‘Didn’t Gagga talk to you?’ he said. ‘I was going to keep an eye on the paper for you.’
‘Oh, heavens, yes, but I did so want to read it.’
‘But you can’t read the paper if I’m supposed to be watching it.’
‘No,’ said Gudmunda, continuing on her way up the stairs, unperturbed, ‘that’s the snag. Do give my regards to your mother, dear.’
Shortly afterwards, as he prepared to tuck into the lunch she had cooked for him, Sigurdur Óli reported this exchange to Gagga, adding that he had no intention of lying in wait for the paper thief again. There would be no more of that nonsense.
Gagga seemed to derive some amusement from her son’s displeasure. She stood behind him, struggling to suppress her laughter, then offered him a second helping and expressed surprise at his appetite.
When she had poured the coffee, she asked if his father had spoken to him. Sigurdur Óli described how he had turned up at the station with the news about his prostate.
‘I expect the poor man was a bit anxious?’ said his mother, sitting down with him at the kitchen table. ‘He sounded pretty subdued when he rang to tell me.’
‘Not that I noticed,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘I’m going to look in on him later as the operation’s tomorrow. He said I should get myself checked out — that I was in a risk group.’
‘Then you should do it,’ Gagga said. ‘He mentioned it to me too. Don’t put it off.’
Sigurdur Óli sipped his coffee, thinking about his father and mother and their relationship back in the days when they were still together. He remembered overhearing a conversation about himself; that for his sake they could not get divorced. That had been his father. Whereas Gagga had said she could look after him perfectly well on her own. His father had done what he could to avoid a divorce but it was no good. It had felt inevitable when he moved out, taking a couple of suitcases stuffed full of clothes, an old trunk that had been in his family a long time, a table that was his, pictures, books and various other bits and pieces, all of which disappeared into a small van parked outside the block of flats. Gagga had been out that day. Sigurdur Óli and his father had said their goodbyes in the car park, though his father had pointed out that it was not really goodbye as they would still see a lot of each other.
‘Perhaps it’s for the best,’ he had said. ‘Not that I really understand what’s going on.’ The words had stuck in Sigurdur Óli’s mind.
When he had asked his mother why, he had received no satisfactory answer. ‘It’s been over between us for a long time,’ she had said, then told him not to pester her any more with such questions.
As long as he could remember, his father had bent over backwards to please her, until by the end he was completely under her thumb. She used to humiliate him in front of Sigurdur Óli who would wait in vain for his father to react, to do something, say something, lose his temper, shout at her, tell her in no uncertain terms what an unjust, domineering bitch she was. But he never said a word, never showed any backbone, just let her walk all over him. Sigurdur Óli knew that his mother was not blameless — she was born demanding and inflexible — but he also started to see his father in a new light and began to blame him, mentally accusing him of spinelessness and of failing to keep their family together. He trained himself to be indifferent to him.
He would never allow himself to be pushed about in a relationship like that; he would do his damnedest to avoid turning out like his father.
‘What did you see in him when you first met?’ he asked his mother, finishing his coffee.
‘Your dad?’ Gagga said, offering him more. He refused it and rose. He needed to head over to the hospital and wanted to call at the station afterwards.
‘What was it?’ he asked again.
Gagga regarded him thoughtfully.
‘I thought he had more guts, but your dad never had any guts.’
‘He was always trying to please you,’ Sigurdur Óli pointed out. ‘I remember it distinctly. And I remember how often you were nasty to him.’
‘What’s this about? Why are you raking this up now? Is it because of what’s happened between you and Bergthóra? Are you having regrets?’
‘Perhaps I sided with you too much. Perhaps I should have stuck up for him more.’
‘You shouldn’t have had to make the choice. The marriage was over. It had nothing to do with you.’
‘No,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘It had nothing to do with me. That’s what you’ve always said. Do you think that was fair?’
‘Well, what do you want me to say? Anyway, why are you brooding over this now? It was all such a long time ago.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘Whatever, I’ve got to go.’
‘I had nothing against Bergthóra.’
‘That’s not what she says.’
‘Never mind what she says; it doesn’t make her right.’
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Give my regards to your father,’ said Gagga, clearing away the cups.
His father was asleep when Sigurdur Óli went to visit him in the urology ward at the National Hospital on Hringbraut, near the old town centre. Unwilling to wake him, he sat down to wait. His father had a room to himself and lay there, wrapped in silence under the white bedclothes.
As Sigurdur Óli waited for him to stir, he thought about Bergthóra, wondering if he had been too inflexible and whether it was too late to rescue the situation.
24
By Monday afternoon the search for Thórarinn had still not yielded any result. The police had interviewed a large number of people who either knew him or had some connection to him, including other van drivers, relatives and regular customers, but no one had heard from him or knew where he was hiding, though various theories were put forward. The police followed up some, though others were deemed too far-fetched to be worth investigating. Wanted notices had been put out for him in the media using a recent photo supplied by his wife. The police announcement warned that he was wanted in connection with the murder of Sigurlína Thorgrímsdóttir and might be dangerous. They did not have to wait long before news of sightings started to flood in, not only from Reykjavík but from other parts of the country, even from as far away as the East Fjords.
While this was going on, Sigurdur Óli spent the best part of the day dealing with another, more puzzling matter that required him, among other things, to find a lip-reader. He finally managed to arrange a meeting with one towards evening. At Elínborg’s suggestion, he had called the Society for the Deaf and the woman in the office there had proved very helpful, providing further contacts until he was eventually put in touch with a woman reputed to be one of the top lip-readers in the country. He emailed her and they arranged to meet at Hverfisgata at six.
Sigurdur Óli wanted her to watch the film clip that had been sent to him wrapped in a dirty carrier bag.
He had handed the film over to the experts who examined it, transferred it to DVD and did their best to clean it up and sharpen the images in the limited time available. The film turned out to be an eight-millimetre Kodak type, which the firm had stopped making in 1990. From the contents, it appeared to be an amateur effort intended for home viewing, though it was very hard to be certain, or indeed to guess, what country it had been filmed in. It might be Icelandic but could equally well be foreign, as one of the technicians put it bluntly when he rang Sigurdur Óli with the results of his analysis.
For a variety of reasons it was difficult to guess where or when the film had been recorded. For one thing, it had a very narrow field of view, as the technician explained, referring to the fact that not much of the surroundings were visible, apart from a glimpse of a piece of furniture that might have been a bed or a couch. In this respect the material offered very little to go on. It could have been recent, meaning shortly before 1990, but then again it could date from the period when this type of Kodak film was most commonly used, around half a century ago. There was no way of telling. Moreover, the clip was extremely short — sixteen frames a second, 192 frames in all — and the view was the same in all of them, same angle, same movement. It was clearly shot indoors, in a house or flat where people were living at the time, and the presence of a bed or couch would suggest a bedroom. But in the absence of any view from a window there was no way to locate the house: the lens was pointed downwards throughout the clip.