The Silence of the Sea

Chapter 21

The darkness inside was pierced by a sunbeam. Motes of dust glittered in the ray of light, vanishing where it faded out. As she breathed in the stagnant air, Thóra was struck by how quickly buildings betrayed the signs of being uninhabited. After their three-week holiday last summer her own house had greeted them with cold, dry air and an unfamiliar musty smell; not until they had given it a good airing and then turned up the radiators had it felt like home again. Ægir and Lára’s house had stood empty for the same amount of time, and although this was her first visit she was sure they too would have made a face on entering the hall.

‘Shall I turn the lights on?’ Margeir stood in the doorway, looking bemused, momentarily arrested, like Thóra, by the play of dust in the light. ‘Or should I just open the curtains?’

‘Turn on the lights. It would be better.’ Thóra adjusted a sock that had been half pulled off when she removed her leather boots. ‘We should take the precaution of touching as little as possible, though of course we’ll have to rummage around in drawers and so on. But with any luck we’ll find the bank statements and other stuff straight away, so that won’t be necessary.’

‘They were over the moon when they bought this house.’ The old man groped disconsolately for the light switch. ‘I helped them with the painting before they moved in.’

Thóra was at a loss how to reply. The whole situation was so depressing that words would be inadequate plasters for the man’s wounds. Besides, the decorating job didn’t really deserve any praise. The house boasted a monochrome colour scheme of the type popular among young people. Yet unlike many similar homes now on the market, here the couple had not spent much on the furnishings. Most of the furniture looked like standard Ikea issue, and there were no paintings on the walls, only a few prints, which were probably wedding presents. Thóra was glad at any rate to see no evidence that the couple had been living beyond their means. That made it less likely that they had serious money troubles, unless the interest rate on their mortgage had recently shot up. And if their finances were in order, it would strengthen her case.

They began by sorting the post from the newspapers that lay piled up in the hall but, with the exception of a recent credit card bill, found nothing of interest. The family had gone abroad at the beginning of the month and there was still a week or so to go before the end. No doubt bank statements would pour in then but Thóra would rather not wait for these if she could use older ones to establish their financial situation. Mortgage payments didn’t rise that much from month to month. ‘Do you have any thoughts about how we should do this? Like whether we should start upstairs or downstairs?’ She averted her gaze from a withered pot plant that was crying out for water. There was no point in prolonging its death struggle by a few more days.

‘I’d rather start down here. I’m not sure I can face the bedrooms. I couldn’t cope with seeing the twins’ empty bunks.’ His head drooped. ‘This is all just unbearable.’

‘I know. It’s awful.’ Thóra looked around for a suitable place to begin. ‘Should we start in the kitchen? Perhaps they stuck their credit card statements to the fridge door?’ It was a long shot; she certainly wouldn’t display her own in such a place. She wouldn’t want Sóley, let alone a visitor, to see the sums that went on paying off loans and other expenditure every month. But they might be kept on top of the fridge or somewhere else in the kitchen. Neither she nor Margeir were keen to prolong this visit.

‘If we find the bills, will that give you enough evidence for the court?’ Margeir led the way into the kitchen. She suspected him of talking as a way of distracting himself from the empty husk of the missing family’s life.

‘Yes, as far as that side’s concerned. It’s essential to be able to demonstrate that they weren’t in dire straits financially because this will undermine any attempt by the insurance company to claim they’ve absconded. After all, what would they have to gain if everything was fine at home? Details like this will weigh heavily with the judge, if we have to go down that road. It’s also worth including this information with our request to have their property recognised as their estate.’

‘It’s preposterous that anyone could believe they did this deliberately. Preposterous. If I was in better shape, I’d sue the insurance company for putting such disgusting insinuations on paper.’

‘Unfortunately, the insurance company has probably had direct experience of similar cases where people have done a runner. Ægir and Lára may have been honesty personified but there are others who have no scruples about making fraudulent claims. By raising objections, the company isn’t trying to blacken your son and daughter-in-law’s reputations. But it’s a great deal of money and they can’t pay it out unless they’re entirely satisfied that Ægir and Lára really are dead. If our application to the court is successful, they’ll accept the verdict and release the money. Who knows? They might even pay up straight away.’

Instead of answering, Margeir started opening drawers at random and shutting them again immediately without even examining their contents.

Using a clean knife she found on the kitchen table, Thóra opened the envelope containing the credit card bill. The transactions covered two sides but the total was within normal limits, neither strikingly high nor low. If their debit card and cash transactions showed the same pattern of spending, the couple’s outgoings could be deemed relatively modest. She ran her eyes quickly down the payments, most of which were to supermarkets or petrol stations. There were also several to a company whose name Thóra didn’t recognise, but the amounts were small. A separate summary of overseas transactions was printed at the bottom. Thóra couldn’t identify any of the recipients so she had no idea what the payments entailed but it seemed fair to assume that they all involved food and drink. None of them was particularly high, except the payment that was processed the day they left port, which was almost certainly the hotel bill. ‘I don’t know if you’d like a look but their credit card bill is pretty modest. You’ll need to contact the bank about paying it off, as well as covering the interest on any loans they have. If you like, I can talk to them. I’m sure they’ll be amenable, despite the fact that they refused to release the bank statements. All you need to know is whether there’s enough money in their accounts to cover the payments. I can speak to the resolution committee too and find out if they’ll be paying Ægir’s salary as usual next month.’

‘Thank you, that would be helpful. I don’t really know what to do if there isn’t enough. We haven’t got any savings; they ran out a long time ago.’

‘I doubt it’ll come to that. This is an unusually complicated situation and I’m sure everyone will be willing to take that into account.’ Thóra walked over to a large white fridge covered with a motley assortment of drawings and notes, among which were two bank giros, one for a magazine subscription, the other for the dentist. ‘The girls liked drawing, didn’t they?’ She detached a picture signed by Bylgja and showed it to her grandfather. It was the typical offering of a contented child, depicting the five family members all smiling broadly and holding hands, standing on a line of green grass. ‘Do you think I could borrow this? It’s useful evidence that they were a happy family, though naturally it wouldn’t be sufficient on its own.’

‘Take it. Take anything you think will help. Of course, it would be nice to have it back afterwards but we’re not intending to sort through their things any time soon. It’s still too upsetting.’ He reached out for the picture and studied it. ‘They both loved drawing. Used to occupy themselves for hours with their crayons, ever since they were tiny. Sigga Dögg’s the same, though she’s too unsettled at the moment. The poor little thing, she can sense that something’s terribly wrong.’

‘Have the child protection authorities been in touch at all since I had a word with their lawyer?’ Thóra looked back at the picture, which Margeir had put down on the kitchen table. The figures’ black eyes were staring at the ceiling, their scarlet mouths grinning crazily. The sight was somehow disturbing and she felt an impulse to cover it up with the credit card statement. But they would continue to smile and nothing would change. She tried to rekindle the hope inside her that the girls would be found alive; perhaps they’d been taken ashore at Grótta and hidden away, or secretly conveyed abroad. The hope was faint, but it was there, nonetheless.

‘Yes, I think so.’ The old man took hold of another drawer handle and dithered, unable to remember if he was opening or closing it. ‘Sorry, my memory’s not working at the moment. They keep ringing. My wife’s on the verge of collapse and I feel as if I’m heading the same way. I keep being overwhelmed by a feeling of hopelessness; we’re not capable of raising her in the long term, and we should just force ourselves to accept it. The money won’t make much difference. There’ll come a point when we open the door to those people and hand her over. It’s so hard when your love for someone harms the very person it’s supposed to protect.’

Thóra laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I do think it’s true that she would be better off with a younger couple. But it’s equally clear that it would be in her best interests to have as much contact with you as possible. You’re her only link to her family and it’ll be incredibly important for her to have you there.’ She withdrew her hand and continued, ‘I’ve been promised a meeting this week with the head of the relevant social services department and I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to arrange things to be as painless as possible for you and Sigga Dögg, while being for the best in the long run. The authorities would have to be heartless to deny you access. Not only heartless: stupid.’

After that they said little. Margeir sat down at the kitchen table, excusing himself on the grounds that he needed to rest for a moment. Thóra continued to search the kitchen but without finding any paperwork relating to money matters. It was the rotten food in the larder that caught her attention; half a loaf of bread covered in green mould and two flat-cakes in the same condition. She closed the door at once but the sour smell lingered in her nostrils. ‘I wonder if it would be okay to chuck out the old bread and stuff?’ She opened the fridge. The situation there was less grim; nothing looked obviously mouldy, though the date on the milk cartons didn’t exactly whet the appetite. ‘I let the police know we’d be looking in and they didn’t object. Apparently they haven’t been round yet and it didn’t sound as if they were planning a visit any time soon. But it would be unfortunate if we threw away something that turned out to be important.’

‘Why should they want to see the house? It’s not as if there’s anything of relevance here.’ Margeir sounded as if he had rallied again; his anger at those who were trying to cast aspersions on the family blazed up, momentarily overshadowing his grief. ‘Anyway, I can’t see what difference an old loaf of bread could make.’

Thóra closed the fridge again and smiled. ‘No. It’s not immediately obvious. Unless to prove that they haven’t been here recently, or to confirm when they left the country.’ Her words sounded so lame that she wished she could add an intelligent comment, but nothing sprang to mind. ‘I’m going to take a quick look upstairs. There’s nothing here.’

Margeir nodded but made no move to stand up. ‘I’ll be here when you come down.’ Thóra suspected that if she left the house without telling him, he would remain sitting at the table for hours, alone with his thoughts and memories.

Upstairs the carpeted landing muffled her footsteps, making it seem even quieter than the floor below. She walked past four open doors, peering into the rooms as she went. There were two fairly tidy children’s rooms, one with bunk beds, presumably the twins’ room, the other full of baby things, which must belong to Sigga Dögg. It contained no bed, only an old chest of drawers and a white-painted table with two small matching chairs. She saw no reason to enter the children’s rooms as it was highly unlikely that she would find what she was looking for in there. The clothes and toys she had promised to fetch for the little girl’s grandmother would have to wait until her main search was over. It wouldn’t help to have to lug around two bursting shopping bags.

She also left out the large bathroom that had apparently been shared by the whole family. It was a mess, which seemed to furnish the most convincing proof that the family had intended to come home. Personally, if she had been planning to abscond she would have washed all the dirty laundry, not left the basket overflowing with socks, T-shirts and underwear. She would also have tidied up the shampoo bottles and thrown away the empty toothpaste tube that lay by the sink, its top on the floor. All the indications were of life being carried on as normal.

The master bedroom seemed smaller than it was due to all the furniture it contained. A cot, its bedclothes unmade, had been fitted in beside the king-size bed. Thóra squeezed between them to reach the bedside table. It didn’t take a genius to work out that it had been used by Lára; on top lay a cheap necklace and reading glasses with pink plastic frames that no man would have been seen dead in. The two drawers contained nothing of interest, only an empty pill card and some dog-eared romantic novels with pictures of muscular men embracing long-haired beauties on their covers. No bank statements.

Ægir’s bedside drawer proved more rewarding. Under some foreign magazines featuring watches and sports cars, she discovered not bank letters but all kinds of work-related papers. Conscious of their fate, Thóra felt that the couple should have used the bed for other activities besides reading love stories, car magazines and work documents. She leafed through the pile of papers in case any of them related to the family’s accounts but found nothing. Instead, she was brought up short by a drawing. It looked like the plans of a ship that bore a striking resemblance to the yacht. Summoning up a mental picture of the cabins on board, she decided that this was indeed a plan of the different decks on the Lady K. The yacht’s name did not actually appear anywhere, but the page had been badly photocopied: the drawings were at a slant and it was possible that they had been part of a larger sheet. She sifted through the rest of the papers more attentively, noticing a few other pages that struck her as odd. All contained information about the yacht’s furnishings and equipment, and it was hard to imagine why an employee of the resolution committee would have been reading them in bed. She decided to take the whole pile of papers with her to study in more detail; if there was an explanation for this, it wasn’t immediately obvious. Perhaps Ægir had been required to study the make and design of the vessel for the valuation. But in bed?

When she put her head round the door of the last room on the landing, she hit the jackpot. It had been used as a study and she glimpsed a stack of bills on the small desk beside the computer. Flicking quickly through them she found bank giros for two mortgage payments and the interest on a car loan. The balances on the three loans were higher than she had hoped, but not alarmingly so. Next she scanned the shelves where she spotted several files marked ‘Tax – home’, together with the year, and took away the most recent, which turned out to be full of receipts and bank statements.

When she went downstairs Margeir was still sitting in the kitchen. A battered wallet lay on the table and he was gazing at a photo in a clear plastic pocket. ‘Is that a picture of the girls?’ Thóra put down the file and took a seat opposite him. The chair creaked as if weakened by standing idle for three weeks.

‘Yes, the twins.’ He turned the wallet so that Thóra could see the photo properly. When she picked it up, the smooth, shabby leather felt slippery to the touch. She focused on the picture.

‘Which one of them is this?’ She pointed at the solemn little girl standing beside her exact replica, who in contrast was smiling and had slung an arm round her sister’s shoulders.

Leaning over to see, Margeir replied: ‘Bylgja.’

‘Did she always wear those glasses?’ Thóra pointed at the bright-red frames on the child’s nose.

‘Yes. They were almost identical except that Bylgja was very short-sighted. She hated wearing glasses but she was too young for contact lenses or a laser operation. Her mother went to great lengths to find a pair she was reconciled to. Cheerful, don’t you think?’ Thóra smiled stupidly and agreed. Failing to notice her odd expression, Margeir carried on talking: ‘But there aren’t many pictures of her wearing them. She generally took them off when the camera came out. That’s why I’m so fond of this picture; it shows her the way she usually looked.’

Thóra took another glance, then returned the wallet without comment. Although the photo was small and the quality poor, the red frames were beyond a doubt the pair she had found in the wardrobe on board the yacht. How on earth could they have ended up there? What was the child doing in the cupboard? Almost certainly hiding. The question was: from who?