The Quiet Mother

6

Konrád had had no intention of involving himself in the case when he sat down with Marta and told her about his association with Valborg. He gave his report and had a cup of coffee with his friend and watched her inhale the vapour from her e-cigarette. Then he went home and tried to forget it all, unsuccessfully. His meeting with Valborg came back to him over and over, the conversations he’d had with her, her sad situation and his refusal. He could just as well have spoken to her encouragingly and promised to explore for her the options that were available but that she may have missed. Instead, he chose the easiest path and acted as if she was of no concern to him. Now, every time Valborg came to mind, he felt a deep pang of regret.

Which is probably why, two days later, he stood in front of the block of flats where she’d lived. The crime-scene investigation was finished and the police had packed up their equipment and gone. The area had been photographed back and front, samples taken, fingerprints searched for, an incident description drawn up and everything else done to help shed light on what happened when Valborg was murdered. The residents of the flats at that stairwell and indeed the entire building had been spoken to, as well as others who lived in the immediate vicinity and most of those who were known to have been acquaintances of Valborg or with whom she’d had some contact.

He’d spoken briefly to Marta over the phone to enquire about the progress of the investigation and learned that the police were nowhere closer to solving the crime. Many habitual offenders or others well known to the police were interrogated, especially those who’d committed break-ins. It was rare for such crimes to be accompanied by gross violence. Not far from Valborg’s block was a shelter for alcoholics and the homeless, where two men who’d had repeat dealings with the police over the years were interviewed. Both were able to account for their whereabouts at the time of the attack on Valborg. It appeared that a rumour she’d been hoarding money at her place had been going around the neighbourhood, and could possibly have precipitated the burglary.

‘She’d visited the shelter several times with food and clothing and the like,’ Marta had said, ‘and some stories were spun about her. We’re looking into that.’

A woman pushed a pram up to the block of flats and started fussing with taking it down the basement steps. She was carrying stuffed shopping bags, making things much harder for her, and Konrád offered her his help, then took the bags and held the basement door open. A baby girl lay awake in the pram and looked up at Konrád with mistrustful eyes, and he hoped she wouldn’t start crying.

The mother, who, naturally, also had her guard up due to the incident there, thanked him for his help, and Konrád asked if she’d been at home when the woman on the second floor was attacked.

‘No, I was abroad,’ said the woman. ‘Did you know Valborg?’

‘Yes, I knew her a little and was shocked when I heard the news,’ said Konrád, before offering to carry the woman’s shopping bags to her flat. ‘I would never have thought a woman like her could be subject to such an attack.’

‘Yeah, it was really unbelievable,’ said the woman, who had thick red hair and freckles. She took the child from the pram, said that she lived on the third floor and thanked Konrád for his kindness. ‘She was always so nice and quiet. I hardly ever noticed her. And then this happens.’

‘No one noticed anything?’

‘The woman in the flat below hers said she heard some commotion and thought she was moving furniture. That was all, I think.’

They went into the basement hallway. The woman held the baby and ascended the stairs ahead of Konrád, and he sensed that she wasn’t entirely at ease about having let a stranger into the building with her. He explained to her that he was a retired policeman and had been assisting the police due to his acquaintance with the deceased woman. That appeared to calm the woman down a bit and she thanked him for carrying her bags up to the third floor. The child, on the other hand, continued to give him the same mistrustful look and held tightly to her mother.

‘My husband and I have of course talked to the police,’ she said. ‘We had very little information for them.’

‘You didn’t notice anything unusual in connection with Valborg the last few days or weeks? No visitors, or anything?’

The woman shook her head.

‘I don’t recall her having any visitors at all,’ she said. ‘I think she was pretty lonely, but as I said, she was always really nice. Showed Lilla a huge amount of interest,’ she added, referring to her child. ‘Offered to babysit her and so on.’

‘And did she do that?’

‘Yeah, a couple of times, just briefly, if I had to pop out.’

‘Yes, of course. Was she good with children?’

‘Yeah, she was.’

‘Did she ever tell you if she had children, now or in the past?’

‘No,’ said the woman thoughtfully. ‘Never.’

Konrád thanked her, went down to the first floor and knocked on the door of the woman who’d heard a commotion in Valborg’s flat. No one answered, and he left the block and got into his car. It wasn’t his intention to question everyone in the neighbourhood. The police had already done their job and he didn’t actually know what he was doing there. He looked up at the building, which hadn’t been painted in a long time, at the concrete damage and weathered yellow surfaces that appeared to match the worn linoleum in the stairwell. Graffiti artists had defaced the building’s gable ends and an attempt had been made at one time to paint over their scrawls, but it had only created a new canvas for the vandals.

Konrád’s mobile phone rang and he saw that it was Eygló. The last time he heard from her, she’d told him she was going to attend the coffin-closing ceremony of a friend of hers who’d died in old age.

‘Did your dad ever talk about a woman named Hansína?’ she asked as soon as he answered.

‘Hansína? No, I don’t think so,’ Konrád said, without remembering for certain.

‘A widow. Lived in Hafnarfjörður,’ said Eygló.

‘I don’t remember. What about her?’

‘I don’t really know. I was coming from the coffin closing and there was a slightly unusual, intrusive man who said that Dad had tried to dupe her. It was at the time when he started hanging around with your dad again.’

Konrád listened attentively. He’d got in touch with Eygló a few years ago because both of their fathers were a brief footnote in a criminal case from the war years. They held séances that turned out to be scams and made a lot of money from them, but when the truth came out, they went their separate ways and probably had no contact until the early sixties, when it appeared that their paths came together again. Konrád had wondered if they’d taken up their old scheme of fleecing people at séances. It was just a hunch that prompted this question, as he and Eygló had very little information about this latter period of the two men’s acquaintance. That’s why all the news about their interactions and collaboration woke his curiosity. Especially in light of the fact that over a period of just a few months, one of them had been found murdered in front of the slaughterhouse run by the Butchers’ Association of the South on Skúlagata Street, while the other had been pulled out of the sea at Sundahöfn Harbour and appeared to have died accidentally. No injuries were found on Engilbert, Eygló’s father. He had sometimes wandered down to the boats in Reykjavík Harbour to scrounge for booze, and the police thought it quite possible that he’d been doing the same when he died, perhaps having fallen between a ship and the pier and drifted into the bay. A significant amount of alcohol was measured in his blood.

‘Tried to dupe her how?’ Konrád asked.

‘Through séances,’ said Eygló.

‘Do you think they were working together to deceive her?’

‘He only mentioned Dad, but...’

‘But what?’

‘I can’t imagine that Dad was working alone,’ said Eygló. She’d always maintained that Engilbert had been a useful innocent in the hands of Konrád’s father, who could be a brute and was one of the police force’s most familiar acquaintances for many years. ‘We know that they were colluding a bit at the time,’ she said. ‘Maybe Hansína was easy prey; I don’t know.’

‘What are you going to do with this information?’

‘The man I met thought that her son was still alive. I was thinking of talking to him. Find out if there’s anything to this. Then we might be able to determine if our fathers had started scheming together again and targeting victims who were easy to deceive and swindle.’