The Shadow District

9

A quick inquiry revealed that the Association of Chartered Engineers had very little information about Stefán Thórdarson, or Stephan Thorson. It was a good many years since he had retired, and he had been receiving regular payouts from the engineers’ pension fund, but the staff there knew nothing else about him. It was news to Marta that the dead man was Canadian. Birgitta hadn’t shared that information with the police when they spoke to her. It appeared that Stefán had never married and had no known children. And since no one had come to view his body at the mortuary or enquired after him, it was hard to establish anything else about him. The lack of progress was making Marta irritable.

‘Nobody can be that alone in the world,’ she complained to Konrád over the phone.

‘Why not?’ asked Konrád. He had just left Birgitta and was about to head over to the nursing home the old man had apparently visited. ‘Presumably his family were all in Canada, and anyway his closest relatives would be long dead by now. He chose to begin a new life here and never started a family of his own. All the same, he must have had a few other friends like Birgitta, so maybe you’ll manage to track some of them down.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ said Marta. ‘It’s bound to have been someone close to him.’

‘Who killed him, you mean?’

‘Yes, the poor old boy opens the door to someone he knows and invites him in. Or there’d be signs of a break-in or a struggle. Nothing was stolen. So it looks as though his visitor intended to do away with him, but even so —’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Konrád. ‘We can’t assume he knew the person who came to the door. That was my first reaction too, but when you stop and think about it, we open our doors to anyone who knocks or rings the bell. You’d have to be unusually distrustful not to. So the old man didn’t necessarily know the person or people who did this. You can’t make that leap.’

‘All the same, the chances are he did. I’ll get in touch with the Manitoba police and find out if they can dig anything up on this... Stephen Thorson, was that what you said?’

‘Stephan. Not Stephen.’

‘Anything else? Anything in connection with the newspaper cuttings?’

‘No, nothing except...’

‘What?’

‘Well, it was a strangely quiet death, but...’

‘What? What are you trying to say? Spit it out.’

‘But it’s oddly consistent with the way he lived. He was so self-effacing. No one’s aware of his existence. He simply lived. And died.’

The manager of the nursing home was rushed off his feet and could scarcely spare a moment for Konrád. He was a big man and loud with it. Konrád tracked him down by following the noise from the other end of the corridor. The man was thundering down the phone — at a supplier, apparently. There were two other men in his office. The manager ended his conversation with a few choice expletives, barked at the two men, who scurried out, then swung round to Konrád.

‘And what can I do for you?’ The phone on his desk started ringing. He picked up the receiver, said no three times, at equally spaced intervals, then banged it down.

Konrád introduced himself. ‘I’m enquiring about a man who came here recently, presumably to visit one of the residents.’

‘Oh yes? Who was that?’

‘His name was Stefán Thórdarson. He was very old, over ninety.’

‘That’s no age nowadays,’ said the manager. ‘It’s like the old have stopped dying altogether.’

‘Quite. Anyway, it occurred to me that he might have asked you or your staff for assistance.’

‘Stefán Thórdarson?’

‘Yes.’

‘I recognise the name. Isn’t that the man who was found murdered in his bed? I remember him. He was round here a few days before that. Asking after our Vigga.’

‘Vigga?’

‘She’s a patient of ours. Spends most of her time in bed, completely out of it. Used to live in the Shadow District.’

Konrád stared at the man. ‘Do you know why he wanted to see her?’

‘No, though I seem to recall him saying he was an old friend of hers.’

‘I used to know a woman called Vigga from that neighbourhood,’ said Konrád. ‘She’d be very long in the tooth by now. I wonder if she’s the one he came to visit?’

‘We’ve only got the one Vigga here. Do you want to see her? Who did you say you were again? Are you with the police?’

The phone started ringing again and the man snatched up the receiver.

‘Thank you,’ said Konrád. ‘I’ll find my own way.’

He left the office smartly. Walking along the corridor, he remembered how, as a child in the Shadow District, life had held no greater terror for him than a woman called Vigga, who lived on Lindargata. Years later he had discovered to his surprise that she was born in 1915. In those days people used to age much faster, ground down by hardship and back-breaking work, so although he had always thought of her as ancient, she couldn’t have been forty yet in his earliest memories.

She had lived alone and was the target of the local children because of her eccentric clothing and habits. They used to call her Vigga Pig and were petrified of her, giving her a wide berth except when they ganged up in sufficient numbers to torment her. Once in a while she would lose her rag, which only increased the thrill. If the kids saw her coming to the door as if to chase them, they would run away shrieking. Occasionally she would take on her persecutors, catching a couple and laying into them, all the while producing a stream of the most terrible curses they had ever heard. Boiling lead was a favourite threat of hers; she used to exclaim that she’d pour it all over the little swine. Once, when Konrád was six years old, she had caught him throwing snowballs at her house. She came storming out in her peculiar get-up of woollen vest, three ragged jumpers, several layers of skirts and a large pair of rubber galoshes that reached almost up to the knee. Konrád would have got away, silly little fool that he was, if he hadn’t slipped and fallen on his bottom. She had grabbed hold of him, slapped his cheek, already raw with the cold, so hard it brought tears to his eyes, then hurled him to the ground and said if he didn’t bugger off home she’d lock him in her cellar.

Konrád had never been inside her cellar but knew of its existence from the blood-curdling tales of children who had gone missing in the Shadow District or neighbouring Thingholt and never been heard of again. It was rumoured that they had come to a sticky end in Vigga Pig’s cellar. She had always lived alone on the edge of the district, in a small house clad in corrugated iron that gave a satisfying boom when you threw stones at it. The single-glazed windows used to ice up in freezing weather. She seemed to have few friends; at least she had few regular visitors, apart from the man in the coal lorry who used to come once a fortnight until Vigga relented in her hatred of inevitable progress and allowed the Reykjavík District Heating Authority into her home to install the new geothermal radiators. She made her living as a washerwoman, according to Konrád’s mother, who used to forbid him to tease Vigga as her life was tough enough without a pack of naughty children giving her grief.

Konrád entered the room where Vigga was asleep under a white duvet. He reflected that the Shadow District had a strange, roundabout way of seeking him out. There was the girl murdered during the war, the cuttings the old man had kept, his dad’s seance, and now Vigga, lying under the covers, invisible apart from her grey hair and wrinkled forehead. He wondered what business Stefán could have had with his childhood bogeywoman, this indomitable old lady whom even death had not yet managed to defeat.