The Shadow District

25

It was late evening. Candles were burning here and there on various tables, and thick curtains were drawn over the windows. The medium was waiting for them in the sitting room. He was about forty, on the small side, with a friendly manner, soft, smooth hands, and a warm smile. He wore a threadbare dark suit and looked a little peaky, as if he was suffering from a hangover. The couple, sensing a whiff of mysticism about him, were surprised to find how down-to-earth and approachable he was when he spoke to them. Konrád’s father had pulled out two chairs for them, which they now took. There were three other people attending the seance: a father and son and a very deaf old man, all of them poor, judging by their clothes. The son had lost his mother after a gruelling illness, and he and his father wanted reassurance that she was better off in the next world. The deaf old man wasn’t seeking contact with anyone in particular and seemed preoccupied with the issue of which language the spirits would use. The medium had no need of a chair. He alternately stood in front of them or paced the floor, trying to pick up the currents flowing through the ether — as he was only the conduit, he explained to his audience.

‘All I do is relay messages to you.’

‘Don’t you fall into a trance then?’ the woman wanted to know. Although she and her husband were no strangers to seances, they hadn’t encountered this psychic before.

‘No,’ the medium replied, ‘that’s not how it works. It’s more that the currents flow through me.’

The old man cupped a hand to his ear. ‘What’s that you say?’

‘I’m explaining how it works.’

‘They will be speaking Icelandic, won’t they?’ the old man bellowed.

The medium reassured him on this point and he began the seance by asking the sitters a series of questions. Names floated around the room, which they either did or didn’t recognise. If a name didn’t sound familiar to anyone, the medium was quick to move on to the next one. But if he received a positive answer from his audience, he would continue to question the spirit and describe any distinguishing features until a consensus was reached about who it could be. Once this was established, he would convey the message that all was well on the other side, and sometimes pass on thanks to somebody in the room. Some spirits, according to him, were accompanied by a sweet smell, others were associated with pieces of furniture, paintings or articles of clothing. The father and son recognised some of these, the old man others. Once the medium had taken his time in attending to them, he turned to Rósamunda’s parents.

‘I... it’s cold and dark here,’ he said, standing in front of them with half-closed eyes, his head tilted to one side. ‘Cold and dark and there’s a man standing... he’s standing in the cold and I... I think he’s got mittens on, it’s as if he’s got mittens on and he’s cold. Mittens knitted from two-ply yarn. Does that sound familiar at all?’

The couple didn’t immediately answer.

‘He’s... could he be wet from the sea?’ asked the psychic. ‘Could he be drenched with seawater?’

‘Yes,’ said the woman hesitantly. ‘If it’s him. Did you say two-ply yarn?’

‘The mittens,’ her husband added in explanation.

‘He says you were always good to him and he wants to thank you for all the coffee,’ said the medium, not letting himself get distracted. ‘I have the feeling his name might be Vilmundur or Vilhjálmur, something like that.’

‘Could it be Mundi?’ the woman said, her eyes on her husband.

‘I get the feeling he drowned,’ continued the medium. ‘That he’s dead. Am I right?’

‘He was lost in Faxaflói Bay,’ said the husband. ‘Off Akranes. There were three of them.’

‘I knitted those mittens for him,’ said the woman. ‘The poor, dear chap.’

‘I can see... it’s like a painting or maybe a view from a sunny house and there’s this strong smell of coffee. A beautiful house. And kleinur. Such a strong smell of coffee and something else too — cinnamon, from the doughnuts, something like that.’

‘Mundi often used to say how good my kleinur were,’ said the woman, nodding as if to confirm this to the father and son who were sitting quietly listening.

‘I sense that he’s in church and I think... I can hear music. Could that be right? Was there a lot of music around him?’

‘That could well be right; he used to play the organ,’ said Rósamunda’s father.

‘Thank you,’ said the medium. ‘He’s telling you not to worry about...’

He broke off and appeared to be listening intently for messages from the spirit world. A long time passed in absolute silence, as if the messages couldn’t get through. Then all of a sudden the medium took a step backwards and froze, as if riveted to the spot, his eyes still half-closed.

‘He says she’s with him. She... that you’ll know who she is.’

The woman gasped: ‘Our little girl!’

‘Can you see her?’ asked her husband eagerly.

‘He doesn’t want... says you’ll know what he means and that you’re not to worry.’

‘Our darling little girl,’ said the woman and began to cry. Her husband tried to comfort her.

The medium fell silent again and they didn’t dare interrupt, convinced that he was straining for messages from the depths of eternity, until finally Rósamunda’s father could hold back no longer.

‘Does she want to tell us who it was?’ he whispered.

The medium stood in the middle of the room, perfectly still, for what felt like an age. The sitters didn’t move a muscle. The eyes of father and son were fixed on him and the deaf old man was trying not to miss a thing. Rósamunda’s parents held hands.

‘Does she want to tell us who it was?’ the husband asked again.

The medium didn’t answer but remained silent and motionless, until he began shaking his head and pacing around the room, saying the connection had broken and he didn’t have the strength to continue.

The seance was over. The psychic sank into a chair as if exhausted and Konrád’s father brought him a drink of water. Rósamunda’s parents sat there dazed, as though they could hardly believe what had happened. It took a while for everyone to get their bearings again. They were all convinced that something important, something extraordinary, had occurred.

Konrád’s father pulled back the thick curtains to admit the light spring night, then went out to the kitchen and came back with coffee for the sitters and offered round some boiled sweets. The deaf old man poured the coffee into his saucer and drained it with loud slurps.

‘Odd about those mittens,’ remarked Rósamunda’s father. ‘That he should bring them up.’

‘I was telling the host only yesterday how fond Mundi was of my kleinur,’ said his wife. ‘And about the mittens. The two-ply ones.’

The father and son looked at them.

‘Did you tell him that?’ the widower asked, his eyes on Konrád’s father.

‘What was that? What did she tell him?’ shouted the old man.

‘I’m sure I did,’ said the woman. ‘I told him about Mundi and how he drowned.’

‘Did that seem wise to you?’

‘Wise? I don’t understand.’

Konrád sat at the kitchen table, watching the sun go down and recalling his father’s account of the incident. He remembered it vividly. He was eighteen when his father told him about the seance with the couple who had lost their daughter, and how he used to go about swindling a few krónur out of gullible types, many of whom were mourning the loss of a loved one. He had never spoken of it before, though he had often talked of the other dubious activities he had been mixed up in. But on this occasion he had been drunker than usual and mawkish with it, willing to open up to his son about some of the murkier episodes in his past.

‘It was laughably easy,’ he had said in his hoarse voice, smoking non-stop as he talked. ‘People were ready to swallow anything, and the more they paid, the more they’d lap it up. Damn it, the whole thing was a piece of cake.’

Konrád couldn’t detect any remorse in his father’s manner. He never made excuses for what he was or what he had done to others, but Konrád couldn’t stop himself from asking how he could stomach profiting from people’s misery like that.

‘If they want to be taken in, that’s not my problem,’ was all the answer Konrád got. ‘Mind you, he did have powers of some kind, the bloke who played the medium for the girl’s parents. We held a lot of seances together, him and me, and we weren’t found out because he did have a certain gift, I reckon, though he was a bloody amateur. I didn’t get everything from the woman — not the organ, for example — but maybe that was just luck. You needed a bit of luck to do it well. I’d tipped him off about the other stuff, like the mittens and how the bloke drowned, before they arrived. But when the father and son got wind of the fact that the woman had talked to me beforehand, they went mad and called the police, and that was that. A phoney medium exposed. And I was described as his accomplice.’ Konrád’s father burst out laughing. ‘Like I was his sidekick!’

‘Was that how you usually did it?’ asked Konrád. ‘Chatted to people beforehand, then passed it on to the medium?’

‘There was no set way of doing it,’ said his father. ‘This particular psychic held a whole load of meetings at our place, and I was in charge of finding out a little bit about the sitters. The same people often came back again and again, so he got to know them himself. Like the father and son. They’d been twice before. But sometimes he didn’t know them at all and said he preferred to have some facts up his sleeve before he started — helped him warm up, he said.’

Konrád’s father paused. ‘He should never have described those mittens like that,’ he continued eventually. ‘But the strange part was that the silly sod did actually sense a presence. He told me, when the fuss about that bloody seance was at its height, that he was sure he’d sensed the presence of their daughter, and another girl too, who was with her. He had the feeling she’d come to a bad end as well.’

‘There was another girl with her?’

‘That’s what he claimed.’

‘What happened to her? What sort of bad end?’

‘He didn’t say. Didn’t like to discuss it, any more than he did the other stuff that happened at that seance. After we’d been found out no one would listen to him any more.’

‘Didn’t he tell you anything about her?’

‘No. Except the bit about the cold. He said she’d been accompanied by this powerful feeling of cold. But listen, Konrád, he was a bloody amateur, this bloke, and most of what he came out with was stuff I’d fed him.’

The story of the seance had remained etched in Konrád’s memory because it was the last conversation of the kind that he’d had with his father. One evening in mid February, Konrád had come home near midnight to see a police car parked in front of their basement flat and two officers hanging about outside. He wasn’t particularly surprised, as his father was certainly known to the police and whenever there was a burglary, or a bootlegger was busted, or a major smuggling ring was exposed, they would come round to question him, even haul him off to the station on Pósthússtræti. It was 1963. Konrád had recently dropped out of technical college where he had been training to be a printer and started drinking heavily. His father had never interfered much in his life, and he seldom heard from his mother who had moved with Beta to Seydisfjördur in the East Fjords. Konrád’s drinking companions were generally other layabouts on a fast track to the gutter, or else his father. Konrád took cash-in-hand jobs on building sites, shoplifted, broke into cars, and ran errands for his father for a minor share in the profits of whatever shady activity he was involved in at the time. In spite of this, Konrád had never been caught or had any kind of brush with the law.

One of the officers approached him and asked if he lived in the building and knew the tenant in the basement. Konrád, who had learnt to be wary of the police, opened his mouth to trot out a lie but nothing came to mind. So he admitted that his father lived in the basement — they lived there together — and asked if it was him they were after.

‘No, we’re not looking for him,’ said the policeman. ‘Were you with him this evening?’

‘No,’ said Konrád. ‘Why are you asking?’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘Any idea who he was going to meet?’

‘Why do you want to know?’ asked Konrád.

‘Had he fallen out with anyone recently? Was there anyone after him?’

‘After him? What are you on about?’

‘Your father’s dead, mate,’ said the other policeman. ‘Do you know if he was planning to break into the abattoir down on Skúlagata?’

Konrád wasn’t sure he’d heard right. ‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘What did you say?’

‘He was found lying in the alley by the abattoir,’ said the policeman. ‘Stabbed. Do you know what he was doing there?’

‘What are you talking about? Stabbed! Was he stabbed?’

‘Yes, stabbed to death.’

Konrád gaped at the policemen. They had been sent to inform the dead man’s next of kin, but they knew his father well and saw no reason to be compassionate towards drunks and petty crooks. Just then a car drew up and yet another policeman climbed out. But this one wasn’t in uniform, and it soon became apparent that he was a detective.

‘What are you talking about?’ Konrád shouted furiously, shoving at one of the officers. He would gladly have punched him but the man’s partner immediately grabbed Konrád, knocked him down in the road and got him in a stranglehold. Konrád flailed wildly and it took both officers to overpower him. When they had managed to subdue him, they raised him to his feet again.

‘Let him go,’ ordered the detective wearily. ‘Leave him be.’

The two officers grumbled but eventually relinquished their grip on Konrád.

‘They’ve told you what happened?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you his son?’ asked the detective.

‘Yes. They said he was stabbed. What happened? Why...? Is he dead?’

‘Are you sure you don’t know what happened?’

‘Yes, I... I can’t believe it.’

‘You don’t know who attacked him?’

‘Attacked him? Me? No, I was in town. What the hell happened? Is... is he really dead?’

The detective nodded. Speaking in a level tone and, unlike the other officers, without a trace of superiority, he explained that a passer-by had found Konrád’s father lying in a pool of blood near the gates of the abattoir on Skúlagata. He had been stabbed twice and left lying in the road. There were no witnesses and they didn’t know the identity of his killer. Konrád couldn’t tell them anything about his father’s movements. He didn’t know what business his old man could have had at the abattoir or down on Skúlagata, and hadn’t a clue who he’d gone to meet or who he could have run into there. His father had fallen out with countless people over the course of his life and had always kept questionable company. Konrád quickly realised that his death was bound to be viewed in that light.

‘My condolences, son,’ said the detective. ‘I’m sorry you had to find out like this. If there’s anything I can do for you, anything that bothers you, anything you want to know, whatever it is, please get in touch.’

His father’s killer was never found. A comprehensive murder investigation was launched but eventually shelved due to lack of evidence. However, his father’s death did have a profound effect on Konrád: he eventually turned his back on his dead-end lifestyle, re-enrolled in technical college and finished his training as a printer. And, as fate would have it, some years later he joined the police and ended up a detective himself. From time to time his fellow officers would whisper about his father and once or twice even asked him outright about the case, but Konrád would bite their heads off. He never forgot, though, the kindness and consideration the detective had shown him in his hour of need.