Why Did You Lie? Page 8

  Helgi puffs out great clouds of breath. He hasn’t a clue what to do now that dusk is falling. Of course he could photograph his travelling companions going about their tasks by the light of their work lamps, but he feels drained after the events of the day and experience has taught him that there is little point taking pictures when he’s not in the mood. It would be better to save his batteries.

  The torch at his feet flickers but, to his relief, the beam grows stronger again when he bangs it. The scramble to the lighthouse with sheer drops on either side would be even more alarming without any light. Nor does he wish to be alone in the darkness on the helipad after what he and Heida saw earlier in the fog.

  Of course it must have been a trick of the light or else there must have been some other natural explanation for the dark shape. Yet he can’t shake off the feeling that there wasn’t. Perhaps he should discuss it with Heida, but so far they have done little more than exchange a glance, inhibited by the presence of Ívar and Tóti. This made it easier to ignore the experience. Now, however, armed only with a torch against whatever might be lurking in the darkness behind him, he can no longer pretend it never happened. What had Heida said? That the dead appeared in the fog when they had a score to settle with the living? If so, he’s sure the shadow must have come for Ívar. Surely not for Heida – or Tóti, even though the younger man is a bit of a jerk. At least he doesn’t give off the same aura of malevolence as Ívar. Helgi’s shivering grows worse and he starts to pick his way over to the lighthouse.

  ‘Had enough of skipping?’ Tóti swings his hammer, grinning at Helgi.

  ‘Yes.’ Helgi feels there is no point explaining the real reason or he would appear even more pathetic. The other man’s mocking look fades and his hammer pauses mid-swing. Helgi relents. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Not bad.’ Tóti surveys the battered wall of the lighthouse where numerous patches of fresh grey concrete bear witness to the repairs. Helgi thinks it’s probably like tidying up; the condition has to get really bad before anything is done about it. ‘The weather’s a bugger, though. It wasn’t supposed to be this cold. I’m hoping it’ll warm up tomorrow so I can fill in all the holes.’ Tóti bends down and switches off his work lamp. The two men are left standing in the faint illumination from the lighthouse. ‘Otherwise we’re in deep shit. I shouldn’t really have started on this with the weather like it is. It’ll probably be a total disaster.’

  Helgi nods as if he’s well acquainted with the problem. ‘It’s bound to warm up a bit. They didn’t forecast falling temperatures, did they?’

  ‘Dunno. But if the wind picks up, it could turn even colder.’

  They have slipped into discussing the weather and Helgi is relieved when Heida emerges from the lighthouse to stretch her limbs, looking profoundly grateful to be outside in the fresh air. ‘Are you done?’ Helgi hopes she’ll say yes, so he won’t have to be alone with Tóti.

  Heida drops her arms and rubs one shoulder. ‘I suppose so.’ She looks around. ‘God, it’s got dark quickly.’ She shivers. Her hazel eyes pause on the helipad and Helgi thinks he knows what is passing through her mind. ‘What time is it, anyway?’

  ‘Nearly seven.’ Tóti lights a cigarette. The flame illuminates his face and in the play of shadows he looks like a zombie. The smoke overpowers the briny smell of the sea for a moment and for the first time in his life Helgi finds it pleasant.

  A muffled ringtone drifts over from inside the lighthouse. They hear the sound of Ívar’s voice and snatches of a conversation about food, weather and rain. Then Ívar falls silent and tuts before appearing with a frown on his face. ‘Fucking hell.’

  Tóti takes a drag and leans more comfortably against the wall. ‘What?’ He seems unmoved by his workmate’s curses.

  Ívar brandishes his phone at them – a small, pink, oddly feminine clamshell model. ‘That was the coastguard.’ Realising that Helgi and Heida are staring at his phone, he hastily returns it to his inside pocket. ‘The fucking chopper’s developed a fault.’

  The four of them stand there in a huddle. After photographing countless people for nearly a decade, Helgi reckons he has a pretty good eye for body language. Although he can’t see himself, he assumes he is displaying the same symptoms of stress as his travelling companions: the fixed gaze and half-open mouth. Heida is the first to break the silence. ‘Developed a fault? How can it have developed a fault?’ It’s not the most intelligent question but nobody points this out.

  ‘It just broke down. I don’t know what’s wrong but they say they were forced to do an emergency landing on Snæfellsnes.’

  The Snæfellsnes Peninsula is miles away.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Tóti asks, the cigarette trembling between his fingers. ‘Fucking Snæfellsnes.’ Helgi opens his mouth to point out that the peninsula is hardly to blame, but Ívar gets in first.

  ‘I gather they’ll have to transport it back to Reykjavík. Once it’s there the mechanics can get a better idea of what’s wrong and sort it out. The guy I talked to didn’t like to hazard a guess about how long the whole thing would take – depends on spare parts and what have you.’

  ‘Surely they could send another chopper to fetch us? What the hell’s the problem?’ Heida is getting more worked up with every word. ‘My child’s with a babysitter. I can’t stay here forever.’

  ‘The coastguard only have three choppers. One’s undergoing a routine service that takes several weeks and the third was hired out to do a job in the Faroe Islands that’s running a bit behind schedule.’

  ‘Behind schedule? What do you mean “behind schedule”?’ Heida looks ready to throttle Ívar. ‘If they’ve hired out the helicopter until a certain date, they should damn well return it then. What the hell does it matter if the job’s behind schedule?’ She speaks without pausing for breath, then breaks off, panting, and gives Ívar a murderous glare. Then she seems to come to her senses, her fury evaporates and her expression relaxes. She drops her eyes and kicks at a stone that bounces a short way before shooting over the edge. ‘What about other helicopters? Couldn’t they borrow one to come and get us?’

  ‘Choppers with winching equipment are few and far between. And I, for one, have no intention of being pulled up by hand into some old rust bucket.’ Smoke pours out of Tóti’s mouth with every word. ‘It won’t be a problem. So there’s no point getting your knickers in a twist.’

  Heida glares at Tóti but doesn’t rise to this. Helgi admires her self-control; although quick-tempered, she’s clearly no fool. There’s absolutely no room to quarrel here.

  ‘Won’t we just have to resign ourselves? At least we’ve got phone reception. Couldn’t you get the babysitter to stay a bit longer?’ Helgi attempts a friendly smile.

  ‘I suppose so. Do I have any choice?’ The anger hasn’t entirely left her voice.

  ‘It’ll turn out all right in the end,’ said Ívar. ‘We’ll just have to tough it out. If the worst comes to the worst we can ask them to send a boat for us and hope the chain gets us to the bottom of the rock in one piece. Though I don’t recommend it, except in an emergency. The fastenings must be seventy years old. So I’ll let you lot go first.’ Ívar zips up his anorak in an effort to appear nonchalant but Helgi detects a hint of fear or uncertainty in the man’s manner. ‘We’d better go easy on the food.’ He accompanies this with a glance at Helgi, making no attempt to disguise the fact. Helgi flushes scarlet.

  Tóti chokes on his smoke. ‘Hang on a minute. How long do they reckon it’ll take to rescue us? Are we talking about one more night or two?’ He is staring intently at Ívar. ‘Three? Four?’

  ‘I’m not sure and neither are they, as far as I can tell. All I know is that they asked me about our supplies and when I told them roughly how much we had, that’s what they said.’ He breaks off and sucks his teeth, then takes his big knife out of its sheath and starts scraping imaginary dirt from under his fingernails. After that he lays down the knife on top of the cool-box and starts rooting aimless
ly in the box beside it. ‘They also advised us to start collecting rainwater tonight.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Tóti flicks his cigarette butt out into the darkness.

  Helgi is desperate to roll over on his thin sleeping mat and find a more comfortable position on the hard concrete floor but it’s impossible. It’s a miracle as it is that he and Heida have both managed to squeeze inside the lighthouse and lie so as to touch as little as possible during the night. If he so much as rolls over onto his back, it will mess up the arrangement. Perhaps, being so much smaller, Heida’s more comfortable.

  ‘Are you asleep?’ Heida’s voice is muffled, as though she’s pulled the sleeping bag over her head.

  ‘No.’ Helgi stops himself from adding: ‘You?’

  ‘I hate it here.’

  ‘Hopefully we’ll be able to go home tomorrow.’ Helgi feels like a teenager again. He doesn’t know quite what to say and can’t remember ever being in such an awkward situation with a member of the opposite sex. When the time came to split up for the night, Ívar ruled that Heida should sleep inside and choose who she wanted to share with. The other two would sleep up on the gallery, or narrow catwalk, that ran around the lantern room. Heida picked Helgi almost before Ívar had finished speaking, and he got the impression that Tóti was annoyed by this, though he tried to disguise the fact. Helgi had been surprised himself as he had assumed she would regard Tóti as the best of a bad lot. Perhaps she feels Helgi is the least likely to try anything. She’s probably right.

  ‘It’s not really about the babysitting. My little girl’s in safe hands with my parents. That was just all I could think of at the time. I didn’t want to admit how I feel about this place. There’s something sinister about the atmosphere.’

  Helgi draws a deep breath. ‘Isn’t it just the confined space and the danger of falling off? Otherwise it’s no different from anywhere else.’ He says this quite against his own instincts because he knows exactly what she means. As he stares at the open doorway, his longing to turn over intensifies, as though he is afraid of seeing something dart past or the shape of a figure standing out there motionless, watching the lighthouse, waiting for them to fall asleep before moving closer, coming inside …

  ‘Where are all the birds?’ From the sound of her voice, Heida must have stuck her head out of her sleeping bag. She sits up. ‘They were making a constant racket earlier.’

  Helgi listens and has to admit that she’s right. The only sound is the breakers at the bottom of the cliff. ‘I expect they’ve gone to sleep. Or flown away.’ He hopes she’ll say something else to distract his attention from the noises outside but no such luck. There is a rustling, then she says goodnight, her voice muffled inside her sleeping bag again.

  Helgi waits for sleep to claim him, with nothing but the sound of the waves in his ears, but his mind seems intent on keeping him awake, just in case. Weariness wins out in the end, though, so he is oblivious to the commotion up on the gallery later that night.

  Chapter 8

  21 January 2014

  The office was windowless. The only other such rooms in the building were used for conducting interviews, as storerooms or for coffee-making facilities. Nína had been allotted this cubbyhole when she joined the police and had never applied to move, even when other offices became available. She couldn’t face the thought of packing up all her stuff; it had taken her less than a year to fill the shelves and accumulate piles of papers that she didn’t dare throw out without going through them first. Besides, she rarely spent any time at her desk, so the claustrophobia and airlessness weren’t a problem. Yet now she regretted not having applied to move. She longed to see the sky and felt as if her office walls were closing in on her, as if it were an extension of the basement.

  The file containing reports of suicides from 1982 to 1985 was lying on her desk. She had trawled through it again and again, read every single word, but found nothing else about the case Thröstur had been linked to. Even so, she couldn’t quite bring herself to put it in the black bin bag that was sitting, still more or less empty, in front of the archives. She knew it was crazy but she couldn’t bear to throw away a single file in case it turned out to contain the information she was looking for. It made no difference that she had already had a quick flick through all the folders; a gnawing fear that she might have overlooked some crucial detail prevented her from getting on with her job. What she really wanted was to take all the files upstairs and examine every page at her leisure. But people would notice if she started lugging stacks of old folders up and down the stairs and someone was bound to alert her boss that Officer Nína, that whinging telltale, had finally lost the plot.

  She had sneaked this one file into a cardboard box of video tapes that were probably recordings of old interviews. The box had been sitting on a shelf at the back of the storeroom, covered in a thick layer of dust, and its bottom was so weak that Nína was afraid it wouldn’t survive the journey upstairs. For all she knew it might contain something worth copying. The problem would be to track down a VHS player in the building, but, if she could, it would make a nice break from the basement to sit and watch the tapes. Not that she expected their contents to be particularly uplifting. Any material the police thought worth recording was bound to make for depressing viewing.

  Nína reached for her mobile phone that had been lying on her desk since this morning. She hadn’t bothered to take it downstairs with her as she wasn’t expecting any calls, and it was good to have a respite from the outside world now and then. She had popped into the canteen at lunchtime, so her colleagues wouldn’t start wondering where she was, but the moment she walked in and encountered their silent stares, she realised what a foolish thought this had been. She had toyed with her food, sitting alone for fear that people would get up and leave if she tried to join them. Maybe she was being paranoid, but she didn’t dare put it to the test.

  Her stomach rumbled and she wished she had eaten more; she couldn’t expect anything better at the hospital – a sandwich from the vending machine, with yellowing mayonnaise, washed down with lukewarm coffee.

  The scratched screen showed three missed calls. One was from her sister, another from a number she didn’t recognise, and the third from the hospital. She knew the number of Thröstur’s ward by now and she felt her heart begin to pound. It was rare for her to receive calls from the hospital. When her husband had first been admitted, she had rung them at hourly intervals, but now she had little telephone contact. Gradually it had sunk in that there was unlikely to be any change, so she made do with slinking in and out of the ward, unseen. Thröstur’s condition was stable, as if his body had paused on a ledge on its way over a cliff and probably wouldn’t stir from there of its own accord.

  For the past two weeks the staff had been dropping hints that it was time to make a decision. At first they had been subtle but when they realised she wasn’t going to take the bait, they became more direct. Now would be a good time to switch off the machines that were keeping Thröstur alive, if you could call it alive. The phone call was almost certainly about that. Perhaps they would give her an ultimatum: if she didn’t give in, they would be forced to cut the power supply to his room. For an instant she pictured herself dragging a small diesel generator to the ward but dismissed it immediately as madness.

  As Nína was calling the hospital back the door opened and her boss stuck his head in. Hastily, she hung up. The very last thing she wanted was for someone to overhear the conversation. Police officers weren’t supposed to cry at work.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Örvar left the door open as if to ensure he could make a quick getaway. He had less than a year left until retirement and lately it had seemed to Nína that he was ageing with every passing month. It was rumoured that he had been diagnosed with cancer and, if his gaunt frame was anything to go by, he probably wouldn’t be much of a burden on the pension fund. His black uniform hung off him, as if it had been purchased from a fancy-dress shop.

  ‘Fine. Sort of.
There are an awful lot of files.’ Nína hoped he hadn’t been downstairs to check up on her. The nearly empty bin bag outside the storeroom, and the flat cardboard boxes that had yet to be assembled told their own story. ‘But it’s slowly coming along.’

  ‘No one expected you to finish it in your coffee break.’ Örvar’s face registered a twinge of pain as he sat down. ‘Just remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.’

  Nína suppressed a grimace. She couldn’t stand that kind of platitude. She gave the cardboard box a light kick. ‘I found a load of old tapes. Do you know if there’s a video player in the building? It may be worth saving some of the material. I don’t like to chuck it away without going through the recordings.’

  Örvar bent forwards slightly to see the box. It was plain he thought Nína’s job was of no importance but didn’t want her to realise. He put on a thoughtful expression that didn’t suit him. ‘They’re almost certainly recordings of interviews. I remember we experimented with taping them all when video machines first came in. Luckily, that didn’t last long or the basement would be overflowing. But talk to the technical manager. He’s bound to have an old VHS player somewhere in his storeroom.’ Örvar straightened up, surveying her office with an embarrassed air, as if ashamed of the conditions she was expected to work in. ‘I’ve been meaning to drop by and see you.’

  ‘Really? Any particular reason?’ This was disingenuous of her. They both knew perfectly well that Nína’s situation was unresolved, and there was no point pretending otherwise. ‘Sorry, I don’t know why I said that. I’m perfectly aware what you want to discuss.’