Someone to Watch Over Me tg-5 Page 7
Matthew pointed the light down at her feet. ‘You’re not kidding.’ He then shone it back into the house to check what lay ahead. At the end of the room a corridor led in two directions. ‘We can have a look around, though I don’t quite understand what you think we’ll find. There’s nothing here that’s going to make any difference. It’s an empty shell and it’s been inspected plenty of times before – and under better conditions.’
‘I’ll feel better having seen it with my own eyes. The descriptions I read only tell half the story – they give a two-dimensional view of the situation instead of the three-dimensional one that will help the witnesses’ testimonies really make sense.’ She was grateful that it was too dark in the building to see Matthew’s expression. She doubted he’d think much of this justification and it was imperative that she set off before he could protest and drag her out. She walked in the direction of the corridor. ‘It won’t take long.’
They set out cautiously; they had no idea what might be hidden in the shallow water and neither of them was interested in falling into it – the fact that it had soaked their feet was quite enough. The water deepened a little when they entered the corridor, enough to cover the edges of their shoes at the ankles. They both shivered, and Thóra recalled the old saying that as soon as the cold gets hold of your feet, you’re cold all over. Once they’d passed the little kitchen, the doors of the apartments began. They were all open, and Matthew pointed out that they were obviously flame-resistant fire doors, because the only damage visible on them was a layer of soot. Then he pointed his torch up at the ceiling, and they both stared at the little sprinklers running the length of the corridor.
‘This shouldn’t have been possible.’ Thóra felt as if the smell of smoke had intensified just at the thought of how horribly the residents died, and how they’d been screwed over both by other people and by fate. ‘It was a total fuck-up; maybe that’s why they were in such a rush to close the case. I’m sure there’s a reason it was wrapped up so quickly, though I suppose it didn’t help that they couldn’t keep the suspect in a normal detention cell.’
She followed Matthew into the first apartment. They quickly took stock of everything inside it. Most of the furnishings had been removed. They called them ‘apartments’, but this tiny space barely deserved the name; the sleeping area, kitchen and sitting room were all in one open-plan area, with the bed in a nook next to the bathroom, the only part of the apartment that could be called spacious. They peeked into it and saw that it was tailored to the needs of a severely disabled resident; the shower area alone was at least twice as large as the one in Thóra’s house, and needed to be to accommodate the various handles and supports fastened to the walls. A shower-curtain, once cheerfully decorated with pictures of colourful fish, hung in tatters from the ceiling, sooty, crumpled and partially melted Thóra was careful not to touch the remains for fear of getting even filthier than she already was, and she wondered whether they’d have to install a shower area like this once eight people were living in her house, which currently had only one shower. Matthew still hadn’t been anything but positive about the prospective changes to the household, but Thóra knew he was only being polite; he must be dreading it as much as she was, if not more. Now that his job at the bank was a thing of the past, he’d be the one who’d have to sit at home most of the day with her parents. She’d have to take him with her whenever she could, otherwise everything would fall apart. She was even considering having a Brazilian wax, which a girlfriend of hers had raved about, in order to surprise him. Even though she’d heard that the first time it was like being skinned – without anaesthetic.
‘Do you know who lived where?’ Matthew tried to shut the charred wardrobe nailed to the wall next to the bed. It was empty apart from shelves that lay, black with soot, at its bottom.
‘I don’t know precisely but I remember that the most physically disabled ones lived in the apartments, opposite the shared bathroom. I read that somewhere. Where the others lived was probably listed in the files, but the information was scattered about and I still have to piece it all together. It will be easier now that we’ve been here, because now I have a clearer mental picture of it all.’ They moved through the next few apartments. When they came to the fourth, it was immediately obvious that it was intended for a severely disabled individual. A track was fixed to the ceiling, branching in several directions – over into a small side room with an imposing toilet, across to the place where the bed had probably been standing, and out into the corridor. They followed the track out and saw that it led to a large bathroom, ending over the largest bathtub that Thóra had ever seen. On the ceiling above the tub was some sort of apparatus, attached to the track. There was a sturdy steel hanger, upon which were fastened two chains ending in hooks. ‘What primitive contraption is this?’ Thóra pushed one of the chains slightly. It emitted a soft creak as it swung slowly back and forth. ‘This could hardly have been used for transporting people between rooms, could it?’
Matthew stopped the chain from swinging. ‘Actually, that’s exactly what it must have been for. They wouldn’t have been transporting water in buckets to the bathtub. I suppose there must have been ropes or something else at the bottom of this that got burnt in the fire. He tried to drag the contraption along the track but it appeared to be dented, because he could only move it a few centimetres. ‘I think this must have been used to move people, no matter how weird the idea might seem.’
‘Jesus.’ Thóra felt a sharp pang of pity. How did disabled people tolerate so much? Maybe it was better to have been born that way and not know anything different. But who was she to judge? No doubt she’d have to steel herself against what she’d be seeing and hearing in connection with this case. They followed the track on to the next apartment, which looked much like the previous one. The only difference was that on the wall next to the bed was a box with connective tubes, which she recognized from intensive care rooms in hospitals. The plastic labels beneath them were no longer legible.
‘This is probably for oxygen.’ Matthew, who had bent down to the box, straightened up again. ‘I expect the person who lived here needed oxygen during the night.’ In the dim light Thóra saw him frown. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to be near the oxygen tank when the fire spread. Oxygen feeds fire and if it was in every other room here, that might explain why the damage was so extreme. The fire would have intensified and become uncontrollable in a split-second.’
It was clear that Thóra would have to go through the fire report. She hadn’t previously considered the oxygen, although she realized Matthew was right as soon as he mentioned it. She looked around in search of evidence of damage other than that attributable to the fire itself. ‘Might the fire actually have been caused by an explosion?’ she asked, although she didn’t see any evidence of one. ‘I mean, if the oxygen supply somehow ignited? Shouldn’t there be a tank somewhere in the house connected to these tubes in the wall?’
‘I would have thought so.’ Matthew looked underneath the box but there was nothing. ‘There’s no visible connection to a tank here, though there are lines behind the box. There must be an equipment room somewhere where it’s stored. I expect we’ll find it if we look through the whole place.’
They completed their tour of the apartments without discovering much more. They were all very similar and had long ago been stripped of anything personal or individual, first by the fire and then by the clean-up. The very few things left behind told Thóra and Matthew nothing: broken window shutters on the floor, a pot lying on its side in the kitchen. Thóra hadn’t really expected to find anything of much signifi-cance, but they continued inspecting the house. In the night watchmen’s duty room they found nothing but an open key cabinet and a dirty whiteboard that was surprisingly undamaged compared to everything else they’d seen. They also looked in a large, empty room whose function was difficult to determine. The floor material seemed different to elsewhere in the house, and by dragging her toes along the surface Thóra noti
ced regular stripes that indicated it was tiled; the floor elsewhere had been smooth, probably carpeted. ‘Maybe this was a storage room.’ Matthew moved around the space, examining the walls. ‘Well, it wasn’t the equipment room. There aren’t any sockets here besides two standard ones.’ They left the building without working out what the room had been for, and looked into a few rooms which were accessed from outside: a cleaning cupboard with a bent steel basin that hung at an angle on the wall, and another smaller storage room.
It was still snowing, and they continued their circuit of the outside in a hurry. But they were forced to slow down when they came to three doors at the front of the house that had not been closed. One of them turned out to lead to the rubbish room, and another to an exterior storage area where a rusty, dirty lawnmower stood in one corner along with some broken garden tools, also rusty. The petrol had no doubt been stored here, and Thóra took a moment to examine the lock on the door, which appeared not to have been tampered with. It wasn’t locked, although that didn’t mean anything given that a long time had passed since the fire.
The third door led to what was indisputably the equipment room. On the wall were connective hoses with melted labels, and steel frames that could have supported canisters or tanks. Matthew shuffled his feet to preserve the tiny bit of warmth left in them. ‘Of course, this wouldn’t have been accessible from the house due to the risk of fire. Maybe other, more dangerous materials were stored here.’
‘This door has taken a real hit.’ Thóra tried to nudge the heavy steel slab that stood half open. It was so twisted that one of the four powerful hinges had broken and it wouldn’t budge. ‘Could this indicate an explosion?’
‘Yes, I would have thought so. Also, you can see that the plaster has fallen off in several places in here.’ He shone his torch on a large cracked patch of wall where the bare concrete showed through. ‘This could be from a canister that exploded.’
‘That must have made an incredible noise.’ Thóra stood up on tiptoe to see how close they were to the family home they’d driven past. She thought she caught a glimpse of its roof. ‘Why didn’t those people hear anything? Is it possible to sleep through an explosion but wake up to the smell of smoke?’
‘Who knows?’ Matthew turned off the torch. ‘Shall we get back to the car before our toes drop off from frostbite? I’m sure you’ll find out something about this explosion in the case files. There’s nothing more we can do here.’
Thóra nodded. They turned away from the house and walked towards the car. ‘I forgot to tell you a little detail I found in the reports.’ She looked sadly back at the ruins of the house. ‘One girl who died in the fire was pregnant.’
‘And?’ Matthew didn’t seem surprised. ‘Bad things can happen to anyone.’ He gave her a puzzled look. ‘You mean you find that strange because the woman was disabled? People are people, Thóra, regardless of whether or not their bodies are fully functioning.’
Thóra rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, do you think I’m that easily shocked?’ She exhaled irritably, but her annoyance quickly turned to sadness again. ‘The woman – or girl, rather – was comatose. That’s not what I call consensual sex.’
Matthew said nothing. He opened her door and Thóra climbed into the car. He hurried to the driver’s side, started the engine and turned the heater all the way up, then scrunched his fingers together and blew on them. When the warm air blowing from the heater started to inch its way over Thóra’s feet, it created a burning sensation that was almost worse than the cold. ‘Did the files say who the father was?’
‘No, it never came out and there wasn’t a single word about it in the verdict.’
‘Do you think whoever got the woman pregnant started the fire to cover it up?’ Matthew sounded highly sceptical. ‘That’s pretty drastic.’
‘I don’t know, damn it. But it could have been Jakob who did this.’
‘Started the fire? Or had sex with the woman?’ Matthew started backing out of the car park.
‘Either. Or both.’ Thóra leaned back in her seat and stared at the building in her wing mirror until it disappeared from sight.
CHAPTER 6
Friday, 8 January 2010
Thóra put down her pen and proudly looked over her drawing of the residence’s floor plan. It certainly wouldn’t win any architectural awards but she was enormously proud of the outcome all the same, since what mattered to her was to mark each apartment with the name of its resident. That had proved extremely difficult, because more often than not she’d been forced to use the testimonies of many different individuals to place each one. She would find out in due course whether her hard work would be of any use. Contemplatively, she ran her index finger along the plan of the house, through all the apartments, vaguely feeling the tiny indents that the pen had left in the paper. Rather like the tracks those young people had left behind, she thought – tracks in the memories of those who loved them, that would become less and less noticeable over time and would disappear completely as the residents’ relatives died. Thóra lifted her finger from the paper and cleared her mind. These melancholy thoughts would be of no help to her in solving the case and she had already spent more time on the drawing than she could afford. This wasn’t the only case that she was working on; of course it was highly unusual, but it was complicated enough without her losing herself in its emotional aspects.
One of the things that troubled her was that Jakob had occupied the apartment next to Lísa Finnbjörnsdóttir, the young pregnant woman. Although even the furthest apart flats weren’t that far from each other, Thóra still felt this was a bad omen; Jakob would have been able to get to the woman’s apartment in a matter of seconds. To make matters worse, there were very few other residents who could possibly have been the child’s father; five out of six apartments had been occupied, with only three men: Jakob, Natan Úlfheiðarson and Tryggvi Einvarðsson. Natan had been the heavily medicated epileptic, and Tryggvi had been severely autistic and, according to the court records, generally never left his room. Neither seemed likely to have had intercourse with the girl, although Thóra knew this assessment might be completely wrong. Hopefully someone would be able to answer this question unequivocally. Perhaps the paternity had been determined but not mentioned in the records out of respect for the deceased and her family; perhaps she’d had a boyfriend; perhaps she’d been impregnated by someone who came to visit her. The possibilities were endless; what mattered was to find the right explanation and pray that it had nothing to do with Jakob.
Before Thóra had started her drawing she’d spoken to one of the centre’s neighbours, the one who had reported the fire, but hadn’t gleaned much from their conversation. The woman had answered her questions and Thóra had had to listen to her complaints about how awful it was to live in such a ghost town; construction of the proposed preschool had been postponed indefinitely, forcing her and her husband to find one in town for their two children. The snow was rarely cleared and when it was, it was done badly; the same went for the bin collections. The woman went on like this for some time before Thóra finally got the chance to bring up what she’d come to discuss. She was relieved when she eventually said goodbye to the woman, convinced by then that the couple’s testimony was credible; they’d simply been fast asleep and had probably been woken by the reverberations of the explosion, though neither of them had realized what it was. The only peculiar thing about the woman’s testimony was that she had specifically pointed out that the couple was used to sleeping through noises, such as loud traffic. Sometimes gangs of kids had been known to hang around the neighbourhood at night, especially at the weekends, but luckily that was now a thing of the past. They hadn’t seen anyone that night, and had noticed nothing unusual.
Now Thóra resolved to get down to business. She looked up the name of the centre’s director: Glódís Tumadóttir, which Thóra thought sounded a very bright and cheerful name. When she finally managed to get hold of the woman through the Ministry of Welfa
re, her voice sounded entirely at odds with the image that her name evoked. Glódís frequently sighed heavily, as if she bore all the sorrows of the world on her shoulders. After listening for half an hour to her complaints about the bustle of the Regional Office for the Disabled in Reykjavík, Thóra eventually managed to persuade her into a meeting, although the discussion was accompanied by a long and detailed report on how Glódís couldn’t give her more than about fifteen minutes, since naturally she’d have to get back to thanklessly slaving away at her understaffed workplace. Thóra wanted to scream when she finally hung up. She’d met far too many of these kinds of people, who felt that their wages didn’t match their great talent and who wallowed constantly in self-pity. She couldn’t be the only one who wanted to give them all a good smack in the hope of snapping them out of their self-appointed martyrdom. But that would have to wait for another time. In retrospect, she realized that underneath all the moaning, the woman had probably been worried or agitated about her call. Perhaps all the waffle about the unfairness of her job had been caused by nervous anxiety; after all, it couldn’t have been pleasant for Glódís to have to discuss the case again. She could have something to hide, but it might not be anything unnatural or suspicious; the young people who died had been her responsibility and although the home hadn’t been in operation for long, she must have had emotional ties to those who died. No doubt everything would become clearer when they met face to face.
Thóra’s mobile phone beeped, telling her that she’d received a text. The message was entirely unfathomable, and had again been sent from ja.is. She hoped it wasn’t some idiot who’d entered a friend’s number wrongly, and was now using her number by mistake. If that was the case, then someone somewhere was asking an extremely important question: How did Helena get burned as a child? She felt momentarily spooked, given that the message mentioned fire, but she dismissed it as coincidence and shut her phone.