At first Nói had difficulty working out the context because Vala had written as concisely as possible, often using abbreviations. But then his eyes opened and he raced through the rest as fast as he could. Afterwards he lowered his hands and stared at his wife’s averted head in a feeble attempt to grasp how she could have misunderstood and underestimated him so badly. But the longer he reflected, the more the truth dawned on him and he was forced to admit that there had been no misunderstanding. This handwritten account had no place in the sterilised world he had created for his family. Had she told him when they first met, he wouldn’t have considered her a suitable candidate to be his wife and would have continued his search elsewhere. There had never been a right time to tell him. Some things have to be revealed at the beginning of a relationship. Later, the time that has elapsed becomes its own kind of betrayal. When was she supposed to have told him this story? On their wedding day? When she had just given birth? In front of the telly one Tuesday evening? He knew himself well enough to recognise that he would never have been able to accept this. Vala had been right to keep quiet about it.
Nói bent down to whisper to Vala that he realised he was emotionally constipated. It was his fault she hadn’t dared confide in him as soon as the letters started arriving, as soon as she received the phone call warning her that her past was about to catch up with her. He meant to tell her that the man named in the letter would get his just deserts; he would see to it personally that he never walked free. If the justice system let them down, he would find a way to rid them and society of this vermin. That was a promise, and hopefully it would go some way to making up for all his mistakes. But as he bent down to kiss her, Vala emitted a strange rattling sound. Stiffening, he turned her head carefully towards him. Her eyes opened but he could see nothing but the glazed whites. Foam oozed from the corner of her mouth and her whole body started to shake.
Everything was far from fine.
Nói flung down the sheets of paper, wondering frantically what to do. Ring for an ambulance or start mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Which came first?
He got no further. From under the valance around the bed two strong hands shot out, grabbed hold of his ankles and jerked so that he toppled over backwards. The world spun before his eyes, and he gasped and groaned weakly as the intruder crawled out from the one hiding place Nói had overlooked: the most obvious.
Everything went black.
When Nói recovered consciousness, it was not due to the mercy of the powers above. He was freezing and couldn’t see a thing. His ribcage felt as if it were bursting and there was only one thought in his mind – that he couldn’t breathe. He became aware of the throttling grip on his throat that was holding his head down. A great weight was pressing on his back, making it impossible for him to turn.
He was drowning.
The taste of salt told him he was in the sea. Probably off the beach below the house. His lungs sent a warning that they couldn’t hold out any longer. He should prepare for them to fill with icy seawater. Instinctively Nói opened his eyes wide and struggled but found he had no strength left. In front of him was something lighter in colour than the surrounding murky gloom. It spread out as if to engulf him. Perhaps this was the afterlife welcoming him. He remembered hearing stories of a white light. This was merely pale but even so it gave him hope that what was to come would not be so bad. Not so bad after all.
Nói gave up fighting and filled his lungs. His death throes did not last long and during them he comforted himself with the thought of Vala’s letter. With any luck it was still lying on the bed and would ensure that justice triumphed in the end. As long as the man hadn’t spotted the pages and shoved them in his pocket. That would be so unfair.
The pale colour vanished and everything went black.
Chapter 32
26 January 2014
There was such a throng of vehicles at the end of the street that anyone driving into the cul-de-sac would be forced to reverse out again. Örvar parked the police car in the drive of the neighbouring house, ignoring the man watching them angrily out of the window. Beside him stood a woman who clearly couldn’t care less about the parking place but was anxiously following what was happening next door. As Nína and Örvar walked away they heard a furious banging on the glass behind them but neither looked round. Instead they quickened their pace to make sure they were out of reach by the time the man stormed outside.
They hadn’t spoken much on the way. Örvar had been on the phone most of the time, talking to officers on the scene, and Nína had only managed a couple of quick questions when they first got in the car. She had asked about the files from the archives: why had he fetched them and where were they now? She had bitten back the urge to berate him for keeping silent when he knew all along that he had the reports she was looking for. That would have to wait. But she had received no answers. Örvar had said there was no time to discuss that now, then put on his headset and started talking on the phone. Nína had a hunch that there was no one on the other end.
It looked as if someone had set up a huge open-air casino in the cul-de-sac. The flashing lights of the ambulances and police cars hurt their eyes and Nína almost expected to hear someone celebrating the fact that they had won the jackpot. There was even a fire engine. Surely that was excessive.
All kinds of uniforms were milling around – doctors in white coats, divers in black drysuits, members of the rescue team in luminous jackets, paramedics, police. They moved briskly in and out of the house, crisscrossing the gardens both front and back, and a couple of police officers with a dog on a lead were walking the boundaries. The lights had attracted curious passers-by and two officers had their hands full trying to keep them out of the way.
Örvar banged irritably on the roof of a car belonging to an elderly couple who had become stranded in the middle of the road, and were sitting there, rigid with fright at their predicament. He waved them away, then sent some officers to the end of the street with orders to let no one through unless they could prove they were residents or had urgent business there.
Flickering blue light played over an attractively renovated wooden house that would have looked at home in the playground of a fairytale princess. Its innocent appearance was completely at odds with the gruesome crime that had been committed there.
When they entered, the floor creaked loudly as if the house were wincing under the strain of all this activity. Apart from that it was oddly quiet. The strange sense of unreality extended to the interior as well: the paintings on the walls hung with perfect precision, every object seemed handpicked for the setting, as if the family had shed all their old belongings when they moved in. There were numerous people indoors as well but they spoke in an undertone and their movements were slower and more methodical. Everyone seemed to have a role to perform. Nína followed Örvar in silence, trying not to let it show that she had no appointed task. He seemed to have forgotten her presence as he surveyed the interior of the house and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. She copied his example – with the gloves on she hoped she would look like a fully paid-up member of the investigation team.
In the kitchen they came across a teenage boy sitting bolt upright in spite of his gangling frame. He had a tabby cat in his lap, which stared at Nína and Örvar with half-closed eyes. One of the boy’s feet was twitching continually up and down and his hands kept wandering to his neck or forehead but finding nothing to do there. They fell straight back to his lap, stroked the cat briefly, then sought out his face again or fiddled with the table top. He didn’t seem to have been crying but his blue eyes fluttered around constantly as if he had been injected with a stimulant, as if he were searching for something to mitigate the unbearable pain.
Of course it was futile. All around him were reminders of his parents who had left this life while he was asleep. His curly hair was in a wild tangle and kept flopping over his wide, staring eyes. He let it hang there for longer than seemed natural, perhaps grateful to be able to draw a veil ov
er his surroundings, then tossed his head back, flinging his fringe out of his eyes again. Beside him sat a woman Nína knew to be a psychologist from the police commissioner’s office. She was talking to the boy in a low voice and tried to take hold of his hands as his trembling fingers paused on the table but he snatched them away. Opposite them a plainclothes detective was sitting as if turned to stone, presumably waiting for a chance to interrogate the boy. Nína hoped he wasn’t waiting for the boy to recover. If so he might as well sit there for the rest of his life.
‘What a bloody nightmare.’ Örvar looked round at Nína. She saw his shoulders sag as the scale of the tragedy sank in.
Nína merely nodded, feeling she had nothing to say, and was profoundly relieved when Örvar turned on his heel and walked over to the staircase. She was having a hard enough time dealing with her own grief without taking on somebody else’s.
Upstairs, plastic sheeting had been draped over an open doorway. Nína saw two men from forensics busy at the end of the bed inside. As they moved nearer she spotted the pathologist behind them, bending over the bed with a cotton bud in her hand. Nína had communicated with this woman several times in connection with work and although her manner was rather chilly, she liked her. A body was lying motionless on the bed, the tanned legs looking uncannily healthy and alive. Vala. The third child witness. There was no one left to tell the tale.
Örvar tapped awkwardly on the plastic. It rustled a little but no one seemed to hear him. He coughed and finally the forensics technicians looked up. One of them came slowly over to the doorway, dressed in a paper overall that resembled a child’s fancy-dress astronaut costume. ‘How’s it going?’ Örvar was standing so close to the plastic that steam condensed on it as he spoke, like a faint shadow of his words.
‘Fine. They’ll be able to move her shortly. Within half an hour, at a guess.’
‘What does she think?’ Örvar looked over at the pathologist. ‘Is the cause of death obvious?’
‘An overdose of painkillers, she reckons. There are some empty bottles in the kitchen. We found what looks like a suicide letter too. It’s written in a clumsy feminine hand, which would be consistent with the fact she’s in plaster.’
Nína pricked up her ears and had to dig her hands into her pockets to prevent herself from tearing down the plastic to get at the letter. She hadn’t been expecting this and felt new hope quickening in her breast. The letter would doubtless explain why Vala had taken her own life, and the same explanation could very probably be extended to Lárus and, more importantly, Thröstur. It couldn’t be a coincidence that all three of them should have resorted to the same desperate measure, at virtually the same time. The odds against it were too great. It must have been a joint decision taken by the three of them or else they had somehow ended up coming to the same conclusion. A triple coincidence would be more than a little suspect.
‘What does the letter say?’ Örvar craned his head to see further inside.
‘We’ve sealed it in a plastic bag. There are two closely written pages. She’s going to read it later.’ He indicated the pathologist behind him. Nína would have given anything to be in the woman’s shoes. The man shuffled his feet, his overall crackling. ‘Konni and I already have more than enough on our hands. We’re in a hurry to finish up here.’
Nína and Örvar went back downstairs. On their way out they passed through the kitchen, where the situation remained unchanged: the cat restless, the boy distraught, the psycholo-gist patient and the detective champing at the bit.
When they re-emerged into the open air they found the same chaos, only now the bystanders’ cars had gone; the show was over for the moment.
‘Who reported it?’ Although Nína had picked up the gist by eavesdropping on the telephone conversation Örvar had had – or pretended to have – in the car, she was still largely in the dark.
‘Some joggers spotted the husband floating down by the shore. A team had no sooner set out to deal with that than the poor boy called. He’d woken up and found his mother in bed. He thought she was in a very bad way and requested an ambulance. With a defibrillator.’
‘Oh, God.’ The impacted snow squeaked beneath their feet. Nína assumed the garden had already been fine-combed. ‘Are we absolutely certain that it’s the father? Has the boy identified him?’
‘No. But it’s him.’ Örvar didn’t reveal how he knew. He scanned the garden, then headed for the back gate. Beyond it they could see more police officers and divers busy on the stony beach. Suddenly another diver’s head emerged from the waves. He waved vigorously, then started swimming to shore. The other people on the beach ran over to meet him. Nína followed hard on Örvar’s heels so she could keep plying him with questions. ‘Do they think he walked into the sea?’
‘Initially they did, yes. But it turned out there were injuries on the back of his neck that indicate the use of force. It’ll all become clear in due course. No point speculating at this point.’ Örvar was so breathless he could hardly get the words out. His strength seemed to have waned over the last few days.
Nína was relieved to see they had removed the man’s corpse from the beach. It must have been done as quickly as possible due to all the traffic along the coast path. She and Örvar had already passed a couple with a pram watching what was going on; further off a jogger was standing with his hands on his knees, his whole body heaving as he tried to catch his breath, his attention fixed on the activity below. Unless they were moved on, these people were likely to see more than was appropriate since the diver seemed to be indicating that another body had been found. Two, in fact. Nína turned and began to herd the members of the public away, much to their indignation. Someone had to do it and everyone else on the beach seemed too busy. No one thanked her when she returned from this self-appointed task and she was glad: it meant they regarded her as one of the team. It wasn’t the custom to praise fellow officers for performing routine tasks at a crime scene. She sensed a lessening of hostility towards her; people obviously had more important things on their mind right now than cold-shouldering a colleague.
At the top of the beach, just above the belt of seaweed, lay a deflated bright yellow rubber dinghy. Nína tapped the arm of the nearest policeman and asked how the boat was connected to the case. He turned his head and didn’t look best pleased when he saw who had posed the question. Clearly she hadn’t entirely come in from the cold.
‘The man was found tangled up in it. At first they thought he’d gone out in the dinghy but it appears to have been in the sea for some time. Longer than the bloke, anyway.’
Nína had no experience of drownings or bodies washed up by the sea, but she’d heard enough stories at the station. She remembered one of her older colleagues teaching her that you should always treat people’s physical remains with respect, even if there was nothing left but a heap of ashes. The commotion on the beach as the diver went back out, accompanied by another man armed with a camera, did nothing to suggest that this piece of advice was being followed.
‘I think I know who they are.’
Örvar, who was standing nearby, started. ‘What do you mean? The bodies?’
‘Yes.’ Nína felt like issuing an ultimatum: she would share the information with him on condition that he told her about the reports he had removed from the archives, but she knew that if she tried anything like that he would send her away. ‘I met Aldís last night and she gave me the lowdown about what’s been happening here over the last twenty-four hours. The couple contacted the police and one of their concerns was that something might have happened to the foreigners – an American couple – who’d been staying at their house. The case was given routine treatment but then yesterday evening the wife was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver and that put a different perspective on things.’ She wondered if she should tell him about the notes they had received but decided against it. He would find out soon enough and it was better not to remind him of Thröstur’s possible connection to the case. If he stopped
to think, he might send her straight back to the station. It was unethical to allow people who had any link to the case to be present at the crime scene. The fact that he hadn’t twigged after she blurted out the connection between Vala and Thröstur suggested either that he hadn’t understood her or else that he was preoccupied with trying to conceal something from her. She was inclined to believe the latter.
‘Why were you at work last night?’ He didn’t seem to have taken in what she said. ‘And what are you doing here now? You’re not supposed to be working weekends.’
‘Don’t you remember? I’m making up for my day off last week. I’ll need to take another day off in the middle of next week, so I wanted to make up the hours. They’re going to switch off Thröstur’s life support.’ She was ashamed of herself for using her dying husband as an excuse. ‘I thought it would be OK. It’s not as if you can tell the difference between a weekday and a weekend down in the basement.’
‘You don’t need to make up the hours, as you well know. I’ve repeatedly invited you to take leave.’ Örvar struggled to hide his anger. Before he had fallen ill and lost so much weight, he had been better at maintaining a poker face, but now he lacked the flesh to mask his feelings. ‘I’ve half a mind to send you home on leave whether you like it or not. Compassionate leave’s not the only kind, you know.’
There were times when not caring came in useful, allowed you to be selective about what you heard or chose to discuss. ‘Örvar. Are you listening? The two bodies in the sea may be the foreign couple who’d been staying at the house. I’d warn the team; they’re going to have to answer to the American police about the way they conduct the inquiry. Or to the ambassador, at least.’
Why Did You Lie? Page 30