On the other hand, it would be easy to speak to the man who shared shifts with Friðleifur, since his name was readily available in the files. Thóra looked up his mobile number and rang it, but he didn’t answer and it didn’t go to voicemail. Until she could reach him, the only way to determine whether she was on the right track was to speak to Friðleifur’s relatives. She looked at the clock – almost five – and hurried to dig out the names of the man’s parents from the files. No one answered the landline, and the mother’s mobile was either turned off or out of range. However, Friðleifur’s father Guðjón answered his at the second ring. It sounded like he was driving.
She introduced herself and offered to call later if it was inconvenient.
‘Inconvenient? What do you mean?’ The line was crackly, but she could hear his surprise.
‘It’s just that I can tell you’re driving.’
‘That’s no problem. I’m about to park.’ A moment later she heard the engine shut off. ‘Did you say you were a lawyer? Are you from the bank?’ Thóra explained carefully who she was and who she worked for. There was a long silence. For a moment she thought the man was going to hang up, but then he suddenly started speaking again, his voice now a great deal sharper. ‘What the hell do you want from me?’
‘I’m trying to get to the bottom of how this fire occurred and part of that process involves speaking to the employees of the centre and the families of those who died.’
‘As if we know anything. You must be pretty desperate if you think that the family members are holding on to some sort of secret information. Do you really think we wouldn’t have told it to the police when they were investigating the case?’
The man was going to be a tricky interviewee, that much was certain. ‘A lot of what you discussed with the investigators back then didn’t find its way into the reports. They don’t include every little detail from the interviews. But just so you understand where I’m going, I have to rule out the possibility that the fire was directed at Friðleifur.’
‘No one would have wanted to harm him. He was just an ordinary guy. He’d never got on the wrong side of the law, never even got into a fight.’ The man’s voice faded, but then he added sadly: ‘Not even as a kid.’
After this the conversation went much better. The man’s anger diminished and he appeared to realize slowly but surely that Thóra’s intentions were good. She carefully formulated her questions so that it would be impossible to interpret them as being in any way negative towards Friðleifur. ‘So he didn’t hang around with anyone undesirable? Someone who might possibly have attacked him at work, and things might have escalated from there?’
‘No, I don’t think so. His friends were like him, easy-going, laid-back guys. Of course I wished he’d been a bit keener on the books, but I don’t know whether that had anything to do with his friends; they were all the same, and most of them dropped out of high school. Actually, I think Friðleifur was planning to go back to school. It’s just a hunch, but when I could finally bring myself to go through his room, I found a brochure of evening classes and some textbooks on pharmacology that he’d apparently bought. God knows he had enough time to study on the night shift.’
‘He lived at home, in other words?’
‘Yes – he didn’t exactly make a fortune from that job, or from his previous jobs, so he couldn’t afford payments on an apartment, and we weren’t in much of a position to help out either. It’s an incredible relief not to be stuck with an unsellable apartment on which you owe more than what you paid for it. Still, he was doing pretty well before he died; he’d become more sensible with his finances.’
Thóra’s mobile beeped, and she read the short text message as she spoke. It was from Sóley, asking whether she was coming home. ‘I don’t imagine you and your wife ever visited the home, though I understand your daughter sometimes dropped in there?’ She replied to Sóley as she waited for the man’s reaction: Soon.
‘Did she? I didn’t know that. Why do you mention it? If she visited him, I don’t see how it’d be relevant here; he and his sister got on well, that’s all.’
‘I was just wondering whether she could maybe assist me. An outsider might have a clearer perspective and I can’t see a statement from her anywhere in the case files.’
‘No, there wasn’t one; and as I say, I wasn’t aware she’d visited him there. Are you sure?’
The phone beeped again. ‘Well, I don’t see why my source would have made it up, or indeed how he would have known that Friðleifur had a sister at all. I’m certainly not suggesting that anything untoward took place, but I’d still be interested to speak to her.’ Thóra reached for her mobile to see the new message. Sóley still had to learn how to end these exchanges; every reply was always followed by another. Thóra had recently gone through it with her, but it didn’t seem to have had any effect.
‘I’d like to discuss it with her first. You don’t think I’d let you loose on her without asking her?’
‘No, no. Absolutely not.’ She prodded the phone’s keypad to see what her daughter had to say. On the screen she read 02 short hose, which meant nothing to her, but underneath it was a photo. ‘Perhaps I could just get in touch with you again in a few days, or you could call me, and by then you might…’ Thóra lost the thread of the conversation. The picture on the little screen was a long way from the kind of thing Sóley usually sent. It was a black, charred corpse leaning back in the remains of an office chair. The deformed head hung over the back of the seat as if the individual had been waiting to have his throat cut; his hands hung at his sides, black palms facing forward. She’d seen this image before. It was Friðleifur.
‘Are you still there?’ The man sounded concerned.
‘What? Oh, yes. I’m sorry.’ Thóra pressed the button to display the phone number and saw that the message was, of course, not from Sóley. ‘Did you just send me a text message?’
He sounded surprised now. ‘I wouldn’t know how to – I’m not good enough with phones to be able to send a message during a conversation. Why do you ask?’
‘Sorry, I just got a bit confused.’ Thóra found it difficult to concentrate on speaking to Guðjón with the image on the screen filling her mind. Who had sent it, and why? She hurried to wind up the conversation. ‘Will you speak to your daughter, then, and let me know? The sooner the better.’ The man agreed he would and said goodbye. Who knew if he’s keep his promise? As soon as he hung up she turned back to the message on her phone. She was in such a rush that it felt like she had ten thumbs and she was afraid she’d deleted the message in her clumsiness. Luckily she hadn’t. She checked the phone number from which the message had been sent, but now it appeared to have been sent from the phone company Telecom. After a rather lengthy call to the company, during which she was transferred twice to different departments, she was informed that it had probably come from the free SMS service that they offered on the Internet. When Thóra reported that she’d also received three strange messages from ja.is, the man on the line sighed and told her that the best thing would be for her to request that such messages be blocked from reaching her phone. It was very easy and could even be done online. When Thóra said that she wasn’t keen on the idea, the man sighed again; clearly this wasn’t the first time the messaging service had been misused, and he must be tired of having these conversations. When Thóra explained to him that her enquiry had to do with a court case, the man’s tone changed and he told her that all messages sent from the Internet were actually registered and traceable, but that it took time to trace them. He pledged to look into it as soon as he could, but couldn’t promise he’d find anything. He took down her mobile number and the time of the message, which he said was enough information, and they hung up.