Someone to Watch Over Me Page 9

  ‘Did she ever go home or leave the centre at all? Did she go to the hospital, or visit friends or relatives?’

  ‘No; why would she? She was comatose, which meant there was no reason to disturb her apart from in exceptional circumstances. She was fed intravenously and needed oxygen, and you don’t get that kind of equipment in ordinary homes. She was actually sent to hospital twice during the course of her time with us, but neither occasion was around the time that she would have conceived. She was four months into her pregnancy when she died, and all our investigations into who the father might have been were based on that timescale.’ Glódís rubbed one of her temples, looking pained. ‘Lísa wasn’t actually a permanent resident at the home, but we were asked to take care of her while another solution was sought. The department she’d been in for many years had closed and we weren’t full, so it made sense. She was actually due to have been moved soon after the time of the fire, but of course that never happened.’

  ‘Which could indicate that the culprit wanted to take the opportunity to do it before she was moved.’

  ‘As I said, we have no idea who the father was, so any theories are nothing more than that – theories. The care home was full of people and it’s impossible to imagine how Lísa’s pregnancy could have happened.’

  ‘You say that there were always a lot of people around in the daytime, but what about at night? There was only one person on duty the night of the fire, and perhaps not only that one time. The night shift must have been under suspicion.’

  ‘There were always two staff members on duty at night, with two exceptions. On the night of the fire, and once during the first week after we opened. The timing of that particular occasion doesn’t fit with Lísa’s pregnancy, and in any case, it’s clear that the night watchmen had nothing to do with it. There were four of them in total, two different shifts, two on each shift. They worked every other week and were off in between. It’s difficult to invert your body clock like that at regular intervals, and it’s certainly true that only a particular type of person chooses to do such work. But none of them was the perpetrator in this dreadful case.’

  ‘Why not? Because they said so?’

  ‘No.’ Glódís looked slightly annoyed. ‘The coroner demanded that their DNA be compared to that of the foetus, and the analysis cleared all four of them – including the one who died.’ She shut her eyes. ‘I’d give a lot to know who did it, and how. It makes me furious to think something like that could happen somewhere where I am responsible.’

  ‘Were others tested? What about the male residents?’

  ‘Yes, but it ended there. Each individual test costs around two hundred thousand krónur, I understand, so it was never going to be possible to test every male who had ever set foot through our door. But as far as my boys go, neither Natan nor Tryggvi nor Jakob turned out to be the father. I should mention, perhaps, that I haven’t seen their results myself, although I did get a copy of the test results on the night watchmen sent to me because I was their boss at the time. But I heard from someone in this office that the other results were negative, and I don’t see any reason to doubt that. In any case, the bastard who forced himself on Lísa has yet to be found.’

  ‘So you agree that it’s impossible for her to have given consent?’

  Glódís looked up quickly. ‘Of course it’s impossible. She was comatose; she was never conscious. It’s out of the question that she consented to intercourse. This was a criminal act, however you look at it.’

  ‘Wasn’t the matter referred to the police, then? You can’t look past the fact that this was rape, and under the most appalling circumstances.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t reported.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It wasn’t me who didn’t want to. But when it came down to it, her parents didn’t want the police to know about it and they got help to prevent them finding out. They said they didn’t want to see newspaper articles discussing their daughter in this context, and they knew the details would get splashed everywhere. It was too late for her, in any case, and sentences for sexual offences aren’t heavy enough to amount to any real justice. Even if the guilty party had been found, they thought it would be just as likely that he would receive a paltry sentence that they would have found hard to accept.’

  ‘But what about public institutions? The police or prosecutors? Didn’t they carry out a proper investigation? Rape is not a private matter, once it’s discovered.’

  ‘No.’

  This all sounded most odd. ‘How can that be? It’s a serious violation of criminal law. Her parents shouldn’t actually have had any say in how the case was handled.’

  ‘They got help, as I told you. The father of Tryggvi, the autistic boy at the residence who died that same night, is high up in the Ministry of Justice and they turned to him. He prevented the matter from going any further.’

  ‘I see.’

  Glódís nodded. ‘After that, our hands were tied.’

  Chapter 7

  Friday, 8 January 2010

  Thóra had an appointment with a client back at the office that afternoon. The man was divorcing his wife; the process had begun before the financial crash but had been delayed because the couple had had second thoughts in the middle of it. In the wake of the disaster, they had cosied up to each other in search of the good old days when everyone in the banking and business world had been honest and the authorities respectable. This sudden affection, however, turned out to be merely the death throes of youthful love, and after two months of renewed intimacy they came to the conclusion that nothing had changed – they weren’t made for each other after all. The divorce was put back on the agenda but now under entirely different conditions; their rather sizable assets had gone up in smoke, leaving only their debts to divide up. Their civility seemed to have evaporated along with their assets and the couple, who’d previously seemed to get along quite well, had changed into ravenous vultures in each other’s presence. Thóra and the woman’s lawyer had their hands full preventing them from coming to blows in their joint meetings. Fortunately the husband was meeting Thóra alone that afternoon.

  The hot dog Thóra had bought for lunch was on the large side and the last bite went down with a bit of difficulty. She licked mayonnaise off her lower lip and took a gulp of the flat fizzy drink that came with the lunch special. She was feeling quite pleased with herself after her conversation with Glódís. She ran her eyes down a printout of the names of all those who had worked at the centre; the former director had given her the list after Thóra had informed her that she could just as easily find the staff members’ names in the court records. That was perhaps not entirely true, since such a list was unlikely to be exhaustive and there would be no easy way for Thóra to fill in the gaps. From Glódís’s list she saw that there had been fourteen full-time staff and a total of ten substitutes and specialists, which meant that, in truth, even finding all the names in the police reports would have proved a Herculean task. It would be impossible to speak to each and every one of these people, but with insight and a good measure of luck she could hopefully filter out those who she most needed to speak to. Glódís had also let her have the names of the residents’ parents, which would doubtless have proved simpler to find, but it spared Thóra the trouble of going through all the obituaries and death notices from the period following the fire. She was certain that some of these people, staff or family members, must know how Lísa’s child had been conceived, but the name of the father was probably not on either list.

  Although Lísa’s rape was a vile act, it wasn’t unprecedented. Thóra had read on the Internet that morning about necrophiliacs, people whose fetish was to have sex with the dead. Nor was this sort of repulsive sexual deviance anything new. The ‘father of history’, the Greek Herodotus, told of how Egyptians let the corpses of beautiful young women rot for three to four days before they were handed over to those who were to anoint them, to prevent them from being disgraced in this way. Of course, Herodot
us was also called ‘the father of lies’, so Thóra didn’t know how much this story could be trusted. It was clear, however, from other articles that she skimmed over, that this was a not uncommon modern-day fantasy. Around seventy per cent of those who suffered from this fetish said that they dreamed of sex with people who neither resisted nor gave any sign of rejecting them. A comatose person would certainly fit into this category.

  Thóra dug her mobile phone out from her overflowing handbag and called directory enquiries. She decided to utilize the time that she had before meeting with her client to speak to Jakob’s former defender, the lawyer also appointed by the Supreme Court as Jakob’s supervisor. She had tried several times to reach Ari Gunnarsson since starting her investigation, to no avail, and he hadn’t responded to her messages. But Thóra had no other choice but to keep on trying, since Ari’s insight into the case was sure to aid her investigation. It was also more appropriate to let him know of her intentions formally, rather than simply through messages left on his answering machine. His role as supervisor was to ensure that the individual deemed not criminally liable remained in residence at the designated institution for no longer than necessary, although this particular issue would have no influence on the reopening of the case.

  Thóra had immediately recognized Ari’s name in the dossier. His details were often given to people who’d been arrested when they asked for a lawyer. He was a decent guy, as far as she could tell; not exactly a genius, but no idiot either. She recalled a rumour which had circulated in the legal world that he had come dangerously close to being disbarred due to being bankrupt for many years, but had somehow escaped this punishment. The man appeared not to have particularly good references, which made Thóra curious about who had selected him to supervise Jakob and why. Had Jakob himself been made to point at a name on a police list, or had his mother done so? She supposed that if you didn’t know any lawyers, that was no worse a way than any other to choose one.

  Ari answered on the second ring, apparently in the middle of lunch. He mumbled to her to definitely drop by – he had an hour free, and it would give him an excuse to put aside the boring job he was working on. He apologized for not having responded to her messages; he simply hadn’t got round to it. After swallowing his food in a dramatic fashion, he stopped mumbling and gave her the address of his law office more intelligibly. As she’d expected, it was close by; few lawyers set up shop in the suburbs. When she got there, she discovered that his firm shared a corridor with a few other unassuming offices, including several small wholesalers and a dentist. The latter seemed not to be taking a lunch break, judging by the whine of the drill that came from behind his closed door as Thóra walked by.

  Ari’s office was a mess. He was obviously self-employed, because there was only one desk set up in the spacious room. Bookshelves lined the walls and were loaded with rubbish that seemed to have been dumped there at random. A sofa that had seen better days stood under the window, but she could hardly see it for the papers, files and books that were scattered all over it. Even the floor was being used as a filing cabinet and Thóra had the feeling that it wouldn’t take long for a narrow path to form from the door to the table and the worn-looking visitors’ chair. After Ari showed her in, she took a seat. He was on the phone when she arrived and appeared to be negotiating a car purchase, with Ari wanting more for the vehicle than the buyer was willing to pay. A half-eaten sandwich in a rustling plastic wrapper moved back and forth when Ari wanted to place particular emphasis on his words. A piece of lettuce flew out from between the slices of bread and landed on the computer screen in front of him. It slid down lazily as Ari wiped away the mayonnaise streak that it left behind. Finally he hung up, without having concluded the car deal, and smiled at Thóra.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t realize that you were so close by.’ Thóra started muttering politely that that was all right, but she didn’t get to finish her sentence before Ari interrupted her. ‘But enough about that. What can I do for you? You said that you’re working on reopening Jakob’s case. How come?’ He took a big bite of the flimsy white-bread sandwich, which was now falling apart after its vigorous shaking.

  Thóra told him the entire story of her new assignment before turning to the business at hand: ‘… and since you were Jakob’s lawyer, I wondered if you had any useful information, or if you could remember anything about the case that struck you as odd or unusual.’

  Ari laughed curtly. He was on the chubby side and it made his cheeks wobble. ‘The oddest thing about that case was the client. He was completely ga-ga. I won’t be defending any more retards, or whatever you’re meant to call them now. It was like dealing with an ugly, overgrown child. And as if it wasn’t bad enough defending him, they appointed me to be his supervisor.’

  Thóra tried not to be too offended by what he said, hoping it was just a reflection of his insecurity. She doubted many clients found their way to this den of chaos. ‘Of course the young man is developmentally disabled, so I can completely understand that communication between you must have been difficult. But I was thinking of something related to the investigation or to the case itself. I’ll make my own judgements on him as a person.’

  ‘Such sensitivity!’ That nasty laugh again, but thankfully it ended abruptly. ‘You know, I’m actually relieved they didn’t consult me about the reopening of his case. I should be insulted or pissed off, but I’m not at all, not in the least. It was one of the worst cases I’ve ever taken on, and I’ve seen a lot in my time. But it all seemed pretty clear-cut to me: those who died were better off dead, to call a spade a spade, and Jakob is best kept institutionalized for life. If you really believe he’s innocent, all I have to say is: “Good luck with that”.’

  Thóra didn’t know quite how she should respond to this extraordinary statement. It was probably best to let it go unremarked; otherwise there was a risk that this would end in an argument. She now seriously doubted that this man had handled Jakob’s interests with anything resembling professional integrity. ‘So you saw nothing in the case that might suggest someone else had a hand in what happened? I’m aware that Jakob’s testimony was contradictory, to the point where at times his guilt didn’t seem to be in question, but as you said yourself, he behaves like a child, and they’ve never been considered reliable witnesses. If full consideration wasn’t taken of his disability, it’s equally likely that something was accidentally missed that might point the finger at someone other than him.’ As she spoke, Thóra marvelled to herself at Jakob’s bad luck in getting Ari as his lawyer. The man was probably great at wrangling with the judicial system on behalf of petty criminals, but he was the polar opposite of what was needed for this case.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  Thóra wasn’t convinced. ‘So there was nothing that came to light regarding the running of the home, or anything else suggesting that someone other than Jakob had reason to want to destroy it?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘What about the young paralysed woman who was pregnant, Lísa Finnbjörnsdóttir? Do you think it stretches credibility to say that the father would have been anxious to conceal the pregnancy?’

  ‘What?’ Ari seemed genuinely surprised. His lower jaw slackened and his half-open mouth formed a black hole in his otherwise pale face. ‘Where did you get that idea?’

  ‘It’s in black and white in the girl’s autopsy report. She was around four months pregnant when she died. The father is unknown, but it’s clear that conception took place at the centre. She didn’t get out much, so I understand.’ The black hole opened even wider and Thóra caught a glimpse of the pink tip of the man’s tongue.

  ‘I wasn’t remotely aware of this, and nor was anyone else as far I know. It was never mentioned in the hearings, or the interrogations, or anywhere else for that matter.’

  ‘It’s untrue that no one was aware of it, although it was never discussed, out of consideration for her family. You could easily have found out about it, but since you failed to do so
, everyone was able to breathe easier.’

  Ari was quick to recover his composure. He shut his mouth again with an audible snap and spread out his hands dramatically. His shirt cuffs were threadbare and the pinstripe material of his suit shiny with wear at the elbows. He clearly wasn’t raking it in defending burglars.

  ‘Well now. I doubt that it would have changed anything. Who would kill a whole lot of people just to hide such a thing? I can see it must have been awkward and all that, but I mean …’ He let his hands drop. ‘Why not just kill her? Cram a pill or two into her mouth, end of story.’

  Thóra thought she might cram a thing or two into him if he went on like this much longer. ‘Of course it’s impossible to understand how or why it happened; I’m just pointing out that something was going on that someone wanted to keep hidden, and there might be more to the case that I’m not aware of. Might you not have come across something but maybe considered it irrelevant to the defence case?’

  ‘No, I swear I don’t remember anything. I would tell you if I did.’ His chair creaked as he leaned back. ‘I should tell you that I was swamped with work when this case was handed to me. Looking back on it, I might not have taken the time to go over every small detail. But that’s another matter; what’s more important is that it wouldn’t have made a difference. All the evidence indicated that Jakob started the fire, and the court would hardly have been receptive to vague theories about other culprits.’ He turned to the slightly sloping bookshelf behind him. ‘I can do one thing, of course, which is lend you the files. I still have them here somewhere.’ He looked around and smiled mischievously at Thóra. ‘I’m not one for throwing things out, as you might have guessed.’ She didn’t return the smile.