The Darkness(5)
Hulda got the distinct impression that Magnús wanted her out of his office; he had more pressing matters to attend to.
‘Great. I’ll try to keep myself occupied then,’ she said sarcastically, and getting to her feet, she walked out without a goodbye or a word of thanks.
V
Hulda stumbled back to her own office in a state of shock. She felt as if she’d been sacked, thrown out on her ear; as if all her years of service counted for nothing. It was an entirely new experience for her. She knew she was over-reacting, that she shouldn’t take it like this, but couldn’t seem to get rid of the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.
She sat down at her desk and stared blankly at the computer, lacking the energy even to switch it on. Her office, which up to now had been like her second home, felt suddenly alien, as if the new owner had already taken possession. The old chair felt uncomfortable, the brown wooden desk looked tired and worn, the documents no longer meant anything to her. She couldn’t bear the thought of spending another minute in there.
She needed a distraction, something to take her mind off what had happened. What better than to take Magnús at his word and dig around among the cold-case files? In reality, though, Hulda didn’t need to think twice: there was one unsolved incident that cried out to be reopened. The original investigation had been conducted by one of her colleagues – she had only followed its progress second hand – but that might prove an advantage, enabling her to approach the evidence with fresh eyes.
The case involved an unexplained death that would almost certainly remain a mystery unless new evidence came to light. Perhaps it would prove a blessing in disguise, a hidden opportunity. The dead woman had no one to speak up for her, but Hulda could take on the role of advocate, however briefly. Plenty could be achieved in two weeks. She didn’t entertain any real hope of cracking the case, but it was worth trying. More than that, it would give her a purpose. She was grimly determined to turn up at the office every day until this ‘young man’ came to oust her. It crossed her mind to make an official complaint to HR about the way she was being treated and demand to see out the year, but there was time enough to think about that later. Right now, she wanted to direct her energies into something more positive.
Her first action was to call up the case file to refresh her memory of the details. The young woman’s body had been found on a dark winter’s morning in a rocky cove on Vatnsleysustr?nd, a thinly populated stretch of coast on the Reykjanes peninsula, some thirty kilometres south of Reykjavík. Hulda had never been to that particular cove, had never had any particular reason to go there, though she was familiar with the area, having often driven past it on her way to the airport. It was a bleak, windswept corner of the country, the treeless lava-fields offering little shelter from the storms that regularly blew in from the Atlantic to the south-west.
In the year and more that had passed since then, the incident had faded from public memory. Not that it had attracted much media coverage at the time. After the usual reports that a body had been discovered, the followup had received little attention: the news spotlight had been directed elsewhere. Although Iceland was one of the safest countries in the world, with only around two murders a year – and sometimes not even one – accidental deaths were far more common and journalists felt there was little mileage in covering them.
It wasn’t the media indifference that bothered Hulda; what concerned her was the suspicion that the CID colleague who had handled the case had been guilty of negligence. Alexander: she’d never had much faith in his abilities. In her opinion, he was neither diligent nor particularly bright, and he clung on to his position in CID only through a mixture of obstinacy and good connections. In a fairer world, she would have been promoted above him – she knew she was more intelligent, conscientious and experienced – but in spite of that she had remained stuck in the same rut. It was at times like this that she hadn’t been able to resist a gnawing sense of bitterness. She would have given anything to have the authority to step in and wrest the case away from a detective who clearly wasn’t up to the job.
Alexander’s lack of enthusiasm for the inquiry had been glaringly obvious at team meetings when, in a bored voice, he had gone out of his way to present any evidence that pointed to accidental death. His report, as Hulda now discovered, was a sloppy piece of work. It included an unsatisfactorily brief summary of the post-mortem results, concluding with the usual proviso in the case of bodies washed up by the sea that it was impossible to establish if foul play was involved. Unsurprisingly, the investigation had turned up nothing useful and the inquiry had been mothballed in favour of other ‘more urgent’ cases. Hulda couldn’t help wondering how different the response might have been if the young woman had been Icelandic. What was the betting that the case would have been given to a more competent detective if the public had been clamouring for results?
The dead woman was twenty-seven years old, the age Hulda had been when she gave birth to her daughter. Only twenty-seven, in her prime: far too young to be the subject of a police investigation, of a cold case that no one seemed remotely interested in reopening, except Hulda.
According to the pathologist’s report, she had drowned in salt water. Her head injuries were a possible indication that she had been subjected to violence beforehand, but she could, equally, have tripped, knocked herself out and fallen into the sea.