by Grant Nicol
She answered after a few rings, her voice heavy with sleep and confusion. I told her to take a minute to collect herself and then enlightened her as to what had happened to Jóhannes and Magga. She didn’t interrupt once as I calmly recounted the events of just over twenty-four hours ago to her as best I could. Her listening in complete silence either meant she was having trouble believing me or was finding it too overwhelming to absorb. It was especially early in the day to be listening to such bad news but I found the absolute quiet on the other end of the line a little unsettling. It was almost a relief when she began sobbing quietly into the phone.
I told her I would be far too busy to drive back into town to pick her up but that she could talk to Dad if she wanted to. She did want to; at least I was pretty sure that’s what she said. I wandered outside, waving the phone at my father. The beleaguered officer had retreated into his vehicle and was talking on his phone also.
I grabbed Dad and shoved the phone into his hand. It had the desired effect, as I knew it would. He wandered off into the stables berating his middle daughter for not being in complete control of her emotions at such a time. For a man who had been through such an ordeal he still didn’t see any need for sentimentality.
I quickly took the opportunity to get into the car with the officer and apologise for Dad’s gruff manner. He wanted to know what to do. He was prepared to stay as long as I wished but his face told a different story. I recalled Grímur telling me that he would be posted at the house for as long as I wanted him there so I told him he could go. The news was warmly received and he didn’t waste any time pointing the car back towards Hafnarfjörður. As he was leaving he told me that if we had any trouble they would send someone back out straight away but that it might be someone else. I thanked him for his trouble but my words fell on deaf ears as he took off down the driveway.
Dad was now sitting inside the stables and seemed to have calmed down considerably. He had even adopted a more conciliatory tone with Kristjana and was answering her questions with patience and consideration. She was obviously demanding a thorough explanation of what had happened and so I took the opportunity to hurry back into the house.
As Dad’s conversation with Kristjana finally came to an end, so did his patience and I overheard him telling her to focus her emotions on something more constructive. Not something she was well known for but he probably thought it to be good advice nonetheless. He had always struggled to understand the more sensitive of his three daughters just as Kristjana had struggled with his inability to take an interest in the many things she found so concerning.
With their conversation over Dad signalled through the kitchen window that I was needed outside again. It seemed that he was ready to put me to work. With very little in the way of conversation between us I helped him attach the old plough harnesses that hadn’t been used in years to the two stallions. Once that was done I stepped back and let Dad get to work on attaching some ropes to the tarpaulin covering poor Magga. It was time to take her out of the stables for the very last time and find her a place to rest.
Once he was done I led the two horses very slowly through the rain following Dad as he walked ahead of us with his head hanging low. He seemed to already have a spot picked out in his mind where our solemn duty would be conducted. Magga’s carcass made a horrible sound as her plastic shroud scraped its way across the property. Although it was cold to be out, I was glad of the rain for once; it would have loosened the ground for us, making the hole that much easier to dig. Even as the sun rose slowly in the sky, the gloom refused to budge in any way. It was if the day knew of the task we had been assigned and did not wish to intrude unnecessarily upon it.
Once Dad signalled where we were to stop I unfastened the stallions from their harnesses and let them graze where they wished. They had spent too long locked up since Jóhannes’s death and so I retrieved Leppatuska from the stables as well and let the three of them stretch their legs.
By the time I returned, Dad had marked a rectangular line on the ground with a shovel so we silently went about our work. I had been right about the soil; the rain had relaxed it to the point where the black dirt parted relatively easily for us. Still, after a few feet of digging my arms and back ached. I was seriously unaccustomed to any sort of physical labour and regretted not keeping myself in better shape. If Dad was feeling the same way he certainly didn’t let it show. If looks were anything to go by it was I who was feeling my age.
In order not to appear to be the weak link in the team I redoubled my efforts as best I could. It was easier said than done, though, and as I found that the digging was easier in some parts than in others, it was to the softer areas that my shovel slowly drifted. I thought nothing of it, figuring that a hole was a hole no matter where it was dug.
It wasn’t until one of my thrusts hit something solid that I stopped to think about where I was digging. The ground all around us was full of small rocks but what I had hit with my spade looked different. It was old and discoloured but definitely looked like a piece of bone. The sudden cessation of activity on my part had drawn Dad’s attention. The flash of anger that flashed across his face was short lived but I instantly knew that I should have paid more attention to what I was doing.
‘That is exactly why I wanted you to keep to the lines I had drawn. Do you think I went to all that trouble just for fun?’
‘What is it?’ I still couldn’t see that I had done too much wrong but obviously I had.
Dad took a deep, exasperated breath to calm himself and then slowly explained, ‘Not long after you lot moved out of here when your mother died I had to bury a horse right where we are now. I had it here only a few weeks before it got sick and I eventually had to put it down. You’ve got to pay more attention to what you’re doing. I want Magga to lie next to the poor thing not on top of it.’
Looking more closely at the horse’s bone I could understand why he had been so particular about where we were to dig. I hoped I hadn’t damaged the poor creature’s remains too badly and apologised silently for what I had unwittingly done.
Under Dad’s watchful eye I resumed digging, making sure that I kept the pit to the area that he’d originally intended.
‘Tell me, Dad. Who would have wanted to do that to Jóhannes? I possibly didn’t know him as well as you but I can’t imagine him having any enemies. I can’t believe that anyone would hate him so much that they would want to do that to him.’
‘I don’t know who would have wanted to do such a thing. As far as I know the lad didn’t have any friends let alone enemies.’
I thought about who had put all those scars on his back and supposed that there was no way we could know everything about anyone’s past.
‘Why did they make you watch?’ I continued, thinking out loud now more than anything else. ‘If it was Jóhannes they wanted to kill then why go to all the trouble of tying you up like that? Why would they be so bothered about you watching what they’d done to him?’
‘I don’t know, Ylfa. I just don’t know.’
‘What did he look like, lying there?’
‘He looked scared, I guess.’
‘Scared?’
‘Yes. With his hands over his eyes like that he looked like he had seen something terrible and couldn’t look any more.’
‘They put his hands over his eyes, though?’
‘I think so. He had been positioned like that with his eyes covered and his mouth slightly open.’
‘Like he had been trying to yell out for help, maybe?’
‘His mouth was open because there was something stuck in it holding it open.’
‘Like a gag?’
‘I couldn’t be absolutely sure but it looked like a piece of paper rolled up into a ball.’
We seemed to have got the hole to the depth that was required and Dad waved a hand over to where the two stallions had wandered.
‘Fetch Alvari and Farfús and let’s get Magga into the ground. I can’t spend all day doing this
; I’m tired enough as it is.’
I reattached the two stallions to their sad cargo and we dragged Magga the few remaining feet to her grave.
I found watching Magga drop into the sodden black ground quite upsetting. Nothing could ever make me understand why anyone would want to do that sort of thing to an animal. People you can learn to hate along the way for whatever reasons but animals are incapable of going out of their way to make you loathe them.
As if reading my mind, Dad put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me to him. Something he hadn’t done since I was young. As he held me I sobbed whole-heartedly into his already sodden chest. I tried to rub the tears from my eyes but only succeeded in making it more difficult to see. I felt more vulnerable then as he held me to him than I had since I was a very small child.
‘You’ve done more than enough today, my girl. Get back inside and get yourself dried off. I’ll finish it from here. You’ve done all the hard work for me.’
The way he looked at me, I couldn’t argue with him. I threw a ceremonial shovelful of earth over Magga, mouthed a silent farewell to her and headed back to the house. I threw one last glance back over my shoulder at Dad. He stood in the pouring rain over the grave with his head hung low in solemn prayer.
He wasn’t a broken man but he had taken a big hit. He had lost two very good friends in one go and it was going to be some time before he realised just how much he was actually going to miss them. In the meantime it would fall to me to make sure he was able to carry on. Not as if nothing had happened, but in a manner that was as close to the way he had previously lived as possible. People are creatures of habit and it would take him time to find a new routine without them. Not only that but his head was still bandaged and he couldn’t be left on his own until he had completely recovered.
As I approached the house I noticed the lights were still on in Jóhannes’s flat. The police probably hadn’t bothered switching them off when they’d finished searching the place. I pulled down the black and yellow tape from across the doorway and walked inside. His bed, which he should have been propped up on playing some violent video game or other, was covered in all sorts of belongings that had just been left strewn about the place. His room had always looked a mess but the way the police had left it was nothing short of a shambles.
Any of the surfaces that might once have been clean had been covered with dirty-looking fingerprint powder that made the place looked unloved and soiled.
It was going to take some getting used to not having him around any more. It was even harder struggling with the thought that someone had wanted to do him such harm. To make an enemy like that I’d imagine you would have to be a pretty nasty character yourself. It was hard to think of him keeping that sort of company. The odd thing was that I couldn’t remember having ever seen him with anybody. He had been a loner in the true sense of the word.
I made a very half-hearted attempt to tidy up the place. There were books, clothes, pieces of paper and no end of assorted paraphernalia strewn throughout the small room. All I could do was stack things in piles of similar-looking objects.
The task of actually putting the place back as it used to be was not one I was ready to tackle yet. For the time being it was going to have to be enough to attempt to put his lodgings back in some semblance of order.
As I collected various pages of paper and notes that he had written to himself in one of the piles something in his handwriting caught my eye. On a page that contained some sort of computer-related jargon and lots of numbers in ascending order, scores from a game, perhaps, or computer code of some kind, I found carefully written:
Let him be drenched with the dew of heaven,
and let him live with the animals.
I was prepared to chance a guess at where that phrase had come from. In fact I was pretty sure I had seen it before. What I couldn’t understand was what it was doing written down in his room. A quick search revealed what I already suspected: he didn’t own a Bible and I had never known him to go to church.
Why, then, would he have a quote from the Book of Daniel lying around amongst some other fairly mundane facts and figures? Was it something he had read? Was it something that been said to him and he had needed to remember?
I folded the sheet of paper up and stuck it in a pocket. The urge to tidy his room had left me and I decided to leave the place in peace for the time being. There were things about Jóhannes I would probably never fully understand now that he was gone but in order to get to the bottom of what had happened to him, I was going to have to try.
CHAPTER 7
Jóhannes’s death and our subsequent burial of Magga had left me fixating on the first loss that had really shaped my life, that of my dear mother. Margrét Ogmundsdóttir, the real Magga. The shock of listening to her tell us she was sick and then watching as the invisible enemy within tightened its grip on her was hard for us to take as teenagers.
In some ways the worst part was watching the reaction, or sometimes lack thereof, from each other. Until that time we had been three relatively straightforward sisters who played, argued and laughed as one. After her death, once the force that had held us together had gone from our lives, we began to see each other differently. We started to see faults with each other where before there had been none to see. Sisters were perceived to be too dramatic in their grief or conversely, not caring enough. It seemed that it was no longer in our powers to keep each other happy.
The toughest thing for Dad was that in his hour of need, due to our petty squabbles and selfish personalities, we decided that it was time for us to each go our own way. He was left alone at the very time when he probably needed us more than ever. He never said anything to any of us but it must have hurt like hell.
In my lifetime he had never appeared to need anybody else’s help, so when the time came when he eventually did, none of us thought to even offer.
I could now see that we had been completely wrong. No one could go through what he had and not want someone around to depend on. I was going to make sure that it didn’t happen again and I was going to do that by making sure I was there for him now.
In the days following our burial of Magga I did what had to be done to help him get through the shock of it all. I finished tidying up Jóhannes’s flat, I cooked when he would let me, but mainly I looked after the horses. I exercised them, brushed them down, kept them fed and watered and cleaned the stalls out for them each day. Even with Magga gone and only three to look after I just couldn’t see how he would manage on his own. It was simply too much for one person of his age but the time wasn’t at all right for bringing that up. Another thing that had to be brought up at some point was why he had chosen now to sign the property over to me. He had never so much as mentioned it before and I hoped that there was some innocent explanation for the timing of it. I wasn’t in any sort of mood for more bad news.
For the time being I was going to let things work themselves out at their own pace. Life has a knack of showing you the way if you’ll just let it.
I called Grímur several times to see if there were any updates he could give me on the investigation. His concern about how Dad was coping seemed genuine enough but he wasn’t interested in divulging any information pertaining to the case. When I asked him directly about the object that Dad had seen in Jóhannes’s mouth I was met with a cold, non-responsive answer.
If he could have told me to just mind my own business I think he would have. It was possible that they had no idea who had killed Jóhannes and that was just the way it was. I certainly couldn’t picture who it might have been and I don’t think Dad could, either. Some people just do stupid things because they’re stupid themselves.
One thing that Grímur did say was that crimes without motives were the hardest ones to solve. If they never found out who was responsible it would be impossible to understand why it had happened. The pain and the sadness would slowly fade in time, but if the reason for it happening remained a mystery, then that was a bad f
eeling that would never go away.
Like a stain you couldn’t get rid of on something that was too precious to just throw away. You would always be reminded of something beautiful that you had once had and was now ruined.
I knew the time to leave had come when Dad could no longer hide his irritation at my continued presence. A sure sign that he was well on the way back to being his usual self. This realisation coincided with the day of Kristjana’s maiden performance with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. I slipped away early that morning leaving Dad a note telling him that all he needed to do was call and I would be straight back but that I thought we could both probably do with a little space. I also made it clear that despite the fact that I hadn’t mentioned it, I wouldn’t be signing the title deed to the property until he had explained why he was doing it now. As far as I was concerned there was no hurry to do anything of the sort, and if there was, I wanted to know why first.
He wasn’t the only one looking forward to some time to themselves. I had, for the meantime anyway, had enough of mucking out stalls and dodging my father’s unpredictable mood swings. It was time to unwind and forget the traumas of the last few days and I knew just the way to do it. It would be all too easy convincing Baldvin to drop everything and meet me at Vesturgata, so that was just what I would do.
I gave myself half an hour to roughly tidy the place before calling him. The flat was beginning to get a rather overly lived-in look about it. There were definite signs that the canvases and painting paraphernalia were taking over the place. But rather than banish them completely we had to come to a compromise that involved a kind of land-sharing agreement. I couldn’t let them take over the place altogether but on the other hand they were essential to my wellbeing.
I had in fact already planned to use them again as soon as I was done relieving the tension that had built up across my shoulders. I had mentioned it to Baldvin a few weeks earlier just after we’d first met when he’d come into the bar for a drink. He had been on his own and as it was a quiet night he had sat at the bar and we’d struck up a conversation as I’d polished glasses. Even though he had agreed to it, I still wasn’t convinced that he’d taken me seriously.