Why Did You Lie? Read online

  At this point the caveman entered the room with Nína’s colleague. The husband drawled that there was no need to get excited – they were married and could do as they liked. Neither Nína nor her fellow officer bothered to try and correct this misconception. Then he offered them a drink, adding that they shouldn’t waste time on that bitch, she was a frigiddirtyfuckingboringwhingingcunt. He must have taken exception to the expression on Nína’s face because the next thing she knew he was behind her, pressing hard against her back, thrusting his hands inside her open jacket and grabbing at her breasts. He slurred in her ear, asking if she liked it, and to her disgust she realised he had a hard-on. Then he released one breast and forcing her face round, licked her cheek. The foul stench from his mouth must have been caused by a rotten tooth. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that her colleague was not lifting a finger to help. A mocking smile played over his lips. Her attempts to twist round and stamp on the man’s toes were in vain; she couldn’t free herself. This seemed only to increase her colleague’s amusement.

  Suddenly the wife rose from the sofa, roaring like a lion, claws out. At first, so bizarre were the circumstances, Nína feared she was going to attack her for trying to steal her husband. But the woman’s fury was directed at him. He loosened his grip as his wife’s nails raked across his fleshy cheeks. When Nína turned, the man looked as if he’d tried to disguise himself as a Native American: four bright red parallel lines scored each cheek from ear to ear.

  The visit ended with them handcuffing the man for assaulting his wife and resisting arrest. On the way back to the station Nína asked her colleague what the hell he had been thinking of and he retorted that if she was equal to a man surely she should have been strong enough to look after herself. He didn’t see how he could have helped.

  Her first action on reaching the station was to make a formal complaint about his conduct and demand that he should receive a reprimand. How could he work as a police officer if he couldn’t be trusted to come to the aid of a colleague? If a crazed woman had attacked him, Nína wouldn’t have stood by and watched. Bickering in the car was one thing, but the dangerous situations arising from their work were quite another. Then officers had to back each other up. Or so she had always believed.

  The following day there had been a huge fuss. Nína was asked to withdraw her complaint as it would seriously damage the man’s career prospects in the force. Instead, he would receive an informal dressing-down. She was also asked to delete the description of the husband’s assault on her from the report. It was for her own good, she was told; she would hardly want the incident to become common knowledge. As if she had willingly colluded in it or been at fault! Nína had refused both requests and threatened to take the matter further if it wasn’t handled properly in-house.

  Suddenly she was a pariah: no one wanted to work with her; she couldn’t be trusted. Even the other female officers gave her the cold shoulder, one commenting that now she had really made their lives unbearable; now they would all be branded as snitches. And she had let them down by not being able to free herself unaided. Nína had been speechless.

  When she was taken off the beat until further notice and assigned special duties instead, she hadn’t raised any protest. In fact it had been a huge relief. The assault by the drunk had shaken her more than she was willing to admit to herself or her superiors. She had no desire to risk winding up in the same situation again, so she welcomed the monotonous but safe chores that were now dumped on her. Her calm reaction disconcerted the duty sergeant who had obviously been ready for a showdown. Instead she had stood before him, nodding meekly as he outlined her latest assignment, which was even duller than the last.

  And now her fortunes had undergone an even greater transformation. Her superiors must have congratulated themselves when they had the brainwave of removing her uncomfortable presence from the office by dispatching her down to the basement. The archives were apparently so extensive that she could expect to be stuck down there for days, even weeks. Meanwhile they could put off making any decision about her future in the force. Her complaint was still being passed from pillar to post and no action had been taken over her accusation against the husband, as it would only expose her fellow officer’s breach of conduct. As a result, it looked as if the wife-beater would get away with it, and this made Nína even more determined to stick to her guns, despite the developments in her personal life that had been the final straw. These days she walked around in a daze and would no longer trust herself to behave responsibly at the scene of a crime even if she was returned to ordinary duties. She was well out of the way down here, in her own opinion as well as that of the male chauvinist pigs upstairs.

  Nína picked up a heavy roll of black bin bags and struggled to fit as many flat cardboard boxes under her arm as possible. Though thin, she had always been strong, but recently she had become positively haggard. Her cheekbones jutted out of her face and her ribs were like a washboard. At least there were no mirrors in the basement.

  Staggering under her load, she made her way towards the archives. Long ago someone had hung a sign, now yellowed with age, on the door, which read: ‘Old Sins’. After a struggle Nína managed to open the door without putting down the bags or boxes. She entered the corridor, laid down her load and stood there panting. There were six doors, each of which, the caretaker had told her, led to a separate archive. She spotted a switch but before she could turn on the overhead lights the door swung shut behind her and all at once she was standing in pitch blackness. Nína cursed herself aloud for not anticipating this but the walls seemed to absorb her words.

  It was a long time since Nína had been in total darkness; there wasn’t even a faint gleam from the cracks around the door. She felt for the wall, then fumbled her way back towards the entrance. As she did so she tried closing her eyes and discovered that it made no difference.

  She thought about her husband, Thröstur. Was he aware of the lightless world in which he now existed? As she groped her way along, she hoped fervently that he wasn’t. Perhaps he could still see, and everything would be all right, in spite of the pessimistic prognosis. But she had been standing beside the doctor when he’d aimed his torch at her husband’s eye and the black pupil had continued to stare blankly at the ceiling.

  The doctor had told her that if Thröstur could see, his pupils would contract, adding – as if to rub salt in the wound – that his other senses had probably failed as well. Although he didn’t come right out and say it, the implication was that her husband was no better than a living corpse.

  When Nína pressed him, the doctor wouldn’t confirm that this was a hundred per cent certain, so she had allowed herself the tiny hope that Thröstur was in some way aware of his surroundings. But a more likely explanation was that there was no such thing as certainty in medical science, any more than in other areas of life. If you weren’t dead, you were alive. But if the doctors’ dire predictions proved correct, she ought really to hope with all her heart that Thröstur wasn’t aware of the changes that had taken place in his life. It would be more merciful if he could sense nothing at all, but just felt as if he was sleeping, floating on the wings of beautiful dreams. But her innate pessimism told her that his dreams were probably as bleak as his prospects.

  Gripping the cold handle, Nína opened the door again, trying to suppress this line of thought. Yet she couldn’t shut out the questions: how could she ensure that Thröstur never found out what sort of state he was in? Never woke up to find himself trapped in a useless body? The only way, in the end, would be to follow the doctors’ advice and switch off his life support. Nína felt the blood rushing to her cheeks. Why the hell did she have to make this decision? What were the hospital staff, with all their specialist training, for? Couldn’t they just tell her what to do? Light spilled in from the corridor and Nína took a deep breath. Don’t think too much; that was best. Activate cruise control and go about your life without thinking. That hurt less.

  Almost every
other fluorescent bulb in the corridor turned out to be working. The walls, once brilliant white, were now discoloured and grubby, and the doorframe was chipped from where people had carelessly bashed it when carrying objects through. The unforgiving glare also revealed how filthy her trouser legs were, and she automatically tried to brush off the worst of the dirt. She had waded heedlessly through the slush on her way to work this morning, after spending the night in a chair by Thröstur’s hospital bed. Nowadays the nursing staff had given up shaking her and telling her to go home for a rest; they knew better than anyone when it was best to say nothing. It wasn’t difficult, after all. It was always best to keep one’s mouth shut. No words were capable of dulling her pain. The silent sympathy she sensed from the doctors and nurses was enough for her, and it was a relief not to have to explain anything; they understood that she would not go home unless compelled to. The flat was an empty shell of what it had once been. All that remained, it seemed, were things whose sole purpose was to remind her of what she had lost.

  Nína stood with her hand on the light switch, lost in thought, while the door swung slowly shut as if guided by an invisible hand. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the ceiling was so low, the floor sloped as well. She didn’t turn away until the door had finally closed. It must have been her imagination but she could have sworn she had seen the handle move.

  In front of her were the rows of doors leading to the archives, three on each side. There was no need to waste effort on wondering where to start as all the storerooms were presumably full of old files. The obvious course would be to begin at the back or front and work systematically to the other end. Yet it was to one of the doors in the middle that she headed first. She didn’t know why; there was nothing behind her decision but an inexplicable certainty that this was where she should start. The door handle was warm, as if welcoming her, as if inside she would receive long-desired peace. Odd. She hadn’t been paying much attention but as far as she could remember the handle of the door leading to the corridor had felt cold to the touch.

  She was met by a smell of dust and old paper. Mindful of what had happened before, Nína took care to switch on the light before entering. As she’d suspected, it was crammed with files, the rows of shelves packed in so tightly that there was barely space to squeeze between them.

  She decided to take a better look around before embarking on the sorting and throwing away. The idea was to scan in anything important, then destroy the hard copy, so the task mainly consisted of assessing what should go straight into the bin and what should be digitised. If this job wasn’t the most exciting, the scanning would be absolute hell. Nína wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that it was her next assignment once she had finished clearing the basement.

  She wandered around, reading the labels on folders and boxes at eye level. Traffic Offences: January 1979, Burglaries: May – September 1980. Her movements were stirring up dust and again she rubbed her nose to stop herself sneezing. The further inside she went, the dimmer the light, thanks to the high shelves, and she resolved to bring a floor lamp down with her next time.

  Nína was about to worm her way out again when her gaze fell on an open file lying on top of a row of upright folders at the back of the room. She blew on it carefully, then noticed there was no dust. Turning it over, leaving it open at the same page, she read the spine: Suicides: February 1982 – October 1985. Her blood ran cold and her heart beat with slow, heavy strokes, so insistently she could almost hear it in the silence. She gave herself a moment to recover. Of course she had known suicide was a police matter; she had been on both sides of the desk herself.

  Before Thröstur decided his life was meaningless, Nína had been involved in the investigation of such incidents. And lately her thoughts had kept returning to a widow she had spoken to more than two years ago. The woman had gazed at Nína with wide eyes, muttering repeatedly that there had been nothing wrong, her husband would never have done anything thing like that; he had no reason to take his own life. Nína had been filled with sympathy mingled with doubts about the woman’s sanity. It had never entered her head that she herself might one day gaze, face puffy with weeping, into the eyes of a police officer and make an almost identical speech. The only difference was that Thröstur had survived his suicide attempt. He was still alive, if you could call it living.

  The folder weighed heavier and heavier in her hands. Nína tried to see where it belonged but there were no gaps in the neighbouring shelves. She found one completely empty shelf in another row but the square, dust-free patch on it indicated that it had contained a box or some other object much larger than a folder. She wondered whether to leave the file open on top of the others but thought no, chucking it straight into the bin bag would be a good start. Reports of suicides from thirty years ago could hardly be considered relevant now, as she knew from personal experience. It was only eight weeks since Thröstur had tried to kill himself, yet few shared her interest in finding out why. Apart from his father and sister, no one wanted to know. She could read in the eyes of her close friends that they wished Thröstur could be allowed to go so they wouldn’t have to keep pussyfooting around the question of how he was doing or why it had happened. In thirty years’ time they would barely remember the incident. She hoped the same would be true of her.

  Nevertheless, once she had moved back into the light, Nína couldn’t resist the temptation to take a closer look at the contents of the folder. Without wanting or intending to, she began reading the text from the point where she had found it open. There would be no going back.

  It turned out to be the final page of a report about a case that had presumably been described in the previous pages since it was impossible to work out the circumstances from the paragraph in front of her. The date was in the top right-hand corner: 18 April 1985. Nína turned back to see how it began, only to discover that the previous pages were missing. It was preceded by a completely unrelated report, which was complete and stapled together. The single page showed evidence of having once been attached to others; the small, triangular scrap of paper left under the staple suggested that the previous pages had been torn away carelessly. She leafed through the file but couldn’t find the first part of the report anywhere. Turning back to the paragraph that had shaken her so badly, she stared at the black typewritten letters as if she expected them to have changed. But they hadn’t. It was the same concluding paragraph stating that Milla Gautadóttir had signed on behalf of her underage son to witness that his statement was true and correct. This was followed by a brief note confirming that the taking of the statement had been concluded at 10.39 a.m. The name of the son was printed under the mother’s name: Thröstur Magnason, born 1 March 1978. Her husband.

  Nína closed the file and clutched it to her chest. There was no question that it was her Thröstur. His mother’s name was uncommon and it was impossible that she could have had a namesake with a son of exactly the same name and age, and a husband called Magni to boot. Impossible. Closing her eyes, she tried to breathe calmly. Someone must have left the folder out so she would find it. Someone who wanted to hurt her. Her friends – if she had any left on the force – would never have done such a thing. To slip a report dating from her husband’s childhood into a file on suicides … Nína squeezed her eyes tighter shut and streaks of light, ghosts of the former brightness, danced before her. She didn’t want to see anything, didn’t want to think at all. If she let herself, she would start tuning into the noises she thought she could hear at the back of the storeroom, from the shelves she hadn’t yet examined. As if someone was standing there, breathing heavily. Perhaps the person who had left the folder out was still down there. She could only assume that sound would carry as poorly out of the basement as it did into it. If she screamed, it was unlikely anyone would hear her. Except the person hiding behind her, among the dusty old archives.

  Chapter 3

  23 January 2014

  The weather seemed unable to make up its mind whether to rain, sleet
or snow, and the Reykjanes highway gleamed blackly in the glow of the headlights that could do little to penetrate the spray. The family members were using the drive home from the airport to ruminate on their holiday. They sat in silence, Nói behind the wheel, Vala beside him and their teenage son Tumi in the back, staring out at the endless lava-field. Two large suitcases had been stowed beside him since the boot didn’t have room for all their baggage. They hadn’t planned to do much shopping but, carried away by the low prices in America, had ended up lugging a mountain of stuff home across the Atlantic. Only time would tell how wise some of these purchases had been. They had got no further than the Leifsstöd terminal before Vala remarked that their new clothes didn’t look quite as smart as they had in the States; somehow they didn’t go with the miserable grey weather. Nói had to bite his lip to stop himself exploding.

  ‘Strange to think we’ve got to go to work tomorrow.’ He focused on the road ahead through the frantically labouring windscreen wipers.

  ‘You were going to go in today, remember? Just be grateful I talked you out of it.’ Vala twisted round. ‘Are you asleep?’

  ‘No.’ Tumi continued to watch the world outside the windows.

  Vala opened her mouth to add something, then turned back. Nói understood her change of heart; Tumi was taciturn by nature and when he was tired you might as well try to hold a conversation with the radio.

  ‘God, it’ll be so good to be back in our own bed.’ Vala closed her eyes and put her hand on Nói’s thigh. He wanted to ask if she’d forgotten how much she had been looking forward to leaving home only two weeks ago but checked the impulse. It was best for him to say as little as possible when he was tired as he had a tendency to come out with something regrettable.