Gallows Rock - Freyja and Huldar Series 04 (2020)

by Sigurdardottir, Yrsa

  When Erla abandoned the subject, Huldar grabbed the chance to ask about the bodies that had washed up on the shore near the crime scene. ‘So you don’t recognise the bed or Margeir, Sigurlaug Lára or Sigurdur. What about a man by the name of Dagur Didriksson?’

  Thormar was visibly relieved by this change of direction. ‘No, never heard of him.’

  ‘Olgeir Magnússon, then?’

  ‘No, nor him either.’

  ‘What about Maren Thórdardóttir?’

  Thormar hesitated for a fraction of a second before giving the same answer: ‘No.’

  ‘Quite sure?’

  ‘Yes, quite sure.’

  Huldar and Erla contemplated the man silently for a while. His discomfort was palpable as he struggled to sit still and to stop himself from repeatedly licking his lips.

  Finally, Erla gave up and thanked Thormar for coming in. She told him he could expect to hear from them again and asked him not to discuss his interview with anyone, as they still had other people to talk to. Otherwise, he was free to go.

  Thormar didn’t wait to be told twice. He was in such a hurry that he was still pulling on his coat as he strode away down the corridor.

  ‘Did you notice that he didn’t ask how Helgi died?’ Erla was standing at Huldar’s side, her arms folded, eyes following the man’s departing back.

  Huldar nodded.

  ‘The bastard’s hiding something. He’s seen that bed before, he remembers perfectly well why he and Helgi fell out, and I have a hunch he’s heard Maren’s name before as well.’ Erla breathed out forcefully through her nose. ‘But he’s not our killer. He’s way too much of a wuss.’ Without another word, she uncrossed her arms and walked off.

  A few minutes after the door had closed behind Thormar, Huldar tried ringing him on his mobile and wasn’t remotely surprised to find it engaged. Erla’s orders that he shouldn’t discuss the interview with anyone had almost certainly been ignored.

  Chapter 21

  For once Fannar – the very last person Thormar wanted to see right now – was sitting downstairs in the living room. Not that sitting adequately conveyed the boy’s attitude. He might have been made of melted wax as he lounged on the sofa in front of the TV, his long legs propped up on the coffee table. The china bowl that usually stood in the middle was now teetering precariously near the edge. Beside it was a plate with a half-finished slice of his sister’s birthday cake, a chocolate sponge with screamingly pink icing. The magazine that Sigrún had put down by the bowl had fallen on the floor. Thormar doubted it had so much as crossed the boy’s mind to pick it up again, but then he was young enough himself to remember what it had been like to be a teenager.

  Like Fannar, he had regarded everything apart from his own trivial affairs as unbearably boring and lame. The only thing that had mattered were his friends Helgi, Tommi and Gunni. They had understood one another. The only music worth bothering about was the music they listened to. The same applied to films, computer games, cars, clothes and food. Their shared opinions were way more important than anyone else’s: the rest of the world was populated by losers. But of course it hadn’t really been that simple. There had been times when he’d had to pretend to hate something because his friends had dismissed it as uncool. No doubt they had all experienced the same thing, all sacrificed their individual thoughts, opinions and desires for the sake of fitting in.

  Then there had been Anna Gudrún in Year 9. Small, with dark hair, brown eyes and delicate hands that he used to fantasise would feel so warm and soft to the touch. She was forever chewing gum, which gave her sweet minty breath, but always discreetly, never making the ugly smacking noises that some girls did. She was a good student too, always paid attention in class, and used to write her name with a heart instead of an accent over the ‘u’. She wasn’t a rebel, wasn’t cool. And yet he’d had a desperate crush on her. So desperate that he found it hard to concentrate in class if she was sitting in his eyeline. Until one day, during break, Gunni had pulled a face and announced to the group that Anna Gudrún was such a total loser, destroying in one fell swoop Thormar’s dream that she would ever be his. Especially when the others had sniggered in agreement. Being with a girl his friends despised was unthinkable, so he had played along with them, mooning over the school’s most popular girls and exchanging comments about how hot they were. Knowing as well as his friends did that none of those girls would ever so much as glance in their direction.

  The only member of their gang who had managed to pull before they started at sixth-form college was Gunni. He was cocky enough to go up to girls and pester them until they gave in. But none of these girls had come anywhere near the ones the boys fantasised about. And none of them, in Thormar’s private opinion, were any prettier or nicer than Anna Gudrún. But Gunni’s relationships never lasted long – even now. He was fickle and easily bored; always kidding himself that he could do better. Since making a packet at the bank he’d had women coming out of his ears, but if anything this only made it harder for him to settle on one.

  Anna Gudrún, meanwhile, had got together with a boy in the sixth form, who she later married. He’d been in the same year as Thormar throughout his dentistry degree, a constant painful reminder of what might have been – assuming she’d ever have wanted anything to do with Thormar, which was by no means guaranteed.

  Instead of Anna Gudrún, Thormar had ended up with Sigrún. She was eight years older than him, which, contrary to his fears, had met with his friends’ approval. No doubt because she was beautiful, intelligent and good company. Fannar had come as part of the package. At the time he’d been a little boy; a nice kid, just cute enough. Thormar had had no choice but to resign himself to the situation. If he wanted to be with Sigrún, he would have to put up with her son. But over time Thormar had actually become quite fond of him. Until he turned into a typical sulky, lazy, pain-in-the-arse teenager.

  ‘What on earth are you watching?’ The action on screen resembled a computer game, though the boy wasn’t holding a controller. Perhaps Icelandic state TV had started showing them live in an attempt to appeal to a younger audience.

  ‘YouTube.’ Fannar didn’t look up. He just stared, mesmerised, at the lurid nonsense on screen, though his face revealed no pleasure, let alone excitement, at the unfolding action.

  ‘Where’s your mum?’

  The teenager shrugged. Clearly nothing, including his mother, mattered apart from what was happening on screen.

  Thormar was in no mood to try and force a conversation. He had pictured himself coming home and flopping on the sofa – which Fannar had now commandeered – and lying there for a while to recover from his visit to the police station. ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ Fannar shot back, his gaze still fixed on the screen.

  Thormar could feel the rage boiling up inside him but controlled it. It would be extremely unwise to enter into a quarrel with the boy while he was in this mood. Like opening a bottle of Coke that had just been dropped on the floor. However careful you were, it always ended in disaster. So he acted as if he hadn’t heard Fannar’s insolent remark. ‘What’s wrong with the computer in your room?’

  ‘It’s broken.’ Fannar didn’t explain. Anyway, the cause of the problem was irrelevant as Thormar would inevitably have to cover the cost. Fannar’s father, who could barely scrape together the cash for his maintenance, had none left over to pay for incidental costs related to his son. Incidental – ha! – the boy was a constant drain on Thormar’s finances. Not a day passed when he didn’t need money for something or other.

  ‘I’d been looking forward to lying on the sofa myself, actually.’ Thormar threw his coat over the back.

  ‘What am I supposed to do, then? My computer’s not working.’

  ‘You could try doing your homework.’ Thormar loosened his tie, pulled it over his head without undoing the knot and dropped it on top of his coat. ‘You might actually surprise yourself by enjoying it.’

/>   ‘I haven’t got any homework.’ Fannar finally tore his eyes from the screen to look at Thormar. ‘Can I borrow your computer?’

  ‘Absolutely not. I need it myself and I don’t want it getting a virus.’

  ‘I won’t infect it with a virus.’ Fannar rolled his eyes as if the idea was totally absurd.

  ‘Go and study or read a book. You’re not having my computer. Or your mother’s either.’ Thormar had had enough. He hadn’t postponed his day’s appointments in order to stand here arguing with a stroppy teenager. ‘We’ve been over this again and again.’ When Fannar opened his mouth to protest, Thormar finally snapped. ‘My friend has been murdered,’ he said sharply, ‘and I’m in no mood for an argument. Get up!’

  Fannar heaved himself to his feet like an old man and slouched resentfully out of the sitting room, clearly unmoved by the talk of murder. A slam echoed from the bedroom corridor as Thormar collapsed on the sofa. But despite lying on one side, then the other, and re-arranging the cushions under his head, he couldn’t relax, and the tight knot of fear burned like acid in his chest.

  The cops were onto them. There could be no doubt. When he realised this, he had been a hair’s breadth from opening up about his fears and showing them the video. Thank God, he’d managed to get a grip on himself, taken a deep breath and kept his mouth shut.

  It would only give them a temporary breathing space. The police obviously knew too much already. It was only a matter of time before his world came crashing down around his ears. The thought that Tommi and Gunni would be crushed by the same rubble was no consolation. Even Gunni had seemed jittery when Thormar rang and told him about the interview and the photo he had been shown. The friends all had a huge amount at stake in ensuring that their secret never came out. Pretty much everything, in fact.

  Chapter 22

  The rubbish from Helgi’s building had been deposited in a shed in the car park behind the police station. Erla had worn a malicious grin as she marched up to Huldar’s desk, presented him with two pairs of yellow rubber gloves and announced to the entire office in ringing tones that he and Lína were to sift through it. She was in a foul mood following her disastrous phone call to Helgi’s American employers, which Huldar had inadvertently overheard when he’d popped by her office shortly after the interview with Thormar. From what he had gathered, before beating a hasty retreat, the person at the other end couldn’t make head or tail of what Erla was saying and seemed to think it was some kind of nuisance call. Erla was understandably annoyed that Huldar had witnessed her humiliation. The chore of grubbing around in refuse was her revenge.

  Huldar had just sat down when Erla slapped the gloves on his desk, putting paid to his hopes of being sent to Helgi’s summer house on a quest to find the bed from the sex videos. The weather was as beautiful as you could ask for on a winter’s day: crackling frost, not a breath of wind, and everything covered in a fresh layer of snow. Ideal conditions for a drive through the south Icelandic countryside. He wanted to protest at the unfairness of it all, to bring up the videos, and plead with Erla to give the garbage-sifting job to someone else. But he bit back the impulse, knowing it would be a waste of time and achieve nothing apart from providing amusement for his colleagues. He got to his feet, silently beckoning Lína to follow. She’d been keeping her head down in the vain hope of being passed over. If she hadn’t already started looking forward to getting back to her university studies, now was surely the time.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Huldar clapped a gloved hand over his nose and mouth as he opened the door to the shed and was hit by the pungent stench that poured out, rejoicing in its freedom. ‘Maybe we should get ourselves some clothes pegs.’

  ‘What are clothes pegs?’ Lína asked in a muffled voice.

  ‘Oh, forget it. They were obviously way before your time.’ Counting up to three, Huldar dropped his hand and started breathing vigorously through his nose. The sooner you got used to the stink, the sooner you’d become inured to it. The job would take them forever if they had to work one-handed. ‘Right. Ladies first.’ He ushered her into the shed ahead of him.

  Lína took a wary step inside as if half expecting the rubbish to burst from its plastic sacks and ambush her. ‘What’s the recommended method?’

  ‘Well, it’s a first for me, so I was kind of hoping you’d know. Didn’t they teach you anything about sorting refuse on your course?’

  ‘No.’

  Seeing that Lína wasn’t amused, Huldar abandoned the attempt to tease her. They’d better just roll up their sleeves and get cracking.

  By his calculations, the shed contained twenty-one bulging black bin bags and one that was only half full. As the weather was dry and, for once, perfectly still, he reckoned they should drag the sacks out in the open, empty them onto the tarmac one at a time and systematically go through the contents there. Although they risked being the butt of jokes from every passer-by, anything was better than putting up with the rotten odour in the enclosed space.

  Once they had gone through six sacks, Huldar called a halt for a break. All they’d unearthed so far was leftover food, old newspapers, junk mail and other bits of post, milk cartons and a variety of packaging. These items were quickly disregarded apart from the post, which required closer scrutiny. Unfortunately, the occupants of the luxury flats weren’t too conscientious about separating out their recycling. Nothing of relevance to Helgi or his murder had yet come to light, but the fact that all the bins in his flat had been empty meant that their contents must be lurking somewhere in these sacks. The prime objective was to find the scraps of paper from the envelope that Helgi had torn up and thrown in the rubbish chute just before leaving the building for the last time.

  Huldar took off his gloves and dropped them on the tarmac. He had no particular desire to touch them after what they’d come into contact with, though God knew how he was to avoid contamination when it was time to pull them on again. He extracted a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, leant back against the wall and lit up. To his surprise, Lína came over and stood beside him.

  ‘I’d never have believed I’d actually welcome the smell of cigarette smoke.’ She inhaled appreciatively, leaning her head back against the wall. ‘Do you realise we haven’t even got through a third of them yet?’

  ‘We’ll have got used to it by the time we’re halfway through,’ Huldar reassured her, though he didn’t believe it himself. Some things were impossible to get used to. ‘Anyway, how are you enjoying the job generally? Apart from the present shitty assignment?’

  Lína didn’t answer immediately. Perhaps she thought Huldar might have to write her a reference at the end of her internship and didn’t want to blurt out something she’d regret later. Eventually she said cautiously: ‘It’s different from what I was expecting.’

  ‘Isn’t that always the way? You have this picture in your head beforehand but the reality’s never like you think.’ Huldar took another drag. ‘I remember when I started out. It was totally different from how I’d imagined.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, for example, I thought the public would be pleased to see us. It was a bit of a comedown when I discovered that nobody wants us around. They have to be literally on the ground with a lunatic crouching over them with a knife before they’re happy for us to be there. After all, nobody needs us when everything’s peachy. So when we do turn up, we tend to be the bearers of bad news. It’s not surprising, when you stop to think about it, so I should have been prepared.’

  ‘Oh.’ Evidently this thought hadn’t occurred to Lína, but then Erla hadn’t let her loose on the public yet, for obvious reasons. ‘Do you enjoy your job?’

  Huldar shouldn’t have been taken aback by this question, but the realisation dawned on him now that he’d never actually stopped to consider it. There were lots of things that got on his nerves, that could in his opinion be done better, and plenty of colleagues who rubbed him up the wrong way or were simply pricks. Not to mention the internal power str
uggles that led to tensions and split the force into factions. But overall? Was he happy? Did he get a kick out of it on some level? Or, given the choice, would he rather go back to carpentry?

  No one puked up on carpenters and there was rarely any reason to lie to them. But however satisfying it was to build a cabinet, say, or create a perfect joint, it couldn’t compete with his present job. There was no buzz to beat the moment when he and his colleagues got their hands on one of the bastards who injured, stole from or otherwise mistreated their fellow citizens. If he set out the pros and cons in a table, the good parts would outweigh the bad.

  Huldar sucked on his cigarette again, then slowly blew out a thick cloud of smoke. ‘I think the answer to that has to be yes. OK, not every day’s like Christmas, but overall I find it rewarding. Sometimes I actively enjoy it.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Lína appeared to be digesting this and Huldar regretted not having expressed himself more eloquently. But he wasn’t really the articulate type. Even if he gave himself until tomorrow to rephrase his reply, it would sound exactly the same. If the girl was looking for an inspiring mentor, he was the wrong man.

  ‘Right. Shall we tackle the next five?’ He crushed the butt under his shoe, then picked it up and put it in one of the sacks they’d already been through. Lína trailed behind, showing no signs of being restored by her break. She seemed even less enthralled with the task than before.

  The next five sacks yielded nothing of interest. It wasn’t until they’d grubbed their way through all but the last two that they finally hit upon what they’d been searching for. Or at least they believed they had. An envelope and a letter, or rather a collection of scraps of paper that could be pieced together to make up an envelope and a letter that resembled what Helgi had thrown in the rubbish chute in the grainy CCTV footage.