As Berglind watched the horizon, mesmerised, her mind emptied and her thoughts evaporated. That was dangerous. Because, sure enough, the intense craving kicked in. The feeling was miserably familiar, triggering a tired old train of thought about needing just one more hit; that one hit would be enough. Just one more and after that she was prepared to be clean for the rest of her life. But she knew that wasn’t true: if she fell now, she would sink to the bottom.
‘If you’d like a coffee, I brought a thermos along. I don’t suppose it’s very good, though, and I forgot to bring any milk, but it’ll probably warm you up.’ She snapped out of her thoughts to see that Fridrik was holding a medium-sized fish; she had no idea what kind. He gestured towards his backpack with the fish still in his hand. His expression was one of concern and she was willing to bet that he thought she was too physically fragile to cope with the buffeting wind. But looks could be deceptive and in truth she was anything but fragile. Her body possessed a wiry strength, driven by her craving, that few would have believed just from looking at her. It was one of the very few perks of being an addict.
‘Oh. No, thanks.’ Berglind was grateful for the big hood she had pulled up over her head. She found any attention from strangers uncomfortable, especially when it involved pity, but the hood provided her with a little shelter. She would have given anything to be invisible.
Fridrik grew embarrassed and seemed on the verge of saying something, but thought better of it. He dropped the fish into a battered tub on deck and turned his attention back to his line.
Berglind recalled all the good advice and rules she had picked up during her countless spells in rehab. How did it go again? Yes: she mustn’t ignore the craving when it hit her but acknowledge it and ride it out. Yeah, sure. None of the advice offered a magic cure, but magic was what she really needed. She wasn’t strong enough to overcome her addiction in a face-off between her and the drugs. The times she had managed to stay clean had been for Tristan’s sake. For him and no one else. If she’d been alone, she wouldn’t have given a damn about what happened to her. She had already done so much damage to herself that it could never be undone. The best she could hope for was to patch up her life sufficiently to satisfy the requirements of children’s services. But even that involved a lot of work on Tristan’s part. He cleaned the flat, bought food to fill the fridge and aired the place whenever the social worker was due round. She herself got too wound up for days beforehand to be of any use.
Just one more hit. One more chance to float away from this situation and forget all the things she had done wrong over the years.
Forget the past. What she wouldn’t give for a memory eraser. Without memories, it would be easier to turn her back on the bewitching lure of being high.
She would begin by erasing the memory of that evening five years ago. The evening when she had let herself be talked into helping out one of her junkie mates who had been paid to do a break-in. He was supposed to climb through a window, delete a post on the occupant’s Facebook page and steal a doll that was probably in the bathtub. He’d told her that if she helped, he would split the money between them. He knew where he could get his hands on some Contalgin and, if they hurried, they could be mainlining it within the hour. He could have saved himself the bother of nagging her; of claiming that he couldn’t fit through the open window they found round the back of the flat; of saying that she would have to climb in for him, even though he was skinnier than she was.
He could have saved himself the bother, because the lure of the Contalgin was so strong that she didn’t raise any objections but went ahead and squeezed her way in, knocking over a pile of empty drinks cans hidden behind the curtains. She had frozen with fear but there had been no sound from inside the flat and no one seemed to have heard. Perhaps the place was empty. She had jumped down to the floor and gone straight over to the laptop that had been left open on the coffee table. It wasn’t locked and it had taken her no time to open Facebook and delete the status, which was a photo of a hideous doll sitting in a bathtub.
Next job.
Berglind had tiptoed into the hall leading to the bedrooms. One door was wide open and inside she saw the footboard of a double bed. The parquet creaked under her feet and she bit her lower lip, unsure what to do next. Flee through the window or keep going? The thought of the needle and the rapturous bliss as she injected the drug into her vein removed all doubt.
She had crept to the door of what she guessed was the bathroom and opened it warily, only to find herself face to face with a terrified woman. They hadn’t exchanged a word and neither had screamed. The woman had taken a step backwards, tripped over her pyjama bottoms, which were round her ankles, and lost her balance. Her head had hit the edge of the bath hard. Although Berglind’s hearing had been damaged by all the blows she’d received over the years, she couldn’t help hearing the sickening crack of the woman’s skull.
She had clasped a hand over her mouth as she stared at the woman twitching on the floor. Blood had leaked out, quickly forming a pool around her head. Then the woman had stopped moving and her eyes had closed, while her mouth hung slackly open.
Without pausing to think, Berglind had entered the bathroom, taking care not to tread in the blood or touch the woman as she reached for the doll. Then she had hurried back to the window, thrown out the doll and closed it. After that, she had left by the door of the flat, out into the corridor, then out of the building.
There had been no one waiting in the garden. Her mate had vanished, taking with him the meagre amount that had been paid in advance. Although the full payment was much more, what he already had in his pocket would be enough for one fix. The allure of an immediate high had simply been too tempting. Nothing new there.
She had picked the doll up from the grass in the hope that she could use it to force him into telling her who requested the break in so she could collect the money, then made off. She’d headed straight round to see a dealer who was sometimes kind enough to give her drugs against a promise to pay later. She had to take something urgently to wipe out the memory of the woman on the bathroom floor.
It was an accident. It was an accident. It was an accident. She had kept repeating the words in her head. When she passed a man on his way home from a night stroll he had stared at her strangely and she’d realised that she was muttering it aloud.
The dealer was having a party and some girls let her in. They were much younger than she was and had pulled disgusted faces when they saw the horrible doll. One of the guests, an old addict and drunk that she knew, came over and asked where she’d got it. She’d pushed him away and walked off, but when he’d called after her that he was prepared to swap her a Contalgin tab for the doll, she’d turned round. The deal was completed rapidly, without a word, and she’d taken herself into a corner, pulled the gear from her pocket and swiftly departed into a state of oblivion where she hadn’t been responsible for the death of an unknown woman.
‘Mum!’ It was Tristan’s turn to wave a fish in her face. It was considerably bigger than Fridrik’s and its metallic scales glistened.
She smiled at him, hoping she wouldn’t have to cook it. She’d never cooked a fish, let alone gutted one. Perhaps she should try. It would please Tristan and she owed him that much at least. He was usually the one who threw something on the table and tried to coax her into eating.
Berglind made up her mind to do it. Cook the fish. Shape up. Beat her addiction. Stop dwelling on the past. Both the distant past and more recent events. Start a new life and do her best to be a good mother to Tristan. He would soon be a young man and then she would be alone. She had to be able to hold out until then. Take it one day at a time.
She hoped fate would grant her this one favour. Up to now, it hadn’t exactly treated her kindly. But perhaps that was unfair. After all, fate had recently spared her the horror of Tristan finding out that it was she who had killed his best friend’s mother. A fact she had been totally unaware of until recently. A fact she would gi
ve anything to forget.
One evening she had given up the struggle, slipped out and taken a bus into town where she had visited two dealers, neither of whom would give her an advance. But one had tipped her off about a new guy out on Grandi who she might be able to coax into giving her a hit, so she had headed over there in search of a container unit with a purple door. She had walked behind the Marina hotel, hugging the shore to avoid bumping into all the people coming and going from the restaurants in the area, then made her way down Fiskislód to the container colony. One of the residents had called out to her, asking if she was there to see Binni. When she said yes, he’d asked if she’d buy a Coke for him. She’d refused and he’d gone back inside, swearing about stupid girls. It was years since anyone had called her a girl.
Berglind had knocked on the purple door and heard a voice say, ‘Come in.’ There on the sofa sat a familiar-looking bloke with a dirty pillowcase and a tea towel wrapped around one leg. It was the man who had swapped a Contalgin tab for the doll all those years ago. The coincidence hadn’t surprised her. Iceland was small and the world of Icelandic addicts even smaller.
She’d introduced herself and come out with her request. The man hadn’t commented on whether he was prepared to advance her something. Instead, he’d started going on about the bloody doll. She’d stared, hypnotised, at the drugs on the table in front of him, only half listening to his ramblings. Right up until he mentioned Rósa’s name. Then she’d torn her eyes away from the pills and started paying attention. It hadn’t been easy to follow as he was completely off his head, but she’d got the gist. The man wanted to come clean before he croaked. He said it wouldn’t be long and Berglind reckoned he was right.
She’d been too shocked to protest about what he’d said next. The man was going to tell the police everything so the girl, Rósa, would know what had happened to her mother and father. The girl dropped in on him regularly in the hope that he would tell her the story and it wouldn’t be fair on her if he took it with him to the grave. He regarded Berglind’s visit as a sign from above that he should hurry up and get on with it. Berglind had given the doll to him all those years ago and that was the proof he would need to make them believe him. After this, he had come out with a string of incoherent stuff about a little girl on the road and her poor parents who deserved to hear the truth as well. Berglind had had no idea what he was on about.
When he’d finished, he’d looked Berglind in the eye and said he was going to turn her in too. She had stolen the doll and been responsible for Rósa’s mother’s death. There was no point doing things by halves when you were having your final reckoning with God. It was all or nothing.
Berglind had begged him not to mix her up in it, telling him she had a fatherless son who would be left without a mother too if she went to jail.
At that the man had looked up, smiled mockingly and said: ‘Wouldn’t he be better off without you?’
At that moment two thoughts had crystallised in Berglind’s head. One: she had to get her hands on some of the pills on the table. Two: this man had to go. Tristan mustn’t find out that she had killed his best friend’s mother. It just mustn’t happen. Berglind had taken out the knife she used to crush pills, gone round behind the sofa, jerked the man’s head back and drawn the blade right across his throat. Then she had watched as he clutched at the wound, emitting a rattling noise as he tried to stem the geyser of blood. A few seconds later he had fallen silent and his arms had dropped to his sides. She had gone back round the sofa and grabbed a handful of OxyContin, leaving the rest behind.
She’d hurried away, pausing only to take the longed-for dose in the first alleyway she’d come to.
When she’d woken up the next day, she’d found her coat pocket empty. Tristan had flushed the pills down the toilet, leaving her racked with withdrawal symptoms and the memory of what she had done. She didn’t know which was worse.
‘Right. That’s probably enough for today.’ Fridrik was looking at the sky. ‘The weather’s supposed to turn.’
Tristan made a half-hearted protest but Fridrik was firm. They helped each other tidy away the tackle, then Fridrik went into the small wheelhouse and turned the boat for home. Tristan came over to his mother and she put her arms round him, resting her head on his shoulder. He was taller than she was now and she hadn’t even noticed.
Berglind felt hot tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. This was no good – she had to deal with it. What had been done couldn’t be undone. She couldn’t go back in time and act differently, and erasing her memory wasn’t an option. But there was nothing to be gained from dwelling on things that had gone badly, even disastrously wrong. No amount of wishing would ever undo the past.
She had to make a new beginning, starting now. Here and now. Throw the past overboard, let it sink to the bottom and never look back.
Berglind gazed towards land, in the direction they were heading. At the houses, apartment blocks and the city’s small handful of high-rises. From here you couldn’t see the seedy little dens, the dark alleyways where she had spent much of her existence. It was as if they had been blotted out. She took it as a message from above. When she climbed ashore, she would begin a new life. A life among decent people – in the sun, not in the shadows – built on the ruins of the old one. For Tristan’s sake.
For the first time in ages, Berglind felt good. She recognised the feeling as optimism – something she hadn’t experienced in a long time. She switched off her thoughts and simply enjoyed standing there with her son at her side. But the instant she let down her guard, her addiction raised its ugly head.
Just one more time.
To celebrate her new life.
Just one more time.
To bid farewell to the old one.
The doll sat on a steel tray in the Forensics department, surrounded by broken barnacles and dried-up white worms. Its arms and legs were still encrusted to some extent in this repulsive armour. One arm was stretched out towards the young technician who had been called in to work on a Saturday.
He avoided looking at it as much as possible. Not because he was afraid but because it wasn’t a pleasant sight. He had the absurd feeling that the doll wanted him to get the cleaning over with. That it was reaching out to twitch at the back of his white coat and ask him this one favour: to restore it to its original appearance. The intention was to return the doll to the parents of the little girl it had once belonged to, but this wasn’t going to happen any time soon. The doll was important evidence in a murder trial and there was no way they were going to dig up the girl’s grave to retrieve it if it was required in court.
He looked away. Not because he was afraid. He just didn’t like the matted hair, the rows of holes in the scalp, the black eyehole and the single eye that seemed to follow him around the lab.
The computer beeped to alert him to an email. He opened the message and read the brief communication from his boss. He could go home; apparently the job wasn’t that urgent after all.
The suspect in the case had had an accident in the Litla-Hraun Prison. He had slipped in the shower and banged his head on the toilet bowl. They were operating but it was touch and go, and if he didn’t make it, the trial wouldn’t go ahead. Since the police already had his confession, there was no point wasting precious overtime trying to make an already thorough case for prosecution watertight. The email said that on Monday the technician would be re-assigned to helping the team who were working on consolidating the case against the other defendant, Fjalar Reynisson.
The young man shrugged. He was neither relieved nor disappointed at getting off early. He switched off the computer and tidied up. He labelled the samples from Bergur Alvarsson, which would presumably now just go into storage. Because he was still fairly new in Forensics, he didn’t know what happened to evidence in circumstances like these.
As he turned off the light on his way out, he could have sworn he saw the doll smile.
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le of Contents
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Pronunciation guide for character names
Five years earlier Chapter 1
The present May Chapter 2
August Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
The Doll Page 38