Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Someone to Watch Over Me

‘How long had Jakob been living there when the centre burned down?’ Thóra was careful not to say when he set the centre on fire .

‘Nearly six months. Not long.’

‘And was he happy there, or did he not have the chance to settle in properly?’

‘He was terribly unhappy, really depressed. Maybe not as bad as he was after the fire, or when he was transferred to the Secure Psychiatric Unit at Sogn, but still miserable. Jakob needs stability, not turmoil.’

‘Then you think it might be inadvisable for me to take on this case? It will inevitably be a disruption for him.’

The woman gave Thóra a look of fierce determination. Her face bore the marks of a difficult life; deep wrinkles fanned from the corners of her eyes to her temples, like the sunbeams Thóra’s daughter drew in the sky in all her pictures. Even deeper furrows lay across her forehead, but although her face was lined with signs of stress her eyes were like a teenager’s, the whites clear and the demarcation of the irises sharp. ‘Someone called me today from Sogn and advised me to ask you to leave it, for Jakob’s sake. I was having a few doubts, but after that call I made my decision and I won’t change my mind.’

‘So you’re against it?’ Thóra was both relieved and disappointed. She had wanted to take the case, but also felt compelled to refuse it. Sometimes it was good to let others make decisions for you, but she was a little irritated that someone had tried to influence Jakob’s mother, even if it had been done with good intentions.

‘No, absolutely not. I want you to take the case, and spare no one in your investigation. Neither me nor Jakob. I’m done with following the advice of people who think they know best. It’s my decision now.’

Thóra smiled weakly. ‘Nevertheless, I feel that you should think it over a little longer. Those are not strong grounds for such an important decision. There are other factors you need to consider; the few advantages would be hard-won, and the disadvantages could be considerable. You should think through all the possible outcomes.’

‘I’ve already done that, and my decision is the same: I want you to take the case. I would be a fool if I refused it on Jakob’s behalf; I would never be able to afford the cost of reopening his case myself.’ Grímheiður stared at Thóra, her blue eyes wide like a child’s. ‘Jakob is innocent and his name should be cleared, sooner rather than later. I don’t have many years left, I’m sure, and when I’m gone there won’t be anyone to look after him. So it’s now or never. I would give anything to spend whatever’s left of our lives together, but not the way things are now. Not like this.’

In Thóra’s experience family members usually thought their loved one was innocent; she had seen them react as if the accused were a cute little bunny rabbit that by sheer bad luck had ended up in the talons of the legal eagles. She thought back to the guileless young man she’d seen at Sogn and decided that a bunny wasn’t such an absurd metaphor in this instance. ‘Before I make my final decision I’d like to see the evidence you’ve brought.’ She watched Jakob’s mother reach for an old-fashioned briefcase made of cracked plastic.

‘I’ve not thrown any of it away; I just couldn’t.’ The woman put the briefcase on the desk with a solid clunk ; it was heavy. ‘You’ll read this differently from me, but hopefully you’ll see what I think is obvious.’ She started to stand but had forgotten the shawl, hat and gloves in her lap. They dropped to the floor and the woman bent down, red-faced, to pick them up. After straightening back up she spoke again. ‘Jakob didn’t set the home on fire, so he didn’t kill anyone. He deserves to come home.’

‘I hope so,’ was all Thóra could say. What the poor boy deserved remained to be seen.

Thóra’s eyes had gone dry from squinting at the computer screen. She hadn’t opened the briefcase, as clearly it would take a while to go through its contents; she also feared she’d find images or descriptions of charred corpses, and needed to prepare herself mentally. So she had decided to write a few e-mails and then read up on Down’s syndrome. Thóra didn’t know much about it, but maybe the condition had been known to cause aggressive behaviour or psychotic episodes that could explain why Jakob had turned to arson, if indeed he did have anything to do with the attack.

Despite extensive online searches and a lot of reading, she found nothing conclusive. She did, however, find herself much better informed about the syndrome. She learned that it was caused by an extra chromosome, and that various disorders were associated with it including learning disabilities, heart defects, poor muscle tone and a below-average life expectancy. The average life span of a person with Down’s syndrome was said to be around fifty years, but most of the articles pointed out that this was an extraordinary improvement compared to half a century ago, when it had only been twenty-five. Various other characteristics were mentioned: facial features were markedly different from the average western appearance and the tongue was often too large for the mouth, as a result of which it often protruded. The palms of the hands had only one transverse line instead of two like most people. Other features were listed, most of them unlikely to be relevant to the case and many too technical for Thóra to understand them fully. She assumed she would find an analysis of Jakob himself in the briefcase, and that it would include his IQ score, though these were generally held to be highly subjective; the IQ of individuals with Down’s syndrome was usually around 35–70. This was a broad range, so the generalizations she was unearthing told her little about Jakob.

Thóra also took some time to familiarize herself with the laws and regulations that might apply to Jakob specifically as an intellectually disabled person, and quickly noticed the change that had occurred in society’s attitude towards this group. The names of older laws, which had been dropped before current legislation on issues pertaining to the disabled, revealed an attitude that no longer existed: a bill from 1936 was named the Law on Idiot Asylums and one from 1967 the Law on Institutions for Imbeciles . In a report accom-panying the bill for the latter law Thóra found this era’s definition of intellectual disability, which was then called ‘feeble-mindedness’. This term applied to a number of different categories: people who had IQs lower than 50 and were either ‘morons’, if their IQs were between zero and 24, or ‘imbeciles’ if their IQs went from 25 to 49; and ‘idiots’, whose IQs were between 50 and 70 or 75. The words were like needles in Thóra’s eyes and the scant resources that had been available to these poor people were equally painful; at the time there was no choice apart from placement in an institution, regardless of an individual’s age or gender. No respite care or assistance was available, meaning that the parents of a severely disabled or hard-to-control child had no other choice than to send it away. This had changed, thank goodness, but there was no doubt a long way to go before everyone’s needs could be accommodated.

She also found a report on the number of developmentally disabled people in Iceland: it was around half a per cent of the population, which was not small. Thóra also looked specifically for information about sheltered community residences and discovered that the implementation of this form of living had begun in 1980, so there had been time to gather some experience regarding how they could best be run. According to the information she found, these units were homes for small groups of disabled people, generally not more than six, all aged sixteen or older and each under the one-on-one supervision of at least one staff member. The staff’s responsibility was to provide support and therapy, with a view to advancing the residents’ independence and life skills. The administration and setting up of these homes was at the expense of the state, although the money came from various of its budgets: construction costs were paid out of the Disabled Investment Fund, staff salaries from the Treasury, and communal expenses were taken from the residents’ insurance benefits, accounting for up to seventy-five per cent of the amount. All in all there were almost ninety such establishments in Iceland, totalling around four hundred and fifty residents.