No matter how busy she was, she always turned up punctually to visit her daughter. Twice a week without fail, never missing a day. However heavy the snow or fierce the storm. Not even illness could deter her, since the glass dividing them ensured that she couldn’t infect her baby. Twice now these visits had landed her in trouble with unsympathetic employers, and on the second occasion she had handed in her notice. Her daughter came first.
Physically at least, the little girl appeared to be thriving. Her second birthday was rapidly approaching and she was healthy and tall for her age, but there was a faraway look in her eyes that made her mother anxious.
Perhaps, deep down, she knew that too long had passed: that her visits weren’t achieving anything; that the invisible thread connecting mother and daughter had snapped at some point during these two years of separation. Maybe it had happened at the very beginning, on the day when, against her will, she had relinquished her daughter into the hands of strangers. Her parents, ashamed of their daughter for having a child out of wedlock and wishing to hush up the affair, had considered it for the best. They had presented her with a stark choice: either give the child up for adoption – something she would never dream of doing – or place her in an institution for infants ‘to start off with’.
She had been living with her parents when her baby was born and couldn’t afford to move into a place of her own, so for her the choice was simple: since giving up her baby for good was out of the question, the second option had seemed the lesser of two evils.
After finishing her compulsory schooling, she hadn’t taken any further qualifications, and felt it was too late to make up for that now. In any case, her parents had never encouraged her to get an education, placing all their expectations instead on the shoulders of her younger brother, who was now at Reykjavík College.
But things were about to change. She had been working for two years, putting money aside, and, although she was still living with her parents, it wouldn’t be long before she could afford to move out into her own flat. And then she could realize her long-desired dream of reclaiming her daughter from the institution.
Her relationship with her parents had become increasingly strained. At first, too numb to stand up to them when she fell unexpectedly pregnant, she had allowed them to push her around. Now, she was afraid she would never be able to forgive them for parting her from her child. Looking back, she couldn’t understand how she had ever agreed to such a thing.
She only hoped her little girl would find it in her heart to forgive her.
XII
After saying goodbye to Pétur with a chaste kiss on the cheek, Hulda went back into the sitting room and reclaimed the old armchair. She was too restless to go to bed straight away, couldn’t face being alone in the dark with only her thoughts for company. There were too many of them circling, waiting to pounce, each more upsetting than the last.
The Russian girl was still uppermost in her mind, though she had pushed the thought of her away while drinking wine with Pétur. The wine – good point: there was still a splash left. No call to waste it. Reaching for the bottle, Hulda tipped the dregs into her glass. The Russian girl … But thinking about Elena inevitably brought Hulda round full circle to the circumstances in which the young woman’s death had ended up on her desk: she had, to all intents and purposes, been given her notice today; told to clear out her office; swept out of the way like a piece of old rubbish.
In an effort to distract herself, she started to think about Pétur, but that was problematic, too, because she didn’t want to risk investing too much hope in the future of their relationship. His visit had gone well, but now they needed to take the next step. She didn’t want to lose him, and she was scared that if she took things too slowly she might end up closing the door completely. And, realistically, how many more opportunities would she get?
Caught in this dilemma, she sat gazing abstractedly into her glass, taking occasional sips of wine, until, creeping out of the dark recesses of her mind, came the figures she didn’t want to think about, the figures she never stopped thinking about: Jón and her daughter.
At long last, she felt her eyelids drooping and knew she was tired enough to go to bed, safe in the knowledge that she would be able to get off to sleep without being tortured unnecessarily by her inner demons.
For once, she switched off the alarm clock on her bedside table, the clock that had for so many years woken her punctually at 6 a.m. every weekday, almost without exception. Well, this time the clock could have a rest, and so could Hulda. Without giving it much thought, she also switched her phone to silent, something she rarely did, as her job was all important to her and she liked to be available day and night. You couldn’t always, or maybe ever, conduct complex police investigations within normal office hours.
Closing her eyes, she let herself float away into the world of dreams.
Day Two
* * *
I
Hulda was stunned to discover that it was nearly eleven o’clock. She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept so late. The light was on in her bedroom, as usual. She didn’t like sleeping in the dark.
Disbelieving, she checked her alarm clock again, but there was no doubt. Her accumulated tiredness must have caught up with her. She lay there for a while, luxuriating in the fact that she wasn’t in a hurry for once, and as she did so, snatches of her dreams came back to her. Elena had turned up: Hulda could remember travelling back to Njardvík, to that comfortless little cell at the hostel. She couldn’t recapture all the details, only the sense that the dream had been disturbing, though nothing like as bad as the one that recurred almost nightly, which was so terrifying that she sometimes woke up gasping for breath. Terrifying, not because her imagination was running riot but, on the contrary, because it was in every detail a recollection of real events that Hulda could never, however hard she tried, forget.
Sitting up, she took a deep breath to dispel these phantoms. What she needed now was a cup of good strong coffee.
It occurred to her that she might actually be able to get used to not working. No commitments, no alarm clock. A comfortable if monotonous life as a pensioner in a fourth-floor apartment.
Except she had no intention of getting used to it.
She had to have a purpose in life. In the short term, she needed to solve the case of Elena’s death, or at least give it her best shot. She knew a success like that would allow her to leave her job in a cloud of glory, but, more than that, she felt an overwhelming urge to achieve some kind of justice for the poor girl. In the long term, she wanted to settle down with someone, escape the loneliness, and maybe – just maybe – Pétur was the one.
It didn’t occur to her to check her phone until she was halfway through her first cup of coffee because, unlike the current smartphone-obsessed generation, she wasn’t in thrall to her device. The younger members of CID could scarcely tear themselves away from their screens for a minute, whereas if she had the choice, Hulda would prefer never to have to look at hers at all.
So it came as a surprise that someone should have tried to ring her, twice, from a number she didn’t recognize. A call to directory enquiries revealed that the number belonged to the hostel that had featured so prominently in her dreams.
The phone was answered by a young man.
‘Good morning, this is Hulda Hermannsdóttir. I’m calling from the police.’
‘Right. Morning,’ he replied.
‘Someone was trying to reach me from this number at about eight o’clock this morning.’