Blackout (12 page)

It was getting on for evening by the time Ísrún arrived in Dalvík, although she needed the dashboard clock to tell her so. The placid June evening was bright and clear, the day even longer on the north coast than down south in Reykjavík. The landscape was rockier and more menacing here in the north, but, mercifully, she had left the poisoned air of the city behind her in the south-west of Iceland.

She pulled up outside the house where Elías’s closest colleague lived. Svavar Sindrason. Forty-two years old. Lived alone.

Kormákur had called her when she was on the way north and asked if she had a scoop for the evening news. She replied, rather caustically, that she didn’t yet, and that it would obviously take time. She took the opportunity to ask him to dig up anything he could about Svavar, saying she was going to meet him. She didn’t mention her conversation with Ríkhardur Lindgren.

Kormákur had done well, calling her again a little later with a wealth of information about Svavar: his date of birth, family circumstances and much more. She grinned with delight at the thought that Kormákur was helping her, rather than her assisting him, as Ívar had wanted.

Despite Kormákur’s efforts, however, there was little to be found about Svavar in the media or on the internet. His name had popped up on the sports pages of old newspapers occasionally, as he had played handball to a high level at one time. But otherwise he’d lived an uneventful life.

Handsome old houses were tightly packed along the length of the street. Ísrún rang the bell at Svavar’s. These days she no longer needed
to screw up her courage to disturb a stranger outside business hours. Journalism had helped her grow a hard shell. News took first, second and third place in her list of priorities. All the same, she took care to be professional, aware that she would sometimes inconvenience innocent people in the course of her work. Equally, she knew that if she were to start feeling too many twinges of conscience over this, then it would be time to look for a less brutal way of earning a living.

Someone finally came to the door: a man with a tired look about him.

‘Good evening,’ he offered in a low voice.

‘I’d like to ask you a few questions about Elías,’ she said, without introducing herself. ‘I’ve come all the way from Reykjavík to talk to you,’ she added, knowing that a little flattery wouldn’t do any harm. ‘I’d really appreciate five or ten minutes of your time.’  

Svavar gave the impression of having been taken unawares.

‘Come inside.’

She didn’t hesitate.

‘Aren’t you on the news?’ he mumbled a moment later, when she was standing in his living room. He stared at the scar on her face.

The room reminded her of an over-furnished summer house, with charmless, mis-matched furniture and a random collection of books in a bookcase, looking as if they had been left there by accident. The shelves were mostly empty, as were the walls. The only sign of life was the small television set in the corner – flickering images but the volume quite low. There was a difference between a house and home, she thought to herself.

Ísrún told him that, yes, she was on the news, and Svavar’s gaze snapped back and forth.

‘Where’s … you know?’ he muttered.

‘Who?’

‘Y’know – the camera guy.’

‘I left him in Reykjavík. I’m doing some background research to start with, and then I’ll do interviews if they’re needed,’ she said, taking care to leave out the magic words
off the record
. There would
be nothing off the record about this interview; she was going to make use of every snippet of information she could get out of him, although not in any way that he might expect.

Svavar took a seat in the only chair, leaving Ísrún standing in the middle of the room, waiting for him to give some kind of response. After a few seconds of silence, she marched to the kitchen, fetched a stool, brought it back and sat down on it.

‘I get it,’ he said at last, the apathy clear in his voice. ‘Background. I suppose you’re doing this for the guy who was on the evening news just now.’

Hell.
She should have chosen her words more carefully. She’d get nothing useful out of Svavar if he thought she was just Kormákur’s assistant. That was something experience had taught her. People wanted to talk to someone with influence, and TV journalists have considerable influence.

‘Not quite,’ she laughed, with a tiny bite of conscience, although it was nothing she couldn’t handle. ‘He’s assisting
me
. I couldn’t bring him up here with me – someone has to stay behind in Reykjavík and put the bulletin together,’ she said with a smile, and deftly redirected the conversation. ‘You knew Elías well?’

‘Yeah,’ he muttered. ‘Very well. Worked for him for years.’

‘What sort of a guy was he to work for?’

He was silent for a moment. ‘Pretty damn good.’

‘A hard worker?’

‘A really hard worker,’ he replied.

‘Were there many of you working for him?’

‘Just the three of us, mostly.’ He cleared his throat and wrung his hands. ‘Me, Logi and Páll the Cop. They both live over in Siglufjörður. Elías was the man in charge.’

‘And you had enough work?’ she asked briskly, making an effort to avoid any long silences that might lead him to stray from the point.

‘Yeah, more than enough. Plenty of night shifts. They want the tunnel finished. It’s supposed to be opening this autumn.’

‘So what happened to your friend?’ she asked, coming to the point.

‘Haven’t a clue,’ he replied, almost without thinking, and rubbed his bristled cheek.

‘But I guess you’d like to know, wouldn’t you?’ Ísrún asked, leaning towards him.

‘Of course I would,’ he snapped. But his voice was so feeble, Ísrún was instantly convinced that he had his suspicions.

‘Had he been in trouble with the law?’

‘Why d’you ask?’

She could almost sense him sweating, even though there was, thankfully, some distance between them.

‘Well…’ she smiled, ‘… you know a journalist never reveals her source.’

‘He was honest as … as honest as the day is long, Elías was,’ he said in a low mumble. ‘And anyway, you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, should you?’

‘Sometimes that’s part of the job. So, no convictions … nothing shady that you were aware of?’

‘Hey, enough of this bullshit!’ He raised his voice and looked ready to get to his feet, although he seemed to lack the energy to do so. ‘I’m not being interrogated by the cops here. What the hell are you fishing for?’

‘I think you know perfectly well. Did the police talk to you today?’

‘Yeah, they were here today,’ he muttered, apparently calm again. ‘Told them the same as I’m telling you. I was at home all night. I didn’t kill him.’

‘That’s not what I was asking,’ she said cheerfully, satisfied with the nugget of information Svavar had let fall. The fact that he had been questioned by the police was something – a morsel of information she could pass on to Kormákur and Ívar while she carried on investigating the things she wanted to uncover.

‘That’ll do, won’t it?’ he said, a new decisiveness in his tone. It was as if he had finally summoned up the courage to behave as if he owned the place rather than looking like a visitor in his own home.

‘That’ll do nicely,’ she said. ‘But give me a call if there’s anything you need to tell me.’

She wrote her phone number on a slip of paper and handed it to him. But as he took it from her, she regretted it. There was something about this character she didn’t like and maybe giving him her number hadn’t been a clever move.

Outside she stood by the red car and took out her phone. It was time to check in and buy herself some more time. If successful, her next stop would be an overnight stay in Akureyri.

Kormákur answered straight away. He was never without his phone.

‘Hi. Up north, are you?’

She could hear traffic in the background behind him and guessed that he was on the way home after his shift.

‘Yep, I’m in Dalvík, just been talking to Svavar. The police questioned him today,’ she said.

‘OK. That hasn’t been mentioned,’ Kormákur said, and she could hear the surprise in his voice.  

Ísrún didn’t doubt that Kormákur was right. It was uncanny how he managed to keep tabs on every media outlet, watching all of their competitors, reading newspapers and websites, and still doing a full day’s work. Maybe that was what he had meant when he had once told her that he was married to his job.

‘I hope it’s of some use,’ she said. ‘I’ll see if I can get something meatier for you tomorrow. How did it go today?’

‘Not bad,’ he said, although he didn’t sound exactly overjoyed. ‘It was at the top of the bulletin, even though there wasn’t much new to report. We didn’t have anything today that scooped the others, unfortunately.’

‘That’s something,’ Ísrún said. ‘I wish I could conjure up a scoop. Maybe tomorrow.’

‘Your bit of information will also have to wait until tomorrow now. By the way, you were really lucky to leave town today. This damned ash cloud is still over the city like a blanket and it’s got worse since you left. It’s dark and gloomy in Reykjavík tonight.’  

Ísrún could imagine the bright summer’s night hidden behind a grey mist. It was like a vision of hell.

‘It would have been good for you to know your grandmother,’ said Katrín, the old lady sitting opposite me at the robust wooden table in her little house in Landeyjar.

That’s true enough, I thought, but gave her a warm smile instead of saying anything. We were in her living room, if that’s what you could call it. The house was so small that the living room and the kitchen were one. There was space to sleep upstairs, or so she said. The house was well heated; overheated, if anything. With every window shut securely the warmth was almost overwhelming.

Katrín was a distant relative of mine, and had been my grandmother Ísbjörg’s closest friend; they had been close ever since they were children.

Now she was past eighty, about the same age that my grandmother would have been if cancer hadn’t whisked her away at such a young age.

We sat by the window, looking out at the sea and towards the Westman Islands. The wind was blowing hard outside, even though it was the height of summer with the long days of sunshine stretching into light nights.

‘There’s always a wind blowing here,’ the old lady had said as we sat down.

‘I’ll be damned if you two wouldn’t have got on well together,’ she said, after a moment’s silence. ‘You remind me of her.’

‘Really?’ I asked out of courtesy, having heard that said more than a few times before.

‘Yes, you do remind me of her,’ Katrín repeated.

It was bright outside, but she had lit a large candle in the middle of
the
table, giving the homely atmosphere of this little, old timber house, full of tales and old memories, a warm glow.

‘We sat here often, at this table. That was back when we were both young and pretty, if you can imagine that! The house has been in the family for years, longer than the oldest of us can remember. That’s further back than my memory goes, and God help me, my memory goes back a long way.’

‘What did you do to keep yourselves occupied back then? Without television, I mean.’

‘No television, no, you can be sure of that. I’ve never had much time for it, anyway. Don’t have a set of my own,’ she said and paused briefly. ‘We used to talk. Or we’d play cards – sometimes just the two of us, sometimes more. There were a few of us in the district who were friends, to start with, at least. But our two best friends moved to Reykjavík and that left us here by ourselves.’

She sighed.

‘What did you play?’ I asked.

‘Mostly
marías.
You know the game?’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘The younger generation doesn’t sit down to play like we used to in the old days. Too much television,’ she frowned.

I smiled to myself. I hadn’t told the old lady that I worked in television.

‘What sort of woman was my grandmother?’

‘She was good,’ Katrín said, without needing to think of what to say. ‘You remind me of her,’ she said yet again. ‘She was as sharp as a knife, and warm-hearted. The kind of woman you could trust.’

I kept quiet, waiting to hear more. And after a little while, Katrín continued.

‘She read a lot, but we all read a lot in those days. We girls would sit in a group and read together. Your grandmother wasn’t much of a one for sitting alone in the dark. She was always a little afraid of it, of the night, of anywhere gloomy.’ She smiled.

‘Afraid of the dark? I guess it must have been easy to believe in ghosts – those dark nights and the long distances between the farms must have
brought
all of the old legends to life,’ I said, and realised that I had slipped into being the interviewer, trying to steer the conversation in the right direction.

‘Believe in ghosts? Well, I can’t answer for your grandmother. All I know is that she didn’t like the dark. When there was the Hekla eruption in 1947, we were all scared – nobody had any idea how long it might last. But it terrified her. It stayed with her until she died.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. She’d often talk about it. We were both about twenty when it happened. There was no warning and suddenly the air was filled with ash and the sky went black. That wretched ash destroyed all the pastures. It’s unnerving when it gets dark as suddenly as that, when you least expect it. It was terrifying and it affected your grandmother very badly.’ Katrín dropped her voice and leaned closer to me. ‘She called it “the blackout”. I remember that clearly. Afterwards, whenever she talked about the eruption, she’d use the same word. “Kata, do you remember the blackout?” she’d ask.’

I glanced out of the window.

A shudder went down my spine. It was as if my grandmother’s world was coming to life, all her fears and the terrors that she had lived with had become real and immediate.

It was just as well it was bright daylight outside, in spite of that incessant wind, constantly howling, a reminder that Iceland, this isolated island in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean, was always, in summer or winter, at the mercy of the weather.

‘I was never as well read as your grandmother was,’ Katrín continued. ‘She had a word for everything. As far as I was concerned, darkness was just darkness. But these days, like her, I don’t feel at ease in the dark anymore. I always feel that there’s something sinister on the prowl – something that keeps itself hidden when it’s light. But when the darkness falls … And that’s when that word always comes to mind, “blackout”.’