozen it’ll be easier to saw him into pieces,’ Sonja said. ‘Then the tiger can have him, a piece at a time. That way he’ll disappear completely.’

  ‘I can’t cut him up!’ Nati yelped, her hands over her face. ‘I can’t do it!’

  Sonja groaned. It wasn’t a job she would trust herself to do either. But there was someone who would chop up Mr José into tiger food; someone who would even relish the task.

  ‘The Nigerian man who worked for you – Amadou? Is he still in London?’

  June 2011

  63

  All the anger appeared to have been sucked out of Adam. He leaned against the frame of Sonja’s front door, seeming more relaxed and speaking unusually slowly, as if he wanted to be certain that she understood him.

  ‘These trips to Greenland are no problem, Sonja. Just dress like a tourist, hang a big camera round your neck and you’ll be let straight through. The only thing they’re looking out for is Danes smuggling hash. So that’s all their dogs are trained to sniff out.’

  Sonja nodded, taking care to maintain the look of doubt on her face. She had already been prepared for a trip to Greenland, but had dragged her heels over agreeing to go, so as to give herself some leverage over time with Tómas. The week she’d spent in London, waiting for the eruption to subside enough to allow air traffic to Iceland again, had sapped her strength, and the energy had leaked out of her like the charge from a cheap battery. She would have liked a few quiet days to rest, but the hope of some time with Tómas outweighed her fatigue. If there was a chance that she could see him, wrap her arms around him and breathe in the smell of his hair, then she would gladly have left that minute. For him she would have set off for anywhere on Earth.

  ‘And what do I get out of it?’ she asked, and saw a momentary crack appear in Adam’s composure as he gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. During their marriage, that had always been the signal that his temper was about to snap, and Sonja had always given way. She had always dropped her demands or hidden her opinions to keep him quiet and to ward off the bubbling anger that threatened to boil over when he was challenged.

  But now she waited. She no longer cared what the consequences might be. She wouldn’t even have cared were he to punch her in the face. Having pushed herself beyond her own stress thresholds with the smuggling trips and everything that went with them – and most recently clearing up after a murder, and having the body fed to a tiger – there no longer seemed to be much that frightened her. She reflected that there had to be something in the saying that what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.

  ‘You get paid, as usual,’ Adam said, his equilibrium regained. ‘You get paid,’ he repeated. ‘That’s what you get out of it.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sonja said. ‘But you know what I’m driving at.’

  Adam smiled thinly and Sonja wanted to clench her own fists. Only a few years ago, when they had been curled up together on the sofa, laughing with Tómas as he did his best to crawl across the floor in front of them, it would never have occurred to her that he would become the bone of contention between them. He had become more than that, turning into a bargaining point in his parents’ jockeying for position.

  ‘How can I trust you not to skip the country with him again?’

  ‘You can hold onto my passport while he’s with me. I won’t be able to go far without it.’

  ‘You’re so sly that you might have a spare passport hidden away,’ Adam said, stubbornness written across his face; he was never easy to deal with at his most stubborn.

  ‘Adam, before I figured out that you were the one pulling all the strings, I did everything I was told to do out of fear for Tómas. I was terrified that he would be harmed. But now that I know you’re the kingpin, I don’t need to be frightened for him any longer because I know you would never hurt him. That means you no longer have the same hold over me. Give me what I want and I’ll be on my way to Greenland.’

  Sonja took a step back and grabbed the door with one hand, wanting to suggest that she was about to close it. She wasn’t in the mood to use the wheedling tone that had always worked on Adam when they had lived together, the pleading tone. She was not begging anymore. She started to close the door, and this seemed to work as his expression softened.

  ‘You can have him one weekend a month and I keep your passport while he’s with you.’

  ‘Every second weekend, at least,’ Sonja countered.

  Adam thought for a moment. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Every other weekend.’

  64

  ‘Let’s say there’s been … er … a certain amount of pressure appl
ied … to encourage you to retire.’

  Senior Customs Officer Hrafn had an embarrassed look on his face, and rubbed his palms together continuously, as if he were applying hand cream. His office desk was huge and Bragi felt that Hrafn seemed a bit small, sitting on the other side of it. He had come by the customs office in downtown Reykjavík to pick up a new tool-belt and somehow Hrafn had heard he was in the building and called him in.

  ‘Yes,’ Bragi said. ‘I’ve been aware of that.’

  If he had given way to the pressure from above, he would have left long ago. It had been four years since the first hints had been dropped, but he had stood his ground. He had every right to work up to the age of seventy, and that was exactly what he was going to do. He had needed these last few years to put everything straight, to ensure that Valdís’s own last few years would be free of worry – at home with him.

  ‘I needed the cash,’ he continued, although he kept to himself that it wasn’t his customs officer’s salary he meant, but the extra he had been able to earn on top of that.

  ‘I understand, of course,’ Hrafn mumbled, still energetically rubbing his hands together. ‘Your leaving date is set for August,’ he added.

  ‘That’s right,’ Bragi said. ‘I’ll turn seventy on the second of August, which is when I’ll be on my way for good and I’ll be out of your hair.’

  Hrafn shifted uncomfortably in his chair and let out a dry laugh. ‘Well, getting rid of you isn’t exactly a priority, Bragi.’

  ‘How so?’ Bragi’s raised a questioning eyebrow.

  Hrafn squeezed out another awkward laugh. ‘Well, you see … How shall I put it? … The Analysis team is pretty pleased with what you’ve managed in the last couple of weeks, so they are naturally wondering if there’s anything that others can learn from you, whether or not you have any more information that could turn out to be useful.’