Why Did You Lie?

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  At the back of the garage was the locked storeroom. Nína walked towards it, inadvertently taking bigger strides than usual. Once she had opened the storeroom and taken a peek inside, this belated initiation ceremony would be over. There would be nothing left to do and she could finally leave this place. Between her and Thröstur, and Thorbjörg and Stefán, there had been two other owners who had suffered no misfortune. If there was a curse on the garage, it only seemed to affect journalists.

  Nína had to give the door of the storeroom a hard jerk and it shook on its rusty hinges as she released her hold. The bulb inside had blown, so she shone her phone inside to illuminate the contents.

  She wasn’t prepared for how much crap had piled up in there. When they first moved in she had stuck her head inside and recoiled at how much the previous owners had left in there, but now the situation was much worse. Clutter lay strewn over the floor so there was hardly anywhere to put your feet. She couldn’t imagine who it was that had torn through it like a hurricane; Thröstur maybe, or the police? Rusty tools, torn magazines, skis, children’s clothes and a broken shovel, ancient drinks cans and bottles – some long-obsolete Icelandic brand she had never heard of. Three children’s bikes lay piled one on top of the other under all the rubbish, presumably relics of the bicycle repair shop that had once operated out of the premises. Nína assumed some of the old tools must date back to then too. Apparently the tenant hadn’t bothered to collect the rest of his gear. Perhaps Thorbjörg had refused to open the door for him and he had abandoned the attempt.

  The presence of the bikes was more of a puzzle. Surely the children who owned them wouldn’t have been resigned to losing them just because some adult was having money trouble? Seeing a bike like the one she had owned as a girl, Nína remembered how attached she had been to it. She would have insisted on getting it back. Perhaps the young owners hadn’t been able to afford to pay for the repairs.

  The only object that appeared to have been left undisturbed was a squalid-looking folding bed. The torn, stained mattress was covered in a thick layer of dust. There was no question that this place needed a thorough spring clean. But Nína decided not to break with tradition: the new owners would inherit the mess, assuming anyone wanted to buy the flat.

  As she backed out she caught sight of a picture on the wall by the bed. It was the drawing of a face, apparently by a child – a girl, she guessed. It consisted of no more than a few lines, of which the pigtail had probably proved the greatest test of the artist’s talents. What made the strongest impression on Nína, however, was the large, downturned mouth.

  She hurried out of the garage. The light dust of snow was still falling but this time she let the flakes settle on her eyelashes. The cold air and the drips running down her face were somehow cleansing. She felt in urgent need of a shower.

  Next morning Nína arrived at work before anyone else. This was partly to escape the hospital before the doctors began their rounds, as she was reluctant to discuss when she wanted Thröstur’s life support switched off. She owed them an answer but couldn’t make up her mind. Ever since she’d made the decision she’d been preoccupied with other things. No, the main reason for turning up early today was to ambush Örvar. He hadn’t told her the truth and she wanted to confront him. She didn’t give a damn that she’d promised to leave the investigation to him; no one could be held to a deal based on lies.

  He appeared at the end of the corridor, concentrating so hard on not spilling a brimming cup of coffee that he failed to notice Nína waiting by the door of his office until it was too late to pretend he was on his way somewhere else. Struggling to mask his consternation, he invited her to take a seat. He was very busy, he explained, and could only spare her a few minutes. Another lie, no doubt.

  Nína sat down and came straight to the point while Örvar was swearing over the coffee he’d slopped onto his desk. Typical that he could carry it without accident all the way from the machine, then mess up just when he was home and dry. ‘Never take your eye off the ball,’ he muttered, mopping at the stained paperwork. No doubt the curses were directed at her too but she pretended not to notice. Finally he sat down, looking even more exhausted than usual. She knew he’d been finding these weekend shifts a trial, but there was no getting out of them. At least he was weary enough to buy Nína’s explanation that she’d come in early now to make up for her day off on Wednesday. She had been afraid he would send her straight home.

  ‘Nína, it’s not what you think. I wasn’t involved in the actual inquiry because I’d only recently joined the police. If Thorbjörg said that, she was mistaken. I went round a few times on call-out and felt sorry for her and her son. She must have remembered me because I was polite to her, and understanding about how hard she was finding it to accept what had happened.’ Örvar sighed. ‘I did a little checking for her in-house but there was no evidence – really, none at all – to suggest anything other than suicide.’

  ‘Then why not just tell me that? Why pretend not to know that another woman had experienced exactly the same thing in exactly the same place?’

  ‘Nína, I had no idea where you lived. I’ve never been round to your house and since we got an HR manager I haven’t kept up to speed with my team’s private lives. Except when they choose to confide in me.’

  ‘Which I did. But you didn’t say a word. You must have twigged when I said I’d found a statement taken from Thröstur. There can’t have been many suicides where a child was called in as a witness. Didn’t the penny drop when his name came up in that context?’

  ‘There were three kids. Boys, if memory serves, all around the same age. And since you ask, I never knew their names as I only heard about it secondhand – I never actually went near the investigation. I hadn’t a clue that your husband was one of them. It’s thirty years since I tried to help Thorbjörg and since then I’ve met countless women in the line of duty. Children, too.’ Örvar took a sip of coffee and made a face when he saw that he’d forgotten to wipe the bottom of his mug. There was a brown ring on the desk, shaped like a mouth shouting at him. Which was exactly what she felt like doing right now. It was intolerable to have to sit here and watch him squirm. She even suspected him of deliberately spilling the coffee to buy himself time.

  ‘It first began to come back to me when you told me about the video. Then the penny finally dropped – but not immediately.’

  Nína didn’t believe this for a second but decided to let him continue.

  ‘Since then I haven’t had a chance to discuss it with you. I know we’ve crossed paths in the office but I hadn’t made up my mind what to say. It was partly out of concern for you – I didn’t want to raise your hopes. I still stand by what I said – no one but your husband was responsible for his actions. But I should have mentioned it to you earlier, I admit that.’

  ‘But you didn’t mention it at all – I had to ask you. That’s not the same thing.’ Nína paused to give Örvar a chance to apologise or protest but he said nothing, so she went on. ‘But now you’re going to tell me anything of importance you remember, aren’t you?’

  ‘Do I have any choice?’

  ‘No, not really. I won’t stop asking.’

  ‘What do you want to know? I can’t remember it in much detail.’

  ‘The two questions bugging me most are how did Thröstur get involved and what happened to the reports?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly where the reports are.’ Örvar sounded convincing but it was an odd choice of words.

  ‘What do you mean exactly?’

  ‘Just that. I can’t point you to their exact location, I’m afraid. But I’ll ask the old hands to check their shelves. And I’ll have a look around my office, though there’s no reason they’d be in here. As you’ll remember, it wasn’t my case, and I had a clear-out not long ago. Besides, I try to deal with everything as soon as a case is closed. Unlike some people, I don’t sit on the files for decades.’ He glanced round at the overflowing shelves. ‘Though, on second th
oughts, maybe it’s longer since my last clear-out than I remembered. Maybe several years.’ Örvar stole a glance at the clock. ‘Look, I’m pressed for time, as I said. I’ve got to be at a meeting in five minutes. What was the other question?’

  ‘How was Thröstur mixed up in it? And the other two boys?’

  ‘Their testimony contradicted Thorbjörg’s claim that someone else had been involved in her husband’s death. The boys were able to confirm that nobody had entered the garage, so it was clear that no crime had been committed. Thorbjörg wasn’t told about them, only that all the indications were that her husband had acted alone.’

  Now it was Nína’s turn to frown. ‘Then I find the way Thröstur was interviewed very odd. Wouldn’t a single statement, taken on the spot, have done? It sounded as if the man interviewing him thought he had something to hide. And how did they manage to trace the kids?’

  ‘By coincidence Stefán’s body was discovered almost immediately. The boys were still sitting on the wall when the police and ambulance arrived. So it wasn’t difficult.’ Örvar adjusted his shirt collar and picked up pen and notebook. ‘Statements were taken from them on the spot, then they were interviewed again in the presence of a legal guardian and after that the decision was made to question them further. Their statements weren’t entirely consistent with the evidence and the police hoped it would be possible to discover why. But they were unsuccessful.’

  ‘Weren’t consistent how?’ Nína remembered the mannerisms that had indicated Thröstur was lying.

  ‘They claimed they hadn’t seen anyone go in. Full stop. There didn’t seem anything strange about it in the first statements because they’d been taken at the scene, but when they came in for formal interviews it transpired that they claimed not to have seen anybody at all. Not even Thorbjörg’s husband, who was known to have gone in while they were sitting there.’

  ‘How could the police establish that? Kids don’t have a particularly good sense of time. Perhaps they arrived after he went inside.’

  ‘No. A driver was parked there, waiting for the woman next door, and remembered seeing the kids on the wall and the man entering the garage. After being shown a photo of Thorbjörg’s husband he confirmed that it had been him. Then the woman he’d been waiting for came out and he drove away with her. His testimony also fitted with that of the woman’s son. He walked past the garage on his way home and saw Thorbjörg’s husband emerging from his house, the kids on the wall and the driver in the car.’

  ‘How was the driver traced?’

  ‘The kids’ licence-plate books. It was the last vehicle registration they’d all managed to write down before they recorded the number of the ambulance, so it was obvious that we should speak to the owner of that car. But the kids stuck to their story that no one had entered the garage.’ He stood up. ‘It was all very peculiar. No explanation was ever found.’

  Chapter 22

  25 January 2014

  When Nói finally surfaced, his headache had gone and he felt as if a boulder had been extracted from his head. Sitting up on the edge of the bed he saw that he had slept for nearly four hours. A low rumbling from his stomach reminded him that it was long past suppertime and he could use a drink too. It was freezing in the bedroom with the window wide open, so he went over and closed it after sweeping out the snow that had collected on the sill.

  Everything was going to hell.

  Muffled sounds reached the bedroom. Vala must be watching one of her tedious crime serials, unless she’d nodded off over the evening news. That was probably it, since she hadn’t come and given him a shake as she usually did when he went for a rest. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been allowed to lie in peace until he got up of his own accord. Under normal circumstances she wouldn’t have stopped badgering him until she had dragged him out on a run with her. She never suffered from headaches herself so it was impossible to get through to her that however fast you jogged you couldn’t outrun the pain. For her, exercise was the magic solution to everything, whether it was aches, tiredness or just a bad mood. Usually he either gave in or ignored her, but at moments like this he felt his wife’s obsession bordered on insanity. What on earth was Vala running away from? She seemed incapable of grasping the fact that sometimes it was all right to be a bit under the weather or take some time out to relax.

  Suddenly it occurred to him that the reason she had left him alone was almost certainly to postpone discussing the police’s visit. She had behaved very oddly while the officers were there and although he couldn’t understand what she had to hide, he’d got the distinct impression that she knew more about the whole business than he did. Could the Americans have contacted her instead? They had her e-mail address too, so it was perfectly possible – but what was it that she didn’t want to share with him? It was unlike her to be secretive, especially since she knew how much he loathed that sort of thing. He couldn’t even stand surprise parties like the one their friends had thrown for his twenty-fifth birthday ten years ago. He still shuddered when he thought of the flurry of furtive phone conversations she’d had in the days leading up to it.

  While these thoughts were running through his head, he remembered that Vala had been in a pretty bad way before they went abroad. She had seemed depressed during Advent, and in the days before they’d left for the States she had suffered from mood swings, one minute hyper, the next jumping out of her skin at the slightest sound. When he demanded to know what was wrong, she had dismissed it as pre-holiday nerves. And certainly once they arrived in Florida she had relaxed and reverted to her normal self, so he had taken her explanation at face value.

  Now, however, he wondered if he should have pressed her harder for the truth. Looking back, it seemed possible that she had been upset over something to do with the Americans. She had handled all the preparations for their trip because he’d had to work like crazy to be able to take time off. There had been no opportunity to ask what the matter was.

  If he was honest, he would have to admit that he’d been relieved when she didn’t want to discuss it. Other people’s feelings were not his strong point. His attention span when it came to listening to someone fret over how things should have been done differently was very short, as he preferred to look to the future. Well, he would just have to make the effort if he wanted things out in the open.

  Nói went out onto the landing. He hoped there was some supper left, though his wife and son would probably have made themselves separate snacks. The emphasis on eating together as a family was all on his side; Vala and Tumi were happy to give shared meals a miss when he wasn’t around. But this didn’t bother him as he felt it wasn’t a proper family supper anyway if he wasn’t there. He walked past the TV alcove on the landing and saw that it was Tumi lying there on the sofa, glued to the screen. He might have known: a war film was on and while he stood there two soldiers were blown into the air by a landmine.

  ‘Move. You’re in the way.’

  Nói shifted so his son wouldn’t miss any flying limbs. ‘Where’s your mother?’

  ‘She went round to Sigga’s. She said you’re to heat up the soup in the saucepan for yourself.’ Tumi didn’t look at his father; all his attention was focused on the battling actors. ‘But I’m warning you, it’s disgusting. It’s … green.’ He shuddered theatrically.

  ‘When did your mother go out?’

  ‘As soon as we’d eaten, luckily – so I could fix myself some proper food. She said she’d be late so we weren’t to wait up for her.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Tumi shrugged, indifferent as ever when it came to his parents. ‘She said you knew.’ If so, either Nói hadn’t taken it in or the fact had slipped his mind. His headache hadn’t exactly helped his concentration, so Vala may well have mentioned her plans, but he didn’t think so. Well, if she thought she could dodge his questions like this, she could think again. He would stay up and wait for her, however tired he was.

  ‘Oh, yeah, and the police rang.’

 
; ‘What did they want?’

  ‘They were just asking if you knew some people. I wrote some notes on the pad by the phone. I didn’t want to wake you up, and Mum had left.’ Tumi sat upright. ‘Did the cop really think me and my mates had put that cat on the barbecue?’

  ‘No. But they have to ask to eliminate all the possibilities.’

  ‘Oh.’ Tumi seemed disappointed. ‘Anyway, there’s a number you’re meant to call. I think he said to call tomorrow, not tonight.’

  Nói went downstairs to the kitchen, frustrated that the boy was incapable of taking down messages properly. He paused on the bottom step, then called up to ask Tumi if he knew where Púki was. His son said he hadn’t seen him. The cat was accustomed to going out at night, which was infuriating because when he finally did come home he would miaow insistently until either Nói or Vala woke up and let him in. And as an extra treat, he brought them presents of mice from the beach. For some reason he never did this during the day. But Nói didn’t care about that now; he just wanted the cat safely indoors. He couldn’t stop thinking about how like Púki the cat on the barbecue had been. Was it a coincidence?

  ‘Púki! Puss-puss!’ Nói called into the dark back garden, then listened. If the cat was nearby he usually came running in the hope of food. But he couldn’t hear the familiar jingling of his bell. He raised his voice. ‘Púki! Here, kitty!’ There was no sound, so Nói closed the door. He peered outside but the light from the house didn’t reach far and the darkness hanging over the sea beyond the garden seemed almost solid. No moon or stars tonight. If someone was standing out there watching, they wouldn’t even need to hide.

  The boy hadn’t lied about the soup. The green gloop in the pan was so unappetising that Nói’s hunger evaporated. He poured a little down the sink so it would look as if he had eaten some, then turned his attention to the notes Tumi had scribbled down. They conveyed little; there was a telephone number – the police station, presumably – and two male names he didn’t recognise. Though scrawled down any old how, the words were just about legible. On the rare occasions when Tumi picked up a pen the results left a lot to be desired.