The Quiet Mother

10

The woman immediately realised who Konrád was and agreed to meet him, but was somewhat surprised by the call. She admitted that she’d never expected him to contact her after all this time.

She knew he was a policeman. Many years after the incident at the slaughterhouse, someone had mentioned to her that he worked as a detective, which made her think he might call her one day. She found that quite natural in the small society that Iceland was in those days — and indeed still was — in which everyone knew everyone else and was acquainted in some way or bound by family ties. When the years passed and she came across his name in connection with criminal investigations that had made it into the media, she sometimes wondered why he’d never called.

When he finally got in touch after so many years, she wasn’t just surprised, but also curious. She couldn’t refrain from asking about it when they met at a cafe in the city centre, saying that she hoped he didn’t take it as presumption on her part. Pointed out that it was none of her business, of course, what he did or didn’t do. She just wanted to quench her curiosity and he mustn’t take it amiss, but he’d worked for a long time as a detective and his father was murdered. Why hadn’t he ever looked into that case? And why was he doing so now?

‘Or maybe you did without my being aware of it,’ she quickly added, realising that that was a possibility, as well. That he’d delved into it without talking to her. ‘Of course, there was no reason why I should have known about it.’

Konrád smiled, getting the feeling that she wasn’t prying, but wanted to help him if possible. She was the woman who had found his father dead outside the slaughterhouse. She was very straightforward and had been receptive to his call, listened to him with an open mind and agreed without hesitation to meet him once she’d got over her surprise. ‘Just let me know when,’ she’d said.

Konrád, however, hadn’t expected that she would press him in this way and found himself tongue-tied, as had sometimes happened when this case came up in conversation. His father was the sort of person who was difficult to be around and Konrád sometimes thought that he’d brought on himself the cruel fate he’d suffered, despite nothing justifying such violence. He left behind him a long trail of petty crimes and misdemeanours, prison terms and dealings with the dregs of society. Family life wasn’t much better: drunkenness, domestic violence and, finally, abuse, which Konrád didn’t find out about until much later. The last interactions between the father and son were full of anger and hatred, due to the fact that Konrád’s mother had finally told him the truth. Many years before, she’d saved her daughter from her husband’s clutches, moving out east to Seyðisfjörður after she discovered that he’d started molesting the girl. Neighbours described a loud argument between the father and son only a few hours before the murder. It so happened that Konrád’s mother was in town that night. Early the next morning, she was on a bus heading back east. The police stopped the bus in the village of Blönduós. During repeated questionings, she denied all involvement in and knowledge of the matter. Her sister and brother-in-law confirmed that she’d stayed with them and not gone out that night. Konrád had also been summoned for questioning. His friends said they’d been with him all night.

There at the cafe, the woman sipped her coffee. They sat off to one side and the question hung in the air.

‘I don’t know,’ said Konrád. ‘Maybe it’s something that’s grown over the years. The need to know. I have more time on my hands and sometimes think about what happened. My father wasn’t a pleasant man, and made enemies easily.’

‘Have there been any developments in the case?’ asked the woman who had once come across his father lying in his own blood. Her name was Helga, and she’d been running a dance school for the longest time. She smiled easily and moved gracefully.

‘No, none,’ Konrád answered. ‘This case is a real mystery, and I haven’t really given it any serious thought. It was dealt with quite well at the time. I can’t fault the investigation. It’s more like fiddling around, on my part.’

She seemed satisfied with his explanation, as imperfect as it was, and recalled what had happened that fateful night. It was vivid in her mind’s eye, despite decades having passed. She would never experience anything like it again, and had nightmares about it for a long time afterwards.

Back then, she was taking dancing lessons in the evenings at Jón Þorsteinsson’s gym on Skuggasund Street with two of her friends, and went home with one of them after practice and sat with her until late that night. The woman lived on Lindargata Street, whereas Helga lived in one of the blocks of flats at the eastern end of Skúlagata Street, not far from where the new police station was later built. The two friends lost track of time choreographing new moves for a dance competition to be held the following week, and when Helga saw how late it was, she decided to take the shortest way home along Skúlagata.

‘I went that way almost every day and knew the route like the back of my hand,’ said Helga. The Völundur woodshop with its tower, the Klöpp petrol station down by the sea, the old Kveldúlfsskáli building and the slaughterhouse. ‘On the other hand, I was hardly ever there that late at night, and at the time, it was a pretty shady part of town. The street lighting was poor and there was almost no traffic on Skúlagata, as there were far fewer cars in the city back then. I remember that long before I got to the slaughterhouse, I could smell the odour of the smoking kilns, which hung over the entire area,’ she added — contradicting her testimony in the case files, which made no mention of the kilns having been running.

‘I remember the smell well,’ said Konrád. It was inescapable when they lit the kilns.

‘There was supposed to be a light over the entrance to the slaughterhouse, but the bulb was out, the police told me later, so I’d come quite near before I noticed the heap on the pavement in front of the gate. I had no idea what it was and slowed down. I was afraid it might be a dog and I was scared of them, but then I saw that that wasn’t what it was at all.’

Helga took a sip of coffee.

‘There was a man lying there in the street and I thought it was a tramp dozing by the gate.’

‘So you hurried across the street?’ asked Konrád. He’d read her testimony numerous times.

‘I was afraid of tramps,’ she said. ‘Dogs and tramps. There were tramps in town back then. Now you hardly ever see them.’

‘And when you crossed the street, you saw that there was something wrong with the man.’

‘I saw the black puddle. The blood under him. It was awful, all that blood. Instead of running away as fast as I could, I went closer and saw that he was badly wounded. I thought he was dead, but he wasn’t.’

‘You saw that he was alive.’

Helga nodded.

‘He looked at me and tried to say something but I didn’t hear what it was, and when I moved closer, I stepped in the puddle of blood and got it on my shoes. It’s one of my strongest memories of that horror. Of course I was just a child. I never wanted to wear these shoes again and my mum had to give them away. She never threw anything away, my mum.’

‘And you never knew what he was trying to say?’

‘No. He saw me, stretched out his hand and opened his mouth and died right before my eyes. I was the last thing he saw in this life. A sixteen-year-old girl who happened to be walking down Skúlagata.’

‘I can imagine how awful it was for you, so young,’ said Konrád.

‘It was just horrendous.’

‘I hope you’ll forgive me for making you recall it.’

‘Well, it’s just good to be able to talk about it with you, finally. I’ve known about you for a long time and I think it’s good that you got in touch. I think it’s great.’

‘I’m sure you’ve often wondered what he was trying to say.’

‘I still believe that it was the name of the person who stabbed him,’ said Helga.

‘You mentioned that he made a peculiar sound.’

‘Yes, it’s hard to describe.’

‘Wasn’t he just groaning in pain?’

‘I felt like he was trying to say something.’

Helga continued to describe what had happened. She told Konrád that the petrol station and every other business on the street had been closed, so she’d run up to the residential area on Vitastígur Street and knocked on the door of the first house she came to. She woke the residents and they called the police, once she’d been able to speak calmly and clearly.

‘I was so surprised that the police knew immediately who the man was,’ she said, again contradicting her testimony in the police reports. ‘One of the first officers to arrive said: “Oh, it’s him.” Somehow, it didn’t surprise them to see him lying there in the street.’

‘He was one of their close acquaintances, as they’re called,’ said Konrád.

‘Yes, and they acted like it. As if it was all his fault. That was the feeling I got, and I always remember my astonishment at the way they talked about him.’

‘Did a crowd gather at the slaughterhouse?’

‘No, I couldn’t say that. Just people who lived on Vitastígur and a few passers-by. There weren’t many. I remember newspaper photographers. Somehow, it all went by so quickly. Then the police brought me home and talked to Dad and Mum, who had of course started getting worried and had called my friends. I became a bit famous in the family and at school. I’d found a body. Stumbled on a murder. It was all thought so exciting. I thought it was terrible. And I still do.’

‘Did you notice anything or anyone peculiar there at the scene or in the vicinity? Someone who stood out? Was hanging around? Acted strange?’

‘No.’

‘You say that the smoking kilns were running?’

‘Yes, I think they must have been.’

‘You didn’t see any Butchers’ Association employees inside the gate?’ Konrád asked. He remembered that the kilns were on Skúlagata, east of the gate.

‘No.’

The reports noted that there was an iron gate at the entrance to the slaughterhouse on Skúlagata, and that it had been tightly locked. Employees of the company were interviewed, but no link to Konrád’s father was found and most of them had alibis. Only a few couldn’t account for their whereabouts at the time of the murder, but they were loners who didn’t know the victim, had clean police records and no reason to commit such a crime. On the other hand, the murder weapon was never found and the only hypothesis was that it had been a butcher’s knife. But that couldn’t be determined by the two wounds found on the body. Such analyses were primitive in those days. The depth of the wounds, the width from the back of the blade to its edge, possible contamination from previous uses that the weapon left behind, all of these things were taken into consideration without it greatly reducing the types of knives possible. The attack seemed to have taken Konrád’s father by surprise, been purposeful and done without any hesitation. He hadn’t been able to defend himself against it at all. No wounds were found on his hands, there was nothing under his fingernails to indicate that he may have grappled with his assailant, scratched his face or grabbed his hair. There were no marks on the hard pavement that could be assumed to belong to the assailant, and he hadn’t stepped in the pool of blood as Helga did a short time later. He was unidentifiable and had been so ever since the murder was committed.

‘This experience has always been with you,’ Konrád said.

‘But not in as bad a way as it has for you,’ said Helga, smiling as if any such comparison was absurd.

Marta called late that evening to ask Konrád more about his interactions with the deceased, as she worded it so professionally. Konrád said that he thought he’d told her everything he knew about Valborg, which was really very little. He sensed an awkwardness in Marta, as if she were in two minds about this phone call of hers.

‘You really shouldn’t be involving yourself in this investigation,’ she finally said.

‘I’m not,’ he said.

‘No, right, that’s why you’re hanging around outside her block and pestering her neighbours.’

‘Are you calling about that?’

‘Did she seem all right to you, I mean Valborg? When you met her. Balanced?’

‘I think sedate is the word I would have used for her,’ said Konrád.

‘Did she seem to be in pain?’

‘What’s going on, Marta? It’s late and I was about to hit the hay.’

‘Aw, damn it, I know I can’t say anything because you’re retired and these things are all confidential and I’m bound to secrecy, but then I just blurt everything out to you as usual.’

‘What are you going to blurt out to me?’

‘Your friend had old scars on her inner thighs. Very old and faded, but they were found during the autopsy. It looks as if she hurt herself at some point. Cut her own legs.’

‘How old are those wounds?’

‘Old as hell. But that’s not all. She’d been at it again, because they found a more recent scar in the same place. That was actually the reason why they started looking into it.’

‘What the hell.’

‘She can’t have been well,’ said Marta.

‘Self-harm?’

‘You didn’t hear it from me,’ said Marta.

‘Was she punishing herself?’

‘That’s one explanation. Anxiety. Depression. Suicidal thoughts. It seems she was struggling, the poor woman, for whatever reason.’