Someone to Watch Over Me (49 page)

During the news that same evening, Thóra’s mobile phone beeped. She grabbed it and saw that once again she’d received a message via ja.is. Instead of reading it immediately she called directory enquiries, requested the number at Sogn and then asked to be connected. Her call was answered on the fourth ring. Thóra asked the staff member to tell Jósteinn that she’d received his message. If he was uncertain about where Jósteinn might be, she considered it more than likely that he’d find him in the computer workshop. Then she hung up without giving the man an opportunity to ask any further questions about this peculiar errand. Thóra was pleased with herself, although her mother gave her a strange look, obviously feeling that she’d dealt rather rudely with a public institution. She read the message.

Vesturlandsvegur Road,
8
December
2007

‘I don’t need a scientific explanation for how it works, Hannes, I just need to know whether there’s anything in it.’ Thóra rolled her eyes, safe in the knowledge that her ex-husband couldn’t see her on the other end of the line. She’d turned to him in his capacity as a doctor for clarification as to whether it were possible to reduce the effects of intoxication and hangovers through oxygen inhalation and intravenous nourishment. She found it all rather dubious and didn’t want to include it in her report if Lena’s claims turned out to be complete nonsense.

‘It does work, yes.’ Hannes sounded disappointed at not being allowed to continue bestowing on her the gift of his great wisdom. ‘Medical students do it sometimes, and other people who work in places with access to oxygen tanks. I don’t recommend it, especially if people have no idea what they’re doing.’

‘You knew about this when you were at medical school?’ Thóra couldn’t conceal her shock. ‘And you never said anything?’ If she hadn’t already been divorced from Hannes, she would have started divorce proceedings immediately. In the early years of their marriage, when they were both at university, she’d spent countless mornings wishing her head could be wrapped in cotton wool to alleviate her terrible hangovers.

‘Of course not. It never crossed my mind to do it. I was hardly going to drag you to a hospital and hide you in a linen cupboard with an IV stuck in one of your veins, hooked up to an oxygen tank. Very few people actually do this, and then hopefully only in moderation. It’s much healthier for the body to wrestle with the effects of alcohol on its own, be it intoxication or a hangover.’

‘You forgot to say that the healthiest thing of all is to drink sensibly.’ Thóra stopped the discussion by thanking him for the information and then briefly asking him about what they would do with the children during the imminent winter holiday. Neither of them had anything planned, so the only conclusion they came to was that they’d both have a think about it and discuss it some more later.

Thóra was happy to have got her facts straight. It looked as if her report would be finished shortly and it would be so watertight that it would be difficult for the Supreme Court to reject the petition. But she was still going to wait until the results of the DNA test on Bjarki Emil, the man who had been found at Nauthólsvík Beach, were made available, since she was certain that they would show in black and white that he’d been the one who’d abused Lísa. Ragna’s testimony was strong, but it would have to be verified nonetheless. Thóra’s happiness was slightly diluted by this: even if she managed to prove Bjarki Emil’s crime, it was unclear whether it would have any influence on the outcome of Jakob’s case. The relationship between the rapes and the fire was unclear. In order to succeed she would need to be able to demonstrate that Bjarki Emil or someone else had set the residence on fire, and explain why. This was easier said than done, however. Even before she had to divine their possible motives for starting the fire, there were very few potential suspects. She’d gone over the main files in the case once more, weighed up which of the individuals she’d had contact with were most likely to be guilty, but the result was always the same: none of them had had the opportunity to start the fire, unless the various people providing each individual’s alibi for the night in question were all lying.

Einvarður and Fanndís had been at an annual ball in the countryside east of Reykjavík, along with a large crowd of fellow partygoers. Of course none of them had been questioned, but the idea that the couple could have lied about this had obviously been considered absurd. If it had transpired that nobody recalled seeing them during the relevant window of time, they could simply have claimed to have been in their hotel room. Could Einvarður’s peculiar behaviour be attributed to anxiety about concealing his part in the tragedy? For her part, Lena had been having a party at her place, and two stragglers – neither of whom had been named, but one male, one female – were both said to have been at Lena’s home when the police turned up later that night, and had verified the girl’s story.

The parents of the other residents had all been either asleep at home, away from the city, or at parties, and Thóra had no particular reason to doubt their stories. Glódís had also been home asleep, but shortly before the fire started an old school friend of hers had woken her by calling to ask whether she wanted to meet up with her downtown. She’d been rather abrupt when the police had called to inform her about the fire, because she’d thought it was her friend calling back to persuade her. Margeir, too, had been asleep and it had been verified that he’d taken a call from Friðleifur on his mobile shortly before the fire started, at which point the phone was located at his home address. Of course Margeir could have gone to the residence immediately and started the fire, but he would have had to move very quickly. Plus it was hard to imagine what might have prompted a seriously unwell man to suddenly jump into a car and go to set a fire that would burn five people to death. According to the case files there was no doubt that Margeir had been ill that night. Others Thóra had spoken to – Sveinn, the filmmaker; Linda, the friendly therapist; Ægir, Tryggvi’s therapist and Ari – were out of the question; it was simply absurd to think that any of these people would have had reason to want to kill either the residents or Friðleifur. Of course there was always a chance that Thóra had overlooked some possible motive in one of them, but it was an extremely slim one.

No, as far as Thóra was concerned there were only three possible scenarios: that Bjarki Emil had started the fire, to kill either Lísa, Friðleifur or both of them; that someone completely different who had not yet turned up in the investigation had done it in a moment of madness, probably a night-time visitor who’d come for the oxygen treatment; or that Tryggvi had attacked Friðleifur and set fire to the building for reasons that were impossible to determine. None of them could have known that the fire alarm system was disconnected, except possibly Tryggvi. Perhaps this was irrelevant to the case and the arsonist simply hadn’t noticed the nozzles on the ceiling, which under normal circumstances would have extinguished the fire before it could spread. Thóra was finding it impossible to work out which of these three possibilities was most likely, but she was leaning more towards the idea that Tryggvi had been involved, based on the reactions of his parents and sister. They had all tried to keep information from her and concealed the fact that he had caused fires at least twice before, once with serious consequences for his sister. It was out of the question for Lísa Finnbjörnsdóttir or Ragna Sölvadóttir to have started the fire, and the same went for deafblind Sigríður Herdís Logadóttir. And Natan Úlfheiðarson had been heavily medicated, as the autopsy confirmed.

After going carefully over the points that she had gathered in her latest perusal of the files, there was nothing that particularly struck Thóra or made her inclined to change her opinion. So she decided her next step would be to find out about the text messages from Jósteinn. She’d been so furious with him when she’d worked out it was him who was sending them that she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it straight away. It irritated her immensely to be manipulated by him and his strange impulses like this. She also found the way he’d chosen to do it particularly unpleasant. Admittedly, most of the bastard’s messages had helped to propel the investigation forward. The one text that she couldn’t work out was the one that said
02
short hose
. She suspected that
02
was supposed to be O
2
, the symbol for oxygen, but she hadn’t come across anything that helped to explain the reference to a short hose. The only message left to deal with was the one about Vesturlandsvegur Road. It was nearly
10
p.m. and it was tempting to put it off until the morning, but then Thóra remembered the flickering monitor at work that she’d forgotten to swap with Bella’s, and decided to try to figure out the message in the peace and quiet of home. She was also forced to admit that she was itching to know how it was connected to Jakob’s case: the place and time didn’t fit at all with the fire – the date was nearly a year before and the location was miles away.

It took Thóra a little while to find on Google what Jósteinn seemed to be referring to. The first entry was an old news story about how a section of Vesturlandsvegur Road had been closed due to a traffic accident, and the police were unsure when it would be reopened. Further details about the accident weren’t available when the story was written, but a short time later a much more detailed article appeared. The article stated that a young girl had been hit by a car and had died. The driver had fled the scene and was being sought, and witnesses were asked to come forward. Thóra vaguely remembered this story as she continued perusing the articles. A huge investigation and a search for witnesses had yielded no result; the only thing that was known was that the girl had been hit by the car as she was crossing the road and had died of her injuries a short time afterwards. The driver had sped off but it seemed inconceivable that he hadn’t been aware of the accident. The investigation appeared to have been extensive; among other things, all garages and car repair workshops had come under scrutiny. Police had hoped it would be possible to determine the make of the vehicle based on evidence at the scene and analysis of the girl’s injuries, but this did not turn out to be the case. They discovered that the vehicle in question had been a medium-sized family car, but they found no further details. The driver failed to respond to repeated requests to turn himself in and no one had witnessed the accident. Gradually the story faded from the media. The girl’s identity had been published: her name was Margrét Svandís Pétursdóttir, but that meant nothing to Thóra. She was sure she’d never seen this name mentioned in connection with Jakob’s case.

Thóra was mainly interested in the next entry concerning the accident. Someone had blogged about a news item that appeared at first to be completely unrelated to this tragedy and had not shown up in the results of Thóra’s Google search. In a short autobiographical description, the blogger said that he was a
self-appointed specialist on all things spiritual and supernatural.
The story that had inspired him to communicate with the outside world was brief, and described how the Icelandic Church had for the first time in more than a century undertaken to exorcise a ghost. Thóra had missed this tiny story completely at the time; it had probably slipped under the radar among the swarm of breaking stories about the bank collapse, much like the story about the fire. In fact the story had only appeared in one media outlet, and the blog entry was more detailed than the news article itself; it mentioned Vesturlandsvegur Road and the date given in the text message, which is why the search engine had listed it. In the text the blogger said that he knew the exorcism was related to the accident in question, and that when he had been called upon he had clearly sensed that the house was haunted. The girl had been on her way to this house to babysit a young boy when she was run over; since her death was unresolved, her soul had ended up in limbo between this world and eternity. As long as her death remained unresolved, the girl was unable to leave the here and now and she had anchored herself to the child she was due to babysit. Thóra couldn’t make head or tail of most of the entry, which went on to describe the nature of limbo and to discuss other issues related to mediums.

Thóra saw that the names of those who lived in the house were given in the blog entry: Berglind and Haraldur; and although she only had their first names, it would be easy enough to find them in the town of Mosfellsbær. Thóra had to stop and think for a moment. It was undeniably important to find out how this tragedy was connected to Jakob’s case, and she was sure it would help if she could do that before she next met up with that nutter Jósteinn, which she planned to do very soon. The danger was that although Thóra had decoded most of his text messages, and thus might have something of an upper hand in their relationship, the advantage might shift to him if she didn’t stay on the alert. Given the chance, he would avoid her questions and instead continue to drip-feed her snippets of information. Of course she could contact the parents of the girl who’d died, but the thought of calling people who were very likely to still be consumed by grief, even though three years had passed since the accident, was less than appealing. No matter how she imagined starting such a conversation, she always came out sounding mad.
Yes, hello, my name is Thóra and I received a text message from a sociopath incarcerated at Sogn, suggesting that a multiple homicide by arson is related to the accidental death of your daughter. Would you be willing to meet up?
People who thought they were being haunted, however, were much less likely to hang up on her in mid-sentence. Without further ado, she looked up the number and called.

The conversation turned out to be much easier than Thóra had dared to hope. Berglind didn’t seem remotely shocked when she explained why she was calling, with as much sensitivity as she could muster. It was easy to hear from her gloomy voice and monotone replies that the woman had been having a tough time. When Thóra asked cautiously whether Berglind might be able to meet her, her reply was succinct.
Yes, just come now – my husband is at work and I’m not doing anything special.