Season of the Witch (17 page)

“How are you doing?” is the first question that occurs to me.

“Not good, thank you very much,” she answers in a small voice. “I haven’t slept for three nights.”

“Aren’t they offering grief counseling at the high school?”

“Yes, if we want it. With the student counselors.”

“Doesn’t it help?”

“I haven’t asked for it. Not yet. I’m not sure that counseling can replace the actual trauma.”

“Replace? Isn’t it supposed to help you get over the trauma rather than replacing it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she says, her cropped head hunched over the table. “Sometimes I think that traumas happen because they’re meant to happen, that they’re an important experience, even a valuable one, and we shouldn’t try to minimize that or make it easier on ourselves. I just don’t know.”

I glance around. “You live here with your parents?”

She nods down at the table.

“Do they both work?”

“Dad’s a fisherman, and Mom works shifts. She has a job in a bakery during the day, and then she works as a cleaner in the evenings and at night.”

“I gather the party on Wednesday evening was here. So your parents weren’t home, then?”

“They’re not here much.”

“Are you an only child?”

“I have a younger sister. She’s away at boarding school.”

Ágústa seems so unhappy that I can hardly bring myself to go on with the interview.

“Do you want me to leave?” I ask her.

She looks up from the table. “No. I’ll do my best to answer your questions. Have you got a cigarette?”

I produce my cigarettes, offer her one, and have one myself.

We smoke for a while in silence. Outside the window the wind howls through the naked branches of the trees, blowing the washing horizontal on the line outside.

She’s agreed to talk to me on the condition that I don’t refer to her by name, but she makes no objection when I switch on my tape recorder. “How did the party come to be held?”

“It was simply that we’d all been working so hard. We wanted to relax a bit, put first-night nerves out of our minds. I knew my parents wouldn’t be home, so I let it be known that there would be an open house here.”

“When you say ‘open house,’ do you mean that the party wasn’t only for members of the drama group or those who were actually involved in the play?”

Ágústa gives me a strange look: “Haven’t you ever had a party?”

“Not for ten to fifteen years, I don’t think. Why do you ask?”

“It’s just that sometimes people turn up at a party without being invited. People bring someone with them. People drift in off the street.”

“And is that what happened that evening?”

She stubs out her cigarette. “There were no admission tickets. People came and went. After a while you stop noticing.”

“So people dispersed all over the house, without you seeing all of them. Or knowing all of them.”

“I suppose. I was in the kitchen chatting for most of the evening.”

“How many people do you think were here?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. Up to about thirty, maybe. But as I said, I wasn’t counting—or noticing.”

“What about Skarphédinn? When did he arrive?”

She thinks for a moment. “The police have asked me all this, and I can only tell you what I told them. I’m just not sure. Maybe about eleven.”

“And when did he leave?”

“I have no idea. There comes a point when you forget the time. And everything else.”

I don’t know what to make of her answers or lack of answers. Maybe that’s simply what parties are like. Timeless. Amorphous. Incalculable. Unpredictable. But I venture to ask her: “Were your guests very drunk?”

A slight smile in her green eyes doesn’t reach her mouth. “Could be.”

“What about the hostess?” I smile back.

“I was just having a good time.”

“Who arrived with Skarphédinn?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Who did he leave with?”

“Didn’t see that either.”

“Were you two close friends?”

She glances out of the window. “We knew each other pretty well.”

“Who were his best friends? Who else should I talk to?”

“Skarphédinn has…” She stops, then goes on: “Skarphédinn…had a lot of friends. He was very popular. I don’t think I’ve ever known a person my age who knew such a lot of people.”

“But who knew him best?”

She thinks. “I can’t answer that. Skarphédinn had lots of groups of friends. All different.”

“How did he get on with the director, Örvar Páll?”

Ágústa doesn’t answer right away. “Not badly,” she says, “considering that Skarphédinn had apparently given more thought to the play than the director had.”

“Did he get in Örvar’s face?”

“Well…Örvar was a bit nervous around him. I think Skarphédinn sometimes threw him for a loop.”

“Why did Örvar get the job?”

“We contacted a number of people. But I think Skarphédinn suggested him—said he wouldn’t give us any trouble.”

“Give you any trouble?”

“Yes. And Örvar Páll jumped at the offer.”

“He told me he didn’t approve of this party, the evening before the first night. Is that right?”

“Yeah, he was grumbling about it to Skarphédinn. But he soon backed down.”

“Did Skarphédinn have a difficult relationship with his parents?”

“Not that I know of,” she says in surprise. “Why would you think that?”

“Well, maybe because he hasn’t lived at home since he started high school. At first he lived in the dorm, and then he moved into his own apartment last fall.”

“That was just because he didn’t like to be dependent on anyone. That’s simply who he was.”

“Then I have to ask you one thing: On the phone the other day, you told me you hadn’t noticed anything odd or out of the ordinary about Skarphédinn that evening.”

“What about it?”

“I’ve been told that he arrived about ten o’clock…”

“Ten, eleven. What difference does it make?”

“No, it’s not a question of the time. From what I’ve been told, he was wearing a dress.”

Ágústa’s melancholy expression suddenly gives way to hysterical laughter.

“If you think there was something odd or unusual about that,” she chokes, tears in her eyes, “it shows you didn’t know Skarphédinn.”

“Really? Was he in the habit of wearing a dress?”

She reaches for a roll of paper towels, tears off a sheet, and dries her eyes. “He simply enjoyed being alive. He wanted life to constantly present him with the unexpected—and other people too. He was always doing the weirdest things.”

“So he wasn’t a transvestite, as such?”

Ágústa strives not to burst out laughing again. “Nope. Don’t think so. He was just always looking for fun.”

“And he wasn’t gay?”

“Why would you think that?”

“Well,” I reply, fully aware that I’m awfully old-fashioned and bigoted, “because he was wearing a dress.”

Her pale and tear-stained face is turned down toward the table. She starts picking at some dirt that has collected at the metal edge. “So far as I saw, and remember, it wasn’t just any old dress he was wearing.”

“So what was it?”

“He was wearing a black robe, with a cord at the waist.”

“Like a monk?”

“No, like a witch.”

Back at work, I call Trausti Löve to tell him I need more time to reconstruct Skarphédinn’s last hours. Ágústa—I’m sure she’s hiding something—gave me the names and phone numbers of the leading members of the drama group, who also seem to have been the leading revelers at her party. But I can tell it’s not going to be easy to put together a coherent picture of events. Trausti replies with encouraging words, such as:
Show what you’re made of, buddy.

I call Gunnsa, and we exchange tales of our Easter adventures. She promises to visit me one weekend, as soon as possible, whenever it’s convenient. I call my parents, and they tell me how pleased they are to hear me sounding so cheery from Akureyri.

With Ásbjörn as intermediary, by dinnertime I have Ólafur Gísli on the phone.

“Is the picture getting any clearer?” I ask.

“Some of it is. Some isn’t. What about you?”

“A few things. Mostly not.”

“Some days are harder work than others.”

“Yep, you’re right there. Shall I ask you some questions?”

“Up to you. Would you rather I asked you?”

“Not unless you want to. Has the time of death been established?”

“Not precisely. But it looks as if he died between between three and six in the morning on Holy Thursday.”

“Have you been able to confirm when he left the party?”

“About that party. We don’t seem to have anything solid to go on. It’s almost as if it never happened. Or to put it another way, it’s as if no one who was there can confirm what happened.”

“Have you spoken to all of them?”

“From the party? How many were there? Who were they? Nobody seems to know.”

“Do you know anything about where Skarphédinn went after the party?”

“Not yet.”

“Or who was with him?”

“Not yet.”

“So you haven’t got much in the way of clues?”

“No, I must admit. So far.”

“At this point in time?”

“Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“What about forensics? From the body? And from the scene where he was found?”

“It’s way too soon for that. We won’t have anything from forensics for a few days at least. Have you visited a garbage dump recently?”

“Not since I came up here to Akureyri. When I moved out of my basement in Reykjavík.”

“If you cast your mind back to the bittersweet memory of your little pigsty, maybe you can imagine the trace evidence that shows up on things at the dump. And on a human body in among all the scrap iron and garbage.”

“But where do you think Skarphédinn was killed? Was it a long way from the dump?”

“No. We think he died there.”

“What have you got?”

“We found evidence—blood and other traces. The obvious conclusion is that he was shoved off the top of a large container on the site and took a dive onto the rocks below. He seems to have died instantly.”

“And what was done to the body?”

“It was dragged some distance from the place where he died and covered with a pile of old tires. There were plenty of them scattered around the place.”

“Well, well.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“That must have been quite a strenuous task. Do you think more than one person was involved?”

“Not necessarily. Depends. On how strong they were, for instance.”

“If this happened during the night or in the early morning, shouldn’t the night watchman have noticed the smoke much sooner?”

“He didn’t notice anything on Holy Thursday. He wasn’t on duty on Good Friday. And he spotted the smoke in the early hours of Saturday.”

“Which means?”

“It seems to mean that the tires weren’t set alight until Good Friday. Probably not before the evening, going on how much they’d burned by the following morning.”

“That’s odd. Why not set fire to the body at once? Why wait a day?”

“We don’t know, at this point in time.”

“Is it possible that the killer or killers, or whatever we call them, had second thoughts and decided to burn the body so it would be difficult to identify? Or something like that?”

“Bad question. Next.”

I have a thought. “Maybe they wanted the body found? Don’t tires burn for a long time and give off a lot of smoke? They can smolder for days, can’t they?”

“That’s a bad question too. At this point in time. But tires can burn for a long time. That is so.”

I think this over some more. “Well then, I can’t think of any more questions.”

“What a pity,” comments Ólafur Gísli. “I so much enjoy our little get-togethers on the phone.”

“Ásbjörn and I appreciate your help. Much more than you know.”

“Well, that’s the object of the exercise. Send him my kindest regards.”

“Oh, while I remember. Have you had the autopsy results on the woman who fell into the Jökulsá River—Ásdís Björk Gudmundsdóttir?”

“Oh, that case. Yes, hang on. They’re here, somewhere.” I hear him shuffling papers. “Yes, it’s as I said. The woman fell overboard and hit the rocks face-first, sustaining major head trauma.”

“Something like Skarphédinn?”

“I suppose so, now you mention it. But it was an entirely different case. Absolutely off the record, I can tell you she was off her face on prescription drugs and beer when she went into the water. The woman was an addict. It was something between an accident and a self-inflicted injury.”

On my way home I stop at the video store and pick up the Icelandic teen movie
Street Rider.

Don’t be trying to fool me…

As the final credits of
Street Rider
roll, the movie’s theme song is sung, expressing the thoughts of the young leading lady, who’s always had:

…A thing for guys like you,
Ridin’ on your bike,
No fear in the world…

Pretty much summed up the movie, I felt, as I watched it last night lying on the sofa with a supply of popcorn and Coke and Polly wandering around my shirt collar, depositing small black-and-white droppings as she went. So it was a pretty romantic evening, all in all, with accompaniment of the gale howling along the roof while the clothesline in the garden hummed.