The Quiet Mother

42

Twenty minutes had passed since Marta was asked to wait a moment, and she was growing tired of the delay. After listening to Marta’s explanation for her visit, the secretary had shown her into a meeting room. Marta hadn’t made an appointment and the secretary, a woman of around thirty who acted as if she’d graduated from flight-attendant school, was taken aback slightly when she realised what Marta was. Visits from police detectives weren’t a daily occurrence at the company, and Marta assumed that the woman in charge was trying to guess the reason for it.

Good luck with that, Marta thought. She looked around the sumptuous meeting room, which was adorned with two large paintings by Icelandic masters from the start of the last century. An Italian espresso machine stood on a table. A modern, stylish video projector hung from the ceiling. The room was on the top floor of three that the pharmaceutical company occupied in the high-rise on Borgartún Street, and now that the weather had cleared up, the view from it of Faxaflói Bay and the mountains Esja and Skarðsheiði was magnificent.

Finally, something happened. The tasteful secretary reappeared and asked Marta to wait a moment more; the CEO was particularly busy but had cleared space in her schedule to meet the detective. No sooner had the secretary made this announcement than the woman who ran the business appeared and made repeated apologies for the delay as she greeted Marta with a handshake. She was friendly and smiled warmly, but was clearly in a rush and wanted to deal with this unexpected interruption quickly. She was slim, dressed in a close-fitting skirt and matching blouse, with dark, short hair and beautiful brown eyes beneath well-groomed eyebrows. She was approaching fifty and Marta found her effortlessly sexy, needing little to accentuate that but to colour her hair every now and then. Her name was Klara.

Whether it was due to the investigation or not, Marta felt she could see Valborg in the woman’s face.

‘Please excuse me,’ Klara said, smiling. ‘Everything’s a mess in here. The new owners will take over soon and we’re a bit upside down. We’re trying to make the transition go as smoothly as possible.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Marta said bluntly, ‘I don’t follow the business world.’

‘Oh? Isn’t that why you want to meet me? You’re not from the Economic Crime Unit? We got your message two weeks ago. Our accountants have already answered it. The tax deduction that we calculated—’

‘Hold on,’ said Marta. ‘Let me stop you right there. I have no interest in your business. I came to see you because of this here,’ she continued, taking out photocopies of the newspaper clippings that Konrád found at Valborg’s flat and laying them on the table in front of her. Klara looked over the articles.

‘What... what is this?’ she asked in surprise.

‘You know these people, don’t you?’ said Marta.

‘Of course. They’re... they’re my parents, when they took a trip to Egypt,’ Klara replied. ‘It was Mum’s dream to see the Pyramids. I remember the article well. It was published in a travel magazine... and then this interview with me when we were starting up the business.’

‘That’s your father with you in the photo, right?’

‘Yes. And then this here, the interview with me at the start of the process for selling the business. I have this photo of me framed. What are you doing with these? What are the police doing with these clippings?’

‘We found them...’

The secretary came to the door and informed Klara that someone was waiting for her. Marta looked at Klara and wondered if this was a prearranged interruption designed to curtail their meeting. She smiled to herself.

‘Yes, I’m coming,’ Klara said, before turning back to Marta. ‘Why are you showing me these?’

The secretary left and Marta took out a photograph of Valborg and placed it on the table next to the clippings. It was the same photo of her that had appeared in the media in the last few days.

‘Do you know this woman?’ she asked.

Klara stared at the photo.

‘Isn’t it... isn’t it the woman who was attacked... the woman who was murdered?’

‘We found these clippings at her home. Among cake recipes and the like. It took us a little time to find them. We didn’t find any other newspaper clippings there. Only these. This one family. Your family. Your parents. You yourself. Do you know what brought that about? Do you have any idea why she had these?’

Klara looked at the photograph and Marta in turn, then picked up the clipping with the photo of herself smiling triumphantly at the readers. When she looked again at Marta, she appeared stunned.

‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it just a coincidence? I didn’t know her. We didn’t know her. People clip all sorts of things out of the papers.’

‘Of course. She isn’t related to you?’

‘No, not at all,’ said Klara. ‘Not that I know of. And I would know,’ she added. ‘I can’t imagine why she collected these articles about us.’

The secretary came to the door again and looked at her watch. Before she could say anything, Klara told her to leave them alone.

‘But—’ began the secretary.

‘Not now,’ said Klara. ‘I’m busy.’

After a slight hesitation, the secretary disappeared from the doorway and Klara asked Marta if there was anything else. She was somewhat upset, although she tried not to show it.

‘Could your father have known her?’

‘Are you connecting these clippings with what happened to her, that woman?’ Klara asked.

‘No, hardly,’ said Marta.

‘Hardly? What does that mean?’

‘We can’t see any connection,’ said Marta. ‘I just wanted to hear your opinion on all this. Find out if the woman was in contact with you at all. Is your father here in the building?’

‘No, he’s not.’

‘Where can I find him?’

‘Why do you need to do that?’ Klara asked. ‘You’re going to bother him with this? We don’t know that woman and have never known her. Believe me.’

She tried to appear composed, but Marta sensed how difficult she found this conversation, what an uncomfortable interruption it was to be visited by the police in a world she otherwise had under perfect control.

‘Can you swear that your father never knew her?’

‘We don’t know who that woman is,’ repeated Klara. ‘Not at all.’

‘So don’t you find it even more surprising that she clipped these out and kept them?’

‘I don’t know what gets into people’s heads,’ Klara said, deciding that this meeting was over. She said goodbye to Marta with a handshake, resolutely and firmly, as she herself was by nature. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t have time for this. Hopefully I’ve made myself clear enough and you won’t be troubling us any more about this... this blessed matter.’

Marta didn’t let go of her hand. She wouldn’t be finished until she asked about something that she didn’t quite know how to bring up without upsetting the woman even more. The words were on her lips when she realised that she might be moving too quickly. That it might be better to wait a bit. Get more information, look at more evidence, before dropping such a bomb into her life.

So, letting it lie for now, Marta said goodbye to the woman and watched her hurry out of the meeting room.