Natan was more difficult to work out than his mother and uncle. The helmet on his head made him look a bit odd, even before you got to the huge grin that stretched from ear to ear – in marked contrast to his tablemates – or noticed that he only had one eye open. Thóra’s understanding of epilepsy was limited, but the helmet was probably meant to protect his head if he suffered a seizure. The young man’s expression suggested that he was also developmentally impaired, either as part and parcel of his epilepsy or yet another burden that he’d been born with. Of course it was also possible that the photographer had told a joke the boy found hilarious, then had clicked the shutter at an unfortunate moment. Natan’s jolliness was incongruous, anyway, against the sadness on his mother’s and uncle’s faces.
Finally Thóra had drawn up a list containing the phone numbers and addresses of the relatives of the four residents who’d died in addition to Tryggvi. In one case it appeared that the parents were divorced, since the mother and father of Sigríður Herdís Logadóttir lived in separate locations.
The overwhelming feeling she experienced once she’d called everyone on the list was fatigue. Fatigue and sadness, though she wasn’t sure why since none of the parents had complained about either their lot or that of their child, and they all seemed to be bearing up remarkably well. Their stories of painful struggles with the system as they sought decent housing for their child were without exception told with a complete lack of self-pity, and Thóra wondered whether rejection and obstacles strengthened people and helped them to deal with things more stoically. Úlfheiður, Natan’s mother, was the only one who’d sounded rather cold. The photograph did indeed appear to have captured her character rather well. She didn’t seem bothered that the wrong man might have been held responsible for her son’s death, leaving the guilty party still on the loose. She described her son’s illness to Thóra as if reading the text off a sheet of paper, betraying no emotion, but seemed happy to speak at length about him. At first Natan had appeared normal, but before he’d even left the maternity ward he had started having seizures and had remained behind in hospital when she went home. The nerve cells in his brain didn’t work as they should have; they were overactive, according to his mother, and he was among those unlucky epileptics for whom medication wasn’t very effective. He then underwent an operation, but it was unsuccessful, leaving him with the possibility of suffering a seizure at any time. He lost the sight in one eye when he was eight, after hitting his face on the edge of a table during a fit.
By this point in her story the woman sounded tired of going over it all again. She began to talk faster, telling Thóra how each fit had further damaged Natan’s brain, and by the last one he’d been in a very bad way. Since Úlfheiður was a single parent and worked day and night to make ends meet, she couldn’t afford to have him at home any longer, especially as the economy declined. He was subsequently moved to a facility for seriously disabled children, coming home only for occasional overnight stays, as well as two weeks in the summer. He’d lived there for around fifteen years, at which point he’d passed the age limit for that home, had moved to the new residence and died. Although Úlfheiður’s account seemed callous, Thóra doubted that she’d always been like that; ori-ginally she must surely have been besotted with her child, like other mothers were. Obviously her circumstances had forced her to let go of her son and along the way her soul must have got damaged. Unless she was just naturally cold-hearted.
Úlfheiður had nothing much to say about the centre; she had rarely visited because she had no car and there were no buses – the area was a ghost town. She had met few people on the rare times that she’d gone, and actually only remembered one woman, who she described as stuck-up. The woman had given her a dirty look when in the course of conversation it came up that Úlfheiður was visiting the place for the first time, two months after it had opened. Úlfheiður snorted as she said this and for the first time Thóra detected a hint of emotion in her voice – she had been hurt by the other mother’s reaction. Of course she was always hanging around, even though her son didn’t even know she was there, she told Thóra. At least Natan was aware of me and wanted me to be there. Thóra had no interest in hearing more about the friction between her and Fanndís, and steered the conversation to Jakob, though she didn’t find out much; Úlfheiður barely remembered him. She wasn’t necessarily convinced that he’d started the fire; that could certainly have been someone else. But she couldn’t be persuaded to name any names and Thóra got the feeling that she’d only really said it to please her.
At the end of the conversation Thóra asked cautiously about Natan’s sex drive, but the woman said she knew nothing about that; she’d simply never thought about it. Before they said their goodbyes, Úlfheiður told her that she tried to think as little as possible about the fire; she’d long since come to terms with her son’s death, as she’d known since he was born that he wouldn’t live long. As Úlfheiður said this, Thóra stared at the image of Natan on the screen, smiling from ear to ear at the family reunion, happy with his life, unaware that some people would see it as simply a long, drawn-out fight to the death.
Although the conversation with Úlfheiður had been difficult, it was a walk in the park compared to the talk she had with Lísa Finnbjörnsdóttir’s parents. Her mother had answered the phone but could barely be persuaded to say anything, except that they’d chosen to let the crime against their daughter be forgotten so that her name wouldn’t be dragged posthumously through the justice system and her case sensationalised in the papers. She agreed when asked whether Einvarður had assisted them in putting a stop to further investigation of the case, but flatly denied that he or anyone else had influenced their decision. She’d then put her husband on the phone and made him finish the conversation, which mainly consisted of him trying to persuade Thóra not to name Lísa directly in the petition to reopen Jakob’s case. There was no way Thóra could agree to this and a long time was spent bickering over the man’s further attempts to persuade her to change her mind, which she deftly deflected. At the same time, she tried to coax out of him the names of those who could have raped his daughter. If he was telling the truth – and he appeared to be sincere in all of his answers – then he had thought about this a great deal, but Thóra could get nothing out of him. The call concluded with him begging Thóra one last time to allow his daughter to rest in peace. He sounded as if he were on his knees.
Other than this she didn’t get much out of the phone calls, though the investigation continued to make slow progress. For example, after speaking to the girl’s parents, Thóra was fairly certain that Sigríður Herdís Logadóttir had had nothing to do with the fire; she had been both blind and deaf, as well as seriously mentally disabled. Lísa Finnbjörnsdóttir was also ruled out, which left only two other residents, Natan and Tryggvi, neither of whom seemed likely either. Nothing in the interviews with the parents suggested they had any information that might prove useful; the only new thing that came to light was that Tryggvi’s unconventional therapy had been disruptive, since it seemed to have caused him unnecessary suffering. However, none of them wanted to go into this in any detail, as it hardly mattered given what happened later. Sigríður Herdís’s mother said that she’d actually complained to the director that Tryggvi’s wailing was causing her distress during her visits to her daughter. She believed her complaint had forced them to switch his therapy to a more conventional kind, because she hadn’t noticed any noises on subsequent visits. Thóra asked her when she’d lodged this complaint, and she replied that it had been about three weeks before the fire. Neither she nor the other parents knew the name of Tryggvi’s therapist, although Thóra assumed that he was on Glódís’s list. She concluded her conversation with the woman and looked up Glódís’s e-mail address, then emailed her to ask. The man must have known Tryggvi quite well and could hopefully tell her what he’d been capable of. It was getting late, so she didn’t expect to receive a response from the director that day.