The Darkness Knows

28

Konrád rarely spoke of his father to anyone, but he made an exception for Eygló. She had worked as a psychic for a while, just like her father before her. Konrád had met her when he was looking for answers about his father’s connection to a crime dating back to the Second World War. The victim, a girl called Rósamunda, had been found murdered behind the National Theatre. When the hunt for her killer was at its height, her parents had attended a seance hosted by Konrád’s father, at which Eygló’s father had acted as the medium. During the seance he had claimed that he sensed Rósamunda’s presence, but one of the other participants had suspected foul play. It transpired that Konrád’s father had gathered information about Rósamunda’s parents before the meeting and passed it on to the medium. The pair were found guilty of fraud and deception over a long period, and were accused of having deliberately set out to profit from the parents’ grief and desperation for answers. Not long ago, Konrád had immersed himself in the details of Rósamunda’s case, which had taken place in 1944, the year he was born, and it had turned out to involve soldiers from the American occupation force, leading members of Icelandic society, and residents of the Shadow District.

The one time they’d met, Eygló told Konrád that several months after his father was stabbed to death outside the abattoir, her father, the medium, had taken his own life. She had never received any explanation for this. All she would say was that Konrád’s father must have had something on her dad, which he’d used to blackmail him into colluding in their scams. Because her dad had told her he was coerced into taking part in that seance. And he’d described Konrád’s father as a bad character. When the two men died in 1963, the war had long been over and so had their fake seances, but Konrád knew his father had associated with some dodgy types and he wanted to find out if there was any chance he could have returned to his old bad habits and started holding seances again.

All this had gone through Konrád’s mind when Hjaltalín raked up the subject of his father during their meeting in the prison cell and asked if Konrád had lost interest in his father’s fate, perhaps because he thought he wasn’t worth wasting any time on. Although Konrád hadn’t admitted as much to Hjaltalín, the truth was that he’d been quite preoccupied with his father’s death in recent months. The inquiry into his murder had been fairly comprehensive by the standards of the day, yet his killer had never been found. Konrád had looked up the case files after joining the police. The conclusion had been that it was a random killing, which made life difficult for the investigators. His father was simply the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. The chances were that he’d lost his temper with some complete stranger he ran into. But there didn’t appear to have been any kind of struggle before he was stabbed, and the motive couldn’t have been robbery as his wallet and watch were found on his body. All his known associates, many of them crooks like him, had been questioned, but nothing of any significance emerged.

Konrád himself had always sworn that he knew nothing about his father’s movements that evening. His parents had divorced many years previously and his mother had moved with Beta right across the country to Seydisfjördur in the East Fjords. She’d put up with her husband’s violence for years, and it had been a marriage in name only for a long time. He’d never had a proper job, drank too much and hung around with other drinkers and petty criminals. When his wife had finally had enough, he wouldn’t hear of her taking Konrád: Beta could go with her, he said, but Konrád was staying with him. She was faced with an impossible dilemma but believed that in time her husband would relent and let Konrád join her. This never happened, though, despite all the trips she made to Reykjavík to visit her son and try to persuade her husband to come to his senses and stop using their boy for revenge.

The evening his father died, Konrád was out on the town with his mates. By then he had dropped out of school, started drinking hard and become involved in petty crime. He had done a few jobs for his father, like selling stolen goods and distributing contraband — both from the American base at Keflavík and from the cargo ships — and on one occasion he had broken into a shop selling watches with a mate but ended up fleeing the scene without bringing away any loot. He was on the fast track to ruin, mixing with the wrong company, and deep down he’d known it.

‘You must have been shocked,’ Hjaltalín had said to him in that prison cell, but that was an understatement. It had been like a punch in the guts when the police broke the news and manner of his father’s death to him. Konrád felt as if the shock waves from that evening had been reverberating inside him ever since.

Eygló had been reluctant to meet Konrád when he rang this time but, after repeated requests on his part, she had finally agreed to have lunch with him at a restaurant in the city centre. She turned up punctually, dressed in black as she had been at their first meeting; petite, only a little younger than Konrád but looking good for her age. Her face was as smooth as if she’d never known a day’s worry in her life. They shook hands, two strangers linked by a pair of old conmen.

‘Do you really think you can dig up anything new on your father after all these years?’ Eygló asked, having chosen the plaice from the menu. Konrád ordered the same, remembering how quick she was to get to the point — no beating about the bush.

‘A while ago someone asked if I’d forgotten him,’ Konrád said. ‘Asked if I felt he wasn’t worth wasting my energy on. I have to say, I was a bit taken aback. But I have less to do these days and maybe it’s taken me all these years to get to the point where I want to know more about my father.’

‘He was a deeply unpleasant man,’ Eygló said, ‘according to Engilbert, my dad. But then you can’t have failed to be aware of that. Men like your father make enemies.’

‘I believe the police talked to everyone who knew him, as well as a whole load of people who didn’t, but nothing doing. I don’t really know where to begin looking into his death, so it occurred to me to start with you. Last time we talked you said you reckoned my dad had something on Engilbert.’

‘Yes. I also told you that I didn’t know what it was.’

‘Do you think they’d started working together again?’

‘I can’t believe that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because Dad loathed your father. He thought he was an absolute shit and didn’t want anything more to do with him.’

‘Is that what he told you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So how come he was talking to you about my father?’

‘He never used to, but one time he and my mother had a fight and your father’s name came up — and my mother started ranting about what a bastard he was. Afterwards, I asked Dad who she’d been talking about, and he told me he’d got into bad company when he was younger and had let himself be talked into doing things that he deeply regretted later.’

‘Did he tell you what those things were?’

‘No. What makes you think they’d started working together again? What evidence do you have for that?’

‘Just some stuff I found among my father’s papers after he died,’ Konrád said.

‘What stuff?’

‘Some articles about notorious fake mediums and how they’d been exposed. Stories about fraud. Accounts of the Ether World.’

‘The Ether World?’

‘Yes.’

Eygló gave Konrád an appraising glance. He had noticed before how wary and suspicious she was by nature.

‘Was his interest in the Ether World out of character?’ she asked at last. ‘Was it a side of him you hadn’t seen before?’

‘Yes, totally. The articles and stories were recent — from a couple of years before his death — and it occurred to me that he might have started messing around with spiritualism again. But I never found any confirmation of that.’

‘Do you believe in the spirit world yourself?’ Eygló asked. ‘Or the Ether World or whatever you want to call it?’

‘No,’ said Konrád.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘Then why do I get the sense that you do?’

‘Search me.’

‘Engilbert respected believers,’ Eygló said. ‘He had compassion for people who were suffering and searching for answers. But your father didn’t believe in anything. He didn’t feel empathy for anyone. He mocked people who were looking for answers. How could those two men have worked together? Tell me that. How on earth did their paths ever cross?’

Konrád had no answer to this.

‘My father believed in what used to be called the Ether World,’ Eygló went on. ‘He believed that people went there after their death, that it was as real as our own world, and that from time to time the inhabitants of the Ether World would make contact with us. His role was to mediate those contacts. To act as a channel. Your father managed to abuse that. He perverted my father’s talents. I find it painful even to think about and, to be honest, I don’t know what to make of you — what to make of your fumblings for the truth. I just don’t know.’