The Shadow District

7

Marta was in the middle of trying to do ten things at once when Konrád dropped in to see her at the CID offices. He rarely went in now that he was retired, and he paid little attention to what was going on there, except for what he heard on the news.

‘I wanted to ask if you could use any help with the murder inquiry into the old man’s death,’ he said when Marta had a momentary break between calls. They were sitting in her office, surrounded by piles of documents, folders, newspapers and other junk that Marta had accumulated over the years, much of it unrelated to work. Amid the clutter was a handsome sword that had belonged to a Danish lieutenant around the turn of the twentieth century. She had picked it up in an antiques shop, and now it lay in its scabbard atop a tide of paper on the windowsill. Konrád had never asked why she’d bought it but vaguely remembered hearing that her grandfather had been an officer in the Icelandic Coast Guard.

‘You what?’ said Marta.

‘Aren’t you permanently short-staffed?’

‘I thought you’d retired.’

‘Yes, and you can rest assured that I have absolutely no intention of coming back. But I’d like to help out with the case, if you’d let me.’

‘Why?’

‘Boredom, simple as that. You wouldn’t even need to tell anyone. I’d report my findings to you and if I uncovered anything significant I’d let you know at once.’

‘Konrád... I... you’re supposed to be retired,’ said Marta. ‘Shouldn’t we just keep things the way they are? You can’t start trying to make private deals with me. It’s out of the question. Honestly, what are you like?’

‘Fair enough, you’re the boss,’ said Konrád.

‘Yes, I am, and don’t you forget it.’

‘Fine.’

‘Right, we’ll be in touch.’ Marta picked up her mobile phone.

‘It’s just that...’

‘What?’

‘I grew up in that neighbourhood,’ he said. ‘In the Shadow District. I remember hearing about the girl you mentioned, back when I lived there, so...’

‘You’re interested?’

‘I want to know why the old man kept cuttings about her. I don’t believe the case was ever solved.’

‘Konrád—’

‘You’d be doing me a big favour, Marta. All I need is access to his flat. I can take it from there. Anyway, you can hardly stop me gathering information about a seventy-year-old murder. And Forensics have already been over the place. It’s not like I’d be compromising any evidence.’

‘We can always use more hands,’ Marta admitted, after a long pause. ‘Are you seriously intending to look into that old case anyway?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’ll have to promise me something.’

‘What?’

‘The second you discover anything, you’ll get on the phone to me. The very second.’

Two days later Konrád received the green light to enter the dead man’s flat. Since Forensics had already conducted a thorough examination of the crime scene, there was no need for a seal on the door. Konrád opened it with the key he had picked up from Marta’s office and closed it carefully behind him.

Exactly what he was looking for he didn’t know. He had brought along photocopies of the three newspaper cuttings that Marta had handed over with the key. He’d read them in the car. According to Marta, they’d been found inside a book on the man’s desk. The cuttings contained three separate reports about the girl whose body had turned up in a doorway behind the National Theatre. They were undated but all appeared to have come from the same paper, Tíminn. The first reported that a young woman had been found murdered; she was thought to have been strangled, and then moved to the spot behind the theatre. The detective leading the inquiry, a man called Flóvent, was quoted as saying that it was a heinous crime, a deliberate act intentionally concealed. The second story reported that the inquiry was making good progress. A post-mortem had revealed death by asphyxiation; pressure had been applied to the victim’s neck until she died and the injuries indicated that the killer had strangled her with his bare hands. But the motive was unknown and the girl had yet to be identified, so anyone who could provide information about the case, however insignificant, was urged to contact the police. The third article reported that the police were searching for an American soldier calling himself Frank Carroll and claiming to be a sergeant in the US Army, though the occupying force had no record of anyone by that name. It was further stated that the soldier had been in the vicinity of the National Theatre with his Icelandic girlfriend, the daughter of a senior civil servant. The young lady in question had provided the police with her full cooperation and did not appear to be otherwise implicated in the crime.

Konrád wandered around the flat, taking his time, wondering why the dead man had hung on to cuttings about a murder committed a lifetime ago. From what he saw in the flat, he tried to form a picture of the pensioner’s solitary existence. The last meal the man had cooked himself was porridge. That was easy — he hadn’t washed up the pan. And he had eaten liver sausage with the porridge. The other half of the sausage was in the fridge, and the bowl in the sink contained traces of this meal. Judging by the contents of the fridge, he had subsisted largely on traditional Icelandic fare. The bread bin contained flatbread and a loaf of rye that was going mouldy. There wasn’t much in the kitchen cupboards, just a few plates and cups. The radio on the table was tuned to the National Broadcasting Service.

In the bedroom was the old single bed where the man had been lying when he was found. On the small bedside table Konrád saw a lamp and a novel in English, The Grapes of Wrath. The wardrobe contained everyday clothes — trousers, shirts — and a lone black suit that scarcely seemed to have been worn. There was a small washing machine in the bathroom, a basket of dirty laundry, and a toothbrush in a glass.

The sitting room was neat and tidy. There were shelves of books, both Icelandic and foreign, none published recently. Several proved to be about the construction of bridges. A TV in one corner. Two cheap prints on the wall. An old sofa and two chairs grouped around a small coffee table, and a desk that turned out to contain various bills in the dead man’s name.

Konrád sat down at the desk. Everything suggested that the man had led a simple, monotonous life in his last years, as one might expect of someone his age. The most unexpected thing, Konrád thought, was that there was no evidence of contact with family or friends: no letters, no family photos, no computer that would allow him to access email or social media. An aura of quiet solitude emanated from every object in the flat, an impression only enhanced by those that were missing.

Konrád could see no clues to help him resolve the questions in his mind. Why had the man’s life ended in such a senseless manner, and why had he been holding on to three newspaper cuttings about a long-forgotten murder? But he did find the book where the cuttings had been gathered. Marta had told him it was still lying on the man’s desk just as they’d found it. The book turned out to be an anthology of Icelandic folk tales and legends.

Konrád had got quite a shock when Marta told him about the cuttings. He had grown up in the Shadow District, on Skuggasund, only a stone’s throw from the theatre, and as a child had heard the tale of the murdered girl from his father, who had been adamant that American soldiers were responsible for the deed. He had known plenty, he said, and they would have been more than capable of treating an Icelandic girl like that. Of having their way with her, then dumping her body. According to him, the matter had been hushed up because a senior American officer had been involved and the military authorities had protected him by posting him abroad. Konrád never discovered what grounds his father had for believing this, and it was not until shortly before he died that he let his son in on the secret of what had happened at the seance requested by the parents of the murdered girl. It wasn’t something his dad was proud of, but characteristically he had no regrets either. Konrád’s dad wasn’t a spiritualist himself; his sole purpose in attending seances had been to con people into parting with their money, which he had done on numerous occasions. All the same, he did have a link of sorts to the otherworld through his sister, who believed in everything normally dismissed as superstition. She had complete faith in spells and curses, in the afterlife, in ghosts and monsters, and the huldufólk or ‘hidden people’, as the elves were known, and possessed a fund of stories that her brother drew on for his deceptions. She was convinced that there was always a good reason why the dead haunted the living, and that reason had to be discovered and solved before the departed spirit could find peace. This sister, who at the time still lived on the family farm up north, had rather eccentric, old-fashioned beliefs and claimed to have more than a touch of the second sight herself. She used to insist that Konrád’s withered arm was the result of a curse that had been laid on the family.

Konrád made another circuit of the flat, browsed the bookshelves, wandered back into the kitchen, then into the bedroom. He pulled out a drawer in the little bedside table and found a large photograph lying on top of an ancient, dog-eared copy of the Bible. The picture showed a handsome man aged around thirty, taken, at a guess, in the 1950s. It was black and white, unmarked and unframed. The back had yellowed with time, but otherwise the picture was very well preserved apart from a few stains in one corner. The man, who was lean and dark-haired, with strongly marked eyebrows, was staring straight at the camera, a faint, inscrutable smile playing on his lips.

Taking the picture into the sitting room, Konrád sat down again in the old man’s chair at the desk, holding the newspaper cuttings in his other hand, his gaze wandering from them to the photograph and then to the book lying open in front of him. A succession of thoughts passed through his head: thoughts of his father, the murdered girl, the military occupation, seances, the tormented souls of the dead, and an old man who lived alone and was found lying on his bed as if asleep — but had in fact been murdered.