Why Did You Lie? Read online

  ‘Mind you don’t get blown over.’

  Helgi starts so badly that he only just avoids losing his footing. He takes a moment to recover, then turns carefully, once he’s sure he looks calm, not like a man in a panic. He came within a hair’s breadth of falling. Ívar’s face appears in a gap in the concrete handrail of the lighthouse gallery. Helgi coughs and inches his way back up the steps. ‘How did you two sleep?’

  ‘How do you think?’ Ívar grins, his face scarlet, strands of hair sticking out from under his crooked hat. ‘I vote we swap tonight. You two outside, us inside.’

  Helgi clings to the wall with bare fingers as he leans back to see Ívar’s face. The cold, rough surface hurts his unprotected skin. ‘I really hope it doesn’t come to that. Surely they’ll fetch us later today?’ His hands are trembling and he hopes Ívar won’t notice.

  ‘An optimist, eh?’ The head disappears, then reappears above the rail. Ívar has risen to his knees and is adjusting his hat with gloved hands. ‘We should’ve made them fetch us by boat yesterday. It’s almost impossible in weather like this. At least, I can’t see you and Heida climbing down the rock and jumping into a boat in a sea like this. Not you, anyway, mate.’

  ‘I meant by helicopter.’ The wind snatches the hood off Helgi’s head but he doesn’t dare let go of the wall to pull it back up. It is unnerving having to crane his neck like this: the slightest movement could make him lose his footing.

  ‘Like I said. You’re an optimist.’

  Helgi can’t be bothered to stand here arguing; he wants to go back inside. All he’s getting out of this is a stiff neck and he doesn’t like the undercurrent of their conversation. They don’t seem to be able to speak to each other without descending into sniping, as if there’s something simmering beneath the surface, something Ívar is not saying but would like to fling in his face. Helgi hasn’t a clue what it could be; they’ve never met before apart from that one conversation in the bar that evening. And since Helgi was perfectly nice at the time, he can’t see what he’s done to deserve this hostility. ‘I’m going to try and make some space so we can all eat inside. We can’t risk the food blowing into the sea. You two come down when you’re ready.’ The joints in his neck click so loudly as he turns his head that he thinks Ívar must have heard them.

  It is darker inside the lighthouse. Given the strength of the wind now, it’s obvious why the window was blocked off: no glass would be capable of withstanding such a battering, year in, year out. Helgi’s sleeping bag takes to the air when he opens the door and falls back to the floor as he slams it behind him. Heida is still sitting on hers. She has put on her boots, hat and padded ski gloves. In the gloom her hands look like those of a robot.

  ‘You’re certainly dressed for the weather.’ His voice sounds falsely cheerful to his ears.

  ‘I heard you talking. Are they awake?’

  ‘Ívar is. I said I’d make room so we can all have breakfast in here. It would be crazy to try and eat outside in this gale.’ Helgi starts bundling up his belongings. It doesn’t take long but he has difficulty rolling up his sleeping bag in the confined space. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Heida tidying her own things away much more neatly; nothing is bundled up or stuffed quickly into her backpack, yet it takes her no longer than him.

  ‘Ívar implied we might have to spend another night here.’

  Heida’s eyes convey all she thinks about that. She groans, her face grim. ‘I just can’t do it. I’m scared to.’ As though she thought simply saying this would somehow alter their fate.

  ‘Perhaps he’s talking rubbish. We’ll find out more when he comes down. I imagine he’ll ring the coastguard. They’re always rescuing people from all kinds of scrapes, so they must be able to pick us up.’ Helgi doesn’t know what else to say. He doesn’t want to spend another night on the rock, though neither does the thought of the winch appeal much in this weather. Hopefully they’ll come later this afternoon. By then the wind should have dropped and he’ll have had time to prepare himself mentally for being hauled up to the helicopter. They both look up on hearing some sort of commotion overhead. ‘Hope they haven’t blown away.’ Helgi smiles at Heida but she doesn’t reciprocate, so he turns back to carry on fighting with his sleeping bag.

  The next minute the door crashes open and Ívar sticks his head in. He is even redder in the face than before. ‘I can’t find Tóti.’ He doesn’t let go of the door or show any sign of coming inside. The wind sends all the loose objects on the floor flying.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Helgi straightens up.

  ‘Hasn’t he just gone for a pee?’ Heida stands up too, inadvertently treading on a booklet that has blown out of one of the radio equipment boxes. ‘He might have climbed out onto the crag for a bit of privacy.’

  ‘Are you soft in the head? There’s nowhere to hide here. Do you think I didn’t have a look around when I saw he wasn’t in his sleeping bag? Are you a complete fucking idiot?’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Helgi stuffs his bag into a corner and takes a step towards the door. ‘If this is meant to be a joke, it’s not funny at all.’

  ‘I’m not joking, you stupid bastard.’ Ívar staggers as the wind snatches at the door. ‘He’s vanished.’

  Helgi looks at Heida, who is still standing on the booklet. The pages flap, as if she has trodden on a small bird that is desperately fluttering its wings. ‘Wait here. I’m going to find out what’s going on.’

  By way of reply, Heida zips her jacket up to her neck. ‘No way. I’m coming too.’ When she lifts her foot off the booklet it flies into the corner, where it continues to flail around in the draught. Helgi fights an impulse to tell her to stay put; she’s not his responsibility and what she does is none of his concern. When he asked her to wait, it was because he was afraid the violence of the wind and the limited standing room by the lighthouse could put them in even greater danger. The more people milling around out there, the bigger the risk.

  He would much rather stay in here himself.

  The moment they step outside the wind seems determined to show off its strength. They stagger around and bump into one another, but finally the three of them manage to climb onto the gallery around the lighthouse.

  There’s nobody there.

  Ívar stands upright, gesturing with one hand while hanging on to the rail for dear life with the other. ‘Look. He’s not here.’ He turns to the crag that rises up behind the lighthouse. ‘And there’s nowhere to hide.’

  They all survey the narrow gallery. There are two sleeping bags on the floor, shiny with sea-spray. On top of one is a sports bag that Helgi assumes belongs to Ívar. The other sleeping bag keeps bellying out and collapsing again, without moving from its place, and Heida pokes at it warily with her toe. Then she peers in through the opening. ‘His backpack’s inside.’

  ‘Is that yours, then?’ Helgi indicates the sports bag that is preventing the other sleeping bag from taking to the air.

  ‘Yes. What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ Ívar’s eyes flash and spittle flies from his mouth. ‘Are you doing a stock check or do you think Tóti’s hiding inside it?’

  Helgi blushes furiously, though he doubts either of them notices. His face must be ruddy from the cold anyway. ‘I’m just trying to work it out. I need to think.’

  ‘Think? What about? Tóti’s vanished. He’s not here and he’s not out there.’ Ívar waves in all directions. He meets Helgi’s eye and adds, as if reciting a nursery rhyme: ‘He’s not anywhere.’

  ‘We must stay calm.’ Helgi tries to mask his own fear. ‘There’s no point quarrelling. As far as I know none of us has any experience in this sort of thing, so we’ll just have to do our best. Was he here when you woke up?’

  ‘No.’ The violence has left Ívar’s voice and there’s a break in it. The man you’d have thought nothing could shake; a strong, weather-beaten tough guy; the type who’d love it if the axle of his jeep snapped during a storm in the depths of the Icelandic wilderness.
But suddenly he has got a grip on himself again and rubs his grey stubble. ‘I just didn’t twig because of the gear in his sleeping bag. It looked like Tóti was lying inside. But when I prodded it I realised he wasn’t there.’

  Heida picks her way right round the gallery, but there is no sign of Tóti. ‘Could he have climbed down the chain? Been rescued before us?’

  ‘Of course not. Do you think he would have gone without telling us?’ Ívar snatches off his hat and scratches his head. The wind makes his thin hair stand on end. He licks his salt-crusted lips and takes a deep breath. ‘He’s not here.’ All eyes turn to the sea that surrounds the rock.

  The waves rage against each other as if driven by invisible forces. The dark shadows under the crests all look as if they could be Tóti, but they keep disappearing before the eye can make out what is there. It doesn’t help that it isn’t properly light yet.

  ‘He must have fallen.’ Helgi clears his throat and looks away as Ívar glowers at him. ‘Maybe he went to relieve himself and the wind knocked him off or he slipped. That’s the only possible explanation. I very nearly fell off myself just now. Were you aware of him at all last night? Is it possible he went for a leak and didn’t come back?’

  ‘What does it matter when he disappeared?’ Ívar is shouting now, and not just to drown out the wind.

  ‘If he fell into the sea a short time ago, he may still be alive.’ Helgi keeps his voice level.

  ‘Nobody could survive that drop. Are you fucking stupid? I know he didn’t fall off yesterday evening. He woke me last night because he was dying of cold. The wind was blowing straight in through the bloody gap in the railing and he couldn’t sleep. We swapped places and I saw him get into his sleeping bag. He was alive then. Fuck.’ Ívar rams his hat back on his head. ‘Fucking, fucking hell.’

  Helgi notices that Heida isn’t saying anything. Her eyes are fixed on Tóti’s sleeping bag and she bends down to it as Ívar turns to face out to sea. Opening the bag, she peers inside and starts back. Then she removes one of her gloves, runs her bare hand over the lining and examines her fingertips, before rising to her feet, her face white.

  ‘I’m going down. There’s nothing we can do here.’ She avoids looking at Ívar as she begins to climb over the rail and Helgi notices that, instead of putting her glove back on, she shoves it in her pocket.

  She lets go of the whitewashed handrail and clambers down the crag that almost touches the lighthouse at this point. Left behind on the rail are two red fingerprints.

  Chapter 13

  24 January 2014

  From her face it was clear that Vala had overdone it. Nói thought she should have followed his example and taken a three-day weekend. She had dark shadows under her eyes as if she’d just been for a swim in heavy mascara, and her drooping lids and slurring voice made her seem a little drunk. ‘I just can’t think about it now. Tomorrow.’

  Nói put his tablet back on the table. The screen showed a freeze frame from the security camera at the holiday chalet. He knew Vala well enough not to bother even trying to persuade her to come over to the desktop. With the tablet he could at least follow her around and force her to look. But the moment she’d walked in he’d known it was a bad idea to share his worries with her. It would have been wiser to wait, give her a chance to relax, have some supper, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself. He had been sitting alone brooding far too long for that. And now the damage was done.

  ‘Come on – it’s weird. You’ve got to admit it.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Vala heaved a sigh. ‘Maybe not. Please don’t start banging on about pizza and scissors again – I’m too shattered to care.’ She unzipped the jacket she hadn’t taken off yet before collapsing onto a chair in the kitchen. ‘Anyway, I can’t see what difference it makes. You’re just collecting anything that fits in with some crackpot theory you’re obsessed with. Even if the camera footage shows people behaving oddly, it doesn’t tell us anything. Except perhaps that you shouldn’t be videoing your guests. I’m not sure we’d come out of it looking too good if people found out. Is it even legal?’ She took off her jacket, hung it over the back of the chair and rubbed her shoulders. ‘And take that iPad away. I’m not looking at it any more. I feel like a peeping Tom.’

  Nói snatched back the tablet. ‘It’s very strange. And there’s nothing illegal about the security camera. They knew about it – it was in the notes we left them, and it’s not like it records continuously. The system switches off when all movement ceases for any length of time, and it only films when there’s no one in the chalet.’

  ‘But you’ve got videos of them.’ Vala exhaled wearily.

  ‘Yes, but out on the decking, and only when they’re arriving. They obviously read our instructions because the first thing he does when they come in is switch off the system. And he switches it on when they go out or to bed.’ Nói cast around desperately for some way to convince her, while leaving out the stuff that would annoy her. He knew his worries stemmed from nothing more than a hunch that something was wrong. It had been triggered by a few minor details: the belongings the Americans had left behind, the things they hadn’t left behind, like the keys, and now this camera footage. Taken separately, unfortunately none of these details was sufficiently unusual to bother Vala, and she didn’t seem inclined to put them all together like him. It was easier said than done to convince other people of one’s gut instinct, especially when there was no concrete evidence of anything amiss, yet this had no effect on his own conviction. Forget logic: there was something wrong. ‘Well, I find the whole thing extremely odd, though you refuse to admit it.’

  Nói had gone through all the footage from the chalet from the period when the foreigners were using it. There were quite a few recordings, but each one was fairly short. The first showed the Americans’ arrival; them coming inside and looking around, apparently pleased with what they saw. The couple were around the same age as him and Vala, the man rather overweight, the woman slim. Neither was particularly memorable to look at. Both wore brand-new Icelandic fleeces under thick jackets, jeans and walking boots. With them they had two sports bags and several plastic bags of shopping.

  Then the man switched off the system and the picture vanished.

  After this came several clips in which they were returning from hikes or pottering about on the decking. Nothing remarkable and nothing that suggested there was anything wrong. Nói had deleted the footage he didn’t want Vala to see, in which the woman appeared stark naked while fetching a drink of water in the night. It was an unavoidable flaw in the system and there was no need to draw Vala’s attention to the fact. This was rather unfortunate since the clip showed the woman peering warily out of the kitchen window as if checking to see if there was somebody outside. She did the same at the large windows facing onto the decking. But it would be pointless to show this to Vala; she would be far too worked up about the infringement of the couple’s privacy to wonder why the woman should think there was somebody or something outside.

  The two clips he chose to show her were different. One was also recorded at night but this time it showed the man, clad in nothing but ill-fitting checked pyjama bottoms. Vala wanted to avert her eyes from the sight of his large paunch but Nói insisted she watch as the man crept over to the windows just like his wife had the night before – a fact Nói could not, unfortunately, mention. The man tiptoed to the windows, then went to check that the door was definitely locked. After he had gone back into the bedroom the view through the windows showed headlights being switched on somewhere beyond the decking. The lights swung away and disappeared. Vala had simply yawned and refused to admit that this was of any interest, though Nói noticed her fingers drumming nervously after the footage had ended.

  The other clip showed the guests returning from a walk and forgetting to turn off the system when they came in. The man fetched some steaks from the fridge, went back out onto the decking and disappeared round the corner in the direction of the barbecue. Then he came back wearin
g an odd expression, the meat still in his hands. He put it down on the table and appeared to retch. The couple spoke together and although the recording had no sound, it was obvious that they were not discussing the Icelandic scenery or the likelihood of seeing the Northern Lights that night. Then the woman rushed out, disappeared like him round the corner in the direction of the barbecue and reappeared almost immediately, her hand over her mouth.

  Then there was confusion. The Americans raced around gathering up their belongings before abandoning the chalet. There were no more recordings until the most recent.

  ‘Please at least admit that the business with the barbecue isn’t normal.’ Nói tried to get a grip on himself; he hadn’t meant his voice to wobble like that.

  ‘OK. If you’ll promise to stop going on about it.’ Vala rubbed her forehead as if she had a headache. Looking at his face, she saw he wasn’t capable of agreeing to this deal. She sighed. ‘Nói. It must have been when they discovered the barbecue wasn’t working. I’ll admit their reactions were a bit excessive but these people clearly aren’t used to things not going their way.’

  ‘No.’ Nói shook his head vehemently. ‘The problem with the barbecue was the day before; I can tell from his e-mail and the date of the recording. He must have been able to get it working after I sent him the instructions.’

  ‘Perhaps it broke down again or the repair didn’t work. How should I know? Please stop going on about it.’

  ‘Vala, I’ve e-mailed them repeatedly and they haven’t answered. Something’s happened.’

  ‘Like what? Come on. They’re having fun in Paris or somewhere and don’t have time to reply to some weirdo in Iceland who keeps bombarding them with messages.’

  ‘I rang and checked with the airlines to see if they’d left the country. Pity I don’t know where they were going, only the date.’