‘But she got the role anyway?’
‘The role in Flame of Hope wasn’t that bad,’ Jóhannes said, finishing his fruit tea. ‘But she was a disaster in it. Utterly wooden, poor darling. After that I think she more or less retired. Anyway, she and Baldvin were seeing each other before he married and had… no, they never did have children, did they?’
‘No,’ Erlendur said, surprised at how well informed the drama teacher was. Apparently there wasn’t much that those big ears missed.
‘Perhaps it affected the woman that way,’ he said. ‘Being childless.’
Erlendur shrugged.
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Hanged herself, didn’t she?’
Erlendur nodded.
‘And Baldvin? How did he take it?’
‘How anyone would, I imagine.’
‘Yes, how do people cope with something like that? I don’t know. I met Baldvin a few years ago. He was standing in for my GP at the local surgery. A very dear boy, Baldvin. Always had money troubles, from what I remember. Left a trail of debts everywhere. He used to cadge loans from me until I stopped lending him money. He spent way beyond his income, but doesn’t everyone these days?’
‘Yes,’ Erlendur said, getting to his feet.
‘It’s as if it’s in fashion to run up as large a debt as possible,’ Jóhannes said, accompanying him to the door.
Erlendur shook him by the hand.
‘She actually made rather a lovely Magdalena,’ the actor said. ‘A pretty girl.’
Erlendur stopped in the doorway.
‘Magdalena?’ he said.
‘Yes, a lovely Magdalena. Karólína, I mean. Hang on, am I talking rubbish? It’s all getting mixed up in my head, actors and roles and all that.’
‘Who was Magdalena?’ Erlendur asked.
‘Karólína’s part in the Swedish play. She played a young woman called Magdalena.’
‘Magdalena?’
‘Does that help you at all?’
‘I don’t know,’ Erlendur said. ‘Possibly.’
Erlendur sat in his car, still brooding on coincidences. He had smoked four cigarettes and was aware of a touch of heartburn. He hadn’t eaten properly since that morning and had been assuaging his hunger pangs by smoking. Most of the smoke escaped via a narrow gap at the top of the driver’s window. It was evening. He had watched the autumn sun disappear behind a bank of cloud. The car was parked at a discreet distance from an old detached house in the west of Kópavogur, the town immediately to the south of Reykjavík, and he had been keeping an intermittent eye on the house while watching the sunset. He knew the woman lived there alone and presumably didn’t have much money or else some of it would surely have been spent on maintenance. The place was in a pretty bad state of repair; hadn’t been painted for a long time and brown streaks of rust ran down beside the windows. He hadn’t seen anyone coming or going. A battered little Japanese car was parked in the road in front. The people who lived in the surrounding houses had trickled home from work or school or shopping trips or whatever people did in their daily grind, and, feeling rather ashamed of himself, Erlendur spied on the typical family life going on behind the two kitchen windows that were visible from his car.
He was there because of a coincidence in a case which he had no idea why he was investigating so assiduously. There was no indication of anything other than the tragic death of a woman who had been on the brink. This was indicated by her past, certainly by the loss of her mother, her obsession with the afterlife. He had found no evidence of foul play until recently when he had heard a name that had come up before. The name sparked off odd ideas about connections, both known and unknown, between the people that the unhappy woman at Thingvellir had known or not known. Magdalena was the name of the medium that María had visited. Erlendur knew that coincidences were rarely anything other than life itself playing nasty tricks on people or giving them a nice surprise. They were like the rain that fell on both the just and the unjust. They could be good and they could be bad. They shaped people’s so-called fate to a greater or lesser degree. They originated from nowhere: unexpected, odd and inexplicable.
Erlendur was careful to avoid confusing coincidences with something else. But from his job he knew better than anyone that they could sometimes be manipulated. They could be skilfully planted in the lives of unsuspecting individuals. In that case the incidents could no longer be described as coincidence. It varied as to how one referred to them but in Erlendur’s line of work there was only one name: crime.
He was going over and over these thoughts when a light came on by the entrance to the house, the door opened and a woman stepped out. She closed the door behind her, went over to the car that was parked in front, got in and drove away. She had to try the ignition three times before the engine coughed into life, and the car disappeared down the road with a considerable racket. Erlendur thought that part of the exhaust must have gone.
He watched the car drive away, then started his old Ford and followed at a slight distance. He knew little about the woman he was spying on. After his visit to the drama teacher he had given himself a quick briefing on the career of Karólína Franklín. Her patronymic was Franklínsdóttir but she used the Franklín part as a surname, a show of pretension which her old teacher found very telling: ‘Utterly superficial, that girl,’ he said, adding, ‘nothing up here,’ and tapped his forehead with his finger. Erlendur discovered that Karólína worked as a secretary at a large finance company in the city. She was single, childless and had not acted in public for years. The part of Magdalena in Flame of Hope had been her last role. In it she had played a working-class Swedish girl, according to Jóhannes, who discovered that her husband was committing adultery and plotted her revenge on him.
He followed Karólína to a kiosk and video-rental shop in the neighbourhood, and watched her choose a film and buy some snacks before driving back home.
Erlendur sat in his car outside her house for an hour or so, smoked two more cigarettes, then drove away down the street and towards home.
25
The bank manager did not keep Erlendur waiting. He came out and greeted him with a firm handshake before inviting him into his office. He was in his forties, smartly dressed in a pinstriped suit with a tastefully chosen tie and gleaming patent-leather shoes. The same height as Erlendur, he was a smiling, friendly man who said he had just been to London with a select group of clients to watch a major football match. Erlendur recognised the names of the teams but that was about it. The bank manager was accustomed to dealing with rich customers whose primary requirement was swift, efficient service. Erlendur knew he had worked his way up to his position through diligence, tenacity and an innate desire to please. Their paths had often crossed, ever since the manager had been a humble cashier at the bank. They had always got on well, especially after Erlendur had discovered that the cashier was not a native of Reykjavík but had grown up on a small farm in the remote south-eastern district of Öraefasveit until his family abandoned the attempt to scratch a living from the land and moved to the city.
The manager poured a coffee for Erlendur and they sat down on the leather sofas in his spacious office. They discussed horse breeding in the east and news of Reykjavík’s escalating crime rate, which was directly linked to the rise in drug use. When the conversation seemed to have run its course and Erlendur was worried that the manager would have to return to the business of making millions for the bank, although he showed no sign of impatience, he cleared his throat and came round in a circuitous way to the point of his visit.