The corridor was empty but the tranquillity of the night hours was gone. She could hear muffled conversations and somewhere the staccato beat of a printer spewing out paper. At the nearest coffee machine she filled a cardboard cup, too lazy to go and fetch her own mug which had ‘Cop Fuel’ printed on it. Thröstur had given it to her after attending an NBA game in the States with his friends and, unbelievably enough, many of her colleagues were envious.
She slurped down the hot coffee, standing by a window that faced onto the back yard. There was an unusual number of police vehicles in the car park this morning as Sunday was the quietest day of the week. The day no one could be bothered to cause trouble: the violent thugs were generally too hungover to resort to their fists and the criminals were probably lying on their sofas in front of the football. Even dangerous drivers generally behaved themselves on the day of rest.
Nína shrugged her shoulders and rolled them backwards and forwards, which alleviated the stiffness a bit. She stood tall and the pain in her back seemed to diminish as well. Feeling her phone in the pocket of her jeans, she thought of ringing Lárus’s widow to tell her what she had discovered. But on second thoughts she didn’t think she had enough to report. Not yet. If she kept pestering her, the woman might start screening her calls. Aldís would be interested, but she had knocked off and gone home, and was probably sleeping like a baby by now. Besides, she hadn’t given Nína her number and although Nína could dig it up, she doubted Aldís would want to hear from her.
Nína realised that she was longing to talk to another human being about her discoveries; to focus her mind by putting her thoughts into words. Since she’d started spending every free moment at the hospital she’d had almost no interaction with anyone except about work or Thröstur’s health. She missed chatting, hearing news of friends and relatives, bitching about politics, gossiping, airing her opinions of actors, moaning about the weather. She couldn’t remember the last time she had let rip about index-linked mortgages. Not that she missed that in particular, but she felt a powerful need for idle chatter. She wanted to fill the corridor with pointless words.
Berglind was the only person she could ring. It was so long since she had been in touch with her friends that she would be forced to begin with a detailed update on Thröstur’s situation. If she just called them for a friendly gossip they would think she was either heartless or crazy, or both.
Rather than phoning Berglind, Nína decided to finish watching the videos. According to the duty rota, Örvar wasn’t due in until midday and she wanted to go through all the material before tackling him. He wouldn’t get away with blowing smoke in her eyes again. This had to stop.
The technician was still sitting there, the heap on the table no smaller. She didn’t bother to greet him but walked straight in, sat down and finished the coffee that tasted of cardboard. She threw the cup at the waste-paper bin but it missed and bounced into the corner. Ignoring it, she put on the headphones and resumed watching.
There was only one VHS left and at quarter to twelve her efforts finally paid off. A little girl walked into the interview room and Nína paused the tape as the child looked up in the doorway. She rubbed her dry eyes. The girl was doll-like with curly hair and an unusually straight back. She looked as if she’d wandered in by mistake and should have been next door at a photo shoot for the children’s clothing section of the Hagkaup catalogue. Nína rewound to the beginning so she could read the handwritten notice. It was the same case number as Thröstur’s and Lárus’s interviews. The girl’s name was Vala Konrádsdóttir. Nína exhaled. The wife of the man called Nói who lived in Skerjafjördur. The one who appeared to have something to hide. Quickly she pressed play and received confirmation that this was indeed the third child on the wall.
When she tried to call to mind what Örvar had said, she couldn’t remember if he had mentioned the sex of the children. Had he talked of three boys sitting on the wall or had she herself merely assumed that? She had the feeling he had said ‘kids’, and, like an idiot, she hadn’t asked for any details. But she couldn’t be sure.
The little girl repeated the same mantra as Thröstur and Lárus. She hadn’t seen anyone go inside. No one, no one at all. Like Lárus she had come with her father. He interfered less than the lawyer had done, but never took his eyes off his daughter and occasionally stepped in when he felt the policeman was putting too much pressure on her. He was restrained, barely raising his voice, but was solicitous of his daughter. And she got away with a blatant untruth. The lie.
The recording ended but instead of watching it again Nína decided to storm into Örvar’s office to make sure she didn’t miss him. She took the two tapes with her, after replacing the rest in the box. She informed the tech guy that she would be back to tidy up and, without waiting for an answer, marched off to her boss’s office. Before she got there she walked straight into him, on his way out, wearing uniform and an anorak.
Nína let rip before Örvar had time to realise who she was. ‘A man called Lárus, who killed himself in December, was a witness in the journalist Stefán’s suicide case. The third child was a girl. Her name’s Vala Konrádsdóttir. She was knocked down by a car last night and—’ She was given no chance to finish.
‘I haven’t got time for this. You’ll have to tell me later. There’s been a serious incident in Skerjafjördur. A man appears to have murdered his wife, then taken his own life.’
Could the wife be Vala? Suddenly Nína’s ears were ringing; all hope of talking to Vala faded. ‘I’m going to get changed. I’m coming too.’ She ran off before Örvar could forbid her. She called to him as she ran, without turning her head: ‘I’ll meet you in the yard in five minutes. If you leave without me I’ll set fire to your office.’ She wasn’t joking.
Chapter 31
26 January 2014
Nói couldn’t stop thinking about the keys. The keys to the chalet and – what was worse – to their house. He had locked the front door when he brought Vala home from the hospital, feeling that here at least they were safe. Nothing bad could happen to them in their own home as long as they remembered to lock up. That’s how it was supposed to work; that was the basis for the ordinary citizen’s sense of security. Those who left their doors open were inviting disaster, whereas careful types locked them and were rewarded with safety. It had never entered his head that there could be exceptions to this rule. Like now. An individual in possession of a bunch of keys could come and go from their house at will, and the lock in which Nói had placed all his faith was useless. He would have been better off giving in to his impulse to barricade the doors with furniture.
Nói felt his way cautiously from the back door towards the front hall. He took care not to bump into anything, grateful that his eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness outside. The gloom was even more impenetrable in here, without the benefit of the dim lamp over the neighbours’ back door. But he didn’t want to turn on the light in case he attracted attention. It was bad enough that he had opened the door noisily; the intruder, if there was one, must have heard him. He had closed it incredibly quietly behind him but now realised how pointless that had been. The damage had already been done.
A faint but cloying smell of cheap aftershave hung in the air. There was somebody inside. But who? Was it the person who had sent those vile letters?
Nói’s attention was caught by a small red light under the kitchen counter, and he remembered the robot vacuum cleaner that seemed to specialise in starting up at the worst possible moment. He bent down to switch it off and saw the glow of Púki’s eyes. The cat hissed as Nói reached for the vacuum. There was no malice in the hiss; instead the cat seemed to be warning Nói or inviting him to crawl under there and join him.
He straightened up and the cat uttered a low mew. Nói strained his ears but could hear nothing out of the ordinary. The fridge emitted its familiar hum and the clock on the wall ticked with quiet clicks.
Otherwise silence.
There was no creaking
of floorboards upstairs, no squeak of a door. The intruder seemed to be keeping still. Nói pictured him standing beside Vala’s or Tumi’s bed, with evil intent. One of those unanswerable questions sprang into his mind: who would you rather save, Vala or Tumi? He couldn’t say, and anyway it wasn’t up to him. He pushed away mental images of his loved ones’ mangled bodies. What kind of person would even think like that?
It was almost pitch black in the hallway by the staircase where there were no windows and the walls were painted dark green. He regretted now that he hadn’t gone with the pale yellow shade that Vala had wanted.
But then he regretted so many things.
Reminding himself of the furniture layout between door and stairs, he took a quick breath and started edging his way forwards. He kept expecting the intruder to be lying in wait, ready to hit him over the head with a baseball bat or stab him with a knife.
Again his mind set him a quick test: would you rather be bludgeoned or stabbed? The answer came straight back, without pause for thought: bludgeoned. At the thought of a shining, lethally sharp blade piercing skin, muscle and internal organs he instinctively clutched at his stomach to deaden the hot pain that his imagination conjured up. But his resolve did not falter. He was going to drive this man out of his house, whatever the cost to himself.
Nói breathed more easily when he felt the bottom step and began to tiptoe up the stairs. He mustn’t make the slightest noise. He had broken out in a cold sweat and his hands were damp as they brushed along the walls.
The whiff of cheap aftershave grew more noticeable the higher he climbed. Nói wondered what kind of person would bother to put on that noxious stuff before breaking into somebody’s house. He recognised the pong; it reminded him of the sleazy blokes who used to visit his mother in the bad old days. It was the sort of aftershave men buy from the corner shop, aimed at those without money or taste. Could it be a smokescreen? Perhaps it wasn’t a man at all but a woman who was trying to disguise the fact to make herself more menacing? That was a long shot. The alternative was more plausible and far worse – that this was a man who had made an effort to smarten himself up in excited anticipation of what he was about to do.
Nói almost lost his nerve. Warily he took a deep breath and his courage returned. But only for a second. It dawned on him that he was empty-handed. If only he’d had the presence of mind to grab a knife instead of wasting time posing himself questions. There were enough sharp blades in the kitchen. But it would be unthinkable now to creep back downstairs, fetch a weapon and climb up again. There was too great a risk that he would be heard, and time was running out. He couldn’t afford any delays. And Vala and Tumi certainly couldn’t.
It was perceptibly lighter upstairs. There was a skylight over the TV alcove, which he used to curse because it caused a reflection on the screen. Now he thanked God he had never got a builder to block it off as he’d often planned to. The grey illumination was enough to show him everything.
Four doors opened off the upstairs landing, all of them closed. They led to his and Vala’s bedroom, Tumi’s room, the bathroom and the stairs to the loft. The choice was between the two bedrooms.
Tumi – Vala, Vala – Tumi?
Which room should he check first? Which of them could he bear less to see harmed – suddenly the question was no longer hypothetical. He couldn’t hear anything to hint where the danger lay. The silence was absolute; no sound but the odd plink from the bathroom tap.
Vala – Tumi, Tumi – Vala?
This was no time to hesitate, so he chose his and Vala’s room. If it was the person who had sent the letters, he was probably the very same man who had knocked Vala down. She was the one he was after. It was unlikely that he would be interested in Tumi. Nói moved towards the master bedroom, taking care not to tread on the floorboards that he knew squeaked. He made it noiselessly all the way to the door and laid his ear against it. He thought he could hear Vala breathing deeply inside but he wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was only the wind. But there was nothing to suggest that she wasn’t alone. Nói gripped the handle and opened the door. There was no point trying to be quiet; he knew the worn hinges too well.
It opened with the loud creaking that had always filled him with a cosy sense of home but now sounded worse than nails on a blackboard. He flung it back against the wall inside. That way he could see the whole room and simultaneously reassure himself that the man couldn’t be hiding behind the door.
The curtains were drawn back. Outside the black clouds had parted and a delicate, silvery radiance flooded into the room. Nói decided to switch on the light anyway. If someone was in there, hiding behind the curtains or in the cupboard, he would have to be deaf and blind not to be aware of Nói by now.
There was a view of the dark sea through the window and his eyes automatically searched for whatever it was that had drawn his attention to the beach. He thought he could see something pale floating just below the surface, but then it was gone and he assumed it must have been the moon gleaming on the waves. When he switched on the light the window glass went black, as if a screen had been turned off.
Vala was lying in bed and showed no sign of having been harmed beyond her existing injuries. She had kicked off the duvet, and Nói’s baggy T-shirt had rucked up under her breasts. Her bare belly and what could be seen of her limbs were blue with bruises, but there was no blood on the white sheet and she seemed to be breathing normally. He couldn’t see her face but sensed that all was as it should be.
Then Nói spotted the sheets of paper he had given Vala lying on the bedside table with the pen resting on them. For an instant he forgot the imminent danger. It looked as if the top sheet had writing on it, perhaps the others too. He stepped into the room, compelled by the longing to read what she had written, but had the presence of mind to check first that no one was hiding inside. Full of trepidation, he whipped the heavy curtains back from the sides of the window and his fear intensified as he opened the wardrobes one after the other. Each hiding place that turned out to be empty only increased the odds that the intruder would be lurking in the next. It was like Russian roulette. His fear peaked when he opened the door to their en-suite. There was nowhere else to hide and he felt an overpowering certainty that this was it.
There was no one in the bathroom, no one behind the door or in the shower. He sniffed the air for traces of aftershave but could no longer detect it with any certainty. Perhaps he was inured to it by now. Unless he had imagined the whole thing. Perhaps there was no one in the house but the three of them and poor old Púki. The smell of aftershave might be emanating from Tumi. Who knows, he might finally have fallen for a girl and be trying to impress her – or maybe girls in general. It was possible that he had invested in a bottle of cologne from the local shop; after all, he was hardly old enough to know that the brands sold there were mainly bought by alcoholics as a cheap tipple.
Relief flooded Nói: the danger was over, if it had ever existed. He decided to check the other rooms upstairs, but there was nobody in the family bathroom or in the loft or in Tumi’s room. There wasn’t any hint of aftershave either, which bothered Nói. He would gladly have suffered a migraine from a thick miasma of the stuff in exchange for an innocent explanation for its origin. But Tumi’s room was merely stuffy. Nói opened the window to let in the pure night air, daring now to relax and linger to tuck his son in properly. Perhaps the intruder had left via the window in the master bedroom when he heard someone coming upstairs. It was far from easy to climb down the fire escape but a piece of cake compared to dropping to the ground.
Had Nói been completely mistaken? Was there no intruder at all? The creaking he heard could have been Tumi or Vala. It wasn’t unheard of for them to nip to the loo in the night. But that didn’t explain the smell of aftershave or the fact that the lights were off downstairs.
There was little point tucking the boy in; he had already kicked off his duvet again. Pausing in the doorway Nói surveyed the chaos in his room and the shelves that ha
d once held Lego creations of all shapes and sizes. He had bombarded the boy with the sets, remembering how he himself had hankered after Lego when he was little. Now that they had gone from the shelves, he felt sad that he hadn’t allowed Tumi to play with the models once they had finished making them. It would have made more sense than putting them on display like a hunter hanging trophies on the walls. Well, it was too late now.
Vala was still lying in the same position. Nói pulled the crumpled T-shirt down over her stomach, then began to draw up the duvet. His gaze became fixed on a bead of blood in her belly button. It must be connected to the accident; it could hardly be a sign of internal bleeding. Although he knew nothing about medicine, he was pretty sure you couldn’t haemorrhage through the navel. To double-check, he fetched some loo paper and dabbed gently at her stomach. Vala didn’t stir, so it could hardly be a wound that the doctors had overlooked. Unless the painkillers were incredibly effective. Nói raised the paper to the light and saw that the blood had spread out slightly. He looked back at her navel, which now appeared perfectly normal, with not a drop of red to see. He vacillated, wondering if he should wake her or call A&E to ask what it might mean, but decided to leave it. Vala seemed fine, so he made do with covering her up, then reached for the sheets of paper on the bedside table.
He began to read as he stood by the bed. Her handwriting covered two pages. Clearly she had meant to give them to him in the morning so she wouldn’t have to speak. Perhaps she had found it easier to write the whole thing down, alone in bed, than to have to explain it to his face tomorrow. He didn’t blame her. It was obvious that she had seen through him when he escorted her back upstairs. She knew he wanted answers, however much he pretended it didn’t matter. Before reading the letter he checked to see if she had finished it and thought she had. It must have been a real effort to use her right hand when her arm was in plaster and sore from the accident, but she must have started the moment he went downstairs, and fallen asleep straight afterwards.
Why Did You Lie? Page 29