The Darkness Knows

31

Konrád was getting into bed when Marta rang. He assumed she wanted to know if he’d extracted any useful information from Linda, but instead it turned out that she had an extraordinary tale to tell.

Just as she was about to leave the office, she had been told that there was a man in reception who wanted to talk to someone senior in CID, someone familiar with the Sigurvin affair. Marta had gone down and greeted the man, who seemed rather nervous, and asked what she could do for him. He had asked if they could have a word in private, so Marta had shown him into her office. The man, whose name was Egill, came across as very embarrassed. Marta was fairly used to dealing with members of the public who wanted to talk to the police about Sigurvin but then failed to provide any genuine leads. Some had developed wild conspiracy theories about the case; others were just a bit odd. Marta got the impression that Egill fell into the latter category and didn’t want to waste too much time on him, as she was eager to get off home.

‘It’s like this,’ Egill said. ‘We had a new kitchen put in, my wife and I.’

What the hell? Marta thought to herself, stealing a glance at her watch.

‘Nothing hugely expensive, just an IKEA job, which I fitted myself. I’m a joiner, you know.’

‘Right, I see. Were you happy with it?’

‘Very happy,’ Egill said. He was around fifty, fleshy, with a pronounced paunch and thick, callused workman’s fingers. ‘The old kitchen really needed replacing and this was at the height of the boom years, when everyone had plenty of cash and you could get loans for anything you liked. Not that we ever took out a loan ourselves. A consumer loan, I mean. We just carried on driving around in our old car. A lot of people I knew were behaving like idiots, throwing their money around, taking loans right, left and—’

‘Excuse me, but weren’t you going to tell me something about Sigurvin?’ Marta interrupted, trying not to sound too rude. ‘Wasn’t that why you wanted to see me?’

‘Yes, sorry. I just wanted to explain. I do hope we can keep this between ourselves — that it won’t have to go any further. What do you think?’

‘I still don’t actually know what you’re talking about,’ Marta said. ‘And I’m not sure I’ll ever find out,’ she added under her breath, glancing at her watch again.

‘What did you say?’ Egill asked, raising a hand to his ear. ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit hard of hearing. It’s working with all those power tools that does it.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Please carry on.’

‘There was just the one owner between us and him. His name was Jóhann and we bought the house from him — just gave it a coat of paint and moved in, you know how it is, but since then I’ve been doing the odd bit of DIY, as you do. Fridný had kept saying we needed a new kitchen, so we finally went ahead.’

‘Fridný?’

‘My wife.’

‘I see,’ Marta said.

‘I’m only telling you this because he turned up on the glacier like that. Otherwise we’d probably have kept quiet. I’m quite ashamed, to be honest. It’s been on our consciences — mine and Fridný’s. We should probably never have done what we did but we’ve always taken the view that it was better not to talk about it. We’ve never told anyone. We... basically, we stole it. All of it.’

‘All of what?’

‘The money.’ Egill shrugged as if what had happened had been beyond his control.

‘What money?’

‘The money we found in the old kitchen. One million in new, thousand-krónur notes. He had hidden it carefully behind the kitchen units before he went missing. It was in an ordinary plastic bag.’

‘Who had?’

‘Sigurvin. The man you found. We knew it wasn’t Jóhann, who lived there before us — who owned the money, I mean. We asked him about it, in a roundabout way. Fridný, that is. She did it very cleverly.’

‘Sigurvin? What’s he got to do with this?’

‘Oh, didn’t I explain?’

‘No.’

‘He used to own our house and was living there at the time of his disappearance,’ Egill said, with a hint of exasperation at Marta’s failure to grasp the point.

‘Sigurvin? Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely. We...’

‘What?’

‘Unfortunately, we can’t pay it back,’ Egill said. ‘It’s all gone.’

Konrád listened in silence as Marta relayed the joiner’s story to him and was as astonished by it as she had been.

‘Are you saying that Sigurvin stashed away a million krónur in his kitchen?’ he asked, stunned.

‘Looks like it,’ Marta said.

‘But what... what did the couple do with the money? Did it never occur to them to hand it in? To report it? What kind of people are they?’

‘The poor bloke was pretty shamefaced about it. Apparently his wife, Fridný, is mortified.’

‘What did they spend it on?’

‘Shares in Kaupthing Bank. Fridný had a cousin who worked there.’

‘And?’

‘They lost the lot in the financial crisis.’