The Shadow District

29

Petra clearly hadn’t followed in her mother’s footsteps: she was neither a dressmaker nor did she run her own business. In fact, judging by her outfit, she was completely indifferent to fashion. And, looking around her home, Konrád couldn’t see any needlework, or any hint of enthusiasm for handicrafts. It was almost as if, despite being well past middle age, she was still rebelling against everything her mother had stood for. It turned out that she was a few years older than he was and had got herself an education, as they used to call it when people stayed on at college to take their matriculation exams, though she hadn’t continued on to university. Instead she had taken the boat to Europe and gone travelling, before coming home and taking an admin job at the National Hospital, where she had worked for most of her career up until the banking collapse. At that point she had been made redundant as a result of cuts in the health service. She was, in addition, a divorcee with four children and what she described as heaps of adorable grandchildren.

As Konrád soon discovered, she never wearied of talking about herself, but he was reluctant to interrupt the flow. She lived in a block of flats in the east end, where she had wound up following her divorce, having been forced to part with the large detached family home in the smart suburb of Gardabær. Apparently she and her husband had quickly grown bored of each other once their children had flown the nest.

When Konrád finally managed to get a word in edgeways, Petra proved extremely interested in Stefán’s death and asked a lot of questions. He did his best to field them without giving away any details that might compromise the inquiry, saying only that the circumstances of Stefán’s death had been highly unusual and the police investigation was making good progress. He himself wasn’t directly involved, but he had been asked to look into one aspect of the case. Petra proved no less inquisitive about Konrád himself and bombarded him with questions. He tried to reply to them as best he could, feeling that it was only fair for him to be a little forthcoming, given that he had come here to extract information from her.

At long last he managed to steer the conversation round to Stefán’s visit. He had come to see her, Petra reckoned, about two weeks before she read of his death in the papers. She had recognised him immediately when his picture was splashed all over the media, but it hadn’t even crossed her mind that she might be able to help the police with their enquiries.

Her mother had run a dressmaking business until the mid sixties when she sold it. By then cheap imported clothing was fairly common; there were many more shops, and large firms offering mending and tailoring were closing down right, left and centre. Petra’s mother had died in 1980, her father sometime later.

Petra and Geirlaug had been friends since college. From what Stefán had told her, he’d been chatting to an old engineering acquaintance who knew Geirlaug well, and somehow it had emerged that she used to know Petra’s mother, who ran a dressmaking business during the war. Stefán had seemed familiar with the company in question and became very attentive, saying he felt sure he had once met the owner.

‘Do you know where Stefán encountered this engineer?’ asked Konrád.

‘At a funeral, he told me. He’d read the obituary of a woman who used to work for my mother. For some reason he went along to her funeral and that was where he bumped into the engineer.’

‘So the woman had worked for your mother during the war?’

‘Yes, during the war and for a number of years afterwards, I believe. It was all described in the obituary.’

‘And...?’

‘She’d been a friend of that girl Rósamunda who was murdered, and Stefán had interviewed her at the time in connection with the police investigation, or that’s what he led me to believe. He’d come across the reference to the dressmaking company in the obituary, and I suppose he felt the urge to find out more about her. Perhaps because he remembered her from the old days. Anyway, he decided to attend the funeral and that’s where he ran into an engineer he was acquainted with — I don’t know how — and started telling him how he’d met the dead woman, and about the link to my mother’s sewing business. The engineer happened to mention Geirlaug and that we were friends... And one thing led to another. Or that’s what he told me. I don’t know if there’s any truth in it.’

‘I very much doubt he was lying,’ said Konrád. ‘Stefán seems to have been a man of strict integrity.’

‘Yes, that’s how he struck me too,’ said Petra. ‘He said he’d interviewed my mother at the time, together with another man, a policeman whose name I forget, as part of the murder investigation.’

‘Did he come to see you about anything specific?’ asked Konrád. ‘Anything directly related to the inquiry?’

‘No, I don’t think so, not to begin with, at any rate. He said he used to think about Rósamunda from time to time and would be grateful for a chance to meet me. He was terribly polite, and you’d never have guessed how old he was from looking at him. He didn’t seem at all arthritic or doddery. But then he said he’d always led a healthy life.’

‘Yes, he seems to have been very fit for a man his age.’

‘Yes, so... I regretted giving him such a turn.’

‘A turn?’

‘I didn’t think it was at all important, but it evidently struck him very differently and he suddenly got all worked up. Started saying he couldn’t understand my mother. How she could have done a thing like that — failed to let them know.’

‘What? What did she do? Failed to let them know what?’

‘About a little thing that my mother told me about long afterwards, many years later. In fact I was grown up by the time she told me. It never occurred to me that it was important.’

‘What did she tell you that got Stefán so worked up?’ asked Konrád, struggling to conceal his impatience.

‘You really need to understand my mother. I tried to make him see that,’ said Petra. ‘She was a funny woman in some ways. You’d have to have known her well to appreciate the way her mind worked. Especially in the old days, as regards her clients. She was — I admit it — a snob. A raging snob. People were in those days. They looked down on other people a lot more, called them common and so on. She still used to talk down to shop assistants, for example, right up until she died. She was stuck in her ways. And she was unbearable when it came to her social superiors, always name-dropping, boasting about how so-and-so used to be her client and always treated her like an equal — you know the kind of thing. “She always used to patronise my shop,” she’d say whenever some toffee-nosed old bag came up in conversation.’

Not entirely sure how this was relevant, Konrád felt it best to keep his mouth shut. Now at least he understood the complete absence of needlework from her home, though. He was detecting a distinct chill in Petra’s attitude to her mother.

‘For example, she used to give some of her clients preferential treatment. She felt that confidentiality was the cornerstone of her business, and she honoured this principle right up to her death. That’s the way she operated. She never gossiped about her customers, felt she was almost part of their private lives, felt they trusted her and came to her with their requirements precisely because of this discretion.’

‘But how did that affect Stefán? Why should that have upset him?’

‘Oh, no, it wasn’t because of that — not because of what she was like, but because of what she failed to tell them.’

‘Which was?’

‘It was about Rósamunda. I don’t really know why I started telling him about it — Stefán, I mean. I don’t know why it should have mattered so much.’

‘What did you tell him?’ Konrád asked, his patience really wearing thin.

‘That my mother said she once came across Rósamunda in the yard behind the shop — in tears and dishevelled, in Mother’s words. Rósamunda refused to say what was wrong but Mother sent her home anyway because the poor girl was in such a state. All Mother knew was that earlier that day Rósamunda had gone to deliver a dress to a house in town and had just come back from there when Mother saw her in the yard. The girl never referred to the incident again but flatly refused to take any further deliveries to that particular address. My mother never discussed it with anyone because she didn’t know the full story. I told Stefán this was typical — my mother would never have cast suspicion on those people. Never in a million years.’

‘Why suspicion?’

‘Because of what happened later. To the girl.’

Konrád stared at Petra as the significance of her story gradually dawned on him, its relevance to the investigation and to Thorson. How had he felt on learning this detail so long after the event? According to Petra it had given him a bit of a turn. That was probably an understatement.

‘Did your mother believe there was a connection between the incident and Rósamunda’s death?’ he asked at last.

‘My mother suspected she might have had a nasty experience at the house. At least, the possibility bothered her in her later years.’

‘Was this shortly before Rósamunda was murdered?’

‘Yes, a few months before,’ said Petra. ‘Mother hadn’t meant to tell me. She blurted it out accidentally. Though I got the feeling she’d been brooding on it. But she obviously felt uncomfortable talking about it, so I let it drop.’

‘Why was Rósamunda crying? And why wouldn’t she go near the place afterwards?’

‘Mother didn’t know. Rósamunda clammed up and wouldn’t say another word about it. Mother knew the people concerned — they were important customers, and she didn’t want to believe they could have mistreated the girl. She was desperate not to draw any attention to the incident in light of that, if you follow me. You’d have to understand what Mother was like. Her clients were sacrosanct in her eyes.’

‘Was your mother the only person who knew?’

‘Yes, I’m pretty sure.’

‘So Rósamunda was hiding in the yard, in tears, all dishevelled?’

‘My mother guessed that she’d been assaulted, but when she tried to help her, Rósamunda wasn’t having it, so Mother left it at that. I think she regretted it later — that she hadn’t done more for the girl.’

‘And she’d just come back from taking a delivery to these clients?’

‘Yes. But Mother would never have suspected them. That’s just the way she was.’

‘Yet it was still preying on her mind?’

‘Yes, it seems so. She was still thinking about it right before she died.’