The Darkness Knows

16

When she’d notified the police about her brother, she’d had her whole life ahead of her. Naturally, she’d been anxious about his unexplained absence, but her manner had been smiling and friendly in spite of that. She wasn’t to know then that she would spend the next three decades living in the shadow of his disappearance. Now, with a good portion of her life behind her, Konrád thought he could see how much the loss had left its mark on her.

Her name was Jórunn. Konrád, who hadn’t seen her for years, noticed the stamp of tiredness on her face, like a visible reminder of the hard times she had endured. There was no trace of her former smiley manner. These days her friendliness was more guarded. She told him that, grateful as she was to fate for making the glacier return her brother, she had found it hard to deal with the accompanying media storm. It had been bad enough having to cope over the years with the steady flow of conspiracy theories in the papers, with all the new rumours, old photos, and endless rehashes of the events surrounding the case. She had soon stopped answering the phone to the press, and suffered agonies every time the case was brought up, until in the end she had stopped following the coverage altogether. She’d been forced to go ex-directory as well, to avoid all the phone calls from drunk, obnoxious strangers claiming to know exactly what had happened.

Brother and sister had been close, which had made it easy for her to answer questions about Sigurvin’s private affairs during the original inquiry. She and Konrád had always got on well. She’d had full confidence in him, knowing in her heart that he was doing everything in his power to solve the case, so when he asked if they could meet up now that her brother had been found, she readily agreed. Marta had been to see her twice and asked her repeatedly about the glacier, but Jórunn, as astonished as everyone else by the fact her brother’s body had been found there, was unable to provide any new insights.

‘I heard you’d retired,’ Jórunn said as she invited him in. She lived alone, never having married or had children, and Konrád wondered if her brother’s disappearance had played its part in this.

‘That’s right, I have. But the situation’s rather unusual.’

‘It certainly is. As no one knows better than you.’

‘It must have come as a shock.’

‘Yes. It was... surreal somehow, when it finally happened. I didn’t think it ever would and had long ago accepted the fact. Accepted that he was dead and that I’d never find out what had become of him. Then this.’

‘What was your first thought when you heard about the glacier? What was the very first thing that came into your mind?’

‘I don’t know. What did you think?’

‘That we should have done better,’ Konrád said. ‘That we must have cocked up badly and missed some vital clue. That we should have found him long before this.’

‘I always felt you were doing your best.’

‘It wasn’t enough. We... we messed up somehow.’

‘I was astonished, of course,’ Jórunn said. ‘What on earth could Sigurvin have been doing up there? But when I heard he hadn’t gone to the glacier voluntarily, I immediately thought whoever did it must have been experienced at travelling on ice. No one would go up there unless they knew what they were doing. Marta told me the police have been devoting a lot of energy to examining this angle but that they haven’t uncovered any leads yet. Of course, all sorts of people travel on glaciers — nowadays, anyway. Tour operators. Mountaineers. Fishermen. Skiers. Walking groups. The Icelandic Touring Association. The Útivist Club. All of them.’

‘The search and rescue teams...’

‘Yes, of course. Aren’t they always having to rescue people from the ice caps?’

‘Did nothing at all occur to you in connection with Sigurvin?’

‘No. I’ve been racking my brains ever since but I can’t think of anything.’

‘He never mentioned anything about a glacier trip?’

‘No. Not that I remember, anyway.’

‘Did he have any friends or acquaintances we weren’t aware of, who were interested in that sort of thing? Who were into travelling in the interior or mountaineering?’

‘I don’t think so. Sigurvin never wanted to set foot outside Reykjavík,’ Jórunn said. ‘He had no interest in travelling round Iceland. Going abroad was what he enjoyed. We weren’t well off as kids, so when Sigurvin got rich, he wanted to make the most of it, and one of the ways he did that was by taking foreign holidays.’

Konrád was aware that brother and sister had grown up with a single mother who had died some years after her son vanished. They had been desperately hard up when they were young; so poor, in fact, that their mother could barely put food on the table. A relative had taken pity on them, though. He had a small wholesale business and saw to it that both kids continued in education: Jórunn went to the Reykjavík Sixth-Form College, Sigurvin to the Commercial College. They were both diligent and Sigurvin was particularly resourceful, providing them with a small income from mowing lawns and other odd jobs. He had got his driving licence as soon as he was old enough and started working for his relative. Whenever he saw a chance of making a few extra krónur, he would leap at it. And once he reached adulthood, it seemed he had never been short of money again. Konrád had talked to the relative during the inquiry and he had spoken well of Sigurvin and mourned his loss, while describing him as very money-minded. It was a description that stayed with Konrád because it fitted the impression other people had given of Sigurvin, though they hadn’t put it quite as tactfully as the kind-hearted relative. Sigurvin had been motivated by a desire to get rich. He’d enjoyed racking up a profit.

Jórunn had once told Konrád that her brother had always taken good care of their mother, as well as being generous to her. Yet he could also be tight-fisted and had been very insistent that people should stick to contracts. He had been terribly hurt when Hjaltalín started accusing him of dishonesty, of ripping him off and deceiving him, and the more Hjaltalín had raged, the more Sigurvin had dug in his heels. Jórunn didn’t know how things had got so bad between them. But the fact was, her brother could be unreasonable. She’d asked him once why he and Hjaltalín couldn’t just find a solution that would make them both happy. He’d retorted that he’d behaved honestly when he’d bought Hjaltalín out; there’d been no cheating or machinations behind the scenes, and it wasn’t his problem if Hjaltalín felt he’d done a bad deal.

‘Tell me something,’ Konrád said now, after they had been chatting for a while. ‘Hjaltalín received a visit in hospital shortly before he died. A woman was seen sitting by his bed. Do you know anything about that?’

‘No.’

‘It wasn’t you?’

‘Me?’

‘You didn’t go to see him?’

‘What for? I had absolutely nothing to say to that man.’

‘No, of course,’ Konrád said, dropping the subject. ‘It must have been someone else.’

‘Sigurvin was a good guy,’ Jórunn said after a long pause. ‘He didn’t deserve what happened to him. No one deserves a fate like that.’

‘That’s true.’

‘I always felt he was like the Boy Scout he’d once been,’ Jórunn said. ‘Eager to help. A sweet person. A lovely man, brother and son.’

‘Was Sigurvin in the Scouts?’ Konrád asked, pouncing on this detail. He didn’t remember having heard it before.

‘Not for very long. He was bursting with enthusiasm when he joined but I don’t think that lasted more than a year or two.’

‘No longer than that?’

‘No. He soon got bored and quit.’

‘How old was he?’

‘Ten or twelve. He can’t have been much older than that.’ Jórunn’s head drooped. ‘I’m glad he’s been found,’ she said. ‘The uncertainty about what happened... it’s been eating away at me all these years. Not a day’s gone by when I haven’t thought about him and... you can’t imagine how much... what a huge relief it is that he’s turned up at last.’