Yrsa Sigurðardóttir - I Remember You

‘But why would the boy have said something like that out of the blue and then taken it back?’ Dagný sat opposite Freyr at the kitchen table, the dregs of some red wine in one of the two wine glasses that had come with the house. It was nearly midnight.

‘Children are extremely poor witnesses. The boy was probably chuffed that the police were talking to him and wanted to add something. Maybe his childish imagination told him that a submarine had taken Benni and sailed away with him. His parents said he’d recently watched a film involving a submarine. It doesn’t make much of a difference anyway, because it turned out that this boy had left the game to go to his cousin’s birthday party before Benni went missing, so he couldn’t have seen or heard anything that mattered. His parents confirmed it.’

Dagný nodded and changed the subject. ‘I’m wondering whether Védís’s death would have been investigated differently if they’d had this dream diary.’ Her cheeks reddened slightly. ‘You know – all this with the garden shears.’

Freyr emptied the wine bottle into her glass. He had enough wine in his, and didn’t expect to finish it. He found the idea of being tipsy uncomfortable under these circumstances. ‘I suppose so. It could very well be that there’s a connection between the dreams and the accident, but not a criminal one. The two things could be connected easily if we suppose that Védís handled the shears clumsily precisely because of her dreams – she’d been stressed about handling them and thereby wasn’t careful enough. But I have no idea why she dreamed about garden shears in the first place; there could be a thousand reasons for it and none of them particularly noteworthy. It’s not possible that anyone planted it in her mind, which somehow led to her death, if that’s what you mean.’

‘No, not at all.’ Dagný pulled one leg underneath her. ‘There was clearly no one else involved. I was wondering more whether it was suicide.’

Freyr shrugged and placed the bottle on the counter ‘I think that’s rather unlikely, although suicide of course takes a variety of forms.’

‘But don’t you find it strange that she also dreamed about Halla, sitting and weeping, her face purple and her tongue sticking out, in a church that resembled the one in Súðavík?’

‘Yes, of course that’s striking, in the light of what happened to her. I also think it’s interesting that the only people she mentions by name in the book after the dreams become so bizarre are her childhood friends from the class picture.’

‘Why would that be?’ Dagný’s teeth were stained from the wine, but to Freyr this just increased her charm. ‘I’m not one for prophecies and dreams, but I don’t see what logical explanation there could be for this. Védís died before these people started popping off. It’s out of the question that she could have been connected to their deaths in any way, even though she seems to have predicted all of them.’ Dagný paged through the dream diary quickly until she found what she was looking for. ‘Here, look. Jón appears here with a black face and no eyelashes. He’s missing half his fingers, and the others are black and burned.’ She turned to the next page. ‘Silja is blue and frosted, lying on a snow bank and speaking to her without blinking, while snowflakes gradually fill her eyes. You remember that she froze to death?’ She flipped rapidly through more pages. ‘Here. Steinn. Lying at her feet, broken and shattered, and Védís writes, and I quote, that some of the injuries are so bad that nothing can heal them; precisely what happened to him. He lay there like a doll thrown off a high-rise and stared at her unable to speak, let alone anything else. The only thing he could do was blink his glazed eyes.’ Dagný looked up from the book. ‘I read the police report that was compiled after he was run over, and her description fits it pretty well. The same thing can be said of all of them; Védís appears to have dreamed how they would die.’

Freyr took care over what he said next, since the topic had taken a strange turn and it would be easy to jump to unrealistic conclusions. ‘It’s stated clearly that Védís got in touch with all of these people, and even though they didn’t all take her overtures well, none of them hung up on her. So they heard her descriptions, and who knows, maybe they had some effect. Although I don’t believe in that kind of thing, I’m afraid I’d be concerned if an old friend called me and told me sadly that she was always dreaming that I’d drowned or something like that. I might actually start behaving differently on lakes or out at sea, which might cause me to fall in and drown. That’s what I think happened in each of these cases, as well as where Védís herself is concerned. Perhaps there’s nothing that mysterious about it.’

Dagný ran her fingers over the book. ‘I’m not completely convinced, sorry. But you get marks for trying.’ She stared at the blue lettering as if searching for a hidden meaning that could explain all of this. ‘Do you think this might be forged? That it wasn’t written by her at all, but by someone else after her death – and therefore after the others had all died too?’

This hadn’t crossed Freyr’s mind. ‘Interesting idea.’ He reached for the book and turned to the first page. ‘I doubt it, but we would need to compare the handwriting with hers to eliminate the possibility completely. Otherwise, the handwriting might not be the main issue. This fits with what Halla’s widower said in his conversation with you, that Halla had started calling these childhood friends of hers around three years earlier – after Védís got in touch with her. It says in the book that Védís was thinking of speaking to Halla around the same time that she first appeared in her dreams. So, she seems to have rekindled her relationship with this old friend of hers, although it didn’t last long because she died a short time later.’

‘I wonder what they talked about? The meaning of the dreams, or how they might take advantage of these omens to avoid the danger?’

‘I guess they’d have just talked about everything. The dreams were the trigger for their renewed acquaintance, but then they discovered that they had things in common and sought out each other’s company.’

‘That doesn’t explain why Halla turned to the others when Védís slipped and cut herself to death on the garden shears.’ Dagný took a tiny sip of wine. ‘Védís probably told her all her dreams about the group, and when she died the way she did, Halla probably wanted to spread the message and continue to warn the others. It actually begs the question why the others continued to answer her phone calls and get in touch with her. According to Halla’s widower, there were a lot of long telephone conversations over an extended period of time.’

Freyr paused for a moment before replying as he tried to remember the name of the childhood friend who was still alive. ‘Obviously, the most direct course of action would be to ask the only one of them left about what actually went on.’ Freyr flipped through the book a bit in search of entries concerning the man. ‘Lárus. The one who appeared to Védís with his guts hanging out.’

‘What sort of death do you suppose awaits him?’ Dagný rested her glass on her leg and swirled the wine in it like an experienced wine taster preparing to sip and spit.

‘No idea. Maybe stomach cancer.’ Freyr pushed back thoughts of accidents and illnesses that could do serious damage to one’s abdomen. ‘Perhaps I’ll try to find him tomorrow, since I’ll be in town. He lives in Reykjavík.’

Dagný looked at the kitchen clock. ‘I’d forgotten that you’re heading south in the morning. I’d better get going.’ She put down her glass and stood up. ‘I like the idea of you trying to reach Lárus; I’d prefer this not to get mixed into the investigation with things as they are. I don’t want to have to explain all this spooky stuff to my boss or the police down south. It can wait.’