Someone to Watch Over Me

CHAPTER 10 Sunday, 10 January 2010

‘I hope Grandma and Grandpa will always be with us.’ Sóley grinned happily and put down her toast, which was sagging beneath the weight of the jam slathered on it. ‘It’s much nicer having them in the garage, instead of a load of old boxes.’

Thóra returned her daughter’s smile as she took the last plate from the dishwasher. The machine had been in constant use, apart from at the dead of night, since her parents had moved in the previous evening. Once the household was at full capacity the washing machine would be going every waking hour as well. ‘Yes, it’s a nice change, isn’t it?’

‘Orri speeterman!’ Three members of the household were awake: Thóra, Sóley and Thóra’s grandson, who was two and a half. Ever since someone had given him a Spiderman T-shirt, he thought he was a superhero. The boy still had some way to go before he could be considered a great orator, but he was starting to speak more.

Sóley opened her mouth to correct her nephew, but stopped and took a bite of toast instead. ‘Oh, yeah. You need to help me find a costume. It’s Kolla’s birthday tomorrow and we’re supposed to wear fancy dress.’ It was doubtful that many people besides her mother would have understood her with her mouth full.

‘When’s the party?’ Thóra knew it had to be today or tomorrow; Sóley had made it her speciality to let her mother know about such things with the smallest possible amount of notice.

‘Later today.’ Sóley swallowed her huge mouthful dramatically.

Although Thóra was sorely tempted to suggest that she go as the Invisible Man, with her costume being that she didn’t turn up, she decided not to. ‘Maybe Grandma and Grandpa can help you.’

Sóley agreed to this, beaming. ‘When is everyone going to wake up, anyway? I think they’ve slept long enough.’

‘Everyone’s tired after last night. We’ll just let them sleep.’ All working together, Thóra and Matthew, her parents, Thóra’s son Gylfi and his girlfriend Sigga had made space in the garage and set up a bed and other essentials for the newest members of the household. While they worked, Sóley had looked after Orri; but the toddler had kept trying to help with the move, which was met with limited enthusiasm by the movers. The garage had been crammed with stuff, and they hadn’t had time to sort through everything that had been shoved in there. Instead, some of it had been put in the basement and the rest out in the shed in the garden. The shed hadn’t been used much up to that point, but now it couldn’t hold another thing. ‘They’ll be up before we know it, demanding coffee and cakes.’

‘Speeterman.’ Orri looked down at his chest, enraptured by the costumed man on his shirt. His breakfast lay untouched on the table in front of him, since he couldn’t take his eyes off the superhero for long enough to eat.

‘Spi-der-man, not speeterman.’ Sóley had finally tired of the endless repetition. ‘He’s called Spi-der-man.’

‘Speeterman.’ Orri neither looked away from the image nor let his language coach distract him.

‘Why can’t he talk better, Mum?’ Sóley’s frustration didn’t surprise Thóra; her daughter had long been comparing Orri to her best friend’s sister, who was the same age, and the little boy was far behind her in terms of language development.

‘He can say quite a few other things, so don’t worry about it. He’ll be chattering away before you know it, and then you’ll miss the time when he hardly said anything.’ Sóley obviously disagreed with this, so Thóra quickly changed the subject. ‘Did you feed Mjása this morning?’ Unexpectedly, the family cat hadn’t shown itself when Thóra came into the kitchen; usually it was the very first one to demand food in the morning, and feeding it was how she started most of her days.

Sóley nodded and swallowed the last bite of toast. ‘She couldn’t wait for you. I think she was dying of hunger.’

‘As always.’ The cat ate several times a day and didn’t appear any the worse for it, since despite its apparently bottomless appetite, it always stayed quite slim. If it was indoors and someone so much as walked past the kitchen it would be there, mewing pitifully in the hope of getting fed. ‘It wouldn’t have wanted to wait for sleepy old me.’ Thóra hadn’t been able to find her mobile phone when they were all finally able to go to bed, and she hadn’t felt like calling it to locate it. As a result, she hadn’t set an alarm and had slept late. Now she caught a glimpse of the phone under a crumpled tea towel on the kitchen sideboard. She reached for it and saw that while she was sleeping she’d missed a phone call, and received a text. That was unusual. No one ever called her at night nowadays; the time when she could expect messages from tipsy girlfriends downtown, telling her about late-night parties was long gone, and although she recalled those days fondly, she didn’t miss them. Perhaps the same wasn’t true of one of her girlfriends, who simply had to tell Thóra about some cute man she’d just met. The screen said Number withheld when Thóra tried to view the details of the call. She could see that it had been around three o’clock, long after she’d vanished into dreamland. The text had come five minutes later. It was sent from ja.is, which meant that there was no way of knowing whether it was from the same person as the missed call, although that seemed likely. If so, the person in question had been at a computer or accessed the Internet through their phone. Several of her friends had smartphones that they bragged about at every conceivable – and inconceivable – opportunity. She opened the text, though she thought she could guess what was in it: Leave your man at home and come to the party or Guess who I went home with? In fact the only thing that she couldn’t predict was how many smiley faces would follow the message.

When she read the text she was so surprised that she dropped the phone into the sink with a thunk. Sóley looked at her inquisitively and even Orri tore his eyes from Spiderman for the first time since being put in his chair. Thóra reached for her mobile phone, which was lying between two coffee cups, thankfully dry and intact. The screen was still backlit and the black letters blared provocatively at her: Who raped Lísa? Whose child is it? Both very good questions, but the one uppermost in Thóra’s mind was: ‘Who sent this message?’

Matthew put down the phone, let himself fall back onto the pillow and yawned. ‘Is the shower free?’

‘The shower?’ Thóra grabbed the phone back. ‘Who cares about that? Don’t you think this is weird? It’s the third time I’ve got this kind of message; I received two the other day, but I ignored them because I thought they’d come to me by accident. One of them just said Pregnant, but the other was How did Helena get burned as a child? You have to admit it’s pretty strange. I have them here if you want to see; luckily I didn’t delete them.’

‘Okay, no, no need. It is very odd, I’ll certainly admit that.’ Matthew closed his eyes. ‘I’m just not really awake yet.’

‘No, obviously not.’ The light of the phone’s screen faded, although the text was still visible through the grey. ‘The thing is, not many people know that I’m investigating this case. In fact, I can only think of two: the lazybones lawyer, Ari, and the woman who used to run the centre, Glódís. I’m fairly certain Jakob’s mother didn’t know where I was going with the questions about Lísa, and Jakob had no clue. And besides, he doesn’t have access to either the Internet or a phone.’

‘But why would Ari or Glódís send a message like this?’ Matthew was starting to perk up, though he sneaked in a deep yawn. ‘What’s the purpose of these questions? To get you to dig around to find out who the father is? I wouldn’t have thought either of them would want to draw attention to that. He admitted how he only skimmed through the files, and she was very open about how little she thought of her clients.’

‘Well, I don’t know, maybe one of them was drunk and wanted to stir things up.’

Matthew pushed himself up onto one elbow. ‘Isn’t that a bit far-fetched?’ He cocked his head to listen, then smiled when he realized that the shower was free.

‘Yes.’ Thóra put her phone in her pocket. ‘But it simply couldn’t be anyone else. I can’t think of anyone, anyway.’

‘I don’t suppose the woman, Glódís, discussed it with someone at work, and they then took it personally? Maybe a former employee of the centre who was unhappy with the outcome of the case?’

‘Maybe.’ Thóra relaxed her forehead and her worry-lines disappeared. ‘I also had another idea. Sóley’s going to her friend’s birthday party where the kids are supposed to wear costumes, and it made me think of a possible explanation for the angel Jakob mentioned. The home burned down in October – the month of Halloween. It’s becoming more and more popular and there may have been a fancy dress party in the neighbourhood, even though the fire didn’t occur on the thirty-first.’

Matthew looked unconvinced. ‘I seriously doubt it.’

‘But it wouldn’t hurt to check.’

Matthew got up, put on a bathrobe and headed to the shower, and Thóra took out the centre’s employee list and sat down with it in front of the computer. First she attempted to find any reference to a fancy dress party somewhere in the vicinity of the residence on the night of the fire, but she found nothing, not even when she widened the search parameters to include the entire city. The idea was probably too far-fetched, as Matthew had said. Sóley and Orri were staring transfixed at a cartoon on TV, so she had total peace and quiet, for the moment at least. Disappointed at not having got anywhere with her idea about the costume party, she decided to investigate whether any of the people on the list still worked for the Regional Office. This proved easier than she’d hoped. The office maintained a website that listed the names of its employees, although it didn’t specify who did what, so she couldn’t determine whether a particular person worked with Glódís at the main office or in a community residence in town. The office managed a total of twenty-eight homes, but only their directors were named on the site. Thóra recognized only one name from the list of former employees: Elías Þráinsson, who had been promoted, which must have been painful for Glódís to witness. Thóra suspected that despite her bitching and moaning about her workload, Glódís had it pretty easy where she was; at least, her phone hadn’t rung once during her meeting with Thóra. Other phones in the office had hardly seemed to shut up. The fire must have been a blow to Glódís’s career, even if only for the revelation of Lísa’s pregnancy and the fact that the security system hadn’t been set up yet. Of course Glódís couldn’t be blamed for the fire, but someone had failed in their duties.

She saw that approximately half of those people on the list still worked in the Regional Office. Except for Elías, Thóra couldn’t find out what jobs they did, despite searching everywhere, and she wondered whether it actually mattered. Since the person sending the messages was in the habit of covering their tracks, they’d hardly be likely to admit sending the messages or say what was on their mind. It might be more useful to stop trying to track down this mysterious texter and focus instead on what the former employees of the centre had to say about its operations. In this regard, Thóra strongly suspected that those who no longer worked for the Regional Office would speak more openly. On the other hand, she had no idea how she would track down these particular employees, most of whom had rather ordinary names, because she didn’t have any other information about them except for what was stated on Glódís’s list. She couldn’t think of anything else but to turn to the Internet telephone directory. She was able to rule out a high proportion of the names from their job titles, which were listed in the directory.

She had just one name left when Matthew came up behind her and stroked her hair. She could smell his aftershave. She took hold of his hand and brought it to her lips, but as she turned to him she spied her mother, wearing a dressing gown that Thóra remembered from her childhood home. Even the belt, which was tied tightly around her waist, was showing signs of wear. In places the material had worn through to little more than threads, revealing a red, full-length velvet nightdress that looked as if it could melt icebergs. The effects of the aftershave instantly vanished.

‘How’s it going? Should I make us some coffee?’ Thóra’s mother smiled at them and walked purposefully into the kitchen without waiting for a reply. Shortly afterwards they heard her humming a tune that sounded familiar, but impossible to place. From the garage came the sound of Thóra’s father whistling the same melody.

This was going to be an interesting living arrangement; maybe now wasn’t a bad time for her to make an appointment for that bikini wax…

Margeir woke up miserable and thought at first that he was hungover. His mind struggled to orient itself. He felt as if he must have drunk an enormous quantity of something – a whole box of cheap white wine, maybe even two. But then his head cleared and he remembered that he hadn’t drunk a drop. His headache was caused by something else. He opened his eyes carefully and avoided lifting his head from the pillow. He lay like that for a few moments, staring at the bedroom window, which was shut tight. The air in the room was thick and heavy and even though he should have long been impervious to it, his nostrils burned with each inhalation, forcing him to breathe through his mouth. In order to do so, he had to push away the thought of the poisonous grey cloud slipping past his teeth and tongue before running along his soft palate and down into his lungs. He felt nauseous and tried to gather the strength to stand up and open the window. Why was it closed, anyway? Margeir always slept with it wide open, whatever the weather. If he could have, he’d have removed the outer wall during the night and allowed the clear, cold air to waft around him. He must have either forgotten to open the window or shut it sometime during the night.

He reached for his alarm clock and turned it towards him. It was the clock radio his brother had given him as a Christmas present, thinking it appropriate since Margeir worked at a radio station. It was now nearly 9.30 a.m., which was about what he’d expected. He felt so rotten that he couldn’t even tell if he was still tired. But the fog in his head was starting to clear and he could finally remember when he’d gone to sleep and what he’d been doing. There had been no drinking involved. He had rented a film from the corner shop, and when that had finished he had sat for two hours watching trashy TV. He hadn’t gone to sleep until nearly three, which was not that late for him. Most single men his age were probably awake longer than he was on weekends, and the thought bothered him. This winter had been different to all the previous ones, and his desire to go out and have fun had vanished slowly but surely. All the good feelings alcohol used to stir in him now seemed so hollow and false; smiling and laughing ran completely contrary to how he felt. His job undoubtedly contributed to his misery; he had the whole disappointed, disillusioned nation on the line. When he felt this crappy, he simply had no desire to try to enjoy himself. He felt nothing but relief the first time he declined to go out on the town with his friends, and from that point on there was no going back; it became easier and easier just to stay at home. They had long since stopped calling him.

The alarm on the bedside table suddenly went off and Margeir stared at the device as his own voice blared out of it. It was a repeat of his show from the day before. For a second he felt as if he’d turned on the radio with his mind, but then he realized what had actually happened. He knew it was pathetic, but until things got better and he found a day job he didn’t want to get into the habit of sleeping late. So he got up and attempted to occupy himself with something, every day of the week. Eight o’clock on weekdays and nine thirty on weekends.

His head felt lighter and the throbbing pain in his neck had dulled. He raised himself onto his elbows and sat up. The sooner he opened the window, the better. With the same technique that he used when jumping into a cold pool, he got to his feet without thinking or hesitating and took the two steps to the window. The latch was stiff but he finally managed to wrench the window open and suck in the pure, ice-cold air.

‘Who is this?’ His voice sounded lifeless in the worn-out mono radio behind him. ‘Don’t call if you’re just going to breathe into the receiver.’

Margeir felt a chill run through his body but he didn’t know whether it was because his lungs were now full of fresh, cold air or whether the repeat of the telephone call from the previous night’s show was making him uncomfortable.

‘Just wait. Just wait.’ If he sounded a bit lacklustre on the radio, the voice of the person he was speaking to was completely lifeless. Hearing it now, he was certain it had been tampered with, probably via some sort of program that could be downloaded from the Internet. There was a particular mechanical tone to the voice that was even more apparent on the little radio than it had been through the station’s telephone the previous evening. His own voice sounded again and his agitation was obvious to him, although others would hardly have noticed it… hopefully. He sounded arrogant and offhand: ‘For what? For you to get to the point? What’s on your mind, friend?’

‘The reckoning.’

‘What reckoning?’ Now the fake toughness was gone from Margeir’s voice. It had become clear to him that this was the weirdo who had started calling in on almost every show. If this continued, it could be called harassment, but Margeir wasn’t certain the police would agree, nor could he see how a telephone restraining order would be implemented. Especially since Margeir would never involve the police in this. Not if the nutter on the telephone was insinuating what Margeir suspected he was.

‘You know perfectly well what I mean. Justice finds everyone in the end.’ Loud inhalation, long exhalation. ‘And there’s no escape.’ The caller hung up and a loud dialling tone followed, until the engineer realized Margeir wasn’t going to add anything clever and put on a song.

His headache was growing steadily more intense. Margeir sat carefully back down on his bed. Sinking slowly into his pillow, he turned off the radio, though he actually longed to push it off the table. As he did so, he spotted his mobile phone lying next to the radio and reached for it thinking perhaps he remembered the phone having woken him in the night. As he fiddled with the buttons in search of calls that he might have missed he suddenly remembered what had happened: he had received a text, a message from ja.is that had disturbed his pleasant sleep and troubled him enough to make him get up, go to the window and shut and lock it. Although he was in no mood to read the message again, his fingers ran over the keys and opened the text, completely against his will.

The reckoning is coming. Is there someone outside?