The Darkness Knows

24

Olga was irritable and inclined to be snappish when Konrád dropped in to see her the following day. Nothing had changed. She had worked for the police archives for many years, was nearing retirement and had always been extremely prickly. As she stood at her desk, she reminded Konrád inescapably of one of her filing cabinets, with her short, dumpy figure, extremely broad in the beam, supported on sturdy legs. She had always been an eccentric character, possessed of the kind of temperament that made people go out of their way to avoid her. But, over the years, Konrád had managed to penetrate her protective shell, and towards the end of his time in the police they had developed quite a good working relationship. That didn’t prevent her from being abrasive, though, and putting up obstacles when he asked her to help him look up the traffic accident in which Herdís’s brother, Villi, had died.

‘I thought you’d retired,’ she huffed. ‘So why do you want to know about it? What’s it got to do with you?’

‘His sister asked me to look into it.’

‘Is she some girl you’re messing around with?’

‘No, she’s a woman who came to me for help.’

Konrád knew there was a reason why she had immediately assumed he must be involved with a girl. According to Marta, Olga was worse than ever these days because her husband had finally reached the end of his tether and walked out on her. They’d been married for thirty years when, out of the blue, he’d announced to her and their two daughters that he’d had enough and was leaving. He didn’t give any explanation but Olga had quickly found out that he’d moved in with another woman — ‘some skinny little cow,’ as she put it — and was behaving as if he had never known his ex-wife. Konrád searched around for some way of expressing solidarity with her plight.

‘How are you?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Oh, don’t pretend you haven’t heard,’ she snapped.

‘I’m not, I...’ Konrád had been about to offer her his condolences, but stopped himself because no one had died and he didn’t know any appropriate greeting for the newly divorced.

‘He was always a stupid sod,’ Olga said, which Konrád assumed was a reference to her ex-husband.

He had met the man occasionally at work socials, where they’d chatted a bit, and although he didn’t really know him, he’d felt sorry for him having to live with such a gorgon. Now it was Olga he pitied, though he couldn’t help wondering if her husband’s departure wasn’t partly her fault. Not that he would ever dare express such a thought.

‘Are tongues wagging upstairs?’ she asked.

‘No, not at all,’ Konrád assured her. ‘But then I’m hardly ever there. I’m glad to have left, to be honest.’

‘Those German tourists succeeded where you failed,’ Olga said, with ill-concealed glee. ‘Bet that pisses you off, doesn’t it? Frankly, I always thought you lot were bloody useless not to be able to find the man. But, of course, you know that. I’ve given you enough grief about it in the past.’

‘Yes, right,’ Konrád said, careful not to rise to this.

‘I can’t let you have any files, Konrád,’ Olga added, and he realised, with a sinking heart, that she was in her most obstructive mood. ‘You know that. You’re not in the force any more and we can’t go opening up the archives to any Tom, Dick or Harry who wanders in off the street.’

‘I know that,’ Konrád said. ‘Actually, what I wanted was to ask whether you remembered the hit-and-run. It’s so rare for drivers to flee the scene like that and even rarer for them never to be traced or to come forward of their own accord.’

He had gone online and scrolled through the old newspapers that had covered the accident, finding press photos of the scene, showing a knot of people standing around the ambulance and police cars in the blizzard.

‘You’re referring to the incident in which Vilmar Hákonarson was killed after being hit by a car? In the winter of 2009?’

‘That’s right,’ Konrád said.

‘It wasn’t your case. You were on leave, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘The state of you back then.’

‘I know.’

‘If I remember right, the accident occurred on Lindargata in the early hours of the morning, during a snowstorm,’ Olga said, and he was relieved that she didn’t go into the reasons for his being on leave at the time.

‘That’s right,’ Konrád repeated.

‘Vilmar was on his way home alone after a night out. He was blind drunk. Judging by the amount of alcohol in his bloodstream it’s surprising he was even capable of walking out of that bar. He died from a head trauma and internal bleeding. Have I got that right?’

Konrád nodded.

‘They calculated directions and distances and Vilmar’s weight. There was a whiteout that night, which made it impossible to measure any braking marks or make a cast of the tyre tracks, since they were buried immediately. In addition to that, the area had been trampled all over by people gathering at the site of the accident. There were no witnesses. The man was believed to have been lying on the pavement for some time before he was discovered — if memory serves.’

‘Was there any indication that he had been deliberately knocked down?’

‘Deliberately?’ Olga frowned and pondered this idea for what felt like a long time. Then she shot Konrád a look, but there was no gleam of pleasure in her eyes now. ‘You’ve got me curious,’ she said. ‘As far as I can remember, they did consider that possibility but nothing came of it.’

‘It would be interesting to know.’

‘Wait here,’ she said, and went and fetched the files.

There were two folders, and before she knew it she was poring over their contents with Konrád, going through the post-mortem report, sketches of the scene, calculations of the vehicle speed, speculation about its model and total mass, information about Vilmar’s weight and general physical condition, including his blood alcohol level, as well as the weather report for the Reykjavík area that night, precise details of the conditions at the scene of the accident, level of visibility, and finally the names of witnesses interviewed by the police, including those from the bar where Villi had gone on his final bender.

‘According to their calculations, it was a large, heavy vehicle,’ Olga said. ‘Not your average family car.’

‘Hang on,’ Konrád said, leafing through the post-mortem report. ‘The vehicle caught him fairly high up, on his hip and abdomen, and the impact was pretty violent. His pelvis and four ribs were broken — they believe as a result of being struck by the car. Then he received a severe blow to the head when he hit the ground.’

‘Like I said, they tried to measure the brake marks,’ Olga replied, reading from another report. ‘But the conditions made it impossible. They couldn’t see any sign that the driver had stopped and got out to see if Vilmar was OK, but then the scene had been trampled all over in the interim. The driver must have carried on, and there’s some speculation that the poor visibility might have prevented him from seeing the victim.’

‘He can hardly have failed to feel the impact, though,’ Konrád said. ‘He must have known what had happened.’

‘Especially as they say it must have been a large vehicle,’ Olga said.

‘Like a four-by-four? Or a van?’

‘I assume so,’ she replied.

‘Did the police talk to anyone who had been with him that evening?’ Konrád asked. ‘Anyone who was drinking with him at the bar, for example?’

Olga turned the pages. ‘Here’s the name of a friend of his, Ingibergur. He said he was out with him that evening.’ She carried on turning the pages. ‘It doesn’t look as if they got much information out of him, though,’ she said. ‘I expect he was pissed out of his skull as well.’