My Soul to Take

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  “Great,” Thóra said. “But keep trying to remember. It’s important.” She took the mobile out of his hands and browsed through the messages once more. “One thing strikes me as odd,” she mused after reading them all again. “Why should Birna obey the message? If I received a message from you telling me to meet you by a cave, I’d call you back to ask why.”

  “She wouldn’t have wondered about that. She’d suggested I build a little restaurant on the beach by that cave, but I wasn’t terribly excited at the prospect. She would have rushed straight there if she thought I’d changed my mind,” said Jónas.

  “And was this common knowledge?” Matthew asked.

  “More or less,” Jónas replied. “She talked a lot, Birna did. Discretion wasn’t exactly her middle name.”

  Thóra stared at Jónas, deep in thought. “Tell me one thing. Since you didn’t kill her, who could have done it? You described her as a wonderful person, someone nobody disliked. I can’t imagine many people would have a motive for killing a fairly run-of-the-mill architect.”

  Jónas looked from her to Matthew. “Ahem. Maybe I didn’t quite tell the whole truth. She was actually a total bitch. None of my staff could stand her. She talked down to them, took the piss out of them for the hotel’s philosophy…So there’s a long list of people who hated her. But I don’t know how many would have gone so far as to kill her. Who would? It’s crazy.”

  “I hope for your sake that you’re overlooking a very obvious lead,” said Matthew, “otherwise the police will make you the prime suspect.”

  “Go off and try to remember where you were on Thursday evening,” Thóra said. “In the meantime Matthew and I will try to find out some more about Birna. Be prepared to have to hand over your mobile. Don’t resist. They’ve probably seen the message on Birna’s mobile and just want yours to confirm it. Under no circumstances delete it. That would just look even more suspicious.”

  “Oh. Would it?” said Jónas glumly.

  “And give me back my SIM card. There’s no need for the police to get hold of that.”

  “SOMEHOW I’M CONVINCED THE MURDER IS CONNECTED WITH THIS house or the area,” said Thóra, plucking a blade of grass absentmindedly.

  “What makes you think that?” Matthew asked, sipping his coffee. They were sitting in loungers on the lawn behind the hotel, enjoying the view across Faxaflói Bay. “The motive is much more likely to be in the present than the past: love, money, madness. The murderer could even have been a complete stranger; maybe he saw a woman on her own and lost control of himself.”

  Thóra chewed on the stalk. “The text message suggests otherwise.” Twirling the piece of grass between her teeth, she added, “I just have a feeling that it’s connected with the hotel in some way. There’s something about this building. And her diary too. It doesn’t contain a word about love or money. It gives the impression Birna was a workaholic.”

  “Couldn’t it be just her work diary? Maybe she kept another one about her private life.” Matthew watched the blade of grass flicking up and down in the corner of Thóra’s mouth. “I didn’t know Icelandic women chewed the cud.” He grimaced. “Does that taste good?”

  “Try it. It focuses the mind,” Thóra said, plucking another piece. She handed it to him and smiled when he pulled a face but forced himself to try. “There’s bound to be something in that diary to help us discover the murderer.” She watched Matthew chewing the grass. “Don’t you like it? You just need a pair of rubber boots and you’ll make the perfect Icelandic farmer.”

  “Rubber belongs in tires, elastic bands, and tennis balls, not foot-wear.” Matthew removed the blade of grass from his mouth. “Shouldn’t we take a look at the diary?”

  Thóra sat up in her sunlounger. “Maybe we should do one thing first. The diary contained a plan of the other farmhouse on this land. It included all kinds of remarks that we might be able to puzzle out if we go there.”

  Matthew sat up as well. “It’s up to you. I’ll follow and play bodyguard.” He winked at her. “I have the feeling that this investigation will lead you into all kinds of dubious territory. You’ve already burgled a dead woman, stolen her belongings, and hindered the course of justice by allowing Jónas to erase suspicious information from his mobile. I can’t wait to see where this ends.”

  “THE NAME KRISTÍN IS WRITTEN HERE, FOLLOWED BY A QUESTION mark. Maybe we should start there.” Thóra pointed at the pages showing the plan of the farmhouse. They were standing in a room leading from the hallway of the old farmhouse and faced the choice of going upstairs or inspecting the ground floor, which according to the drawing ought to consist of two living rooms, a kitchen, storeroom, toilet, and study.

  “Isn’t that upstairs? Shouldn’t we check down here first?” Matthew said, peering through a doorway to his left.

  “Sure,” Thóra said, slamming the diary shut. She had given up trying not to leave her fingerprints on it, as she didn’t intend to return it unless she was forced to. “Ugh, what a stink.” A strange smell that Thóra couldn’t place permeated the house. It was a mixture of rising mildew, dry dust, and mothballs. One thing was certain—the place had not been aired properly for decades. “Yuck,” she said, putting her hand over her nose and mouth.

  Matthew took a deep breath. “You should try and get used to it as quickly as possible. You stop noticing it after a while.” Bold words, but he pulled a face as soon as he had spoken them. “Oof, can’t we open a window in here?”

  They entered the room on the left, which according to Birna’s plan was a study. The door handle was antique, made of thick wood, and needed a good tug to open. The door seemed to be warped, and Thóra was struck by how much thicker modern doors were. She went in behind Matthew and they looked around in silence.

  “Not much to see here,” he muttered after they had scanned the empty bookshelves along the walls and opened the drawers of a large desk beneath the dirty window. The drawers turned out to be as empty as the shelves, apart from one ancient pencil. It had been sharpened with a knife, and there was no rubber on the end.

  “Look at this, though,” said Thóra. “It looks like there were books on these shelves not that long ago.” She pointed to the dust. It was thick at the edges but thinner toward the back of the shelves, the difference barely perceptible.

  Matthew went over to examine them. “I agree. Do you suppose Birna took the books? Maybe they were valuable.”

  Thóra shrugged. “I doubt it. She didn’t mention any books in her notes, although I guess she wouldn’t have if she planned to steal them. The previous owners must have taken them. Jónas said they told him they’d remove all the contents.”

  They went farther inside the house, where they found two adjoining living rooms with old-fashioned furniture: a tatty three-piece suite that would have been stylish in its day, an imposing sideboard, and a mahogany dining set with a faded embroidered cloth on the table. There were small side tables with no ornaments. Two paintings hung on the walls, one of a ship and the other showing Snæfellsnes glacier. Both were too filthy to read the artist’s name. The sideboard was empty, as was the cabinet.

  “I dare you to throw yourself on to the sofa,” said Matthew, pointing at the dusty upholstery. The vague outline of a flower pattern was visible through the dirt. “I really want to see the cloud it would send up.”

  “No, thanks,” Thóra said. “You do it. I’ll give you a hundred krónur.”

  Matthew stroked her arm. “I could think of a better reward than hard cash.”

  Thóra smiled. “We could come to some arrangement.” Then she looked back at the sofa and wrinkled her nose. “But I think you should give it a miss; I’m not sure the dust would settle before evening and we might not find our way back out. Come on, let’s check the kitchen.”

  The kitchen was not as spartan as the other rooms, but it was just as antiquated, with modest oiled-wood cupboards and a small, shallow sink. Compared with a modern kitchen, the work surface was not large, but there was mu
ch more floor space than Thóra was accustomed to. Wooden spoons and a steel fish slice hung from hooks on the wall, and a tin coffeepot stood on the stove.

  “Weird that they left so much personal stuff,” Thóra said, looking around.

  Matthew opened one of the kitchen cupboards and found an assortment of cups and glasses. “Isn’t it one of those boring chores, though? Always getting put off until later, and then it never gets done. Maybe the householders died and didn’t have any use for it, and the heirs must have already had enough coffeepots and furniture, so couldn’t be bothered to—” He stopped short and pointed at a cardboard box on one of the kitchen chairs. “Look, what’s that?”

  The box was full of items wrapped in newspaper. Beside it lay a pile of magazines. Thóra picked one up to see the date. “It’s from this May. The previous owners have been here packing up quite recently. And what’s this?” she continued, pointing at a thermos flask that had been obscured by the box. “This isn’t old.” She lifted the flask and shook it. Liquid splashed around inside and Thóra unscrewed the lid. She took a cautious sniff. “Coffee,” she said. “This must have been left by Elín and Börkur, or by whoever they sent to remove all this stuff.” She put the flask down again.

  “Who are these former owners, Elín and Börkur? Did they live here?” asked Matthew.

  “They’re the brother and sister who inherited the land. Middle-aged. Whether they lived here I don’t know, but I doubt it, considering how old all this stuff is.” Thóra looked around the kitchen. “They were fifty at most. This stuff is much older, so they couldn’t have been brought up here.”

  “But why suddenly clear the place now?” wondered Matthew. “The property must have been sold several years ago. Surely the new part of the hotel wasn’t built in a couple of months.”

  “No, you’re right. I suppose they were spurred on by Jónas’s plan to build an annex to this farmhouse, although it fell through later.” Thóra opened the kitchen drawers one after another and peered inside. Nothing in them caught her eye.

  They finished inspecting the lower floor without finding anything else. The storeroom contained items that had obviously spent decades on the shelves, along with a few new cardboard boxes. They opened a couple of the boxes and assumed that the others also contained ornaments that had been cleared from the living rooms and the dusty old books from the shelves. Thóra left Matthew to check the downstairs toilet, and his expression when he returned suggested that she hadn’t missed much.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” he said, his face pale as he headed for the stairs. A muffled creak was heard from the floor above. It was followed by what sounded like a low groan.

  “Did you hear that?” whispered Thóra. Mathew nodded. In a louder voice she called out in the direction of the landing. “Hello! Is someone there?” Sheer silence greeted them from above.

  “It’s probably just the boards rotting away.” Matthew appeared nonchalant while Thóra knew her face was ashen. This house was eerie in a way that she could not pinpoint. Who leaves their home in such a rush that they can’t take the time to box up their belongings? This was a bad place and she could not suppress the feeling that the former inhabitants had wanted so badly to depart the premises that their stuff had not mattered.

  Before heading upstairs they peeked through a door leading down to the basement, but because there was no light inside, Thóra decided it was not imperative for them to go down there and they went up instead. The house was creepy enough as it was and Thóra had no longing to enter its underbelly. She would rather move on to the second story where the groan had originated. On the landing they found five doors, all closed. The first one Matthew tried turned out to be locked. Gripping the handle of the next, he suddenly stopped. “Take a quick look at the drawing and tell me which one is the bathroom.”

  After checking Birna’s diary, Thóra proposed they examine the room marked “Kristín?” “I think that interested Birna most,” Thóra said, pointing out the door.

  “I’ll never forgive you if you’re playing a trick on me and this is another bathroom,” he said before he opened it.

  “You’ll see,” Thóra said, and pushed open the door the moment he turned the handle. She made sure that he did not notice that her eyes were closed while the door swung inward. If there was something awful behind it she did not want to see it. When he did not yell out she opened them and acted natural.

  They walked into a child’s bedroom, presumably a little girl’s. At the head of a white-painted bed sat a scruffy teddy bear with one eye missing. It was covered in light brown fur, apart from the chest, which was made from gray material. Its limbs were attached by black steel buttons at the shoulders and hips, and Thóra was moved to see how the faded red ribbon around its neck had yielded to gravity and now dangled down to the middle of its chest. A tatty doll sat beside the teddy bear, its painted eyes staring at the wall opposite the bed.

  “There’s something really weird about this,” said Thóra, disturbed.

  “Yes,” answered Matthew. “Someone clearly left in a hurry. Look.” He went up to a shelf where a few dusty books were arranged. Beneath the shelf was a white-painted desk and a sheet of paper with a half-finished drawing on it. Crayons were spread across the desk. He picked up the drawing to examine it more closely. The corners were curled, and a layer of gray dust covered the surface. He blew on it, sending up a cloud that he batted away. Then he handed the drawing to Thóra. “The child didn’t even have time to finish her drawing.”

  Thóra scrutinized the picture. It would have been by a child only slightly older than her daughter, Sóley, who was six. It showed a burning house, with thick flames climbing skyward through the roof. Roughly half the picture had been colored in.

  “An odd subject,” Thóra said, putting it down. “Do you suppose it’s a drawing of this house?”

  Matthew shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Although it’s a child’s drawing, it clearly only has one floor.” He frowned. “The door’s unusually large as well.”

  Thóra pointed to the window. “Are those eyes?” She stooped for a better view. “I’ll be damned. The kid’s drawn someone inside the house. Look, there’s an open mouth but no nose.”

  Matthew bent down. “Charming subject for a picture. Maybe the child was a bit strange.”

  “Or had seen something disturbing,” Thóra said, turning away from the desk. “I think we should find out about the family who lived here and why they moved away. I know the man who lived here was called Grímur, and I think he had only one daughter, who was so young when she died that she couldn’t have drawn this picture. Another family may have lived here after them.” She went over to a small door set into the wall. Opening it carefully, she saw that it was a closet. There were several hangers on the rail. Two still had clothes hanging from them, a small sweater and a thin cotton shift dress. Both were too large to belong to Edda, who had died in her fourth year, according to the album in the hotel basement. The dress swayed slightly on the hanger and Thóra took a step back. “Did that dress just move?”

  “Looks like it. Maybe there is a draft entering from the back of the closet. What’s behind there?” Matthew asked, pointing inside the wardrobe.

  Thóra stuck her head inside and noticed that at the back of the wardrobe there was a frame around a rectangular board, not quite flush with the wall surrounding it. She pressed the board and it fell inward. “Oh, look!” she exclaimed. “It’s a little door on hinges and there are some stairs leading up.”

  They took turns peering into the dark hole and Matthew took out his car key. There was a tiny light on it that he could use as a flashlight. He illuminated the stairs. “Look,” he said, gesturing toward one of the steps that he had lit up, “a footprint in the dust. Someone’s been up here.”

  “Birna. It’s bound to have been Birna,” Thóra said firmly. “She recorded the condition of the beams in her diary and wanted to see the state of the rafters. This must lead up to an attic. Shall
we go up?”

  Matthew looked amused. “Sure, just wait here while I go and fetch a knife. I just need to chop off my arm, and maybe the shoulder for good measure.” He pointed to the hole. “There’s no way I could get through there.”

  “Give me your key, then,” Thóra said with more bravado than she felt at the thought of going alone into the attic. She put the key in her mouth while she clambered into the closet and squeezed from there through the narrow hole. Before heading up the steps, she turned to Matthew, grinning. “See you. I’ll kill you if I trip over a rat.” She went up the first step. Then a thought occurred to her and she leaned back through the hole. “Or a mouse. I’ll also kill you if there’s a mouse.”

  The attic was completely empty. When Thóra aimed the weak beam of the torch along the floor, she could see Birna had been walking around up there. She was apprehensive about stepping on to the floor in case it wouldn’t take her weight; Birna was much smaller than her, judging by the clothes Thóra had seen in her room. Thóra would have preferred to examine the attic from the steps where she was standing, but when the light caught something glittering by one of the wooden posts supporting the beams, she couldn’t resist temptation. She inched her way cautiously out on to the floor. It creaked and groaned with each step she took, and she half expected to plunge through onto Matthew in the room below. Or, far worse, into the bathroom. She aimed the tiny torch farther across the attic and saw that Birna—or whoever’s footprints they were—had also been there. Thóra slowly began to make her way to the post but every step she took away from the opening increased her apprehension. It wasn’t so much falling between floors that caused her anxiety but a feeling of not being alone. A feeling she could not shake despite common sense telling her that no one was thin enough to hide behind the many slender posts that held up the roof. At one point she could have sworn she heard someone breathing behind her and the goose bumps that crept up her neckline into her scalp did nothing to dampen the effect. It was as if a tiny stream of cool air had been blown into her neckline. The breath of a dead child. Thóra froze in her tracks but did not dare turn around. “Matthew? Are you there?” She heard his muffled and puzzled voice call back to her. She relaxed a bit, mustered up the courage to peek behind her, and kept on going when she saw nothing.