The Darkness Knows

51

Unable to wait until the following morning, Konrád drove straight back up to Efra-Breidholt to see Jóhanna and try to confirm his suspicions before deciding what to do next. He’d said a curt goodbye to Marta and hurried out of the school. Although the main rush hour had passed and the traffic was lighter, he was so impatient that he dodged his way between the other cars and once even jumped a red light.

As he drove, he reviewed all he knew about the Sigurvin case, followed by all the things he didn’t know, despite the long years of investigating and working and thinking and interviewing and meeting people from all levels of society who had links to Hjaltalín and the missing man. The discovery of the body in the ice had certainly thrown up new information that narrowed the search, but Konrád thought that, ironically, if it hadn’t been for Villi, the witness he had never even met, he wouldn’t have found the leads he was following now.

His mind went back and forth over all the different pieces of the puzzle, thinking about Bernhard and the Scouts and Sigurvin and the girl in the class photo, about search and rescue teams, and the secret stash of money in Sigurvin’s kitchen. About the rundown scrapyard and Bernhard’s failed marriage. Hjaltalín’s peculiar obstinacy. And the business Sigurvin had got mixed up in that had led to his death. What could it have been, and how come it had ended in tragedy?

From there, his thoughts led him to reflect on the impact the case had had on his own life, shaping him perhaps more than he had realised or was willing to acknowledge. He thought about the effect the failed investigation had had on him as a police officer, about the reason why he had been sent on unpaid leave back in the day. It had been one of the few times he had completely lost it.

He shook his head, cursing, and blasted his horn at the car in front of him, which was taking forever to get going again now that the lights had turned green. He had always regretted what happened. His colleague Ríkhardur had asked if he’d lost his mind. To be fair, he probably had. He had gone out to his jeep in the yard behind the police station, grabbed a tyre iron and stormed back inside, bursting into the corridor to the cells with the intention of beating the living daylights out of the prisoner. Instead, he had been seized, thrown to the floor and held down by his colleagues until he had recovered his senses, after which he had been sent home.

Konrád hadn’t been able to claim extenuating circumstances, even though the prisoner he was intending to beat with the tyre iron had attacked him first by headbutting him in the face and breaking his nose, causing a fountain of blood and excruciating pain. Even though the prisoner had insulted him and threatened his family. Even though he had mocked him and jeered at him over his investigation into Sigurvin’s disappearance, and called him the most pathetic piece of shit in the whole fucking police force.

Even though the prisoner’s name was Hjaltalín.

Konrád should have been man enough to shrug the whole thing off, but instead he had cracked.

Cracked and broken into a thousand pieces.

Hjaltalín had been picked up for drunk driving one night in the run-up to Christmas. He had been uncooperative and resisted arrest, so he had been thrown in the cells at the police station to sleep it off. A blood test had been taken that confirmed he was way over the limit. Konrád had learnt of his presence in the cells when he came to work the next morning. As it had been a long time since he had last met Hjaltalín, he made the mistake of going down to see him. He’d realised too late that the night hadn’t been long enough to sober Hjaltalín up and that he was still drunk and raging at his incarceration. The moment he saw Konrád he started yelling insults at him and accusing him of having ruined his life.

‘I’ll kill you and your whole fucking family!’ Hjaltalín had snarled at the height of their confrontation. ‘You pathetic cripple!’

‘Shut up!’ Konrád had yelled back.

They were standing face to face in the narrow cell, years’ worth of tension boiling up to the surface.

‘I’ll kill them if I feel like it, you arsehole! Your wife and the whole fucking lot of you.’

‘If you—’

Konrád never got a chance to finish the sentence; the attack took him completely by surprise. All of a sudden Hjaltalín sprang at him and headbutted him in the face. The pain was so agonising that Konrád cried out, his eyes filling with tears, and he felt the hot blood gushing. Hjaltalín flung him against the wall, grabbed him by the throat and swore he would kill him, then threw him on the floor and started kicking him until a guard rushed in and got him in a chokehold.

Konrád saw red. What happened next was something of a blur. He had a vague memory of fetching the tyre iron from his jeep, running back in and going for Hjaltalín, who was out in the corridor with his hands cuffed behind his back. Konrád had swung the tyre iron, smashing it into the wall beside Hjaltalín so hard that a chunk broke off and the concrete crumbled all over the floor. Before he could swing it again, he was overpowered by his colleagues.

Hjaltalín hadn’t pressed charges and Konrád had dropped the charges he had initially wanted to bring for violence against a police officer and making threats against his family. Most of his year’s unpaid leave had been spent in Sweden with Erna. She had been talking for a while about wanting to go back to Stockholm, where she had done her specialist training, so this had seemed like the perfect opportunity. She got herself a job at the Karolinska Hospital and they had left for Sweden at the end of February, not returning to Iceland until the autumn. Just over a year later, Erna was dead and he had retired from the police for good.

Konrád parked by the block of flats in Efra-Breidholt, sighing heavily at the memory of his attack on Hjaltalín. The block looked even more depressing in the dark. He saw a light on in Jóhanna’s flat and hoped that meant she was home. He took the stairs two at a time and knocked on her door, out of breath. There was no sound from inside. He knocked again, louder and for longer, then pressed his ear to the door. There was a noise on the other side. He waited impatiently. Just as he was about to knock for a third time, the door opened and Jóhanna appeared, in an even more dishevelled state than before.

‘What’s all this racket?’ she asked, squinting as if she had just woken up.

‘I wanted to ask you something else about Bernhard and—’

‘Who are you? What do you mean by banging on my door like that?’

‘My name’s Konrád. I was here earlier today. Excuse the disturbance but—’

‘You again? Why do you keep coming round here?’

‘I wanted to see if I could help you remember the name of the woman you mentioned — the one who rang Bernhard once, pretending she wanted to buy a part for her car.’

Jóhanna stared at him blearily.

‘You said you knew he’d been seeing other women,’ Konrád prompted.

‘Why don’t you come in?’ Jóhanna said. ‘We can’t talk about things like that in the corridor. Konrád, was it?’

She was cottoning on.

‘That’s right.’

For the second time that day he followed the woman who had once been married to Bernhard into her grotty flat, closing the door behind him. Jóhanna obviously hadn’t moved a thing since he left. She dropped heavily into the same chair.

‘The woman’s name?’ she said.

‘Do you by any chance remember it?’

‘I was trying to after you left.’

‘You said you thought it was a name out of the Bible.’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘Has it come back to you?’

Jóhanna frowned. Konrád waited impatiently for an answer. It would be better if she could remember it of her own accord. He shifted from foot to foot in front of her. It wasn’t going to work.

‘Was it Salóme?’ he asked at last.

Jóhanna perked up a little. ‘Yes — Salóme,’ she said. ‘That was her name, wasn’t it? He pretended not to know who she was. Claimed he was just selling her a spare part.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. Salóme. I have a feeling that was it.’

Jóhanna looked at Konrád a little sheepishly and he saw that she had something on her mind.

‘Did you have a question for me?’ he asked.

‘You told me before that...’ Her voice died away.

‘Yes?’

‘You told me... you said Bernhard used to know Sigurvin.’

‘Yes, a little. When they were boys.’

‘Do you think he could have done something to him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Konrád said. ‘It’s possible.’

‘Killed him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And the young lad on Lindargata?’

‘I’m trying to find out. You should know — you were in the car with him.’

‘Yes,’ Jóhanna said. ‘Of course, but... it’s just...’

‘What?’

‘I don’t owe that man anything.’

‘Who? Bernhard?’

‘Do you think I owe him anything?’

‘I wouldn’t—’

‘The lying bastard.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He treated me like dirt. And I’m supposed to... I’m supposed to lie for him.’

‘Lie about what?’

Jóhanna sat up straighter in her chair. ‘Bernhard rang me one day and asked me to say I’d been in the car with him on a particular night. There, I’ve done it. I’ve never told anyone that before.’

Konrád wasn’t sure if he’d understood her right. ‘He asked you...?’

‘Yes. I wasn’t in the car with him.’

‘But you were supposed to say that you were?’

‘Yes. He asked me to lie for him. The cops had talked to him about some accident. He said he’d been driving drunk and didn’t want to lose his licence, so he asked me to say, if they asked, that I was with him and that he’d been sober. That he’d picked me up from work or a party, I can’t remember which, and that nothing had happened and we hadn’t noticed anything unusual. I didn’t even know what he was talking about.’

‘Was that the night the young man was knocked down on Lindargata?’

‘I think it might have been. It was around about then. I got to thinking about it after you were here earlier. It was the only time he ever asked me to do anything like that.’

‘And you told the police you were with him?’

‘No. The police? I didn’t tell them anything.’

‘Why not?’

‘They never asked me. I never had to tell them anything about it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I never talked to any policeman,’ Jóhanna said.

‘So no one ever asked you to confirm his alibi?’ Konrád’s mind flew to Leó, scuttling off to his Freemasons’ meeting.

‘No one ever talked to me.’

‘So he was alone when he claimed he’d been with you?’

Jóhanna nodded. ‘I don’t know why I should have to keep on covering for him. I don’t mind you knowing. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t know if he was asking me to lie because of that lad or not.’

‘Didn’t you find it odd that he asked you to lie for him like that?’

‘I didn’t ask any questions. He just said he’d been driving over the limit. I didn’t connect it with that lad. But then I didn’t take much notice of the news in those days. Do you think Bernhard knocked him down? And killed Sigurvin too? I can’t get over that, I just don’t believe it. I don’t believe he’d be capable of it. Bernhard’s just not like that. He was... I’d never have believed he had it in him.’

Konrád didn’t know how to answer that. ‘Do you remember noticing any change in him at the time?’ he asked instead.

‘Change?’

‘Did his temper get worse, for example? Was he more depressed? Did he drink more or seem more on edge?’

‘No. Well, except that was when he took himself off to rehab. I do remember that. Just all of a sudden, like.’

Konrád had heard enough. He thanked Jóhanna for her help, reflecting as he did so on the women he had encountered in the course of this inquiry; the women who had lied for their men, been codependent, eager to help, unsuspecting.

‘Yes, Salóme, that was it,’ Jóhanna repeated as she shook his hand in parting. ‘I knew it was something out of the Bible. Didn’t she... er... how did it go again? I used to go to Sunday school, so I ought to know. Wasn’t she given what’s his name’s — John the Baptist’s — head on a silver platter? Wasn’t that her? The little dancing girl. Her name was Salóme, wasn’t it?’

Konrád opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. It could hardly be a coincidence. Salóme wasn’t a common name in Iceland. She’d been Hjaltalín’s girlfriend. And Bernhard’s classmate.

‘Yes, that’s the one,’ he said. ‘The little dancing girl who brought us Hjaltalín’s head on a silver platter,’ he muttered under his breath, as he closed the door behind him.