The Darkness Knows

4

Two days later, the phone rang late in the evening. Normally Konrád would have been startled, as he’d largely stopped receiving phone calls at night and early in the morning since retiring. It was the biggest change he’d noticed, apart from the silence. But now the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. This time it was a friend who used to work with him in the police. Konrád had been hoping to hear from her.

‘He wants to talk to you,’ the woman said. Her name was Marta and she was chief inspector at Reykjavík CID.

‘He’s not going to confess, is he?’ Konrád had read online that a man had been arrested following the discovery of the body on the glacier. It didn’t surprise him that it should have been Hjaltalín. The whole circus was starting up again. This time, though, Konrád was determined to stay out of it. Reporters had been pestering him for a quote about the discovery but he’d told them he had nothing to say on the subject. He’d left the police: others had taken over the case.

‘He insists it’s you he wants to see,’ Marta said. ‘He won’t talk to us.’

‘You told him I’ve retired?’

‘Hjaltalín knows that. He wants to talk to you anyway.’

‘What’s he saying?’

‘Nothing new: he’s innocent.’

‘He used to own a big four-by-four.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Which would have been capable of driving onto the ice cap.’

‘Yep.’

‘Are you allowing him visitors? Isn’t he in custody?’

‘We’d make an exception in your case,’ Marta said. ‘You’d be working for us in a temporary capacity — as a consultant.’

‘I have absolutely no interest in getting mixed up in this again, Marta. Not now. Could we talk about it later?’

‘We don’t have much time.’

‘No, I realise that.’

‘I’d never have believed Sigurvin would turn up.’

‘Thirty years is a long time.’

‘Don’t you want to see the body?’

‘Already have,’ Konrád said. ‘He looks like he died yesterday.’

‘Ah, of course — Svanhildur’s been in touch with you. So, are you going to see the prisoner?’

‘I’m retired.’

‘All right, no need to go on about it.’

‘I’ll talk to you later.’ Konrád rang off.

The truth was he couldn’t stop thinking about Sigurvin and the visit to Svanhildur at the mortuary, but he was reluctant to reveal his interest to the former colleagues who’d been in touch over the last couple of days. He’d retired, he told them, and had no intention of going back, under any circumstances. Over thirty years had passed since they’d begun searching for Sigurvin. Since then Konrád had lost count of the people they’d interviewed, but no one had ever been charged. The investigation had quickly become focused on a man called Hjaltalín, but they’d never managed to prove anything against him. Hjaltalín had consistently denied ever having laid a finger on Sigurvin, and in the end they’d been forced to release him due to lack of evidence. The body had never been found: Sigurvin had simply vanished off the face of the earth.

And now he was lying in the mortuary, looking almost as if he’d only been gone a few days. Svanhildur hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said his body was uncannily well preserved. Although they hadn’t embarked on the full post-mortem yet, a few facts had been established. Sigurvin was wearing the same clothes as he had been when he met his fate: trainers, jeans, shirt and jacket. The cause of death appeared to have been a heavy blow to the head with a blunt instrument. The skin had been broken and blood had been found on the back of his skull and on his clothes.

Konrád thought about all the years that had passed since the man died. He had sometimes imagined what the moment would be like; how he’d feel if Sigurvin ever turned up. Although he had long ago stopped searching, he’d never managed to put the case entirely behind him, and the suspicion that one day the phone would ring with the news that the missing man had been found had always been there, lurking just below the surface. Yet, ironically, when the news finally came, he’d found it almost impossible to process. Sigurvin’s fate had been a mystery for decades. They hadn’t even been sure he was dead, let alone had any idea how he’d died. Now they knew both the cause and the fact he had died at the time he went missing. They had never known exactly what he had been wearing when he vanished but now they could see for themselves. His body would provide those in charge of the inquiry with a variety of important new details, including a rough idea of the murder weapon. Those vital missing pieces were finally falling into place.

Konrád sat down at the kitchen table with a glass of red wine and lit a cigarillo. He sometimes smoked them when he felt a craving for nicotine, but apart from that he wasn’t a big smoker. The phone rang again. This time it was his sister, Elísabet. She asked how he was doing.

‘Fine,’ he said, sucking down smoke. ‘The phone hasn’t stopped ringing.’

‘I hear that bloody case is blowing up again,’ said Elísabet, who was known to all as Beta. Like everyone else, she had been gripped by the news reports about the body.

‘Apparently Hjaltalín’s trying to drag me into it,’ Konrád said. ‘They’ve taken him into custody and he wants to see me. They’ve told him I’m retired but he won’t take no for an answer.’

‘Does anyone ever retire from a case like that?’

‘That’s a question I’ve been asking myself.’

‘Aren’t you curious to hear what he’s got to say?’

‘I know exactly what he’ll say, Beta. He’ll say he’s innocent. The fact the body’s turned up won’t change a thing. We had nothing on him thirty years ago and we won’t find anything now, “because he’s innocent”. That’s what he’ll say. I’ve no idea why he wants to repeat it for my benefit.’

Beta was silent. They hadn’t been close when they were young, having been brought up in separate households following their parents’ divorce, but they’d been trying to make up for it ever since, each in their own way, though it wasn’t always easy.

‘You weren’t entirely convinced he’d done it at the time,’ she said after a moment.

‘No, unlike the rest of them. But he was always our most likely candidate.’

It was common knowledge that Hjaltalín had been the only serious suspect for Sigurvin’s murder in 1985 and that, despite a spell in custody, he’d never confessed. The police had failed to prove beyond all doubt that he’d been involved in Sigurvin’s disappearance. Yet he was the last person to have been seen with him, and the two men had reportedly quarrelled bitterly just before Sigurvin vanished. Hjaltalín was also known to have threatened him.

‘Have they asked for your help with the investigation?’ Beta asked.

‘No.’

‘But they want you to see Hjaltalín?’

‘They think he might tell me something he won’t tell them. He’s refusing to talk to them.’

‘Thirty years is a long time.’

‘He did a good job of hiding Sigurvin. The reason he got away with it was because we never found the body. The question is whether he’ll get away with it so easily this time round.’

‘But you had nothing on him.’

‘We had various things on him, just not enough. In the end, the prosecutor didn’t feel he had a good enough case to take before a judge.’

‘Don’t let yourself get drawn in again. You’ve left the police.’

‘Yes, I’ve left.’

‘Talk to you later.’

‘OK, bye.’

The discovery was all over the media but Konrád had got the inside story from Svanhildur. Ever since the body was recovered from the ice, four members of Forensics had been stationed on the glacier, conducting a search of the area. Police officers from the little west coast town of Borgarnes had been first on the scene after the German tour group had rung the emergency number. The local volunteer search and rescue team had also been called out, and this had alerted the press to the fact that something was up. The police officers from Borgarnes had made their way onto the ice, despite being inadequately equipped, and had confirmed that the body was that of a man, aged around thirty, who had evidently been there a long time. They had been ordered by their superior not to touch anything, and to keep the tourists well away. At this point, Forensics in Reykjavík had been notified. By then, the Borgarnes rescue team had reached the edge of the glacier in their specially equipped vehicles. They conveyed the Germans down to the hotel at Húsafell, along with their guide, a woman in her early sixties called Adalheidur, who had found the body. That evening, the group had travelled back to Reykjavík. Detectives from CID had questioned the woman closely and spoken to the Germans with her help. An older man, who informed them that he was a doctor, explained that he’d brushed some snow from the man’s face but that otherwise they’d been careful not to touch anything.

In order to minimise disturbance of the evidence, a block of ice weighing almost two hundred kilos had been carved out around the body, then freed and hoisted onto the rescue team’s ice truck. A forensic technician had accompanied the chunk of glacier to Reykjavík, keeping a close eye on anything it produced as it melted. Later that evening, most of the police and rescue team members had gone down to Húsafell where they had spent the night, leaving four officers behind on the glacier to prevent any unauthorised individuals from approaching the site.

One of the country’s top glaciologists, interviewed on the radio in connection with the discovery, was quick to point out that since 1985, when Sigurvin’s body had been hidden on the glacier, the ice cap had shrunk by more than seven cubic kilometres. It was now around six hundred metres thick, but experts calculated that during the next quarter of a century the glacier would shrink by almost 20 per cent as a result of global warming.

‘And some people are still sceptical about manmade climate change!’ Konrád had heard the glaciologist saying in a tone of exasperation on the radio that morning.

‘Would the body have been laid on top of the ice or buried somehow?’ the radio host had asked.

‘Hard to say. It’s possible he was dropped into a crevasse. He went missing in February, when freezing temperatures would have made it extremely difficult to dig into the ice. But he would have been covered with snow quickly enough. Another possibility is that a crevasse subsequently opened and swallowed him up, and he remained there until his recent reappearance.’

‘Did the ice just melt to reveal him, then?’

‘Of course, that will require further analysis, but it sounds plausible. It would be the simplest explanation for why he’s turned up now.’

Yet again Konrád’s mobile phone shattered the silence of his house in Árbær. This time it was Svanhildur, wanting to know what he was planning to do. She’d heard that Hjaltalín was asking to see him.

‘I don’t know,’ Konrád said. ‘Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to talk to him — to hear what he’s got to say.’

‘Oh, come on! You must be dying of curiosity. This is Sigurvin we’re talking about! Surely that must spark your interest?’

‘Hjaltalín wasn’t even thirty when we arrested him,’ Konrád remarked.

‘I remember it well.’

‘He must be pushing sixty now. I haven’t seen him for donkey’s years.’

‘Do you think he’ll have changed much?’

‘I think he’ll be the same idiot.’

‘You two weren’t exactly best mates.’

‘No,’ said Konrád. ‘Though he seemed to think we were. I don’t know what he wants to talk to me about. The fact is, I wouldn’t trust Hjaltalín as far as I could throw him. He wouldn’t be in custody now if they hadn’t thought he was trying to make a run for it. He was on the point of leaving the country when they arrested him. That was the day after Sigurvin was identified. He claimed it was a complete coincidence.’

‘Are you sleeping any better these days?’

‘Not much.’

‘You know you can always call me if there’s something bothering you,’ Svanhildur said. ‘If you want to chat.’

‘Yes, but I’m fine,’ Konrád said brusquely.

‘All right.’ Svanhildur was about to ring off, then added, as if she couldn’t help herself: ‘You never get in touch any more.’

‘No, I...’ Konrád didn’t know what to say.

‘Just call if...’

He didn’t respond and they ended the call. He took a sip of wine and lit another cigarillo. He and Erna had sometimes talked about downsizing and moving away from Árbær. Not to some block of flats for pensioners but to a cosy little place near the city centre. Though not in Thingholt or any of those old streets east of the lake, Erna had said, as there were too many party animals living there nowadays. To the west end, rather. Nothing had come of it, though. He remembered how often they had discussed the Sigurvin case at this kitchen table, and how she had always been there for him, whatever happened.

The table in the sitting room was covered with old papers of his father’s that Konrád had been looking through the evening Svanhildur had rung with the news about Sigurvin. They’d been in a cardboard box in the basement and he hadn’t given them so much as a glance in decades. It had been getting mixed up in an old case from the Second World War, involving fraudulent spiritualists, that had resurrected his long-buried interest in his father’s fate. He had been discovered one evening in 1963, lying fatally stabbed in front of the South Iceland Abattoir on Skúlagata. Despite an extensive investigation, the murder had never been solved. Konrád had banished the incident from his mind during all the long years he had worked as a detective. His father had been a troublesome, vindictive man, who had made enemies on every side. He had done stints behind bars for smuggling, theft and fraud. And that wasn’t the half of it. He had also conspired with at least one, if not more, fake mediums during the war. Konrád’s mother had eventually fled their home, taking Beta with her, but her husband had refused to let her take their son, who had remained behind, growing up with his father in the Shadow District.

Konrád leafed through the yellowing papers. His interest had been piqued by a handful of newspaper cuttings on spiritualism and the paranormal that his father had kept. Among them was an article about conmen, and an interview with an Icelandic psychic in a long-defunct weekly newspaper. Another cutting was from a publication by the Society for Psychical Research, discussing the afterlife and ‘the Ether World’. The articles dated from about two years before Konrád’s father had been stabbed outside the abattoir. They had led Konrád to wonder if, in the final months of his life, his father could have returned to his old bad habits of swindling money out of people through fake seances.