Season of the Witch (11 page)

She answers the phone breathlessly.

“Hello,” I say. “This is Einar at the
Afternoon News
. I wrote an article about
Loftur the Sorcerer
in today’s paper.”

“Oh, yes. Hello,” she replies. Clearly she had hoped it was someone else on the phone.

“I heard the appeal on the radio at lunchtime. Has Skarphédinn turned up?”

“No. We’ve had to postpone the first night. We couldn’t leave it any longer.”

“Has a search started?”

“We’ve been looking for him all morning. And now the police are involved.”

“What do you think has happened?”

Obviously upset, she breathes rapidly. “I don’t know. There was a party after the dress rehearsal yesterday. He was there for a while, but he hasn’t been seen since.”

“And did anything out of the ordinary happen?”

“Nothing I know of.”

“Couldn’t he be sleeping it off? Or maybe he went out somewhere, and the party’s still in full swing?”

“You don’t know Skarphédinn. He’s a hundred percent reliable.”

“Where does he live?”

“He used to live at the high school dorm, but he moved out last fall and rented an apartment in town. He’s not answering the door.”

I thank her for the information, with the feeble assurance that we must hope for the best.

Then I call the police.

“We’ve put out an APB about him, and a search is beginning,” says the woman who answers. “He hasn’t been missing long, but the circumstances are certainly unusual. With the first night this evening, and all that.”

“Have you been to the apartment where he lives?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more.”

On an impulse, I make one more phone call.

“Good afternoon,
Hóll
.”

“May I speak to Gunnhildur Bjargmundsdóttir?”

“Just a moment.”

Two minutes.

“Hello. Yes, hello.”

A wavery, nervous voice.

“Hello, Gunnhildur. This is Einar at the
Afternoon News
. I got a message a few days ago asking me to call you. But I haven’t managed to reach you until now.”

A long silence.

“Hello? Gunnhildur?”

A massive throat clearing resounds down the phone. “Hrhuhrummmmm.”

I wait while she clears her tubes.

“Sorry, my boy,” says Gunnhildur, wheezing slightly. “When you’re as old as me, everything gets clogged up.”

“I gather that you’re Ásdís Björk’s mother. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you. They often say you can never really grasp the reality of death until you bury your own child. That…That…”

It sounds as if the old lady is on the verge of tears.

“That is absolutely true,” she manages to say.

“Is there something I can do for you?” I ask to keep her on track. “Why did you get in touch with me?”

“I don’t know whether you can do anything for me.”

“But…?”

“I’ve tried talking to the police. But they won’t listen to me. They probably think I’m a senile old bat. Too many people assume all old people are daft and deaf and have lost their marbles.”

“I’m sure that’s right,” I say, wondering if I am one of them. I realize that my remark was ambiguous and hasten to add: “That far too many people think that. It’s nothing more than prejudice, of course.”

“I don’t envy people who think that way, when they get old themselves. Or hopefully not.”

Although I don’t want the conversation to develop into a discussion of old age, I playfully reply: “Why do you say that? You’re not wishing those people an early demise, are you?”

“No, I’m just expressing the hope that no one need be humiliated or ignored just because of their age. The same applies to children. And teenagers. Everyone has rights.”

“I’m with you there. But,” I add, “why did you call me?”

Irritated, Gunnhildur raises her voice to a harsh and grating tone: “Because the police dismissed me! Just like that! Dismissed me!”

“Why?”

“I told them Ásdís Björk’s death wasn’t an accident.”

“What?”

“And I won’t have it!” she shrieks into the phone. “I won’t be dismissed, not until I leave this godforsaken world feetfirst, in my coffin!”

“But why do you say your daughter’s death wasn’t an accident?”

She lowers her voice and whispers her secret to me with melodramatic emphasis: “Because, my boy, she was murdered. Murdered in cold blood. In the coldest of blood that flows through human veins.”

In the beginning was the wish.

As Good Friday dawns, the main idea in my mind is the simple, sincere wish that I may get through this day without doing anything. Not a single damned thing. If I may use such language in the present situation. But, as we know, wishes are not always granted.

On the dining table I find a note: “Gone to meet You Know Who. Hope to see you later.”

Next to the note Jóa has left a selection of pastries she has bought somewhere that remains open on this holiest of days. A gas station, probably. When I was young, gas stations just sold fuel for cars. Now they seem to be mainly for refueling the drivers.

Relishing Jóa’s little treat, I open the door from the living room into the garden and sit at the table on the small terrace with my coffee and cigarette. I bask in the sunshine, which is as bright as yesterday. There’s not a trace of snow, so the skiers who have made their way to Akureyri, hoping to swoop down the slopes, might as well have stayed at home. In the next-door garden,
children are kicking a ball around. Even computers and high technology haven’t managed to stop kids going out to play. Not yet, at least. After half an hour of luxurious indolence, I’m climbing the walls. I check that my avian roommate has plenty of food and drink to keep her going, then bid her farewell, reassuring her that I’ll be back by dinnertime.

POLICE
reads the sign over the entrance to a long, white two-story building on Thórunnarstræti, with a blue square beneath each window. The police station bears a strong resemblance to the stronghold of law and order in Reykjavík—though in miniature. I go to reception, and before long I am shown into the office of Chief of Police Ólafur Gísli Kristjánsson. He’s a tall man with sharp features, going on forty, in a light-blue uniform shirt. He wears glasses in heavy black frames of the kind sported by Buddy Holly and other rock and rollers of the fifties and sixties. Below his shaven scalp, he has a strong Roman nose, a cleft chin, and a big gap between his upper front teeth. Gravely he waves me to a seat.

Not very welcoming. Behind the lenses, his eyes express distrust.

“I wanted to ask how the search for Skarphédinn Valgardsson is progressing,” I say.

He crosses his arms across a barrel chest.
No entry
, says that posture.
You won’t get anything out of me
. “Unfortunately it hasn’t yielded any result as yet.” He speaks in a deep voice with a lilting northern accent.

“Are many people taking part in the search?”

“We’ve called out all available manpower—both police and the volunteer rescue team. About twenty people in all.” He leans
forward on his desk, where papers are neatly stacked alongside a hefty desktop computer.

“Have you any clues as to what may have happened to him?”

“I can only tell you what I’ve told your colleagues from radio and TV and the
Free Times
and
Morning News
. We have no information that we can share with the media at this point in time.”

After a moment’s thought, I decide to push a little harder. I politely inquire: “Is that because you have no information? Or don’t you want to share it with the media?”

Chief Ólafur Gísli Kristjánsson gives me a ferocious glare, jumps to his feet, and looms over me like a volcano about to spew fire and brimstone over the plains beneath.

“Who do you think you are?” he asks in a silky tone, disconcertingly at odds with his threatening posture.

“A jour-jour-journalist,” I babble, struggling to my feet.

“I know who you are,” he goes on. “You’re a sensationalizing tabloid hack from the south, putting on your cosmopolitan airs and thinking you’re going to dig up dirt here in Akureyri. But you’ve got another think coming.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“I know who you are,” he reiterates. “You’re notorious down south, the police know all about you. You don’t respect the rules of the game. You ignore the usual channels of communication to go sniffing out information…”

“I just won’t be told what’s news and what isn’t,” I say.

“…and you think you’re God’s own seeker of truth…”

“It’s for me to decide. We still have freedom of expression…”

“We don’t need people like you here in Akureyri.”

“…and freedom of the press in this country.”

“However. Since you’ve seen fit to come here, there’s just one thing that’s stopping me from kicking you out.”

I’m brought up short. “Really? What’s that?”

He returns to his seat behind the desk. “No, probably two things. Firstly, my tolerant attitude to troublemakers of all kinds.”

His smile is now so broad that through the gap between his front teeth I catch a glimpse of his uvula. “No, wait. There are three things,” he smirks. “Secondly, my duty as a police officer to maintain good relations with the public and the media…”

He waves me to a seat.

“And thirdly?” I inquire, wiping cold sweat from my forehead.

“Thirdly, I shall, at least for now, give you the benefit of the doubt, because my friend Ásbjörn has vouched for you.”

I find I am breathing more easily. “Aha. So you’re Ásbjörn’s friend on the force here?”

“I know the two of you haven’t got on well over the years. So it just goes to show what a fine, honorable man he is, that he has asked me to show you as much consideration and understanding as possible.”

I don’t know what to say.

He glares at me again. “So what do you say to that?”

“Excellent,” I reply with a smile. “I humbly thank you, and Ásbjörn, for your tolerance.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank Ásbjörn. I’m turning a blind eye, primarily out of my regard for him.”

“Were you childhood friends?”

“We were classmates at the high school, and we soon became inseparable friends. I owe him a lot.”

“Really? Like what?”

Ólafur Gísli removes his spectacles and polishes them on the tail of his blue uniform shirt. “I wasn’t an outstanding student. Believe it or not.” Smirk. “I was more interested in girls and parties. I might well have flunked out, ended up in the gutter. I could
have finished up on your side of this desk. But I could rely on my best friend, of course. It was Ásbjörn, really, who got me through my high school diploma. After that we went our separate ways.”

“Shall we start over?” I ask, offering him my hand across the desk.

He shakes it firmly. “Let’s,” he says, still smirking. “Ásbjörn warned me. He said you might push the envelope. But he also told me that you were to be trusted, if you gave a promise. That you aren’t as bad as you look.”

“I must remember to thank him.”

“I still can’t tell you any more at this stage than I have already about the search for Skarphédinn. But off the record, I have a bad feeling about this. Everybody seems to agree that he’s a responsible young man.”

“Where are you searching?”

“All over Akureyri and in the vicinity.”

“And Skarphédinn doesn’t appear to have been home the night before last?”

“We don’t know. But it’s definite that he isn’t in the apartment.”

He stands up again, calm and composed his time. “Duty calls.”

Before I leave, I ask: “The death of the woman who fell into the Jökulsá River. Is that being investigated at all?”

He glares at me again. “Why do you ask?”

I consider telling him about my phone conversation with Gunnhildur Bjargmundsdóttir. But I conclude that I must maintain confidentiality. I owe no loyalty to Ólafur Gisli. Not at this point in time—as he would say. “Just asking.”

“We’re waiting for the autopsy results. It’s Easter, and people are on vacation and so on. We should hear after the weekend.
But there’s no indication that it was anything other than an accident.”

His parting words are: “Remember you’re not in Reykjavík anymore. Learn about your new surroundings. Even a bull in a china shop can learn to tread carefully.”

In the deathly quiet of the
Afternoon News
offices, I’m starting to feel envious of the broadcast media, with their frequent news bulletins, not to mention the
Free Times
and the
Morning News
, which publish an Easter Sunday edition. But there’s nothing I can do about that. Sometimes the last are, in the end, last. I pick up the phone and call Reydargerdi Police Station. I ask for Höskuldur Pétursson, Ólafur Gísli’s fellow chief.

“Speaking.”

“Hello. This is Einar from the
Afternoon News
.”

“Oh, yes. Hello,” he says, politely enough. But he sounds a little stressed.

“So. Did I succeed in displaying responsibility without falsifying reality?”

“It was all right. But the leader of the town council wasn’t particularly pleased about the picture of his son.”

“So I suppose he would have liked me to soften the truth a little?”