Why Did You Lie? (35 page)

After the phone call she had sat staring at the blank wall in front of her. At that moment she would have been grateful to be able to look out of a window and watch the morning traffic. Then she had stood up, smoothed down her crumpled clothes and hurried out of her office. It was just after eight and the working day was beginning. Again she reminded herself that it was nobody’s business what she did in her spare time – short of running a brothel or a crackhouse – but in work hours she had better get on with the job she was paid for: to sift through old sins and decide which should be preserved and which could safely be destroyed. As if she hadn’t had a hard enough time making that decision in relation to Thröstur.

‘You’re doing pretty well here.’ The caretaker was standing by the open door to the archives; a man no longer young, with strong, work-worn hands protruding from the slightly-too-short sleeves of his overall, which looked almost like a uniform, the blue denim covered in pockets, not all of which appeared to have a function. ‘There’s so much crap in those storerooms. Throw out the bloody lot like they originally intended, that’s what I say. Who’s interested in all that paper? Not the criminals, that’s for sure. I just can’t understand why they’ve lumbered you with this.’

Nína liked the man, who generally had a warm smile for her. Shortly after she’d joined the police, they had both arrived at the door to the station yard at the same time. He’d had his arms full of clean mops and she had waited for him, holding the door open. Ever since then he’d had a soft spot for her.

‘It’s all right. I’m not up to much at the moment so it suits me fine.’

‘It’s not exactly a cheery place to be. If you’re having problems you shouldn’t be locked away down here, you should be upstairs with your colleagues. I know people can be so and so’s at times but we all need company. You won’t get much of that from old documents.’

‘Maybe – but it can be good to have a bit of time to yourself. I’m not complaining anyway.’ She smiled dully at him. He was right in a way; certainly she was in no hurry to end this conversation. It was so comforting to have a normal chat with someone at work that Nína felt almost humiliatingly grateful for the man’s kind words. Being ostracised had obviously affected her more than she had realised or been willing to admit. She resolved to hold the door open for people whenever possible from now on.

The man shook his head, frowning. ‘It’s daft, if you ask me. Nobody’s set foot in these archives since they filled up. I should know – I used to look after the keys until we opened them up for you. Chuck the lot, I say. No one has any use for this junk now.’ Suddenly, however, he seemed struck by a thought. ‘Though I do remember one time when they needed something from down here. Not that long ago either. But that’s once in more than twenty years. Chuck the lot, then you can slip off home and take a little holiday. I won’t tell on you.’

Nína’s mind flew to the missing reports. ‘You don’t happen to know which documents they fetched?’

The man looked amused. ‘No. I may know this building better than anyone else but I haven’t a clue what goes on in here. Nobody ever tells me a thing about the cases you’re investigating or who you’re arresting. Not that it usually matters – it’s none of my business, apart from that one time I was here over the weekend and had no idea that my son was locked in the cells the whole time. So no one would dream of telling me what files they were fetching from down here. Especially not the top brass. I’m invisible to them.’

‘Was it a senior officer then?’ Nína pictured the folder lying open on the shelf the first time she came down to the basement. Little dust had settled on the open pages and it was obvious now that whoever had gone down there had removed the reports she so desperately needed. If she’d known that the archives were usually locked, she would have gone to the caretaker straight away to ask who’d been in.

‘Yes.
Your
boss, as a matter of fact. I reckon he should try his hand at this himself.’

The lights seemed to dim momentarily. ‘Örvar?’

‘Yes.’ The caretaker hesitated. ‘Anything wrong?’

‘No. Not at all.’ This was no lie. Nína suddenly felt alive, her tiredness forgotten. ‘Did you see what he took upstairs with him? Was it a whole file or a box maybe?’ She remembered seeing a dust-free space on one of the shelves where a box might have stood. Perhaps she was hoping for too much.

‘No, it was just a few pages. Not a thick bundle. About ten pages or so. I was pottering about waiting to lock up after him. That’s how come I saw him leave, though he didn’t notice me.’

‘Do you remember when this was?’

He wrinkled his brow. ‘Before Christmas. The beginning of December or thereabouts. I can never remember dates, I’m afraid. I never give any thought to what day it is. For me it’s either a weekday or a weekend. I generally take weekends off but I’ve had to make exceptions recently because of the move. The overtime comes in useful, though, so don’t think I’m grumbling.’

Thröstur had tried to kill himself at the beginning of December and he had probably phoned Lárus shortly beforehand. She had to get hold of those papers. ‘You know what, I’m going to follow your advice and take a break from the archives today. Find something to do upstairs.’

The caretaker’s face lit up. ‘Good for you! You know where I am if you need any help emptying those rooms. I’d have the whole lot down at the dump in an hour.’

‘Amazingly enough some of this stuff still matters. I’ll tell you about it later.’ She smiled and set off upstairs. She was going straight along to Örvar’s office and wouldn’t leave until she had the missing reports in her hands. He should be at work today; she’d seen the duty rota. The bastard. She had only taken a few steps when she turned. ‘Is it possible he took a box too? Came back to fetch it, I mean?’ Perhaps there had been more information about the case than just files. There was no telling what it might have been, but if Örvar was the only person who had been down here for years, the large, dust-free gap on one of the bottom shelves must be his doing. Nína knew it was optimistic of her but she had the feeling that her luck had suddenly changed and that now anything was possible.

‘No.’

She tried and failed to hide her disappointment.

‘You’re not looking for the videos, are you?’

‘Videos?’ She realised the misunderstanding. ‘Oh, no. It was me who took that box. The one I’m trying to trace could have contained just about anything. All I can tell is that a box is missing from the shelves and I was wondering who’d taken it and what might have been inside.’

The caretaker walked over to her. ‘I don’t know if we’re talking about the same thing but I took a box of videos off one of the shelves when I heard they were planning to go through all this stuff. That was before I knew you were being given the task – when I thought it would land on me. I assumed they were planning to bin the lot. I forgot to put it back.’

‘So you didn’t get rid of it?’ Her luck hadn’t deserted her after all.

‘No. It’s in a heap of junk I’m collecting to take to the dump. But it hasn’t gone there yet.’ He led Nína over to a pile that looked no different from any of the others. She would have liked to ask the caretaker how he went about deciding what to keep and what to throw away, but didn’t want to hang around down there any longer than necessary. So she accepted in silence the dirty, battered cardboard box that he dug out of the heap, and carried it upstairs. Despite the heavy weight in her arms she felt as if she were walking on air, for the answers she was desperately seeking might finally be within reach. Now, at last, she could say goodbye to her old life and begin a new one. Not as Nína the widow, but simply as Nína. Nína, who had lost her husband but who wasn’t going to let that rule her life. Ahead was some sort of closure, or at least a turning point.

Chapter 30

26 January 2014

The fan in the old video player whirred and groaned horribly but Nína ignored its protests. If she fetched the technician he was bound to confiscate it and put it in intensive care and she didn’t know where she could lay her hands on another.

When she’d signed for the machine she’d noticed that no one else had used it since her last week. Before that it hadn’t been taken out for three years. So any damage it might incur would be understandable. Inevitable, really. This excuse reminded her of the times she and Berglind had got up to mischief as children. She had usually known better but been unable to help herself; either because the forbidden activity had been too much fun, or because she’d thought they would get away with it. Berglind hadn’t suffered the same twinges of conscience because she’d put all her faith in her elder sister. When they were caught she would howl, having more often than not been Nína’s innocent sidekick.

Nína missed her sister’s company as she sat there alone, wrestling with her conscience and trying to ignore the machine’s screeching complaints and the faint smell of burning. It would have been easier to assuage her guilt over the mistreatment of the VHS player if Berglind had been beside her, since guilt shared is guilt halved.

Nína fast-forwarded and the burning smell intensified. She still hadn’t come across any interviews from the case Thröstur had been linked to. She only hoped the fan would last until she had gone through all the tapes.

Suddenly a child appeared on the screen. Nína paused the video, fire hazard and protesting shrieks forgotten. She was drawn into the interview room, her entire mind focused on the events of thirty years ago. She rewound a little, then watched the playback at normal speed. A handwritten notice was held up to the camera and on it Nína read the familiar case number and learnt that they were about to question the witness Lárus Jónmundsson.

Nína felt uncomfortably hot; there was a humming in her ears. With trembling hands she put on the headphones. Here was the link. Lárus and Thröstur had both been called in for questioning as part of the inquiry into Stefán Egill Fridriksson’s death. Nína leant back. Lárus must have been one of the children who sat on the wall with Thröstur, collecting car registration numbers. That had to be it. Thröstur’s phone call to him must have been about this case. What else did they have in common? Nothing, probably. That would explain why Klara said her husband had taken a while to work out who the caller was. They had known each other as boys but their friendship had ended when Thröstur moved away from the west of town shortly after the incident. Thröstur’s scribble,
Lalli? Lárus – Lárus Jónmundsson?
, must be evidence of his attempts to dredge up the man’s name.

Nína concentrated on the screen, dismissing all pointless, premature speculation. Once she had watched the recording and tracked down the reports it would be easier to figure it out. She pressed play again. A skinny, mousy-haired boy came in, accompanied by a man in an overcoat, who seemed anything but pleased to be there. As he entered he announced irritably that he was extremely busy and didn’t have time for this nonsense. His hands were buried in his coat pockets and Nína guessed his fists were clenched. This must be the boy’s father, though he looked more like his lawyer. Under the coat was a glimpse of suit and tie. But surely Lárus’s parents wouldn’t have sent him to see the police with only a legal counsel for company? The boy looked cowed as if he had been forced to listen to a tirade from his father on the way to the station. Remembering what it used to be like sitting in the back of her own father’s car after she and Berglind had committed some childish misdemeanour, she pictured the boy staring out of the window all the way to the station, gazing enviously at the passers-by who weren’t being subjected to a scolding.

The police officer indicated some chairs and the boy’s head drooped dejectedly as he walked over to one of them. The officer was the same man who had interviewed Thröstur, exuding the same air of calm. Ignoring the father’s grumbling he focused his attention on the son.

When the boy sat down, his stiff anorak rode up. He seized the opportunity to bury his chin in the neck so his mouth and nose were hidden. Only his large eyes were visible above the collar, staring down at his zip. He stuck his hands in his pockets like his father. It was as if he wanted to disappear inside the bulky jacket. But his wish was not granted. When his father sat down beside him, he nudged the boy sharply and told him to sit up like a man. From his expression, it was plain that the child wasn’t sure what this entailed.

The first questions were more or less the same as those that had been put to Thröstur. The answers were similar too, the main difference being the behaviour of Lárus’s father, who constantly interrupted his son. He invariably began by pointing out that he was a lawyer, as if the police officer had no short-term memory. Or perhaps he expected the man to fall to his knees in awe? Rather than being annoyed by the father’s high-handed behaviour, Nína felt smug that she’d interpreted his appearance correctly. She wondered which was better for a child: to be accompanied by a parent who never uttered a word, like Thröstur’s mother, or one who behaved as if his child was about to be charged with treason. As a police officer, she would prefer the former; as a child, the latter. Lárus seemed to be getting away with much briefer answers than Thröstur had, in any case, and was subjected to fewer questions. The replies he did give were short and childish: he had told the truth, he hadn’t seen anyone go inside the garage. No one at all. Nína thought it obvious the boy was lying, like his friend Thröstur. He never met the policeman’s eye, squirmed in his chair every time he repeated this mantra, and looked relieved whenever his father intervened.

This time the interview was not cut short by the tape ending, as it had been in Thröstur’s case, but nothing emerged that she didn’t already know; the boy’s name and his connection to Thröstur were what mattered. Nína watched the father jerk his son roughly from his chair and march him out of the room. The boy’s short legs were unable to keep up and as he disappeared through the door he looked back despairingly at the policeman. The overhead lights drew a glitter from his eyelashes where he had shed a tear. Perhaps it was simply a reaction to his father’s harsh grip.