Why Did You Lie? (6 page)

‘What are you going to do if it’s been trashed?’ Vala stood behind him, watching the screen. ‘There’s no way you’re charging up there now.’ Vala hadn’t been quite as sold on the idea of buying a holiday chalet in the countryside as he had. It struck him that she might even be pleased if it was broken into.

‘I just want to check. If necessary I could ring someone or go to bed now and head up there later.’ Nói was glad Vala didn’t ask who exactly he was planning to call. There was no caretaker on site and their chalet stood some distance from the main colony to which it officially belonged. His worries proved groundless, however. Everything looked fine when the picture appeared on screen. The old three-piece suite in the living room, which they really should replace, the clunky TV and DVD player, the small kitchen area. Everything was as it should be, intact and untouched. Nói couldn’t hide his relief and Vala shared it, though for different reasons. ‘Brilliant. Now can we go to bed?’

Nói stood up, having recovered his good mood at last. He was even happier when they saw their bed. The Americans had changed the sheets and although Vala was a little put out by the non-matching linen they had used, she was too relieved to complain. Nói had stripped off and was about to collapse into bed when he announced that he had forgotten to turn off the computer. Vala sighed and told him to relax. It worked. He lay down and conked out even before she did.

The family were all sound asleep when the computer in the kitchen suddenly came to life, so the cat was the only witness when the webcam picked up a movement. He watched the dark picture, then hissed at the screen. Darting out of the kitchen, he bounded upstairs and halted before the open door to the master bedroom. There he sat down on the threshold and mewed plaintively at his sleeping owners.

Chapter 4

20 January 2014

The Christmas bauble resembled a small, fat Santa Claus. It grinned merrily at Nína from where it hung from the curtain pole in the hall, but drew no answering smile from her. She felt an urge to smash it. Thröstur had chosen December to try and kill himself, and although Christmas was over, she still had to clear up after it, deliver the few gifts they had bought people and take down the corny decorations. She didn’t know why she couldn’t galvanise herself to get on with it, since the shiny tat did nothing but reopen the wound every time she laid eyes on it. One consolation was that they hadn’t put up many decorations, so when she finally got round to it the job wouldn’t take long. But she couldn’t drum up the energy. All she had done was drag the Christmas tree out onto the pavement in mid-January, still dressed in its baubles and fairy lights. It had tumbled around out there for a week before vanishing, and Nína suspected the old man on the ground floor of having something to do with that. Pity he didn’t have a key to her place, if he was that keen.

The flat was almost as airless and dusty as the archives at the police station. Even though she’d hardly spent any time at home recently, it was well overdue a clean. Well, that would have to wait. Nína threw off her jacket, missed the peg and left it lying on the floor. This would only be a brief stop. She would have gone straight from work to the hospital but her sister had announced she was coming round. She was obviously worried and Nína wanted to reassure her that she was all right. Task of the day: look normal. Sad, of course, but not unhealthily so. She hoped this would deter Berglind from any further attempts to try and cheer her up. She just wanted to be left alone.

While the coffee was percolating, Nína drew back the kitchen curtains for the first time since Thröstur had been admitted to hospital. She had wanted to spare the neighbours the unedifying sight of her sitting howling at the kitchen table, and also to avoid seeing the garage. She would pull the curtains across the windows again the moment Berglind had gone, though fits of weeping in the kitchen were a thing of the past. She hadn’t set foot in the garage since Thröstur had left it in an ambulance, and as far as she knew no one else had had any reason to go in there since the detectives had finished their examination. If Nína had had access to a bulldozer, the low-rise building would have been flattened by now.

In hindsight, she should have noticed something was wrong when Thröstur’s attitude to the garage changed almost overnight. When they’d bought the flat six months ago, his behaviour had been perfectly normal. At first he hadn’t been particularly keen on the property as prices in the west end of town were on the steep side. But when she managed to persuade him to view the flat, he was infected by her enthusiasm, and from what she remembered the garage had played no small part in that. At the time she had assumed he was planning to tinker with the car or start collecting tools, though he had no real interest in either. The garage had stood more or less empty for the first few months while they were busy doing up the flat. But from the middle of November Thröstur had taken to staring at it out of the window for long periods, as if he expected a figure to appear in one of the garage windows, or was afraid someone would try to break into it.

Nína had assumed he was feeling daunted about having to start work on it just when they had finally got the flat straight. She’d told him she couldn’t care less if he left it for now, but her words seemed to have no effect. He would stand for long periods at the window, silently contemplating the building. A week before he did the deed, she had come across him standing in the middle of the garage, lost in thought. He pretended nothing was up when she nudged him and led him out, but was quiet and distant for the rest of the evening. Now, Nína kept wondering if he’d already made up his mind then; whether his evasive gaze had been nothing to do with the problem of how to make use of the building, but a sign that he was calculating the strength of the steel tracks that supported the hefty door. It was one of so many things she would never know. What they hadn’t told one another would never be put into words now. For example, she had never told Thröstur about her problems at work, for fear he would go ballistic. He would have been quite capable of beating up her colleague or – worse – writing about the incident in the papers. But now there was no question of changing her mind and confiding in him, as she would have done in the course of time.

Nína watched the coffee drip down. With every drop the kitchen smelt more homely and she inhaled deeply in the hope that it could somehow invigorate her soul. Nína would never have admitted as much but she had a suspicion that the bloody garage itself had somehow planted the idea of suicide in Thröstur’s mind. She knew she wasn’t alone in thinking that there was some kind of curse on the building. Twice she had seen children from the neighbourhood dawdling along the street, only to break into a run as they passed the garage, eyeing it fearfully. No sooner had they reached a safe distance than they slowed down again, though some glanced round as if to make sure no one was following them.

About a week ago a plastic ball had landed by the garage door as Nína was parking her car. The woolly-hatted heads of the neighbours’ children had popped up above the fence but the smiles were wiped off their rosy faces when they saw where their ball had fallen, and after exchanging glances, they had made themselves scarce.

Reluctant as she was to pull back the curtains and let in the grey afternoon light, it would be worth it if the kitchen seemed more inviting as a result. The solo performance of
Woman Making a Slow but Steady Recovery
was to be staged here for the benefit of a single audience member – Berglind – but in the gloom with the curtains drawn it would be almost impossible to play a sane woman convincingly.

Nína gathered up the post and newspapers she had been throwing on the kitchen table for weeks and flung the whole lot in the bin without so much as reading the envelopes. She put a few dirty plates in the dishwasher and set it going, and the low humming and sloshing it emitted sounded comfortingly mundane. Next she arranged some fruit in a glass bowl so the rotten bits wouldn’t show. Luckily there was an unopened milk carton that ought to be OK, though it was past its sell-by date. To be on the safe side she poured the milk into a cream jug and placed it with two cups on the kitchen table. Surveying the scene, Nína felt the overall impression still left something to be desired. Removing the Christmas candlestick from the top of the fridge made a slight improvement. After that she sat down and waited.

Her eyes strayed to the window and a chill ran through her but she wouldn’t let herself look away. It was a garage. A square, concrete box that had stood there for decades. It wasn’t the building’s fault that Thröstur had tried to kill himself in there; the decisive factor had been the presence of a suitably sturdy support from which a rope could be slung. That was all. Nína continued to stare out of the window. The sooner she accepted that the problem had lain with Thröstur not the garage, the sooner she’d be reconciled to the building.

As if to dispute this, the brightly coloured plastic ball was still lying there in the slush. But it wasn’t only the ball that made her uneasy: high up in the garage wall, two rectangular windows squinted like black eyes. On one of the sills was a flower pot, the shrivelled plant like a skeleton in silhouette. Nína tried to force herself to look at the windows but couldn’t, she was so afraid of seeing a movement inside. Perhaps Thröstur had felt the same when he stood here staring at the garage as if mesmerised. She pushed away the thought. She was not going the same way as him, that much was certain.

The big, ugly cracks in the pebbledash wall put her in mind of the broken veins on the cheeks of the man who had shared a ward with Thröstur for the first week. In the end she had plucked up the courage to ask if her husband could be moved to a single room so she could be alone with him. To her surprise, he had been moved two days later and she no longer had to cope with other visitors or patients. But having her wish fulfilled turned out to be a mixed blessing. Now there was nothing to distract her, so she sat alone for the most part, listening to the beeping and sucking of the machines Thröstur was hooked up to. Occasionally one of the nurses would pop their head round the door, but otherwise they might have been alone in the world, Nína and the empty carapace that had once been Thröstur.

Dusk slowly filled in the cracks in the garage wall. Her sister was already a quarter of an hour late. This was unusual, as normally you could set your watch by Berglind. But it didn’t really matter; she wasn’t going anywhere except up to the hospital, and Berglind only had home waiting for her. In spite of this, Nína was keen to get the visit over with as quickly as possible.

She opened the kitchen window a crack. It was as if the wind had been waiting to pounce because instantly a violent gust blew the curtain in. Old notes and photos of her and Thröstur tried in vain to escape their moorings on the fridge door. Then all was still again. The faint rumble of traffic blended with the noise of the dishwasher and Nína felt a little better. Silence was a constant reminder of what she had lost. Thröstur used to turn on the football the moment he walked in the door. But it didn’t cross her mind to let the excited sports commentators loose in the room, any more than it did to lay the table for Thröstur and pretend he still lived here. The television sat unused in the sitting room and Nína averted her eyes from it on the rare occasions she went in there. If she gave it half a chance the reflection in the black glass screen would unnerve her by showing odd shadows and movements, just as the garage windows did.

The doorbell rang shrilly and Nína stood up. At last. She paused briefly in front of the hall mirror and swore under her breath when she saw how haggard she looked. There was no point pretending she was in good spirits if she had black rings under her eyes and wild hair – Berglind would think she had finally tipped over the edge or was overdoing the meds. Nína had in fact refused all the pills she was offered, whether they were to help her sleep or stave off depression, though with every day that passed the thought of such solutions became increasingly attractive. She was held back by stubbornness and the certainty that dulling her senses wouldn’t help in the long run. Any more than drawing the curtains would cause the garage to disappear.

Nína licked her fingers and wiped her eyes in a vain attempt to hide the signs of exhaustion. The image the mirror presented her with was unchanged: a familiar face imprinted with shadows. She slapped her cheeks to make them pink, which slightly improved the overall effect.

The doorbell rang again and Nína hurriedly answered it. ‘Is the bell broken?’ People often said the sisters looked almost identical, but right now few would have thought so. Berglind was the picture of health, a natural glow in her cheeks. Her long blonde hair swirled around her head in the wind and she had to pull a thick strand from her lips. ‘Aren’t you going to let me in?’

Nína stepped aside and Berglind entered the hall with a sigh of relief. Nína received an icy kiss on the cheek and watched as her sister tried to tidy her hair.

‘Should I just throw my coat on the floor?’ Berglind eyed Nína’s jacket. As she looked up her gaze encountered the Santa Claus and Nína regretted not having smashed the bloody thing after all. Berglind was regarding her anxiously. ‘You look terrible. Worse than last time, and that’s saying something.’ She frowned. ‘And what on earth’s wrong with your cheeks?’

Clearly her attempt to bring a little colour to her face had misfired. ‘Nothing. I’m just tired.’ Nína led the way to the kitchen, eager to go in there as soon as possible so Berglind wouldn’t have a chance to look around. The kitchen was her stage and that was where the audience member was to sit. ‘Coffee?’ Behind her she heard Berglind say yes to a small cup. The element was on the blink in the coffee-maker and no steam rose from the cups when Nína poured them. She sat down facing her sister. ‘Sorry, it’s not very hot.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Berglind took a sip and put down her cup. She didn’t take another. ‘How are you doing?’ She glanced around, apparently more satisfied with the kitchen than the hall. Nína’s efforts hadn’t been wasted. ‘I haven’t heard from you for ages.’