Someone to Watch Over Me Page 22

  ‘I’m trying to get to the bottom of how this fire occurred and part of that process involves speaking to the employees of the centre and the families of those who died.’

  ‘As if we know anything. You must be pretty desperate if you think that the family members are holding on to some sort of secret information. Do you really think we wouldn’t have told it to the police when they were investigating the case?’

  The man was going to be a tricky interviewee, that much was certain. ‘A lot of what you discussed with the investigators back then didn’t find its way into the reports. They don’t include every little detail from the interviews. But just so you understand where I’m going, I have to rule out the possibility that the fire was directed at Friðleifur.’

  ‘No one would have wanted to harm him. He was just an ordinary guy. He’d never got on the wrong side of the law, never even got into a fight.’ The man’s voice faded, but then he added sadly: ‘Not even as a kid.’

  After this the conversation went much better. The man’s anger diminished and he appeared to realize slowly but surely that Thóra’s intentions were good. She carefully formulated her questions so that it would be impossible to interpret them as being in any way negative towards Friðleifur. ‘So he didn’t hang around with anyone undesirable? Someone who might possibly have attacked him at work, and things might have escalated from there?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. His friends were like him, easy-going, laid-back guys. Of course I wished he’d been a bit keener on the books, but I don’t know whether that had anything to do with his friends; they were all the same, and most of them dropped out of high school. Actually, I think Friðleifur was planning to go back to school. It’s just a hunch, but when I could finally bring myself to go through his room, I found a brochure of evening classes and some textbooks on pharmacology that he’d apparently bought. God knows he had enough time to study on the night shift.’

  ‘He lived at home, in other words?’

  ‘Yes – he didn’t exactly make a fortune from that job, or from his previous jobs, so he couldn’t afford payments on an apartment, and we weren’t in much of a position to help out either. It’s an incredible relief not to be stuck with an unsellable apartment on which you owe more than what you paid for it. Still, he was doing pretty well before he died; he’d become more sensible with his finances.’

  Thóra’s mobile beeped, and she read the short text message as she spoke. It was from Sóley, asking whether she was coming home. ‘I don’t imagine you and your wife ever visited the home, though I understand your daughter sometimes dropped in there?’ She replied to Sóley as she waited for the man’s reaction: Soon.

  ‘Did she? I didn’t know that. Why do you mention it? If she visited him, I don’t see how it’d be relevant here; he and his sister got on well, that’s all.’

  ‘I was just wondering whether she could maybe assist me. An outsider might have a clearer perspective and I can’t see a statement from her anywhere in the case files.’

  ‘No, there wasn’t one; and as I say, I wasn’t aware she’d visited him there. Are you sure?’

  The phone beeped again. ‘Well, I don’t see why my source would have made it up, or indeed how he would have known that Friðleifur had a sister at all. I’m certainly not suggesting that anything untoward took place, but I’d still be interested to speak to her.’ Thóra reached for her mobile to see the new message. Sóley still had to learn how to end these exchanges; every reply was always followed by another. Thóra had recently gone through it with her, but it didn’t seem to have had any effect.

  ‘I’d like to discuss it with her first. You don’t think I’d let you loose on her without asking her?’

  ‘No, no. Absolutely not.’ She prodded the phone’s keypad to see what her daughter had to say. On the screen she read 02 short hose, which meant nothing to her, but underneath it was a photo. ‘Perhaps I could just get in touch with you again in a few days, or you could call me, and by then you might …’ Thóra lost the thread of the conversation. The picture on the little screen was a long way from the kind of thing Sóley usually sent. It was a black, charred corpse leaning back in the remains of an office chair. The deformed head hung over the back of the seat as if the individual had been waiting to have his throat cut; his hands hung at his sides, black palms facing forward. She’d seen this image before. It was Friðleifur.

  ‘Are you still there?’ The man sounded concerned.

  ‘What? Oh, yes. I’m sorry.’ Thóra pressed the button to display the phone number and saw that the message was, of course, not from Sóley. ‘Did you just send me a text message?’

  He sounded surprised now. ‘I wouldn’t know how to – I’m not good enough with phones to be able to send a message during a conversation. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Sorry, I just got a bit confused.’ Thóra found it difficult to concentrate on speaking to Guðjón with the image on the screen filling her mind. Who had sent it, and why? She hurried to wind up the conversation. ‘Will you speak to your daughter, then, and let me know? The sooner the better.’ The man agreed he would and said goodbye. Who knew if he’s keep his promise? As soon as he hung up she turned back to the message on her phone. She was in such a rush that it felt like she had ten thumbs and she was afraid she’d deleted the message in her clumsiness. Luckily she hadn’t. She checked the phone number from which the message had been sent, but now it appeared to have been sent from the phone company Telecom. After a rather lengthy call to the company, during which she was transferred twice to different departments, she was informed that it had probably come from the free SMS service that they offered on the Internet. When Thóra reported that she’d also received three strange messages from ja.is, the man on the line sighed and told her that the best thing would be for her to request that such messages be blocked from reaching her phone. It was very easy and could even be done online. When Thóra said that she wasn’t keen on the idea, the man sighed again; clearly this wasn’t the first time the messaging service had been misused, and he must be tired of having these conversations. When Thóra explained to him that her enquiry had to do with a court case, the man’s tone changed and he told her that all messages sent from the Internet were actually registered and traceable, but that it took time to trace them. He pledged to look into it as soon as he could, but couldn’t promise he’d find anything. He took down her mobile number and the time of the message, which he said was enough information, and they hung up.

  Thóra took a closer look at the photo. It wasn’t very clear on the little screen but she recognized the subject nevertheless. A similar photo had been included in the police records found in one of Ari’s files, but not in the documents Jakob’s mother had given her. The photo was one of several taken at the scene before the bodies of the dead were removed. They had all caused Thóra’s hair to stand on end and each and every one of them had imprinted itself so strongly onto her mind that she didn’t need to see them clearly in order to recognize them again. She called Matthew.

  ‘How can I enlarge a photo that I received in a text message?’

  ‘Oh, hi, Matthew. How are you, Matthew?’

  ‘You’ll get a hi later, when I come home. I seriously need to find out how I can view a photo from my mobile in an ordinary size. Do you know how?’

  ‘Umm …’ Matthew clearly didn’t relish admitting that this was beyond his knowledge, even though he was rather more technologically minded than Thóra. ‘I don’t know how you would do it on your phone but it must be possible to find out.’

  ‘So you know how to do it on your phone?’ Perhaps Thóra could forward the message to him.

  ‘Umm …’ Matthew sucked his teeth. ‘No, not exactly.’ Before Thóra could say anything he added hastily: ‘If you still have the cables that came with it, you should be able to upload the photo to your computer. If you’ve lost them, I’m sure Gylfi could help you with it.’

  ‘Do we know anyone who keeps those cables somewhere they ca
n actually remember?’ As soon as she said this she remembered that they did: Matthew himself. She added hurriedly: ‘Anyway, see you in ten minutes.’

  Before Thóra left her office she looked up photos of the scene in order to confirm to herself that the little photo was of Friðleifur’s body. Luckily it was among the first that she pulled out, so she was spared from having to trawl through the entire mess once more. It was quite clear that the subject of the photo was the same, and in fact it looked like exactly the same photo. Who the hell had access to the police photograph database, and why had they sent it to her?

  ‘It’s the murderer, and he’s trying to frighten you.’ Thóra’s mother’s face was creased with worry. ‘You need to stop the investigation before he comes and sets us on fire.’

  Thóra rolled her eyes. ‘How about if we drop this subject while we’re eating?’ She smiled at Sóley and little Orri, who were gazing wide-eyed at her. Unfortunately, her mother had walked in on Matthew and Gylfi as Gylfi was working on uploading the photograph to her laptop – at the exact moment that the photo had appeared in all its glory on the screen. She wouldn’t stop going on about it until Thóra had explained the situation, and was still fretting now.

  ‘Is the murderer coming to kill us?’ Sóley put her fork down. ‘Wow, that’s so cool.’ Then she realized what she’d said and added: ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Murrr-err.’ Orri was still too young to understand what the word meant but was sensible enough to realize that it was something terrible, and therefore belonged in the same cat-egory as exciting things like dinosaurs and crocodiles.

  ‘Of course not. Grandma’s just joking.’ She saw that Sóley didn’t believe her one bit and added: ‘Don’t worry, there’s no murderer on the way. Just finish your food, darling.’ Thóra glared at her mother.

  By the time the meal was over Sóley was her usual happy self again, since the adults had all started talking with false cheer about something entirely different. Thóra waited until her daughter had gone to bed and her parents were sitting in front of the television before returning to the computer to take a better look at the photo. Matthew sat down next to her at the kitchen table and shook his head after peering silently at the screen for a few moments. ‘It’s very strange, I have to say. Could it be that the person who sent you this didn’t realize that you have all the case files?’

  ‘Good question. I can’t think of anyone who could possibly be behind it. I mean, why would anyone send me this?’

  ‘As I said, maybe the person who sent it doesn’t know you already have the photos.’ Matthew leaned back from the screen. ‘But still, I don’t understand their motivation. Maybe the aim is to frighten you, as your mother so helpfully suggested at the table earlier. Perhaps the first step is to try and figure out who has access to the photo. The quality suggests it may not have come straight from the camera, so it might have been scanned.’

  ‘There are quite a few other possibilities. Apart from the policemen who worked on the investigation, the different parties involved in the case all received copies of the files: the judges, the public prosecutor’s office and Jakob’s lawyer, Ari. He let Jakob’s mother have a copy of some of the material, but that didn’t include the photo. I can’t quite see why Ari would want to send it to me again like this. He could have drawn my attention to it by sticking a Post-it on it, or just pointed it out to me when I visited him.’

  ‘Could someone in the justice system, the police or the prosecutor’s office, have done it?’

  ‘That’s possible, but why should anyone there want to bother me with something like this? They’d be in serious trouble if it came out, and I can’t see why anyone would take the risk. And whether the intention was to scare me or to help me, it seems like a weird way to send me a message. The police and the public prosecutor could easily summon me to a meeting if anyone there were interested in my investigation.’

  ‘What about the victims’ relatives? Were they given the files?’

  Thóra shook her head slowly. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. Usually, every attempt is made to protect the relatives from the unnecessary distress of seeing an image like this. In order to be given a copy, you’d need to have an extremely good reason. I can’t imagine what grounds there might have been to turn over this photo to the parents or other relatives.’

  ‘What about the people who ran the centre? Do you think they’d have been able to follow the investigation?’

  ‘No doubt they would have, but not in any detail – and certainly not this kind of detail. This is just totally incomprehensible. The only thing I can think of is that someone within the system – someone who knows about my involvement and has access to this image – is losing their marbles.’

  ‘Or had already lost them.’ Matthew looked Thóra in the eye. ‘If Jakob is innocent, the criminal is probably on the loose. Maybe your mother was right. This photo is certainly enough to frighten someone off, but the message could have been clearer. I’d hazard a guess at ‘mind your own business’ or something along those lines, though.’

  ‘But if that’s the case, the real murderer would have to be a policeman, a lawyer or a judge. Or Jakob’s mother. None of whom seem very likely.’ Thóra lifted her phone. ‘Speaking of the message, what could 02 short hose mean?’

  ‘An apartment number? Weren’t the residents’ apartments numbered 01, 02 and so on?’

  ‘Yes, actually they were.’ Thóra exhaled. ‘If I remember correctly, 02 was the number of Natan’s apartment, but there was no hose there to my knowledge, long or short. Maybe the girl who’s still alive might know what it means.’

  ‘Isn’t that a good enough reason for you to find her? Maybe this text isn’t a threat at all, but a suggestion. She’s the only one still alive who knows what it was like to live there. Maybe she was even involved in the case.’

  ‘She’s paralysed and she can’t speak. I don’t know how she could possibly have been involved.’ Thóra shut her laptop. ‘But I obviously do need to meet her. First I’ve got to find out who she is, and where she is.’

  ‘That shouldn’t be hard.’ Matthew smiled. ‘As far as I can see, your real problem will be how to question her.’

  Thóra closed her eyes. ‘Fantastic – this case just gets better and better.’

  Chapter 19

  Thursday, 14 January 2010

  The Secure Psychiatric Unit at Sogn had obviously not changed since Thóra had been there last; abandoned wheelbarrows still stood in the driveway and the same wooden boxes were stacked against the wall, a few work gloves on top. It looked as though the place had lain dormant since the doors had shut behind her several days ago and had come back to life just a few minutes before she rang the bell again; everyone appeared to be dressed in the same clothes and as far as she could tell the same outdoor shoes were still lined up in the foyer. ‘It’s really cold out,’ Thóra remarked, handing her coat to the woman in reception. She couldn’t think of anything else to say and she could hardly ask the woman whether she’d been waiting for her there since last time, even if that was how it appeared.

  ‘Is it?’ The woman draped the garment over her arm. ‘Are you here to see Jósteinn? He was expecting a lawyer.’

  ‘Yes, that’s me.’ Thóra glanced down at her shoes, which were wet from the slush in the car park, and looked around for a mat to wipe them on. ‘I received a phone call from here this morning, saying he wanted to see me. That’s all I know about it.’ Although Thóra would have preferred to excuse herself from this meeting, pleading an enormous workload, that wasn’t really on; the man was footing the bill for the investigation into Jakob’s case, which meant that he had to be shown the minimum of courtesy.

  ‘Please have a seat in the waiting room and I’ll go and fetch him; do you remember the way?’ Thóra nodded and stopped trying to clean off the bottoms of her shoes, since it was a hopeless task. Instead she made a show of taking them off, while the woman said, ‘Hopefully we can get him to tear himself away from his wo
rkshop, since you’ve come specially.’

  ‘Is he in there a lot?’ Thóra had to pretend to take an interest in the man’s daily labours, and in fact she was happy to make conversation with the woman, since it meant delaying the meeting. She wasn’t exactly afraid of Jósteinn, but she wasn’t looking forward to seeing him.

  ‘Yes, he seems to feel at home around those broken computers; he achieves incredible results, in fact. We’ve lost count of the number of machines he’s managed to cobble together from other broken-down ones. They’ve been given new lives in developing countries.’

  ‘Do you think he gets something out of it, doing good deeds?’ Perhaps Thóra needed to revise her opinion of Jósteinn. He seemed genuinely concerned about Jakob, and now this. Maybe there was a good soul somewhere deep inside that broken and damaged man.

  The woman smiled pityingly. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that. He couldn’t care less about those poor people in the Third World. He just likes the computers themselves; he says they’re perfect, that it’s impossible for them to make mistakes on their own. He enjoys giving them new life. He once told me that the great thing about computers was that they didn’t have eyes or brains, which meant they couldn’t tell how ugly he was, both outside and in. He’s a very sick man, and the computers seem to bring him some kind of satisfaction, which he needs. As do we all.’

  Thóra didn’t know what more she could say, so she just nodded. She found her own way to the waiting room and when she opened the door to it she had the same feeling that she’d had when she walked into the building; the embroidered pillows appeared not to have moved a millimetre, and the puzzle on the dining room table looked equally untouched. Even the two puzzle pieces lying next to one of the table legs were still there, waiting to either end up in the vacuum cleaner or be spotted and picked up by someone eagle-eyed. Thóra considered gathering them up from the carpet herself, but decided not to. She wasn’t going to be anything other than a spectator in this place; she wouldn’t change anything. She didn’t understand why she felt like this, but she didn’t want to leave any trace on this sad little outpost of humanity, no matter how small.