Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Someone to Watch Over Me

Thóra didn’t know precisely, but a thick layer of snow now nearly covered the vehicle. After the mystery of the computer was solved Einvarður had seemed distracted and anxious, and it was difficult to get him to focus on their questions. This did have an upside as well as a downside; for example he seemed less cautious, saying that of course it was perfectly natural that they would want to speak to his daughter, after Thóra had told him about the Facebook memorial page for Friðleifur. He seemed less concerned about there being a photo of Lena in that group than he was about the fate of the computer; he tried to play it down, saying that his daughter was a young woman and of course she went out and partied like other people her age. For her to have made friends with people of the same age at the residence just showed how sociable she was. She had a wide group of friends from all walks of life. Thóra decided not to press him about the nightlife at the care home, since he clearly didn’t realize that it could have been connected to the fire. Thóra felt reasonably confident that his daughter hadn’t had anything to do with the tragedy, but she was still certain that Lena would be able to shed some light on what had gone on there.

When she brought up his family connection to Ari, Einvarður grew wary, but he defended himself with the old tried and tested ‘Iceland is a small country’ line. Thóra didn’t believe for a minute that this was sheer coincidence. But however much she questioned him about it, it got her nowhere; Einvarður wouldn’t budge a millimetre. So Thóra changed tack and asked whether he knew anything about the case of Jósteinn Karlsson, which she described in general terms. Einvarður said he vaguely remembered it, but only because of the media reports at the time. He hadn’t been involved, either privately or through the ministry. He did know Jósteinn’s name well, though, because the man had recently been under discussion at Prison Services in connection with where he and Jakob were now to be housed – though he didn’t mention this until the end of their conversation, after they’d exhausted their list of questions. As they left, Thóra couldn’t resist a parting shot: he could inform Prison Services that they no longer needed to concern themselves with Jakob’s incarceration as in all likelihood he would be released from custody before long. This didn’t appear to have any effect on Einvarður; it was as if he wasn’t interested in knowing who had started the fire if it hadn’t been Jakob. Perhaps he simply didn’t understand the connection.

‘Why isn’t the scraper kept on the outside of the car?’ Matthew stood next to the white hump covering the vehicle. ‘If I open the door to fetch it, the seat will get covered with snow.’

Thóra stuffed her hands into her coat pockets and used her elbows to scrape as much snow as she could off the car above the passenger door. ‘You just do it like this. You should know that, after all this time and all this snow.’

Matthew rolled his eyes but gave in and copied her. In the end they managed to clear enough snow from around the gap to be able to open the door and take out the much more effective scraper. ‘Do you want to go back to the office or are you done for the day?’ he asked as she scraped off the windscreen. ‘Weren’t you going to swap monitors with Bella?’

‘No, that’ll have to wait. We need to go and see Lena before her father comes to his senses and forbids her to speak to us.’

‘I never suspected so many people had gone there. When I went there with my friends it was only the two of them. I thought they would have told me about it because I had a connection to the centre.’ Lena spoke quickly, her voice trembling a little. ‘I was really surprised when I saw all the photos on Facebook and maybe I should have told someone, but they’d already sentenced Jakob so I thought it was too late. How was I to know that it mattered?’ She looked imploringly at Thóra and Matthew. When neither of them displayed any reaction she looked down, embarrassed. Turning an ornate ring several times around her finger she added in a low voice: ‘But the damage is done and I would be very grateful if you could make sure that Mum and Dad don’t hear about this.’

Thóra raised her eyebrows but didn’t reply. Jakob’s interests had to take priority. ‘But are you sure you don’t know this Bjarki Emil? Maybe he called himself Emil?’

Lena looked again at the printout of the photograph and shook her head slowly and hesitantly. ‘I don’t think so. Of course I might have met him, but I meet so many people, really. He does seem a tiny bit familiar though.’

Thóra watched the people streaming past the café. This was one of those new places that catered to the younger crowd, and it sold organic coffee that was supposedly purchased directly from farmers. She was too old to fall for this spiel, but it did make her wonder whether other coffee was stolen from farmers at gunpoint. Still, the coffee tasted good – and who was she to say that wasn’t partly because she could sip it with a clear conscience? Lena had suggested this place to Matthew when he called, as she was studying there at the time, and on Matthew and Thóra’s arrival the average age of the café’s patrons had risen signifi-cantly. Lena had been sitting at a small table with three of her friends, all hunched over their textbooks. When she spotted them in the doorway she left her friends and the three of them had taken seats by the window facing Laugavegur Avenue.

‘Well, it would be good if you could try to remember,’ said Thóra, turning back to Lena. She had a feeling that she knew more about this Bjarki than she wanted to admit. Of course it was possible that she was genuinely unsure whether she’d met him and therefore wanted to say as little as possible. ‘Just keep thinking about it, would you? Sometimes once they’ve mulled it over, people remember a small detail.’

Matthew spoke up for the first time since Lena had given up lying about what had happened at the residence when Friðleifur and Margeir were on duty. ‘How much did it cost per session?’ He shifted in his chair, which was far too small for a fully grown man.

‘I have no idea. They told me three thousand, but as I said to you just now, I didn’t know that it was something they did all the time. I actually thought it seemed a fair price. They could probably have charged much more – well, a bit more, anyway.’

‘And what exactly was included?’ It looked like Matthew hadn’t understood this fully, which was to be expected. Perhaps he thought he’d misheard – it wouldn’t have been the first time.

‘Well, I don’t know everything, of course – I can only say what they offered me and my friend.’

‘Which was?’ Matthew clearly wanted to get this sorted out.

‘She was given intravenous sugar water, on a drip. That, and oxygen.’

‘And she sobered up?’ Thóra asked, unable to hide her scepticism. Lena’s story was so different from everything she’d imagined that she found it nearly as difficult as Matthew to accept what the girl was saying.

‘Absolutely.’ Lena spread out her hands. ‘It was unbelievable, like magic. Maybe she didn’t sober up completely, but at least we could go downtown. She’d been totally wasted when we arrived and she certainly didn’t regret spending the money.’

‘So let me get this straight – you found out about this when Friðleifur mentioned it to you one morning?’

‘I might not have explained this well enough, but I used to sit with him in his office on Sunday mornings when Mum was with Tryggvi. When I asked him about the beer cans in the rubbish bin, he said he’d been helping a friend of his who’d needed to sober up. The guy who’d come with him had been drinking beer. Then he told me how he’d gone about helping him and invited me to drop by if I ever got into trouble. When my friend got completely smashed I decided to try it. Another friend of ours drove us.’ She seemed to be struggling to overcome her anger, but it still showed on her face. ‘That’s him in the photograph that was taken while my friend was on the oxygen, the one that ended up on Facebook. I still don’t understand how you found me there, because I untagged it.’ She saw that they weren’t going to answer this, so she continued: ‘It was a bit of a drag, because it took such a long time. Maybe that was why they didn’t charge more. He said he could also cure hangovers using the same method but he did that less often because they were only there during the night and early in the morning on the weekends. Most people are hungover when they wake up around noon, but maybe people needed to go to work in the morning or something.’