The Day is Dark (2 page)

In the vestibule she put on a thick eiderdown jacket that had proven invaluable in this stormy place, and with the damaged face of the little girl in mind she took a scarf from one of the hooks and wound it tightly around her head, leaving only her eyes uncovered. Finally she put on mittens and pulled on the warmest boots she could find. Her shoes were wet, since she had once again forgotten to turn them upside down. The snow on them had melted as she worked, and made them soggy and cold. The same went for her hat, which had fallen off its hook onto the wet floor, so she also grabbed a fur hat to keep the wind and cold out of her ears. No one would miss it, or the scarf and boots, if she came to work early enough the next day. She pushed her trouser bottoms into the boots and stood up stiffly. She was so warmly dressed that she could barely move, and it would be no easier when she got outside, with the wind in her face. She drew a deep breath and opened the front door. Suddenly it struck her that perhaps the dog had been warning her, not menacing her – was there something else she should be afraid of?

The cold invigorated her and she pushed this thought aside. Her unease was probably all due to the video recording she’d just been puzzling over. Just before supper a clip had been e-mailed to her and her co-workers, showing Bjarki and Dóri, the two drillers, mucking around in the smokers’ room. Oddný Hildur didn’t know who had shot the video; maybe they’d set up the camera themselves, since there were few others besides the two of them who could bear the little smoke-saturated room for any length of time. However, what had caught her attention was not their stupid antics, but something that shot past the window behind them without their realizing it. Since she had little interest in this kind of foolishness she hadn’t opened the e-mail before supper, when she could have asked her colleagues about it. Maybe the apparition behind them was part of the joke? She had tried unsuccessfully to pause the clip and get a better view of it, but the movement was so swift that she never managed to stop it in the right place.

It looked to her like a person wearing some kind of mask or strange headdress, and after it disappeared a red streak was left behind on the windowpane. The person – or whatever it was – had been holding something red, which must have bumped into the window or been dragged across it on purpose. But what was it? The rapid movement and dark red, irregular streak formed something of a gruesome backdrop to the drillers’ pranks, and her failure to figure it out unsettled her. Maybe she would laugh it off in the morning, but right now she wished she had an explanation. For some reason she couldn’t imagine stopping by the smokers’ room to see if any marks were still there. Deep inside she knew that it was out of fear that the dark red streak was blood.

Oddný Hildur exhaled in the doorway and put her hands in her pockets. The dog was nowhere to be seen. She walked out into the drifting snow and darkness for the last time.

Chapter 1

18 March 2008

Thóra Gudmundsdóttir put down the overview of her last month’s work schedule at the legal firm. It was hardly what she would call encouraging reading: the cases taken by her and Bragi, her business partner, along with two paralegals, were numerous, but mostly small-scale and quickly processed. That was certainly good for the firm’s clients, but it didn’t put much in the till. Nor was it all about the money. The most exciting cases demanded a great deal of work and were more complex than the smaller ones, which were usually run-of-the-mill and monotonous. Thóra groaned inwardly. She didn’t dare groan audibly for fear that one of the young lawyers would hear her. If he sensed that she were worried about the firm’s workload, he might start thinking of moving on, and they could not afford that. She and Bragi could never run the firm and everything belonging to it – not least their dreadful secretary, Bella – alone. Although it would be difficult to imagine how it could be possible to do her job any worse than Bella herself did it, Thóra had no interest in stepping in for the girl, and Bragi would do whatever was necessary to avoid having to sit and take phone calls. So they would just have to accept this arrangement: these two young lawyers who appeared more interested in YouTube than Supreme Court judgements, and Bella, who also spent more time than was healthy on the Internet.

Thóra turned back to the list of clients and cases. Divorces, bankruptcies and other financial entanglements were the most prominent types of case by far. There were some involving inheritances, paternity suits and sporadic minor cases. It was probably not appropriate to think so, but Thóra longed for more criminal cases. They were much more demanding than divorces, which Bragi had been specializing in recently. He had built up a good reputation in this area, which meant that more and more people turned to the firm for help when their marriages were on the rocks.

Such cases, however, could often be quite colourful. One of her current clients was a man named Trausti, who wanted to change his name following his divorce since his wife had left him for another man with the same name. Of course it was no trouble to obtain permission to name oneself something other than what was recorded on the church register. But things became complicated when this was not enough for Trausti; he also insisted that their children’s patronymics be changed accordingly. He wanted to make it clear to everyone that he and not his wife’s new partner was the father of his children. Although the laws on namegiving allowed for changes in children’s surnames under special circumstances, the legislation had not foreseen this possibility, thus there was no easy resolution to the case. Thóra thought it highly unlikely that a Trausti who did not want to be named Trausti would be permitted to change his children’s surname, especially in light of the children’s mother being totally opposed to the change. Her protestations only made her husband more determined to have his way, and in the end Thóra gave in and sent a letter describing the matter to the Minister of Justice. By then Thóra would actually have been completely willing to change her
own
name rather than sign such an unprecedented letter. Over a month had passed since she had sent it, and still no word had been received. She took that to mean that the authorities were wondering if this were some sort of joke.

At the time, her own divorce had certainly brought out less than the best in her and Hannes, her ex-husband. However, they hadn’t had the imagination for anything much beyond quarrelling over worldly possessions – which of them would get the flat-screen TV, and so on. Name changes would have been inconceivable. It was probably this experience that distinguished her from Bragi, who enjoyed working on such cases. He had been happily married to the same woman for three decades, and thus had no personal experience of marital failure. Thóra, on the other hand, could easily identify with her clients and what they were going through. As a result, what she always wanted most was to tell her clients to face the fact that lying ahead of them were difficult times in which the spouse who was previously so dear to them would radically transform into the Devil himself and that no one, not even their mothers, would feel like listening to the dramatic stories of the other’s cruelty. Enough time had passed since Thóra’s own divorce for her to realize how unbearable she must have been; she had taken every opportunity she could in her conversations with others to complain about how impossible Hannes was. She had clearly been extremely unreasonable towards him – and vice versa. In any case, divorce had been the only sensible option in their situation, since they both agreed that they’d had enough.

Now things looked different. Thóra was in a stable relationship with Matthew Reich, who had accepted a job as head of security for Kaupthing Bank. But they hadn’t yet gone so far as to move in together. Not for lack of willingness on his part – it was Thóra who wasn’t quite ready. She was in over her head at the moment: her two children, Sóley and Gylfi, made sure her hands were always full, not to mention her grandson Orri, who was almost two. Thóra was much more involved in Orri’s life than most grandmothers; her son had only been a child himself when he and his girlfriend, Sigga, had rushed rather heedlessly into their biological experiment. As a result, they would never be named Parents of the Year; with their son they behaved almost more like his siblings, and didn’t fully shoulder the responsibilities that come with a small child. Thóra realized this was partly her own fault, along with Sigga’s parents. It was too easy to take over and do things herself; easier than following from a distance the teenagers’ unorthodox attempts at childcare. When Orri was with her, it was as if the child was Thóra’s own. She felt happiest when the boy was at home, but when she took him and his young parents into town she must have looked like a dubious mother, to put it mildly. Orri was barely talking and he already called Thóra ‘mama’, meaning that those who didn’t know their situation must have thought she was a bit strange, letting her older children look after the youngest and not seeming to care when Orri cried or called for his mother. But that was the life of a young grandmother.

So it wasn’t because she didn’t want to live with Matthew that she had responded to his suggestion unenthusiastically. She just found it so comforting to be able to switch to a different life now and then; a life in which everything was clean and tidy; no dirty nappies, no sandwiches to make or piles of clothes to wash. In that other life Thóra could go out to eat at a café, or do whatever else she wanted. That life revolved only around her and Matthew, adults with no obligation to wake up at the crack of dawn on weekends and watch cartoons. Thóra enjoyed that parallel life only on alternate weekends, when the whole gang abandoned her home and went to Hannes and his new wife. Few things cheered Thóra more than the pretend look of happiness on Weekend Daddy’s face when she drove up to his house with the youngsters. His smile had grown even stiffer after Sigga fell out with her mother and moved in with Thóra. She reluctantly went along with the others to Hannes’ and as soon as he tried to object, Gylfi said simply that if Sigga were made to feel unwelcome in any way he wouldn’t come either. His father quickly held his tongue and never complained again about the lack of space. Gylfi was now eighteen years old, which meant that he wasn’t obliged to spend time with his father every other weekend; in fact he could have refused to do so from the age of sixteen. Thóra doubted Gylfi realized this, but she had decided not to mention it so that he and his father would remain in touch. And also so that she herself would continue to have some space.

Thóra tried to direct her attention back to her work – a draft of a prenuptial agreement. Part of it concerned a two-storey single-family home which was to be divided into two separate apartments to save the owner (the prospective bridegroom) from the black hole of the currency basket loan that he had taken at the wrong time, during a fit of great optimism.

Before she could get stuck in again, Matthew called. It was rather unusual for him to call her during working hours – unlike Thóra, he was quite formal and took everything very seriously. For example, he had enrolled in a course in Icelandic for foreigners – he was German – and worked on it very diligently. At first she had helped him out with the homework and had been unable to resist the temptation to slip in a few words at an inappropriately high level. Matthew wasn’t at all amused when this came to light, and he stopped asking for her help. Thóra’s daughter Sóley had then taken over as teacher’s aide. She was only eight years old and thus still bore an almost unlimited respect for every sort of schooling. As a result the two of them had become good friends and Matthew started making quick progress in the language, even though he and Thóra still spoke German together.

‘How would you like to take on a little project for the bank?’ asked Matthew, after apologizing for calling her at work.

‘The bank?’ repeated Thóra. She was surprised, since the banks had armies of specialists and lawyers at their fingertips. ‘What kind of project?’ She stared at the prenup awaiting her on the computer screen. Did they need a contract of this sort? Had their own army of lawyers refused to come anywhere near such trivialities?

‘It has to do with a performance bond,’ replied Matthew. ‘The bank has guaranteed a contractor called Berg Technology, which apparently is not going to fulfil a contract it signed with a British mining company. It looks as if the British want to claim insurance, meaning the bank will take the hit. It really is a lot of money, even more in the current financial situation, since the guarantee is in Euros.’

‘And what’s my job?’ asked Thóra. ‘Get the mining company to drop their claim to the money?’

Matthew laughed curtly. ‘No, neither you nor anyone else would be able to do that. I understand they’re really hard to deal with, since they’re not in the business of giving money away. Even if they get the insurance money out of the bank, they still lose out on the work contract. They’re simply cutting their losses.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’ asked Thóra. ‘See to it that the Euros change hands, or maybe try to file a complaint?’ This was sounding potentially even duller than prenups, so it might be better not to take the job.

‘Neither,’ replied Matthew. ‘As things have gone, Berg Technology is way behind schedule and unlikely to be able to make up for the delays that have already occurred. On top of that, their work has come to a complete stop, and it looks as if that situation won’t be remedied any time soon. Their employees refuse to return to the site, and the work is so specialized that replacements can’t be picked up off the street. The plan is to send a team there to assess things and decide whether the bank should hire another contractor if the situation is irretrievable.’

‘Can they do that?’ she asked. Although her work had focused on contract law for some time now, an actual construction contract had never found its way onto her desk. She was not that familiar with them, but knew enough to understand what they involved, and to realise that they were considerably different from other, more traditional contracts.