Why Did You Lie? (21 page)

The slamming of the car doors echoed in the silence, and the gravel crunched loudly under their feet as they walked towards the small building. The air was so crisp that Nói could have sworn it crackled, and he relished filling his lungs after the drive. ‘Notice how good it is to breathe here?’ He wasn’t really expecting any answering enthusiasm, but it was his duty as a parent to open his son’s eyes to the glories of nature.

Tumi slipped on the icy ground and just avoided losing his balance. He had fallen in love with a particular brand of trainers that Vala loathed, and always wore them, regardless of the weather. This was his third pair in a row. Smooth-soled and slippery – but cool. ‘Seems a bit weird to me. Even the air.’

‘How do you mean?’ Nói had just been feeling relieved at how normal everything seemed. He had come to the conclusion during their silent drive here that he would rather everything was all right, even if it meant that Vala would crow.

‘It’s too quiet. There’s no birds or anything.’

‘They’re just being quiet so they don’t attract attention. Most of them have gone anyway. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s winter.’

‘There’s always birds here. Even in winter.’

Nói stamped the snow off his shoes onto the decking and shrugged. He didn’t want to agree with his son but he had to admit that the hush felt unusually oppressive. Suddenly the thought struck him that it had been a mistake to bring Tumi along. What would he do if they came across a body? Tumi was too old to be fobbed off with the lie that the dead person was sleeping. ‘Wait here. I’m going to have a look around inside in case anything’s wrong.’

‘If something’s wrong I want to see. Why else do you think I let you drag me all the way up here?’

‘Wait, I said.’ The hinges squeaked as Nói opened the door. Had they always done that? Their arrival was normally accompanied by bustle and noise, so the faint squeaking would have gone unnoticed. He experienced the same sensation as he had on their return from America. It was as if a different, alien tang hung in the air that met him, but he couldn’t work out what it was this time either. As usual the wooden panelling on the walls muffled all sounds, which made it even quieter inside than out.

The hush had a dense quality.

Nói’s first action was to pick up a crumpled letter that was lying on the floor by the door, in exactly the same spot as it had in the video clip. The side facing upwards had a single line printed in the middle of the page, and he turned it over to see if the main text was an advertisement for a Christmas bazaar at the church or something equally rustic. But the back was blank. The message said:
The day of reckoning has come. Why did you lie?
Nói frowned. It must have been delivered to the wrong house. None of them were liars and certainly none of them were expecting a day of reckoning. He and Vala had always stressed the importance of being honest in all their dealings. With Tumi too, though once or twice they’d had to resort to white lies when their son was small and asked awkward questions.
Why’s granddad got an oxygen tank? – He’s practising to be a diver.
An answer better suited to a five-year-old than the truth about his grandfather:
He’s dying of lung cancer, darling
.

Nói folded the paper and put it in his pocket. It was nothing to do with them. Yet a vague memory came back to him of the words that had sprung into his mind the day before, not exactly the same but uncomfortably similar:
Welcome back, liar
. This odd coincidence was unsettling, but then that was the nature of coincidences; you only noticed the ones that disconcerted you. Others passed without your being aware of them. Nói continued his circuit of the house and opened the doors to both bedrooms and the small bathroom without spotting anything untoward. He climbed far enough up the ladder to peer onto the sleeping platform but it was the same story there. Nothing out of the ordinary. In spite of everything he felt a momentary stab of disappointment. He turned on the ladder and called out to Tumi that it was safe to come in, everything was absolutely fine.

‘Smells bad.’ Tumi walked in, making a face, his hands in his pockets. ‘What do we do now? Drive home?’ He surveyed the room as if the answer was to be found on the walls.

‘I’m going to take a better look around, just to make sure they’ve put everything away properly. Would you mind hunting for the keys?’

While his son pulled out kitchen drawers, Nói walked over to the living-room window facing the decking. He looked out but could see nothing unusual. No one was lurking in the birch scrub; he could see no other cars or anything that could be regarded as abnormal or strange.

Tumi banged a drawer shut. ‘The keys aren’t here.’

‘No. That would have been too simple.’ Nói stretched. He wondered if he should pull the curtains across the window or leave them as they were, and he hadn’t made up his mind when Tumi spoke again.

‘What’s this, Dad?’

‘What?’

‘Some kind of letter, or note. But it can’t be from those foreigners. It’s in Icelandic.’

Nói took the folded sheet of paper from his son. ‘Where was it?’

Tumi pointed to the kitchen worktop.

In the middle of the page was written:
Why did you lie? The truth will out
. ‘What is this rubbish?’ He could ignore one note with this sort of cryptic message and convince himself that it was a mistake. But two?

Tumi shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t write it.’

‘I didn’t think you did.’ Nói put the note in his pocket with the other. It must have been delivered either before the foreigners arrived or while they were here, or it would have been lying on the floor beside the other note. The family hadn’t visited the chalet since mid-November and it certainly hadn’t been lying on the worktop then. He would hardly have forgotten such a peculiar message. ‘I expect the guests picked it up somewhere without understanding it. Maybe it’s some kind of weird advertisement.’ One more white lie could hardly do the boy any harm.

‘Advertisement? What for?’

‘Search me. But the note’s obviously nothing to do with us. Perhaps it’s the name of a play. Or a line from a poem.’ Was it possible that the message was part of some peculiar art happening or poem that the poet delivered to houses line by line? Such a thing wasn’t unheard of.

They lapsed into silence and continued their search until they were sure the keys were nowhere in the chalet. Nói didn’t forget the notes, however, and while he was peering under the beds and running his hands along the shelves he couldn’t stop thinking about the strange messages. After checking all the likely and then the unlikely places, they gave up and decided to head home.

On the way back to the car Nói went to check the barbecue in the hope of discovering what had upset the guests. He opened the heavy steel lid. On the rack inside lay a dead cat that looked almost exactly like Púki.

Chapter 17

23 January 2014

Nína kept sneezing but had developed the knack of turning away from the shelves when the fit came upon her so as not to blow up even more dust. As always, once she was engrossed in a project, her physical discomfort ceased to bother her. She would have stayed where she was even if she had sneezed every time she drew breath. At last she had a solid lead: a name, a year and a month, more or less. Her neighbour from the ground floor had remembered them as best he could, and although he had been a little uncertain, Nína was almost sure he was right. She would deal with it later if it transpired that he was mistaken. Or that the whole thing was pure coincidence – which she refused to believe. The date the old man had guessed at fitted exactly with the witness statement Thröstur had given the police as a boy. Turning her head, Nína had seen the wall of the garden on the other side of the street. A grey, concrete fence, Thröstur had told the policeman. All that was missing were the phantoms of children perched there with notebooks, on the eternal lookout for cars. Ashen-faced, she had turned back to the man and carried on interrogating him.

She had bombarded him with such a merciless stream of questions that the old man had backed further and further inside his flat, until the conversation that had begun by the front door had ended halfway down his passage. She could read in his eyes that he regretted ever having brought the subject up and for a while he seemed afraid she might try and shake the information out of him if he didn’t answer quickly and confidently enough. Even Berglind looked disconcerted, though she had the sense to stay out of it.

The old man had mainly talked about the journalist Stefán’s suicide in the garage thirty years earlier. But Nína also learnt from him that the building already had a bad reputation at the time, as though past generations of children had come to a secret agreement, without the grown-ups’ knowledge, that there was something sinister about the place. For example, there had been a bicycle repair shop there that had closed down in the end because the children refused to take their bikes to it. The workshop owner had been forced to pack up and move his business elsewhere.

Nína’s neighbour had no idea what basis the children had had for their belief, but the story had lived on among successive generations of kids in the area and even today a hint of their old fear of the garage remained. In the old man’s opinion, Stefán’s suicide must have had a lot to do with it, and now Thröstur’s attempt to follow suit. Perhaps the children imagined that the building itself forced people to kill themselves and were afraid of suffering the same fate.

As the sisters were saying goodbye to the old man, Nína thanked him for removing the Christmas tree. From his expression she inferred that he hadn’t been responsible. Whatever happened, it was clear she had to sell the flat.

Nína crammed yet another folder back onto the shelf. Nothing there. She pulled out the next and began leafing through it. Her movements were quick and deft, as she was practised by now. After fine-combing all the files labelled ‘Suicide’, she decided to widen her search in case the reports on Stefán’s death had ended up in the wrong folder. To hell with the fact that she had already gone through most of the files in the basement. She hadn’t been in possession of a name then, so it was perfectly possible that she had overlooked the relevant documents.

According to her neighbour, the police had spent a good deal of time on the case. The widow had refused to accept that her husband had taken his own life and insisted there must have been another explanation: an accident or maybe something more sinister. She had threatened to go to the press, but the neighbour didn’t remember seeing anything about the incident in the papers. And anyway the widow had been in a state of collapse by the time the police finally closed the case.

He didn’t know what had become of the woman but he doubted things had turned out well for her. A year after the incident she had abandoned her attempts to keep up the payments on the flat, not least because, shortly before her husband had killed himself, the tenant renting the garage had handed in his notice.

The old man had talked to Stefán a week before he died. Stefán had knocked on his door to ask if he would be interested in renting the garage from them and admitted that he was dreading having to break it to his wife that their tenant was leaving as they were very hard up just then. His death must have been a terrible blow to the family finances. For all the old man knew, it might have been money worries that had led him to take this desperate way out.

The widow’s sufferings were far from over, however. Her husband’s suicide left her almost incapable of working and she started drinking heavily. By the time the bank threw her out of the flat, the family was in a wretched state and the impact on her young son had been particularly cruel. If Nína hadn’t just listened to this tragic tale she would have been inclined to burst out laughing when the old man earnestly advised her to steer clear of alcohol, at least for the next year.

If his account was to be trusted, the police must have written reports about the case. Nína went on flicking through the files, hardly taking in what she read but aware that subconsciously she was classifying the information with great care. This became evident when she finally came across the woman’s name. She gasped inadvertently, the dust-filled air leaving a bad taste in her mouth. Hastily she turned over the pages to find the next report, in the hope that other documents relating to the case would have been filed with it. Not so. Swallowing her disappointment, Nína focused on what she had found.

She felt her lips moving as she read the file, as they had when she was a little girl learning to sound out her letters. The frisson was the same too; she wanted to ensure she didn’t miss anything. So she read the page again. And again. Afterwards she laid her hands on it, leant back against the wall and closed her eyes while digesting what the text had contained. Really, it was nothing more than a confirmation of what the neighbour had told her. There was no mention of Thröstur or anything to link him to the incident.

The report was not classified as an investigation into a suicide. That was why Nína had scarcely given it a glance the first time she went through the files. It was just one of countless folders containing reports about unfortunate souls who had suffered a raw deal. The recently widowed Thorbjörg Hinriksdóttir had telephoned to request police assistance at her home – not for the first time. When they arrived, it transpired that she was not in any danger: what she actually wanted was to discuss the death of her husband six months previously. When asked why she had requested police assistance, Thorbjörg responded that she was fed up with never being put through to anyone when she called and constantly being turfed out of the station. Nobody in the police would talk to her any more. The officers pointed out that wasting police time was a criminal offence but she refused to listen. The author of the report added that the woman had reeked of alcohol and that the empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays littering the flat were evidence of a serious drink problem.

The woman wanted to draw their attention to what she described as vital information, but judging from the report this did not seem to include any new facts. It all boiled down to her conviction, repeatedly asserted, that Stefán had had no reason to kill himself and that the police had failed to prove otherwise. The officers pointed out that they could hardly be expected to do so; the job of the police was merely to rule out other eventualities and this had been done. The woman then claimed to be in possession of new information about the garage that she believed was relevant. When they questioned her, however, it seemed there was little substance to this. Shortly before his death her husband had apparently made a big issue of telling their son never to enter the garage or go anywhere near it. When the police tried to explain that this was understandable since the building had been full of dangerous tools on account of the workshop on the premises, the woman had blown her top and in the end they had fled under a hail of abuse and accusations of cowardice and a cover-up. The woman’s son had been nowhere to be seen. The report concluded that this situation could not continue and guidance was requested as to how officers should respond to further call-outs. It was also recommended that social services be contacted to check on the boy’s wellbeing.