The Reckoning: Children's House Book 2 (Freyja and Huldar) Read online

  ‘Shall we take a seat in the meeting room?’ Out of the corner of his eye, Huldar saw that Erla was showing signs of heading in their direction and it was all he could do not to drag Freyja away. Not that the meeting room would provide much of a refuge. It would be better to leave the building, but he couldn’t think of a convincing excuse off the top of his head. ‘It’s quieter there,’ he added lamely. He grabbed some papers from his desk and a pen that he only remembered too late had run out of ink. Never mind – he had to get them both to safety before Erla reached them. Freyja was clearly unimpressed when he almost shoved her down the shortest route between the desks to the smallest meeting room.

  Holding the door open, he hustled her inside with the same haste. As he did so, he sneaked a glance over his shoulder and, much to his relief, saw Erla in the middle of the office, engrossed in a phone call. He closed the door behind him. ‘Sorry about that. Things are a bit hectic.’ Seeing that this apology had done nothing to mollify her, he added: ‘There’s been a fresh twist that’s really put the cat among the pigeons. As you know, I was ordered to drop my investigation into Thröstur’s letter since they thought it could wait. But the situation’s changed.’

  ‘What happened?’ Freyja chose a chair as far away from Huldar as possible. He would have preferred to sit closer to her but, seeing Erla through the glass wall, changed his mind.

  ‘It’s possible it’s linked to another case. Unlikely, but possible.’ Huldar brought her up to date with the murder in the garage and the link between the victim Benedikt Toft and Jón Jónsson, and also with the severed hands that had turned up in Benedikt’s hot tub. He asked her to keep it confidential, but that was only for form’s sake as the media had already got hold of the story. The coverage was lurid, as he’d guessed it would be, and no wonder. Freyja could hardly add anything to the existing stories and speculation in the press. ‘I was hoping you’d come with me to have another go at talking to Thröstur, and to his sister and mother as well this time. I’m also interested in talking to Jón Jónsson and would appreciate it if you were there to provide your psychological insights – is he likely to be violent on top of everything else? That sort of thing. It’s not impossible that he’s connected to the murder, or even that he’s the killer.’

  ‘As I’ve told you before, I’m no expert on sex offenders. I work with their victims.’ She loosened her scarf and put it in her lap. ‘I can come with you, but I doubt I’ll be much use. I decided to read up on Jón and found the record of his judgement by the Supreme Court, but it wasn’t very enlightening. There are no files about the case at the Children’s House, but then the centre had only recently been set up and it took a while to persuade the courts and investigators to take it seriously. They seem to have completely bypassed us, which was a common problem in the early days. It’s a pity, since if we’d been involved both Jón’s children would have been given medical exams. I can’t see any evidence that this was done. They were questioned in court but denied that he’d ever abused them.’

  ‘Would it have changed anything? The judge has to stay within the narrow parameters of the charge and since the abuse of Jón’s own children wasn’t the issue, he wouldn’t have seen any reason to complicate the trial further. I’m guessing the question was only allowed because the man’s defence counsel wanted to demonstrate that the attack on Vaka was a one-off. He must have known the children claimed their father had never touched them, and trusted that they wouldn’t change their testimony when he confronted them in court.’

  Freyja made a face.

  ‘There’s another judgement,’ Huldar added, ‘dating back a couple of years earlier, from the Reykjanes District Court. I can give you a copy. You won’t find it online because Jón’s name was removed after he was acquitted. There’s not a lot to be learnt from the version I have – all the details are missing. I’ve put in a request to see the full records. All I know is that he was charged with the sexual abuse of a minor.’

  ‘Well, there’s a surprise.’ Freyja snorted. ‘By the way, I went to see my brother Baldur. He says Jón Jónsson received few if any visits but quite a lot of letters, handwritten, from an adult. Perhaps from his children, or his wife. Though it’s difficult to imagine why they’d have been writing to him.’

  ‘When was this?’ Huldar reached for his pen to make a note, then remembered that it was out of ink. ‘Letters to prisoners are censored – especially letters to paedophiles, I’d have thought. I’ll ring and ask if anyone remembers what they contained and who sent them.’ Through the glass wall, Huldar noticed Erla shoving her phone back in her pocket. Their eyes met, and she looked anything but happy. She was about to move when her phone rang again. Saved by the bell once more.

  ‘The prosecutor who was found dead, this Benedikt Toft, is he the one who got Jón convicted for murder?’

  ‘No, he was the prosecutor in the earlier case, when he was let off.’

  Freyja raised her eyebrows. ‘And you lot think Jón Jónsson killed him? Rather than his son, Thröstur?’

  ‘We don’t think anything. We just want to decide if there’s any reason to investigate Jón further. Benedikt Toft had a long career as a prosecutor and was involved in countless cases that could have prompted some nutter to seek vengeance. We’re working through them all but I find this one the most plausible. The man is left in peace until shortly after Jón Jónsson gets out. It’s a strange coincidence and I make it a rule not to believe in coincidences.’

  ‘But why should Jón attack the prosecuting counsel in a case where he was acquitted? Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate to go after the person who sent him to jail?’

  ‘You’d have thought so, but when you stop to think about it, it hardly matters who prosecutes in a murder trial. Your dog, Molly, could do it. Defendants in murder trials are never acquitted in this country.’ Outside the meeting room Erla had finally finished her phone call and was advancing in their direction. It was too much to hope that a higher power would intervene with a third call to prevent her. She flung open the door and stood there with a nasty glint in her eye, taking care not to give any sign that she was aware of Freyja’s presence.

  ‘We’ve just had a call from the cemetery in Hafnarfjördur. A grave has been vandalised and there’s quite a bit of damage. You’d better get over there.’

  ‘Me?’ Huldar was wrong-footed. He’d been prepared for an earful about uninvited guests, but not this. ‘Can’t someone else handle it? Someone who’s not involved in the murder investigation?’

  ‘Everyone’s involved in the investigation. As you should know. The difference is, they’re following up real clues, not wasting their time on a wild-goose chase.’

  Huldar’s face darkened. He didn’t often lose his temper but when he did, he had trouble controlling himself. Or rather, he had no desire to. When he was angry, he was really angry. ‘A wild-goose chase that you gave the green light for, remember?’ He bit back a comment about the other leads turning out to be blind alleys. No need to reveal that kind of detail in front of an outsider.

  ‘Get over to Hafnarfjördur.’ Erla’s lips compressed into a thin line. ‘And, by the way, I’d rather you didn’t drag every Tom, Dick and Harry in here without consulting me.’ She jerked her head angrily in Freyja’s direction, still without looking at her, then barked again: ‘Hafnarfjördur Cemetery. Now!’

  On the way to the cemetery Freyja barely paused for breath in her condemnation of Erla. Huldar had persuaded her to go along with him, partly so they could continue their discussion of Jón and Thröstur’s case, but also in the hope of talking her out of storming back to the Children’s House and making a scene. Pissed off though he was with Erla, he’d rather she didn’t get into even more trouble.

  ‘What is that woman’s problem? I mean, what have I ever done to her? She was rude to me the first time we met, before I’d even said a word.’

  Huldar hummed and hawed noncommittally as he pulled into the empty car park. It seemed the dead had fe
w visitors on a weekday. He parked by the service building where he had arranged to meet the caretaker. Unwilling to give the man the impression that he wasn’t taking the incident seriously, he tried not to fret about the foolishness of this errand at a time when far more urgent matters were awaiting his attention. But he couldn’t shake off his resentment. Why couldn’t Hafnarfjördur Police handle this? No doubt it was just Erla being vindictive.

  Freyja followed him out of the car, still ranting. Huldar nodded from time to time but was privately grateful when she shut up on entering the silent service building. She didn’t say another word about Erla as Huldar made the introductions to the caretaker, nor as the man led them to the desecrated grave, inhibited partly by his presence but also, Huldar suspected, by the sobering impact of the endless rows of crosses and headstones. When confronted by these symbols of life’s transience, he couldn’t help thinking how trivial their everyday problems seemed.

  ‘Here it is. As you can see, the damage extends well beyond the grave itself.’ The man gestured to the vehicle tracks that had torn up the turf, flinging earth over the snow all around the disturbed grave. The headstone had been knocked flat and its inscription now faced heavenwards: the person it commemorated could look down and read it if they so wished. ‘I can’t begin to understand why anyone would have done such a thing. This almost never happens. Even the worst vandals tend to leave us alone.’

  Huldar bent down to take a closer look, though there was nothing to see but a mess of soil and gravel. He straightened up again. ‘Who discovered this?’ The snow on the path leading there had been almost pristine, the only tracks a line of footprints that the caretaker said were his. Since very little snow had fallen in the night, the vehicle that had caused the damage must have come from a different direction. The paths criss-crossing the cemetery were wide enough to drive down. Scanning the surroundings more carefully, Huldar spotted caterpillar tracks leading from the opposite direction.

  ‘I did. I always do a circuit of the cemetery in the mornings to check that everything’s in order. I don’t often see anything. You get the odd cross leaning a bit, but it’s usually just vases knocked over by the wind.’

  ‘Do you have CCTV?’ Huldar asked, though he could already guess the answer. He hadn’t spotted any cameras in the graveyard or car park. He took a few pictures with his phone in case the police took any action, unlikely though it seemed.

  ‘No. They didn’t think there was any need. As I said, things are usually quiet here.’

  Huldar nodded: ‘Right.’ He wondered what he could do beyond scribbling down a description and taking the man’s statement. ‘In other words, the vandalism you wanted to report is this disturbance here? A headstone knocked over and, what, superficial damage to the terrain?’

  The man looked surprised. ‘No. Not only that. The digger we use to excavate the graves has been damaged too. The vandals can’t have shut the door properly when they finished and it blew open, breaking the glass. We never lock it; the keys are usually left in the ignition, but we won’t be making that mistake again. It seems there’s no limit to what people will stoop to these days. I’ll take you to see the digger; it’s parked behind the building. It was returned there, strange as that sounds.’

  A damaged digger. Huldar caught Freyja raising her eyebrows and wasn’t surprised. This was turning out to be an utter waste of time. ‘I’ll take a look, if only to make a note of the damage. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s unlikely this incident will be solved. I’m guessing some drunks thought it would be a laugh to go for a joyride around the cemetery last night and collided with the grave. Perhaps they got stuck in the mud and tore up the ground while they were trying to free the digger.’

  The caretaker looked around, frowning. ‘I don’t believe they just careered off the path by accident.’ He pointed at the next-door grave that was now buried in soil and gravel. ‘They obviously used the bucket here.’

  Huldar stared at the marks left by the digger’s bucket attachment, trying to keep a straight face. This mess didn’t make it into the top hundred list of criminal damage he had seen. ‘There’s no telling what put them up to it or what exactly they were trying to achieve. But it’ll certainly be almost impossible to catch the hooligans responsible.’

  ‘You think so?’ The caretaker looked disgruntled. ‘Can’t you take fingerprints from the digger? If they had bare hands, that should help you trace them.’

  Huldar coughed to smother a sigh. ‘Forensics take care of that side. But they’re a bit tied up at the moment so I doubt they’ll have time to send anyone along. They do have to prioritise. The fact that the vandals put the digger back where they found it suggests they’re not the kind of petty criminals we have on record. If they were, they’d have either stolen it or abandoned it where it was after they’d tired of the game.’ Huldar took a few more pictures to satisfy the man. ‘Like any help straightening up the stone?’

  The caretaker wavered. He was clearly dissatisfied but Huldar’s offer of help was tempting. ‘I was going to fetch the digger and pull it up. But the three of us together can probably right it. Seeing as you’ve come all the way out here without doing any actual investigating.’

  Ignoring this, Huldar said, still in a friendly tone: ‘Shall we get on with it then? In case anyone comes to visit the grave.’

  ‘It doesn’t get many visitors. The man lying here’s been dead for years. Grief fades with time, just like everything else.’ The caretaker donned a pair of work gloves. ‘But you never know.’

  They went over to the stone and positioned themselves as best they could. Freyja didn’t seem too thrilled at being made to stand in the middle of a mud-bath and heave up a gravestone. She had pulled on a pair of bright red gloves that weren’t designed for such dirty work. ‘Do you think there’s any point?’

  Neither Huldar nor the caretaker replied; they were too busy pushing and grunting with the strain. It was an impressive block of stone; the dead man must have been a person of consequence. No simple wooden cross for him. When Freyja eventually joined in, they managed to right it, but they had to scrape away a bit of soil around the base before it would stand up straight.

  Panting, they contemplated a job well done. Huldar remarked that this Einar Adalbertsson owed them a favour, though it probably wouldn’t be repaid any time soon. Neither the caretaker nor Freyja seemed to appreciate his humour and they walked over to the digger in silence. There Huldar took a few more photos before they said goodbye and returned to the car.

  Huldar’s phone rang before the cemetery had even disappeared in the rear-view mirror. It was Erla, sounding a little agitated but otherwise normal, as though no cross words had been exchanged in the meeting room earlier. ‘Are you at the cemetery?’

  ‘No. In the car, just leaving. It didn’t take long, you won’t be surprised to hear.’

  ‘Turn round.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Turn round. There’s been a development.’

  Huldar listened, then did a U-turn at the next junction. When Freyja asked what was going on, all he said was that he needed to check something before they went back to town. She didn’t ask any further questions, just said she’d wait in the car while he ran in.

  So she wasn’t with him when he asked the caretaker how deep the coffins were buried. Nor when he asked if he could borrow a metal stake to prod into Einar Adalbertsson’s grave.

  Chapter 16

  Over three hundred tonnes of rubbish was transported daily to be turned into landfill at the Sorpa site on Álfsnes, according to the digger operator standing at Huldar’s side. The bulk of it arrived in the form of weighed bales, which were stacked up in mounds that would eventually be covered with earth. Those who didn’t know would never guess how the resulting landscape had been created, though at the moment it was glaringly obvious. A swarm of screaming gulls circled over the colourful slope in search of food. At its foot stood two mechanical diggers, their huge yellow arms in the resting position, forced
into inactivity by the discovery. Meanwhile the bales from the sorting centre at Gufunes were piling up. It wouldn’t be possible to process them until the police had finished examining the area, and the digger operator predicted gloomily that it would take for ever to make up for lost time.

  The citizens of Reykjavík wouldn’t stop throwing out rubbish just because a coffin had been found at the landfill site.

  ‘Someone must have brought it here last night. There’s no way we could have missed it yesterday. We were working in that area and I assure you that we never saw any coffin and none of us put it there.’ The digger operator who’d reported the discovery, whose name was Geiri, folded his arms, resting them on his protruding gut. His massive bulk was stuffed into a hi-vis jacket that barely met around his middle. He looked as if he had been vacuum packed. ‘We didn’t notice it to start off with because it was covered in snow, but as soon as the wind picked up, we spotted it.’

  ‘Who saw it first?’ Huldar shoved his hands in the pockets of his parka to protect them from the biting wind.

  ‘Him. Stebbi.’ Geiri pointed to a man watching them from where he was leaning against a Portakabin with a steaming mug of coffee. He was the man who had come storming towards them, waving his arms urgently to chase them off the site, when Huldar’s unmarked police car drove down the access road. He had relaxed once Huldar explained who he was, though he had flashed a doubtful glance at Freyja in the passenger seat, since she could hardly have looked less like a police officer. She was still in the car, having refused to get out because of the stench, though in fact one soon ceased to notice it. As the digger operator had informed Huldar, every effort was made to keep strong-smelling waste to a minimum at Álfsnes due to complaints from the nearby residential area, and in summer they used chemicals to reduce the smell. No such luxuries were available in winter, however. Perhaps that was why the gulls were making such a racket.