The Creak on the Stairs

by Eva Bjorg AEgisdóttir

  ‘I haven’t given up,’ Karen said, rather huffily. ‘I’m just going to ask for an extension for this project. The good thing is that the teachers are very flexible, especially when you’re stuck at home with a sick child – like I am this evening.’ She winked at them and they laughed. ‘This is just what I needed,’ she continued. ‘This week has been unbelievable. We found silverfish in the bathroom on Monday.’ Her friends gasped. ‘I mean, we’ve only just put in a new bathroom and now these pests turn up. We’d have done better to build a new place from scratch than try and restore an old house.’

  ‘But you’ve got it looking so beautiful,’ Brynja protested. ‘And silverfish are perfectly harmless; you just need to put down some insecticide.’

  ‘There’s no point.’ Sigrún finished her tea in one gulp. ‘They turn up where there’s damp and won’t go until you’re rid of it.’

  ‘We should have gone for a new-build, like you, Magnea.’ Karen sighed. ‘You must be free from all creepy-crawlies and other problems.’

  Magnea nodded without listening.

  ‘Are you all right, Magnea? You’re awfully quiet.’ Karen was looking at her searchingly.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said, smiling. ‘Really,’ she added, when her friends appeared unconvinced.

  ‘Apparently there’s some horrible bug going round,’ Brynja said.

  ‘There’s always something going round,’ Sigrún retorted.

  Cheers were heard from the sitting room, followed almost immediately by swearing and loud exclamations that it wasn’t bloody offside. The women exchanged grins.

  ‘Christ, he’ll wake the kids.’ Karen glanced anxiously towards the children’s rooms. ‘Well, they’re his problem if he does.’

  The friends all knew this was a lie. Karen took care of the children and the house while her husband, Guðmundur, looked after nothing but himself. They had witnessed this during the various visits to summer houses and camping trips that the group of friends had undertaken over the years. He invariably lounged on his backside, beer in hand, while the children ran around shrieking or bawling, with Karen on their heels.

  ‘I’ve never understood how they can get so worked up over football,’ Sigrún said disgustedly, shaking her head. ‘It’s only a game.’

  ‘Don’t let Gummi hear you say that,’ Karen said. ‘Seriously, I tried it once and I’m not doing that again in a hurry.’

  They all laughed.

  ‘By the way, did you hear that they found a body by the lighthouse?’ Karen looked round at the others, her expression part scandalised, part excited. ‘Apparently they’ve identified the woman and she was local. Or, at least, she lived here as a child.’

  ‘Seriously?’ The other women leant forwards eager to hear more. ‘Who was she? It’s so awful. I heard she’d been murdered. Is that true? It seems unbelievable.’

  Magnea could feel herself beginning to sweat. She took another sip of water and ate some chocolate raisins, but it didn’t help.

  ‘Yes, apparently. She’s … or rather she was called Elísabet. She went to Brekkubær School, but recently she’d been living in the Hvalfjörður area with her husband and kids. Two boys.’

  ‘Elísabet…’ Sigrún lingered over the name. ‘I don’t remember any Elísabet. Was she our sort of age?’

  ‘Yes, she was in our year. I looked up a picture of her and recognised her face, though I don’t remember much about her. Apparently she was very young when she moved away.’

  When the noise from next door suddenly ceased, Karen glanced at the clock. The game was over and the TV had been switched off. Shortly afterwards they heard the sound of the shower.

  ‘It’s absolutely terrible. Her poor children.’ Brynja put a hand to her cheek. ‘I just can’t understand what sort of person would do a thing like that. Was it the husband? It often is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Would her body have turned up here in Akranes if it was him?’ Karen asked. ‘I don’t understand why she was here. What on earth could she have been doing out by the lighthouse?’

  ‘Maybe she was drunk and wandered out there, and was unlucky enough to run into the wrong guy.’ Sigrún yawned.

  ‘Who, though? Wouldn’t we know if there was somebody living in Akranes who was capable of doing a thing like that?’ Karen asked.

  ‘You think so? Would it be that obvious?’ Sigrún looked doubtful. ‘Mind you, there are some pretty dodgy types living in this town.’

  ‘Yes, dodgy, sure, but murderers … I doubt it,’ Karen said.

  Magnea bent forwards and took a deep breath.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right, Magnea?’ Karen looked concerned.

  Magnea raised her head. Her breathing was coming fast, she felt dizzy and could smell herself sweating under her perfume.

  ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘No, I’m not feeling too good.’ She hoped they wouldn’t notice that she swayed slightly when she stood up. Saying a hasty goodbye, she headed for the door. Karen got up and followed her.

  ‘You must be coming down with something, darling. You’re as white as a sheet,’ she said, fetching Magnea’s coat from the cupboard. ‘Shall I give you a lift home?’

  ‘No, there’s really no need.’ Magnea tried to smile, then said goodbye and hurried out, avoiding Karen’s eye as she closed the front door.

  She felt better as soon as she was out in the cold, damp air and her nausea receded further with every step she took away from the house. She drew a few deep breaths, then stroked her belly. It was becoming a habit, although her stomach was still flat. It was so reassuring to sense the life growing inside her and know that she was no longer alone. But now, as she placed a hand on her belly, all she could feel was emptiness, and she had a sudden premonition that it would all go wrong; that the child would be made to pay for what she had done.

  Akranes 1990

  She had a premonition that something was going to happen before she even opened the door. Every step she had taken away from school and closer to home had amplified the feeling. Although it was only April, the sun was shining brightly, the breeze caressed her cheek and there was a sweet smell in the air – the scent of new grass peeping up through the soil. But she was numb to these harbingers of spring. The sounds around her receded into a distant hum. She was no longer aware of the cars, people’s voices, doors opening and shutting or the cries of the birds. All were drowned out by the deafening silence inside her. She could sense that something was going to happen.

  The concrete steps leading up to their house were crisscrossed with cracks and there was moss sprouting in the gaps. She sat down and started tearing it up until she had reopened the sores on her fingers. Her hair fell forwards, almost covering her face. She was wearing the brown anorak and red-and-white trainers given to her by the women who sometimes came and visited her mother.

  The women were OK. They brought her clothes and looked her in the eye when they spoke to her. How are you feeling? they asked. How are you getting on at school? Do you have many friends? What happened to your hands? All questions to which she had answers. Well – I’m getting on well, I’ve got a friend called Sara, I fell over when I was playing. Yes, Mummy’s good to me. They took her hands and their faces grew concerned as they examined her nails, or what was left of them. She rarely noticed until they started bleeding. She had bitten her nails ever since she could remember. And she scratched at things too. Clawed at stones or concrete until the skin of her fingers split and they bled even more.

  Like now. Blood mingled with the dirt and moss on the concrete steps. The wounds on her fingers were swollen and angry. Sometimes they developed a white or greenish tinge. At school she went around with her fists clenched so no one would see what she had been doing. She couldn’t stand the looks on the other children’s faces when they saw her hands. After the first day at school, she had been careful always to hide her fingers, but sometimes it just wasn’t possible. Disgusting, she read in the other kids’ faces. But the expressions on the adults’ fac
es were even worse. In them she could read pity. Concern.

  There was nothing for it. Elísabet opened the front door and was relieved to find there was nobody home. The floorboards creaked as she went into the kitchen. Their house was old. This had never occurred to her until she started going round to Sara’s. She hadn’t noticed before how dirty everything was either. Perhaps she had ceased to see it because it had always been like that, ever since she was a little girl. She didn’t feel like a little girl any more, though. Soon she would be seven but she had long ago stopped thinking of herself as a child.

  Their house was big too; they had all three storeys to themselves. She had never stopped to wonder how they could afford to live there until one evening her mother told her they would have to move. That the rent was too high. But something must have changed, because they hadn’t moved out after all, although her mother never had a job and there was never any money.

  She found a yoghurt in the fridge and mixed it with breakfast cereal and brown sugar – lots and lots of brown sugar. Then she sat down at the kitchen table and gazed out of the window as she ate. The sea was calm and the sun cast a yellow-white streak across its blue surface. As always when she looked out to sea, her thoughts drifted to her father.

  She was still thinking about him when the front door opened and she heard her mother’s voice. It was shrill and she was laughing loudly. Too loudly. Elísabet heard a deep male voice too and immediately started glancing around for somewhere to hide. There was a larder leading off the kitchen and she stood up, but before she could dart in there, they were both standing in front of her.

  ‘Elísabet,’ said her mother. Her expression was remote, her eyes glazed. She was so thin that her jeans hung off her. ‘Go up to your room. Now.’ There was a man beside her. Unlike the other men who sometimes came to visit her mother, he was neatly dressed, in a shirt and tie.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked. His eyes were a stony grey, his hair dark.

  ‘That’s Elísabet,’ said her mother. She took him by the hand and tried to pull him away. ‘And she’s to go to her room,’ she added in a stern voice, narrowing her eyes.

  But the man lingered.

  ‘You’re a pretty girl, Elísabet,’ he said. He smelled nice and he was smiling at her.

  ‘Say thank you,’ said her mother.

  ‘Thank you,’ Elísabet said, her head drooping.

  ‘He owns our house,’ her mother added, smiling up at him. ‘So you’d better be nice to him.’

  Elísabet nodded. She could feel the man’s eyes following her as she climbed the stairs.

  Thursday, 30 November 2017

  Elma got to work early the following morning. She had lain awake for much of the night, her mind buzzing with thoughts about the case, the people she had met that day, and Sævar. She was troubled by a nagging sense of guilt because of Davíð. It was too soon. Too soon to be interested in someone else. Yet her thoughts kept returning to Sævar. She got up, fetched a cup of coffee and tried to clear her head and focus on the case. Chewing the cap of her pen, she stared at the wall, going back over the conversations she’d had the day before.

  Guðrún had done little other than confirm what Eiríkur had said. Nothing she had told them could explain why Elísabet had been found dead by the old lighthouse in Akranes.

  Elísabet puzzled Elma. She had been beautiful in spite of her sombre, verging on sullen, air. With that dark, almost black, hair and luminous skin. Why had she been so serious? Was she naturally made that way? Just as some people were always smiling for no obvious reason, wasn’t the opposite possible as well? She seemed to have been well set up in life, with a husband and two children; both she and Eiríkur had had good jobs, and it was a long time since she had broken all ties with Akranes. Apparently she hadn’t been in contact with anyone who lived there, apart from an old woman whose identity had not yet been established. Yet her body had turned up there. Nearly thirty years after she had sat in a classroom in Akranes, gazing solemnly into the camera, she had been found on the shore near the town. Murdered.

  Had she been meeting a man? Had Eiríkur found out? Statistically speaking, the average Icelandic murder victim was not a mother of two in her thirties. Since 2000, around twenty men and ten women had been murdered. Most of the male-on-male killings were linked to alcohol. When the victims were women, on the other hand, it was usually the result of domestic abuse. Elma knew that violence in the home was often well hidden, existing even among the expensive designer furniture in luxury apartments, so it would make sense to take a closer look at Eiríkur.

  Elma recalled the look on his face as they were leaving. She didn’t for a minute doubt that his grief was genuine, but there had been something else there too: anger. Elma was sure that was what she had seen. For some reason he had been angry.

  Eiríkur hadn’t made a particularly good impression on her. He was far too slickly presented, too conscious of his own behaviour and appearance. It made him come across as insincere. All his movements had a rehearsed quality, as if he were putting on a performance. Yet there was nothing to suggest he had wished Elísabet any harm. On the contrary, he had clearly been crazy about her. But what if she had been planning to leave him? The police hadn’t found any confirmation of this other than the text messages, but then Elísabet didn’t seem to have had any confidantes, apart from her friend Aldís. Perhaps her computer would provide more clues. Forensics were currently going through the contents, searching for anything that might hint at what had happened. Elísabet could have entered some search term, for example, that would demonstrate conclusively that she had been considering leaving her husband.

  Then there was the house. Aldís had mentioned that Elísabet had talked of wanting to visit her childhood home on Krókatún, so it was perfectly possible that this was what had drawn Elísabet back to Akranes. Perhaps it had been part of an attempt to come to terms with her past. From the descriptions they had been given, it sounded as if there had been something weighing on Elísabet. Perhaps something had happened at school or at home that had caused her to become so withdrawn and unsociable.

  Elma closed her eyes and tried to think logically. It didn’t help that ever since Elísabet’s body had turned up, the town had been alive with curiosity. People kept dropping into the police station on the off-chance, sniffing around for information on the pretence of having some other business. The phones were constantly ringing too, with reporters asking for information. The fact was, the clock was ticking and it wouldn’t look good if the police didn’t throw the press a titbit soon. It was understandable at first, but as time wore on it would begin to look as if they were clueless. Which was right, of course. It was more than three days since the body had been found but they still had no leads.

  All they had so far was a report from the pathologist, but they still didn’t have a suspect. The progress meeting was due to start in a few minutes, and Elma wasn’t holding out hope that anything substantial would emerge from it.

  Hörður’s grey-streaked fringe was standing on end and his eyes, peering over his glasses, were weary.

  ‘They’ve gone through her computer but her search history doesn’t show anything of interest. Just the usual browsing; no suspicious search terms or anything like that. In fact, she doesn’t seem to have spent much time online at all.’ He paused and lowered his eyes to his notes. ‘But what they did find was an email showing that she had an appointment with a lawyer last Friday. His name’s Sigurpáll G. Hannesson and he works at a solicitor’s office in Reykjavík. We’ll need to get in touch with him and find out what she wanted.’

  ‘Do you think she was applying for a divorce?’ Sævar asked, arching his spine in the hope that it would alleviate his backache. He was tired and stiff from having sat hugging Telma all evening until she had finally fallen asleep. Despite his cramped position, he hadn’t dared move for fear of disturbing her and, as a result, he had woken up in the middle of the night with a numb arm and a crick in his neck. At
that point he had taken her to bed, where she had gone back to sleep, pressed against him. Her sobs had continued sporadically even after she had dropped off, keeping him awake for hours.

  ‘Yes, I was wondering that too,’ Hörður said. ‘Eiríkur could have discovered that she was cheating on him. Or just that she was seeking a divorce. Though, of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean there was another man involved.’

  ‘When Sævar and I talked to Eiríkur, he insisted they weren’t having any problems,’ Elma pointed out.

  ‘Of course he did,’ Sævar said.

  ‘What about the aunt, Guðrún?’ Hörður asked. ‘Did she know more than the husband’s letting on?’

  ‘Guðrún was no help,’ Elma said, picturing again the shrunken little woman who had seemed so devoid of feeling or pity. ‘I got the feeling that Guðrún wasn’t particularly happy about having to take Elísabet in back then. She described her as ungrateful and insisted that she was antisocial and lazy. They hadn’t spoken for years, so she could tell us next to nothing about her recent circumstances. Whereas Elísabet’s friend, Aldís, gave us the impression that Eiríkur was a bit obsessed with her. That he was much more in love with Elísabet than she was with him. I don’t know how much weight we should place on her opinion but I think we should take a closer look at him anyway.’

  ‘He’s got an alibi, if his kids are to be believed.’

  ‘Is it watertight, though?’ Sævar asked. ‘How long would it have taken him to drive to Akranes? Half an hour? If the boys were asleep, they wouldn’t have noticed him going out.’

  ‘Is there anything to indicate that she was planning to leave him?’ Hörður asked. ‘We have very little real evidence to support that theory.’

  ‘There’s the fact she called in sick without telling Eiríkur and then stayed away overnight,’ Elma pointed out. ‘We still have no idea where she was. Not only that but she had a meeting with a lawyer. Mind you, I think that could have been connected to something completely different. To events in her childhood maybe, or to someone she knew before she moved away. According to her friend Aldís, she was talking about going to see her childhood home, which had recently come on the market.’