Instead, her teachers repeatedly reported she had a problem with concentration, suggesting that she couldn’t learn. She did poorly in exams. For a long time, indoctrinated by her teachers’ beliefs, she believed that she didn’t have an intellect suited for study. Her fear of books grew, and it soon became clear that college would be out of the question, as would any thoughts of university. Her teenage years were the toughest, staying in Siglufjördur and watching her contemporaries disappearing – some to Akureyri and some to Reykjavík, off to exciting futures. She spent long hours alone in her room, in the dark, even when he was finally dead, courtesy of the bottle.
Eventually her mother gave way under the pressure, the strain of seeing her daughter spending wordless hours alone in the dark. Nína was placed in an institution in Reykjavík and those two sequestered years remained a blur. She recalled the identical days melding into one, without a single visit from her mother. But when she finally came home to Siglufjördur, Nína didn’t ask her why she never visited. She discovered that her mother had explained her absence by saying that she had been with relatives in the south for those two years. Nína never knew if anyone in the town found out the truth, and she didn’t really care.
After this terrible upbringing she never thought she could find true love, but when it presented itself, she clung to it, even after the object of her affection had gently dismissed her approaches. She kept loving him from afar, staying close. Loving him.
‘There have been some stories about Nína,’ Tómas said to Ari Thór before the funeral. ‘Try and talk to her at the reception. She disappeared for a couple of years when she was quite young, sent to Reykjavík. I recall my mother and her friends talking about it at the time. Her father was a heavy drinker and she was always very introverted.’
Ari Thór wondered what tales would be told of the Reverend Ari Thór once he had moved away. Or were there stories already being told? Gossip about him and Ugla? He would presumably be the last one to hear it.
Nína sat at a table in the upstairs hall of the church, enjoying traditional twisted doughnuts with a glass of orange juice. She was looking across the hall at Pálmi and Úlfur, who stood together in conversation. She was startled as Ari Thór came and sat by her side.
‘Looks like it’s slippery underfoot,’ he said, pointing at Nína’s right foot, which was in plaster.
She looked back at him solemnly. ‘There’s ice on the ground,’ she agreed.
‘It pays to tread carefully,’ he said cheerfully, unwilling to jump straight in with questions about Hrólfur. He cast his gaze around the assembled guests. Nobody would be going home hungry, as the tables groaned under the weight of cakes, doughnuts and pancakes.
She didn’t comment, but looked at the assembled people in the hall.
‘Did you speak to Hrólfur often?’
‘What? No. He’d spit out orders now and again. That was about it,’ she replied, obviously uncomfortable with the thought of speaking ill of the deceased right after his funeral.
‘He liked to give the orders?’
‘Yes. He could be difficult with some people. Not everyone. Either he liked you or he didn’t,’ she said.
He took it as a simple statement of fact, considered and without any regret or bitterness. ‘Do you think he liked you?’
‘I don’t think he had an opinion. It doesn’t matter now, does it?’
It was clear that she wasn’t expecting a reply.
‘I gather that Hrólfur was curious. Could he have come across something that he ought not to have heard about? Maybe to do with someone at the Dramatic Society?’
‘Someone who might then have pushed him down the stairs?’
Her directness took Ari Thór by surprise, although it made a pleasant change. She appeared to be the first person he had spoken to in connection with Hrólfur’s death who didn’t have something to hide, apart from Ugla, of course. Ugla wouldn’t hide anything from him, even though he hadn’t been as open with her as he could have been.
He hadn’t mentioned Kristín.
Ugla was seated at the next table, by Leifur. He shot a quick glance in her direction, ensuring she wouldn’t see him looking. Her eyes looked puffy, as if she had been crying. Maybe Ari Thór’s assessment that there had been no tears for the old man had been wrong.
‘Yes. Maybe,’ he answered, pulling his thoughts back to Nína and the case.
‘No. To be quite honest, no. I think he got on people’s nerves but I can’t imagine that anyone would have wanted to do him harm,’ Nína said. She still hadn’t answered his question about Hrólfur having come across some information he shouldn’t have, secrets at the Dramatic Society, so Ari Thór repeated his question.
She thought for a moment, as if weighing her thoughts. ‘No,’ she answered shortly, and looked across the hall to where Pálmi and Úlfur stood, as if she would prefer to be talking to them. Her eyes were blank and her face expressionless.
He stood up and thanked her for chatting.
Tómas and Hlynur were talking to people he didn’t recognise. Everyone here knew everyone else and he felt like a gate-crasher; maybe that wasn’t far from the truth? He hadn’t even known the deceased.
He looked around, hoping for a chance to speak to Anna, but she was nowhere to be seen – and neither was Karl.
30
SIGLUFJÖRDUR. SATURDAY, 17TH JANUARY 2009
The black jacket didn’t suit her, so she had taken it off, along with her T-shirt, by the bed in the basement flat. She glanced at the window to make sure the curtains were drawn – not that it mattered in this blizzard – and peeled off her trousers. Black wasn’t her colour.
As so often before, they had gone to her place. Little could be seen through the falling snow, which provided cover for them. Siglufjördur wasn’t the most convenient place to carry on an affair and caution was everything. On the other hand, she didn’t have experience of adultery in a larger place, but she imagined that it would be a lot easier. Here, everything had to happen under cover of darkness, and even then nobody was safe from the watchful eyes of neighbours, with their twitching curtains. There was no hotel where a couple could register under assumed names. The manager of the town’s only hotel was an old friend of her parents’ and she had been at school with the reception manager.
The reality was that this was complete madness. But wasn’t that the attraction? The excitement of clandestine meetings in the dark and feverish lovemaking. Both of them being involved in the rehearsals did make things easier for them, as it meant there was an innocent reason they could be seen walking together, but they had to take care going to her place; always one at a time, always in darkness. Fortunately, the door to her basement wasn’t on the street, but hidden away at the side of the house. Her parents generally left her to herself and didn’t make a habit of calling in unannounced, undoubtedly hoping that she would put off moving back south if they left her in peace – even though she was living in their basement. It had certainly never occurred to them that she might have a lover, least of all a lover who was already living with another woman. Whatever way you looked at it, the situation was inexcusable. She could hardly find words to describe how much she hated herself for what she had done. But she couldn’t stop. There was always one last time, and when he held her in his tight embrace it was as if she forgot what the word ‘conscience’ meant.
Even now, right after the funeral, she couldn’t resist. He’d ensnared her with a penetrating glance after the service, whispering so sweetly in her ear.
‘Not in the middle of the day, not now. Someone will see us,’ she protested unconvincingly. She might as well have asked him just what they were waiting for. All the same, she knew it wasn’t the timing that was the worst part of it. It didn’t matter that it was daytime or right after the funeral of a man neither of them had liked. The worst part was that she couldn’t say no, even knowing what had happened to his girlfriend.
‘Are you just going to stand there?’ he asked.
His voice was gentle, but it carried an authority that was so seductive she melted every time she heard him speak.
‘What about Linda? This is just so … wrong. For God’s sake, Karl, she’s in intensive care in Reykjavík!’
‘Come on, don’t be like that. You know that it was all over between me and Linda long ago.’
‘But she is your girlfriend, and she’s still critically ill.’
‘I can’t do anything about that, and the police won’t let me go down south,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t the one who assaulted her,’ he added, somewhat defiantly.
No. I hope not. She only had his word for it.
‘I didn’t attack Linda,’ Karl repeated. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
Anna looked at him. She wanted to believe him, but she wasn’t entirely sure. She had to conceal her doubts.
‘Of course, sweetheart. Of course I know that.’
She longed to ask him to leave, but it was all too exciting; everything was so fantastically inappropriate that she couldn’t resist the temptation and slipped into bed beside him.
It would be nothing short of catastrophic if someone were to come in now, she thought. What sort of person had she become? What would her parents say? The story would spread like a virus around the town. It wouldn’t matter so much for Karl – he could just move away, maybe back to Denmark. But she had no other home than Siglufjördur for the moment, and she stood a decent chance of getting a long-term job at the school. All this she was placing in jeopardy, everything wagered on the single turn of a card and a few minutes of passion with Karl. It was just as well that she could trust him to keep his mouth shut.
She’d asked herself more than once if she genuinely knew anything about him. She knew that he was far too old for her; in the summer he’d be forty-three to her twenty-four. Twenty-four; it had struck her when the priest had described Hrólfur’s life that he had been just twenty-four when his masterpiece was published. When he had been her age his greatest achievement was already behind him. Her only achievements so far were to finish university and sleep with another woman’s husband.
Karl was certainly too old for her, although she knew her friends in the south went out with men of that age – older, even. But adultery was another matter.
How the hell had she got herself into this?
A phone rang, Karl’s mobile. He didn’t even look up.
‘It might be something about Linda. Aren’t you going to answer it?
‘Not now, darling. We’re busy.’
How could she be so entranced by a man who was so indifferent to his own wife’s wellbeing?
This time her phone rang and she reached for it on the bedside table.
‘Don’t answer it, darling,’ said Karl.
But Anna had already picked it up. ‘Hello? Anna here.’
It was Úlfur. He sounded business-like. ‘Anna. I’m calling the whole company together. Can you come to the theatre this afternoon? Say, three o’clock? We need to go over things.’
‘All right. I’ll be there.’
‘Good. Have you seen Karl, by the way? I didn’t see either of you at the reception.’
Anna paused before saying, ‘No, I haven’t seen him.’
‘That was Úlfur,’ she said, ending the call. Then smiled weakly, a stab of concern deep inside, worrying that someone might put two and two together. It was a thought she didn’t dare dwell on.
Úlfur entered the theatre to find he was alone.
The auditorium was probably the only place in the town where he was able to exclude entirely the turbulent outside world and retreat into a dream world – into a fantasy where nothing had gone wrong, a world where the chairman of the Dramatic Society had not fallen to his death a week before and the male lead’s wife had not been found in the snow, close to death in a pool of her own blood.
He looked out over the auditorium.
He suddenly felt old; a lonely, old man, crushed by how much he missed his work, his ex-wife and even his late mother. Although he would presumably be asked to run the town’s Dramatic Society, all at once it hardly seemed to matter.
‘Damn! Damn!’ Tómas shouted in fury. He banged his cup down on the table in front of the computer, where he had been reading the latest report on the investigation into the fatal incident at the Dramatic Society.
Ari Thór had accepted a lift to the station in the police jeep, even though he was still wearing his suit. In spite of being off duty, he had no desire to be at home. This was the kind of thick winter weather that called for company. He sat in the coffee corner with Hlynur and started when Tómas’s anger boiled over.
‘Hell and damnation!’ Tómas swore a third time.
Ari Thór stood up while Hlynur sat still, as silently as he could.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, hardly daring to speak.
‘How do they find out this stuff? How the hell do they sniff it out? Look at that.’
Ari Thór read the headline.
Murder at Siglufjördur Theatre?
According to reliable sources, the police in Siglufjördur are treating the death of Hrólfur Kristjánsson as suspicious …
‘Has either of you talked to anyone about this?’ he shouted at Ari Thór accusingly.
Ari Thór shook his head and Hlynur mumbled something.
‘What?’
‘No, Not a word to anyone,’ Hlynur said.
‘I asked Nína earlier, not directly, of course, but I can hardly imagine that she could have called some journalist.’ Ari Thór said.
‘You can never tell. It’s a bloody nuisance.’
Tómas read through the news item a second time.
‘It’s the same journalist again, the same one who wanted to know about Linda. By rights I should call him and give him a piece of my mind, but we need to tie up this bloody investigation, and as quickly as we can. I think we have to release a statement to say that the Hrólfur investigation is over and that it was an accident. Ari Thór, have you spoken to everyone who was at the rehearsal that night?’
Ari Thór thought quickly. If he included the chat with Úlfur in the hot tub and the private conversations with Ugla, then there was just one person he still needed to speak to.
‘Everyone except Anna.’
‘I was at school with her father. A good guy and a petrolhead like you.’
Ari Thór cursed himself for incautiously admitting that he had a fondness for cars; it had become part of his persona, along with the theology. The Reverend Ari Thór – priest and petrolhead. He wondered if it would be possible to become ‘just’ Ari Thór again, without the labels?
‘You ought to go and have a look at that old jeep of his. It’s a real beauty, still with the original number plates. You don’t see many cars with those any more. He bought it from Karl years ago, before he moved to Denmark. Karl had saved for ages to buy her, and then he had to up sticks and move with his parents. My guess is that he’s never stopped regretting the fact that he was forced to sell her.’
Ari Thór looked at his colleague with something bordering on bemusement. Was there any hope of getting to the bottom of this case in a place where everyone knew everyone else so intimately? Old schoolchums, former workmates, friends and relatives; everyone seemed bound together with innumerable links.
‘I’ll call Anna and see if I can meet her,’ Ari Thór said, sidestepping the discussion about Karl and the car. Anything to get me out of here.
‘The show must go on.’
Anna sat at the back of the auditorium, not far from Karl and Pálmi. Nína had arrived unusually late and sat next to Pálmi. Leifur stood by the wall with his head in the clouds, studiously ignoring everything around him. Úlfur clearly hadn’t succeeded in grabbing everyone’s attention.
Anna had been careful to sit as far as she could from Karl.
‘We said our farewells to Hrólfur today, but he is still watching over us,’ Úlfur said.
It hadn’t escaped Anna’s notice that being on sta
ge did not come naturally to Úlfur. He was nervous; his hands fidgeted incessantly and his eyes flitted in every direction, but mostly down at his feet. ‘Hrólfur would have wanted to carry on regardless. I propose that we open next weekend, on Saturday. We’ll have one dress rehearsal during the week and then put on the finest performance that Siglufjördur has ever seen. I spoke to Karl just now. He’s ready to continue to play the lead, in spite of …’ he hesitated. ‘… Linda’s situation. This demonstrates commendable commitment and courage, I have to say. I admire the man.’
He smiled warmly at Karl, but got no response.
Nobody said a word.
‘Well, now. We meet here on Thursday. That will be the final rehearsal. Any questions?’
There was a moment’s silence again, before Anna stood up and spoke in a low voice that was clear enough to be heard throughout the auditorium.
‘I saw a report that Hrólfur might have been … murdered.’
Úlfur jerked in alarm and he shook his head sharply, muttering under his breath. But then he raised his voice so it filled the hall. ‘Stupid! Damned stupid! Isn’t this just some wicked gossip? Speculation?’ he shouted. ‘There’s all kinds of idle talk when someone well known passes away under unusual circumstances.’ He took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead. ‘Shall we call this meeting to an end? Let’s all be on our way home before we’re literally snowed in.’
Anna’s phone rang. It was a number she didn’t recognise but she answered it. ‘Yes … I’ll be home shortly,’ she said. ‘You know the address? That’s right. I live in the basement.’
She could feel the sweat start to rise on her skin. Her fingertips were suddenly damp. The police.
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