95
‘I’ll find another photo of me that you can have,’ Úrsúla said with sarcasm. ‘Looking ministerial in front of the flag. I could even sign it for you.’
There seemed to be some kind of karma that repeatedly brought them together, as this was the third time she had found herself going from floor to floor in the lift with Adolf. As before, his bulky frame seemed to fill more than half of the space. He had begun by complaining that Eva had made him delete the picture he had taken of Úrsúla in the helicopter, which he decided was tantamount to censorship.
‘It was just a bit of fun,’ he grumbled.
‘If it’s fun, then it would have to be funny,’ she retorted, not bothering even to try to hide the irritation in her voice. She might have been overstepping the mark, but everything seemed to leak from the ministry to the media, and she had no desire to see the picture Adolf had taken of her, chilled through and soaked, on the front page of a newspaper.
‘You people – feminists – are completely humourless,’ he said and squeezed out something that was undoubtedly supposed to be a grin but which turned into a scowl.
The lift halted, and Úrsúla stood in the opening as she turned to face Adolf.
‘The Coast Guard will get its additional funding,’ she said. ‘That’s because of me, and not you. If anything, it’s your pushiness and lack of manners that have made it harder for them. You people – men who can’t accept a female minister – are completely tactless.’
She turned and stormed away, and instantly began to wonder if she had been too hard on him. She shook the feeling off. It had been a hard day, on top of which she had slept badly the night before, which had left her irritable. Right now she had no patience with men who tried to blame their own inappropriate behaviour on a woman’s poor sense of humour.
Gunnar was waiting for her right by the door, with the car already warm. She was set on using the ministry’s front door from now on, convinced that there was no reason to sneak in and out of the back door as if she preferred not to be seen. She was going to use the same strategies as she had in Syria. She was going to hold her head up high, crank up her determination, even though it might be at the expense of a little courtesy, and look straight in the eye those who seemed to relish reminding her of her every minor shortcoming – something that seemed to be an inevitable part of this job.
‘Home, please,’ she said to Gunnar and pulled off her leather gloves to put them in her coat.
As she did so, she found a scrap of paper in her pocket. She opened the glove compartment, where Gunnar kept a small bag for rubbish, but as she was about to drop the paper into it, she saw it bore her own face. She smoothed it out and inspected it.
It was a cutting from a newspaper; less a cutting than something that had been torn out, leaving the edges ragged and tattered. It was from the day she had taken over as minister. For a moment it seemed that it had been long ago, even though hardly two weeks had passed. Lettering in a hand she had come to recognise had been scrawled on the paper, the letters misshapen and the lines wavering, as if the fingers holding the red pen had trembled.
‘Look,’ she said to Gunnar, who slowed the car and stopped by the side of the road as he took the scrap of paper from her hand.
‘Where did you find this?’ he asked in surprise.
‘It was in my coat. I found it when I put my hand in my pocket.’
Gunnar looked at it for a long moment.
‘Pétur must have slipped it into your pocket,’ he said.
Úrsúla took it from Gunnar’s fingers and read the shaky script on the clipping.
‘Little Úrsúla’ had been scrawled by her face, which was smiling for the cameras as she took the keys to the ministry from Óðinn, who was handing them over to her. Over his head had been drawn a pair of red horns, and the words ‘Devil-cop, Ari’s killer’.
96
‘Here it is,’ Úrsúla said, passing to Gunnar the laptop that rested on her knees, still logged in to the ministry intranet. ‘There’s the article about Óðinn’s appointment eight years ago as permanent secretary. And look, underneath it details his whole career.’
Úrsúla leaned back in her seat and breathed a couple of heavy sighs.
The tension had left Gunnar sweating, so his fingers slipped on the screen of his phone as he had searched for information about Óðinn. But now Úrsúla had found what they were looking for.
‘Óðinn was on the Reykjavík police force from 1979 to 1989, and was an inspector from 1986 onward.’ Gunnar leaned back in his seat, and his heavy sigh echoed Úrsúla’s. ‘That means he was a serving police officer at the time your father died.’
‘Fuck,’ she spat, punching the plastic dashboard in front of her. ‘I don’t know what to make of this.’ She shook the scrap of paper that had been in her pocket. ‘I don’t know what the hell to think.’
‘Do you have any of the court documents from Pétur’s trial?’ he asked.
Úrsúla sighed again. ‘I know them practically off by heart,’ she said. ‘But the names of the officers on duty that night aren’t mentioned. They’re just Police Officer A and Police Officer B. I’ve never even wondered about their names. It never occurred to me that there was any kind of doubt about the events of that night. I was a child at the time, and everyone accepted it as fact that Pétur had beaten Dad to death.’
‘I know who could help us,’ Gunnar said, and tapped a message to Boris into his phone:
Who were the cops on duty the night Pétur P was supposed to have murdered Úrsúla’s dad?
He knew the wording would spark Boris’s curiosity. He had deliberately said ‘supposed to have murdered’ instead of ‘murdered’. Boris would be intrigued and he’d definitely check it out. His phone pinged an alert almost immediately. He opened Boris’s reply:
Is Monday OK? We’re having a weekend out of town.
Gunnar swallowed his disappointment. Pétur’s scrawled note wasn’t grounds for wrecking Boris’s cosy weekend in his summer cottage. Maybe it was just something the old man had dreamed up.
‘There’s only one way to find out what he means,’ Gunnar said, starting the engine. Úrsúla seem to understand instantly what he had in mind.
‘We’ll have to find a way to keep him calm so we can talk to him,’ she said, staring straight ahead.
The engine had been switched off, and in their excitement, their breath had clouded the car’s windscreen, and even with the heater turned up to maximum, it still hadn’t cleared by the time Gunnar brought the car to a stop outside the police station at Hlemmur. Úrsúla opened her door, but Gunnar placed a hand on her arm.
‘I’ll go inside,’ he said. She nodded as she clicked her door closed again. It wasn’t ideal for the minister of the interior to march into the police station, asking about a particular prisoner.
She sat and stared ahead with empty eyes, and it occurred to Gunnar that as far as this matter was concerned, she was no longer a minister, or even a grown woman, but a little girl; a frightened little girl who missed her dad.
97
The police officers who searched the house wouldn’t answer Marita’s questions, other than with questions of their own. The one who was in charge had handed her a sheet of paper that he told her was a search warrant, but she was so upset, for all she knew it could have been a recipe from a cookbook.
‘Where’s your husband?’ he asked as he handed another of the uniformed officers the family computer.
‘He went back east last night to finish his shifts there. He comes home, back to his old job, next week,’ she said. ‘What’s all this about? And why are you taking the computers?’
The man finally stopped.
‘There’s a suspicion that your husband has been sending threats to the minister of the interior, Úrsúla Aradóttir,’ he said and looked at her with searching eyes, as if she might know something about the matter.
‘What kind of threats? What do you mean?’
‘Threat
s of violence and more, if she doesn’t resign. He came to our attention as there was a charge already against him that was being reviewed.’
Marita shook her head in disbelief. She couldn’t understand any of this. Now a second uniformed officer appeared with Kiddi’s laptop in his hands. Kiddi followed with a sour expression on his face. Marita was surprised that he wasn’t erupting with rage. Maybe he was holding back until the police had gone. Normally he yelled at her when only the two of them were at home.
‘Did your husband take a computer with him when he went to the east?’ the policeman in charge asked.
‘No. Or yes,’ Marita said. ‘He has one of those little tablets that he reads the news on. This has to be some misunderstanding,’ she added. ‘Jónatan would never make threats against anyone, let alone a minister…’
She fell silent as the image came to mind of Jónatan in the bedroom with the phone to his ear the previous Monday. You owe me, he had said to the phone. You owe me.
Could he have been speaking to the minister then? Could she owe him something? Marita couldn’t understand all this.
‘This has to be some kind of misunderstanding,’ she repeated, maybe more to convince herself than the police.
98
As Úrsúla waited in the car while Gunnar was inside the police station, the question Boris had asked at the meeting last week came back to mind. Who was this Devil Pétur seemed desperate to warn her against? Could there be anything in the accusation scrawled on the scrap of paper? Could Óðinn, the permanent secretary himself, be her father’s murderer? It was too crazy to be real. Her thoughts whirled around in circles; Pétur and all the notes he had left, and then the two occasions he had physically attacked her, which now seemed strange in this new context. Why had he attacked her if all he had wanted to do was warn her against Óðinn? She had to find an explanation. There was nothing for it but to speak to Pétur quietly.
‘He’s not here anymore,’ Gunnar said as he got back into the car.
‘Then where is he?’
‘He was released. They couldn’t keep him any longer. They said to check the shelter on Lindargata. That’s where the street people stay.’
‘This really is completely crazy, isn’t it?’ she asked, hoping that Gunnar would agree, that this was just the confused mind of a mad old drunk dreaming up something to excuse his own guilt.
But Gunnar shrugged. ‘If you think it through, nobody’s going to believe someone who’s on the street, especially if he comes across as not all there. He makes the ideal scapegoat.’
They sat in silence for the rest of the way to the shelter. Gunnar parked on the corner and hurried inside to ask about Pétur. Úrsúla stayed in the car, her feet restless with impatience. She longed to run inside after him, to find Pétur and question him about every detail of the whole affair. She wanted to know what he meant by all those notes he had left for her, why he had jumped her outside the shop, and why he had spent all that time in the boot of her car. But most of all she wanted to know what had happened in that cell the night her father died.
‘He hasn’t been seen here for days,’ Gunnar said as soon as he returned. ‘Not since he beat the crap out of his pal, another homeless bum, who was staying here as well.’
Saturday
99
The children lay in the big double bed with Úrsúla, their eyes wide and fastened on her. Tears flooded down Herdís’s cheeks as she listened to her mother’s account, and the expression on Ari’s face showed that he had discovered a completely new side to her. Of course he had. She had never told them much about her upbringing, just a few vague words to say that her father had died and her mother had worked hard to make ends meet. But Nonni had told her that the time had now come: they were already hearing about the story from the media. He was right, of course. It went without saying that she should have told them long ago how her father, their grandfather, had lost his life.
She stroked their cheeks tenderly, and for the first time in far too long she felt herself properly close to them, and enjoyed the feeling. This time Ari didn’t shrink from her touch, and there was none of the usual ‘oh, Mum’ or ‘duh’ from Herdís. They both sat watching her intently while she tried to find neutral or pleasant words to describe the misery and the violence for them. Kátur lay on her lap and snored quietly, and Nonni sat at the foot of the bed with a cup of coffee in his hand, occasionally offering a word or a comment. For the moment there was nothing outside this little world of theirs: no ministry, and certainly no Thorbjörn. Nothing but the four of them was of any importance, there in the light of the lamp that cast its gentle glow over them that dark midwinter morning, packed close together and snug in soft bedclothes. It was now, right now, that Úrsúla rediscovered her clear love for them all. She felt her heart swell with an emotion she had not experienced for a long time. Maybe the session with the psychologist was starting to work already.
‘Why didn’t he want to come home, if he could have?’ Ari asked. ‘If he had, he wouldn’t have ended up in prison and died.’
‘Maybe not,’ Úrsúla said. ‘When I was young I couldn’t understand it either. I often went downtown to look for him and ask him to come home. But he was an alcoholic so he wasn’t really able to make his own decisions.’
‘Can you be an alcoholic suddenly?’ Ari asked, eyes wide with horror. ‘Could Dad become an alcoholic?’
‘Of course not, you idiot,’ Herdís hissed, giving what had become the standard answer to her brother’s questions.
‘Talk nicely to each other, please,’ Úrsúla said, brushing a stray lock of hair away from her face. ‘Your dad’s not an alcoholic,’ she told Ari. ‘If anything, it’s a struggle to get him to have a drink.’
She winked at Nonni and he laughed. She was about to embark on a longer explanation of alcoholism when Ari steered the conversation in another direction.
‘Was there a lot of blood on him?’ he asked.
Úrsúla nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see for myself, which is just as well, but I read all the court documents and they said there was a lot of blood because he was so badly hurt. The reason he died was because there was bleeding in his brain where he was hit so hard.’
‘But why isn’t this Pétur in prison?’ Herdís asked. ‘Why’s he on the street?’
‘He was in hospital for a long time after that, in a secure unit, because he wasn’t right in the head and the judge decided that he hadn’t known what he was doing. So when he recovered, he was allowed out.’
Herdís looked thoughtful, and Ari closed his eyes and curled himself up deep in the duvet, as if he wanted to give his mind a rest.
‘But it’s not a hundred per cent certain that Pétur was the one who beat my father so badly,’ Úrsúla added. ‘There were also two police officers on duty who…’ She saw from the expression on Nonni’s face that she had ventured onto dangerous ground, so she pulled back. ‘Maybe we’ll never know exactly how your grandfather lost his life. We might have to accept that it was some kind of mishap, some sort of terrible accident. Perhaps we’ll have to live with the uncertainty.’
The children were silent. She kissed the top of Herdís’s head, and then reached for Ari’s hand, planting a kiss on his palm as she had done since he had been tiny. It could well be that she was telling the children the truth, that they would have to accept living with this uncertainty. But the more she thought about the newspaper clipping that Pétur had slipped into her pocket, the more her doubts grew.
100
‘Hello there, old man,’ said the amiable young fellow behind the counter in the kiosk at Hlemmur. ‘What do gentlemen of the road have to say today?’
‘Things look bleak,’ Pétur replied. ‘The Devil’s at my heels.’
He stood by the door and peered through the glass to see if he could make out the black car.
‘That’s quite something!’ the boy said, and he sounded amused. ‘The Devil himself in person? You really do have the Devil on your
tail.’
‘He drives a big black car,’ Pétur muttered, moving closer to the counter. ‘If a man driving a big black car comes in here looking for me, then you mustn’t breathe a word to him that I’ve been in.’
‘No chance,’ the lad said. ‘I’ll be as silent as the grave.’
‘He knows I warned Úrsúla,’ he said, more to himself than to the youngster. ‘He has the minister in his power, the bastard. But I warned her, and now he’s after me.’
He glanced at the doorway, but everything was quiet.
‘Úrsúla? You mean the minister of the interior? Is that who you’re talking about?’ The lad seemed astonished. ‘Hold on. Aren’t you the guy whose medical records she asked for? Are you that Pétur?’
‘And what’s your name?’ he asked in reply.
‘My name’s Steinn,’ the lad said. ‘You don’t have much of a memory, do you?’
‘I always forget everything,’ Pétur replied. ‘The Devil told me to forget everything. So you’d best keep your mouth shut and forget everything too. Otherwise I’ll end up like Ari.’
‘Who’s Ari?’
‘Keep your mouth shut and forget everything, was what he said, before he let me out.’
‘And what do you think about the minister demanding your medical records? Aren’t you angry about that?’
‘I’m furious. I’m angry with the Devil. I’m angry with Úrsúla for letting herself be fooled.’
The lad opened the till, took a handful of change and handed it to Pétur.
‘Here you are, old man,’ he said. ‘Go and get yourself something to eat.’
Pétur bowed, but forgot to thank him. His mind was on the Devil. He wondered if he should leave through the kiosk’s back door, but he couldn’t see any sign of the black car nearby. At least, not until he was outside.
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