Outrage (17 page)

‘I’ve either lost it or it’s been stolen. I just don’t understand. I’ve checked everywhere else I’ve been. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed it here?’

‘No, sorry,’ Edvard replied. ‘It’s not here.’

‘Are you absolutely sure?

‘Yes, quite sure. Your bag is not here.’

‘Would you … would you mind taking a look? I’ll wait here.’

Edvard eyed her sceptically. ‘There’s no need. It’s not here. Was there anything else?’

‘No,’ answered Elinborg glumly. ‘I’m sorry to inconvenience you. There wasn’t much money in it, but I’ll have to cancel all my cards and replace my driving licence and …’

‘Yes, well. As I said …’ replied Edvard.

‘Thank you.’

‘Bye.’

Valur was waiting in the car.

‘Do you think he spotted you?’ asked Elinborg as she drove off.

‘No, he didn’t see me.’

‘Well, was that him?’

‘Yeah, it’s the same guy.’

‘The one who came to you using the name Runolfur, and bought Rohypnol from you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You said you only saw him once, about six months ago. You said you didn’t know him, that you’d never seen him before. You said a relative of his had put him in touch with you. That’s a lie, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘It’s most important that you tell me the truth about it.’

‘Leave me alone. I’ve got nothing more to say about it. Whatever you’re investigating has got nothing to do with me. I don’t give a fuck what’s important for you and what isn’t. Now take me home.’

They drove the rest of the way in silence. When they reached Valur’s block of flats, he got out without a word and slammed the car door behind him.

Elinborg drove home, deep in thought. A pop song was on the radio, sung by a female singer who had long been a favourite of hers:
I whisper your name, but there’s no answer
… She thought about Edvard and the girl from Akranes, Lilja. Might he know something about her disappearance, six years before? She had checked it out earlier. Edvard had no criminal record. His relationship with Runolfur might prove to be the key to what had happened in Runolfur’s flat, but she was wary of reading too much into Edvard’s use of his friend’s name when he’d bought the Rohypnol. Had Edvard been supplying Runolfur with prescription drugs? When had that started? And what for? Or was Edvard using the stuff himself? Who was the man Petrina had seen hurrying through Thingholt, towards number 18? Elinborg felt that Petrina’s information about the man was reliable, even though some of her statements were hard to fathom. Why was the man in such a hurry? Did he see something? Did he have a connection with the tandoori woman who had apparently been in Runolfur’s flat? Was he more than just a potential witness? Perhaps he was Runolfur’s assailant?

Elinborg parked outside her home and sat in the car for a while, considering various questions but finding no answers. She was feeling guilty for neglecting her family recently. As if it weren’t enough that she was hardly ever home her mind was invariably on her job, even during the very limited time she did spend with them.

Unhappy though she was about the situation, she could not help herself. That was the way with the difficult cases - they were relentless.

As the years went by, Elinborg increasingly craved the safe haven of her family life with Teddi. She wanted to sit with Theodora and help her with her knitting. She wanted to know Valthor better, and understand how he was growing into a young man who would soon be leaving home. Then he would probably be largely lost to her, except for the odd awkward phone call, neither of them knowing what to say. A visit now and then. Perhaps she had neglected him when he’d been younger because, in spite of everything, her work had always come first - morning, noon and night. Perhaps she had given it more thought than she had to her own flesh and blood. She understood that she could not turn the clock back but she could still try to make up for it. Or maybe it was too late. Maybe in the future she would only have news of her son from his blog? She no longer knew how to approach him.

She had checked Valthor’s blog earlier in the day when she’d been at work. He was describing a football match he had seen on TV, and a political debate on a popular chat show about conservation - apparently aligning himself with big-business interests. He also sounded off about a teacher at college against whom he apparently had a grudge; and, finally, he mentioned his mother: she wouldn’t leave him alone, he wrote, just like she had never left his brother alone, which had led to him leaving the country to live with his real dad in Sweden. ‘I’m consumed with envy of him,’ blogged Valthor. ‘I’m thinking of renting a place,’ he went on. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’

This? This what? wondered Elinborg. We haven’t spoken for weeks. She clicked on
Comments (1)
, where she saw two words:

Mums suck
.

18

The man observed Elinborg as she stood at his door in a block of flats in Kopavogur. He was unwilling to invite her in, so she had to explain what she wanted out on the landing and she was not handling it particularly well. She had acquired a list of over a dozen individuals who had spent time at the Isolation Clinic in Reykjavik. They were the last patients to have contracted polio before the introduction of the immunisation programme in the 1950s.

The man seemed wary, standing half-hidden behind his front door, so Elinborg could not tell whether he was wearing a leg brace. She told him that the police were trying to trace a group of people who had been in the Isolation Clinic in their youth. The enquiry concerned a crime that had been committed in Reykjavik - in fact, in Thingholt.

The man listened, then asked exactly what they were looking for. She told him: a man who might still need a leg brace.

‘Then I can’t help you,’ he said, opening the door wide so that both his legs were visible. He wore no brace.

‘Do you remember any other boy at the Isolation Clinic who might have had to use a brace? In later life, I mean.’

‘None of your business, my dear,’ said the man. ‘Goodbye now.’

That was the end of the interview. The man was the third one that Elinborg had spoken to who had been in the Isolation Clinic. Hitherto she had received friendly responses but had got nowhere.

The next name on Elinborg’s list was that of a man who lived in a townhouse in the eastern suburbs. When he heard what Elinborg wanted he was more helpful than her last interviewee had been. He welcomed her warmly and invited her in. He wore no brace, but she noticed that his left arm was withered.

‘People all over the country caught polio in that epidemic,’ said the man, whose name was Lukas. He was in his sixties, slim and lithe.

‘I was fourteen, living in Selfoss. I shall always remember how terribly ill I was, you know. My whole body ached, like with a bad case of flu, and I was paralysed from head to toe. I couldn’t move a muscle. I’ve never felt worse in my life.’

‘It must have been an awful illness,’ said Elinborg.

‘It didn’t occur to anyone that it could be polio,’ Lukas explained. ‘Never even considered it. They assumed it was just the usual flu epidemic. But it turned out to be much, much worse.’

‘And they took you to the Isolation Clinic?’

‘Yes, they put me in quarantine once they realised what was really going on, and they took me to that house, the one they called the Isolation Clinic. There were people there from all over the country, mostly children and youngsters. I think I was lucky. I made a pretty good recovery, thanks to the rehabilitation at the clinic, but my arm’s been useless ever since.’

‘Do you remember any man or boy at the Clinic who had to use a brace - a leg brace, perhaps? - I don’t know much about these things.’

‘And I don’t know how they did in the end, the lads I met there. You lose touch, you see. So I don’t suppose I can tell you anything useful. But there’s one thing I will say: the youngsters I was with there, there was no way they were going to give up.’

‘I’m sure people dealt with their problems in different ways,’ said Elinborg.

‘As I often say, our futures were put on hold for a while,’ Lukas continued. ‘But we were determined to pick up and go on, and that’s what we did. I think we were all determined not to let it break us. It never occurred to us to give up. Never crossed our minds.’

Elinborg took the tunnel under Hvalfjordur and drove up to Akranes. A brisk northerly wind was blowing. She had arranged to meet the parents of Lilja, the girl who had vanished six years before. She had spoken to the mother, who still contacted the police occasionally to ask if any progress on the case had been made. When she first heard from Elinborg, the mother had thought initially that there might be a new lead, but the detective was quick to disabuse her and say that, regrettably, she had no new evidence. She only wanted to review the events and establish whether Lilja’s parents might have anything new to contribute to the investigation.

‘I thought the case was closed,’ the woman had said on the phone.

‘No, nothing new has come up, we don’t know any more than we did then.’

‘So what do you want?’ asked Hallgerdur, Lilja’s mother. ‘What are you ringing me for?’

‘I gather that you get in touch with us now and then to ask about the case,’ said Elinborg. ‘A colleague mentioned Lilja the other day. I played a small part in the investigation at the time, and it occurred to me that you might be prepared to refresh my memory, run through the events. We try to learn from cases like Lilja’s. We’re always learning something new.’

‘Absolutely,’ replied the woman.

She was waiting for her visitor and had opened the front door before Elinborg was out of her car. They shook hands in the chilly breeze, and Hallgerdur ushered her in. She was some years older than Elinborg, very slender, and appeared to be highly strung. She was clearly tense about being visited by the police. She said she was alone in the house. Her husband, an engineer on a fishing boat, had gone out to sea that morning. The couple lived in an old detached house with a large garden which showed the ravages of autumn weather. In the living room Elinborg saw a large photograph of Lilja, taken about two years before her disappearance. She recognised it as the photo that had been published in the media at the time of the search. It showed the cheery face of a young girl with dark hair and pretty brown eyes. The photograph was displayed in a heavy black mourning frame on top of a fine chest of drawers. In front of it a votive candle flickered.

‘She was just a normal child,’ said Hallgerdur, when they had taken their seats. ‘A really lovely girl. She was so interested in all sorts of things, and loved being with her gran and grandad in Hvalfjordur. She spent all her time there with the horses. But she had a lot of friends here in town: you could speak to Aslaug - the two of them were inseparable, ever since infant school. She works in the bakery now, she’s got two children of her own. Married a good lad from nearby. Aslaug’s a treasure. She always stays in touch, pops in for a chat. She brings her two little girls, such pretty children.’

Elinborg detected a fleeting, delicate tinge of regret in Hallgerdur’s voice.

‘What do you think happened?’ asked Elinborg.

‘I’ve been torturing myself all these years, and all I know for sure now is that it was God’s will. I know now that she must be dead and I’ve accepted it, and I know she’s with God. As to what happened to her, I have no idea. No more than you do.’

‘And she intended to stay the night with a friend, did she?’

‘Yes, with Aslaug. They’d been talking about meeting up that evening and seeing a film. They often stayed the night with each other, without planning it specifically. Sometimes Lilja would ring to say she was at Aslaug’s and was going to stay over, and the same went for Aslaug when she came here. They didn’t necessarily decide in advance, but this time Lilja had said she meant to go to Aslaug’s that evening.’

‘When did you last speak to her?’

‘It was that Friday, the day she disappeared.
See you
, she said. It was the last thing she ever said to me.
See you
. There was nothing special about the conversation. Just a routine call, to let me know. No more than that. I said a proper goodbye, I think.
Bye, sweetheart
, I said. That was a comfort to me, afterwards. That was all there was to it.
Bye, sweetheart
. That was all.’

‘So she hadn’t been feeling depressed in the days before, or seemed unhappy about something?’

‘Not at all. Our Lilja was never depressed. Always cheerful, and positive, and willing to help. She was pure in heart, an innocent, as really good people are. She treated others well and they treated her well in return. That was the way it was. She was trusting, didn’t see evil in anyone, because she’d never encountered it. She had only ever known good people.’

‘There’s a lot of talk now about bullying in schools, and ways to prevent it,’ said Elinborg.

‘No, there was nothing like that going on,’ Hallgerdur replied.

‘And was she happy at school?’

‘Yes. Lilja was a good student. Maths was her favourite subject, and she used to talk about doing something scientific at university - physics or maths. She wanted to go abroad to study, to America. She said their universities were the best for those subjects.’

‘Was the science teaching good at the college?’

‘So far as I know. I never heard anyone complain about it.’

‘Did she ever talk about the teaching? Or the teachers - anything like that?’

‘No.’

‘Did she ever mention a teacher called Edvard?’

‘Edvard?’

‘He taught her science subjects,’ Elinborg explained.

‘Why are you asking about him?’

‘I …’

‘Did he know my daughter, or something?’

‘He taught her during the school year before she disappeared. He’s an acquaintance of mine, that’s all. I know he was teaching here around that time.’

‘She never mentioned any Edvard. Is he from here? I don’t remember her ever talking about him specifically, no more than any other teacher.’