Friday
50
Adolf moved one step closer to her as she entered the lift, and she immediately had the feeling he had been waiting for her. She said ‘good morning’ as a sneering smile appeared on his face. He folded his arms across his chest and she felt that he was deliberately flexing to place an emphasis on his physique. She felt uncomfortable, but she knew that she was still tense after the previous evening. It had been a very long time since she had broken down like that. She hadn’t freaked out even when Pétur had leaped at her from the car’s boot. But at that time she hadn’t known that it was Pétur coming at her. When it came, that realisation had filled her with a searing mixture of fear and sorrow that had opened a weakness she seemed to have spent her life trying to conceal. It was the sensitive and immature weakness of a child. She moved to the far end of the lift and repeated her ‘good morning’ in a firmer tone.
‘Has the matter got to committee stage?’ Adolf asked in a derisive voice, without returning her greeting. The lift came to a halt and Úrsúla stepped out with relief.
‘Not to committee,’ she replied and smiled amiably. ‘But an informal working group has been put together to work with the Coast Guard on finding a solution.’
Adolf put out a hand to stop the lift door from closing.
‘Really? I haven’t heard about a working group,’ he said, and Úrsúla’s smile broadened.
‘No, I don’t think you’re part of it,’ she said, turning and walking quickly into the minister’s corridor, hearing the door lock behind her. She went directly to her office and told Freyja that she wanted no interruptions for the next hour.
Her breath was coming fast and as soon as she was in her office she leaned against the door. Eva was sitting with her nose almost against the screen of her laptop.
‘I’m pretty much in shock,’ Eva whispered.
Úrsúla nodded her agreement.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I read the interview with that poor girl’s mother when I got home yesterday. It’s such a tragic description of the whole thing.’
Eva shook her head, and there was something about the look on her face that sent a chill down Úrsúla’s back.
‘I don’t mean that,’ Eva said. ‘I’m looking at the item that popped up online a few minutes ago. It’s about you.’
51
‘According to our sources, the minister requested at a meeting with ministry staff and police that Pétur Pétursson’s medical records should be handed over, as well as records of any psychiatric treatment he may have undergone. Such records are confidential and are not considered to be publicly available.’
Óðinn read from the screen in front of him in a voice that was so powerful and resounding that Gunnar found it almost painful. Then he slammed the laptop shut with a bang.
‘There were three of us at this meeting,’ he hissed, staring at Gunnar. ‘How the hell was this leaked?’
‘I have no idea,’ Gunnar said and shrugged. ‘I know as much about this as you do.’
Óðinn glared at him for a while, then sighed and slumped back in his chair. Gunnar had always felt that Óðinn was a friendly, reliable type, but now his manner was sharp and irritated.
‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘I’ve spoken to Boris and he was as surprised as I was – said he hadn’t even started looking for these documents so there’s nobody else inside the police who knows about the minister’s request, and I haven’t mentioned it to anyone.’
‘So it has to be me?’
Gunnar squeezed out a smile in a weak attempt to highlight how ridiculous this half-accusation sounded, but it made no difference. Óðinn’s expression didn’t change, but he twisted slightly in his chair to stare out of the window at the dark sky that would hardly have time to turn a real blue before dusk again set in.
‘Maybe you mentioned this in passing to someone who could have then leaked it?’ he said, still gazing out of the window.
‘No,’ Gunnar said.
‘We’re talking about a meeting that took place yesterday,’ Óðinn said, turning back to face Gunnar. ‘It can’t be a long trail in such a short time.’
Gunnar shrugged again. There was no satisfactory explanation that he could give the permanent secretary; he couldn’t think of any way Úrsúla’s innocent and, in fact, understandable request could have triggered such a media storm.
‘You have a girlfriend?’ Óðinn asked. ‘Could you have inadvertently mentioned this to anyone you trust?’
‘No,’ Gunnar said. ‘I haven’t mentioned this to anyone at all. It’s as simple as that.’
Óðinn sighed and turned his gaze back to the window.
‘It’s a clusterfuck, the minister getting a kick in the teeth like this after only a week in the job.’
‘What can we do?’ Gunnar asked as he stood up.
Óðinn spun his chair in a semi-circle and got to his feet.
‘What you do is precisely nothing,’ he said with determination. ‘The ministry will issue a statement explaining that this is all a misunderstanding.’
Gunnar nodded, turned and could feel Óðinn’s eyes were on him as he left the office, along with his suspicion. It was obvious that Óðinn thought Gunnar was the source of the leak.
Gunnar walked along the minister’s corridor to the lift. While he waited, he opened his phone and checked the news. It didn’t look good, and the comments were vicious. He scrolled through one thread back to the beginning.
Guðmundur Jónsson: Officials misusing their power, again and again.
Abbi Stabbi Ólason: Who the hell does this old bitch think she is? Medical records are confidential!!
Óli Gunnars: Hey, pal. This Pétur is the man who murdered her father, so maybe she just wants to make sure her kids are safe.
Ingigerður Adamsdóttir: Then she should be at home looking after her children instead of getting involved in politics that she obviously knows nothing about.
Hulda Ýr: Hey, 1950 called and it wants its opinions back. Seriously, you think women should just stay at home?
Emma Björk Eyfells: It doesn’t matter who this man is. She has no right to see medical records, and especially not psychiatric records. This is sensitive information!!
Grallaraspói: All this one needs is rock-hard dick :)
Hulda Ýr: Really? There’s something political you’re unhappy with and this is the best you can come up with? Good luck being revolting.
Einar Einarsson: This overprivileged scum think they can do what they like! And they don’t hesitate to walk all over the sick and break every rule of human rights! Úrsúla Aradóttir should resign immediately!
Guðmundur Jónsson: Hang on, Einar. Aren’t you ‘good guys’ happy with your bitch now?
Gunnar shook his head and got into the lift. He would get more satisfaction from vacuuming the car than from seeing any more comments.
52
‘Pleeease. Please come home,’ she had said in the most imploring voice she could manage. But her father merely leaned back against the plinth that supported the statue of Ingólfur Arnarson on the Arnarhóll hillock in the centre of the city, looked out over the harbour and lifted the bottle of spirit high in a toast.
‘A bourgeois lifestyle isn’t for me,’ he said, and Pétur voiced his agreement.
‘This man’s a bohemian!’ he said, slapping her father’s shoulder. ‘You can’t lock up a free spirit inside a terraced house.’
Then they went back to singing ‘Little Boxes’, as they always did whenever she came to ask her father to come home. By the time they finished, Úrsúla was in tears. She was gripped by an overwhelming helplessness and wished she had some way to force her father to come back home, to take a shower, sleep it off and have a decent meal, and then everything would be fine. After a few days he would go back to work and bring home money for her mother. That was the way it had been up to now. But that autumn he hadn’t come home with after his usual summer-long bender.
‘Mum’s so tir
ed,’ Úrsúla said. ‘She works all day and knits sweaters all evening for extra money, but there’s still hardly a thing in the fridge.’
‘That’s the old girl all over! Wasting time knitting when she could be reading the ancient sagas and nourishing her soul!’ Pétur piped up, and her father patted his shoulder.
‘How old are you now, little Úrsúla?’ he asked gently, and she couldn’t understand how he could have forgotten something like that.
‘Ten,’ she said, and tears began to roll down her father’s grubby face. ‘Please. Come home and help us.’
‘I’m no good,’ he said, took a swig from the bottle and wept some more.
That was the last time Úrsúla went to him for help. After that she had become the one who helped him, slipping him the change from her piggy bank or an extra sandwich she made for lunch without her mother noticing, and which she’d take to him at either Arnarhóll or down at Hlemmur.
‘Are you all right?’
Eva placed a hand on her shoulder and stooped over her. Úrsúla was sat at her desk. She hadn’t noticed the door open and Eva come into the room. She shook herself, still half dazed.
‘Yes. Fine. I was just thinking about my dad. All this Pétur business has stirred it up again.’
‘I can well believe it,’ Eva said. ‘You know I’m here for you whenever you need me. I have a shoulder to cry on.’
Úrsúla gave her a smile. It was a generous offer, but she wasn’t inclined to accept it. She didn’t make a habit of shedding tears, especially not over things from the distant past. It was a side of her that nobody other than Nonni had seen; the fear, sorrow and powerlessness, which were often so illogical but sometimes possessed her – just as they had the night before when the dried-fish guy had called.
‘Thanks, Eva. You really are the best. But … moving on. Would you be so good as to set up an informal working group to consult with the Coast Guard to figure out what additional funding we can find for them? And would you make sure that Adolf isn’t part of it? He’s been far too pushy with me.’
Eva tapped notes into her phone at lightning speed.
‘Start the working group off with a visit to the Coast Guard, and count me in. I’d like to show them that I’m taking their request for funding seriously. And will you book me a visit to the Directorate of Immigration? Going there was supposed to be the first thing I was going to do, but then other stuff got in the way.’
As the door closed behind Eva, Úrsúla found the weight of her memories returning. She had no idea how long she spent staring into space. In her mind the doorbell buzzed, heralding the arrival of the priest, along with two police officers, who took seats in their living room, told them the news that her father was dead, and that Pétur was suspected of having murdered him.
Her mother had cried, asking why on earth they had placed the two men together in a cell. One of the policemen had explained that it had been Saturday night with a full moon, and every cell had been full. They had all said how sorry they were, and the priest had laid a hand on Úrsúla’s head and muttered a short prayer. She recalled that she had found it uncomfortable, as if the priest was treating her like a little girl, as if he thought of her as an innocent child when in fact she was twelve years old and had lost any belief in God.
She had often thought back to how that moment had been so different from her mother’s death more than a decade later. She had sat with her, holding her hand, as her mother’s life ebbed away, and the peace and proximity blended with the sorrow and gratitude in her heart. There had been nothing painful about her mother’s death. It had seemed to be completely natural, although it had come early, and there had been no questions or doubts.
Úrsúla was startled by the ringing of her phone. She had promised herself not to reply to any of Thorbjörn’s calls, but she was unable to resist.
‘That was a dirty trick,’ she snarled into the phone.
Thorbjörn was immediately on the defensive.
‘I knew nothing about it until a minute before it went live, I swear! Otherwise I’d have warned you,’ he said.
‘How can a story be kept secret on a paper with a staff of only four, all of them working in the same room?’
‘That’s exactly it,’ Thorbjörn said. ‘There aren’t enough of us; we’re loaded down with work and don’t get an opportunity to compare notes. You have no idea how sorry I am about this, Úrsúla. I’m devastated.’
‘Who the fuck leaked this to you?’ Úrsúla hissed, her anger towards him already cooling and her longing for his body against her bare skin building, along with the desire to feel her emotions at work.
‘I’ll find out for you,’ he said. ‘I’m at home now. Come to me.’
‘No,’ Úrsúla said.
‘Yes. Come.’
53
There was no doubt that it had been a tough day for Úrsúla. If he hadn’t known better, he would have said that she had lost weight since the morning. She seemed somehow thinner and slighter in the seat next to him, and was oddly absent-minded, her thoughts apparently far from reality.
Gunnar drove slowly. It wasn’t far but he dragged the journey out as far as he could, as if he was giving her a chance to change her mind. He knew exactly what she was up to. It was pretty obvious. This was the second time in two days she had asked him to drive her to this man’s home for what she called a ‘very quick meeting’.
He had looked up the address in the National Registry, and that was where he found Thorbjörn’s name. It was gut-wrenching to know that the minister was privately visiting this man, who worked for an online media outfit that seemed to have as its primary objective besmirching the reputations of government ministers.
‘Are you sure you can trust this … journalist?’ he asked cautiously as he brought the car to a halt outside a building that he had always thought was all student apartments.
‘Yes.’ Úrsúla didn’t catch his eye as she got out of the car. ‘I won’t be long,’ she added.
She clearly didn’t want to be accompanied to the door on this occasion, so he watched until she had ascended the steps to the door, which opened as she approached, and vanished inside. He moved the car to a position at the far end of the gloomy car park, but made sure he could still watch the entrance for her to reappear. There was no need for the ministerial car to be obvious to everyone passing by.
At one time he had dreamed of living in this district, on the western side of the university, in a community of students and academics. That had been back when he had been aiming for academe. He had once imagined that he would find happiness in deep discussions with professors who were the diametric opposite of his father: men who would respect him, listening to him as they guided him. Instead he had seen during his teens that what would set him free would be his physique. Exceptional strength and agility would give him the self-confidence to meet any challenge. He had managed to find a way to make a living out of this obsession with muscles, as his father had called it, a sour expression on the old man’s face as Gunnar had twisted his arm yet again in an attempt to prevent one of his drunken furies.
What are you doing tonight? The message on his phone was from Íris.
Nothing, he replied.
Shall I come to yours? Her reply came right back and Gunnar felt he could sense the optimism in the phone’s ping.
No. I’m tired, he wrote back. Let’s make it tomorrow.
Are you meeting someone else?
This time the phone seemed to have a harsher, louder tone to it, and the message came with an icon of a man with horns and a trident in his hand.
No, sweetie, he wrote back. I’m just tired.
It was a joke on his part to call her sweetie, honey, darling or doll, but she seemed to fail to realise that these weren’t words that could be applied to her. She was as far as could be imagined from being a sweetie or a darling.
He glanced at the clock. Only ten minutes had passed since Úrsúla had gone inside. Reckoning that she was going to
be as long as the last time, he thought he had another half-hour, so he checked his email. There was one message from Fossi, sent to Úrsúla’s email address, but Eva had intercepted it and forwarded it to him:
Resign, you cunt, and I’ll think twice about coming round to your house and raping you, feminazi wrecker bitch.
Gunnar read the message again and again. What could have triggered such strong feelings in this lunatic? Maybe it couldn’t exactly be called progress, but for the first time Fossi had stated what he wanted from Úrsúla. He had finally spelled out the point he wanted to make with these disgusting messages. He wanted her to resign from her post as minister.
54
Úrsúla’s breathing had barely started to slow as she lay her head on Thorbjörn’s shoulder on his living-room floor, when she caught herself comparing him to Nonni. Thorbjörn was no match for Nonni; he wasn’t even close. She couldn’t understand herself; she had a handsome, wonderful husband at home, who had stood by her through thick and thin over the years, and who she knew loved her, but she was throwing herself at this rough guy she hardly knew. Maybe that was what it was all about. Perhaps it was the primitive nature of their relationship that allowed her a freedom she couldn’t find with Nonni. Or perhaps she was simply too terrified of letting herself connect with Nonni again; if she allowed him past her defences and into her feelings, then she would have to tell him about Liberia. She would have to tell him that the explosions and the bursts of gunfire in Syria had almost been light relief after dealing with Ebola; that an enemy in sight was child’s play compared to the enemy who could hide inside you. But this was something she couldn’t trust herself to do. She couldn’t bring herself to see him lose his childish belief that the world would be a wonderful place if everyone just behaved decently.
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