Someone to Watch Over Me (5 page)

‘No, absolutely not. I want you to take the case, and spare no one in your investigation. Neither me nor Jakob. I’m done with following the advice of people who think they know best. It’s my decision now.’

Thóra smiled weakly. ‘Nevertheless, I feel that you should think it over a little longer. Those are not strong grounds for such an important decision. There are other factors you need to consider; the few advantages would be hard-won, and the disadvantages could be considerable. You should think through all the possible outcomes.’

‘I’ve already done that, and my decision is the same: I want you to take the case. I would be a fool if I refused it on Jakob’s behalf; I would never be able to afford the cost of reopening his case myself.’ Grímheiður stared at Thóra, her blue eyes wide like a child’s. ‘Jakob is innocent and his name should be cleared, sooner rather than later. I don’t have many years left, I’m sure, and when I’m gone there won’t be anyone to look after him. So it’s now or never. I would give anything to spend whatever’s left of our lives together, but not the way things are now. Not like this.’

In Thóra’s experience family members usually thought their loved one was innocent; she had seen them react as if the accused were a cute little bunny rabbit that by sheer bad luck had ended up in the talons of the legal eagles. She thought back to the guileless young man she’d seen at Sogn and decided that a bunny wasn’t such an absurd metaphor in this instance. ‘Before I make my final decision I’d like to see the evidence you’ve brought.’ She watched Jakob’s mother reach for an old-fashioned briefcase made of cracked plastic.

‘I’ve not thrown any of it away; I just couldn’t.’ The woman put the briefcase on the desk with a solid
clunk
; it was heavy. ‘You’ll read this differently from me, but hopefully you’ll see what I think is obvious.’ She started to stand but had forgotten the shawl, hat and gloves in her lap. They dropped to the floor and the woman bent down, red-faced, to pick them up. After straightening back up she spoke again. ‘Jakob didn’t set the home on fire, so he didn’t kill anyone. He deserves to come home.’

‘I hope so,’ was all Thóra could say. What the poor boy deserved remained to be seen.

Thóra’s eyes had gone dry from squinting at the computer screen. She hadn’t opened the briefcase, as clearly it would take a while to go through its contents; she also feared she’d find images or descriptions of charred corpses, and needed to prepare herself mentally. So she had decided to write a few e-mails and then read up on Down’s syndrome. Thóra didn’t know much about it, but maybe the condition had been known to cause aggressive behaviour or psychotic episodes that could explain why Jakob had turned to arson, if indeed he did have anything to do with the attack.

Despite extensive online searches and a lot of reading, she found nothing conclusive. She did, however, find herself much better informed about the syndrome. She learned that it was caused by an extra chromosome, and that various disorders were associated with it including learning disabilities, heart defects, poor muscle tone and a below-average life expectancy. The average life span of a person with Down’s syndrome was said to be around fifty years, but most of the articles pointed out that this was an extraordinary improvement compared to half a century ago, when it had only been twenty-five. Various other characteristics were mentioned: facial features were markedly different from the average western appearance and the tongue was often too large for the mouth, as a result of which it often protruded. The palms of the hands had only one transverse line instead of two like most people. Other features were listed, most of them unlikely to be relevant to the case and many too technical for Thóra to understand them fully. She assumed she would find an analysis of Jakob himself in the briefcase, and that it would include his IQ score, though these were generally held to be highly subjective; the IQ of individuals with Down’s syndrome was usually around
35
–
70
. This was a broad range, so the generalizations she was unearthing told her little about Jakob.

Thóra also took some time to familiarize herself with the laws and regulations that might apply to Jakob specifically as an intellectually disabled person, and quickly noticed the change that had occurred in society’s attitude towards this group. The names of older laws, which had been dropped before current legislation on issues pertaining to the disabled, revealed an attitude that no longer existed: a bill from
1936
was named the
Law on Idiot Asylums
and one from
1967
the
Law on Institutions for Imbeciles
. In a report accom-panying the bill for the latter law Thóra found this era’s definition of intellectual disability, which was then called ‘feeble-mindedness’. This term applied to a number of different categories: people who had IQs lower than
50
and were either ‘morons’, if their IQs were between zero and
24
, or ‘imbeciles’ if their IQs went from
25
to
49
; and ‘idiots’, whose IQs were between
50
and
70
or
75
. The words were like needles in Thóra’s eyes and the scant resources that had been available to these poor people were equally painful; at the time there was no choice apart from placement in an institution, regardless of an individual’s age or gender. No respite care or assistance was available, meaning that the parents of a severely disabled or hard-to-control child had no other choice than to send it away. This had changed, thank goodness, but there was no doubt a long way to go before everyone’s needs could be accommodated.

She also found a report on the number of developmentally disabled people in Iceland: it was around half a per cent of the population, which was not small. Thóra also looked specifically for information about sheltered community residences and discovered that the implementation of this form of living had begun in
1980
, so there had been time to gather some experience regarding how they could best be run. According to the information she found, these units were homes for small groups of disabled people, generally not more than six, all aged sixteen or older and each under the one-on-one supervision of at least one staff member. The staff’s responsibility was to provide support and therapy, with a view to advancing the residents’ independence and life skills. The administration and setting up of these homes was at the expense of the state, although the money came from various of its budgets: construction costs were paid out of the Disabled Investment Fund, staff salaries from the Treasury, and communal expenses were taken from the residents’ insurance benefits, accounting for up to seventy-five per cent of the amount. All in all there were almost ninety such establishments in Iceland, totalling around four hundred and fifty residents.

The telephone on the desk emitted a peculiar sound, start-ling Thóra. The ring tone was very loud and high-pitched – their secretary Bella must have changed the setting, probably just to annoy her. Thóra suppressed her anger and lifted the receiver. ‘Yes?’

‘Your parents are here to see you; should I show them in, or tell them you’re not here?’

Thóra knew her parents were standing in front of Bella as she spoke. The girl was a lost cause. ‘Show them in.’ There was no point telling her off, if only because once Thóra started she wouldn’t be able to stop.

Her parents appeared in her office doorway, and after greeting them she invited them to sit down. They seemed ill at ease, and small talk about the weather did nothing to loosen them up. Finally her father got to the point, and the reason for their agitation became clear.

When he had finished explaining, Thóra stifled a sigh and took the paperwork her father was holding out to her. ‘So you don’t think you’ll be able to pay back the loan? Did this eventuality never occur to you when you bought the house?’ The property her parents had financed with a massive foreign-currency loan was a rather grand summer home in Spain; the purchase price looked high to Thóra, even without the doubled exchange rate of the euro. ‘The monthly payments would be crippling, even if you weren’t retired.’

‘We were advised that we could let it out, and the rent would cover the mortgage payments. The former owners said they were going to take care of it for us,’ said Thóra’s father, as her mother nodded vigorously beside him.

Thóra ground her teeth. ‘Of course they did.’ She flipped to the clause in the agreement that specified the payment amounts. ‘According to this, the property was purchased entirely on credit. A one hundred per cent mortgage is pretty risky, whatever the exchange rate, and I doubt that the rent would ever have covered the payments, even without the global financial crisis and a decline in the Spanish tourism industry.’ She looked up at them. ‘So you started renting it out? Did the rent pay off the mortgage, initially?’

They both looked sheepish, shifting in their chairs. ‘Well …’ said her father.

‘How much of the monthly payment did it cover? All of it? Half? A third?’ She hardly dared go any lower. ‘How do you think I can help you with this? And why didn’t you tell me that you’d bought a house in Spain? You’re in a very tight spot, it’s almost impossible to default on a mortgage.’

‘We didn’t want to get you involved at the time, but we were hoping you might know a way to get it converted to a bullet loan?’ He smiled weakly, clearly realizing this was not a viable option. Thóra’s mother still seemed hopeful, though, and was nodding her head even more energetically than before.

‘That can’t be done.’ Thóra didn’t want to waste their time pretending to entertain the idea. ‘Your position is even worse than it was, since you haven’t paid anything for several months. It’s probably been flagged as a bad debt at the bank, and if you don’t make a payment very soon you could wind up bankrupt.’

‘Is there nothing that can be done? Some sort of legal trick?’

‘Nothing I can think of. The lawyers who draw up these mortgages are no fools, and the bank loaned you the money in good faith. The sellers who conned you into buying this place also seem to have protected themselves pretty well, since it states quite clearly here that they offer no guarantee that you’ll be able to rent it out.’ Thóra gently laid the papers on her desk and tried to keep her composure. ‘This is a very tricky situation, and I’m sure you’ve tried to come up with a solution. The house is up for sale, which is good, but I doubt it will sell quickly and you’re very unlikely to make your money back on it. Whatever you
do
make should shrink your debt, at least. But the property market is as dead there as it is in Iceland, so the house is unlikely to sell any time soon.’ Thóra sighed. Her parents weren’t the first to show up in her office looking for a magic solution to insurmountable financial difficulties. ‘How were you planning to get yourselves out of this?’

‘Well, we do actually have an idea,’ said her father. Her parents exchanged a glance. ‘We can’t rent out this bloody place in Spain, except for a week here and there, but what we have done is put our house here in Iceland up for sale, and we’ve had a good offer that will allow us to pay off the other mortgage monthly until we can realistically put that house on the market. We’ve also found a nice flat we can afford without endangering the Spanish payments. The thing is, we’d have to hand over the house immediately, but we can’t move into the flat for two months. That is, if we decide to do it.’

Thóra’s mother had stopped nodding along with her husband and was watching her daughter’s reaction closely.

‘And where would you stay until your flat is ready?’ Thóra swallowed hard, just resisting the temptation to cross her fingers. She was an only child.

‘Well, we were thinking maybe we could just bunk in with you.’ Now they were both smiling eagerly. ‘We wouldn’t be any bother, and we’d even help out with the housework.’

Thóra was struggling to stay calm. Of course she wanted to help her parents out of the financial hole they’d dug for themselves. They had been very good to her throughout her life and she was more than grateful for that. Her problem with the idea stemmed from her own domestic situation. Her house was a decent size, but there were quite enough people living there already. Besides herself, there were her two children, ten-year-old Sóley and nineteen-year-old Gylfi; Gylfi’s girlfriend Sigga; and their son Orri, now two and a half. Thóra’s partner of several years, Matthew, had also recently moved in. The addition of a fourth generation to the household would eat away even more at their limited amount of private time. ‘I see,’ was all she could say.

‘It won’t be for long, probably not even the full two months,’ said her father cheerily. ‘I’ll find work and then we can go to a hotel or get another short-term rental somewhere.’

Clearly nobody had broken the news to him about the unemployment figures. She didn’t want to discourage him by pointing out how much had changed since he’d retired, or that right now the one thing the market didn’t need was a career banker, even one who had ended up as a branch manager. As far as she knew his only saleable skill was managing other people’s money, which made it even harder to understand how they’d been duped. In fact they’d been doubly cheated: tricked into putting their savings into equity funds which, according to the sales patter, made you a handsome risk-free profit on the interest; and then advised to take out loans against their property portfolio to buy everything their hearts desired. The original amount her parents had put into this fund would have covered the bulk of the price of the summer home when they’d made the decision to buy it, but now it had been whittled down to a third of the size and things looked dire for them. Their life savings were as good as gone, and their debt to the bank – the same one that ran the stock exchange – had been too much for them even before the crash of the króna had doubled the size of the loan.

Now that she understood this depressing situation, Thóra could see why her parents had been so embarrassed. At first she’d thought they’d come to write their wills and were unsure how to broach the subject. That seemed a rather comical thought now that it was clear how little they had to divide up.