Snowblind (10 page)

The news was all over the front page of the Sunday newspaper that was on the table at the station’s coffee corner. The paper hadn’t reached Siglufjördur until Monday, but it provided written confirmation of what everyone already knew, that Hrólfur was dead.

Hrólfur Kristjánsson passes away.

There were no big headlines, just a restrained black-bordered feature at the bottom of the page.

‘He rang me up,’ Tómas said.

Ari Thór looked up.

‘Who?’

‘He rang me up, the journalist. It didn’t take them long to work it out. He asked if the old man had been drunk.’

Tómas scratched his head and raised one heavy eyebrow, giving him a strangely dramatic expression, while the other eyebrow remained practically still in its usual place.

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘He already knew. Someone must have told him. I said I had no comment to make. We’ll let the old fellow rest in peace.’

‘You’re still sure it was an accident?’

‘I am. Let’s not be making mountains out of molehills.’ Tómas’s voice was firm.

‘I heard there was an argument there on Friday.’

‘What do you mean?’ Tómas shot Ari Thór a suspicious look.

‘Didn’t you know? I heard that Úlfur and Hrólfur were going at it hammer and tongs.’

Tómas looked surprised. ‘No, Úlfur didn’t mention that,’ he said, and looked thoughtful. ‘It can’t be anything unusual, just before a first night. You know what those artistic types are like – too excitable, the lot of them. How do you know this, anyway?’

‘Something I heard yesterday,’ Ari Thór said, hoping he could get away without any further explanation. He preferred not to let Tómas think he had discussed police business with Ugla. ‘Shouldn’t we ask a few more questions?’

‘Ask what? It was an accident. I have no intention of stirring up a hornets’ nest,’ Tómas said, his voice rising and his fist landing with a bang on the table.

That was clearly as far as things were likely to go.

‘I’ll go to the gym at the pool at lunchtime if that’s all right with you,’ Ari Thór said, and he saw that Tómas appeared to be relieved that he had dropped the subject.

‘Fine. You do that.’

Ari Thór read the lettering on the wall for the hundredth time as he went down the steps from the changing room to the pool. It was tempting to dive in and see how his shoulder would cope after his injury, but instead he went past the pool and outside into the fresh air where the hot tubs stood surrounded by a high wooden fence. It was bitterly cold outside, the air still, as if holding its own breath. The snow had held off, and the sunlight was almost impossibly bright, reflecting on the frost-dipped landscape. Ari Thór shivered and squinted as he made his way towards the tub.

Úlfur was there already, as Ari Thór had suspected.

Ari Thór had been to the pool several times before – usually during his lunch break, when his shift had been quiet. A dip in the hot tub relaxed his muscles, and he would slip quietly into the water and lose himself in his thoughts. In the past, Úlfur had frequently been in the tub around noon, but the two men had never spoken – their silence respectful and personal. That was about to change. It was certainly Tómas’s right to decide whether or not to investigate the incident at the Dramatic Society, but he couldn’t forbid Ari Thór from talking about it.

They were the only ones in the hot tub.

‘I’ve never understood,’ Ari Thór said, ‘why there isn’t an outdoor pool in a wonderful place like this, with a view out over the fjord. It’s a real shame that the pool has a roof over it.’

‘What?’ Úlfur said with a start.

‘Good morning. My name’s Ari Thór. We met on Friday.’

Úlfur sniffed. ‘Yes, well. I suppose we did,’ he said. ‘The Reverend, isn’t it?’ He added in a low voice.

‘That’s right,’ Ari Thór said, letting the reference pass without comment. ‘Don’t you agree?’

‘What? The pool?’

Ari Thór nodded.

‘Actually, no. I well remember when it
was
an outdoor pool, back in the old days.’ The look on Úlfur’s face and his tired eyes said that he meant the good old days. ‘It was no picnic in all that winter snow, believe me. It was a blessed relief when they finally built a roof over it.’

The ice had been broken and Ari Thór pressed home his advantage.

‘I hear the opening night was postponed.’

‘Yes, there was no other option. We had to put it off until after the funeral.’

‘You knew Hrólfur well?’

‘Fairly well. He was of a different generation, although the lines start to get blurred with age,’ he said with a smile. ‘We were both in the pension club.’

‘Poor old fellow, falling on the steps like that.’

Úlfur nodded and looked skywards.

‘It looks like snow,’ he said.

‘You must have been one of the last people to speak to him.’ Ari Thór said, trying to make his words sound careless.

Úlfur appeared to take them that way and replied without thinking. ‘More than likely … we had made some minor changes to the script during the rehearsal. You have to do that sometimes, even though it’s irritating to alter things at the last minute. We were talking through some of the arrangements when the others had gone
to dinner and, as usual, he came up with very apt observations. He was certainly alive and kicking,’ he said, and then stopped himself. ‘I’m sorry, that was a tasteless thing to say.’

‘But you worked well together, didn’t you?’

‘We did, not bad,’ he said and his gaze returned to the sky as if he was waiting for the first snowflakes of the day to fall.

A young woman came and joined them in the tub, without uttering a word to either Úlfur or Ari Thór.

Ari Thór wanted to ask about the drinking, to ask just how drunk Hrólfur had been, but this was exactly the kind of talk that could get him into trouble. There’s little juicier than a good morsel of gossip in a society where not a great deal of note happens. The woman who had joined them was more likely a local, rather than a tourist – at this time of year, with the town shrouded in snow and darkness, and the roads dangerous to the point of being lethal, there were few visitors to the area. The forecast was also poor, or so Ari Thór had heard somewhere in passing. He had stopped taking notice of weather forecasts after moving north as there was a constant prospect of foul weather.

‘He wasn’t the easiest character?’ pressed Ari Thór.

‘Yes, well, sometimes. Sometimes,’ Úlfur said and again looked up at the sky.

Ari Thór couldn’t resist the temptation. ‘I hear there was an argument between the two of you on Friday,’ he said.

Úlfur wasn’t fooled by Ari Thór’s lighthearted tone.

‘What the hell do you mean?’ he demanded, and stood up as if to leave. The first soft snowflakes began to drift downwards. ‘Is this some kind of damned interrogation?’

Ari Thór said nothing, smiled and looked towards the young woman to avoid Úlfur’s eyes. Her expression remained unchanged, and it was clear that she hadn’t come to the hot tub to involve herself in other people’s arguments.

By the time he looked back, Úlfur was gone and the snow was descending – like a thick, white darkness. Ari Thór took a deep breath and tried to fend off the impending feeling of claustrophobia.

Pálmi Pálsson had been pleased that Úlfur had only greeted him with a nod when they met in the early morning on the Town Hall Square. Pálmi had continued across the square and down to the quay, his regular route for a morning walk. This was a habit that had developed since his retirement from teaching three years before, when the staff and pupils had held a reception on his final day to wish him on his way. That had been a Friday, the last day of the term, when spring had arrived practically everywhere in Iceland except in Siglufjördur, with its white-faced mountains. There was sufficient snow on their slopes to suggest that summer was still a long way off, but not enough to run down them on skis. Pálmi was still an enthusiastic skier, even at seventy-three.

Seventy-three. He could hardly believe it. His health was robust and friends and acquaintances commented constantly about his youthful looks.
You don’t look a day over sixty, Pálmi. How on earth do you manage it?
Of course, he knew that was a lie. His hair had gone grey, but that only served to make him look more distinguished. A glance in the mirror, however, told him he was far from young, the veins showing in a face that had become lean, his cheeks almost sunken. His mother had only reached sixty-seven before succumbing to a sudden stroke. In his younger years Pálmi had often feared that he’d go the same way, but he had long since got over that particular concern. He had already been teaching at the local primary for a good few years by the time his mother died, in 1983. She had lived in an old flat near the square and had steadfastly refused to move in
with him, to the house he had bought on Hvanneyrarbraut, with its view over the fjord, where he still lived now. It was a location fairly close to the square and the theatre, but still pleasantly set – almost on the shore, with an unrestricted view of the sea.

These strong genes must have come from his father’s side of the family, although his father’s life had been a short one, cut off by tuberculosis at only twenty-four. Pálmi had always felt a strong connection to the father he did not remember. A few pictures of the two of them together remained, taken in 1936 and 1937, shortly before his father had left his family behind to seek his fortune in Denmark, back when Pálmi had been just a year old. He and his mother had been left behind in Siglufjördur, but Pálmi had never sensed any bitterness on his mother’s part.
He needed his freedom
, he had heard her say once. His own warm feelings towards his long-departed father stemmed unconsciously from her positive attitude towards him, and she had loved his father, at least for a while.

It hadn’t been easy for her, left behind with a small child in a remote coastal town in the north during some very hard years. Like so many, his father had contracted tuberculosis in Denmark and died far too young, only a year after leaving Iceland.

Pálmi had been well liked at the primary school. He had been a conscientious teacher and spent his summers walking high in the hills and mountains. He had been abroad on only three occasions, each time on school trips with pupils. He had never experienced any strong urge to explore the wider world, something he imagined he had inherited along with his mother’s genes. She had always been careful, had always lived within her means, painstakingly counting her pennies. Pálmi had been surprised after her death to find that her estate barely covered her funeral costs.

He had always been a loner. A good, well-regarded teacher, but he had struggled to establish friendships outside work. There had also been precious little romance in his life and now it was surely too late. Or was it? Maybe it was his own fault for hesitating, failing to leap when opportunity beckoned. He had been in love in his
younger days, but let the chance slip away, not daring to gamble. If he thought back to those days it was with regret. However, he had a practical nature and trained himself not to look over his shoulder, as that generally brought too much pain.

Since retirement he had immersed himself in writing. He woke early every morning, long before the rest of the town had drawn its curtains, and made a habit of writing every day in his study with its view overlooking the fjord. After dinner, the evenings would find him back at his computer for another hour or more. Through the winter, with its early nightfall, he would light candles and arrange them in old jam jars in the window. Sitting in front of the computer, he would look out into the darkness, through the heat rising from the candles, to the sea and the point of land on the far side of the fjord.

His book was progressing well and he had already written three plays alongside his magnum opus. The plays came easily and made a lightweight counterbalance to his work on the novel. The first had been almost a farce, while the second had been a little more dramatic; the third, which he felt was the best, was a piece of real drama, with lighter moments neatly woven into the script. That was what people wanted, the chance to laugh and cry. The new play was the one that the Dramatic Society had intended to stage on Saturday.

He stood on the quay and looked landwards along the fjord.

His Danish visitors were still asleep, the old woman and her son. Why the hell did she have to come? She was staying in his basement – ninety years old and on a pilgrimage to Iceland with her son tagging along, asking to stay with Pálmi simply because she had known his late father during his time in Denmark.

‘I want to take the opportunity to visit Siglufjördur. Your father always spoke so fondly of the place,’ she had said over the phone in her clear Danish. After decades of teaching the language, Pálmi spoke Danish with ease. He had warned her that the weather could be unpredictable at this time of year, and that there was no guarantee that she would even be able to get to Siglufjördur, let alone leave it.

‘All the same, I have to try. I so want to see the fjord with my own eyes before I die. I will be staying in Reykjavík at New Year because I want to see the fireworks,’ she had said with almost childlike excitement. ‘Could we visit you for a few days after New Year, if the weather is reasonable?’

How could he refuse?

A whole week to go. They were planning to travel back south next Monday. A whole week.

There was still no breath of wind, but Pálmi knew that in a place such as this the coming storm was inevitable.