The Shadow District Page 6

  The man explained to Flóvent how in the end they had gone out looking for children to adopt. They weren’t getting any younger, and when his sister-in-law wrote to tell them of a poor family in her area who needed help they didn’t hesitate. Three of the children were to be farmed out to neighbours, but the father wasn’t averse to the idea of one of them going to a nice couple in Reykjavík. The sister had told him about them, and he had nothing against meeting them. So the couple had travelled north over the moors to talk to the girl’s father, who turned out to be a crofter living in very straitened circumstances. And there they took the little girl in their arms for the first time. A happy, healthy child in her second year. Her mother had died four months earlier while giving birth to her eighth and last baby.

  ‘Life can be very unfair,’ said the woman, raising red-rimmed eyes to Flóvent.

  So they took little Rósamunda home with them, her husband continued. She was happy in town with them, went to Austurbær School and passed her school certificate. Though she wasn’t especially good at her books, she had always been hard-working and clever with her hands. They had talked to her about going to college but she was bored of schoolwork and at the beginning of the war she had taken a job at a dressmaker’s near Austurvöllur Square. Rósamunda enjoyed sewing and had been over the moon to get a position with such a good seamstress. She was desperate to learn how to make dresses and soon started creating her own pieces. She’d made a very pretty frock for her mother.

  ‘She used to talk about setting up her own shop one day,’ said the woman, her pride shining through.

  ‘No chance of that now,’ added her husband.

  ‘It was ever such a nice dress,’ said his wife. ‘Ever so pretty and exquisitely made. I must say, I’ve never owned a dress that suited me so well. She was always good with a needle, so it came easily to her.’

  ‘You mentioned that she’d disappeared once before,’ Flóvent prompted gently.

  ‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘About three months ago.’

  ‘What happened?’

  The man glanced at his wife, suddenly unsure of himself. ‘She didn’t come home for two days.’

  ‘She never really told us what happened,’ said his wife.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, the poor dear. I expect she must have been with a young man. But she didn’t want to talk about it and we didn’t press her. Though, I don’t know, perhaps it would have been better if we’d insisted. In hindsight.’

  ‘What did she say?’ Flóvent searched their faces in turn.

  ‘She said she’d needed a little time to herself. That was it really. Didn’t come home for two days and that’s all she would say.’

  ‘Was she in some sort of trouble?’

  ‘Not that we could tell.’

  ‘And she gave no further explanation?’

  The couple exchanged glances again without answering.

  ‘Had she ever done anything like that before?’ asked Flóvent.

  ‘No, never,’ said the husband. ‘It was just that one time. We didn’t want to press her. If something had happened and she didn’t want to tell us, that was her business. We thought maybe she’d tell us later. Once it had all blown over.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘No, she hadn’t by the time she …’

  The man trailed off. Flóvent looked at them sitting dejectedly before him. It was plain that they bitterly regretted not doing more when their daughter disappeared the first time. They couldn’t turn back the clock now.

  ‘She told us not to worry,’ said the woman. ‘That it was nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Was she seeing a young man at the time?’

  ‘Not as far as we know,’ said her mother.

  ‘What about her friends? Did they know anything?’

  ‘She didn’t have that many friends,’ said the woman. ‘She’d never had a boyfriend, though she easily could have found one, a pretty thing like her. But she did get on well with another girl who worked at the dressmaker’s.’

  ‘Did she have any contact with her birth family?’ asked Flóvent.

  ‘No, very little,’ said the man. ‘It was only recently that she began to take an interest in her background. She exchanged letters with her … her father, I suppose I should call him, and was thinking of taking a trip up north sometime soon.’

  ‘Had she known for long that she had family up there?’

  ‘She knew from the very start,’ said the woman. ‘It was never a secret, if that’s what you’re asking. We never kept anything from her. Our relationship wasn’t like that. She was our daughter.’

  ‘Yet she never told you why she didn’t come home for two days?’

  They were silent.

  ‘She must have had her reasons,’ the man said finally.

  ‘Did she associate with American soldiers at all?’

  ‘Soldiers?’ said the woman, surprised. ‘No. Not at all. No. Impossible.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because she didn’t want anything to do with them. You can be sure of that – she didn’t know any Americans. Personally, I mean. Of course soldiers may have come into the shop where she worked, but that was all. She definitely didn’t have any other occasion to meet them. She never mentioned it. Not once.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘The day you found her,’ said the man. ‘She went to work and we never saw her again. We went out of town to stay with friends in Selfoss.’

  ‘It was only a short trip and we assumed she was fine,’ said his wife. ‘We heard on the wireless about the girl behind the theatre but of course it never crossed our minds that it could be our Rósamunda. Then, when we got home yesterday evening she wasn’t there, and she didn’t come back in the night, so early this morning we spoke to the woman who owns the dressmaker’s but she didn’t know where Rósamunda was, only that she hadn’t turned up to work yesterday, so she’d assumed she was ill. Then we began to suspect −’

  ‘What makes you think she might have been involved with an American?’ the husband cut in, leaning forwards in his chair.

  ‘The doctor must have told you what he discovered during the post-mortem,’ said Flóvent. ‘How your daughter lost her life and how she’d used the services of –’

  ‘He said she’d had an abortion recently,’ interrupted the woman.

  ‘That’s right. Were you aware of that?’

  ‘No, we had no idea.’ The woman struggled to control her voice. ‘The poor child. It breaks my heart to think about it. She never told us and I … I didn’t notice anything. No doubt I should have done but … she hid it so well.’

  ‘Was it an American soldier who did this to her?’ asked her husband.

  ‘I really don’t know,’ said Flóvent. ‘But it’s a possibility we have to consider, given the current situation in Reykjavík.’

  ‘Was it the same man who got her in the family way?’

  ‘We can’t rule it out,’ said Flóvent. ‘But we don’t know for sure. We know nothing of the circumstances that led to Rósamunda losing her life.’

  The couple sat in silence, their hands in their laps, and Flóvent was deeply moved by their plight, by their wordless grief, their bewilderment in the face of such an incomprehensible tragedy.

  ‘She was so beautiful and such a good girl,’ said the woman, her voice thick with tears. ‘I just don’t understand how something like this could happen to her. Just can’t begin to understand it.’

  12

  As Konrád sat beside Vigga’s bed waiting for her to wake up, his thoughts drifted back to the little street where he grew up: Skuggasund. Even in his earliest memories, the war had been over for several years, though the prosperity that it brought was still very much in evidence. But the years that followed had been tough. The Shadow District used to be its own little world, with its shops and businesses, large and small. It was intersected from west to east by Lindargata, bracketed by high culture at one end and the me
at-packing trade at the other. At the western end, the National Theatre turned its back to the street as if it were too grand for the neighbourhood. It was flanked by the National Library, for those who thirsted after knowledge, and the High Court, for those who had strayed from the path of virtue. At the eastern end, the autumn lambs would fall eerily silent at the gates of the abattoir. Between these poles, the properties ranged from shacks clad in corrugated iron to modern houses built of concrete, with two or even three storeys; some well maintained, others dilapidated, their small back gardens facing south into the sun. It was here, in one of the poorest basement slums, that Konrád had grown up.

  The inhabitants, an assortment of labourers, artisans and toffs, got on with their lives in relative harmony. There were drinkers and teetotallers. Those who went to church on Sundays a little the worse for wear and celebrated the word of God with a twinge of conscience, chiming in wholeheartedly when the minister intoned: ‘… and forgive us our trespasses’. And those who donned their fedoras and strolled through town with their lady wives – showing off a new coat perhaps – removing their hats and decorously greeting others of their kind. While their wives gazed into shop windows, exclaiming over a beautiful dress or tasteful hat direct from Copenhagen or London, the men would squint out to sea with narrowed eyes, keeping track of the ships, or they would follow the progress of a magnificent new automobile, gliding down Austurstræti like a glittering dream. At noon the savoury smell of roasting meat would waft into every corner of the house, and the afternoon would pass in a satisfied doze until coffee time. That was how Sundays used to be. And there was always some hungover bloke standing at a window wearing nothing but a vest, trying to recruit a boy to run down to the shop and fetch him a cold Pilsner, yelling after him ‘Keep the change!’

  It was all so vivid to Konrád that he would often revisit it in his mind. Unusually for the time, his mother had worked outside the home and been the one to put food on the table. His father, on the other hand, rarely held down a job, and was involved in all kinds of dodgy schemes, most of them illegal. As Konrád got older he discovered that petty crimes and lawbreaking were his father’s daily bread. His parents didn’t have a large family to provide for, just him and his sister Elísabet. Konrád recalled the visitors who used to come to their home: relatives from the north, friends of his mother, his father’s more dubious associates. The heyday of the fraudulent seances had been before he was born, but he remembered his dad’s tales about the meetings held in their little flat. His father never adopted the role of medium himself, freely admitting that he was a lousy actor. The psychics, sometimes male, sometimes female, used to warm up by asking if the names Gudrún or Sigurdur – some of the most common in the country – meant anything to those present; if anyone was familiar with a painting of Mount Esja or knew why a smell of mothballs should suddenly assail the medium’s senses.

  At the height of these seances, the sitting-room tables would levitate and the chairs shift as if by magic; a rumbling would be heard, and the most extraordinary details would surface from the past. The sitters latched on to these purported connections to the deceased, their hearts gladdened that life had conquered death and that death was only a door to another, better world. Of course, the entire thing was a hoax cooked up by Konrád’s father and his associates. They used to toy with the feelings of the bereaved, merely for the sake of swindling a few krónur out of them. When, years later, these shameless deceptions came up in conversation, Konrád’s father showed no sign of contrition. He’d spotting an opening, he said, when the Icelandic Society for Psychical Research was at the height of its popularity in the late thirties and forties. The society had gained particular fame as a result of two incidents. One was the disinterment and reburial in Skagafjördur of the remains of Solveig of Miklabær, an eighteenth-century woman, the subject of a celebrated ghost story; the other was the extraordinary peregrinations undertaken by the bones of the beloved nineteenth-century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson, all the way from the Danish capital Copenhagen to his birthplace of Hraun in Öxnadalur, before finally coming to rest at the ancient assembly site of Thingvellir. Their spirits had allegedly made contact at seances organised by the society, and it seemed only right to comply with their desire for reburial. In such a heady atmosphere, Konrád’s father’s psychic agency had prospered. Some of the mediums he worked with genuinely believed they had the gift but just needed a little leg-up to get things going. Others were simply good actors, sensitive to the reactions and body language of the credulous, and ingenious at extracting information from them.

  Hearing a faint moan from Vigga, Konrád took the liberty of lifting the duvet from her face. There she lay, all sunken cheeks and toothless jaw, her wrinkled skin as dry as parchment, grey tufts of hair plastered to her skull. Her eyes opened a fraction.

  ‘Vigga?’ whispered Konrád. ‘Can you hear me?’

  No reaction.

  ‘Vigga?’ he said again, louder this time.

  The old woman didn’t move a muscle, merely stared dimly into space.

  ‘I don’t know if you remember me. My name’s Konrád and I used to live near you in the Shadow District.’

  She didn’t stir, and he lapsed into silence. The girl who looked after Vigga had told him she was only occasionally compos mentis. The girl didn’t think she had long to live, but admitted that she would have said the same several years ago too, adding that she was an amazingly tough old bird.

  ‘I wanted to know if a man came to see you recently. His name was Stefán, Stefán Thórdarson.’

  Vigga blinked.

  ‘Do you remember him at all?’ Konrád waited for a reaction but none came. ‘He may have been calling himself Thorson,’ he added, in the faint hope that the old woman could hear him.

  This seemed to do the trick. Slowly Vigga turned her head and regarded him with colourless eyes.

  ‘Thorson,’ repeated Konrád. ‘Do you know him?’

  The old woman stared at him without speaking.

  ‘Did he come here to see you a week or two ago?’

  Vigga didn’t respond but nor did she take her eyes off Konrád.

  ‘Thorson’s dead,’ he continued. ‘I thought you’d want to know that if you were friends with him. You may have heard already. I gather he came here to visit you recently.’

  Vigga’s gaze was unwavering.

  ‘I don’t know if you remember me. I grew up in the Shadow District, not far from where you lived. My name’s Konrád.’

  ‘H …?’ Vigga tried to whisper, but it came out so quietly that Konrád couldn’t catch it.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘H … ow?’

  ‘How? Do you mean how did he die? Well, it was rather a bad business actually. He was smothered. Very probably murdered.’

  Vigga grimaced. ‘Mur … dered?’ she whispered weakly, almost voicelessly.

  ‘We don’t know who did it,’ said Konrád. ‘He lived alone, and he was found dead. I understand he came here shortly before he died, so I wanted to ask how you knew him.’

  ‘He … came …’ Vigga’s eyes closed.

  ‘I found some cuttings in his flat – newspaper cuttings about a girl who was found dead behind the National Theatre during the war,’ Konrád continued. ‘The girl had been strangled. Do you know why he kept those cuttings? Did he come to see you about the case? Or for a completely different reason? How did you two know each other anyway? How did you know Stefán Thórdarson?’

  Konrád kept up a flow of questions but Vigga no longer seemed able to hear him.

  ‘Why did he visit you, Vigga? Why did he visit you just before he died?’

  The old woman had fallen asleep again. Konrád restrained the urge to try to wake her and instead sat quietly and patiently by her bed, remembering that Vigga hadn’t always been in a foul mood, cursing the local children. Once, when Konrád was seven, he had plucked up the courage to knock on her door early one Sunday morning. He was selling stamps for the Scouts and ha
d knocked on almost all the doors in the neighbourhood except hers. He’d had scant success – had in fact only sold one measly stamp – but then perhaps he had set off a little too early in his excitement and woken his prospective customers, who didn’t hesitate to let him know what they thought about that. He hadn’t intended to risk approaching Vigga’s lair, as he had always avoided her like the plague, but for some reason he forgot his cowardice and before he knew it he had rapped on her door. A long time seemed to pass and he was on the point of running away while he still could when the door opened and there stood Vigga, glaring down at him.

  ‘What do you want, boy?’ she had asked, scanning the street for more little pests waiting to torment her. There were none to be seen.

  ‘I … I … I’m selling stamps,’ Konrád stammered.

  ‘Stamps? What are you on about?’

  ‘Scout … Scout stamps.’

  ‘After my money are you? A little scamp like you? Want to come in?’

  Konrád hesitated, then told the truth: ‘No.’

  Vigga regarded him stormily for a moment and Konrád thought he should perhaps have said ‘no, thank you’ and was about to correct himself when she began to emit a rumbling noise which became a full-blown guffaw. She laughed so hard she had to lean against the door.

  Konrád had turned, ready to flee down the steps, when her laughter subsided.

  ‘There, there, I’ll buy some stamps from you, boy,’ said Vigga. ‘Wait a minute while I fetch my purse.’

  She bought three Scout stamps on the understanding that he would never knock on her door or show his face there again, for any reason whatsoever.

  Konrád studied the old woman under the duvet, still hearing the echo of her laughter on that long-ago Sunday morning. Without warning she opened her eyes and looked at him.

  ‘Th … orson?’ Her whisper was barely audible.