Yrsa Sigurðardóttir - I Remember You

They watched the dark screen and listened hard to catch the vague sound from the camera’s little built-in speakers. They heard several of the house’s familiar little creaks and groans, then the recording stopped without warning. Garðar tried the next one, which was also so dark that it seemed as if the screen were turned off. He was about to stop the playback and try another clip when a more rhythmic creaking, like footsteps on floorboards, came from the camera. It was only through sheer luck that he didn’t drop the camera when the frightened voice of the cameraman could be heard whispering: ‘He’s in here.’

On his way to the police station to meet Dagný, Freyr thought about coincidences. His shift had passed unbearably slowly, as if he were wading through treacle. Incredibly, Freyr had somehow managed to do his job without his colleagues and patients noticing how out of sorts he was. Still, he couldn’t refrain from virtually running out of the hospital when his shift ended. When he got into his car he stuck the key in the ignition with a trembling hand. Dagný had promised to look into the disappearance of the boy in Ísafjörður nearly sixty years ago, and while Freyr was occupied with work he hadn’t been thinking about how this tragedy could be linked to his son’s case – it had taken all his energy to concentrate on the down-to-earth problems of his patients. Now that he’d had time to consider this question on the way to the police station, his feeble hope that there might finally be an explanation for Benni’s disappearance had dwindled.

The two disappearances were strikingly similar, yet so far apart in time that there couldn’t possibly be a connection between them. And yet. He didn’t like coincidences, which more often than not turned out not to have any explanation at the end of the day. But what was a coincidence? Wasn’t it when similar things occurred within a short interval? Could sixty years be considered a short interval? If two meteorites landed in the same place on Earth several centuries, or even millennia, apart, you’d call it a coincidence. But what about events in people’s lives? Wasn’t the occurrence of similar events with a break of several decades – spanning more than two generations, even – too long a time to merit the term coincidental? He wasn’t sure. Children didn’t often disappear without a trace, though it was unfortunately more common than rocks crashing down through the Earth’s atmosphere. The less frequently something happened, the longer the amount of time there could be between events for them still to be coincidental. So was this coincidence, then? Freyr couldn’t decide, and his mental turmoil was accompanied by a feeling of hopelessness, making it impossible for him to focus on anything.

He knew it would help to talk through this out loud, make sentences out of his ideas and see how they sounded. Another person’s questions would also help him to get his thoughts on track, yet he still said nothing and couldn’t bring himself to air them as he sat next to Dagný at the police station. Instead he tightened his grip on the edge of the sturdily built table in front of them, doubtless chosen for its durability, and flipped with his other hand through the old police reports he was forcing himself to concentrate on. Judging by the serious look on Dagný’s face, there was no lack of focus on her part. Yet she must have been tired, with a long working day behind her. If she weren’t being so obliging to him, she would have gone home long ago. ‘I don’t think we’ll find out anything more about this.’ Dagný placed the final piece of yellowed paper on the stack in front of her. The old-fashioned black lettering on the report made Freyr think vaguely of the sound of striking typewriter keys. ‘Of course the boy might be mentioned in other reports, since his disappearance attracted some attention, but we can hardly go through all the reports made by the Ísafjörður police in search of it.’ She smiled sadly at him. ‘I enquired about this through a colleague of mine who’s retiring from the department. He remembered it from his childhood and was absolutely certain that the boy was never found. So we haven’t missed anything.’

‘No.’ Freyr re-read the final report that seemed to have been made about the case. It was dated to the feast of St Þorlákur, 23 December 1953, almost two months after the boy disappeared. A man thought he’d seen a shabbily dressed boy behaving oddly on the beach near the harbour late in the evening, in the blistering cold, and the description fitted Bernódus perfectly. The boy had stood there still as stone, staring down as icy seawater washed over his feet. When the man called to him and said that he was going to come down onto the beach himself, the boy had disappeared, making the man think he had probably fallen into the sea. His search of the beach proved fruitless, so he notified the police. The investigation was neither long nor detailed, since there was little that could be done about the situation. The child wasn’t found and there were no signs of his whereabouts that evening, nor the next day when the search was renewed. The man was asked to describe the child in more detail, and it seems that a clear-sighted police officer had realized that the boy’s tattered clothing fitted with the description of the boy who’d gone missing in the autumn. ‘The investigation of the boy’s disappearance seems to have come to a swift end. At least it was far more detailed in Benni’s case. I hope this is a sign of changed times and doesn’t reflect the difference in the two boys’ social statuses.’ Bernódus had been the son of a single father with a drinking problem and mental health issues, while Benni had had two reliable and concerned parents, who would never have settled for anything less than a full investigation.

‘I suppose it’s a bit of both. The police’s working methods have changed, as they have in other professions.’ Dagný took the papers they’d gathered and stood up to go and photocopy them. ‘If you and your wife hadn’t involved yourselves in the search for your son, it’s entirely possible that it would have been called off earlier. The attention would probably have been directed more towards you if you’d seemed unnaturally interested in the details of the case, but in any case, the behaviour of family members always has an influence, one way or another.’ She arranged the papers on the desk into a tidy pile. ‘In fact, I looked over the files in your son’s case in the light of his possible connection to these other cases, and I must say that the police considered you extremely suspicious for a time.’ She studied him, obviously wondering how he’d react.

Freyr didn’t try to evade it, since there was no reason to. ‘I already told you that; I’m not trying to avoid discussing it. It was awful for a while; I was almost out of my mind with worry about my son, and on top of that I was afraid I’d be wrongfully arrested. Amazingly, though, I actually didn’t give a damn about myself; it simply didn’t occur to me to care, we were so busy grieving at Benni’s disappearance.’

‘I understand that.’ Dagný was still staring at him. ‘Did you ever find out what happened to the insulin? The stuff that was missing from the package?’

Freyr relaxed his grip on the edge of the table and rubbed his temple. ‘No, it was never found. The drugs never left my sight and I’m well aware that it made the police suspicious at the time, but everything I said was true, and it was all corroborated. I hope there’s nothing to the contrary in the reports, but I’m absolutely certain that the police believed me. I didn’t take the insulin out of the box.’ If he had a hundred krónur for every time he’d wondered about this, he would be a rich man, though unfortunately he had never come to any satisfactory conclusion. He was convinced he’d either been given an incomplete prescription at the hospital pharmacy, and that there’d never been more than one syringe pen in the box, or that the missing needles had fallen out of the box without his noticing it. He’d gone to the hospital to pick up the drug, been given it in a box inside a little bag, and hadn’t given it another thought. He’d been in a hurry to get back to his office, where he’d stayed for around two hours before realizing he had to get home.