by Grant Nicol
‘You want me to go check that he’s home first?’
Under the present circumstances, I had to offer.
Stefán Jón was looking somewhat forlorn but pulled a stoic expression together for my benefit and shook his head.
‘I want to hear this too,’ he said. ‘If I had asked all the right questions the first time around we could be on our way home by now. And who knows, maybe it’ll be warm and dry in there.’
I had to admit, he had a good point. Even if this old man had nothing of any use to add to our trip, he could at least offer us the opportunity to dry out for a while.
‘All right, off we go, then. You never know, he might even have some coffee in there to offer us.’
After what seemed like an awful lot of banging on the front door we looked at each other, ready to admit defeat. I no longer needed to be convinced that it was time to head back home; that time had come and gone as far as I was now concerned. I flicked my head back in the direction of the car and was just about to grab Stefán Jón’s arm and pull him away from the door when it finally opened.
Diðrik had obviously perfected the art of moving about his house silently. He had also somehow perfected the art of rendering Stefán Jón speechless. As I waited in vain for the words to come out of him I realised something was wrong. I just didn’t know what yet.
Stefán Jón stumbled over his words the way a drunk might exit a bar at 5a.m. Diðrik looked up at him wondering who had appeared at his door and what the problem with them might be. I felt forced to say something just to break the increasingly awkward silence.
‘We were wondering if we could have a word with you. My friend was just talking to you at the graveyard not far from here but I was wondering if I could ask you a few more questions myself.’
‘Ylfa, there’s something... ’ Stefán Jón began but again he seemed unable to finish his sentence. He tried once more to tell me something when Diðrik himself spoke up.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, young lady. Maybe you’d like to explain yourself a little better,’ he said.
I looked at Stefán Jón, who looked back at me and just shook his head.
‘Who are you exactly, if you don’t mind me asking?’ he asked the old man.
It didn’t feel as if the conversation was going the way any of us thought it would. I suspected that all that rainwater had indeed got into Stefán Jón’s brain. The old man looked us up and down and then up and down some more while letting the silence hang in the air between us. God only knows what he was thinking. Whatever it was, he wasn’t in any hurry to let on.
‘My name is Diðrik Guðmundsson. And who might you two be, if you also don’t mind me asking?’
I looked at Stefán Jón waiting for some sort of explanation as to why they didn’t recognise each other. Then it hit me. Given my sudden understanding of the confused faces in front of me I had expected to feel better about things, but I felt worse.
Much worse, in fact I felt pretty ill. I didn’t understand anything any more, except maybe that I should listen to Grímur a little more carefully from now on. Possibly even a lot more carefully if I was to remain alive much longer.
Stefán Jón fumbled around in one of his jacket pockets for something and eventually pulled out a business card. Diðrik looked at it suspiciously and then handed it back.
‘I still don’t see what it is that that you want from me.’
‘I was, that is, we were, just up at the local cemetery and I was talking with you. At least I thought it was you at the time. Obviously it wasn’t, I can see that now, but I really thought it was. There was a man there tending two of the graves. The ones belonging to Inga Rós and her daughter. Your daughter. That was why I assumed it was you I was speaking with. That and he told me his name was Diðrik.’
Stefán Jón smiled in a slightly uncomfortable fashion and paused, hoping that he would understand how this misunderstanding had come about. From the look he gave my mildly idiotic sidekick, he didn’t.
‘And this man. He said he was me?’
‘Yes. I told him who we were and why we had come and he didn’t seem to think that he could be of any help but Ylfa here, she’s sure that you can be, for some reason.’
He turned to me as if to signal that it was now my turn.
‘That’s right. You see, when I went back to look for him, he’d gone but there were some more questions I wanted to ask.
‘So we tracked you down with a little help from the nice old lady who was cleaning the church. The question that now needs to be asked, though, is, if that wasn’t you, then who was it?’
Diðrik sighed as though we were an intrusion upon his calm that he didn’t really require.
‘I think that you will probably not leave me alone until this has somehow been explained to your satisfaction. So you’d better come in and I’ll make us all some coffee. You’re going to have to start from the very beginning if I’m to have even a tiny chance of understanding you people. I used to have sheep that made more sense than you, and they were stupid animals.’
He turned and walked into the house leaving the door open for us. We kicked off our sodden shoes at the door and gratefully followed him inside. He motioned without saying anything to the sofa so we both took a seat and waited for him to make the coffee. By the time it was ready neither of us could hide our excitement at the prospect of something hot to drink. He could see it in our faces when he returned and almost smiled as he handed the steaming mugs over. He took his own seat opposite us without a word and looked at the two of us and waited.
I ran through the story from the very first note that I had been shown on Inga Björk’s phone to the present day. He didn’t really need to know everything but I thought that it might help when I eventually pulled out the note I had with me.
I told him about Jóhannes and my father’s horse. I told him about my two sisters and my fears of what had befallen them. I left out a lot of the stupid stuff that Elín had done. I figured he already thought we were idiots so why overdo it? I pulled out the note that had been left for me to find, the one that had led us to the graveyard in the rain. He took it from me to read it for himself. He was still suspicious but, as I’d hoped it would be, the note was the turning point. After reading it his face softened and I could tell that he believed me and was going to help us if he could.
‘So those two girls on the television are your sisters?’
I nodded.
‘And this note was left for you by the man who took them?’
I nodded again but with a lesser degree of certainty.
‘And this old man you talked to in the graveyard, the one who was tending the graves of my Inga and Erla, you suspect him of something?’
He directed that comment at Stefán Jón, who shrugged a little sheepishly.
‘At the time I assumed it was you, but now I just don’t know. He could have been the man who killed Jóhannes and has taken her sisters. Or he could have been some old crank doing the rounds in the graveyard for a laugh.’
‘What exactly did he say to you?’
‘He said he had heard about the case but he thought we were probably wasting our time coming all the way down here on a hunch.’
‘He just might have been on to something there, you know,’ Diðrik offered with a grin.
There were a few things that weren’t quite right in my mind that I needed to address.
‘What did this old man look like?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t get that good a look at him, to be honest. It was really raining and he had a lot on.’
‘What do you mean by a lot on?’
‘You know: gloves, raincoat, hat and he had glasses and a big ratty-looking old beard.’
‘Did you get to see his face at all, then?’
‘Not really, you couldn’t see much behind the beard and the glasses. They were all fogged up and wet from the downpour. It could have been anybody, really, now I think of it.
/> He seemed to know what he was talking about, though, so I had no reason to doubt he was who he said he was. He looked just like a little old man tending a couple of graves,’ Stefán Jón shrugged as if to say there was no way to know we were being fooled.
‘That was him waiting for me to show up so he could get his hands on me too and complete the set,’ I whispered.
Diðrik had been sitting quietly listening to the two of us and he finally decided that he had something to add.
‘It sounds as if you’ve done something to really piss someone off,’ he said looking straight at me.
‘I don’t generally go around doing such horrible things to people that they want to kidnap everyone in my family. If Stefán Jón hadn’t volunteered to go out into the rain for me... ’
I couldn’t even finish the sentence. I could feel my voice beginning to break and I didn’t want them to know just how scared and upset I really was.
‘If it was a trap, why did he use your family to lure me down here? What could your wife and daughter have to do with my family? There has to be something here that we’re not seeing. The old lady in the church told me that your daughter died in an accident.’
I wasn’t at all sure that he would want to talk about what had happened to his family and if he didn’t, then our time in Hella was at an end and our trip had indeed been a wasted effort. I decided not to push him, so I just sat there watching him sip his coffee and mull things over in his head.
‘It’s been just over twenty years since I buried my two darlings. Erla died in 1991 in a fire in one of our barns. It was late in the year, very cold outside. Colder than now, even.
We were never really sure what she was doing out there but we suspected she had gone looking for her new puppy and may have followed it into the barn. We never found out how the fire started but it seemed that some fuel cans had been spilt and the fumes had ignited somehow. By the time the alarm was raised the barn was too hot to get anywhere near. My wife and I just stood there and watched it burn. As far as we knew, all there was in there were a few sheep we had put indoors to safeguard from the cold. We had no idea that Erla had got herself trapped in there until we realised that she was nowhere else to be found.’
He paused and had some more of his coffee. I could tell that these were not easy memories for him to be reliving.
‘That little dog of hers escaped the blaze somehow and that was when we began to panic. Inga Rós ran through the house looking everywhere for her but she wasn’t about. Standing in front of that barn as it burnt to the ground broke our hearts. The iron walls got so hot they glowed in the darkness. By the time the firemen arrived there was nothing to be done. They found our little girl when they went through the wreckage the next morning. There wasn’t very much left of her when they pulled her out. There was even less of us left after that.
Inga Rós never recovered and could never come to terms with what had happened. Three months later she used the tranquilisers the doctor prescribed for her to take her own life. Just before she killed herself, she became very quiet to be around. It was like having a ghost in the house. Now I have two ghosts to keep me company and precious little else.’
I looked at Stefán Jón. He had stopped taking notes and just stared at me. I could feel a tear running down my cheek. I still didn’t know what this poor man’s story could possibly have to do with my own but I felt as if we had trodden upon ground on which we had no right to be standing.
Stefán Jón was the first to break the silence that had descended over the room. ‘Was there anyone your daughter was close to at the time? A school friend, perhaps?’
Diðrik seemed to think this over carefully before answering.
‘There was her cousin, Halldóra. She lived in Selfoss in those days but they used to spend their holidays and a great deal of time together. If you can track her down she might just be able to help answer any more questions you might have.’
I gave Stefán Jón the look that said we were done. I thanked Diðrik for letting us into his home and his life. I decided that I had been feeling way too sorry for myself of late. I could do something about what was going on with my sisters, or I could not. That was still my choice.
Sitting around wondering why it was happening to us and not someone else wasn’t going to achieve a thing. I had to get them back before they were gone for good. I had seen the end result of not doing anything, and I didn’t like the way it looked.
CHAPTER 21
When I rolled over and felt the other side of the bed it was already cold. He must have left early to work on whatever piece he was going to write next without the distraction of having me around. One thing I liked about staying at his place was that no one knew to look for me there. I was out of reach of even the most determined of pursuers. It was starting to concern me a little that our spending the night together was beginning to constitute something of a pattern. I guess I was just reluctant to admit that I really liked him. I didn’t feel the instant need to keep him at arm’s length, which was my tried and true approach to most men in my life. Baldvin hadn’t bothered keeping in touch either so maybe that was a sign that I should just let things turn out the way that they were going to turn out.
The trip to Hella had instilled in me an appreciation for just how vulnerable I was if someone wanted to get at me. If Stefán Jón had made me get out of the car first into that pouring rain it would have only taken a moment for him to straighten his hair or find himself distracted in some other manner, and I would have been gone. That’s how fine the line had become between escaping and being swallowed whole. If I wasn’t more careful in future, I would only find darkness.
The link between the story of Erla’s death and that of my own family still eluded me but I imagined that there was one there somewhere, waiting for me to dig far enough and in the right direction.
As I made myself some coffee I toyed briefly with the idea of getting in touch with Grímur and letting him know what we had been up to.
Every time I ran the conversation through in my head, though, I sounded more and more like the crazy woman he had specifically told me not to become. I really should have thought harder about who had left the note for me in the bookshop and why before embarking on a cross-country expedition after a dead girl and her dead mother.
The sorrow in Diðrik’s voice had left me worrying about what would become of us and how I would deal with never seeing my sisters again should it come to that. It wasn’t something I had allowed myself to think about too much but now, now it was all I could think about. A harrowing unease that I was about to be abandoned had permanently set in and it was an existence I wanted no part of.
After a quick shower I made my way back to Vesturgata and picked up the car without even going inside. I wanted to see Dad as soon as possible. It was time to find out if he’d ever had anything to do with Hella or that part of the country in general and it couldn’t wait. I had the feeling that time might just be running out for us all.
As soon as I pulled up the driveway in Hafnarfjörður I could see he had company. The two of them were standing near the entrance to the stables chatting away to each other and hadn’t even noticed me arrive. The man Dad was standing next to had a certain rustic quality to him. A little frayed around the edges but not yet quite falling apart. None too concerned with the way he looked or the way others perceived him was the impression I got. My first guess was that he might be a farmer friend of some kind. Definitely not a city dweller. Possibly even the help that I had been quietly suggesting he get for the horses.
Although if that were the case I had pictured him finding someone a little younger. Quite a lot younger, in fact. This man was Dad’s age at least, possibly even a little older. They seemed very relaxed around each other as though they may have known each other for some time.
So as not to disturb their conversation I made my way into the house and put some coffee on. Sooner or later Dad would have to bring his friend indoors and introduce him. T
here was a travel bag sitting on one of the living room chairs. Perhaps a sign this new arrival was planning something of a stay. It was possible that Dad had simply grown tired of having no one his own age around. Even though he was a stubbornly independent man he had to find himself getting a little lonely sometimes. I might have been his daughter but I wasn’t a peer.
I rather quickly became sick of waiting for an introduction to our mystery guest so I went looking for one instead. I loaded myself up with coffee cups and made my way out to the stables. They were nowhere to be seen but I could hear their voices from within.
‘I thought you two might like some coffee while you’re catching up.’
The two men smiled as they accepted their cups.
‘This is my daughter, Ylfa. Ylfa, this is an old friend of mine, Ólafur from back east. We haven’t seen each other in an awfully long time.’
Ólafur shook my hand and looked me up and down in an effort to appraise his friend’s prodigy.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Ólafur said. ‘I’m sorry to hear about all the trouble you’ve have been having. These are indeed terrible times for your family.’
‘How do you two know each other? I don’t remember Dad telling me he was expecting a visitor.’
‘He wouldn’t have told you because he had no idea I was coming. I’ve made a completely unannounced visit, I’m afraid. I saw your father’s name in the newspaper and thought it was time I paid a very old friend a visit before neither of us are up to it any more.’
I looked from one man to the other trying to comprehend what the relationship between the two of them might be.
‘How long exactly have you two known each other?’
Dad and Ólafur looked at each other as though it would take the two of them thinking about it to figure it out. Either that or they weren’t completely sure they wanted to let on. I had never heard of any Ólafur in my father’s past. It was Dad who eventually broke the silence.
‘It would be sixty years now give or take. We grew up together in Höfn back in the day but we haven’t seen each other since. Life conspired to separate the two of us and then did its very best to keep us apart. It’s been our own fault we haven’t kept in touch but I guess friends you make at that age are for life.’