‘Plenty to do?’ she asked in a friendly voice.
‘Yeah, sure, well … not so much in the translation line, but plenty of Russian tour groups. I swear the tourist dollar’s the only thing keeping Iceland afloat these days. But things are quiet today. I’m just … writing, you know, working on my book.’
The surge in tourism since the collapse of the Icelandic banking system – and the subsequent collapse of the Icelandic króna – was certainly helping to get the country back on track, since the tourists brought in valuable foreign currency. The outlook was a bit brighter than before, but the financial crisis had cast a long shadow, and Hulda, momentarily distracted, reflected that tourism would do little to boost her personal finances. Her job didn’t pay that well, and now all she had to look forward to was a fixed income from her government pension.
‘Come in,’ Bjartur said, breaking into her thoughts. ‘It’s still a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. I haven’t got round to buying a chair for visitors so you’ll have to make do with the bed.’ He turned red. ‘I mean, you know, you’ll have to sit on the bed.’
Hulda found a space free of clutter where she could park herself while Bjartur sat down in his superannuated office chair. The air in the room was unpleasantly stuffy: Hulda’s unexpected arrival had given him no chance to open a window.
‘Do you live out here in the garage?’ she asked curiously.
‘Yes, I do, actually. I sleep and work in here. It’s more private, you see. Mum and Dad have the house, but I couldn’t live with them any longer. It all got too much, living on top of each other like that. Unfortunately, there’s no basement or I’d have moved down there, but they let me do up the garage.’
Hulda wanted to ask why he hadn’t simply moved into a flat of his own but didn’t like to, in case it sounded rude.
Bjartur seemed to guess the unspoken question: ‘There’s no point getting a flat of my own, not yet; it’s way too expensive, whether you rent or buy. House prices are going through the roof and I don’t have a regular income. It’s all pretty hand to mouth – translation work, tour-guide gigs. Sometimes I’m rushed off my feet, especially in the summers, but often there’s not enough work to go round. I’m managing to save up a bit, though. It’ll all work out in the end. And Mum and Dad are getting on, so they’re bound to want to downsize at some point.’
Or die, Hulda read from his expression.
‘I wanted to ask you a small favour,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes? What’s that?’
She handed him the envelope of papers Albert had passed on to her.
‘It contains some documents that Elena’s lawyer dug out. I don’t know if there’s anything of interest, but “no stone unturned”, and all that.’ She smiled, making light of it.
‘I get you. How’s the investigation going, by the way? I see you’re still on the case.’
‘Yes … sure, I’m not planning to give up,’ she lied. The truth was that she would happily have abandoned it right now. Today of all days, when she was still reeling from the news Magnús had broken to her, pursuing this case was the last thing she felt like doing, though it was the only thing she had left.
There was no getting away from the fact that a man had died because of her. But he had been a child abuser, and that made it easier to square with her conscience: some crimes were quite simply unforgiveable.
And there was a good chance that she had sabotaged her colleagues’ investigation into áki’s activities. Her career as a detective inspector lay in smoking ruins. No wonder she wasn’t in any fit state to be working. Yet, in spite of everything, she persisted, too pig-headed to quit, caught up in a last race against time.
‘Of course I’ll take a look at them for you,’ Bjartur said, swivelling his chair round to face the desk, where he drew the papers from the envelope and spread them out in front of him. ‘Just give me a few minutes to run through them.’
‘Of course.’ On a sudden hunch, she added: ‘Could you pay particular attention to any mentions of somebody called Katja.’
‘Katja?’ he queried, still poring over the pages.
‘Yes, I gather she was a friend of hers.’
‘OK.’
‘You didn’t know her? Interpret for her?’
‘Nope.’
‘The thing is, she went missing.’
‘Went missing?’
‘Well, either that or did a disappearing act. She was a Russian asylum-seeker, too, and it occurred to me that the cases might be linked.’
‘OK. Nothing yet. This first document is just some kind of residence certificate from Russia; she must have brought it with her to prove her identity.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Hulda, a little disappointed. She knew she was clutching at straws, but these papers were her last chance. ‘Please read them carefully,’ she added, as politely as she could.
‘Sure.’
Bjartur read on without speaking, his back to Hulda, while she perched uncomfortably on the edge of his bed, waiting in an agony of suspense. The silence dragged out interminably until finally Bjartur showed some kind of reaction.
‘Whoa,’ he said, and it was evident from his tone that he’d found something unexpected. ‘Whoa,’ he repeated.
‘What?’ Hulda got up and peered over his shoulder. He was reading the last sheet of paper, which was handwritten.
‘Have you found something?’ she demanded impatiently.
‘Well … I wouldn’t like to … though …’
‘What?’ she asked, her voice sharpening. ‘What does it say?’
‘She’s talking about a trip she made to the countryside with a friend who she refers to as K. Could it have been Katja?’
‘Yes, could be, could be.’ Hulda felt herself tensing with excitement. At last.
‘And someone … I’m not sure if it’s a man or a woman …’
‘Come on, out with it …’
‘She’s used an initial again. But from the context it looks like there was a man with them.’
‘What’s the initial?’
‘An A.’
XIX
He laughed.
‘Put the axe down and we’ll talk. You don’t have the guts to use it, anyway.’
Beside herself with terror, she braced herself against the door, brandishing the axe in front of her with one hand while groping for the door handle with the other.
He didn’t seem in the least fazed and took a step closer. Then, in one fell swoop, he was on her and had torn the axe from her hand.
For an instant, he stood quite still.
She was paralysed by fear, though all her instincts were screaming at her to get outside.
Then he lunged.
Had the axe hit her on the head? She experienced a split second of bewildered disbelief, still too numb with the cold to register what had happened.
Then, raising a hand to her scalp, she felt the hot blood seeping out.
XX
‘An A?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t mean …?’
‘That was my immediate thought, too,’ said Bjartur with a nod, looking dismayed.
Hulda said it out loud: ‘Albert?’
‘Yes.’
‘But maybe, maybe it was all perfectly harmless. Something to do with preparing their cases. Could he have been Katja’s lawyer, too?’
Bjartur shrugged. ‘It doesn’t sound harmless, though. She’s hinting at some kind of violence – this reads like an excerpt from a diary. Maybe she wanted to put it down in writing in case something happened. At least, I’m assuming Elena wrote this. She spoke very little English so, naturally, she’d have written in Russian.’
‘What, and Albert came across it, ignorant of what it contained, and passed it on to me?’
‘The irony,’ said Bjartur. ‘You know, I feel as if I’m in the middle of a whodunnit. I used to read a lot of those when I was younger.’ He grinned, as if relishing the role of detective’s assistant.