Black Skies Page 15

  It was the name of his friend, Patrekur.

  28

  THEY HAD WATCHED him suspiciously when he went into the state off-licence to buy two bottles of Icelandic brennivín. He had made an effort to smarten himself up by hitching up his trousers, pulling on an anorak and donning a woolly hat to hide his dirty, unkempt hair and keep out the cold. Then he had walked the long distance to the off-licence on Eidistorg Square, on the Seltjarnarnes Peninsula at the westernmost end of the city. He had taken the decision to avoid visiting the same shop too often after noticing the glances of the staff when he went to the town centre off-licence, near Grettisgata. The branch in the Kringlan shopping centre was also out. He had been there recently too. He had had to pay using cash because he did not own a credit card, never had, which meant he sometimes had to go to the bank to withdraw money. His disability benefit was paid directly into his account and in addition to this he had some savings left over from his last job. Not that he needed much these days, because he hardly ate; the brennivín served as both food and drink.

  The staff at the off-licence watched him as if he had committed a crime. Perhaps it was his appearance? He hoped so. What could they know, anyway? They knew nothing. Nor did they refuse to serve him; after all, his money was good, even if he didn’t exactly look like a banker. They avoided engaging with him, though; did not address a single word to him. Well, what did he care what they thought? They meant nothing to him. And anyway, what did he have to do with them? Not a thing. He was just there to buy a couple of bottles of spirits and that was all. He was causing no trouble; he was a customer, just like anyone else.

  So why the hell were they gawping at him like that?

  Was there a dress code for drinking brennivín?

  He walked out of the off-licence, his mind churning, casting frequent glances behind him, as if he expected to be followed. Could they have called the cops? His pace quickened. The young man who had served him sat on his chair by the till, watching him through the glass frontage until he was out of sight.

  He did not see any police officers but took the precaution of turning down a side street as soon as he could. From there he made his slow way back towards the centre of Reykjavík, heading for the old graveyard, instinctively picking the quietest back streets and alleyways. From time to time, when no one was looking, he stopped, removed one of the bottles from the bag and took a swig. When he finally reached the graveyard the bottle was nearly empty. He would have to go easy if the other one was to last.

  The old cemetery on Sudurgata was a favourite refuge when he needed peace and quiet. He sat down now for a rest on a low stone wall that fenced in a large tomb, taking frequent sips from the second bottle, and although it was cold he did not feel it, protected as he was by the drink and his thick, padded jacket.

  The alcohol had a restorative effect and he felt livelier, somewhat lighter of heart. A snatch of verse kept repeating itself in his head, as it often did when he was drinking: Brennivín is the best of friends / It never lets you down. In future he would avoid the town centre; you never knew when you might bump into some acquaintance, or even a cop, and that was the last thing he needed. More than once he had been picked up for the sole crime of showing his face in town. He had not been pestering anybody, merely sitting on a bench in Austurvöllur Square, minding his own business, when two policemen had approached him. He had told them to get lost – maybe adding a few obscenities, not that he could remember – and before he knew it he was in the cells. ‘You spoil the view for the tourists,’ they had told him.

  He gazed across the graveyard at the mossy headstones and the trees that grew amid the tumbled graves, then raised his eyes heavenwards. The sky was gloomy and overcast; to him it seemed almost black, but then the clouds over the mountains parted for an instant, showing a gleam of sunlight and a pale strip of blue sky before it was obscured again by a dark bank of cloud.

  He had not attended his mother’s funeral. Sometime, somewhere – probably when she was admitted to hospital, he did not know – she had given his name as next of kin, to be contacted in the event of her death. One day he had received a phone call that he still heard occasionally, as if from afar, from beyond the rim of sky over the mountains, telling him that his mother Sigurveig was dead.

  ‘Why are you telling me?’ he had asked.

  He had felt neither gladness nor sorrow, neither surprise nor anger. Just numbness, but then he had been numb for a long time.

  The woman had wanted to discuss arrangements about the body and the undertaker, and something else he did not catch.

  He took a slug from the bottle and looked up at the clouds, checking to see if they had parted again but he could see no sunlight. He knew the graveyard well, often coming here in search of respite. No one bothered him here.

  As he sat there among the old graves he was filled with a strange sense of tranquillity, and so he remained, uncertain, as sometimes happened, which side of the grave he was really on.

  He had almost forgotten why he had come when he noticed a policeman approaching. The name escaped him at first. Sigur-something.

  Sigurdur.

  29

  SIGURDUR ÓLI WAS standing reading the printout when the phone on his desk rang. He answered testily and could hear nothing but breathing at first, the faint snuffling sounds of rapid breathing.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘I need to see you,’ said a voice which he immediately identified as belonging to Andrés.

  ‘Is that Andrés?’

  ‘I … can you meet me now?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In a call box. I’m … I’ll be in the graveyard.’

  ‘Which graveyard?’

  ‘On Sudurgata.’

  ‘All right,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘… about two hours.’

  ‘OK. In two hours. In the graveyard. Whereabouts in the graveyard?’

  There was no answer. Andrés had hung up.

  Nearly two hours later Sigurdur Óli parked his car and entered the old Reykjavík cemetery from the western end. He had no idea where to find Andrés but decided to try going left first. He walked some way down the hill past tombs and headstones, along narrow footpaths that wound between grey slabs, and had almost reached Sudurgata, the road at the bottom, when he caught sight of Andrés sitting on a low, mossy wall that had long ago been erected around a double tomb. Andrés watched as Sigurdur Óli approached. His hands, glimpsed beneath the long sleeves of his jacket, were black with dirt; he wore a woollen hat on his head and looked as dishevelled as he had when he last spoke to Sigurdur Óli behind the police station.

  Andrés made to stand up but abandoned the idea. The stench he gave off was beyond belief; a reek of excrement combined with alcohol and urine. Apparently he had not changed his clothes for weeks.

  ‘You came then?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ Sigurdur Óli replied.

  ‘Well, here I am.’

  He had a plastic bag from the state off-licence that looked to Sigurdur Óli as if it contained two bottles. He sat down on the wall beside Andrés, watching him take one bottle out of the bag, loosen the cork and swig from the neck. Noticing that he had almost finished it, Sigurdur Óli reflected that there was probably more to be gained from him drunk than sober.

  ‘What’s going on, Andrés?’ he asked. ‘Why do you keep contacting me? What do you want from us?’

  Andrés looked around him, his eyes straying from one gravestone to the next, then took another gulp of alcohol.

  ‘And what are you doing here in the graveyard? I’ve been asking after you at your block of flats.’

  ‘There’s no peace anywhere. Except here.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a quiet spot,’ said Sigurdur Óli, remembering how the body of a young girl had once been found on the grave of Jón Sigurdsson, Iceland’s national hero. Bergthóra had been a witness on the case, which was how they had met. The occasional
car drove past along Sudurgata and on the other side of the wall the pleasant houses of Kirkjugardsstígur slumbered in the quiet afternoon.

  ‘Did you get my package?’ asked Andrés.

  ‘You mean the film clip?’

  ‘Yes, the bit of film. I found it in the end. Not much, but enough. He only kept two short films. He’d thrown all the rest away.’

  ‘Is it you we can see in the film?’

  ‘We? Who’s we? I sent it to you. Have you shown it to somebody? Nobody else was supposed to see it! Nobody else can see it! You mustn’t show it!’

  Andrés became so agitated that Sigurdur Óli tried to calm him down by reassuring him that he had only allowed a lip-reader to watch it to find out what the boy in the film was saying. No one else had seen it, he added, which was not far from the truth. He had not put the inquiry on an official footing yet because he wanted to conduct his own investigation first, to see if there were sufficient grounds to call in the vice squad and devote time and manpower to pursuing the case.

  ‘Is it you in the film?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me,’ said Andrés faintly. ‘Who else … who else would it be?’

  He fell silent and drank from the bottle.

  ‘It took you a long time to find the film, did it? So where did you find it in the end?’

  ‘You see, my mother … wasn’t … she wasn’t strong, she couldn’t control him, you know?’ Andrés said, ignoring the question and following some thread of his own. He was unshaven, his tufty beard sparse, his face grimy. A bloody bruise stood out under one eye as if he had been in a fight or an accident. His eyes were small, grey, watery, almost colourless, his nose swollen and crooked as if it had once been broken and never properly set, perhaps during the years that he had spent loitering around the bus station at Hlemmur for warmth.

  ‘Who are you talking about? Who couldn’t she control?’

  ‘He just used her, you know? She gave him a home and he kept her in drink and drugs, and no one bothered about me, eh? He could do what he liked with me.’

  His voice was hoarse and slurred, fuelled with ancient anger and loathing.

  ‘Are there any other films?’

  ‘He got a kick out of making them,’ Andrés said. ‘He had a projector that he stole from some school when he was working in the countryside. Had a stash of porn that they used to smuggle in on the boats.’

  He was quiet again.

  ‘Are you talking about a man called Rögnvaldur?’ asked Sigurdur Óli.

  Andrés was staring into space. ‘Do you know who he is?’

  ‘We spoke to you in January, on another matter,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘Do you remember? You remembered the other day. We spoke to you about this Rögnvaldur back then. He was your stepfather, wasn’t he?’

  Andrés did not answer.

  ‘Was it him who made the film you sent us?’

  ‘He was missing a finger. He never told me why. But I sometimes comforted myself by hoping that it hurt, hoping that he had suffered and screamed from the pain. Because he bloody well deserved to.’

  ‘Is he the man you’re describing?’

  Andrés hung his head, nodding reluctantly.

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘A long time ago, years ago.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Ten. When it started.’

  ‘So, around 1970? We tried to work it out.’

  ‘You can never be free of it,’ Andrés said, so quietly that Sigurdur Óli could barely hear him. ‘However hard you try, you can never be free of it. Mostly I’ve tried to drown it in drink, but that doesn’t work either.’

  He raised his head, straightened his back and cast a glance at the sky, as if seeking something in the heavens. His voice dropped to a whisper.

  ‘I was in hell for two years. Almost constantly. Then he left.’

  30

  A BUS DROVE past noisily, down Sudurgata in the direction of the city centre, and the sound of laughter rose from Kirkjugardsstígur: life in the city carried on as usual but in the graveyard where Andrés sat it might as well have stopped altogether. He did not say another word. Sigurdur Óli waited for him to continue, unwilling to press him. The minutes passed. Andrés had picked up one of the bottles, taken a long draught, then shoved it back in the bag with the other one. He had retreated into a private world. When all hope of his resuming the story seemed lost, Sigurdur Óli coughed.

  ‘Why now?’ he asked.

  He was not sure if Andrés had heard him.

  ‘Why now, Andrés?’

  The other man turned his head and regarded Sigurdur Óli as if he were a complete stranger.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Why are you telling us this now?’ Sigurdur Óli asked again. ‘Even if we caught this Rögnvaldur, the case is long dead, long over. There’s nothing we can do. There are no laws that can touch him now.’

  ‘No,’ Andrés said slowly. ‘You lot can’t do anything. You never could have …’ He trailed off.

  ‘What happened to Rögnvaldur?’

  ‘He moved out and never showed his face again,’ said Andrés. ‘I didn’t know any more about him. He just disappeared. For all these years.’

  ‘But then?’

  ‘Then I saw him again. I told you about that.’

  ‘We couldn’t find him, and we lost interest once we had closed the case that he was thought to be involved in, because it turned out he hadn’t been anywhere near it. There was no way we could use your statement; it was so vague and you refused to give us any more specific information. So why do you want to talk about it now?’

  Sigurdur Óli waited for an answer but Andrés merely gazed down at his feet.

  ‘If I remember right,’ Sigurdur Óli went on, ‘you hinted that he had killed someone of your age. Were you talking about yourself? Is that how you experienced what he did to you? That he killed some part of you?’

  ‘Maybe he should have finished me off,’ said Andrés. ‘Maybe it would have been better. I don’t remember what I told you. I haven’t been … I haven’t been in a good way for a long time.’

  ‘There’s support available, you know,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘For people like you, people who’ve gone through this sort of thing. Have you tried any help like that?’

  Andrés shook his head. ‘I wanted to see you to tell you … to tell you that whatever happens, however things turn out, it wasn’t all my fault. Do you understand? It wasn’t all my fault. I want you – the police – to know that.’

  ‘How what turns out?’ asked Sigurdur Óli. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  ‘Have you found Rögnvaldur?’

  Andrés did not answer.

  ‘I can’t let you leave without answering. You can’t just drop hints like that.’

  ‘I’m not trying to make excuses. What’s done is done and it’s too late to undo it. After he left I tried to … I tried to pull myself together but I couldn’t deaden the feelings. Then I found that I could keep them away with booze and dope, so I turned to them, to the people who could supply them, and that way I managed to keep the feelings under control. The minute he was gone. I got drunk for the first time when I was twelve years old. Sniffed glue. Took anything I could lay my hands on. I’ve hardly been sober since. That’s the way it is – I’m not making excuses.’

  He paused, coughed, and delved into the bag for the bottle.

  ‘You’ll find out,’ he added.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  ‘I gather you wanted to train as an upholsterer,’ said Sigurdur Óli, keen to keep him talking, to encourage him to open up, in the hope that more would emerge about Rögnvaldur. It did not take an expert to see that Andrés was on the verge of mental and physical collapse.

  ‘I’ve tried to clean up my act over the years,’ he said. ‘But it never lasted.’

  ‘Have you tried making anything out of leather recently?’ Sigurdur Óli asked carefu
lly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Andrés said, immediately on his guard.

  ‘Your neighbour, the woman next door, was worried about you,’ Sigurdur Óli explained. ‘She thought something might have happened to you, so she let me into your flat. I found bits of leather in the kitchen and when I put them together they made a round shape, a bit like a face.’

  Andrés did not respond.

  ‘What were you cutting out?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Andrés said, beginning to scan his surroundings as if in search of an escape route. ‘I don’t understand why you had to go into my flat. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Your neighbour was concerned,’ Sigurdur Óli repeated.

  ‘You talked her into it.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have gone into my place.’

  ‘What are you doing with the leather?’

  ‘It’s private.’

  ‘Do you remember we found child pornography at your flat in January?’ said Sigurdur Óli, changing tack.

  ‘I …’ Andrés faltered.

  ‘What were you doing with that?’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t.’

  ‘I … I despise myself more than anyone else … I …’ He started mumbling again.

  ‘Where is Rögnvaldur?’ asked Sigurdur Óli.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I can’t let you leave until you’ve told me.’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do. Then I remembered. How the farmer used the spike. Then I knew how to do it.’

  ‘The spike?’

  ‘It’s no thicker than a krona piece at the end.’

  Andrés was no longer making sense.

  ‘Where is Rögnvaldur?’ asked Sigurdur Óli again. ‘Do you know where he is?’

  Andrés sat there dumbly, his eyes on the ground.

  ‘I always wanted to go back there,’ he said at last. ‘But I never got round to it.’