Nightblind (19 page)

I’m going home tomorrow. The new medication is much more effective, and I’m a lot better. I think. It’ll be good to get away from this place but I’m nervous about it. I don’t particularly want to go home. I’m sure that time has stood still while I’ve been away.

The doctor says I’ve turned the corner.

But he doesn’t really know. He doesn’t know why Hanna and I parted so suddenly and with so much ill feeling.

I had pretty much moved in with her, and came home one evening to her place, our place. I was tired, irritated by my parents, as always, and angry.

She said something and I don’t even remember what it was. It doesn’t matter now, but it was something that caused me to see red. I don’t know what came over me, but I hit her. Not as hard as Dad would have done, but hard enough all the same.

She was shocked to begin with. Then I saw her feel the pain, and the anger poured out. Everything happened so fast. We haven’t spoken since. I moved back to my parents’ house and shut myself away for days on end. I couldn’t believe what I had done. I didn’t believe I had done it.

It was as if I had been infected by something malicious, an incurable sickness. There was no way to escape it. That’s the way I felt and that’s the way I sometimes still feel. Occasionally I hope for a brighter future, and that I can lift myself above all this somehow.

Dad came yesterday. He said it was time to come home. He had obviously spoken to my doctor or someone else in charge here because he seemed to know everything about my treatment. Then he told me I had nothing to worry about, and this spell in hospital would be wiped clean from any official documents. In other words, it would be hushed up. There would be no black mark on my file, as he put it. My career would not be affected. Of course I don’t have a career yet, but we both know what he has planned for me. Maybe he wants to wipe out any record of these dark days for his own benefit as well as for the family’s reputation. It’s a humiliation he’d find hard to bear.

The nurse came to see me off. She was unusually warm, almost embarrassed. We both know that she had crossed the line, but I’m not going to do anything about it. Dad would never have it, anyway, as it would attract too much attention. For someone with Dad’s connections and influence, it’s possible to make all the records of my stay here disappear, but there will be people who will remember me, especially that nurse. And it’s not as if I have a name that’s all that common.

Herjólfur.

Kristin found Ari Thór and their son asleep when she returned home late that evening, and she didn’t want to disturb them. Ari Thór had managed to get very little rest over the last few days, and he was still struggling with the after-effects of his flu.

Dinner in Akureyri had not gone well. She wondered what she had been expecting. Was it just a half-hearted attempt to be unfaithful to her husband, but without taking things too far? Pay him back for his dalliance with Ugla all those years ago? Or maybe shock him into noticing that she actually existed, and needed more from him to make the relationship sustainable? Petty revenge wasn’t her style, really, and the evening had been a mistake.

Even the food had been poor and she hadn’t eaten much of it. Maybe her conscience had soured her taste buds. She made herself a snack from the contents of the fridge to quash the worst of the hunger pangs. The company hadn’t been everything she had hoped for, either, and there had been more excitement in the expectation of dinner with this good-looking man than in the reality of it. She had found that they actually had less in common than she had hoped, and Ari Thór had never been far from her thoughts. She had to admit that it had been a grand error of judgement on her part. Her punishment, and fortunately her only punishment, was that she would have to continue to work with this man and endure endless potentially awkward moments.

Ari Thór woke up as she crawled into bed alongside him. He turned to her, kissed her and stroked her cheek.

‘Tough day?’ he asked.

‘Just a bit,’ she said, shivering at the lie she had told, and the necessity of maintaining the fantasy that she had been on duty far into the evening. ‘And you?’

‘It’s not been easy. I’m sure there’s something crucial in this case that we’ve overlooked, some kind of explanation…’

He sat up in bed, and force of habit made him check his phone.

‘Hmmm,’ he grunted to himself. ‘I need to pop downstairs to use the computer, sorry. It’s a message from a guy – a local villain, in fact – about some pictures he’s sent me. There’s never a minute’s peace.’

‘All right, love,’ Kristín said and closed her eyes.

She was on the verge of sleep, when Ari Thór came back upstairs. For once, he didn’t try to keep his voice down, even though Stefnir was asleep in the same room.

‘Can you explain this?’ he demanded, a hurt surprise, fury evident in his voice. ‘Can you explain
that
?’ he demanded, louder this time.

He handed her the laptop. She was shaken fully awake by the photographs. There were several, not particularly clear, presumably taken with a mobile phone, but clear enough; pictures of her secret dinner date.

‘When were these taken? Weren’t you at work this evening?’

At that moment she knew she
could
tell a lie, but also knew that she wouldn’t. She knew that she had to be completely honest and there was no way to cheat her way out of this, not if she had any intention of salvaging her relationship with Ari Thór. She definitely wanted to do her best to do just that.

‘No … I was invited to dinner,’ she said in a low voice.

‘Dinner? Who invited you? This guy in the photo?’ Ari Thór snapped.

‘Yes…’

‘And who is he? Who’s this man?’

‘Just a doctor, in Akureyri.’

‘Just a doctor? Are you sleeping with him?’

‘No,’ she answered, hesitating unnecessarily and immediately regretting not having been more definite.
Of course not
. Something like that would have been better.

‘We’re just friends,’ she added.

‘So why did you say you had to work?’ His voice was loud and it woke Stefnir, who started to cry.

She gulped again. She didn’t want to lie, but the whole truth was going to be difficult.

‘I … er. I thought you’d react badly.’

‘Why? Because you’re seeing someone else?’

Stefnir’s cries became louder. Kristín got out of bed and swept him into her arms, trying unsuccessfully to comfort him.

‘No, Ari Thór, we’re just friends.’

Her words sounded unconvincing in the dark bedroom, even to her own ears.

‘I don’t believe it.’ The anger in his voice seemed to have given way to wretched sadness. ‘You can sleep here tonight, you and Stefnir. And you made me take him to the childminder so you could go for dinner with your boyfriend!’ He was hurt, deeply upset.

‘I’m sorry, Ari Thór,’ she said, a sob threatening to burst from her, and realising that an apology was tantamount to an admission.

He said nothing, and disappeared downstairs, leaving Kristín with the discomfort of knowing that everything had changed. Nothing could ever be the same again.

Ari Thór found an interesting email awaiting him when he arrived at the police station, a message that had also been copied to Tómas. There were questions over Valberg’s knife wound and the way the knife had entered his chest. It seemed unlikely that he had ‘walked into the knife’ and more plausible that he had received the wound where he had laid on the floor. Ari Thór was uncomfortable with the theory. He found it hard to accept that Elín was anything other than the victim, and his sympathies lay with her.

The email had been sent to him and to Tómas for their information only, making it plain that they were not expected to take any further part in the investigation.

He struggled to get to sleep on the old sofa at the station. It was too small in every direction. His feet stuck out over the end and the slightest movement threatened to topple him onto the floor. Above all, the evening’s events were keeping him awake – the argument with Kristín, and the overwhelming disappointment. Of course he’d made a mistake of his own, but that was in the past, and he’d taken his punishment for it at the time.

Kristín’s face, her body language, her tone of voice and of course the secrecy all pointed towards something much more than an innocent meal with a colleague. He couldn’t get out of his mind how distant she had been recently. How long had this relationship been going on? It was a betrayal, a clear betrayal of him, Stefnir and their family.

What next? Should he go home after a night on the sofa as if nothing had happened?

Should he allow Addi Gunna, who had sent him the pictures, to succeed in wrecking his family? The idea was distasteful, but this was about something larger and deeper. A trust that had taken a long time to build had been swept away in the blink of an eye.

Maybe it was all over?

It was a long night. Ari Thór slept fitfully, a few moments at a time and during periods of wakefulness, his thoughts went from Kristín to Herjólfur’s death and back. What had Tómas said that hadn’t quite added up? And why did Ari Thór
still
feel there was a link to Valberg?

It wasn’t until the early hours, as he lay somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, that the answer broke through from his subconscious. Herjólfur had told him that he and his wife weren’t much interested in outdoor activities – such as skiing. But now the news from Reykjavík was that his wife had broken her leg on the slopes. Could that be a fiction? What was she hiding? The thought of Valberg kept on flashing back to him, too, as did the year’s leave that Herjólfur had taken to look after his wife when she was ill.
What illness?

Strict and decisive was how Tómas had described Herjólfur.

Tómas’s tale of Addi Gunna and the rescue operation high in the valley at Skardsdalur came to mind.
Everyone has a good side to them, even Addi
, Tómas had said.
And everyone has a dark side that others don’t get to see
, thought Ari Thór.

When he and Tómas had talked about Valberg, Tómas had made the point that not only criminals committed violent acts, but also men who appeared on the surface to behave impeccably, heads of households in responsible positions.

He also recalled that Helena had not seemed to be particularly upset about her husband’s injuries, neither when he brought her the news, nor later when they met again. She had even started to prepare for the man’s funeral before his death had been confirmed.

Could she have been hoping that he wouldn’t survive?

Valberg’s assault on Elín had given Ari Thór the germ of an idea … had Herjólfur possibly been violent towards his wife? Would that explain the strange, subdued atmosphere, and the lack of any apparent distress or sorrow on his family’s part?

Ari Thór sat up on the sofa. There wasn’t a chance of getting back too sleep.

The more Ari Thór thought about it, the more convinced he became that this possibility was something he would have to investigate.

But regardless of whether this theory was right or not, surely the assault on Herjólfur was most likely linked to the drug trading that Herjólfur had been looking into, the business that was at least partly conducted at the house where the fatal shot had been fired?

Then Ari Thór recalled how he had first found out about the investigation at the house. From a family member who had so very kindly pointed him in that direction; away from Herjólfur’s personal life.

No,
hell
…

Ari Thór refused to believe it. It was unthinkable.

How had he known where the shotgun could be found?

The answer came to him in a flash. Of course this person knew about Ingólfur’s shotgun. And if Herjólfur was the intended target, very few people could have known that he was on duty that night. He quickly pulled on his uniform jacket and hurried out of the police station, slamming the door behind him, out into the cold morning to meet a murderer.