The Wake, page 24
part #2 of Black Ice Series
Trausti intervened again as Sigga opened her mouth to make an angry retort: ‘There’s an area here on the headland, to the south of the house, that can only be seen from the sea. If we dig the grave at night, we should get away with it.’
Ari clearly wanted the last word when it came to the choice of site: ‘Or on the beach by the isthmus. It’s easy to dig in sand.’
Sigga scoffed at this idea: ‘Uh, hello! The road runs straight past. No, the headland gets my vote.’ She gave Trausti the ghost of a smile but he maintained a stony face.
‘The beach is out of the question. It may be easy to shovel up sand but the sea will dig it up again just as fast. We might as well dump the body in the town square with nothing but a sheet over it.’ Trausti didn’t return the conspiratorial smile Sigga sent him. He wasn’t on her side either. He was on his own from now on.
‘We don’t have to decide straight away.’ Ari couldn’t bring himself to admit that Trausti’s suggestion was the best of a bad bunch. ‘We’ve got plenty of time. After all, it’s not like we can do anything until it gets dark again. Let’s just have a think and try to come up with some more ideas, then make a decision this evening.’
Silence fell, giving Trausti the opportunity to focus. ‘We’re forgetting one thing.’ His friends looked at him, their faces showing signs of exhaustion, the light long gone out of their eyes. ‘What about the phone calls? The note on the car window? It’ll be no use getting rid of the body if someone knows what we’ve been up to. What if that person’s next step is to stop harassing us and go to the police instead?’
While the others’ mouths went slack with defeat, Ari rolled his eyes. ‘All the more reason to do this tonight. No body, no crime. And stop being such a pussy. We get rid of the body, and if the police come knocking, we say we came here for the funeral and a reunion. We just look confused if they ask anything about a body or a box. We went to the house, sure, but had no reason to go down to the cellar. Got it?’ He left no room for objections, but then there probably wouldn’t have been any as he had a point. Instead, he yawned and pushed himself away from the kitchen unit he’d been leaning against. ‘I’m going upstairs to sleep until lunchtime. If we’re going to have another late night tonight, I recommend you have a kip too.’ He put down his mug, yawned again and left them. Apparently, the intervening years since they’d graduated hadn’t taught him to clear up after himself. He still expected someone else to take care of that.
Trausti stifled the old urge to take his mug, rinse it and put it in the dishwasher. In their student days, he had generally taken on this role as the girls had flatly refused to clean up after Ari, and Leifur had seemed indifferent to dirt and mess. But times had changed. Trausti wasn’t going to run around tidying up after Ari any more or indeed after any other slob.
Although he was still in shock after all that had happened, it seemed that one good thing had come out of this ordeal: he had developed a backbone.
Sigga stared at the door Ari had left by, rolling her eyes. ‘He’s got a peculiar knack of making me want to resist anything he suggests. I’m falling asleep on my feet here but I don’t want to go to bed, just because he told us to.’ She rinsed out her mug in the sink. ‘Is it a skill that has any uses or is it just designed to drive you mad?’
Trausti merely shrugged but Sigga didn’t take offence: ‘Are you going to lie down?’
‘Not right away.’ To stop her thinking he too had an inbuilt resistance to anything Ari suggested, Trausti added: ‘I’m going to look for a spade. If I can’t find one, we’ll have to go out and buy one. Or preferably two.’
‘Won’t that look suspicious? What kind of tourist would buy a spade – in the middle of winter?’
Trausti shrugged again. ‘Then we’ll just have to hope I can find one. Or we could say our car’s got stuck or something. Maybe Ari and Ragga should have thought of that before they brought the body up here. If I can’t find anything to dig with, they can bloody well go into town and sort it out themselves.’
Sigga closed the dishwasher. ‘I’ll come too. To help you look. Not to the shops.’ She retied the belt of her bathrobe. ‘I’ll just run upstairs and change. Wait for me. Don’t go out in the dark alone.’
He was no longer sure whether he was more worried about the people inside the house or what might be lurking out there in the dark. But it was pointless trying to give Sigga the slip as the headland wasn’t large and there were only a couple of outhouses to search. She would find him immediately. While he was waiting, the phone started ringing. It was the bloody landline in the hall again. The ringing was so unnerving that Trausti felt the skin prickling on his arms. He wasn’t usually neurotically oversensitive to this sort of thing and had only once before experienced the same sensation, during a swarm of earth tremors that had hit Iceland when he was in his teens. He hadn’t been in any danger, yet that hadn’t prevented him from breaking out in a cold sweat, his heart galloping every time he heard the rumbling starting up around him.
The ringing went on and on. Trausti, as the nearest person to the phone, had two alternatives: either let it ring out, knowing that the person on the other end would call straight back, or pick up. The last thing he wanted was to answer, but he went into the hall anyway. He stared at the phone as if hypnotised as another ring tore into the silence. To shut it up, he lifted the receiver, automatically raising it to his ear, though he wasn’t expecting to like what he heard.
Instead of saying hello as he would in normal circumstances, he held his breath and listened. The caller didn’t keep him waiting long:
‘Morons,’ the voice at the other end hissed.
Trausti didn’t answer, just listened to the breathing of the caller and the thudding of his own heart.
‘Liars.’
He stayed silent and concentrated on the voice, ignoring the words and focusing on the timbre and intonation, in the hope of being able to work out the caller’s age, sex, any familiar qualities or any other hints that might indicate who it was. But it was no good. The caller was speaking in telegraphese, in single words, which meant Trausti hardly had a chance to focus on the voice before it fell silent. The person was hissing, too, which made it even more difficult. Woman or man – either was possible. Or anything in between.
‘Losers.’
It was tempting to yell down the receiver at their persecutor to find a healthier hobby and go fuck themselves. But Trausti knew from painful experience that when someone has you in their sights, it’s best to keep a cool head. Showing a reaction only encourages your tormentor.
‘You won’t get away with it.’
Although there were more words this time, he couldn’t detect anything familiar about the voice. He didn’t know anyone who spoke in a hoarse whisper.
‘Who’s that outside?’
Instinctively, Trausti’s eyes slid to the nearest window. He could see nothing but darkness out there. His heart beating frantically against his ribcage, he braced himself for the shock of seeing a movement.
‘Bye,’ the voice whispered.
Trausti was on the verge of saying goodbye back, his innate politeness almost getting the better of him, but he managed to bite back the word before it could slip out, and the next thing he heard was the dial tone indicating that the caller had hung up.
Something touched his shoulder, making him jump so badly that he dropped the receiver, which banged against the wall, leaving a mark on the freshly painted plaster.
It was Sigga. She had dressed in jeans and a cable-knit jumper with a polo neck that reached up to her chin. She made no apology for startling him. ‘Was that . . . you know?’
Trausti nodded. He picked up the receiver that was dangling from its cord and replaced it. Sigga pushed him gently aside and read the number of the caller from the little screen. Then she took out her own phone and looked it up on the Icelandic directory website.
‘Ellidi Jónsson. Lives in the Westman Islands. Not in the same street as Gugga, though.’ Sigga met Trausti’s eye. ‘Do you recognise the name?’
‘No. I don’t. Any more than the other two who called.’
‘I’m going to try calling him back.’ Sigga reached for the phone on the wall.
‘It won’t achieve anything. Except to wind him up and provoke him into making more calls. Anyway, he probably won’t answer. I tried earlier and it rang out. It was a different number – but still.’
Sigga didn’t let this dissuade her. ‘We’ll see. Maybe this Ellidi will react differently.’ He didn’t. The phone rang out. She hung up and turned back to Trausti. ‘What did he say?’
Trausti searched his memory but he was too tired to recall the exact words. Not that it mattered whether he got them right, because the contents of the phone calls weren’t carefully planned or coded. It was just words intended to intimidate them. That’s all. Why was the question they should be considering. Why? And who were these people? And what did they know? He looked at Sigga. ‘Why on earth would a bunch of locals be ringing here at this time in the morning?’
Sigga’s face brightened. ‘Of course. The calls aren’t intended for us. They must have something to do with the people renting out the house or the man who lived here before. The lighthouse keeper.’
‘I imagine most people will be aware that he’s moved. It’s not a big place. And the caller referred to us in the plural.’
Sigga frowned. ‘Could it be Ari’s friends? The guys renting out the house? I haven’t a clue if they’re local. Maybe they’ve found out that Leifur’s sleeping on the sofa and are pissed off about it?’ The idea was absurd but then so were the phone calls. ‘I mean, no one in the islands actually knows we’re here. So it’s unlikely to be a local calling us.’ Sigga suddenly broke off and made a strange face, as if she’d swallowed something inedible.
‘What?’
‘Oh. No, nothing.’
Trausti wasn’t about to let her off that lightly. ‘What? Did you tell someone in the town that we were staying here? Someone at the funeral reception?’ He’d gone back over the conversation he’d had with Halldóra at the reception but couldn’t recall telling her where they were staying. Or that she’d asked.
‘Well . . . I . . .’ Sigga took a deep breath. ‘I may have mentioned it when we were on the ferry. To a crew member.’
‘What crew member?’ Trausti gritted his teeth. ‘What crew member, Sigga?’
‘A woman. The young woman working in the shop. When I went to buy a Coke. She . . . She, er . . . was giving me advice about how to deal with seasickness and we got chatting. She asked if we were going to the fishing conference and one thing led to another. I think she was at the funeral too but I’m not sure. It can’t be her ringing, can it?’
‘It didn’t occur to you to mention this before?’ Trausti didn’t even try to hide his anger.
‘I’d forgotten. It wasn’t a big deal. Jesus.’
Trausti got a grip on himself. There were so many other things to be angry about. It was hard to imagine why a crew member from the ferry would want to rope a load of people into making nuisance phone calls. It seemed more likely that Leifur was using some AI program to phone in and scare them, though for what reason Trausti couldn’t begin to imagine.
‘Forget it. Let’s go and find a spade.’ Trausti cut Sigga off before she could continue making excuses: ‘As more than one local seems to know or suspect what’s going on here, there’s no need to attract even more attention by buying spades in town.’
‘Didn’t the caller say there was someone outside? Should we wait until it gets light?’
Trausti hesitated. Then, remembering his newly acquired backbone, he shook his head. ‘No. There’s nobody out there. Let’s get it over with.’ He wished he felt as confident of this as he sounded.
But it seemed he was right: there was nobody outside. A search of the outhouses achieved little, however. They found a broad snow shovel made of hard plastic that would break at the first thrust into the frozen ground. A plastic bucket with a child’s spade that looked ancient. And a rusty garden trowel, suitable at best for planting summer flowers. If they had to bury the body using those, they would need to extend their visit by several weeks.
They would have to buy spades. Another problem; an endless stream of them. Exasperated, Trausti went up to his room and lay down on his bed but couldn’t get back to sleep. The echo of the endless ringing from the ground floor saw to that.
Chapter 22
Day 7 – Wednesday, 29 January
Idunn was still in her pyjamas, with unbrushed teeth and hair, when her phone rang. It was lucky she had it switched on. She was in the middle of uploading photos of the woman on the beach from her phone to her laptop. After that, she had been intending to switch her phone off. The police could come and fetch her if they decided her presence was required. Her mother was having one of her major episodes. When she went ballistic like this, it was like a rocket being launched with insufficient fuel. Up, up, up she would go – until she plummeted back to earth, landing with an almighty crash. Then it would be Idunn’s job to patch her up again. That meant getting any outstanding jobs out of the way first, hence the need for peace and quiet to work in now, free from continual interruptions. Besides, Idunn reasoned to herself, it wasn’t as if she could have any influence on the progress of the investigation at the moment by responding to phone calls or messages.
That wasn’t the only reason she was planning to switch off her phone and leave it behind if she got the green light to go ahead with the post-mortem. The truth was, she’d been gripped by an extremely bad idea that she couldn’t shake off. If she had her phone to hand, there was a risk she might put it into action. She’d fallen asleep mulling over the idea, dreamt about it, then woken up with it still buzzing in her head. She had even rehearsed the tirade she was planning to deliver; the bollocking she meant to give her father over the phone.
The knowledge that it was a terrible idea didn’t make it any the less tempting. She had all the arguments prepared and wouldn’t be thrown off her stride. After all, she knew the story better than anyone else, so sheltering behind lies or irrelevancies would be a waste of his time. She was aware that her mother hadn’t been telling the truth when she claimed her dad didn’t pay her child maintenance. Her mother had done this to fool Idunn into believing her father didn’t care about them. Idunn had subsequently discovered that the state provided the payments, then charged them to the person responsible for paying maintenance. This had led her to re-examine everything her mother had ever told her. As a result, she had come to believe that her father hadn’t forgotten about her at all and that his lack of involvement in her childhood was entirely her mother’s fault. She even suspected that he’d sent her Christmas and birthday presents that her mother had hidden from her. But even if this were true, there was no point in him trying to plead it as an excuse now. Because when he’d been given a chance to re-establish his relationship with his daughter, he’d spurned it.
When Idunn discovered the truth about the child maintenance, she had been so livid with her mother and filled with such a longing to see her father that she had taken out nearly all the money she’d been given in Confirmation presents – enough for an air ticket to the Westman Islands. Instead of going to school next day, she had walked all the way to Reykjavík’s domestic airport and caught the first plane to Heimaey. Once there, she had walked from the airport to her father’s office by the harbour, with the idea of throwing herself into his arms and declaring that she wanted to come and live with him. She would apologise for ever having believed her mother’s lies. But nothing had come of this plan. Her father’s secretary had told her he was busy on the phone and asked her to wait. Idunn had sat down and watched as the woman poked her head round the door to tell her father she was there. And she had heard as he told the secretary irritably to get rid of her and say he wasn’t in.
When the woman closed the door and turned to Idunn with a look of embarrassment, Idunn had jumped to her feet and rushed out. It was better not to be among strangers when the world collapsed around your ears. She had sat on a bench by the harbour and cried her eyes out. Through her tears, she had seen her father dash out to his car and roar away. Of course, he hadn’t noticed the sorry sight huddled on the bench, her nose running, her face puffy from weeping. She had sat there until her tear ducts were empty. Then she had got up and set off on the long walk back to the airport. She had only withdrawn enough money for a one-way ticket, as she hadn’t been planning to go home again. How was she to get back to Reykjavík? She’d just hoped the airline would take pity on her youth and lend her the fare.
The first thing she had seen at the airport was her father’s car. At the time, she had interpreted this as meaning that he’d decided to fly to Reykjavík to visit his mistress rather than talk to his daughter. But nowadays she was inclined to believe there had been some fish-related emergency that he had prioritised over her. Well, he’d made his choice and he would have to stand by it. No way was she going to let him back into her life. To make sure she never forgot this slight, she had framed her flight ticket to Reykjavík. The frame, crooked and battered now, still hung on her wall. She had made it home again thanks to the kindness of the staff at the check-in desk, who had taken pity on her when she burst into tears on learning that she wouldn’t be allowed to fly back on credit. She suspected they had known who she was and subsequently charged the flight to her father. At the time, he had already been in the air. Whereas she had been forced to sit for hours in departures, lonely and humiliated, clutching her free ticket, waiting for the next plane out of there. It might still have been possible to rescue the situation if he’d called her afterwards to apologise and explain, but there had been total silence from his end. She had felt earth-shatteringly betrayed and completely worthless. After that, Idunn had no reason to doubt her mother’s constant reminders that he was a mean bastard who didn’t give a damn about his daughter.
