Someone to Watch Over Me (4 page)

Thóra turned and watched the two men come out of the little greenhouse, their buckets appearing much heavier now than when they’d gone in. It was clear now that the chubbier one did have Down’s syndrome. ‘Very practical.’ She very much wanted to ask what Jakob had done; as far as she knew, people with Down’s were usually peaceful and good-natured. Of course this went for most people, and it was the exceptions to the rule who ended up here.

‘He’s my friend. A good friend.’ For the first time Jósteinn seemed to be speaking sincerely. It didn’t last long. He turned away from the window. ‘Is it possible to reopen old cases? To overturn a conviction and get an acquittal, if you’re innocent?’

Thóra was prepared for this question, and had in fact been waiting for it. ‘Yes, if there is strong enough evidence of wrongful conviction.’

‘I’ve recently become a rich man. Did you know that?’

Thóra shook her head. Was he delusional? ‘No, I haven’t looked into your finances. Have you made a profit from your computer work?’ Perhaps his definition of ‘rich’ was different to hers.

‘I inherited money from my mother. Now everything I am
and
everything I own comes from her.’ His features softened into a dopey smile and Thóra recalled reading about his difficult childhood and the genetic nature of his condition. He had probably been raised by an unfit mother, a female version of himself.

‘She was hit by a car, you see, and because she was paralysed she got benefits. She died soon after, and now the benefits and everything else she owned are mine. I’m getting rid of all her personal belongings but the money, I’m keeping.’

‘Do you have a trustee?’ asked Thóra. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t be allowed control over his own finances.

‘No. But I do have a supervisor. He’s never been to see me; I’ve not even had a phone call.’ Jósteinn spoke dispassionately, as if unaware of the significance of this. ‘I want to use the money to reopen an old case. I don’t have much use for it otherwise. Luckily, too much time has passed since I was convicted for the boy I messed with to sue me for damages. Or rather, for his relatives to sue me – I heard he lost his marbles.’ Jósteinn grinned, seeming to find the idea amusing.

There was a sudden knock on the window. Thóra couldn’t conceal her shock, and Jósteinn looked delighted. ‘It’s just Jakob, wanting to know who’s come to see me. As I told you, I’ve never had a visitor.’ He smiled again. ‘Which is understandable, of course.’

Thóra stared back at the beaming face with thick-lensed glasses pressed up against the window. Jakob ran his muddy hands down the pane, leaving brown smears, before waving enthusiastically at Thóra. She waved back. ‘Why is he in here?’ The question slipped out before she had a chance to stop it.

Jósteinn did not seem rattled. ‘He killed five people in an arson attack, just like that. It was amazing.’

‘Yes, an extraordinary case.’ Thóra remembered it, as it wasn’t an everyday occurrence for people to burn to death in Iceland. It had been overshadowed by the financial crash, which had happened at the same time. ‘Was it about eighteen months ago?’

‘I think so.’ Jósteinn flapped his hand dismissively, as if the timing of the fire were an irrelevance. ‘He’s only about twenty, and he’ll probably spend most of the rest of his life in here. People like him often have weak hearts, so he might die before he ever gets out.’

They seemed to be getting off-course again. Thóra said, ‘I think I ought to tell you that I don’t believe there’s much to warrant reopening your case. You were caught red-handed, so to speak, and I can’t see how you could come up with a new explanation for what happened without very compelling new evidence. The verdict looks bulletproof, and I can’t see that there was anything untoward in how the case was tried.’

Jósteinn laughed again, louder this time. An unpleasant waft of halitosis drifted over to Thóra and she screwed up her face involuntarily, as she did whenever a change in the wind gave her an unwelcome update on the state of decay of her neighbours’ compost heap. His hilarity was short-lived, and Jósteinn let his expression go blank once more. ‘Not
my
case! Jakob’s. The fire.’ He ran his hand through his greasy hair and then wiped it on the arm of the sofa. ‘He didn’t do it. I know more than you can ever imagine about what it takes to do bad things. Jakob didn’t set light to anyone or anything, and I want you to prove it.’ He suddenly leaned forward and grabbed Thóra’s hand, which had been resting on the coffee table, with both of his. His eyes met hers for a brief moment, but then moved back down to their joined hands. She could feel the sticky hair gel, like thick sweat, on his palms. ‘Sometimes a child who’s had his fingers burned still wants to play with fire …’

Her name was Grímheiður Þorbjarnardóttir, and if she had a nickname she chose not to reveal it to Thóra. She seemed on the defensive, and had firmly declined to take off her slightly tatty coat, sitting there still bundled in it despite the warmth of the office. She had, however, quickly removed her hand-knitted shawl, matching hat and lined leather gloves and placed them in her lap. The hat and shawl were a similar colour to the coat, but not close enough to match. Grímheiður had probably not been wearing the coat when she bought the wool, and the result was a little jarring. The woman’s swollen red fingers fiddled with the shawl’s fringe as her eyes searched for a place to put it.

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to hang up your coat for you?’ Thóra held out her hand hopefully. It was one of those winter days when the cold north wind fights the sun for control and neither appears to be winning. As long as the battle was raging Thóra could not open the windows; the winds were hitting the building square-on, and the slightest chink in its armour would immediately turn her little office into a walk-in fridge. Keeping them closed was only marginally better, because the merciless sun made a furnace of it. Over the years Thóra and Bragi, her business partner, had somehow never got round to buying curtains, which made it nigh-on impossible to be in the office on cold, sunny days like this one.

‘No.’ Grímheiður’s reply was curt, bordering on rude. She appeared to realize this, because her cheeks, already red from the heat, darkened even further. ‘I mean, no thanks. It’s okay.’

Thóra nodded, let her outstretched hand drop and decided to get down to business. ‘As I mentioned on the phone, I’ve been asked to look into your son’s case, on the grounds that he’s been wrongfully imprisoned.’ She paused to allow Grímheiður to respond, but the woman neither spoke nor reacted. ‘Since you are your son’s legal guardian, I don’t wish to accept this case without your consent. Of course I could take it on without consulting anyone, but I’m unwilling to do so without the full cooperation of you and your son. I will also speak to the lawyer appointed by the Supreme Court as Jakob’s supervisor; as you know, he is responsible for ensuring that Jakob doesn’t stay at the institution any longer than necessary. Obviously any move to reopen the case would concern him.’ Grímheiður was staring impassively at the table, and Thóra couldn’t be sure if she was actually paying attention. ‘Since your son’s development is …’ Before the meeting began Thóra had tried to come up with the right terminology to describe Jakob without offending anyone. Now that the time had come she couldn’t remember what she’d decided on, so she’d have to wing it and hope for the best. ‘Since Jakob has Down’s syndrome your opinion holds even more weight than it usually would, although of course I will discuss it further with him if you wish us to proceed with the case. I would like to reiterate that this is free of charge for both of you, so your consent does not affect Jakob’s finances, for which you are the legal executor.’ Jakob, unlike Jósteinn, had been deprived of control over his finances and the court had appointed his mother as his legal proxy. ‘As I told you on the phone, your son has made friends with this Jósteinn, who is adamant that he wishes to cover the cost of the investigation. I feel I should say that I don’t fully understand why he’s doing this and am finding it hard to shake off the feeling that he has some motive beyond pure philanthropy, but that’s not for me to judge at this stage.’

‘I’ve met him.’ The woman’s thin lips tightened, causing them to almost disappear. ‘I don’t like him. But Jakob seems to consider him a great friend, and he’s a good judge of character despite his learning disability.’ Grímheiður fell silent and resumed smoothing out the fringe of her shawl.

Thóra didn’t know what she could add to this without embarrassing herself by revealing her ignorance of mental disabilities. She knew little about people with learning difficulties, or at least those that were as severe as Jakob’s, and it made her feel stressed and uncomfortable. No doubt there was plenty of information out there, but Thóra hadn’t had much time and had decided to wait until she was sure the case would be ongoing. And that all depended on the woman who now sat before her, melting. ‘But leaving aside the ques-tion of the purity of Jósteinn’s motives, what’s your opinion on this? Do you see any sense in it? What effect do you think it would have on your son, given that there’s no guarantee of it changing anything? I can’t predict how he’d react if his case was reopened – let alone how disappointed he’d be if it didn’t do any good.’

Grímheiður stopped fiddling with the fringe and clenched her fists until her knuckles whitened. Then she relaxed them and let her shoulders droop. ‘When I found out I was pregnant with Jakob, my husband and I had long since lost all hope of having children. We were both already in our forties, and of course we were delighted. When I underwent an amniocentesis, as I was advised to due to my age, we also found out what sex the baby was.’ She inhaled sharply and sat up straighter. ‘Well, anyway. I was steered towards aborting the foetus, not explicitly, but quite emphatically. Neither I nor my husband could bear to contemplate it, despite everyone saying it would take over our lives completely; on the contrary, that was precisely why we wanted a baby. It made no odds to me that I’d have to stop working, though we certainly enjoyed having two wages. Neither of us made a huge amount of money; we barely hit an average wage. But either way, an abortion was out of the question. He was our child, no matter how many chromosomes he had.’

Thóra couldn’t help but be impressed. She was sure that faced with the same dilemma her choice would be different, but that was irrelevant since she already had two children. Perhaps the decision hadn’t helped the woman’s marriage; she was the only one registered to the telephone number Thóra had called. ‘Are you still married to Jakob’s father?’

‘He died when Jakob was ten. Another victim of nanny state bureaucracy. He was a plumber, and he was sent east to Hveragerði to do a small job for a contractor. It was early May and they’d put summer tyres on all the company cars, but their regulations don’t control the weather and he hit black ice. He flipped his car over on Kambarnir and died instantly.’ The woman looked away and gazed out of the window. ‘He hadn’t liked the look of the weather, so he’d called the police to see if he could put on winter tyres. They said no.’ She paused. ‘When Jakob turned twenty the system went to work to put him into a sheltered community. The social worker who handled his case felt it best for him to move away from me, since in her infinite wisdom she thought I was overprotecting him and inhibiting his development. I’m still not sure quite how it was all sorted out, since I know that at the time there was a long waiting list for the community. For some reason the others on the list were turned down and Jakob was squeezed in. If you ask me, their so-called support was just the opposite: you never got what you wanted, and you never wanted what you got.’

‘Were you opposed to him living in a sheltered community?’ It was a ridiculous question given what the woman had just said, but Thóra always preferred to have everything spelled out to prevent any misunderstanding.

Grímheiður didn’t seem to mind. ‘Yes, I certainly was. He was too, but that just made it more of a challenge for the system, and in the end they won and I let myself be persuaded. But my doubts didn’t arise from any fears about his future; if I’d had a crystal ball, obviously I would have fought harder. I just wanted to have my son with me; I thought I could care for him better than complete strangers, off somewhere in the middle of the city. And his benefits made a difference, too. It’s very hard to run a household alone. After he moved out, the residence received the lion’s share of his monthly allowance and what little was left wasn’t even enough to keep him in clothes and shoes.’

‘How long had Jakob been living there when the centre burned down?’ Thóra was careful not to say
when he set the centre on fire
.

‘Nearly six months. Not long.’

‘And was he happy there, or did he not have the chance to settle in properly?’

‘He was terribly unhappy, really depressed. Maybe not as bad as he was after the fire, or when he was transferred to the Secure Psychiatric Unit at Sogn, but still miserable. Jakob needs stability, not turmoil.’

‘Then you think it might be inadvisable for me to take on this case? It will inevitably be a disruption for him.’

The woman gave Thóra a look of fierce determination. Her face bore the marks of a difficult life; deep wrinkles fanned from the corners of her eyes to her temples, like the sunbeams Thóra’s daughter drew in the sky in all her pictures. Even deeper furrows lay across her forehead, but although her face was lined with signs of stress her eyes were like a teenager’s, the whites clear and the demarcation of the irises sharp. ‘Someone called me today from Sogn and advised me to ask you to leave it, for Jakob’s sake. I was having a few doubts, but after that call I made my decision and I won’t change my mind.’

‘So you’re against it?’ Thóra was both relieved and disappointed. She had wanted to take the case, but also felt compelled to refuse it. Sometimes it was good to let others make decisions for you, but she was a little irritated that someone had tried to influence Jakob’s mother, even if it had been done with good intentions.