Week followed week, adding up to months and years of Elínborg’s childhood, with hardly a variation. A ready-made meal was bought perhaps once every two years or so: her father would bring home open sandwiches of smoked lamb on malted bread, or prawns and mayonnaise on white.
Elínborg was nineteen when the first piece of grilled chicken entered her home, in a carton with ‘French fries’. That was another unforgettable day. She did not particularly like either foodstuff and her parents never repeated the experiment. She enjoyed reading about food in books, and often all she remembered from children’s stories and novels were the descriptions of meals and cooking: unfamiliar foreign delicacies, unavailable in Iceland in those days, such as ‘marmalade’, ‘bacon’ and ‘ginger beer’. She recalled reading one day about ‘melted cheese’. It took her some time to understand what it meant. She had never heard of cheese being eaten in any other way than straight from the fridge, sliced on to bread.
Elínborg was picky about certain foods and was a constant source of disappointment to her mother, who was a firm believer in the virtues of boiling: she believed that food was inedible unless reduced to a mush, and she would boil slices of haddock for twenty-five to thirty minutes. Elínborg was always terrified of choking on a fish bone at the kitchen table. She did not like the fatty breadcrumb coating of the cutlets, found the meat bland and flavourless, and the caramelised potatoes were disgusting. Lamb’s liver in onion sauce, served on Tuesdays except when her mother plumped for hearts and kidneys, she simply could not get down. Nor did she think heart or kidney could be considered proper food. Her culinary blacklist was endless.
It came as no surprise to Elínborg when her father suffered a heart attack in his early sixties. He survived, and her parents were still living in the same place, Elínborg’s childhood home. Both were now retired, but remained alert and self-sufficient. Her mother still boiled her air-cured fish until the windows misted over.
When it had become clear that Elínborg’s fussiness about food was incurable, and as she grew old enough to find her way around the kitchen, her parents allowed her to start cooking for herself, using whatever her mother had bought. She would take some of the haddock or cutlets, or the fish loaf served on Thursdays after the pasta experiment came to an end, and prepare something that she really wanted to eat. And she developed an interest in cookery: she always asked for cookbooks for Christmas and birthday presents, subscribed to recipe clubs, and read cookery columns in the papers. Yet she did not necessarily want to be a chef; she just wanted to prepare food that was not inedible.
By the time Elínborg left home she had had some impact on the family’s eating habits, while other aspects of their life had changed of their own accord. Her father, for instance, no longer came home to eat lunch and lie down to listen to the news. Her mother went out to work and came home exhausted in the evening, relieved that Elínborg was willing to cook. She worked in a grocery shop where she was run off her feet all day long, and every evening she soaked in a hot bath, her feet red and sore. But she was more cheerful than before, as she had always been a sociable person.
Elínborg graduated from high school, left home and rented a small basement flat. During the summer vacations she worked as a police officer, having secured the job through an uncle. She decided to study geology at university. In her teens she had enjoyed travelling around the country with friends, one of whom, who was keen on geology, urged Elínborg to enrol with her. Although she was initially fascinated by the subject Elínborg knew before she graduated that a career in geology was not for her.
She watched Theodóra at her homework and wondered what her daughter would do when she grew up. She was interested in science — physics and chemistry — and talked about doing it at university. She also wanted to study abroad.
‘Do you have a blog, Theodóra?’ asked Elínborg.
‘No.’
‘Perhaps you’re too young.’
‘No, I think it’s silly. I think it’s ridiculous to go talking about everything I do and say and think. It’s nobody’s business but mine. I have no interest in putting it on the net.’
‘It’s surprising how far people go.’
Theodóra looked up. ‘Have you been reading Valthór’s blog?’
‘I didn’t even know he blogged. I only found out by chance.’
‘He writes total nonsense,’ said Theodóra. ‘I’ve told him I don’t want him mentioning me.’
‘And?’
‘He says I’m an idiot.’
‘Do you know these girls he writes about at all?’
‘No. He never tells me anything. He tells everyone everything about himself, but he never tells me anything. I gave up trying to talk to him ages ago.’
‘Do you think I should let him know I’ve been reading his blog?’
‘Get him to stop writing about us, at least. He writes about you too, you know. And Dad. I meant to say, but I didn’t want to be a telltale.’
‘How does it work … if I read his blog, am I snooping?’
‘Are you going to talk to him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then maybe you are snooping. I’d been reading it for months before I lost my temper over something he’d written about us, and told him. He wrote that I was a lame swot. I don’t know why he puts it on the net if we’re not allowed to read it without being accused of spying on him.’
‘Months, you say? How long has he been doing it?’
‘Over a year.’
Elínborg did not feel that she was spying on her son by reading a public blog. She did not want to interfere, because she felt he must take responsibility himself, but she was concerned that he was writing too openly about his family and friends.
‘He never tells me anything,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should talk to him. Or your Dad could.’
‘Let him be.’
‘Of course, he’s almost a grown man, he’s at college … I feel I’ve lost touch with him. We used to be able to talk but now we hardly ever do. All I can do these days is read his blog.’
‘Valthór has already moved out — up here,’ said Theodóra, tapping at her forehead with a finger. Then she went back to her homework.
‘Did he have any friends?’ asked Theodóra after a little while, without taking her eyes off her books.
‘He? Valthór?’
‘The man who was killed.’
‘I assume so.’
‘Have you spoken to them?’
‘No, not me. Other people are tracing them. Why do you ask?’ Her daughter sometimes spoke in riddles.
‘What did he do?’
‘He was a telecoms engineer.’
Theodóra looked at her pensively. ‘They meet people.’
‘Yes, they go to people’s homes.’
‘They go to people’s homes,’ Theodóra repeated, and returned to her easy maths assignment.
Elínborg’s mobile rang from the pocket of her coat in the hall closet. It was her work phone. She went into the hall to answer it.
‘We’ve just had the preliminary autopsy results for Runólfur,’ said Sigurdur Óli without so much as a hello.