Yrsa Sigurðardóttir - I Remember You

‘Ugly?’ Freyr exclaimed. The old man focused his watery blue eyes on Freyr. ‘Yes. I chose to interpret it as the man referring to himself and what he’d done. That helped me, having to look at it for all those years, even if you could only see a faint shadow of the word through the paint.’ The man pulled the cover all the way up to his chin. ‘I had a harder time coming to terms with what was written in the assembly hall.’

‘And what was that?’ Freyr was determined to end the conversation so that he could finish his shift, go home, take an ibuprofen for his headache and lie down. Still, he couldn’t resist asking; the events of the morning had had a deeper effect than he’d realized or was willing to admit to himself.

‘ Dirty .’ The old man’s voice sounded stronger than before, as if the low baritone of his former years had returned. The old man seemed to notice this himself, and he struggled to sit up in bed. ‘In the assembly hall, of all places. No child should have to sit and look at that.’

‘Did you say “dirty”?’ Freyr thought he must have misheard the man. ‘Are you sure you’re not confusing this with what your granddaughter told you this morning about the preschool?’

The old man gave Freyr a displeased, even indignant look. ‘Of course not. I was going to tell you that I remember this as if it happened yesterday, not this morning. Scribbled on the wall was this one word. Dirty.’

Dagný’s expression when he told her was not unlike the old man’s, except that her displeasure seemed grafted onto her face. ‘What are you saying? That there’s a vandal who breaks into schools at sixty-year intervals?’ She shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t buy it. If that were the case, whoever was in the school last night would have to be at least seventy years old. That doesn’t fit. The old man must have heard about the “dirty” graffiti during the girl’s visit this morning.’

‘That’s not what he believed.’ Freyr tried to hide his irritation. As soon as he’d told Dagný the story, he’d realized how ridiculous it sounded. Still, he’d insisted, even though logic was on her side. It felt odd to be the one insisting on a story that was difficult to justify. That was usually Sara’s role.

‘No, but isn’t he in his nineties?’ Dagný allowed herself a rare smile. ‘I’d say he’s just a bit confused.’

Freyr let his eyes wander over the packed bookshelves in the office. ‘Would you be willing to check whether there are records of the old case? It would remove any doubt about whether the man is confused or not. He seemed absolutely convinced that he was remembering things correctly.’

‘Do you have any idea how much work we have to do here? It isn’t just the healthcare system that’s suffered cutbacks. We have far too few employees and for the moment the break-in at the preschool isn’t a priority.’ Dagný lifted the stack of papers on the desk and let it thud back into place. ‘We’re investigating more cases than just this one. There isn’t much more we can do in this situation than speak to the people who seem the likeliest candidates, and if we’re lucky, someone will confess or we’ll nail him by his fingerprints. If that fails, we’ll have to hope that whoever did it will be arrested for something else entirely, and that his fingerprints will give him away. Either that or we might find he’s already on record. In any case, it’ll take quite some time to find out.’ She shrugged sadly. ‘There was such a mess of fingerprints in the preschool.’

Freyr was sweating in his thick coat, but didn’t want to ask her to open a window for fear that the wind would blow the pile of papers onto the floor. ‘How much time are you talking about?’

‘One or two weeks. We’ll see how it goes.’ There was a note of surrender in her voice. ‘If the government had insured its property, this would be a matter for the insurance company and it would take over the investigation. But since that isn’t the case, it looks as though we’ll soon have to conclude our own investigation, unless new evidence turns up or we hear any rumours about the vandalism. As you can imagine, no one goes through old files in search of…’ She stopped for a moment, trying to work out what she wanted to say. ‘Well, I don’t really know what.’

Freyr said nothing. He personally had no idea how sixty-year-old police reports could help them now. As he sat there on his hard, uncomfortable chair, he realized that Dagný was right; the crime wasn’t so serious that it necessitated a complex police investigation. The graffiti would doubtless be painted over, the damage repaired, and the case would be history. He decided to stop worrying about it; he wouldn’t take it too well if Dagný started lecturing him about medicine. He’d let her know what he heard – there was nothing else he could do. ‘Did something bad come up this morning? You left in such a rush.’

Dagný frowned automatically and stroked her chin, as she did when she was pondering something or facing a difficult decision. ‘Oh, I might as well tell you. You’ll hear about it at work tomorrow morning anyway. I actually thought you knew already.’

‘What? I haven’t heard anything.’ Freyr had purposely buried himself in his work in order to shut out the lingering feelings his conversation with Sara had provoked, which meant he had completely missed the day’s gossip. The hospital might have been abuzz from one end to the other with stories without him being aware of it.

‘Someone committed suicide in Súðavík last night. The body was found in the church this morning when the priest arrived. We had to get there quickly.’

‘Was it a kid?’ Freyr hoped not, especially because young people’s suicides occasionally came in waves. In the eyes of some teenagers, there was something heroic about surrendering your life in the battle of adolescence. It only took one of them to sow the first seed of tragedy before others began to follow.

‘No, it was an older woman.’ Dagný took the topmost paper from the pile on the desk and read from it. ‘She was sixty-nine years old.’ She looked at Freyr. ‘Maybe she had trouble accepting the fact that she was a pensioner. Some people live for work. Or else she’d become seriously ill and didn’t want to deal with it.’

Freyr nodded thoughtfully; ridiculously, it hadn’t immediately occurred to him that it might be a woman. Although only a quarter of suicides in Iceland were committed by women, there was nothing odd about such a thing occurring in the Westfjords, any more than anywhere else. There were between seventy and eighty suicides a year throughout the country, most of them in Reykjavík and its suburbs, but perhaps statistically it was the turn of women in the west. ‘Suicides more commonly involve older people, but although I obviously haven’t looked into this case, I’d say it was unlikely that the end of her career had anything to do with it. In general, it’s men who have difficulty accepting that. The woman’s relatives might know the reason behind it.’ Freyr slipped off his jacket. ‘Mind you, I would be interested to know why she picked a church. Generally, people choose to do it at home, or out in the wild when they want to protect their families from the additional shock of finding them dead. That location is fairly unusual.’

‘Maybe she was a devout Christian and wanted to be nearer to God when she died. Although she wasn’t a religious fanatic or anything like that; we learned that much from her husband. Of course, he could have been lying to us; if he were a fanatic himself, he might have a different definition of the term.’

‘So she was married?’

Dagný nodded. ‘Yes. With three children and five grandchildren. Of course some of them have moved south, but they’re all alive. She wasn’t recently bereaved and grieving.’