The Darkness(54)

Only as an adult had she learned the concept of constructive criticism, something completely alien to her grandmother.

And now, yet again, she felt the shame of having made a mistake.

She could do better than this.





XVIII


This time, Hulda didn’t waste time going to the house but marched straight round to Bjartur’s garage and knocked on the door. As she did so, she noticed a neat sign in the window: ‘Bjartur Hartmannsson, interpreter and translator.’

He answered the door quickly and looked surprised to see Hulda.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello, Bjartur, me again,’ she said apologetically, aware that she was forever tilting at windmills, on a mission to solve a case that was almost certainly a lost cause.

‘Well, well,’ he said with a smile, scratching his blond thatch. ‘Looks like I’m becoming an old friend of the police.’

Hulda wondered idly how old he was; she hadn’t bothered to look him up but guessed that, despite his boyish appearance, he must be pushing forty. The woman – presumably his mother – who had answered the door on Hulda’s first visit had looked to be around seventy.

‘Plenty to do?’ she asked in a friendly voice.

‘Yeah, sure, well … not so much in the translation line, but plenty of Russian tour groups. I swear the tourist dollar’s the only thing keeping Iceland afloat these days. But things are quiet today. I’m just … writing, you know, working on my book.’

The surge in tourism since the collapse of the Icelandic banking system – and the subsequent collapse of the Icelandic króna – was certainly helping to get the country back on track, since the tourists brought in valuable foreign currency. The outlook was a bit brighter than before, but the financial crisis had cast a long shadow, and Hulda, momentarily distracted, reflected that tourism would do little to boost her personal finances. Her job didn’t pay that well, and now all she had to look forward to was a fixed income from her government pension.

‘Come in,’ Bjartur said, breaking into her thoughts. ‘It’s still a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. I haven’t got round to buying a chair for visitors so you’ll have to make do with the bed.’ He turned red. ‘I mean, you know, you’ll have to sit on the bed.’

Hulda found a space free of clutter where she could park herself while Bjartur sat down in his superannuated office chair. The air in the room was unpleasantly stuffy: Hulda’s unexpected arrival had given him no chance to open a window.

‘Do you live out here in the garage?’ she asked curiously.

‘Yes, I do, actually. I sleep and work in here. It’s more private, you see. Mum and Dad have the house, but I couldn’t live with them any longer. It all got too much, living on top of each other like that. Unfortunately, there’s no basement or I’d have moved down there, but they let me do up the garage.’

Hulda wanted to ask why he hadn’t simply moved into a flat of his own but didn’t like to, in case it sounded rude.

Bjartur seemed to guess the unspoken question: ‘There’s no point getting a flat of my own, not yet; it’s way too expensive, whether you rent or buy. House prices are going through the roof and I don’t have a regular income. It’s all pretty hand to mouth – translation work, tour-guide gigs. Sometimes I’m rushed off my feet, especially in the summers, but often there’s not enough work to go round. I’m managing to save up a bit, though. It’ll all work out in the end. And Mum and Dad are getting on, so they’re bound to want to downsize at some point.’

Or die, Hulda read from his expression.

‘I wanted to ask you a small favour,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes? What’s that?’

She handed him the envelope of papers Albert had passed on to her.

‘It contains some documents that Elena’s lawyer dug out. I don’t know if there’s anything of interest, but “no stone unturned”, and all that.’ She smiled, making light of it.

‘I get you. How’s the investigation going, by the way? I see you’re still on the case.’

‘Yes … sure, I’m not planning to give up,’ she lied. The truth was that she would happily have abandoned it right now. Today of all days, when she was still reeling from the news Magnús had broken to her, pursuing this case was the last thing she felt like doing, though it was the only thing she had left.

There was no getting away from the fact that a man had died because of her. But he had been a child abuser, and that made it easier to square with her conscience: some crimes were quite simply unforgiveable.

And there was a good chance that she had sabotaged her colleagues’ investigation into áki’s activities. Her career as a detective inspector lay in smoking ruins. No wonder she wasn’t in any fit state to be working. Yet, in spite of everything, she persisted, too pig-headed to quit, caught up in a last race against time.

‘Of course I’ll take a look at them for you,’ Bjartur said, swivelling his chair round to face the desk, where he drew the papers from the envelope and spread them out in front of him. ‘Just give me a few minutes to run through them.’

‘Of course.’ On a sudden hunch, she added: ‘Could you pay particular attention to any mentions of somebody called Katja.’