Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Someone to Watch Over Me

‘How do you think it will look if it turns out his wife drove away after running over and killing that girl? Is that any better than what I did? I didn’t kill anyone.’ He fell silent and then added mournfully: ‘More’s the pity.’

Matthew shifted on the couch. ‘And it turned out that his son was a witness? He was in the car?’

‘Yes.’ Jósteinn’s voice was as emotionless as before. ‘He was in the front seat and he saw everything. The daughter was also a passenger in the car. Tryggvi’s violent reaction to the collision caused his mother to just keep driving, or so they say, although it might lead one to suspect that she’d simply had a bit too much to drink.’

Thóra sat silently. No doubt this was the reason why Tryggvi had hated being put in a car. It must have been a shock to Fanndís and Einvarður that when the treatment of their beloved son finally appeared to be producing results, it should also involve what they feared most. The boy had finally been able to interact with his surroundings, albeit to a limited degree, but when he tried to express himself it was to tell the world about the fatal accident on Vesturlandsvegur Road. The irony of it. The prone figure in the picture wasn’t Lísa at all, but the young babysitter, and the peace sign must be the car’s steering wheel. When the string of characters was viewed in reverse, it showed the licence-plate number of their family car, NN180, the car that Fanndís had been driving that evening. ‘And Ari took on Jakob’s case to make sure no incriminating evidence would get out during the trial?’ He had already told her this, so it was a rhetorical question.

‘All he knew was that he should keep everything concerning Tryggvi, his drawings and how fascinated he was with fire, out of the picture and prevent any suspicion from falling on him. Glódís, the director of the centre, was also drafted in to help Einvarður cover up a few things, without being told why. If she’d given it just a bit of thought, she would have realized that by doing so she was endangering an innocent man. Jakob. Actually, Einvarður never says anywhere that they started the fire; that’s just what I inferred from some other things I found on the laptop.’

‘Such as?’ Matthew leaned forward but then jerked back immediately when he realized how close he’d got to Jósteinn.

‘Some photos that were uploaded to the computer. I found several that were taken on the night of the fire. Einvarður thought he’d deleted them, but computer files aren’t deleted completely unless the area where they’re stored is written over. Laymen generally don’t know this.’ Jósteinn gave a small, lazy yawn, as if he were bored with his visitors and the topic of conversation. ‘Aren’t you at all interested in knowing who started the fire? I still haven’t told you. Well, since I can’t send you helpful clues any more, I’ll have to just come out with it.’

Now Thóra and Matthew’s attention suddenly peaked. ‘Weren’t you suggesting that Einvarður started it?’ Thóra hoped that he wasn’t about to say something about guts or other internal organs.

‘It wasn’t him, it was his daughter. Lena.’

They barely spoke on the way home, lost in their own thoughts. Jósteinn’s story fitted with everything that had already come out in the investigation as well as filling in the missing pieces. According to him, the photos from the party that Lena had held at home that evening showed her wearing a long white dress – the same dress Thóra had seen her wearing in a photo at her parents’ house, taken the night before the fire. When she’d added a gold headband, she looked exactly like an angel, the ‘angel’ Jakob had seen. Jósteinn had got into all the case files Einvarður had saved on his computer, and had done his research into who was who and what was what. He’d discovered the Facebook page and realized what was in Lísa’s autopsy report, in addition to finding the photograph of Friðleifur’s burnt corpse, which he’d sent to Thóra by text message. He had dutifully compared the photos on the Facebook page to those taken at the party at Lena’s house that night, and had found some familiar faces. As the night wore on the number of guests in the photos diminished. Finally there were only three left, and of these, one was asleep on the sofa. The other guest was Bjarki, whom Jósteinn had recognized from the Facebook page.

The very last photo taken was of Lena. She was leaning forward on the kitchen table with a Bacardi Breezer in front of her, her hands and her white dress all sooty. It was no wonder her father had deleted the photos. There was absolutely no doubt about what she’d been up to.

Jósteinn had also found Margeir and started bombarding him with text messages and phone calls with the help of Skype; he had managed to steal a credit card number from a staff member at Sogn to purchase domestic credit. He was convinced that Margeir was more closely connected to the case than had yet been discovered, because he was in so many photos on the Facebook page and must at least have known what was going on. Jósteinn had sent him the sequence of characters from Tryggvi’s drawings, which Ægir had mentioned submitting to Einvarður when he was dismissed. The report also mentioned the mirror imaging, which made Jósteinn realize that the characters needed to be read backwards. By searching the computer for various versions of the character sequence, in which he also tried exchanging numbers and letters, he found an electronic tax return that Einvarður had also stored on his laptop. In it was the licence-plate number. No wonder he’d turned pale when he realized that the laptop was still in use. On closer inspection, Jósteinn noticed that the car had vanished from the following year’s tax return without any mention of it having been sold, and another car had been added. Thóra found this quite ingenious, since it would always be possible to claim to have forgotten to delist the car, which had probably stood in the garage since the night of the hit-and-run. Tryggvi had written the licence-plate number on his drawings. He probably didn’t actually understand its meaning, but he was able to connect it to the vehicle and the accident. Because he drew things in mirror image, no one had realized what he was trying to say when he drew his vague pictures of the accident again and again. When Margeir scribbled the number in the frost on the windowpane, the little boy had seen the reverse image. Jósteinn hadn’t anticipated this coincidence. Thóra had been able to verify through Berglind, who had called her the previous evening, that this was the licence-plate number of a car that Einvarður had used two or three years ago. She’d assisted him in filling out the mileage log, so she had often entered the number over the years.

‘Do you want to go straight to the police?’ asked Matthew, as the lights of the city appeared on the horizon.

‘No. Let’s go down to the office; I need to make a copy of this.’ She opened her hand and looked at the little USB stick. She hadn’t wanted to put it in her handbag in case it got damaged rattling around among all the other rubbish in there. On it were all the main files concerning the fire and the accident that Jósteinn had found on the laptop. He had hidden the key long before the computers were taken. He said he’d always assumed he’d be found out in the end.

She had to hand it to him, that bastard Jósteinn: he was cunning.

The sun was low in the sky and it shone in Jakob’s eyes, but that didn’t diminish the joy that radiated from his face. He was still wearing his Coke-bottle glasses, but the bandages were gone now and they sat much better on his ears, though one of the arms was still rather bent and would never be the same, any more than the eye in which he’d lost his sight. His ear was fine, but the blind eye was always pointing in a different direction to the other. This drew attention to the odd pupil, which had been oblong, rather like a cat’s, since the attack.