The Reckoning

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  The worst part was that he had brought Freyja, the director of the Children’s House, down with him. The Child Protection Agency, unable to forgive her for shooting a man at her workplace, had relegated her to the position of ordinary child psychologist.

  Really, they should both be grateful they weren’t tramping the streets in search of a job.

  Not that gratitude was uppermost in Freyja’s mind. On the rare occasions their paths had crossed following the fateful events at the Children’s House, she had scarcely deigned to look at him. She was seething with anger and there was no doubt that it was directed at him. Huldar grimaced at the memory. He had still entertained hopes they could get together, despite an awkward beginning, an uneven middle section and a catastrophic finale. He had only himself to blame; their first encounter had set the tone and it was astonishing that he had managed to get back in her good books at all, even if the truce was short-lived. Burnt by his previous encounters with women while out clubbing, he had posed as a carpenter the first time he met Freyja and spent the night with her under false pretences. Few women he met were attracted to cops. To make matters worse, he had fobbed her off with his middle name, Jónas. Later, when their paths crossed during the murder inquiry that was to put both their professional reputations through the shredder, the whole sordid deception had been exposed: carpenter Jónas had been forced to introduce himself as Huldar from the Police Commissioner’s office.

  Still, what had happened once could happen again. Maybe he would get another chance. The thought cheered him.

  He smiled at the young policeman sitting opposite. The youth returned his smile shyly, then dropped his eyes to his computer again. The screen couldn’t show much of interest; he had joined CID so recently that he was even lower in the ranks than Huldar – as low as it was possible to get. But although the rookie was currently the only person in the department who enjoyed less respect than Huldar, that state of affairs was unlikely to last long.

  ‘Rushed off your feet?’ Huldar was careful to keep the mocking note out of his voice. The boy was absurdly sensitive. It wouldn’t hurt him to toughen up a bit, but someone else could take responsibility for that. Huldar had enough on his mind without worrying about detectives who were still wet behind the ears.

  ‘Yes. No.’ Above the monitor the young man’s forehead turned bright red.

  ‘Is that a yes or a no?’

  ‘No. I’m not rushed off my feet. But I’ve got plenty to do.’

  ‘You know, there are advantages to our having little or nothing to do. From the public’s perspective at least.’ Huldar sat down and pulled over the documents. The sooner he sorted out this nonsense, the better. He curbed an urge to sigh as he skimmed through the childish handwriting on the top page. In 2016 there will be no need for cars. Instead there will be little helicopters that run on solar batteries. A cure will be found for cancer and all other serious diseases. No one will die until they’re a hundred and thirty. Iceland will still be the best country in the world! Elín, 9–C. The signature was accompanied by two hearts and two smiley faces. It was the first time he could remember encountering a smiley face in his line of work.

  ‘Would you swap your car for a solar-powered chopper?’ Huldar pulled aside a couple of slats in the blinds and peered out of the window. The grey winter daylight would hardly provide enough energy to allow a helicopter to take off, let alone stay aloft.

  ‘What?’ From the young man’s tone, he seemed to regard this as some kind of test.

  ‘Nothing.’ Huldar didn’t have the energy to explain. He had gone to a bar with some mates last night, stayed up too late and had one too many beers. Either the boy hadn’t heard about the case Huldar had been given, or he was too slow to make the connection.

  ‘Do we have access to a helicopter?’

  ‘Yes.’ Huldar immediately regretted this answer and corrected himself. ‘No. We don’t have a chopper. I’ve just got to read these predictions about the future written by a bunch of school kids ten years ago. This is one of them – that we’ll travel around in solar-powered choppers. Probably not the stupidest idea I’ll come across while slogging through them.’

  The young man rolled his chair sideways so he could see Huldar’s face. His name was Gudlaugur but he was always known as Gulli at the station, in spite of his protests. No doubt he would remain Gulli until he had proved himself as one of the team – if he proved himself. Not everyone lasted the course. ‘Why do you have to do that?’

  ‘Because they found a weird message among them and the headteacher contacted the police.’ Huldar handed Gulli the photocopy of the helicopter letter. ‘At the time their school was twinned with a school in the States, and one of their joint initiatives was to bury a time capsule in the playground. The idea was to dig it up ten years later and compare the kids’ predictions about the future. All the year nine children wrote down what they thought Iceland would be like in 2016, then their letters were put in the time capsule. So far so good, except that one of them seems to have taken it into his head to predict some murders. My job is to try and track down the author so the psychiatrists can decide if he constitutes a threat. Personally, I doubt it, but I’ve got to look into the matter anyway.’

  ‘Who does he say he’s going to kill?’

  ‘A whole list. He mentions six people. Actually, he doesn’t give their names, only their initials. And in two cases only one initial.’ Huldar leafed through the papers in search of the offending letter. The school had given him photocopies of the others but the original of this one. The secretary had made a face as she handed it over, then looked relieved that it was now somebody else’s problem.

  Gudlaugur watched him flicking through the pile. Huldar couldn’t deny that it was a nice feeling to have a colleague show an interest in what he was doing for once. It was quite a while since that had last happened. Pity the case was such a waste of time.

  ‘Why not just talk to the relevant pupil? It can’t be that difficult to track him down.’

  ‘The letter’s unsigned.’

  ‘What are you going to do, then? Find out who didn’t put a letter in the time capsule? Compare the handwriting to old homework?’

  ‘Something like that. There’s one more letter than there were pupils in year nine at the time, which suggests that the writer submitted two. So I need to compare the murder letter to the others from the capsule. Shame the kids all had such bloody awful handwriting. The boys, at least.’

  ‘Was it a boy?’

  ‘I assume so, considering how messy the writing is. Or maybe a girl who wrote with her left hand.’

  ‘Any fingerprints?’

  Huldar laughed. ‘Yeah, right. Like I’m going to get permission to run the fingerprints off sixty-five letters by a bunch of teenagers through the lab. For that I’d need at least one corpse. And preferably all six.’ He pulled out the threatening letter and read it to himself again. In 2016 the following people are going to die: K, S, BT, JJ, OV and I. Nobody will miss them. Least of all me. I can’t wait. No smiley faces or hearts here.

  ‘So you reckon all these people are still alive?’

  ‘I’m reasonably sure, though as I’ve got nothing but initials to go on I can’t be a hundred per cent positive.’ Huldar passed Gudlaugur the letter. ‘The school secretary says no one with these initials has been murdered in the last ten years. She did add that one man whose name began with a K had been killed in 2013, but the person responsible has been convicted and wasn’t a former pupil or the right age. Of course I’ll have to check for myself, but even a school secretary should be capable of running through the short list of people murdered in this country.’

  Gudlaugur said nothing until he had finished reading. Then he looked at Huldar with an unfathomable expression. His face was still soft, his nose and cheeks were strewn with freckles and there wasn’t the slightest hint of five o’clock shadow on his jaw. He must be in his late twenties, only a little older than the anonymous letter-writer would be today. �
��There’s a Wikipedia page.’ Gudlaugur blushed again, which made him look even younger. ‘On Icelandic murders.’

  Huldar raised his eyebrows. ‘Maintained by you?’ he asked, a little scornfully.

  ‘No. I just wanted to draw your attention to it. You can save time by checking the names of all Iceland’s murder victims there.’

  Huldar regretted his momentary lapse into mockery. He’d do better to befriend the young man – he could do with a few allies at work. But there was no time to make amends. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Erla bearing down on them, wearing her coat. He sent up a fervent prayer that she wasn’t about to drag him out of the office with her. He’d only just come in and the storm that had been forecast was already starting to show its claws. But it just wasn’t his lucky day.

  * * *

  It was the forty-fifth area of low pressure to rage over Iceland that winter. Each one seemed more violent than the last. You’d have thought the weather gods had entered into an abusive relationship with the island and revelled in giving it a regular battering. As if in support of this idea, a gust blew a wet leaf smack into Huldar’s face. It stuck, cold and slimy, to his cheek. When he raised numb fingers to his face, the leaf stuck to his hand instead. He shook it vigorously and the leaf spun away across the garden.

  ‘Found anything?’ Erla was struggling to keep her balance. Her long black police parka was acting like a sail and she turned side on to the wind, understandably reluctant to fall flat on her face in front of him. Their interactions had become rather strained since he’d been demoted and she was given his job. The awkwardness was entirely on Erla’s side: he didn’t bear her any grudge. Someone had to do the job, so why not her? To his mind she was a bit crude and tactless for the role, but perhaps that was part of the reason she had been chosen. The police were under pressure to promote more women, and with Erla they got the best of both worlds: a woman who behaved every bit as loutishly as her male colleagues.

  ‘No. Can’t find a thing. Nothing untoward, anyway. It’s just an ordinary garden with the usual junk.’ He nodded towards a battered trampoline securely tethered at the other end of the lawn. It had clearly been a while since any child had bounced on it; the fabric had rotted away until only the metal frame and a few springs remained. Huldar rapped the top of a rusty barbecue, but didn’t bother to draw Erla’s attention to the hot tub as she couldn’t miss it. No one could fail to see how ordinary the garden was. ‘It must have been a prank, don’t you think?’

  ‘A prank?’ Erla surveyed the garden as an excuse to avoid Huldar’s gaze. From under her hood she watched Gudlaugur poking around with a pole in a leafless bush in search of goodness knows what. A few withered leaves, like the one that had plastered itself onto Huldar’s face, whirled up into the air. Erla turned back to Huldar, careful to focus on his chin, not his eyes. ‘I can’t see what’s so fucking funny.’

  Huldar shrugged. ‘No. Me neither.’ He was having a hard time seeing the amusing side of being tricked into going out in this weather. The joke certainly wasn’t calculated to generate any warm feelings towards the prankster. On the way there Erla had told them that a message had arrived shortly after midday, addressed to her, stating that there was something in this garden that might be of interest to the police. The letter was anonymous and contained no further details. ‘Should we maybe call it a day?’

  Erla met his eye at last and Huldar realised he’d have done better to have kept his mouth shut.

  ‘No. We’ll bloody well look harder.’

  ‘OK. No problem.’ Huldar stretched his lips into a smile that was gone almost instantly; it was hard to pretend he didn’t mind being forced to stay out here. He watched Erla’s progress. She was unsteady on her legs in the gale but clearly determined to get the better of it. He turned back to the decking and peered around for potential hiding places. It would have been easier if they’d had a clue what they were looking for.

  There was a rattle from the hot tub and Huldar saw the heavy lid lift slightly, then bang down again. Over the howling of the wind he heard the creaking of the fastenings. There was a small door in the casing of the tub, which Huldar had not yet investigated, so he walked over to it under the watchful eyes of the house-owner upstairs. The man, whose name was Benedikt, hadn’t taken too kindly to their visit, seeming unable to grasp what exactly was going on. It seemed unlikely that he had anything to do with the anonymous message; astonishment that genuine would have been hard to fake. He looked like someone who had recently retired, one of those domineering old gits used to being listened to, the type who had trouble adjusting to the fact that those days were over.

  Huldar waved and smiled again. All he received in reply was a frown and a gesture that probably meant he should leave the hot tub alone. The guy couldn’t be thinking Huldar was planning to jump in; no doubt he was more worried about what would happen to the lid if the fastenings were tampered with. Huldar, who had no intention of touching them, nodded to him reassuringly.

  The only things behind the little door were a pump and some pipes. When Huldar poked his head inside to make sure there was nothing lurking behind the tangle of pipes, he banged it hard on the wooden casing, which emitted a creak of protest. This was turning out to be a complete wild-goose chase. If he ever got his hands on the person who’d written that letter, it would be tempting to give them a lump like the one that was now forming on his head. One punch would hardly matter. His reputation was already mud.

  Huldar closed the door and straightened up. He rubbed his sore head as he surveyed the dusk-filled garden. They had combed it pretty thoroughly, more thoroughly than the front garden. He hoped Erla wouldn’t get it into her head to search that again. The old man had stood at the window, yelping at regular intervals that they were to be careful of the flowers, which was a bit of a joke, given the time of year. Only bare stalks could be seen.

  Huldar swept back his hair. The wind responded by whipping it over his forehead again. A pointless waste of time, like every other aspect of this job. Where should he look next? Huldar walked around the garden, trying to spot a likely hiding place. Erla and Gudlaugur were wandering around in a similarly aimless fashion, the young man still with his pole in the air. Huldar went back and perched on the hot tub, relishing the warm steam escaping from the gaps around the lid.

  There was nothing of interest here.

  The letter must be a bad joke – unless someone had got here first and removed whatever they were supposed to be looking for. Perhaps some parents had found drugs in their teenager’s room and wanted to hand them over to the police without getting their child into trouble. The teenager could have followed and retrieved the stash after they had left. Far-fetched. Very far-fetched. It would be much simpler for the parents to flush the drugs down the toilet than put themselves through all that hassle.

  Without warning, the wind dropped and the hot steam rose up Huldar’s body until it was playing over his face. It carried a faint whiff that he recognised. The iron tang of blood.

  Leaping to his feet, he unfastened the lid. There was an urgent banging on the window upstairs.

  It took Huldar a moment or two to work out what the things floating in the tub were, but once his brain had processed the strange messages it was receiving, he took an involuntary step backwards, losing his grip on the heavy lid. The wind, seizing its chance, hurled it back so violently that the hinges gave way. The lid began to scrape back and forth on the decking, dangling from a single fastening. But when Huldar glanced up to see the owner’s reaction, the old man’s face registered not rage but disbelief.

  Disbelief and horror.

  Huldar hurriedly grabbed hold of the lid and battled to drag it back into place. He yelled to Erla and Gudlaugur for help. Another blast snatched at it. His arm muscles ached as though they were on fire. But he couldn’t tear his eyes away. He felt a sudden heartfelt wish to be back dealing with the trivial little school matter.

  For there, floating in the red-stained water, w
ere two human hands.

  Chapter 2

  Things had been quiet at the Children’s House for several days now and this morning was no exception. Freyja had been the last one in and the front door hadn’t opened since, while the phone in reception remained stubbornly silent. It was as if winter had sapped all the energy from the country’s child abusers. Fed up though she was with the endless cycle of storms and thaws, Freyja was ready to forgive the weather if it really was having that effect. She’d seen too many broken children, listened to too many grim descriptions of mistreatment, not to be grateful. All the world’s storms were welcome here, if this was the outcome.

  A gust rattled the window, as if instantly taking her up on the invitation. Freyja sighed. She wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable hassle of scraping her windscreen and offered up a silent prayer that for once the heater in her wreck of a car would work. The thought made her shiver. To warm herself up, she reminded herself that winter had its plus sides. As long as the weather was this bad at least she had a break from the pestering of her friends who couldn’t hear of a hill within ten hours’ hike of Reykjavík without wanting to drag her up it.

  ‘Freyja. I’d put away any breakable objects, if I were you. Looks to me like you’ve got a visitor.’ Elsa, the centre’s new director, was standing in the doorway of the cramped little office that Freyja had been allocated after her demotion. The woman, who was around fifty, had been head of a department at the Child Protection Agency before taking over from Freyja after the debacle. It wasn’t considered appropriate for a person who had shot someone to be director of the centre. Even though it was in self-defence. Her bosses had feared a media backlash; that doubt would be cast on her fitness for the role, not least because her brother Baldur was in prison. Fortunately, the agency’s worst fears had not been realised, but by then she had lost the job she loved.