The Darkness(53)

XV


‘No one can hear you,’ he said, laughing as he wrestled with her long johns, trying to pull them down.

It was then that she acquired an extra burst of strength from somewhere, in spite of the numbing cold, and managed to shove him away so hard that he fell off the bed on to the floor.

She leapt out of the bunk, blind in the gloom, aware that her only chance was to get out of the hut and run away into the snow, find somewhere to hide in the vast, empty landscape. As unrealistic as the idea was, she had to try. In that instant, she spotted the faint gleam of the ice axe that he had untied from her rucksack and placed by the door.

By some miracle, she managed to reach it first.





XVI


Hulda knocked on Albert’s door. She was hoping to speak to his brother and find out whether he had taken Elena for a drive somewhere in a four-by-four. To her surprise, the lawyer answered the door himself, though it was not yet four in the afternoon.

‘Hulda?’ he said, a little taken aback.

‘Albert, I just knocked on the off-chance …’

‘Right, right, I came home early for once, as there wasn’t much on.’ He seemed embarrassed and a little shifty, as if business might not be going that well. ‘Didn’t you get the papers? Baldur told me you dropped by yesterday evening to pick them up.’

‘Oh, yes, I’ve got them. But they’re all in Russian, so I haven’t been able to glean anything from them yet.’

‘Yes, I thought they were, but, you never know, there might be something useful in there. Let’s hope you can get justice for the poor woman. She was my client, after all.’

‘Actually, I was hoping to have another quick word with your brother.’

‘With my brother?’ Evidently, this was the last thing Albert was expecting to hear.

‘Yes … He, um, there was something he happened to mention yesterday,’ she lied clumsily, cursing herself for not having come up with a better excuse, but then she hadn’t been expecting to run into Albert, ‘that I just wanted him to clarify.’

‘What on earth has he been telling you? Something to do with Elena?’

‘No, well, yes, not directly. It’s a bit hard to explain.’

‘To do with me, then?’ Albert’s voice sharpened.

‘What? Of course not, nothing like that. Is he in?’

‘No, he isn’t. He managed to pick up a house-painting job today, so he won’t be home for a while yet.’

‘Could you ask him to give me a ring when he does get in?’

Albert appeared unsure how to react to this request, but eventually said: ‘Yes, yes, of course. I’ll do that. I’ll call you at the station.’

‘No, call the mobile, you’ve got my number,’ Hulda said hurriedly, and smiled.

Albert briefly returned her smile then quickly closed the door.





XVII


Since access to the services of an official police translator was now denied to her, the obvious answer was to see if Bjartur could help. Hulda got back in her car and headed out to the interpreter’s place in the west of town. It would be her final port of call, unless something significant turned up in the papers. While part of her clung to this hope, the realization was growing that she would be grateful to let it go and have a rest at last.

Her phone rang and she pulled over to answer. It was Magnús again.

‘Hulda,’ he said, sounding grave.

‘Yes.’ She braced herself.

‘I didn’t want to burden you with anything else today but there’s something I forgot to mention: they arrested áki this morning.’

‘Really?’ Her spirits rose a little. ‘For running a prostitution ring?’

‘Among other things, but the downside is that they were forced to bring the whole operation forward and it’s ended up being a bit of a rush job – all because you went and interviewed him without permission.’

Hulda swore under her breath.

‘And there’s a risk he’ll have been busy destroying records in the interim, which is a bugger. You’d better be prepared for them to call you about your conversation with him. They’ll want to know if he gave anything away, what information you were acting on …’

Hulda sighed. ‘Yes, OK … Though I’ve nothing new to give them.’

‘Then I’m afraid you’ll just have to put up with the hassle. This whole thing’s a total fiasco, but don’t let it get to you.’

Any more than it already has, she thought as she rang off. Hulda felt truly guilty over having potentially ruined her colleagues’ investigation, knowing how much effort they must have put into it.

She hated making mistakes.

She really hated making mistakes.

When she was young, doing her school homework, her grandmother used to be constantly looking over her shoulder, checking every answer, every composition, whether it was grammar, maths, geography, history … And her criticisms had often been both harsh and unfair, Hulda felt. Time and time again, her grandmother had told her that she had to do better, that she was too slow, that she had to outperform the boys to have any chance of succeeding in life. She had often been brought to tears by these exchanges.