Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Someone to Watch Over Me

Thóra rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, do you think I’m that easily shocked?’ She exhaled irritably, but her annoyance quickly turned to sadness again. ‘The woman – or girl, rather – was comatose. That’s not what I call consensual sex.’

Matthew said nothing. He opened her door and Thóra climbed into the car. He hurried to the driver’s side, started the engine and turned the heater all the way up, then scrunched his fingers together and blew on them. When the warm air blowing from the heater started to inch its way over Thóra’s feet, it created a burning sensation that was almost worse than the cold. ‘Did the files say who the father was?’

‘No, it never came out and there wasn’t a single word about it in the verdict.’

‘Do you think whoever got the woman pregnant started the fire to cover it up?’ Matthew sounded highly sceptical. ‘That’s pretty drastic.’

‘I don’t know, damn it. But it could have been Jakob who did this.’

‘Started the fire? Or had sex with the woman?’ Matthew started backing out of the car park.

‘Either. Or both.’ Thóra leaned back in her seat and stared at the building in her wing mirror until it disappeared from sight.

Thóra put down her pen and proudly looked over her drawing of the residence’s floor plan. It certainly wouldn’t win any architectural awards but she was enormously proud of the outcome all the same, since what mattered to her was to mark each apartment with the name of its resident. That had proved extremely difficult, because more often than not she’d been forced to use the testimonies of many different individuals to place each one. She would find out in due course whether her hard work would be of any use. Contemplatively, she ran her index finger along the plan of the house, through all the apartments, vaguely feeling the tiny indents that the pen had left in the paper. Rather like the tracks those young people had left behind, she thought – tracks in the memories of those who loved them, that would become less and less noticeable over time and would disappear completely as the residents’ relatives died. Thóra lifted her finger from the paper and cleared her mind. These melancholy thoughts would be of no help to her in solving the case and she had already spent more time on the drawing than she could afford. This wasn’t the only case that she was working on; of course it was highly unusual, but it was complicated enough without her losing herself in its emotional aspects.

One of the things that troubled her was that Jakob had occupied the apartment next to Lísa Finnbjörnsdóttir, the young pregnant woman. Although even the furthest apart flats weren’t that far from each other, Thóra still felt this was a bad omen; Jakob would have been able to get to the woman’s apartment in a matter of seconds. To make matters worse, there were very few other residents who could possibly have been the child’s father; five out of six apartments had been occupied, with only three men: Jakob, Natan Úlfheiðarson and Tryggvi Einvarðsson. Natan had been the heavily medicated epileptic, and Tryggvi had been severely autistic and, according to the court records, generally never left his room. Neither seemed likely to have had intercourse with the girl, although Thóra knew this assessment might be completely wrong. Hopefully someone would be able to answer this question unequivocally. Perhaps the paternity had been determined but not mentioned in the records out of respect for the deceased and her family; perhaps she’d had a boyfriend; perhaps she’d been impregnated by someone who came to visit her. The possibilities were endless; what mattered was to find the right explanation and pray that it had nothing to do with Jakob.

Before Thóra had started her drawing she’d spoken to one of the centre’s neighbours, the one who had reported the fire, but hadn’t gleaned much from their conversation. The woman had answered her questions and Thóra had had to listen to her complaints about how awful it was to live in such a ghost town; construction of the proposed preschool had been postponed indefinitely, forcing her and her husband to find one in town for their two children. The snow was rarely cleared and when it was, it was done badly; the same went for the bin collections. The woman went on like this for some time before Thóra finally got the chance to bring up what she’d come to discuss. She was relieved when she eventually said goodbye to the woman, convinced by then that the couple’s testimony was credible; they’d simply been fast asleep and had probably been woken by the reverberations of the explosion, though neither of them had realized what it was. The only peculiar thing about the woman’s testimony was that she had specifically pointed out that the couple was used to sleeping through noises, such as loud traffic. Sometimes gangs of kids had been known to hang around the neighbourhood at night, especially at the weekends, but luckily that was now a thing of the past. They hadn’t seen anyone that night, and had noticed nothing unusual.

Now Thóra resolved to get down to business. She looked up the name of the centre’s director: Glódís Tumadóttir, which Thóra thought sounded a very bright and cheerful name. When she finally managed to get hold of the woman through the Ministry of Welfare, her voice sounded entirely at odds with the image that her name evoked. Glódís frequently sighed heavily, as if she bore all the sorrows of the world on her shoulders. After listening for half an hour to her complaints about the bustle of the Regional Office for the Disabled in Reykjavík, Thóra eventually managed to persuade her into a meeting, although the discussion was accompanied by a long and detailed report on how Glódís couldn’t give her more than about fifteen minutes, since naturally she’d have to get back to thanklessly slaving away at her understaffed workplace. Thóra wanted to scream when she finally hung up. She’d met far too many of these kinds of people, who felt that their wages didn’t match their great talent and who wallowed constantly in self-pity. She couldn’t be the only one who wanted to give them all a good smack in the hope of snapping them out of their self-appointed martyrdom. But that would have to wait for another time. In retrospect, she realized that underneath all the moaning, the woman had probably been worried or agitated about her call. Perhaps all the waffle about the unfairness of her job had been caused by nervous anxiety; after all, it couldn’t have been pleasant for Glódís to have to discuss the case again. She could have something to hide, but it might not be anything unnatural or suspicious; the young people who died had been her responsibility and although the home hadn’t been in operation for long, she must have had emotional ties to those who died. No doubt everything would become clearer when they met face to face.

Thóra’s mobile phone beeped, telling her that she’d received a text. The message was entirely unfathomable, and had again been sent from ja.is. She hoped it wasn’t some idiot who’d entered a friend’s number wrongly, and was now using her number by mistake. If that was the case, then someone somewhere was asking an extremely important question: How did Helena get burned as a child? She felt momentarily spooked, given that the message mentioned fire, but she dismissed it as coincidence and shut her phone.

Bella hadn’t arrived yet though it was nearly ten o’clock, so Thóra scribbled a note to her to remember to order more paper for the photocopier. The chances of the secretary actually doing it were slender, but Thóra refused to let the young woman have the upper hand so she added hurriedly underneath: Can’t pay your salary if I can’t print out a payslip . Then she put on her coat and left. It was still snowing outside but now it was coming down faster and thicker, not at all like the gentle flurries of the previous evening. She’d have to hurry if she was going to scrape the ice and snow off her car and make it to Síðumúli in time for the short interview window Glódís had so kindly granted her.