Why Did You Lie? (3 page)

They look at each other self-consciously and no one says anything. It is Helgi’s acquaintance Ívar who finally makes a move, muttering that they had better stow the gear. The younger man follows him. They search among the small piles on the platform until they find what they’re looking for and break open some boxes. Both seem completely unaffected by vertigo, though to Helgi it looks as if they are stepping dangerously close to the edge and it wouldn’t take much to lose one’s footing on the rough concrete. He considers making another attempt to talk to the two men, but decides against it. Ívar was reluctant to speak to him at the airport; he doesn’t seem to remember him, which isn’t really that surprising. A few days ago Helgi had struck up a conversation with him in a bar that seemed mainly to attract lonely, friendless types like himself, plus the odd tourist who appeared horrified at the idea that this might be the fabled Icelandic nightlife.

Ívar had been pretty wasted, bragging about a perilous trip he was about to make. After letting him ramble on for a while, Helgi asked if there was any chance he might be allowed to go along to take pictures. Ívar had thumped him on the back, so hard it hurt, and said it might well be possible. Helgi seemed like a good bloke and he would be glad of the company. Helgi should just ring and ask the coastguard, making sure to mention that Ívar was OK with it. Which he had done.

He watches the men laying aside tools in a neat row. They work in silence, having no apparent need for words. Both clearly know what they’re doing and their movements are practised and confident. Helgi thanks his lucky stars he doesn’t have to participate in the repairs to the lighthouse or measurements of the helipad. He finds it hard to imagine how there can be any room for manoeuvre in these confined conditions and is sure any activity must be extremely dangerous, whatever security measures are taken. He’d be only too happy to stay out of the way – the only condition for his being permitted to go along – but easy as it was to make such a promise, he sees now that it will be almost impossible to aim the camera without bumping into his companions while they work. If he can ever actually summon up the courage to make the move from the helipad to the lighthouse, that is.

It’s hardly any distance but that doesn’t make it any less daunting. Involuntarily Helgi grabs hold of a pile of equipment to combat his dizziness. Out of the corner of his eye he catches sight of the young woman who is also searching for something to hold on to, and feels ashamed of himself for not being a proper man like the others. To mask his embarrassment, he starts taking photos completely at random until the men seem to have finished their task.

Gingerly he inches after them as they stride, sure-footed, over to the lighthouse. He is aware of the woman behind him but doesn’t dare look round. A rattle of loose gravel and unnaturally rapid breathing indicate that she is following close on his heels. He concentrates on the lighthouse, which looks so small you would have thought it had been built for one of Snow White’s seven dwarfs. Once there, he heaves a sigh of relief and presses himself against the rough wall. The woman stations herself beside him, her cheeks ruddy, her eyes betraying a hint of anxiety, as if she has been brought here against her will – or her better judgement. She’s kitted out like a veteran, in drab green outdoor gear, designed with an eye to protecting her from the cold rather than enhancing her feminine charms. But the clothes are brand new and she looks about as pleased to be there as him.

Helgi opens his mouth to offer comfort, partly as a means of bolstering his own courage, but can’t find the right words. Together they gaze in silence at the view from the rock, at the heaving, glittering surface of the sea and almost cloudless vault of the sky. Helgi shoots a glance at the woman whose name, he now remembers, is Heida. He guesses that she is the technician who has been sent, in a last-minute decision, to update the radio transmitter and GPS equipment in the lighthouse. Tóti, the man with Ívar, must be the other carpenter, as no manual worker would have long pink nails like Heida’s.

Ívar sticks his head inside the lighthouse, turns and looks at Heida and Helgi for a moment then climbs onto the step in front of the door and stamps imaginary dirt off his shoes. Tóti follows on his heels. Ívar puts his hands on his hips and sighs, then shoves a knife in the leather sheath attached to his belt. Helgi regrets not having brought along his hunting knife to fit in better.

‘Right,’ says Ívar. ‘No point hanging about. There’s no time to lose if we’re going to finish by tomorrow evening.’

Slowly Helgi detaches himself from the wall and feels as if he’s reeling. ‘If you like, I might be able to help. I won’t be taking pictures all the time.’

The men barely react, though Ívar mutters that he’ll bear it in mind. They enter the lighthouse and Heida follows, but the space is so tiny that one person is forced to stand in the doorway. Helgi allows his rapid heartbeat to slow as he listens to the sound of their voices inside. This is incredible. Here he is, standing on a pillar of rock hardly any bigger in area than his flat, surrounded on all sides by the freezing ocean, which seems to be just waiting for one of them to lose their footing. This is no place for a human being to spend an hour, let alone the whole night.

His thoughts return to his dream and although he can remember little about it, he’s pretty sure his imagination fell far short of the reality. He tries to pick out the helicopter on the horizon but it has gone. There’s nothing to see for the moment, so he moves slowly over to join the others, clinging onto the wall all the while, and peers in through the doorway over Tóti’s shoulder.

Inside, Heida and Ívar are bending over something he can’t see. But his attention is drawn not to the people but to the whitewashed walls of this tiny space. More snatches of his dream flash into his mind. Whitewashed concrete, spattered all over with blood. Shiny black pools on a stone floor. All of a sudden he remembers how the dream ended.

There were four people to begin with.

Two returned to land.

It’s a pity he can’t remember if he was one of them.

Chapter 2

20 January 2014

Few people had any business down in the bowels of the police station. Because of its low ceiling the windowless basement was used solely for storage, not for stuff that was needed but for useless things that no one could decide whether to throw away. Nína switched on the light and one fluorescent tube after another clicked and flickered to life as she descended the stairs. As a rule only the caretaker came down here, but a faint smell of cigarette smoke suggested that other employees used it on occasion. Nína wrinkled her nose and sighed. She would get used to the stale fug; it wasn’t the worst thing she’d smelt in the line of duty. She surveyed the assorted junk that covered the floor, then picked her way through it along the zigzagging path created by the caretaker. She pitied the poor man having to sift through this worthless rubbish in preparation for the force’s move to a new, more modern headquarters. But it wasn’t all junk; somewhere in here lurked filing cabinets crammed with documents that Nína’s superiors felt it would be more appropriate for a police officer to empty. The information they contained might still be sensitive.

Dust danced in the air, refusing to settle. Nína rubbed her nose. The silence was total; she couldn’t hear the faintest echo of the roar of traffic from Hverfisgata and Hlemmur Square, which constantly got on her nerves upstairs. Extraordinary how much difference a single layer of concrete could make. Down here it was like entering another world, far from noisy distractions and the light of day. She shrugged off her initial disgust at the stale air, pushing away the memory of all those recent newspaper articles about the dangers of mould spores. Not that she was particularly worried about her health. She didn’t really care about anything these days. Lately she had gone about her work like an automaton, doing only what was strictly necessary. Her colleagues treated her as if she were made of porcelain or else a hand grenade primed to go off, and her boss seemed incapable of dealing with the situation. That probably explained why she was down here in the basement. He couldn’t send Nína back out on the beat because of the furore that had broken out at the station when she’d lodged a formal complaint about the conduct of a colleague – although such matters were supposed to be handled in the strictest confidence.

They had received a report of a disturbance and possible domestic at a block of flats in the east end of town. Nína had been sent with another officer to restore the peace and arrest the troublemaker if it turned out he had beaten up his wife badly enough for her to press charges. On the way there her fellow officer had been grumbling about a recent report that had revealed the shitty conditions endured by policewomen and the prejudice they experienced from male members of the force. Nína had stood up for her female colleagues; after all, she had firsthand experience of the problem. Women still made up a small minority in the police but apparently even that was too much for some of the men. Her male colleague had tried to argue that men were better at the job than women and started regaling her with exactly the kind of bigotry the survey had exposed. It was a pity, really, that they had wasted their money on research when speaking to him would have told them all they needed to know.

Nína had refrained from comment during most of his rant but her patience snapped when he started using chess to prove his point. She asked if he was really that expert at the noble game himself. Extrapolating from the genius of Russian grandmasters wouldn’t wash. If chess was a standard of male intelligence, then he and his fellow officers in the police must be singularly unrepresentative; at least, the less-than-enthusiastic participation in the Christmas chess tournament hadn’t pointed to the existence of many grandmasters on the force. This and more in the same vein accompanied their progress up the stairs and by the time the door was opened in response to their banging, they were both red in the face and fuming.

The man standing in the doorway didn’t look like much of a chess player. Behind him they could hear his wife whimpering. The flat stank of alcohol and old cigarette smoke. The man let them in as if nothing had happened, as if beating up your wife was standard practice. Nína followed the noise to where his wife was curled up weeping. When she looked up, the crimson mark of a blow was visible on one cheek and her face was streaked with mascara. Her top was torn, revealing a red lace bra, and when she loosened her arms from round her knees, it was apparent that her trousers had been dragged down to her pubic bone. The flies hadn’t been undone and the skin around her jutting hipbones was badly grazed.

At this point the caveman entered the room with Nína’s colleague. The husband drawled that there was no need to get excited – they were married and could do as they liked. Neither Nína nor her fellow officer bothered to try and correct this misconception. Then he offered them a drink, adding that they shouldn’t waste time on that bitch, she was a frigiddirtyfuckingboringwhingingcunt. He must have taken exception to the expression on Nína’s face because the next thing she knew he was behind her, pressing hard against her back, thrusting his hands inside her open jacket and grabbing at her breasts. He slurred in her ear, asking if she liked it, and to her disgust she realised he had a hard-on. Then he released one breast and forcing her face round, licked her cheek. The foul stench from his mouth must have been caused by a rotten tooth. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that her colleague was not lifting a finger to help. A mocking smile played over his lips. Her attempts to twist round and stamp on the man’s toes were in vain; she couldn’t free herself. This seemed only to increase her colleague’s amusement.

Suddenly the wife rose from the sofa, roaring like a lion, claws out. At first, so bizarre were the circumstances, Nína feared she was going to attack her for trying to steal her husband. But the woman’s fury was directed at him. He loosened his grip as his wife’s nails raked across his fleshy cheeks. When Nína turned, the man looked as if he’d tried to disguise himself as a Native American: four bright red parallel lines scored each cheek from ear to ear.

The visit ended with them handcuffing the man for assaulting his wife and resisting arrest. On the way back to the station Nína asked her colleague what the hell he had been thinking of and he retorted that if she was equal to a man surely she should have been strong enough to look after herself. He didn’t see how he could have helped.

Her first action on reaching the station was to make a formal complaint about his conduct and demand that he should receive a reprimand. How could he work as a police officer if he couldn’t be trusted to come to the aid of a colleague? If a crazed woman had attacked him, Nína wouldn’t have stood by and watched. Bickering in the car was one thing, but the dangerous situations arising from their work were quite another. Then officers had to back each other up. Or so she had always believed.

The following day there had been a huge fuss. Nína was asked to withdraw her complaint as it would seriously damage the man’s career prospects in the force. Instead, he would receive an informal dressing-down. She was also asked to delete the description of the husband’s assault on her from the report. It was for her own good, she was told; she would hardly want the incident to become common knowledge. As if she had willingly colluded in it or been at fault! Nína had refused both requests and threatened to take the matter further if it wasn’t handled properly in-house.

Suddenly she was a pariah: no one wanted to work with her; she couldn’t be trusted. Even the other female officers gave her the cold shoulder, one commenting that now she had really made their lives unbearable; now they would all be branded as snitches. And she had let them down by not being able to free herself unaided. Nína had been speechless.

When she was taken off the beat until further notice and assigned special duties instead, she hadn’t raised any protest. In fact it had been a huge relief. The assault by the drunk had shaken her more than she was willing to admit to herself or her superiors. She had no desire to risk winding up in the same situation again, so she welcomed the monotonous but safe chores that were now dumped on her. Her calm reaction disconcerted the duty sergeant who had obviously been ready for a showdown. Instead she had stood before him, nodding meekly as he outlined her latest assignment, which was even duller than the last.