The Darkness Knows

57

Lúkas stared downstream to where the river took a sharp bend into the gorge on the other side of the bridge, continuing on its tireless journey to the sea.

‘Are you planning to do something stupid like Bernhard?’ Konrád asked.

Lúkas peered over the rocky ledge and shook his head. ‘You needn’t worry about that. I’ve always been afraid of the river, like I told you.’

‘You said your plan was a disaster.’

‘None of it would have happened if we hadn’t bumped into Sigurvin at the cinema one day. I don’t remember the name of the film, only that it was crap. We hadn’t seen each other for years, not since we were in the Scouts, but we got chatting, and for some reason we started talking about booze because I used to work on the cargo ships. I said I could get hold of some vodka for him, if he liked. I had some gallon bottles smuggled in by a mate of mine and took a couple round to Sigurvin’s place the following evening. He liked the price and after that I used to sell him the gallon bottles from time to time, whenever I had some to spare, and we used to chat a bit and got to know each other better and—’

‘I don’t remember any bottles like that turning up at his house,’ Konrád interrupted. He was constantly on the lookout for any details he had missed during the original investigation. ‘There was nothing to connect him to smuggling. Not a single piece of evidence.’

‘No. He was careful. I think he used to empty out the gallon containers into normal-sized vodka bottles. He said something about it once.’

‘And the drugs?’

‘No one had a clue that we were mates with Sigurvin,’ Lúkas said, seeming eager to tell the whole story at last. ‘And he was the only person we knew who had any money. So I told him about Bernhard’s idea of using the search and rescue team. Sigurvin thought it over, then said he was up for it. He was greedy. “You can never have too much dosh,” he said. We told him he could get twenty times back what he’d paid for the drugs, which was perfectly true. His involvement would never come out, and even if it did he could simply deny everything. We’d make sure we didn’t leave any tracks that could be traced to him. Bernhard and I offered to go to Amsterdam on rescue-team business. I’d done a bit of drug smuggling before on a very small scale, so I knew where to lay my hands on the goods. Everything went according to plan. We bought the drugs — cocaine mostly, which was starting to be popular in Iceland at the time — and packed it in with a consignment of equipment for the rescue team that was due to be transported home in a container. We hid the stuff in two second-hand German snowmobiles. The whole thing went like a dream, right up until Sigurvin lost his nerve. First he said he couldn’t trust us; that we were cheating him and he’d never have any way of being sure that we weren’t. We weren’t cheating him but he didn’t believe us when we denied it. In hindsight, I reckon he just wanted an excuse to withdraw from the whole thing. He’d got his profit and we’d given him some extra money as a sweetener because he made such a fuss, but then, stupidly, we decided we wanted him to return part of it. He flat-out refused.’

‘We learnt recently that he’d kept a considerable sum in cash in his house,’ Konrád said reflectively. ‘Presumably, you two met him to talk things over?’

‘Bernhard met him on Öskjuhlíd.’

‘Had they met there before?’ Konrád asked, remembering Ingvar’s story about the big off-road vehicle by the tanks.

‘Yes, once before. Bernhard had invested part of his profit in the scrapyard. He’d bought it off some bloke and was planning to sell it on quickly and open a garage instead. He had other big dreams too. We’d made a hell of a lot on that consignment. My brother had connections in the drugs world and helped us with the distribution. He was under the impression that me and Bernhard were responsible for smuggling it in on our own. I never told him about Sigurvin. By then, things had got so bad that we couldn’t talk to him any more without it blowing up into a row. But Bernhard wanted to fix things, so he met Sigurvin on Öskjuhlíd and persuaded him, with a lot of difficulty, to come over to the scrapyard, where I was waiting. All we meant to do was smooth things out between us. But of course tempers got lost immediately and it turned into a shouting match. Sigurvin threatened to shop us. He talked about ringing the police with an anonymous tip-off. Said we’d never be able to prove he’d been involved. Which was true. We’d made sure there was no evidence pointing to him.’

‘Which of you hit him on the head?’

Lúkas hesitated for a moment, then said: ‘It would be easy to blame Bernhard now.’

‘Sure,’ Konrád said. ‘If that would let you off the hook.’

‘I often wondered if I should say it was Bernhard. If we were ever caught. Blame it on him and see if I got a more lenient sentence. It would be easy now he’s dead to claim it was Bernhard, but I’m fed up with lying. I hit him. Twice.’

‘What with?’

‘Some junk I saw on the counter in the workshop.’

‘What was it?’

‘A tyre iron. Sigurvin was leaving and I lost it. I... I wasn’t entirely sober and I’d done some of the coke too. I was so angry.’

‘Did he die instantly?’

‘Yes. It wasn’t supposed to happen. I didn’t mean to kill him, I meant to stop him. It’s up to you whether you believe me. It was never supposed to go that far.’

‘No. All the same, there were two blows,’ Konrád pointed out. ‘Heavy ones. So you were obviously pretty determined, whatever it was you intended to do.’

‘Yes,’ Lúkas said. ‘I... I went too far. It was... I...’

‘What happened to the tyre iron?’

‘I... Bernhard got rid of it. I don’t know how. I never asked him.’

‘Have you been involved in any smuggling since then?’

‘No.’

‘And Hjaltalín? Did neither of you give a shit about what he was going through?’

‘Of course we did, but what were we supposed to do? We weren’t suspects; we were in hiding. So we didn’t come forward. Time passed. And the investigators never came after us. You lot took the inquiry in a completely different direction, and Hjaltalín was never charged. The case was dead. Until Sigurvin turned up on the glacier.’

‘Why did you take him up there?’

‘It was Bernhard’s idea. He wanted to hide the body and had been on the glacier the previous week. It was the only place he could think of. And even though we messed up, it worked. For thirty years, anyway. We knew we’d have to take him quite high up onto the ice if he wasn’t to be found. That was about two days after he died. But we hit such crazy weather that in the end we had to save ourselves and we completely lost track of where we’d put him. It got dark, there was a complete whiteout and... we’d been meaning to throw him into a deep crevasse to explain his head injuries if he was ever found, but...’

‘You took his car keys?’

‘We wanted to make it look like Sigurvin had got lost and died of exposure on the ice. But by the time we finally remembered his jeep and decided to drive it up to the foot of the glacier, it was too late because you lot had already found it. That’s how come Sigurvin vanished without a trace. If we’d managed to leave his jeep near the glacier, you’d have had an explanation for his disappearance. We knew the glacier would be searched if his car was there, but we doubted his body would ever be found. It was Bernhard’s idea to make it look like Sigurvin had died of exposure. Like he’d fallen into a crevasse. Bernhard had often taken part in searching for people in all kinds of circumstances and said it couldn’t fail.’

Lúkas shrugged, defeated. Below them the water flowed relentlessly past and Konrád felt as if he could sense the power of the glacier in its deep roar. The uniformed officers were slowly moving closer.

‘Then people started talking about the greenhouse effect and saying the world’s glaciers were melting. The amount of tourist traffic on the ice kept increasing too, and we knew it was only a matter of time before someone stumbled on Sigurvin. We went up there ourselves to see if we could find him before anyone else did but we failed. We knew he’d turn up one day. Knew it all along and it was a horrible feeling. Waiting for him to be found. Sometimes it was almost more than I could bear.’

‘What did you do with the car keys?’

‘Threw them away. I went to the rubbish dump at Gufunes and chucked them as far as I could onto the mounds.’

‘Rescue team members searching for a man they had lost themselves,’ Konrád said. ‘Not to save a life but to dispose of a body. There’s something sick about that, isn’t there? Can’t you see it?’

‘In every single nightmare,’ Lúkas said. ‘It was the same for Bernhard...’

‘That’s no—’

‘We’ll never be forgiven,’ Lúkas said, meeting Konrád’s eye. ‘It’s been very hard but it’ll only get worse from now on. I think Bernhard realised that.’

‘Oh, my heart bleeds for you,’ Konrád hissed, tired of fighting back rage.

‘What was that?’

Konrád had listened to Lúkas and heard the regret and penitence, mingled with self-justification, but hadn’t been able to summon up any sympathy for him. Hadn’t felt anything except anger: anger on behalf of those who had died because of him. On behalf of those who had been made to grieve. Anger because the two men had never come forward and told the truth. Because they had crawled into their holes and disappeared. But, most of all, anger on behalf of Hjaltalín, who had protested his innocence all those years to deaf ears. The longer Lúkas’s story had gone on, the angrier Konrád had grown. He looked down into the raging torrent and felt as if his emotions were in a similar turmoil. He hadn’t experienced such a sense of revulsion since he’d walked out on his father that last time all those years ago, and before he knew it his disgust was whispering to him about how easy it would be to give Lúkas a little push.

‘You didn’t give a damn about Hjaltalín, did you?’ Konrád said, rising to his feet to put an end to their meeting. ‘About what you did to him? Sigurvin was dead and you couldn’t hurt him any more, but Hjaltalín went through sheer hell because of you. Do you have any idea what that man had to endure? What you did to him? How you destroyed his life? Smashed it to pieces?’

‘Yes, of course, yes, it’s... it was always... Of course we were worried...’

Lúkas started to scramble to his feet. Konrád didn’t see exactly what happened next, but Lúkas never finished his sentence. Instead, he gave a muffled cry. Either his foot had slipped or he’d lost his handhold. It all happened incredibly fast, but Konrád caught the flash of terror in the other man’s eyes as he fell and began to slide over the edge. Konrád reached out to him and Lúkas snatched at his hand. Before Konrád could brace himself, he was almost pulled over the ledge with the falling man. Lúkas scrabbled frantically for a hold to save his life, but seemed to sense, even as he clutched at Konrád’s hand, that it wasn’t enough.

Konrád saw the realisation dawn. Saw it in the man’s wide-open eyes as it came home to him that there was no hope; that his grip wouldn’t hold. Then Lúkas emitted a blood-curdling scream.

He plummeted into the river, where the current whirled him away, curling him up, spinning him round and hurling him onwards, shooting him up to the surface, only to submerge him again an instant later. Lúkas couldn’t see a thing in the murky depths, his limbs were paralysed by the cold, and when he tried to shout for help in his anguish and terror his lungs filled with water. He shot up to the surface again, coughing, to see a rock towering above him and the silhouette of a fir tree against the sky.

Again he was plunged head first into the depths, where he bashed into stones and, flinging out his arms, grasped at a jutting rock below the surface, only to lose his hold. He groped in the darkness like a madman, unable to tell which way up he was in the tumbling water, until the next minute he had emerged again and caught hold of a rock, momentarily slowing his headlong progress before his grip was torn away. The skin of his fingers ripped, but despite that he grabbed at a snag and this time managed to stop himself. The water flung him against a rough rock wall, he glimpsed a fir tree overhead, and only now did it dawn on him that he had been carried out to the islet in the middle of the river.

The water pounded him ceaselessly as he clung to the rock for dear life and slowly worked his way along it to a slightly calmer patch of water, out of the fiercest current. Then he hung on to the low cliff with his torn, numb fingers, his head just above the surface, the waves constantly breaking over him, glimpsing a faint chance of rescue. He didn’t dare move for fear of losing his hold and being snatched away, but flattened himself against the rock wall, trying to present as little resistance as possible.

Konrád, observing the battle from the ledge, saw that it could only end one way. Lúkas’s hands couldn’t have any feeling left in that freezing water. He watched the man fighting for his life until, inevitably, Lúkas lost his grip on the rock and was borne away by the flood, disappearing under the surface, this time for good.