Blackout

by Ragnar Jónasson

  10

  Svavar Sindrason sat in the old wicker chair and gazed into the distance. This was where he sat most often to watch the weather. The view in itself was nothing special, consisting mostly of next door’s wall. But that didn’t matter. It was the sky he liked to observe.

  Occasionally he went to church, more out of habit than devotion, although he had his own faith. He had a belief in a higher power, but as he never expected to get answers, he rarely went to God for advice.

  He was in his forties now. He hadn’t intended to be living in the old house in Dalvík by the time he reached forty. The plan had been to salt away some money and move somewhere else. He was born and had lived here all his life, with only a few breaks. He had rented an apartment and worked down south for a while, even though he owned the house in Dalvík outright, now that his parents were both dead. Svavar liked the town, but he dreamed of a little flat somewhere in southern Europe, preferably close to the beach, where he could take it easy, and enjoy the sunshine and many long drinks. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to have those dreams come true.

  A little earlier, Svavar had watched the news.

  Now he sat by the window and thought about the Almighty.

  For once, he was slightly confused.

  Questions about life and death plagued him.

  His own life and the death of someone else.

  He wondered how far he would be prepared to go to save his own skin.

  Svavar wanted to live to the full the one life he was offered – he had no intention of doing so under lock and key.

  But it wasn’t just the prospect of prison that concerned him. Svavar knew that if he was to go to the police, it was death that he should fear. His own death.

  If only he could know for certain how serious the consequences of going to the police might be, perhaps that would help his decision. He certainly had a clear enough idea of what could happen if he didn’t go to them.

  Over the years the expression that something was a ‘matter of life or death’ had often tripped off his tongue, but it was only now that he was able to appreciate the true meaning.

  He continued to stare out of the window in the hope that he would somehow be presented with an answer to his dilemma: do the right thing, save a life but face the inevitable consequences; or keep everything to himself and live with his conscience for the rest of his days.

  11

  The coffee corner at the Siglufjörður police station was a popular spot whenever there was something out of the ordinary to investigate. The first of the day’s visitors was Ómar, the retired skipper, who made an appearance not long after the news was made public that the body found was that of a man who had not only worked on the new tunnel but also lived in Siglufjörður.

  Ómar was one of the station’s regular visitors – although of his own free will, looking for a cup of coffee at the police station whenever he felt like company. Nobody was quite sure what ship he had commanded, but the name ‘Skipper’ stuck to him as firmly as the Reverend nickname had attached itself to Ari Thór, who had never had a congregation.

  ‘How are you, Ómar?’ Tómas asked as they both took their places at the table.

  ‘Not so bad, my boy. And you?’

  Tómas wasn’t prepared to chat about his own feelings. He knew exactly what Ómar was fishing for – probably some gossip about Tómas’s wife, who had ‘temporarily’ moved south to Reykjavík. Tómas suspected that his communication with his wife or, rather, the lack of it, had become a popular topic for the gossips around the town.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Tómas said, with more enthusiasm than he felt. In fact, he thought, sometimes I am fine, but that was only when he wasn’t thinking of his wife. He longed to move to Reykjavík to be with her, but that was easier said than done. He’d considered a short career break, maybe a year’s sabbatical, to go and live in the south. He’d been pleased and reassured to see that there was a resilience about Ari Thór, and Tómas considered the possibility that he might be able to run things on a temporary basis if Tómas were to take a break.

  ‘Keeping busy today?’

  ‘Well, as busy as usual,’ Tómas replied, keeping his answer deliberately short.

  ‘Dreadful to hear about that fellow who was … murdered,’ Ómar said with a dramatic emphasis on the last word.

  ‘Yes. You knew him?’

  ‘No. Good Lord, no. He was just a contractor here, wasn’t he? Making some money out of the tunnel? Everyone seems hell-bent on making something out of it. I hear he lived at Nóra’s place.’

  ‘That’s right, he rented it from her,’ Tómas confirmed, taking care not to give the old man too much information. The investigation was being handled by CID in Akureyri, assisted by the local force in Sauðárkrókur, and, in a more minor way, the Siglufjörður police.

  Ari Thór had already been busy working on the case, and had interviewed Hákon, or ‘Hákon the Herring Lad’, as Tómas habitually referred to him. Hákon had given him the names and contact details of Elías’s three closest colleagues. One of them, Páll Reynisson, had been a police officer in Siglufjörður at one point. Then there was Svavar Sindrason, resident in Dalvík, and a third man, Logi Jökulsson.

  Tómas and Ari Thór had then taken part in a conference call and had been told that Svavar Sindrason had already been interviewed. He had known Elías for a long time but had not been able to provide much information. He had been aware that Elías had a job on the side, working on the house in Skagafjörður; Elías certainly hadn’t kept it a secret.

  The likelihood was that the murder had taken place at night, but with little traffic surveillance in the district at that time and no traffic cameras, it would be close to impossible to work out who had been travelling through the area.

  As for Svavar himself, he said that he had been asleep all night. As he lived alone, that would be difficult to confirm.

  It hadn’t been ruled out that the killer could have been a woman. Comparatively little force had been behind the blow, and the length of timber hadn’t been particularly large. The real damage had been caused by the nail that had protruded from it.

  Nóra Pálsdóttir’s life could be divided into three distinct sections: a disastrous marriage; foreign travel, and peering into other people’s mouths. She had studied dentistry because her father had been a dentist and no other career path had even been mooted in the household in which she had grown up. In reality she had no interest in her work and organised things so that she could spend as much time as possible travelling. After ten years of marriage, her husband had realised that she loved her travels more than she loved him, promptly divorced her and took an unnecessarily generous proportion of her wealth with him in the process. The divorce was perhaps due, not so much to her love of holidays, as to her habit of being not entirely faithful to her husband.

  She downsized, selling the detached house in downtown Reykjavík and moving away from the city centre, buying instead an apartment in the suburbs and channelling the resulting cash into her travel fund.

  The journeys had begun during her university years, globe-trotting with a minimum of luggage, and preferring to be alone.

  Living on a remote island in the north Atlantic was never going to satisfy her and she had always had a deep inner urge to explore the world, to experience distant and unfamiliar cultures and the natural world. So she took every opportunity to visit somewhere new, to leave Iceland far behind.

  First it had been Europe, but as her earnings increased, more exciting destinations were added, in Asia, Africa and South America. She found her own favourite places in each hemisphere and made sure to visit them more than once. Her itinerary was relentless. With every new paradise she discovered, a return journey was planned, until it became clear, as the years passed, that time was a finite resource, and so were her funds. By the time she reached the age of sixty, she decided that enough was enough. One by one, her friends and acquaintances were retiring and began talking about travelling the w
orld, taking cruises or walking holidays to foreign lands. But Nóra was exhausted, jaded by the constant trips.

  Around the time that she retired, Nóra sold the apartment in Grafarvogur. She’d never really felt comfortable there, and one of the main reasons for this was that she had borrowed heavily against the equity to invest in the stock market. When the financial crash unfolded, she rapidly discovered that she’d lost almost everything.

  There was nothing for it but to move away from the Reykjavík area and back north to her hometown, Siglufjörður, with just enough retrieved from the financial mess to buy a pretty house with a sea view, on Hvanneyrarbraut. She was able to defray her living costs by renting out the upper floor. In fact, having company upstairs turned out to be something she enjoyed.

  Her intention was to relax in Siglufjörður, to enjoy life. And Nóra was able to achieve that, taking an active part in the town’s social scene, experimenting with a few new lovers, and spending much of her time reading by the living-room window with its view over the sea and the mountains that ringed the town.

  She was at home when the young police officer knocked at her door. Ever since the news that her tenant upstairs had been found dead, she had been expecting this visit. Rather than receive the police dressed in her usual tracksuit bottoms and flip-flops, she had smartened herself up. It was the least she could do.

  She had hoped that Tómas would come in person, but instead it was the one they called the Reverend, a good-looking young man. He was much too young for her, of course, although she refused to rule anything out. He was a serious character, with dead eyes, she decided, as if he had lost something precious.

  ‘Come in.’

  The woman in the doorway gave him a smile that was almost fawning as she looked him up and down. ‘You must be Ari Thór.’

  It was still disconcerting that unfamiliar people knew his name, but he conceded that in a small community everyone knew who the police were.

  ‘Thank you. I need to take a look at Elías’s apartment. I understand he was your tenant.’

  ‘Quite right. What’s happened is dreadful. The poor man … he was so lovely.’

  Her words didn’t sound entirely genuine. So lovely. He wondered if that would be Elías Freysson’s epitaph. Would it be carved on his gravestone?

  ‘What on earth am I supposed to do with all his things?’ she mused.

  ‘We’ll find out for you. There may be a relative to inherit his belongings, but first I need to look around. It’s best if you don’t touch anything for the moment,’ Ari Thór said in a tight voice, avoiding unnecessary chat.

  The walls of the hall were painted a dark shade of yellow and decorated with small graphic prints. A staircase on the right led upstairs, the passage painted the same shade of yellow.

  Opening the door, Nóra showed Ari Thór into the living room. A small fireplace was filled with oddments and potted plants. The walls were hung with paintings from far-flung parts of the world: one from Africa, another of an Asian scene and a watercolour of Rio de Janeiro. This was clearly a traveller’s home, a repository of memories.

  ‘When did you last see him?’ Ari Thór asked, when he had made himself comfortable on an embossed white sofa. She sat next to him, uncomfortably close.

  ‘Yesterday,’ she said. ‘I ran into him in the hall early yesterday morning. As you just saw, he couldn’t go upstairs without walking through my hall. I had the place modified when I bought it, so I could have separate apartments upstairs and down,’ she said. Again, her smile was intense, discomfiting Ari Thór. He averted his eyes.

  ‘Did he seem to be concerned about anything? Did you notice anything unusual about him?’ he asked.

  Nóra thought for a moment. ‘Well, there’s a question. Not concerned. More like excited about something.’

  ‘About what, do you think?’

  ‘I really have no idea, I’m afraid.’

  ‘When did he move in?’

  ‘A few months ago. I got to know him through Household Rescue. Have you heard about that?’ she asked, her voice softening.

  ‘Yes, and I contributed to it,’ Ari Thór replied stiffly, preferring to keep the woman at a distance.

  She brightened immediately. ‘I’m delighted to hear it! Elías offered to help. He said he had plenty of free time and wanted to give something back to the community.’ She paused for a moment. ‘At the beginning of this year he told me he had to move out of the place he was living in, and needed somewhere to stay for a few months, until the tunnel was finished. I’d mentioned at a Household Rescue meeting that I had had the house altered in order to rent or sell the apartment upstairs. He was a perfect tenant,’ she said, lowering her voice as if it were a mark of respect for the deceased man. ‘There was never a sound from upstairs. And he had been away quite a lot recently.’

  ‘You have access to his apartment?’

  ‘Access? Of course. But I never went up there. It’s important to respect someone else’s privacy.’

  Ari Thór felt there was a hint of guilt in her voice.

  ‘In short, he was an angel. I love people who are prepared to sacrifice their time for good works. It didn’t do any harm that he was drop-dead gorgeous as well, a real charmer, just like you.’

  Her eyelashes fluttered. Ari Thór tried to ignore her gaze, but he felt his cheeks flush, and trying to stop them doing so was making it worse.

  ‘Don’t be bashful. There’s no point being shy about your appearance,’ she said, and the ingratiating smile made a reappearance as she leaned closer to him. ‘Would you like anything to drink? Coffee? I have red and white wine as well.’

  He rose swiftly to his feet. ‘Let’s keep things professional,’ he said coolly. ‘Would you be so kind as to let me into his apartment?’

  It was an instruction rather than a request.

  ‘Of course,’ Nóra said, apparently taking his rejection in her stride.

  She followed him up the stairs, unlocked the door and was about to go with him into the apartment. But he held up his hand and asked her, firmly, to remain outside.

  The upper floor had clearly not been envisaged as a separate apartment. There were two rooms, with a small bathroom leading off one of them. Both had presumably been bedrooms at one time, before one had been transformed into an awkward combination of kitchenette and living room. A fridge took up space along one wall alongside a sink and a stove, and apart from that there was just enough furniture to fill the place rather than to decorate it.

  The bedroom decor was bland, even colourless, with a double bed and a couple of monochrome pictures on the walls. There were few personal items – a jacket lying on the bed and shoes placed neatly together on the floor next to some weights.

  Clothes had been thrown into the wardrobe and there was an open sports bag among the pile of garments. A white towel, folded and unused, could be seen hanging half out of the bag.

  It was only when he had examined the bag’s contents more carefully, though, that he decided he needed to call Tómas. Immediately.

  12

  It didn’t take Ísrún long to track down Elías’s ex-wife, uncovering both her name and her place of work.

  She had an aptitude for gathering information about people on the internet, in an entirely legal way, of course. It amazed her sometimes just how careless people were about leaving all kinds of personal information on social media sites to be picked up by anyone who cared to look. This made background research so much easier, and now there were online newspaper archives as well, finding people’s personal details was child’s play.

  The ash cloud over Reykjavík was becoming denser, the air felt gritty, as if filled with tiny particles of sand. The nervous girl from the Meteorological Office had been right. The heat was unusual for this time of year, but it was hardly possible to say that the weather was good, with the air so dry and dirty.

  Leaving the TV station’s offices and holding her breath for the short walk from the door, it was a relief to get into th
e car. In spite of the hot, stale air inside being almost overwhelming, Ísrún withstood the temptation to wind down the window as she drove down to the harbour where Idunn, Elías’s ex-wife, ran a small café.

  The port area was quiet, with only a few tourists braving the ash, as they waited to board a boat that would take them out to watch whales or puffins. Occasionally Ísrún would go down to the harbour at weekends to buy fresh fish at the market, halibut if it was available. More often than not, however, she had a weekend shift. And then there were the weekends when she could hardly trust herself to get out of bed.

  The café had a homely feel to it, comforting music playing quietly in the background, wooden fittings giving the place a rustic warmth, and a thick aroma of freshly brewed coffee. The door was closed and all of the windows were fastened to keep out the sour air, although the lingering metallic stench of the ash cloud was evident even inside. A couple with a pram sat at one table, the woman sipping coffee while the man nursed a glass of water and hid behind his open laptop. An older gentleman stood at the counter, chatting to one of the café staff, a large dog at his side. Then Ísrún spied her: Idunn.

  This was the same woman whose pictures Ísrún had dug up in an old newspaper archive, including one of Elías and Idunn at the fortieth birthday party of a popular politician. The only difference between now and then was that Idunn’s hair had been coloured bright red.

  Ísrún walked towards her and ordered a cappuccino.

  As Idunn placed the cup in front of her, Ísrún took the opportunity to open a conversation. ‘I’m sure I recognise you. Haven’t we met somewhere?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Could be, but I’m terrible with faces,’ Idunn replied cheerfully.

  ‘I never forget a face, it can be a curse sometimes. My name’s Ísrún.’

  Idunn gave her own name and all of a sudden seemed to recognise Ísrún, looking at her with sudden confusion.