Yrsa Sigurdardóttir - The Day Is Dark

Arnar knew that the man was right. One hundred per cent, not ninety-nine. So there was nothing he could do. In fact, he was in the same boat as Bjarki and Dóri. God had to come to his rescue. That is, if God existed and wasn’t too busy. The night would be long, just like other nights in the future.

Outside snowflakes fell lightly to the ground as if they didn’t really feel like doing so. Was it snowing in Greenland now? If so, wouldn’t Bjarki and Dóri’s bodies soon be entirely buried? Hopefully gone forever, but at least until the spring. What would happen then? How would Arnar feel if a child came across their remains? He had to do something. But it could wait. Maybe until spring. Then he would have time to adapt his story to gain a little sympathy.

‘Can you believe this?’ Thóra leaned back in her chair. ‘And then they put it on the Internet like it’s just another silly film.’

Matthew didn’t appear as shocked as she was. ‘Maybe it wasn’t as nasty as it looked. What led up to it? Sometimes the build-up reveals more than the event itself. And what happened afterwards?’

Thóra frowned at him. ‘How can anything that was done either before or after make this any better?’ She reached for the mouse and replayed the video. As they watched the scene a third time, Thóra felt as if she were as guilty as the pranksters. On the screen the image moved down the familiar corridor of the Berg office building in Greenland. The man holding the camera giggled and whispered to someone who was apparently following him. Thóra struggled to distinguish the words but thought that he whispered: Do you think he’ll start crying? This was followed by the uncontrollable giggling of his companions. Next the men started singing ‘Happy Birthday’, and their singing sounded false to Thóra. The camera stopped outside one of the doors in the corridor, which appeared to be closed, and as the singing grew louder the camera zoomed in on the door’s name-plate, on which stood the words Arnar Jóhannesson – Engineer . A hand appeared in the frame as the cameraman knocked hard on the door, then opened it almost immediately. Inside a man sat in a chair at a desk. At first his face displayed pleasant surprise, which quickly changed to suspicion.

The singing stopped and the man was handed a white shoebox tied with a large ribbon. The ribbon was made of yellow plastic and printed with a warning about underground cables. ‘What is this?’

‘A birthday present, or course! Isn’t it your birthday today?’ The two men outside the frame giggled again, now even more nastily than before. ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’

‘No, thank you.’ The man handed back the shoebox. ‘I remember what I got from you last year.’

‘Oh man, come on. We just didn’t remember that you’d stopped drinking. Most people would be very happy to get a bottle of schnapps.’

‘Yes, yes. Probably.’ The man shook the box at the camera in an attempt to return it. ‘Take this and get out of here with that camera. I need to work.’

‘Come on. Open it. We went to a lot of trouble to get it for you.’ He wasn’t laughing any more. ‘Open your present, man.’

The man looked into the camera, and the brutally honest lens captured the moment of his surrender. ‘What is this?’ The anxiety in his voice was clear, but he received no answer. He stared into the camera for a moment longer before violently tearing off the plastic ribbon. He was clearly upset about giving in to them, but was unable to toss the box at them and throw them out. It was as if this were inevitable; if he didn’t open the box now it would turn up again at the supper table, in the lounge or somewhere else. Thóra frowned; it must have been horrible to be in this man’s shoes in this kind of workplace. Before he took the lid off Arnar looked up nervously. Then he threw it on the floor with a quick flip of his hand and looked into the box. Thóra would have preferred to fast forward through the rest of it, but she forced herself to watch it again. The man cried out and looked at the others in bewilderment. ‘What is wrong with you two?’ His voice cracked.

‘What?’ The cameraman’s simulated surprise fooled no one and Thóra supposed that the expression on his face was just as false. ‘Aren’t you happy? We went to a lot of trouble to get it.’

‘Get out of here.’ The man didn’t throw down the shoebox, as he’d done with the lid, but let it lie in his arms and simply stared down at it as he spoke. ‘This is even lower than I would have believed you two could go.’

‘What?’ His voice was falsely incredulous. ‘Haven’t you been trying to get this for a long, long time? You can stop now. We’ve done it for you.’

The other man crowed: ‘Happy Birthday!’ The giggling began again.

‘Get out.’ The man was still staring into the box. ‘You’re disgusting.’ The camera zoomed in to reveal the box’s contents. It had been filled with paper from the paper shredder and in the centre of the pile was a tiny sparrow.

‘Now you can stop trying to lure it to you with breadcrumbs. Be happy.’

‘I wasn’t trying to lure it. I was feeding it. To keep it alive.’ The man looked up and now anger radiated from his face. ‘It’s obviously too much to ask, expecting imbeciles like you to notice that there aren’t any birds here. It ended up here and simply needed to be fed until the spring. Then it would have survived.’

‘My dear man, don’t be so sentimental.’ The men snickered and now the camera was turned towards them. They were similar despite not looking at all the same, and to Thóra’s eye they were the incarnation of boorishness – schoolyard bullies, all grown up. One of them was starting to lose his hair but tried to make up for it with his beard, which was ragged and discoloured. The other was dirty blond and could have seriously used a haircut. He was chubbier than his balding partner, but they were both wearing dark blue fleece jackets marked Berg Technology , which they should have thrown into the washing machine long ago. They jeered and made faces into the camera, repeating ‘Happy Birthday!’ before shutting it off.

Thóra turned to Matthew. ‘What utter, utter bastards.’

‘Yes, they don’t seem to be particularly nice people, judging by this video.’ Matthew was always cautious, so Thóra didn’t push him for a stronger reaction. ‘I assume that these are Bjarki and Dóri, the drillers, the ones we’re searching for, along with other things.’

‘Yes, and I’m on the verge of believing that the world is better off without them. I want to show you something else on this page.’ She scrolled down. ‘Total nonsense, and most of it seriously nasty. I’d bet my right arm that if the bones in the drawers are Oddný Hildur’s, then these men were involved in cleaning the flesh from them. I’m certain they wouldn’t have thought anything of it.’

‘Have you watched all these clips?’ said Matthew as she scrolled from one media player window to the next.

‘Yes.’ Thóra let go of the mouse. On the screen was yet another clip waiting for her to click on ‘play’. ‘This is typical of the rest: the two of them thinking they’re funny. I don’t know who shot the video, or whether they set up the camera to record automatically. Usually only one of them is in the frame at a time.’ On the screen the men sat and smoked cigars with great enthusiasm. The joke was based on the decision to allow all the workers to decide for themselves whether smoking would be allowed in their individual offices. The corridor would be a smoke-free zone, and the smokers’ room as well, since its function was now obsolete. Speculation on what it could now be used for took over and the lameness of the humour increased exponentially.