The Darkness(60)

‘Where?’

‘I don’t think that’s any of your business. On the other hand, I don’t suppose you’ll be able to tell anyone. She’s in a colder place than you.’ He grinned. ‘She took a trip to the countryside with me as well, though the circumstances were very different. You see, I was in love with her and she knew it. I thought the trip was the beginning of a relationship, but she thought differently, and … well, what’s done is done.’

Hulda fought to steady her breathing, to resist the rising tide of panic so she could use her brain. She must be able to think her way out of this. Talk him round. To do that, she needed to win time, engage him in conversation. Anything to keep her mind off the prospect of being buried alive.

‘You murdered Elena, didn’t you?’ she said, mastering her voice. ‘You two had a long phone conversation the evening before she died. You never mentioned that.’

‘Elena. She worked it out,’ Bjartur said. He had resumed shovelling earth on top of Hulda but now paused again, resting the tip of his spade on the ground for a moment. ‘Elena was the only person who knew that Katja and I were close friends. She wouldn’t stop pestering me about what had happened to her. At first, I lied and said I’d helped Katja give the authorities the slip; that she was hiding out in the countryside. But Elena kept nagging at me to let her see Katja. Then she rang me the evening she … she died. She was threatening to go to the police. I tried to convince her not to. I had to stop her, you must see that?’

Hulda nodded.

‘I invited her for a walk down by the sea later that evening. She had no reason to be afraid of me.’





XXVI


‘I’ve got to see Katja!’ Elena said over the phone. ‘I’ve got to!’

‘Well, you can’t,’ Bjartur said. He was sitting in his garage, or rather his parents’ garage. It had been a challenging month: too few jobs coming in, and he’d been feeling too listless to work on his own writing. The incident in the highlands was preying on his mind. He kept replaying it in his head, the moment when he had been forced to kill the woman he loved. Katja, who had come to the country as an asylum-seeker; who he had met when he was hired to interpret for her. They’d hit it off so well from the start, or so he’d believed. And she was so beautiful. As Katja didn’t speak a word of English, she had often turned to him for help and, sometimes, they had ended up chatting all evening. They shared an interest in nature and Russian literature. He’d never found it easy to talk to women, not Icelandic women, anyway, and now that he was over forty he had pretty much resigned himself to being single, but then Katja had entered his life. He had fantasized about marrying her, which would automatically entitle her to a residence permit. Maybe he could move out of his parents’ place, or pack them off to an old people’s home and move into their house with Katja. In his imagination, he had already planned their future together and was just waiting for the right moment, confident that Katja felt the same. That she loved him. Then she had casually dropped into conversation that she’d like to get out of town some time. He had immediately taken her at her word, aware that this was his chance. He would take her into the interior, where they could stay in a mountain hut. And there, when it was just the two of them, cut off from the outside world, their relationship would begin.

But things had turned out quite differently. He’d ended up having to kill her. Of course, he hadn’t wanted to but then, sometimes, you didn’t have a choice. Like in Elena’s case; he’d been forced to kill her as well. She was always asking about Katja, and he had to lie, claim that he’d helped her go into hiding; that Katja had heard she was unlikely to get her residence permit and panicked. Of course, this wasn’t true either, but he’d had to come up with a plausible reason for why she should have run away. Elena hadn’t questioned the story.

He had been praying that Elena would be deported from Iceland soon so he would never have to see her again. And that Katja’s fate would never come to light. The police had carried out a search for her, but no one had been aware of their trip to the mountains and no one – with the exception of Elena – knew that he and Katja had got on so well. Got on so well, that is, until the night in the hut.

But then came the day of Elena’s phone call. She had been told, as far as she could grasp with her limited English, that her application had been accepted. Her call to tell him the news had thrown him into a blind panic: she wanted to see Katja, to tell her the good news and persuade her to give herself up so they could start a new life together in Iceland.

‘I’ve got to see her,’ Elena insisted. ‘And you’re the only person who can help. Just tell me where she is – I won’t tell anyone. I just want to see her, talk to her.’

‘We can’t take the risk,’ he said.

There was a silence at the other end.

‘Then I’m going to the police,’ Elena announced.

‘The police?’

‘Yes. I’m going to tell them you helped her run away. If the police question you, you’ll have to tell them the truth. And then she might have a chance, don’t you understand? A chance to get an actual residence permit. But she’s got to give herself up first!’

There was another silence. They had been on the phone so long that Bjartur’s nerves were in tatters. He was worn out with the strain of having to lie. And now he was afraid, too.