Betrayal

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir

  Inside, he was still boiling with frustration after yesterday’s altercation, and that was why he overheated when he thought about the incident. He had only meant to take Úrsúla to one side to talk to her; somewhere out of sight, maybe behind the shop where the Devil couldn’t watch them through some security camera, somewhere he could hand her the newspaper clipping of her and the Devil so he could ask her straight out if she had chosen to follow the path of evil.

  Pétur lay down on the mattress. It was plastic and his hot skin stuck to it, so he rolled onto the floor and lay there with his back against the cool stone. He had often spent time here – sometimes alone, sometimes with others. There had been times when he felt good here and had been grateful for the shelter and the shower and breakfast; at other times he had been sick, injured and humiliated. And there had been that one time he had seen a man die in just such a cell. That had been his friend Ari.

  Now he had failed yet again to speak to Ari’s daughter, Úrsúla, to tell her about how it had all happened. It was impossible to get close to her now that the Devil was at her heels every step of the way. When she had been small he had often picked her up and spun around with her in his arms. He had picked her up as if she had been as light as a feather, showing off his own strength. She had laughed and made fun of him, and he had replied that lifting such a little child high in the air was nothing. It wouldn’t have been hard to lift her now, either, if only she hadn’t struggled. Of course it had been damned stupid of him to try and abduct a grown woman, but he was desperate. Úrsúla needed to know the truth.

  He ran a hand over the roughness of his face. That black-clad agent of the Devil hadn’t been gentle as he jumped him from behind to get him away from Úrsúla. He had rubbed Pétur’s nose in the dirt, and as he lay manacled and face-down he had tasted the blood mingled with the salt on the ground and been grateful that his handling hadn’t been rougher.

  The man in black could easily have knocked Pétur’s head hard on the pavement if he had wanted to. He could have landed a kick to his head. He could have stamped on his head in fury. But he had done none of these things, because even though he was clearly an agent sent by the Devil, he wasn’t the Devil himself.

  Pétur sighed. It was taking him a long time to cool down. The sweat ran from his armpits and soaked his vest. Maybe he’d wake up in the night in a wet shirt and with a chill. If that happened, he’d crawl onto the mattress and pull the blanket over himself.

  He had managed to get the note into Úrsúla’s pocket. He had stuffed the slip of paper into her coat while she struggled, as soon as he realised that there was no possibility that he would be able to take her to one side to explain things quietly. And this scrap of paper, this message, would have to suffice, because he had now given her the evidence, the picture of her from the newspaper in which she stood holding the Devil’s hand.

  91

  Lying on the sofa downstairs, Gunnar couldn’t make out what was being said above his head, but it was obvious there was an argument going on. It was like an echo from his childhood, lying alone in the darkness, nerves stretched taut, waiting for it to boil over. That was when the first blow was struck. He tried to take deep breaths and calm his mind. There was no danger of that here. Nonni wasn’t a man given to violence.

  Gunnar scrolled through Tinder on his phone, swiping all the women left, as he wasn’t looking for a date but simply checking to see if Úrsúla would appear. The first couple of profiles had been deleted, but there was no telling if this crazy Fossi would decide to register her yet again. He was relieved that the police had decided to investigate the Tinder thing. He thought Boris hadn’t taken Fossi’s emails seriously enough; it looked like they had gone into the pile with all the other oddball messages to ministers. But now that there was a clear threat of physical violence to the minister while she was under their protection, they had knuckled down and set the cyber-security department to work on it.

  Gunnar sat up as he heard footsteps on the stairs. Úrsúla had come down, so he got to his feet and followed her into the kitchen.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked.

  She sighed. ‘I was going to get myself a beer. Would you like one?’

  He shook his head, but she handed him a bottle all the same, so he took it and went with her into the living room.

  ‘I’m sorry. The racket we’re making must be keeping you awake.’

  She sat in an armchair, tucking her feet under her. She wore tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt. Gunnar found it odd to be here, in her space, inside her private life; somehow it made her appear smaller and slimmer than he had seen her before.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, taking a seat in his nest on the sofa – he had made a bed with the duvet Úrsúla had given him. He always kept a sleeping bag in the car, but she had insisted that if he was going to bed down on the sofa, he should have a decent duvet. He had told her more than once that it wasn’t a problem; part of the job.

  ‘I feel a lot happier keeping an eye on you here than being at home worrying that there’s some idiot banging on your door,’ he added.

  She looked up, caught his eye and smiled.

  ‘I’m absolutely in agreement with everyone who told me at the start that the best thing about being a minister is having a driver.’ She sipped her beer, woke her phone from sleep and handed it to him. ‘In fact, I think the only good thing about being a minister is the driver,’ she added as Gunnar read the text on the screen:

  ‘Pétur Pétursson Detained Without Charge’, the headline read, and the article beneath it hinted that Úrsúla was using her privilege as a minister to persecute an aged homeless man as a way of settling old scores. Under the article was a link to a petition that people could sign, demanding her resignation.

  Friday

  92

  Úrsúla hadn’t slept much; one beer with Gunnar had turned into three. Nonni had been asleep when she went upstairs and was still sleeping when she got up, or else he was pretending to sleep so he didn’t have to talk to her. She seemed to have managed to get everything in their relationship wrong since becoming a minister, and as they had argued the evening before, he seemed to have found an outlet for an anger that she had underestimated. She had known that there were many things that irritated him about the changes to their life, and she regretted having kept a few things back from him, such as the incident at the shop, but the depth of his dissatisfaction had taken her by surprise. Maybe he sensed the gulf that had formed between them, felt something that couldn’t be put into words, and knew that she wasn’t completely there even though she played the part well. Perhaps it was for these reasons that he took trivial things so much to heart.

  The guilt weighed on her shoulders as she thought of Thorbjörn and what had gone on between them over the last week, and she felt herself helpless and drained of energy. She stared out of her office window at the double-decker tourist coach that had stopped outside the Harpa concert hall and was swallowing up a whole queue of travellers who had been shivering for some time in the cold gusts that came off the sea. Something inside told her that everything would be fine if only she could be honest with Nonni and share with him even a fraction of the horrors that were buried deep in her soul. But she had no desire to do so. She felt she had no right to wreck his happy outlook on life by telling him that it was a stormy biological process that a single kiss or an explosion could in an instant reduce to a foul-smelling pool of blood, or a puff of smoke and steam.

  The psychologist Médecins Sans Frontières had sent her to after she returned from Liberia had told her that she needed to reinvest in life all over again. She had to believe that she would recover. For a few weeks she had thought it over, but then had pushed the idea away as she pounced with relief on the next assignment. That was overseeing the movement of two thousand people and their refugee camp from Syria, across the frontier into Jordan.

  Úrsúla pushed away her coffee cup. When Freyja appeared she would ask her to fetch breakfast. She
wouldn’t be pleased, and on top of that she would have to put up with the presence of the police officer who was there to stand guard outside Úrsúla’s office all day long. She heard sounds out in the hallway, so it seemed the ministry was coming to life. She sighed deeply, stretched as if she had just woken up and clicked on the online news to see what the day’s headlines were. Aside from the conspiracy theories that suggested she was engaged in some Monte Cristo-style vendetta against the wretched homeless man who had murdered her father, most of the newspapers led with the rape charge against the Selfoss police officer. As she scrolled through the comments she could see people beside themselves with anger that the charges had been dropped, alongside the sincere delight of others who equated the investigation being halted with the accused man being innocent. Úrsúla suppressed the longing to add a furious lecture of her own to the comments, or to call Thorbjörn and ask him to underline the words ‘investigation halted due to technical mishandling of evidence’ in his paper. She felt a second wave of guilt engulf her as she thought of the mother of the young woman and the promise she had made on her very first day in office. She had promised to see justice done. There was no shred of justice in this outcome: the case would not even be investigated.

  There was a knock at the door and Óðinn came in.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we don’t need to concern ourselves any longer with that rape charge.’

  He seemed cheerful, and despite Úrsúla understanding perfectly well that his role was to protect both her and the ministry from anything potentially uncomfortable, this wasn’t how she had imagined that a department under her charge would operate.

  ‘Tell me the truth, my dear Óðinn,’ she said. ‘Did you bring any pressure to bear to make sure the charges would be dropped?’

  Óðinn smiled awkwardly and cleared his throat, as if buying himself time as he thought through what he could reply. His bulky body seemed to shrink, and he appeared to stoop, as if trying to make as little as he could of his own presence. He drew a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and dabbed at his upper lip.

  ‘I do my job,’ he said slowly, taking a seat in the chair opposite her.

  Úrsúla took the sheet of paper with the following week’s schedule on it, staring at it as she pretended to read while she swallowed her disappointment. The feeling that she had become some kind of pawn in a system that chugged along according to its own rules had become overwhelming.

  93

  Pétur had the feeling that he was being watched, and that it had been going on for a while. He walked at his habitual pace along Laugavegur and didn’t need to turn round to know that the car slowly driving behind was shadowing him. He acted as if he’d noticed nothing and carried on until he was right by the underpass that led to the steps up to Grettisgata. This was the classic way of shaking the cops off, as they could rarely be bothered to continue the chase on foot. But it could hardly be the cops after him now; they had only just let him out, with a stern warning that he ought to keep out of trouble. He turned and saw that the car that had followed him was a large, black, gleaming 4x4. The windows were tinted, but the moment the car stopped beside him, the driver’s window hissed down and the face of the Devil himself appeared.

  ‘Jump in and we’ll have a quick chat, Pétur,’ he said.

  But Pétur didn’t stand still long enough even to refuse; he had already taken to his heels, through the underpass and up the steps. He hurried straight across the car park and over Grettisgata, into the playground outside the nursery, through the gardens and up onto Njálsgata before he dared look back. The Devil hadn’t followed him. He would hardly leave that beautiful shiny car in the middle of Laugavegur. Pétur’s heart hammered and he panted with exertion. It had been a long time since he had looked into the Devil’s eyes. The last time he had escaped he had sworn that he would never again let himself be caught in his clutches. But now the Devil was on his tail, and that had to mean he knew Pétur’s message had reached Úrsúla, that he knew he had warned her about him, that he had told the truth. Now the Devil knew everything. Pétur felt the fear take hold of him. The Devil’s voice had been friendly enough as he had invited him into the car, but he wasn’t going to let that fool him, knowing what the man was capable of.

  In the old days the police boys had sometimes been downright offensive, especially the young ones, giving them an earful and calling them a waste of space. But it was worst when the Devil was on duty. He was the meanest of all of them, and quick to use his fists. That night he had lost his temper with Ari, who had dropped a tab of acid, was disobedient and smelled pretty foul because he had been sick down his front. When the Devil had punched him to force him into the cell with Pétur, Ari had spat at him and called him by his right name: Devil. He had spat a second time, this time right in the face of the Devil, who reacted furiously. Pétur never knew if it was the spit or the fact that Ari had known his true name that turned him into such a personification of fury, but he didn’t stop punching and kicking, even when Pétur tried to put himself between them, receiving such a heavy punch on the jaw that he had been thrown back against the wall and knocked unconscious. He had come to his senses again to see the Devil with his boot on Ari’s throat. There was no life in his face, as if he had already forsaken himself and left behind that vomit-smelling, blue-faced bag of blood that didn’t move, but lay on the floor of the cell, groaning at intervals. As Pétur sat up, he was aware of a lad of a part-time policeman hauling the Devil out of the cell.

  ‘That’s enough,’ the youngster had said, catching hold of both of the Devil’s hands to stop him. ‘That’ll do.’

  The cell door slammed shut and the lights went out, and he could hear the young policeman yelling at the Devil, demanding to know what the hell he was thinking and if he had lost his mind.

  Pétur knew then and there that the Devil didn’t think. He simply roamed the world and whatever was in his way would suffer the heat of his anger.

  When the cell door had opened again, it was the young lad who threw a pair of shoes in to him.

  ‘Your shoes,’ he said, shutting the door again and switching off the light so that Pétur had to fumble in the darkness.

  He found the shoes and put them on, ready to run the moment they’d let him out. He wanted to flee from the terror, to save himself from the Devil. He laced the shoes tightly but it wasn’t until he had them on that he realised they didn’t fit. Although these were police-issue boots, like the ones he usually wore, these weren’t his.

  Pétur had felt a trickle of blood run down his face from where his scalp had grazed against the wall as he had fallen. He put his hand to the wound to stop the bleeding as he sat in the darkness and snivelled, while Ari took his last few difficult breaths.

  94

  The hot light that Stella’s grandmother had given her on her birthday would burn in her head for a while, but then fade away, and she hadn’t yet worked out what it meant. She would figure it out. She would learn to understand what it meant when her head was filled with the hot, blue-green brightness. So far she wasn’t sure whether she was being warned of something when it lit up, or whether it was an indicator that she was doing the right thing.

  Mostly it came on when she thought of Gréta. Now, as she stacked packs of toilet paper on the shelves of the cleaners’ storeroom, remembering how Gréta and the blonde had walked away from her outside the grey apartment block, practically in step, hand-in-hand, her head blazed like a broken gas burner.

  She growled in irritation as one stack of toilet paper toppled off the shelf and the packets bounced across the floor. She picked one up and hurled it against the wall, but it gave her no relief, and instead she found herself suddenly choking, so she snatched up the two bags of rubbish that came from some office that dealt with finance, banged the door shut behind her and hurried out and down the steps to the rear staff entrance.

  Outside she drew the air deep into her lungs several times to bring some oxygen to her overheating head. The creepy
journalist’s car was parked behind the rubbish skip in the lower car park. She hurried over to it. She was about to put her hand on the door handle when she realised that there was someone in the car with him. She was about to quietly back away, back to the ministry building, but was startled as the car’s door opened and Óðinn, the permanent secretary, stepped out.

  ‘That wasn’t what I asked you to do!’ he yelled into the car, just as he saw Stella.

  He was clearly taken by surprise. He stared at her for a moment, and Stella felt a strong urge to run away. At the same time the fire in her head cooled so that the cold wind chilled her through to the bone, blew in her ear and down her neck, so that she shivered.

  ‘Not a single word about that to anyone,’ Óðinn hissed at her, his anger as cold as the wind. ‘Otherwise you’ll get what you deserve for what you’ve done!’

  It took Stella a moment’s thought before she worked out what the permanent secretary had meant; he clearly knew that she had been selling the ministry’s rubbish, but he hadn’t been sitting in the creep’s car to trap her. He had been there because he had an errand of his own with the journalist. He had been berating the creep, venting his displeasure because the man hadn’t done as he had been asked.

  Stella threw the bags into the car and snatched the proffered notes from the journalist’s hand. She felt tears running down her cheeks as she walked back across the car park and down to Sæbraut, taking care not to look in the direction of the grey tower that loomed over the district.

  She licked her lips, tasted the salt, and wiped her face, growling to herself at her own feebleness. Had the permanent secretary’s rebuke triggered the tears, or was she crying with relief that she hadn’t been sacked on the spot? Her eyes finally strayed to the grey tower. Was she crying over Gréta? The blue-green flame burst into life in her head, so hot that it almost hurt. Was that it? Was she really in tears over the fat newsreader?