Why Did You Lie? (37 page)

Nói almost lost his nerve. Warily he took a deep breath and his courage returned. But only for a second. It dawned on him that he was empty-handed. If only he’d had the presence of mind to grab a knife instead of wasting time posing himself questions. There were enough sharp blades in the kitchen. But it would be unthinkable now to creep back downstairs, fetch a weapon and climb up again. There was too great a risk that he would be heard, and time was running out. He couldn’t afford any delays. And Vala and Tumi certainly couldn’t.

It was perceptibly lighter upstairs. There was a skylight over the TV alcove, which he used to curse because it caused a reflection on the screen. Now he thanked God he had never got a builder to block it off as he’d often planned to. The grey illumination was enough to show him everything.

Four doors opened off the upstairs landing, all of them closed. They led to his and Vala’s bedroom, Tumi’s room, the bathroom and the stairs to the loft. The choice was between the two bedrooms.

Tumi – Vala, Vala – Tumi?

Which room should he check first? Which of them could he bear less to see harmed – suddenly the question was no longer hypothetical. He couldn’t hear anything to hint where the danger lay. The silence was absolute; no sound but the odd plink from the bathroom tap.

Vala – Tumi, Tumi – Vala?

This was no time to hesitate, so he chose his and Vala’s room. If it was the person who had sent the letters, he was probably the very same man who had knocked Vala down. She was the one he was after. It was unlikely that he would be interested in Tumi. Nói moved towards the master bedroom, taking care not to tread on the floorboards that he knew squeaked. He made it noiselessly all the way to the door and laid his ear against it. He thought he could hear Vala breathing deeply inside but he wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was only the wind. But there was nothing to suggest that she wasn’t alone. Nói gripped the handle and opened the door. There was no point trying to be quiet; he knew the worn hinges too well.

It opened with the loud creaking that had always filled him with a cosy sense of home but now sounded worse than nails on a blackboard. He flung it back against the wall inside. That way he could see the whole room and simultaneously reassure himself that the man couldn’t be hiding behind the door.

The curtains were drawn back. Outside the black clouds had parted and a delicate, silvery radiance flooded into the room. Nói decided to switch on the light anyway. If someone was in there, hiding behind the curtains or in the cupboard, he would have to be deaf and blind not to be aware of Nói by now.

There was a view of the dark sea through the window and his eyes automatically searched for whatever it was that had drawn his attention to the beach. He thought he could see something pale floating just below the surface, but then it was gone and he assumed it must have been the moon gleaming on the waves. When he switched on the light the window glass went black, as if a screen had been turned off.

Vala was lying in bed and showed no sign of having been harmed beyond her existing injuries. She had kicked off the duvet, and Nói’s baggy T-shirt had rucked up under her breasts. Her bare belly and what could be seen of her limbs were blue with bruises, but there was no blood on the white sheet and she seemed to be breathing normally. He couldn’t see her face but sensed that all was as it should be.

Then Nói spotted the sheets of paper he had given Vala lying on the bedside table with the pen resting on them. For an instant he forgot the imminent danger. It looked as if the top sheet had writing on it, perhaps the others too. He stepped into the room, compelled by the longing to read what she had written, but had the presence of mind to check first that no one was hiding inside. Full of trepidation, he whipped the heavy curtains back from the sides of the window and his fear intensified as he opened the wardrobes one after the other. Each hiding place that turned out to be empty only increased the odds that the intruder would be lurking in the next. It was like Russian roulette. His fear peaked when he opened the door to their en-suite. There was nowhere else to hide and he felt an overpowering certainty that this was it.

There was no one in the bathroom, no one behind the door or in the shower. He sniffed the air for traces of aftershave but could no longer detect it with any certainty. Perhaps he was inured to it by now. Unless he had imagined the whole thing. Perhaps there was no one in the house but the three of them and poor old Púki. The smell of aftershave might be emanating from Tumi. Who knows, he might finally have fallen for a girl and be trying to impress her – or maybe girls in general. It was possible that he had invested in a bottle of cologne from the local shop; after all, he was hardly old enough to know that the brands sold there were mainly bought by alcoholics as a cheap tipple.

Relief flooded Nói: the danger was over, if it had ever existed. He decided to check the other rooms upstairs, but there was nobody in the family bathroom or in the loft or in Tumi’s room. There wasn’t any hint of aftershave either, which bothered Nói. He would gladly have suffered a migraine from a thick miasma of the stuff in exchange for an innocent explanation for its origin. But Tumi’s room was merely stuffy. Nói opened the window to let in the pure night air, daring now to relax and linger to tuck his son in properly. Perhaps the intruder had left via the window in the master bedroom when he heard someone coming upstairs. It was far from easy to climb down the fire escape but a piece of cake compared to dropping to the ground.

Had Nói been completely mistaken? Was there no intruder at all? The creaking he heard could have been Tumi or Vala. It wasn’t unheard of for them to nip to the loo in the night. But that didn’t explain the smell of aftershave or the fact that the lights were off downstairs.

There was little point tucking the boy in; he had already kicked off his duvet again. Pausing in the doorway Nói surveyed the chaos in his room and the shelves that had once held Lego creations of all shapes and sizes. He had bombarded the boy with the sets, remembering how he himself had hankered after Lego when he was little. Now that they had gone from the shelves, he felt sad that he hadn’t allowed Tumi to play with the models once they had finished making them. It would have made more sense than putting them on display like a hunter hanging trophies on the walls. Well, it was too late now.

Vala was still lying in the same position. Nói pulled the crumpled T-shirt down over her stomach, then began to draw up the duvet. His gaze became fixed on a bead of blood in her belly button. It must be connected to the accident; it could hardly be a sign of internal bleeding. Although he knew nothing about medicine, he was pretty sure you couldn’t haemorrhage through the navel. To double-check, he fetched some loo paper and dabbed gently at her stomach. Vala didn’t stir, so it could hardly be a wound that the doctors had overlooked. Unless the painkillers were incredibly effective. Nói raised the paper to the light and saw that the blood had spread out slightly. He looked back at her navel, which now appeared perfectly normal, with not a drop of red to see. He vacillated, wondering if he should wake her or call A&E to ask what it might mean, but decided to leave it. Vala seemed fine, so he made do with covering her up, then reached for the sheets of paper on the bedside table.

He began to read as he stood by the bed. Her handwriting covered two pages. Clearly she had meant to give them to him in the morning so she wouldn’t have to speak. Perhaps she had found it easier to write the whole thing down, alone in bed, than to have to explain it to his face tomorrow. He didn’t blame her. It was obvious that she had seen through him when he escorted her back upstairs. She knew he wanted answers, however much he pretended it didn’t matter. Before reading the letter he checked to see if she had finished it and thought she had. It must have been a real effort to use her right hand when her arm was in plaster and sore from the accident, but she must have started the moment he went downstairs, and fallen asleep straight afterwards.

At first Nói had difficulty working out the context because Vala had written as concisely as possible, often using abbreviations. But then his eyes opened and he raced through the rest as fast as he could. Afterwards he lowered his hands and stared at his wife’s averted head in a feeble attempt to grasp how she could have misunderstood and underestimated him so badly. But the longer he reflected, the more the truth dawned on him and he was forced to admit that there had been no misunderstanding. This handwritten account had no place in the sterilised world he had created for his family. Had she told him when they first met, he wouldn’t have considered her a suitable candidate to be his wife and would have continued his search elsewhere. There had never been a right time to tell him. Some things have to be revealed at the beginning of a relationship. Later, the time that has elapsed becomes its own kind of betrayal. When was she supposed to have told him this story? On their wedding day? When she had just given birth? In front of the telly one Tuesday evening? He knew himself well enough to recognise that he would never have been able to accept this. Vala had been right to keep quiet about it.

Nói bent down to whisper to Vala that he realised he was emotionally constipated. It was his fault she hadn’t dared confide in him as soon as the letters started arriving, as soon as she received the phone call warning her that her past was about to catch up with her. He meant to tell her that the man named in the letter would get his just deserts; he would see to it personally that he never walked free. If the justice system let them down, he would find a way to rid them and society of this vermin. That was a promise, and hopefully it would go some way to making up for all his mistakes. But as he bent down to kiss her, Vala emitted a strange rattling sound. Stiffening, he turned her head carefully towards him. Her eyes opened but he could see nothing but the glazed whites. Foam oozed from the corner of her mouth and her whole body started to shake.

Everything was far from fine.

Nói flung down the sheets of paper, wondering frantically what to do. Ring for an ambulance or start mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Which came first?

He got no further. From under the valance around the bed two strong hands shot out, grabbed hold of his ankles and jerked so that he toppled over backwards. The world spun before his eyes, and he gasped and groaned weakly as the intruder crawled out from the one hiding place Nói had overlooked: the most obvious.

Everything went black.

When Nói recovered consciousness, it was not due to the mercy of the powers above. He was freezing and couldn’t see a thing. His ribcage felt as if it were bursting and there was only one thought in his mind – that he couldn’t breathe. He became aware of the throttling grip on his throat that was holding his head down. A great weight was pressing on his back, making it impossible for him to turn.

He was drowning.

The taste of salt told him he was in the sea. Probably off the beach below the house. His lungs sent a warning that they couldn’t hold out any longer. He should prepare for them to fill with icy seawater. Instinctively Nói opened his eyes wide and struggled but found he had no strength left. In front of him was something lighter in colour than the surrounding murky gloom. It spread out as if to engulf him. Perhaps this was the afterlife welcoming him. He remembered hearing stories of a white light. This was merely pale but even so it gave him hope that what was to come would not be so bad. Not so bad after all.

Nói gave up fighting and filled his lungs. His death throes did not last long and during them he comforted himself with the thought of Vala’s letter. With any luck it was still lying on the bed and would ensure that justice triumphed in the end. As long as the man hadn’t spotted the pages and shoved them in his pocket. That would be so unfair.

The pale colour vanished and everything went black.

Chapter 32

26 January 2014

There was such a throng of vehicles at the end of the street that anyone driving into the cul-de-sac would be forced to reverse out again. Örvar parked the police car in the drive of the neighbouring house, ignoring the man watching them angrily out of the window. Beside him stood a woman who clearly couldn’t care less about the parking place but was anxiously following what was happening next door. As Nína and Örvar walked away they heard a furious banging on the glass behind them but neither looked round. Instead they quickened their pace to make sure they were out of reach by the time the man stormed outside.

They hadn’t spoken much on the way. Örvar had been on the phone most of the time, talking to officers on the scene, and Nína had only managed a couple of quick questions when they first got in the car. She had asked about the files from the archives: why had he fetched them and where were they now? She had bitten back the urge to berate him for keeping silent when he knew all along that he had the reports she was looking for. That would have to wait. But she had received no answers. Örvar had said there was no time to discuss that now, then put on his headset and started talking on the phone. Nína had a hunch that there was no one on the other end.

It looked as if someone had set up a huge open-air casino in the cul-de-sac. The flashing lights of the ambulances and police cars hurt their eyes and Nína almost expected to hear someone celebrating the fact that they had won the jackpot. There was even a fire engine. Surely that was excessive.

All kinds of uniforms were milling around – doctors in white coats, divers in black drysuits, members of the rescue team in luminous jackets, paramedics, police. They moved briskly in and out of the house, crisscrossing the gardens both front and back, and a couple of police officers with a dog on a lead were walking the boundaries. The lights had attracted curious passers-by and two officers had their hands full trying to keep them out of the way.

Örvar banged irritably on the roof of a car belonging to an elderly couple who had become stranded in the middle of the road, and were sitting there, rigid with fright at their predicament. He waved them away, then sent some officers to the end of the street with orders to let no one through unless they could prove they were residents or had urgent business there.