Page 5 of The Darkness
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 Vatnsleysuströnd, 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.
The victim’s name was Elena; she was an asylum seeker from Russia and had only been in Iceland four months. Perhaps one reason Hulda found it so hard to let the matter lie was the speed at which everyone else had forgotten about Elena. She had come to a foreign country in search of refuge and found only a watery grave. And nobody cared. Hulda knew that, if she didn’t seize this last chance to get to the bottom of the mystery, no one else would ever bother. Elena’s story would pass into oblivion: she’d simply be the girl who came to Iceland and died.
VI
Hulda drove south out of Reykjavík, following what used to be her daily commute when they lived in their little house down by the sea on Álftanes. She hadn’t been out there for years, not since the house was sold and she made the decision never to go back. The peninsula now appeared, low and green, across the bay to her right. Álftanes always used to feel semi-rural, its own little world, set apart from the urban sprawl of Reykjavík, but a whole new neighbourhood had sprung up there since her day.
As Álftanes dropped behind, taking her old life with it, she focused on her destination, the small town of Njardvík, which lay close to Keflavík airport on the Reykjanes peninsula. She was going to visit the asylum-seekers’ hostel where, according to the case file, Elena had been living at the time of her death.
Hulda could have taken the rest of the day off and gone home. In spite of the rain, there was a hint of spring in the air. Now that May was here, you really began to notice how late it got dark, the light evenings holding out a promise of the midnight sun. It was a wonderful, life-affirming time of year, the darkness of the northern winter gradually receding, the evenings growing almost imperceptibly brighter every day until the middle of June, when the night was banished altogether. A vivid memory came back to her of those spectacular summer nights at their old place on Álftanes. Out in their back garden, where there was room to really breathe, you could watch the sun dipping below the sea while the sky flamed orange and red and the shore birds piped all night in the soft afterglow. In a cramped flat in a city apartment block, all the seasons seemed the same, the days merging in a monotonous blur and time slipping away with bewildering speed.
As if summer wasn’t brief enough anyway. At its very height, in July, the darkness would begin its insidious return, creeping back into the lives of the islanders, first as no more than a hint of dusk, then by August, one of Hulda’s least favourite months, the nights would have closed in again, a reminder that winter was at hand.
No, there could be no question of going home now, not after Magnús had dropped his bombshell. Cooped up between the four walls of her flat, she would go stir crazy, with nothing to distract her from the soul-destroying prospect of giving up work. Retirement was something Hulda had never mentally prepared herself for. It had been merely a date, a year, an age, all purely hypothetical. Until today, when it had suddenly become cold, hard fact.
Her thoughts snapped back to the present. She was grateful for the stretches of dual carriageway where she could stick to the right-hand lane and allow the more impatient drivers to zip by. She drove an eighties Skoda, a relic of the times when most Icelanders drove around in affordable Eastern European cars – Soviet or Czech models, usually – from the countries with which Iceland traded fish. It was a bright-green, two-door model which had never had much acceleration and demanded an increasing amount of maintenance these days. Although practical, Hulda was no mechanic, but luckily she knew a man who lived for the chance to tinker with old cars and he kept the faithful Skoda on the road. For now.
It was a long time since Hulda had last driven south along this coast. She rarely had any need to go out to the Reykjanes peninsula. Even the international airport, the main draw in these parts, held little attraction for her. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy foreign travel – chance would be a fine thing – but her finances put the kibosh on any plans of that sort. Her police salary didn’t stretch to overseas holidays, not once she had covered her daily outgoings. In the old days, such luxuries had been comfortably within reach. Her husband had run his own investment firm, with what she’d naively assumed to be a very respectable turnover, so it had come as a shock, after his sudden death, to learn that their financial security had been an illusion. Once the lawyers had unravelled his affairs, the inherited debts had turned out to exceed their assets. The upshot was that she’d had to sell their beautiful house and start again, almost from scratch, in middle age. She’d left the financial side of things entirely to her husband and never put aside any savings for herself, so it had proved far from easy to learn to live within her means on her new, tight budget. She had initially bought a small flat, which she had subsequently sold, and now she lived in a slightly larger flat in an apartment block. By incredible bad luck, she had upgraded to this place with an index-linked mortgage on the eve of the banking collapse and was now stuck with a massive debt and eye-wateringly high monthly repayments.
Hulda had always found the drive to the airport bleak and rather dispiriting. The dark lava-fields extended on either side, empty, windswept and flat, broken only by the conical form of Keilir and other low mountains to the south, and merging into the treacherous grey sea to the north. It was a dangerous area, full of hidden volcanic craters and clouds of steam, scarred by the violent forces at work beneath the earth’s crust, here, where Iceland straddled the divide between two continental plates. The mountains were popular with hikers – Hulda had climbed quite a few of them herself – but otherwise this was a landscape better viewed from a distance than experienced on foot; anyone venturing into the lava-fields could so easily get injured and simply disappear.
But today the sun was shining out on the peninsula, although there was a blustery wind and, looking back across the bay, Hulda could see the rain clouds still hanging low over Reykjavík. Finally, a series of white apartment blocks with blue roofs rose from the featureless terrain to her right, signalling the outskirts of Njardvík, and she turned off into the town. It wasn’t large but, as she didn’t know her way around, it took her some time driving aimlessly through the streets before she finally located the hostel.
She hadn’t called ahead to let them know she was coming; it hadn’t even occurred to her in her haste to get out of the police station, away from the oppressive atmosphere that seemed to descend on the office the instant she got the bad news. She kept imagining that the corridors were full of people gossiping about her, that all her colleagues knew she’d been given the boot, that she was past it, surplus to requirements, ditched in favour of a younger model. Goddamnit.
The young woman at reception couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. Hulda introduced herself as a police inspector without elaborating on the reason for her visit. The young woman didn’t bat an eyelid.
‘Oh, yes? What can I do for you? Do you need to speak to one of our residents?’
From what Hulda had been able to discover, the hostel was used exclusively as accommodation for asylum-seekers. It was an unwelcoming place. She could almost sense the desperation in the air, the silence and the tension. The walls were painted a stark white and there was nothing here to remind one of home or even of a hotel. This was a place where people waited in limbo to learn their fate.
‘No, I’d just like a few words with whoever’s in charge here.’
‘Sure. That’s me, Dóra.’
It took Hulda a moment to grasp that this young woman was the hostel manager. ‘Ah, right,’ she said, embarrassed, ashamed of her own preconceptions. It hadn’t even occurred to her that a mere slip of a girl like that could be in charge of running the place. ‘Is there somewhere we could have a word in private?’
Dóra had short brown hair and a businesslike manner. Although her smile was friendly enough, her gaze was disconcertingly sharp. ‘Of course, no problem,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an office round the back.’
She got up without another word and led the way briskly down the corridor, with Hulda following on her heels. The office was small and impersonal, with dark blinds over the windows and a single overhead bulb casting an unforgiving glare over the meagre contents. There were no books or papers, nothing but a laptop on the desk.
They sat down and Dóra waited, still without speaking, for Hulda to state her business. Casting around for the right words, Hulda began: ‘The reason I’m here is … I’m investigating the death, a little over a year ago, of a woman who was one of your residents.’
