His eyes strayed to the corner of the office.
There was Hulda’s box, the personal items that had belonged to the policewoman who had occupied this office before him. He had never met her – never managed to talk to her. Bizarrely, she seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth at around the same time as he had started his new job.
At first, there had been rumours hinting that she had taken her retirement hard, which was why she wasn’t responding to messages or phone calls. But that theory was disproved as the days passed. When nothing was heard from Hulda, her colleagues became concerned. Eventually, a search was launched for her, but the problem was that no one had any idea where to look.
It was well known that she enjoyed hiking in the mountains – just like Elín – although all the indications were that Hulda mainly pursued this hobby throughwalking groups, rather than on her own. However, the general assumption was that she must have gone for a solo hike, perhaps due to the strain she’d been under recently, and had lost her way or had an accident. It was the most convenient explanation and made it possible to draw a line under her career in the police.
Helgi had attended her memorial service, despite never having met her.
It did strike him as odd, though, that Hulda should have been in the middle of an investigation when she went missing. Although he hadn’t known her, judging by the way her colleagues talked about her, she had been utterly dedicated and exceptionally good at her job. Would a person like that really have done a disappearing act – directly or indirectly – without finishing her investigation first, or at least formally handing it over to somebody else? The case seemed to have been wide open, though there were some voices who insisted that Hulda had been on a wild-goose chase, digging around in a matter that had already been satisfactorily solved long before.
Helgi doubted it had been that simple. The two cases – Hulda’s disappearance and the investigation she had been working on – roused his interest, and although he already had more than enough to do, he made a mental note to come back to both later. Out of curiosity, he had checked to see who Hulda had been talking to. He’d also heard about the mistakes she’d made, but somehow he got the impression that she had known what she was doing.
He was careful to keep his inquiries under the radar, asno one had actively asked him to track down his predecessor, but the mystery continued to intrigue him.
So far, though, every avenue had led to a dead end. There were no solid clues, either in relation to the death of the girl that Hulda had been investigating, or to the fate of Hulda herself. Helgi had achieved one thing, though, which was to make contact with an older man Hulda had been involved with shortly before she went missing. His name was Pétur, and they had talked briefly on the phone, but now – as Helgi contemplated Hulda’s box yet again – he decided that the time had come to go and meet this Pétur and hand over Hulda’s belongings. He meant to fit this into his busy schedule at some point in the next few days, perhaps even this weekend. There was no point putting it off endlessly.
2012
Saturday, 3 November
As the day wore on, it began to snow.
It was the first snow Helgi had seen that winter since leaving Akureyri.
He had stepped out of the office to visit his old neighbourhood of Laugardalur, an area of attractive residential streets close to the centre, known for its beautiful green spaces. Today, though, everything was subtly transformed. It was incredible how the whiteness of the snow could lift one’s surroundings on a dark winter’s afternoon. Helgi hadn’t liked to park directly outside Bergthóra’s place, so he had found a space at a discreet distance and walked the last stretch. Halfway there, the heavens had opened.
Oh well, perhaps the snow would provide him with a bit of cover.
He had pictured Bergthóra sitting at the window, keeping an eye on everyone who passed by, but of course shewouldn’t be doing that. She had never been that interested in other people. She was much more likely to be in the sitting room, weighing up whether to have another glass of red wine.
He had done it; he had moved out.
They had never actually discussed it, or indeed any other aspect of their break-up. Helgi would rather Bergthóra had left and he had got to keep the flat, but in the event he was the one who had walked out under cover of darkness, taking his most precious possessions – not least his beloved books. He had asked a friend to drop by the following morning and pick up some other objects that were important to him. Inevitably, a lot of other things had been left behind, but that didn’t matter. The moment he was out of there, it had felt like being released from prison, and he had sworn to himself that he would never see Bergthóra again if he could possibly avoid it. She had verbally humiliated him and physically attacked him, always when she was drunk. Helgi had put up with it as long as he could – he didn’t know why – but he’d finally realized that he’d hit a wall and couldn’t go any further. That life couldn’t go on like that.
He remembered the police knocking on the door one evening after a noisy row, obviously suspecting thathehad laid hands onher, not vice versa.
The relationship had been so toxic that it had taken him weeks – no, months – to get back on an even keel, and then he’d only been able to do it with Aníta’s help.
Yet in spite of his vow to himself, here he was, standing in the falling snow, staring at the house across the street.There was their old flat, where Bergthóra lived now. A warm glow shone from the windows and he noticed movement inside. It was her. He shrank back. Was he scared? No, and yet… suddenly the old poison seemed to be at work inside him again. The painful memories came flooding back thick and fast.
He tried to imagine how the conversation would go.
She would never take a reprimand lying down. She knew how to get under his skin, how to hurt him. He became aware of a vein throbbing in his temple and realized that he would have a headache for the rest of the day. He wasn’t frightened exactly, just full of a sick trepidation. He didn’t want to encounter her, but he had no choice but to knock on the door. He had already surrendered his key, passing it on to her new boyfriend.
He reminded himself why he was here. Bergthóra had turned up uninvited at Aníta’s office, and that in itself was unacceptable. It counted as nothing less than menacing behaviour. No one should be allowed to get away with that sort of thing. Clearly, Bergthóra hadn’t laid down her weapons: the incident had been carefully planned.
Aníta gave the appearance of dealing with it well – she was quite a tough cookie – but Helgi wasn’t fooled: she’d been shaken. That first stunt of Bergthóra’s had been so crazy that the mere thought of it made him burn with rage.
But he had meant to let it go.
Until the incident on the bus.
Of course that had been no coincidence. Of course Bergthóra was stalking Aníta; she knew exactly what shewas doing. And the sinister part was that Bergthóra had almost certainly been completely sober on both occasions. It was a cold-blooded, calculated act of revenge, or hatred, or both. Her target was obviously him, not Aníta. She intended to go on making his life unbearable, poisoning the very air until he was struggling to breathe.
Helgi wasn’t cold, despite the thickly falling snow; not yet, anyway. The air was scintillatingly fresh, reminding him that Advent was just around the corner. Although the day was dark, there was beauty in the softly falling snow in the streetlights. The horror wasn’t out here, it was lurking indoors, in Bergthóra’s shadow.
What the hell was he supposed to say to her?
