Yrsa Sigurðardóttir - I Remember You

Katrín wasn’t willing to form an opinion on this, or at least not out loud. In her heart she knew that the wind hadn’t opened the door. On the other hand, she admired Garðar’s patience and his ability to rule out the more obvious, but less pleasant explanation. ‘That’s enough nonsense, Líf, just stop thinking about it. It’s not helping, you going on and on.’ He ran a box cutter along the brown tape on one of the boxes they thought the former owner had left behind. ‘We’ll go through this stuff while we wait for the light to get better, then we’ll hike up the hill and call the skipper. I thought we were agreed on that.’

‘Only if you tell us exactly what happened to the previous owner. I can’t believe you kept it a secret.’ Líf pouted. ‘I would never have let you drag me here if I’d known about it.’

Katrín paid little attention to this. Líf was the sort of person who heard only what she wanted to hear in any given situation. Einar, God rest his soul, probably had told her about it when he bought the house. And although Katrín was furious at Garðar for having hidden it from her, she felt she had to defend him. Until now she’d been content to listen to them bicker about it, but she’d gained new strength after seeing her own face and realizing that the scrapes and bruises on it didn’t make her look like the Elephant Man after all. ‘Are you quite sure he was here when he disappeared? Couldn’t he have been on a boat, or out hiking, or something like that?’

‘According to Einar he vanished from here.’ Garðar opened the box. ‘He was on the same mission as we are, to fix up the house, but when they came to get him they found no one. Obviously I have no idea whether he died of exposure somewhere outside, I have no way of knowing precisely what happened. He was never found. I didn’t want to bother you with it, but I think it matters in light of the bizarre break-in last night.’

‘ He killed him.’ It was useless to argue with Líf; her words and tone of voice brooked no argument. ‘He pushed him down the stairs, then strangled him.’

‘Exactly how he died doesn’t matter now. We’ll go through this stuff and see if he left anything behind that could help us figure out what’s going on.’ Garðar didn’t look directly at either of them as he spoke. ‘You agreed that we would, remember?’ Katrín had had no say in the decision, since it had been made before she regained the power of speech. Just coming down the stairs had proved difficult enough for her; she’d only just managed to inch her way down and into the kitchen, where, shivering, she took a seat and listened to the others’ conversation. She’d refused to go down until Garðar had thrown the crosses out of the house and assured her that there were no new footprints.

‘Didn’t you say he disappeared three years ago?’ Katrín was praying this wasn’t linked to the incident last night, and the more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed. ‘The child can’t be older than eleven or twelve, so three years ago he would have been eight or nine. There’s no way such a young child could have killed a man, let alone survived here all this time.’

‘Not unless someone else is here with him.’ Líf did have a point, and she couldn’t conceal her satisfaction at having come up with such a clever theory.

Garðar didn’t reply, but continued to rummage through the box. ‘Maybe there’s a radio in with this stuff. Who knows? That would save us having to trek up the hill. I don’t know about you, but I’m not really looking forward to that.’

Katrín looked out of the window, at a scene very different from before. In place of the dull earth colours of sleeping vegetation, everything was white. The sleet had turned into snow during the night, and a thin layer of it covered the ground. The snow had stopped falling, but she quaked nonetheless at the thought of schlepping up the hill; she was in no fit state for the walk and there might be icy patches concealed beneath the snow, plus they had no spikes for their shoes or anything like that. And since there were three of them, there was no way to split the group in half without one of them ending up alone, meaning she had no choice but to go along. She wasn’t going to stay behind on her own, and she couldn’t imagine Garðar making the journey by himself. A sudden gust of wind blew up the snow in front of the wrecked porch and tiny snowflakes danced in the air. Then, just as suddenly, everything went completely still. Katrín turned her attention back to the kitchen table and the dusty boxes. Garðar had taken several items from the first box, none of which appeared likely to tell them much: two books, a hammer, a wallet and a torch. She reached for the latter and tried to turn it on, but the batteries were dead.

‘Doesn’t a radio need electricity?’ Líf went over to where Katrín sat and picked up the wallet.

‘I don’t know, but if there’s one here, it probably runs on batteries. Otherwise it would have been pointless to lug it up here.’ Garðar rearranged the things in the box in order to see deeper inside. ‘What a pile of fucking junk.’

‘Who do you suppose did this?’ Katrín put down the torch and picked distractedly at the tape on the side of the box. ‘He could hardly have packed all this up before he disappeared.’

‘Maybe the rescue teams that came to search for him. Or someone connected to his estate.’ Garðar pulled out two tea towels from the box and looked at them. ‘The stuff seems to have just been thrown in, so I doubt it was him, or anyone close to him. I know I wouldn’t pack my belongings this way. Everything’s all mixed up.’ He put the checked towels back and pulled out a brightly coloured plastic plate. ‘There’s no system at all.’

‘His name was Haukur. Haukur Grétarsson.’ Líf waved a credit card she’d found in the wallet.

‘We don’t know that’s his.’ Garðar grabbed the card and looked at it before handing it back to Líf and continuing with his rummaging.

‘Whoever packed the boxes probably thought they’d be taken to town soon after. The wallet is full of credit cards, receipts and coins.’ Líf flicked through the receipts. ‘But if the man put these in the boxes himself, he must have committed suicide. No one packs away his own wallet.’

‘What did he buy?’ Katrín picked up the bits of paper Líf had already examined. The receipts were just over three years old and the amounts were all quite small: a few thousand krónur at Hagkaup supermarket, a haircut at a barber’s near Hlemmur bus station, Domino’s pizza, Subway, petrol. The next batch was much the same; faded slips of paper containing useless memories, records of trivial everyday purchases. Suddenly goose bumps sprang up on Katrín’s arms. ‘These receipts suggest that Haukur was a bit of a loner. Most of them are from supermarkets and fast food places, and he never spent much.’

‘I guess they’re from three years ago and everything’s gone up since then, but he can’t have had many people to invite round for dinner,’ said Garðar. ‘I know the fact that he didn’t have any close relatives or a spouse made the sale of the estate much easier.’ He pulled out some folded pieces of paper, opened them, read what was written on them and grinned. ‘Awesome!’ He turned the two pages towards the others; a receipt from Byko Hardware Store and a pencil drawing marked with dimensions. ‘This is a drawing of the septic tank connections.’ Katrín and Líf stared at him in bewilderment, clearly not sharing his excitement. ‘Don’t you get it? We can connect the toilet.’ His joy faded slightly. ‘Well, maybe not now, but on the next trip.’

‘The next trip?’ Líf shook her head and laughed mirthlessly. ‘I’m about as likely to come back here to connect a septic tank as I am to take a bath in it once it’s full.’