Page 8 of The Darkness
‘Yes.’
There was little to be learned from the room, at first glance, anyway. Hulda took another quick look around her, if only to try to put herself in the shoes of the dead girl; get an impression of what her life must have been like during those last few months, cast adrift in a strange country at an unfriendly hostel where no one spoke her language. Trapped within the four walls of a small room, just as Hulda sometimes felt like a prisoner in her own flat, all alone, no family, no one to care for her. That was the worst part – having no one who cared.
Just for a second, Hulda closed her eyes and tried to breathe in the atmosphere, but all she could smell was mushroom soup wafting through the building from the kitchen.
VII
Before she left, Hulda had a brief word with the two men from Iraq. The one who did the talking spoke quite good English. They had been living in Iceland for over a year and were obviously grateful for the chance to speak to a police officer, apparently regarding her as a representative of the authorities. Before she could ask the questions she wanted, Hulda was forced to listen to a stream of complaints about the way their cases were being handled and the treatment they’d had to put up with. When she was finally able to get a word in edgeways, she established that they did remember Elena, though mainly because of her sudden death. It turned out they had never actually spoken to her, as they didn’t know a word of Russian, so there was very little to be gained from the conversation.
On her way out through reception, Hulda thanked Dóra and asked her to get in touch when the Syrian woman turned up, in the faint hope that she might know something. ‘I’ll do that,’ Dóra promised, but Hulda wasn’t under any illusion that she would make it a priority.
Three quarters of an hour later, Hulda was back in Reykjavík. She parked outside the police station but had no real intention of going inside. Instead, she set about trying to find out which lawyer had been handling Elena’s case. It took no more than a couple of phone calls to establish that the man she wanted was a middle-aged solicitor who had worked for the police for several years before leaving to set up his own firm. He remembered Hulda immediately.
‘I doubt there’s much I can tell you,’ he said in a friendly voice, ‘but you’re welcome to drop by. You know where we are?’
‘I’ll find you. Can I come over now?’
‘Please do,’ he said.
The solicitor’s office turned out to be a modest affair in the city centre that didn’t even run to a receptionist. Albert Albertsson, who had come out to greet Hulda in person, seemed to read her mind: ‘We run a tight little outfit here,’ he explained. ‘Don’t waste any money on frills. We all turn our hand to whatever needs doing. Anyway, it’s nice to see you again.’
Albert had always had an easy manner and spoke in the warm, well-modulated tones of a congenial late-night radio host chatting to listeners against a background of soothing music. By no stretch of the imagination could you call him good-looking, but he had the kind of face that inspired trust.
The office Albert showed her into couldn’t have presented a greater contrast to Dóra’s bare, soulless little workspace at the hostel. The walls were hung with paintings, there were photographs lined up on the shelf beside the desk and towering stacks of papers on every available surface. Hulda found it slightly overwhelming. It felt a bit over the top, like an attempt to cover up the fact that maybe Albert didn’t actually have that much to do. All the photographs and paintings would have been better suited to a home than a workplace. Unless this was all the home he really had?
‘Have you taken over the case?’ he asked, once they were seated.
Hulda barely hesitated: ‘Yes, for now.’
‘Any developments?’
‘Nothing I can comment on at present,’ she replied. ‘Did Alexander speak to you in the course of the original inquiry?’
‘Yes, he did. We had a meeting, but I don’t think I was able to help him much.’
‘Did you handle Elena’s asylum application from the beginning?’
‘I did. I take on a lot of these human-rights jobs. Alongside my other work, of course.’
‘Could you fill me in on the background to her case?’
‘Well, she was claiming asylum in Iceland on the grounds that she’d suffered persecution at home in Russia.’
‘But her application was unsuccessful?’
‘What? No, on the contrary, we were making good progress.’
‘How good?’
‘They were about to allow her claim.’
Hulda was completely wrong-footed. ‘Hang on a minute: you’re saying they were going to grant her asylum?’
‘Yes, it was in the pipeline.’
‘Was she aware of this?’
‘Yes, of course. She heard the day before she died.’
