The Shadow District

19

‘What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ Vigga stood over her saucepan, observing Flóvent’s reaction with curiosity. The coal crackled in the range. The woman with the pram walked back past the window on her way home.

‘She mentioned the hidden people?’ said Flóvent after a moment. ‘That she’d been attacked by an elf man?’

‘That’s what her sister said. She claimed she’d run into a man from the other side. It was all very muddled and ridiculous, unless you happen to believe in those sorts of old wives’ tales, which I don’t. Don’t believe in the elves or any other invisible creatures.’

Flóvent didn’t know what to think. Two girls, on opposite sides of the country, with identical stories; one found dead behind the theatre, the other missing, possibly a suicide. Both had mentioned the hidden people. Could it be a coincidence? No one but himself and Thorson and the young seamstress knew that a man had raped Rósamunda and told her to blame it on the huldufólk. And neither he nor Thorson had breathed a word about it to anyone else.

‘When was all this?’

‘Three years ago.’

‘And how did people react to the girl’s explanation?’

‘Some thought she’d gone round the bend. Others started repeating all kinds of stories about ghosts and elves, and found nothing odd about it. The old beliefs die hard.’

‘Which ones?’

‘Folk beliefs, of course. You know the kind of thing — supernatural beings and cursed ground and people vanishing into elf palaces hidden in rocks or mountains. I gather the girl was a sucker for fairy tales like that, though I don’t believe for a minute that it was a supernatural being who attacked her.’

‘But she believed it, you say? Believed in the huldufólk and spirits?’

‘Yes, so they say. She knew all the local elf rocks and tales of the hidden people. Of course they tell these stories on every farm up there, whether they believe them or not.’

‘What do you think happened?’

‘It’s not for me to say.’

‘But from what you’ve heard.’

‘You can’t go asking me that. I don’t know what went on,’ said Vigga testily. ‘But some of the locals thought maybe the girl had been messing about with a soldier and it’d gone wrong, so she felt she had to lie and blame it on the elves. You know how people are about the Situation. But if she was seeing a soldier, he never came forward. And the local boy she was supposed to be sweet on flatly denied having anything to do with it. He swore blind he hadn’t touched her.’

‘You talked of an elf man having his way with her. Are you talking about rape?’

‘That’s what they said, but I don’t know whether there was any truth in it.’

‘And Rósamunda was shaken when she heard this?’

‘Knocked sideways. I told her in my opinion the girl must have been raped and the bastard who did it told her to lie and blame it on the hidden people. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. She turned white as a sheet and rushed out of the door.’

Flóvent pondered this news. If the incident in Öxarfjördur had taken place three years ago, might the man who raped Rósamunda have got wind of it? Surely the only possible conclusion was that the two cases were linked? Didn’t Rósamunda’s reaction suggest as much? Flóvent didn’t for a moment believe Hrund’s explanation. It must have been a man. It had nothing to do with the elves. Could the same man have raped both girls, and found the girl up north easier to fob off with this ridiculous lie than Rósamunda?

‘Isn’t it obvious that the poor girl was raped, beaten and had her clothes torn off?’ said Flóvent.

‘Yes, you’d have thought so,’ said Vigga. ‘But they never had a chance to get to the bottom of what really happened.’

‘You said there were British soldiers in the area. Were you aware of any other visitors to the district, anyone passing through, anyone—?’

‘Why do you assume it was an outsider?’

‘I don’t,’ said Flóvent. ‘But it seems natural to consider that angle.’

‘There were British soldiers around. I didn’t come into contact with any of them, though I can’t answer for the people on the farms — whether they had any dealings with the Tommies. Then there was the road crew, quite a crowd, all men, apart from us cooks. Must have been about thirty, forty men altogether. I don’t know who else was passing through, though I expect there were the usual summer visitors on the farms.’

‘Including the farm where the girl lived?’

‘Of course.’

‘Anyone from Reykjavík around at the time?’

‘Other than me, you mean? Our foreman, he was from town. And two or three others, but most of the crew were locals, boys from Húsavík, Kópasker and the other villages, and two or three cocky little sods from Akureyri.’

Flóvent stopped off at Fríkirkjuvegur on the way home to make notes on the information he had gathered that day. He telephoned Thorson’s office, only to learn that he had been called out and no one knew when he would be back. So Flóvent walked home across the bridge over the lake, calling in at the cemetery on Sudurgata as was his custom. Pausing by the grave, he said a brief prayer, then carried on through the west end of town to Framnesvegur.

Flóvent lived with his father in a small flat in a wooden house that had been converted into two apartments. It looked out over Faxaflói Bay, and from its windows Flóvent had watched the British invasion force sailing into Reykjavík harbour early one May morning in 1940. The occupation hadn’t come as a surprise to him, and since occupation by one side or the other was inevitable, he preferred the Tommies to the Nazis of the Third Reich.

His father had worked on the docks for many years, and was still employed there as caretaker for a small tool shed. He could have earned more working for the armed forces but refused to take part in any profiteering from the war. He was asleep on the couch in the kitchen but woke up when Flóvent came in.

‘That you, son?’ he said, sitting up. ‘I must have dozed off. Have you eaten? I’ve made rice pudding and there are some slices of liver sausage to go with it.’

They sat down to eat. Knowing just how much the cases that landed on his desk interested his father, Flóvent filled him in on the latest about Rósamunda. He knew his father would keep it to himself, trusted fully in his discretion as he trusted him in everything.

‘The huldufólk?’ said the old man. ‘Odd that the girl up north should mention them too.’

‘There may be a connection,’ said Flóvent. ‘It’s highly unlikely that two girls, on opposite sides of the country, would come up with an outlandish story like that unless there was a link. In fact, it’s out of the question.’

‘Have there been other stories about attacks of that kind?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Flóvent. ‘Maybe in a folk tale. Or even in old court records. I could check. See if anyone’s peddled that kind of nonsense before.’

‘You’d be wise not to rule it out. Supposed to have thrown herself into Dettifoss, is she?’

‘Nobody knows what became of her.’

‘Remember, just because you and I don’t believe in them, that doesn’t mean she didn’t genuinely believe she saw one of the hidden people. There must be a reason why we have all these folk tales about light elves and dark elves and trolls and ghosts. I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand or condemn her as being soft in the head.’

‘I’m not.’

‘No, I know, son. Your dear mother had a lot of time for the old beliefs. She’d have given the girl the benefit of the doubt, I expect. By the way, did you drop in at the graveyard?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘God bless them,’ his father said, not for the first time when the subject of the cemetery came up.

They had been living in a small, draughty basement room in one of the houses set back from Hverfisgata. It had been the coldest winter in living memory. People called it the Big Freeze. The pack ice had come right in to shore, the harbours froze over, you could walk out to the island of Videy without getting your feet wet, and the temperature kept plummeting below –30 °C. Day after day, Flóvent had huddled around the coal range with his parents and little sister, bundled up in all the clothes they owned, while his father used anything he could lay hands on for kindling.

And that was only the beginning of that fateful year, 1918. After a fleeting summer, autumn had set in, bringing with it the sickness that was said to have killed millions of people around the world. Their basement had provided some shelter from the cold, however inadequate, but it couldn’t keep out the Spanish flu. Flóvent’s mother and sister had both succumbed after a short illness. Flóvent had fallen ill too but recovered, while his father had escaped it entirely, which he put down to having contracted the influenza that ravaged the country in 1894.

The majority of the fatalities occurred in Reykjavík. The town’s mortuaries were soon overflowing and the authorities resorted to digging mass graves in the cemetery. On one terrible day at the height of the epidemic, almost twenty bodies had been interred in two graves, Flóvent’s mother and sister among them. Flóvent had been too ill to attend their funeral. In some cases as many as six coffins at a time were placed before the altar in the cathedral.

Emergency measures were put in place. The town was divided into thirteen districts, medical students were given temporary licences to practise, and house-to-house visits were organised to help those in need. The situation was desperate. People died in their beds a few days after being infected. Children were found standing alone over their parents’ bodies. Others lay gravely ill, unable to move.

Although Flóvent’s father had lost his wife and young daughter, or perhaps because of this, he did his bit for the relief effort. Once he had nursed his son through the flu, he worked day and night to support the doctors and nurses, accompanied all the while by church bells ringing the death knells of loved ones and the echo of weeping, carried from house to house by the bitter wind.

‘God bless them,’ his father said again, his eyes resting on his son. ‘God bless them and keep them, now and for ever.’