The Darkness Knows

30

That evening, Elísabet paid her brother a visit. She was single and had begun to look increasingly to Konrád for company in recent years. She worked in a library, and when he asked how it was going she gave her usual answer: fortunately there was enough to do. People still read books. She also volunteered at Stígamót, the counselling service for survivors of sexual abuse, though she rarely talked about that, but then she had always been unforthcoming about personal matters. She was a big woman, with raven-black hair, a face that tapered towards the chin, and sharp brown eyes above a long, pointed nose. Her clothes were designed to hide her figure: thick jumpers, as many as two or three in cold weather, thick skirts and galoshes. She had a colourful collection of woolly hats as well, and would often cram two on her head at once.

‘Are they still investigating the Sigurvin murder?’ Beta asked, after she had sat with Konrád for a while and was on the point of leaving. ‘Are you involved?’

‘I didn’t intend to be,’ he said, ‘but I keep being drawn in.’

Hardly knowing where to begin, he told her about Villi and his sister, Herdís, and the man Villi had seen on Öskjuhlíd. The police were currently evaluating this new information. But Konrád didn’t feel that his meetings with Olga and the chaplain really counted as part of the inquiry. That was just his retirement hobby. He had taken early retirement, fed up with police work, and had never felt any desire to return to his job. Perhaps it was just another sign of what had become a common theme in his life recently: he lacked purpose and resolve, which, when you stopped to think about it, was odd for a man his age. He smoked cigarillos but wasn’t a smoker. He dabbled in criminal investigations without being a policeman. And, strangest of all to him, he was a pensioner but didn’t feel remotely old.

Perhaps these were natural feelings for someone later in life. Konrád was one of the last Icelanders to have been born under the old Danish monarchy. The day after his birth in 1944, Iceland had been declared an independent republic in the pouring rain at Thingvellir. For a brief moment of his life, so brief it was almost immeasurable, he’d had a Danish king.

He had been a sunny-tempered child and never let it bother him that he had a slightly withered arm. His left arm had less strength and mobility than his right and appeared noticeably weaker. When he was old enough to ask about the difference, having observed that everyone else he knew had two equally strong arms, his mother had explained that it had happened during his birth. He hadn’t wasted too much thought on it. Since he didn’t know what it was like to have two sound arms, he had nothing for comparison. All he knew was that he was a bit different from other people. He had been teased about it when he started school but hadn’t let it upset him, and since he was naturally good at PE and swimming, and took part in the other kids’ playground games, the teasing soon stopped. As time went on, few people even noticed that his arm was different from any other arm that sported a hand and five fingers. Only Konrád knew how weak it was when put to the test.

His form teacher at primary school had been a God-fearing woman of around sixty, who believed in miracles and urged Konrád to pray to the Lord for healing, in case that would help. Jesus had healed a man with a wasted arm, she told him, and had broken the law of the Sabbath to do so. From what she’d said, Konrád gathered that the son of God was familiar with the problem, and that this should make it easier for him to solve it.

In contrast, Konrád’s paternal aunt, a countrywoman from the north who was fiercely traditional in her beliefs and habits, said that his withered arm bore all the signs of being a mark of punishment and misfortune. Not that she thought the poor innocent child was being punished. Oh no, it had been visited upon him as a reminder of past misdeeds. And here she had flung her words at her ‘no-good brother’, which was her usual name for Konrád’s father.

When Konrád was a boy, he had sometimes noticed a short man in an overcoat walking around town and had been told that he was a great poet. Like Konrád, he had a withered arm. He was said to have been given a tough time over it as a child, and that this might have been one of the reasons for his acid tongue and morose temperament, but that the adversity had also helped make him into an outstanding poet.

‘Why are you so quiet?’ Beta asked, studying her brother, who looked as though he were miles away.

Konrád decided he might as well tell her about his meeting with Eygló. Beta already knew about his theory that their father had started dabbling in spiritualism again before his murder. Konrád now told her how the medium, Engilbert, who had worked with their father during the war, had died only a few months after him, and he raised the possibility that the two conmen might have reverted to their old tricks.

‘Apparently Eygló’s father got into a terrible state when he heard that Dad was dead,’ Konrád said. ‘He wouldn’t go anywhere alone and had to have a light on all the time in his flat. He became afraid of the dark.’

‘I didn’t think mediums could be afraid of the dark,’ Beta said. ‘But, come to think of it, perhaps they’d have more reason to be afraid than most.’

‘I wouldn’t know. Anyway, then he went and died himself, leaving no explanation.’

‘Perhaps he felt it was time to experience the Ether World for himself,’ Beta said drily, then added that she had to get going. She had no desire to talk about their father and what had happened to him, and still less about his fraudulent practices.

Konrád remained sitting at the kitchen table, thinking back to the days when he had dropped out of his printing course at technical college. He had been sinking ever deeper into a life of debauchery until one of his less disreputable friends, who had dropped out of the Reykjavík Sixth-Form College but still attended its social events, had taken him along to a play. And there, on the stage, Konrád saw a girl who took his breath away. Her name, he discovered, was Erna.

Much later, after his father had died and Konrád had managed to drag himself out of his feckless, drink-fuelled existence and resumed his course at the tech, she had crossed his path again, as dazzling as a ray of sunshine.

‘Is it crippled?’ she had asked matter-of-factly, touching his arm.

‘Well, it’s smaller and weaker,’ Konrád replied. ‘It’s been like that since I was born.’

‘That must be hard if you’re training to be a printer.’

‘I can’t complain,’ Konrád said. ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t bother me.’

‘No, of course not,’ she replied. ‘You’ve never known any different. Can you arm-wrestle with it?’ She placed her elbow on the table.

‘Are you challenging me?’ he asked.

‘Are you too chicken?’

That was their first meeting. Erna was a top student, who had long had her sights set on medical school and, in the event, had no problem getting in. He had never known what she’d seen in him, but he had realised from the first that she was the light of his life and all the love in his heart.

He would never have believed he could cheat on her, but that only showed how little he knew himself.