Gallows Rock - Freyja and Huldar Series 04 (2020)

by Sigurdardottir, Yrsa

  ‘Get on with it.’ Huldar stood up to watch as Tómas reluctantly started to type in the address. He prodded the man when he hesitated, and tried to jot down the address but could barely keep up with Tómas’s fingers once they started flying over the keyboard. Afterwards, he showed what he’d written to Tómas, who corrected a few letters. Once this had been done, Tómas sat with his head drooping. Huldar shoved the keyboard back to Erla, then turned to the wall on which the site now flashed up.

  Not much effort seemed to have gone into the interface. The colour scheme and font were enough to turn a graphic designer queasy, so the main attraction must be the content.

  Huldar moved over to stand beside Erla, who chose a page at random from the bottom of the screen. Up popped several posts dating from a year before, with the friends’ reactions underneath. Three were football related, but one came with a video that Erla clicked on. The familiar headboard appeared, this time providing a backdrop for a young woman who was different from the others Huldar had seen. She had close-cropped dark hair and appeared shorter than the blonde stunners in the other videos, her lean body muscled like a CrossFit pro. The man wasn’t Helgi either. He was more careless about concealing his identity from the camera and they frequently got a clear view of his face as the action hotted up.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Huldar asked Tómas, who was keeping his eyes lowered. ‘Answer me. Look up and tell us the name of the man on screen.’

  Tómas obeyed, his face like a frightened child’s, his voice hoarse as he whispered the name. ‘Gunni. Gunnar Bergsson. You should recognise him – you’ve already had him in for questioning.’

  Erla shifted her gaze from the wall to Tómas and commented dryly: ‘He had all his clothes on then and he wasn’t wearing his orgasm face.’

  She selected another page, located a video and pressed ‘Play’. This time the man involved was Helgi and it turned out to be a film Huldar had already seen. Erla stopped it and went on searching until she found another video featuring Gunnar. Her third attempt resulted in a video of Thormar, the dentist currently sitting in the cells. Leaving the film running, Erla turned down the volume of the groans emanating from the tinny laptop speakers. She fixed her eyes on Tómas again. ‘I don’t get it. Were you sharing videos of each other having sex?’

  Tómas cleared his throat and answered in a strangled voice: ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Where can I find a video of you?’

  The man looked as if he was going to faint. ‘I don’t know. I’m not on there …’

  ‘Oh come on. Which is it? You’re not on there or you don’t know which videos you’re in?’

  ‘I want a lawyer.’

  ‘Of course, no problem.’ Erla smiled maliciously. ‘In a bit. First, though, I’m going to browse through a few more videos.’ She put her fingers on the keyboard.

  Tómas raised his voice. ‘I want a lawyer. It’s my right. You’ve got to provide one when I ask. You’re not allowed to ask me any more questions until he gets here.’

  ‘Who said anything about questioning you? We’re just going to watch some movies.’ Erla caught Huldar’s eye. ‘Have we got any popcorn?’

  Huldar grinned and watched as she scrolled through the video clips until finally she found one with Tómas. ‘Now what have we got here?’ She turned up the volume again, then lifted her hands from the keyboard and reclined comfortably in her chair. ‘Is that your wife? No need to answer. We can wait until your lawyer arrives. I expect he’ll enjoy the show as much as us.’ She met Huldar’s eye again. ‘What do you reckon? Should we call in the IT department as well? The more people who watch it, the more chance someone will recognise the woman. You know, she reminds me a bit of Jói’s sister.’ She prodded Huldar under the table.

  ‘Jói who?’ Huldar had become quite adept at interpreting her prods.

  ‘You know. Jói who was kicked out of special forces on account of his anger issues.’

  Tómas flicked a glance at the wall, the whites of his eyes showing. Huldar guessed there were probably more videos of him on the site, featuring several different women. Presumably he wanted to check which one it was. He buried his face in his hands. ‘That’s not my wife. The girl’s name’s on there somewhere.’

  ‘You needn’t say anything until you have a lawyer present, remember?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Tómas muttered through his fingers. ‘I’ll speak if I want to. If you turn that off, I’ll try to explain. It’s not what it looks like.’

  Erla paused the film on a frame that showed Tómas lying with his eyes shut and his mouth open wide, while a woman knelt astride him. Judging from his expression, the action was nearing its climax. ‘OK. Fill us in on the facts, then.’

  Tómas raised his eyes and caught sight of his stark-naked image, blown up on the wall. Letting out an anguished groan, he begged Erla: ‘Turn that off first. Please.’

  For the first time since he’d been brought in for questioning, Erla granted his wish. He was visibly relieved and sat up in his chair, though his gaze still skittered away from theirs. ‘It’s a site we set up for organising get-togethers, games of golf, trips to matches – both here at home and abroad.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Huldar grinned. ‘So the woman in the video is a travel agent, is she? I trust you got a good deal?’

  ‘I’m telling the truth. That’s what the site was for. But we used it for other things too. Like that …’ He pointed at the blank wall as if he could still see the image of himself in flagrante with the woman.

  Erla leant forwards over the table in an attempt to capture Tómas’s gaze. ‘How the hell did that happen? I can understand the bit about the trips, but what sort of kick did you get out of watching each other shagging? I just don’t get it.’ She leant back again and turned to Huldar. ‘What about you? Do you understand? Is it a bloke thing?’

  Huldar shook his head. ‘It’s beyond me.’

  Tómas started talking fast, desperate to explain their abnormal behaviour. This was par for the course. Suspects often discovered an urgent need to excuse their actions during interviews. Having convinced themselves that what they had done was understandable, they failed to realise that their rationalisation wouldn’t wash with other people.

  ‘It didn’t start out like that. At first it was just sharing photos of girls we fancied. Helgi was living abroad and it was a way of keeping up our friendship. That sort of thing – and the other stuff we posted on the site.’

  Huldar pulled over the laptop, unplugged the projector and started calling up the oldest posts while Erla continued the questioning. He wanted to check if Tómas was telling the truth.

  ‘Which of you set up the site originally and what was it intended for? You went to a hell of a lot of trouble to conceal it, if the purpose was as innocent as you claim. Why couldn’t you use email or Facebook like normal people?’

  ‘Helgi set it up. With the help of an IT guy he knew in the US. He worked for a bank and his emails were monitored. He thought it was better than setting up a separate account to keep in touch with us. It’s more secure too. The site’s on the Dark Web so it can’t be traced.’ Tómas briefly met Erla’s eye. ‘So we weren’t breaking the law. We weren’t sharing porn. Quite the opposite – we were taking care that it wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands.’

  Huldar chuckled inwardly at this lame excuse as he studied the laptop. The oldest posts confirmed Tómas’s story, consisting mostly of pictures of fully dressed girls and the friends’ comments about them.

  ‘If, as you claim, you were so ultra-careful, perhaps you’d like to explain how one of the videos ended up on a porn-sharing site?’ Erla asked, simultaneously glancing at the screen that Huldar had turned towards her to show that Tómas’s story was true. ‘Were you showing off by sharing the material on other forums? Individually, perhaps, without letting on to the others?’

  ‘No!’ Tómas exclaimed vehemently. ‘It wasn’t like that. None of us would have dreamt of sharing those videos. I me
an, we were in the films ourselves. We’d have to be perverts to want to circulate any of them.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any doubt you’re perverts.’ Giving him no time to object, Erla persisted: ‘The video posted on the file-sharing site tells a different story. It’s there for all to see and it can’t have wound up there by itself. Who else had access to the site apart from the four of you?’

  Tómas shifted nervously in his chair. ‘There are five users. Us four and someone whose identity we don’t know.’ He shifted again, thrusting his hands under the table, then bringing them back into view a moment later. ‘But we do know he’s got something to do with what happened to Helgi.’

  ‘With what happened to Helgi?’ Erla lunged forward over the table, grabbed the man’s chin and roughly forced him to meet her eye. ‘Helgi was murdered. He’s dead. We’re not investigating broken fairy lights on the fucking town hall Christmas tree. It doesn’t get any more serious. If you’re as innocent as you claim, stop dodging our questions and give us a straight answer. Who’s the fifth user you’re referring to?’

  ‘I don’t know. I swear it. He just appeared on the platform and took control. None of us know how.’

  ‘Stick to answering for yourself. Your friends will get a chance to give us their version later. You can be sure of that.’

  Huldar skipped forward a few years on the site to see how things had developed. Again there were pictures of girls, but this time a handful of videos too. He carried on scrolling closer to the present while listening to Erla grilling Tómas, only to stop short when he came across a video posted five years previously. Unlike the others, the information bar showed that it lasted almost two hours. That was far longer than any of the others he’d seen. The first comment was also interesting and atypical. What do you reckon? Keep or bin? Could prove bloody risky if Miss Pissed-out-of-her-skull remembers anything. Huldar pressed ‘Play’ while Erla was tightening the thumbscrews on Tómas to force him to reveal the name of the fifth user.

  At first, the events on screen appeared little different from the other videos. A young woman removed her clothes and flopped down on the bed. She attempted to take a selfie but was too drunk to hold her phone steady. In fact, she seemed much drunker than the other girls, though she didn’t appear to be under the influence of Rohypnol. At this point a man came into the room. He was holding a wine glass that he handed to the girl and she drank some while he was getting undressed. The man, whom Huldar recognised as Gunni, took back the glass, placed it on the bedside table, then got onto the bed beside her. Huldar fast-forwarded through the subsequent action and was surprised to see the man stand up, hand the glass back to the girl, and leave the room. She emptied it and lay back again, giving the impression, from her movements and expression, that she was by now extremely drunk.

  She appeared to fall asleep.

  The strange thing was that the video had only been running for twenty minutes. Huldar fast-forwarded again, expecting to see nothing but the woman sleeping it off, and assuming that the explanation for the length was that Gunni had forgotten to switch off the camera. But not a bit of it. The woman carried on sleeping, having presumably passed out cold. But that wasn’t all that happened.

  Huldar focused on the unfolding events, deaf to what Erla and Tómas were saying. He fast-forwarded again, until he’d come to the end of the film. His heart was pounding in his chest and he had that iron taste in his mouth that went with violent rage. Yet he managed not to betray himself, merely reached for the projector cable and plugged it back in, even taking time to make sure it was screwed in tight. He was hoping this delay would help him get his anger under control. Then he started the playback from the beginning.

  When the image flashed up on the wall, Erla jerked her head round so fast that Huldar thought she’d crick her neck. The look she gave him was one of the blackest he had ever encountered, which was unsurprising as he had broken the one condition that Tómas had set for answering their questions without a lawyer present.

  But it was worth it.

  When Tómas saw the footage, he leapt to his feet and ran for the door, only to find it locked.

  ‘I want a lawyer. I’m not saying another word.’ He broke down in tears again, his howls even louder and more pathetic than before.

  Chapter 31

  After the recording had finished, there was a deathly silence in the small interview room. Watching the video with Huldar and Erla this time were a police lawyer in his early fifties and a representative from the Sexual Offences Unit, the man Huldar had consulted when the videos turned up on Helgi’s computer. He seemed the least affected by what he had just witnessed.

  All four of them stared at the white projector screen until Erla broke the silence, addressing the lawyer: ‘Well, what do you reckon? Does it constitute a clear case of rape?’

  ‘Yes and no. That’s the problem.’ The lawyer laid down his pen on the blank sheet of paper in front of him. He had been intending to take notes during the video but in the event he hadn’t written anything. This was understandable, since the contents could be summed up in a few words. A young woman sits on a bed and tries to take a selfie. A man enters, they undress and have sex, which appears to be consensual on her part. She then passes out and the man’s friends take advantage of her unresisting body, one after the other. From time to time she regains consciousness and seems unhappy about what’s happening but is held down until she passes out again. After the men have finished, one of them goes in, shakes her awake, and orders her to get dressed and leave. The dazed woman struggles into her clothes and disappears from view, looking dishevelled and moving as if her body hurts. The video ends.

  When Erla didn’t respond, Huldar couldn’t hold back: ‘What other evidence do you need to prove that this is rape? A declaration from every man in the video of their intention to rape the woman? Just before they jump on top of her?’

  ‘That would help, of course.’ The lawyer did not appear to be joking.

  At this point the representative from Sexual Offences intervened. ‘We had a case involving a film that showed what we judged to be a gang rape. That case was lost in the District Court and again in the Supreme Court.’

  ‘Yes, despite the fact that the plaintiff was available in that case.’ The lawyer grimaced. ‘Unfortunately it’s not that cut and dried, regardless of how it looks to us. At no point did I hear the woman clearly say no or that she didn’t want it.’

  Erla wasn’t about to give up so easily. ‘All the woman’s attempts to sit up or push them off her were thwarted. It should be blindingly obvious to anyone that her participation wasn’t voluntary. That ought to be enough to charge them.’

  When the lawyer replied, they could hear the weariness in his voice: ‘It’s possible. But I wouldn’t like to bet on the chances of getting a conviction. The defendants could make any claims they like since they know there’s no statement from the alleged victim. They could say the whole thing had been pre-arranged and that she’d agreed to it before they entered the bedroom. I’m afraid it would be difficult to disprove if they claimed that her feeble attempts to sit up had been part of the game: that she’d wanted a turn on top, for example, but they’d preferred to stay on top themselves. Something like that. How are we supposed to disprove that?’ The man sighed heavily. ‘But, on the bright side, at least we’ve got a fairly watertight case against them for sharing the video. It’s illegal to distribute or exchange pornographic material, and there’s no question that they did that. It’s like the other videos on the private site; if any of the women involved press charges we might have a case there too. But the content of this recording means it’s our best chance of a successful prosecution. The only hitch is that the man who posted it is dead. If I’ve understood correctly?’

  Erla confirmed this. ‘We’ve only Tómas’s word for it that Helgi was responsible, but I assume the others will back him up. The username matches the one on material posted from the US during his time there. So the odds are th
at it was Helgi who uploaded the video.’

  ‘Ahh.’ The lawyer sounded disappointed. ‘Well, that’s that, then. But all’s not lost. The law contains a whole section on damage to reputation and offences against an individual’s right to privacy. The clauses relating to violation of modesty are often used when bringing a charge of non-consensual porn. Perhaps this could be used against the surviving members of the group. They were all aware that the incident was being filmed and yet none of them posted an objection in the comments section to the fact that the video was shared. So we could argue that they took an active part in violating her modesty. When was the video posted on the site, by the way?’

  Erla checked in the notes that had been compiled on the video and on Maren, the young woman who featured in it. ‘It was uploaded the day after it was filmed.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ The lawyer sighed again. ‘The woman was dead by then, wasn’t she?’ When Erla nodded, he explained: ‘To my knowledge there are no precedents involving deceased individuals. Can you commit an offence against the modesty of someone who’s dead? I’d have thought so. After all, the right to privacy is extended to the dead, but I would need to re-read the clause pertaining to modesty. Unfortunately, it’s possible that the law wasn’t designed with that in mind and only applies to the living.’

  Erla wasn’t about to be drawn into a discussion of legal niceties. ‘What kind of sentence is handed out in cases of non-consensual porn?’

  ‘If a prosecutor brings a case based on the clause I mentioned, you can expect short or suspended sentences. The framework for penalties is limited and in this instance all the individuals involved are of good character and have no previous convictions.’

  Huldar felt his shoulders sagging. It wasn’t going to be easy to get justice for the poor woman in the video, though he didn’t suppose it would matter to her now. Her name had turned up in the comments, and although her patronymic had been omitted, they had identified her immediately. Plenty of Icelandic women had been named Maren and, of these, there were around 150 still living, according to the National Register. But only one woman by the name of Maren had been washed ashore close to the foot of the Gallows Rock: Maren Thórdardóttir, the twenty-four-year-old who had drowned after walking into the sea the night the video had been made.