The Shadow District Read online

‘Do you remember him?’

  ‘Is it … you … Thorson?’

  Konrád didn’t know what to say. Did she really think he was Thorson? ‘I’m not him if …’

  Vigga closed her eyes again.

  ‘Do you know if he was asking questions about that girl who was found behind the National Theatre?’

  No response.

  ‘Do you have any idea why Thorson held on to cuttings about the case for all these years?’

  There was no point asking. Vigga had dozed off again. After sitting beside her for a while longer, Konrád rose to leave. He stroked the old woman’s cheek gently. Once she had terrified him, but no longer. There was an air of tranquillity about her. He was on his way out of the room when he thought he heard her voice behind him.

  Konrád turned. ‘Did you say something?’

  Vigga opened her mouth but barely had the strength to articulate the words. ‘Thorson? Is that … you … back again?’

  ‘Is everything all right, Vigga?’

  ‘Have you come … about that girl?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Konrád, thinking he might as well go along with it.

  ‘… not … just her …’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘… there was … another one,’ croaked Vigga from under the duvet, her voice hoarse and threadbare with age. ‘Another one who disappeared … and the huldufólk … the huldufólk …’

  ‘Another girl?’ Konrád leaned closer to hear. ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘… never … found her … never found her bones …’

  13

  The military police had their headquarters at the Laugarnes camp. There, standing in a huddle, were twelve GIs guarded by four armed men. They had been rounded up from various parts of Reykjavík and the surrounding area by the military police and brought there without any explanation. Nine were privates, one a lieutenant, two worked in the mess hall, and one was from the US naval base in Hvalfjördur. They still hadn’t worked out that they were all called Frank when the door opened and Thorson greeted them. Flóvent had telephoned following his meeting with Rósamunda’s parents to inform him that the body had been identified and the girl’s parents were adamant that she hadn’t known any American soldiers, let alone been walking out with one.

  The men were made to line up in a row, facing forwards. Two or three demanded to know why they were being treated like this, but Thorson just asked for their patience, thanked them for assisting the police in a difficult case and assured them that they would soon be free to go. At that moment Flóvent entered the room, accompanied by Ingiborg, who recognised her Frank immediately.

  She walked straight up to him, and he gave her a chilly, embarrassed smile. The other men watched, still unsure what the police wanted with them and what sort of drama they were witnessing.

  Thorson went over to Ingiborg. ‘Is that him?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is Frank Carroll. If that is his name.’

  The soldier met Thorson’s eye and nodded. ‘I’m Frank Carroll,’ he murmured in English.

  ‘Why did you lie to me?’ Ingiborg asked him, with a hurt expression. He may not have understood the words, but he couldn’t fail to detect the pain in her voice. ‘What’s your real name? Who are you?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I −’

  ‘Was everything you told me a lie?’ she whispered. ‘About us? Everything?’

  Frank’s gaze slid away from hers. Thorson turned to the other soldiers, thanked them again for their help and told them they were free to go. Exchanging bemused glances and muttering under their breath, the men filed out of the room. Ingiborg turned to Flóvent.

  ‘May I go too?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But wouldn’t you like a ride home?’

  ‘No, thank you, I’ll manage.’ She hurried out without looking at Frank. He watched her leave, his expression hard to read, though Thorson couldn’t detect even the slightest hint of remorse.

  Once they were alone, the three of them sat down and Frank lit a cigarette, looking from Flóvent to Thorson in turn.

  ‘Is this about the girl we found?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thorson.

  ‘I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Then why did you run away?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t my problem. I know nothing about it. I didn’t know the girl. I can’t help you. I realised that right away and got the hell out of there. Did Ingiborg call you? Did she lose her nerve?’

  ‘What’s your real name?’ asked Thorson, ignoring his questions.

  ‘Frank Ruddy.’

  ‘Why did you give a fake name?’

  Frank shrugged as if it was self-evident.

  ‘You’re not a sergeant either,’ continued Thorson. ‘You lied to the girl about that as well. You didn’t think being a private would impress her?’

  ‘They like it better if you’re an officer,’ said Frank. ‘They can’t tell the uniforms apart. Don’t understand the stripes.’

  ‘And that makes it all right to feed them a pack of lies, does it?’ asked Flóvent. He spoke good English with a slight Scots burr from a stint in Edinburgh.

  Frank didn’t answer.

  ‘It says here that you’re married, with two children,’ said Thorson, leafing through some papers. ‘Are you divorced?’

  ‘No,’ said Frank, seeing no reason to lie any more since he assumed they would check up on whatever he said. ‘I didn’t want Ingiborg to find out I was married. That’s why I skedaddled.’

  ‘You didn’t want her to know that you were a husband and father of two back in Illinois?’ said Flóvent.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Frank. ‘I thought if we were summoned as witnesses I’d be exposed, and I didn’t want to hurt Ingiborg.’

  ‘A true gentleman,’ said Thorson. ‘Are there other women in the picture?’

  ‘Other women?’

  ‘Other Icelandic women, I mean. Are you seeing other women? Apart from Ingiborg?’

  Frank hesitated. ‘OK, I’ll tell you so you don’t think I’m lying. This is the truth. I’ve been dating one other girl. That’s all. There aren’t any others.’

  ‘Does Ingiborg know about her?’ asked Flóvent.

  ‘No. And she doesn’t know about Ingiborg either.’

  ‘So you had a few reasons for fleeing the scene,’ said Thorson disgustedly.

  ‘I didn’t want any trouble.’

  ‘And that’s the only reason, eh? You’d been screwing around?’

  ‘What are you driving at?’

  ‘Sounds like more bullshit. Like the name you invented. Where did you get it from anyway? Who’s Carroll?’

  ‘He’s a Hollywood actor. They were showing a movie of his when I met Ingiborg. The Flying Tigers.’

  ‘With John Wayne,’ Flóvent told Thorson in Icelandic. ‘I saw it. The actor’s called John Carroll. He’s not making that part up.’

  ‘Right,’ said Frank, catching the name and looking rather shamefaced. ‘John Carroll. We were standing by the movie theatre and she asked me what else I was called besides Frank and I saw the name John Carroll on a poster and … it just slipped out. I didn’t even think, just told her my name was Frank Carroll.’

  ‘Why did you run away from the theatre, Frank?’ asked Thorson.

  ‘I’ve already −’

  ‘Was it because you recognised the girl the moment you clapped eyes on her?’

  ‘No. I never saw her before.’

  ‘Ever heard the name Rósamunda?’

  ‘No. Who’s that?’

  ‘The murdered girl.’

  ‘Never heard of her,’ said Frank. ‘I swear to you. I didn’t know that girl. Didn’t recognise her. I never saw her before. Did you talk to the guy who was standing on the corner?’

  ‘What guy?’ asked Thorson.

  ‘The one who was standing on the corner behind the theatre.’

  ‘Which corner?’

  ‘Which one? I don’t know the names of the streets around
there. He was standing on the corner smoking when we first arrived, but when I looked back he was gone.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘I don’t know. He wasn’t a soldier, I can tell you that. He was an Icelander – he was dressed like a civilian, wasn’t in uniform. But I couldn’t see that well. It was dark. I just happened to clock a man standing there and it looked to me like he had a cigarette, but when I checked to see if he was still there, he’d disappeared.’

  ‘Was this to your right or left as you were facing away from the theatre?’

  ‘The nearest corner on the right, the other side of the street,’ said Frank, patting his right arm for emphasis.

  ‘Which street is that?’ asked Thorson, turning to Flóvent.

  ‘Skuggasund,’ said Flóvent. ‘That’ll be the corner of Lindargata and Skuggasund.’

  ‘Ingiborg didn’t mention a man.’

  ‘Then she can’t have noticed him. I only saw him for a second. But I’m not lying – he was standing there.’

  ‘What was this man doing?’

  ‘Nothing. Just standing on the corner, smoking. Then he was gone.’

  Thorson wanted to head straight over to Skuggasund, even though a couple of days had passed since Frank had spotted the man. He and Flóvent parked on Lindargata, walked to the corner in question and looked around for evidence of the smoker. A faint illumination came from Skuggasund, but apart from that the place was shrouded in darkness; the street light on the corner was broken, and the next one was a fair way off. Thorson had a torch, which he shone carefully around them. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, and all they found were the butts of two American cigarettes that had been ground into the street.

  ‘What kind are they?’ asked Flóvent.

  ‘Lucky Strike.’

  14

  That evening Konrád’s sister dropped in to see him. She was single, worked in a library and lived a life of fairly unrelieved monotony. Her workplace suited her down to the ground, as books had been her greatest passion since childhood. She was something of a collector too and had built up an enviable library of her own. Elísabet, or Beta as she was affectionately known, was an old-school communist and took a dismissive attitude to most things on the grounds that they were bourgeois. There was nothing she loathed more than capitalism, a term that covered a multitude of sins in her book.

  ‘Is this a bad time?’ she asked, perfunctorily as always. If it was, she pretended not to notice.

  ‘No, come in,’ said Konrád. ‘Would you like a glass of wine?’ He took out a bottle of Dead Arm.

  ‘No, thanks. Drinking rather a lot, aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Anyway, red wine’s good for you.’

  ‘Good for you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Huh, don’t tell me you swallow that crap from the red-wine capitalists,’ said Beta, taking a seat in the kitchen. She noticed that her brother seemed rather distracted.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did I come at a bad time?’

  ‘No. Actually, I was just thinking about Dad and the seances at our flat.’

  ‘What on earth made you think of that?’

  ‘A case I’m looking into. Remember the girl who was found strangled behind the National Theatre during the war?’

  ‘All I remember is that Dad held that disastrous seance because of her. Why?’ she added suspiciously. ‘Was he involved in the case?’

  ‘No, not directly,’ said Konrád. ‘It turns out that an old man called Thorson, who came over during the war, had hung on to some cuttings about the girl’s murder, and it seems he went to see Vigga about it.’

  ‘Old Vigga? Is she still alive?’

  ‘Only just. I went to visit her, but she was pretty out of it – started rambling on about some other girl, not the one found by the theatre. You don’t remember hearing about any similar incidents, do you?’

  ‘No. But then it all happened before we were born. Was the other girl found in the Shadow District too?’

  ‘I don’t remember anyone mentioning another case when I was with the police. The question is whether it ever made it into the papers.’

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t be too hard to look it up.’

  ‘The thing is, shortly after he visited Vigga, this man – Thorson – was murdered. He seems to have been digging around for information about the dead girl by the theatre. And possibly about a second girl too, given what Vigga said. I got the impression she mistook me for Thorson. She’s a shadow of her former self, poor old thing.’

  ‘What was her name again? Rósamunda, wasn’t it? The girl behind the theatre?’

  ‘That’s right, Rósamunda. Why was he wondering about her now, seventy years later? Thorson was in his nineties. Why did he go and see Vigga? For that matter, how come he knew her in the first place and what could she have known about the case?’

  ‘Well, the girl was found in the neighbourhood and Vigga used to keep her ear to the ground. She lived there almost all her life.’

  ‘Yes, but he must have unearthed something directly connected to the case. God knows what that could have been and how he managed it.’

  ‘Perhaps it had been nagging at him his whole life,’ said Beta. ‘Perhaps he stumbled across some new information. Who was he?’

  ‘I haven’t been able to find out much about him,’ said Konrád. ‘Incidentally, Vigga said something else about the other girl. It was very hard to hear but I thought she said her bones had never been found. But I don’t know what she meant and I couldn’t get any more out of her.’

  ‘So some other girl must have suffered a similar fate, but her body was never found?’

  ‘Actually, that fits with something Dad said about the seance, though it was all a bit vague.’

  ‘What, that there were two girls? Rósamunda and a second girl you know nothing about?’

  ‘Yes, a girl who was never found,’ said Konrád. ‘Assuming there’s any point in trying to make sense of what Vigga said. I wonder if Thorson was still looking for her after all these years? Was that why he visited Vigga at the nursing home? Mind you, I’ve no idea what she was saying about the huldufólk.’

  ‘The huldufólk?’

  ‘Vigga mentioned this second girl and referred to the hidden people – the elves, presumably – in the same breath.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue. But I was wondering if it could be the same girl the medium mentioned to Dad.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘The medium said there was another girl.’

  ‘That was a hoax,’ said Beta angrily. ‘They were con men. You can’t believe anything that came out of those seances. When are you going to wake up? Don’t tell me you’re still trying to … Dad was an absolute shit and no doubt deserved what happened to him. He was a nasty piece of work who swindled people and harmed people and treated Mum so badly she walked out on him, thank God.’

  ‘Leaving me behind.’

  ‘She didn’t leave you behind, Konrád – he wouldn’t let you go. He split us up. That’s the kind of man he was. We’ve been over this again and again. How do you think Mum felt when she had to leave you behind? He was just using you to get back at her. He broke up the family. Mum couldn’t live with him any longer and that was his way of punishing her. That’s the kind of man he was and you’re old enough to stop defending him. Our father was a feckless creep and a scumbag.’

  ‘I remember what he was like,’ said Konrád. ‘There’s no need to fly off the handle. I know how he treated Mum. I know all that and I don’t need you to remind me every time we talk about him. But he wasn’t completely worthless.’

  ‘He was a total shit. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘How can you say he deserved what happened to him? You know nothing about it. You come out with this crap but you have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘He brought it
on himself,’ Beta snorted, and stood up to leave, as she did from time to time when she got really angry with Konrád. ‘He brought it on himself.’

  15

  Following their interview with Frank Ruddy, Flóvent and Thorson took a table at a restaurant on Hafnarstræti called Hot and Cold. The place had opened after the outbreak of war and was popular with servicemen. It sold fish and chips alongside traditional Icelandic dishes such as breaded lamb chops, rhubarb pudding, and skyr with cream, which proved a hit with the soldiers. The worst of the crush was over by the time the two men arrived and the owner, a short, curly-haired man in shoes with noticeably built-up heels, was busy clearing the tables. As they tucked into their salt cod with boiled potatoes and dripping they fell to discussing Frank Ruddy.

  Ruddy would remain in the custody of the military police until they had confirmed his statement and checked whether he had a criminal record in the States. He had given them the name of the other Icelandic girl he was seeing and Flóvent was planning to talk to her later that evening. Both men instinctively felt he was lying to them about the man he claimed to have seen on the corner of Skuggasund and Lindargata, deliberately misleading them to divert attention from himself. It seemed that had been his intention all along: he was as deceitful and slippery in his dealings with them as he was where Icelandic women were concerned.

  ‘Luckily they’re not all like him,’ said Thorson.

  ‘No, the girls deserve better than jackasses like that.’

  ‘John Carroll?’ mused Thorson. ‘Didn’t he play Zorro?’

  ‘Yes, he was Zorro.’ Flóvent blew on his hot dripping. He was a keen cinemagoer, and a particular fan of two stars, Clark Gable, and the new lead, Humphrey Bogart.

  ‘Maybe Frank sees himself as some kind of Zorro,’ said Thorson. ‘A womanising adventurer.’

  ‘Yes, some hero.’

  ‘Do you think he had something to do with the girl’s murder?’

  ‘I can’t picture it,’ said Flóvent. ‘He’s a good-for-nothing fool but I don’t believe he knew her. Why would he take his girlfriend to the scene of the crime? Seems a bit far-fetched to me.’

  ‘Rósamunda stayed away from GIs according to her parents,’ said Thorson.