‘Well, you’re bound to get the odd troublemaker. I expect the majority are decent enough,’ said the doctor.
‘Indeed. Look, I think it would be best if a doctor filled them in on the facts — how she came to die, the abortion.’
‘I can do it if you like.’
‘Thank you, it might sound better coming from you.’
Baldur nodded and went back to join the couple. Flóvent waited outside in the corridor, trying but failing to imagine how the girl’s parents must feel.
After a considerable length of time, the door opened and the couple came out again, accompanied by the doctor. The woman was wiping her eyes with a handkerchief she had taken from her bag. Her husband had his arm around her. After saying goodbye to the doctor, Flóvent gave the couple a lift back to Fríkirkjuvegur where he showed them into his office. He offered them some genuine coffee that Thorson had rustled up from US Army stores, and gave them a chance to recover from their initial shock. He didn’t want to come across as overbearing or intrusive in their hour of grief.
‘Do you have any idea who could have done this to her?’ the woman asked eventually.
‘I’m afraid we have nothing to go on yet. We very much hope you’ll be able to help us get the investigation off the ground, now that we know who she is.’
‘I just can’t imagine who would have wanted to do this,’ said the man. ‘It’s so... so unreal somehow. That something so horrible should happen to our little girl.’
‘I understand she was your adopted daughter?’
‘That’s right,’ said the man. ‘Our Rósamunda came to us when she was one and a half. We didn’t have any children of our own. We’d always wanted them, but it wasn’t meant to be.’
‘Where was she from?’
‘From up north in Húnavatn County,’ said the woman. ‘My sister worked on a farm there. A local woman died leaving behind a large family of young children and, thanks to my sister’s efforts, the father gave us his daughter to bring up.’
The man explained to Flóvent how in the end they had gone out looking for children to adopt. They weren’t getting any younger, and when his sister-in-law wrote to tell them of a poor family in her area who needed help they didn’t hesitate. Three of the children were to be farmed out to neighbours, but the father wasn’t averse to the idea of one of them going to a nice couple in Reykjavík. The sister had told him about them, and he had nothing against meeting them. So the couple had travelled north over the moors to talk to the girl’s father, who turned out to be a crofter living in very straitened circumstances. And there they took the little girl in their arms for the first time. A happy, healthy child in her second year. Her mother had died four months earlier while giving birth to her eighth and last baby.
‘Life can be very unfair,’ said the woman, raising red-rimmed eyes to Flóvent.
So they took little Rósamunda home with them, her husband continued. She was happy in town with them, went to Austurbær School and passed her school certificate. Though she wasn’t especially good at her books, she had always been hard-working and clever with her hands. They had talked to her about going to college but she was bored of schoolwork and at the beginning of the war she had taken a job at a dressmaker’s near Austurvöllur Square. Rósamunda enjoyed sewing and had been over the moon to get a position with such a good seamstress. She was desperate to learn how to make dresses and soon started creating her own pieces. She’d made a very pretty frock for her mother.
‘She used to talk about setting up her own shop one day,’ said the woman, her pride shining through.
‘No chance of that now,’ added her husband.
‘It was ever such a nice dress,’ said his wife. ‘Ever so pretty and exquisitely made. I must say, I’ve never owned a dress that suited me so well. She was always good with a needle, so it came easily to her.’
‘You mentioned that she’d disappeared once before,’ Flóvent prompted gently.
‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘About three months ago.’
‘What happened?’
The man glanced at his wife, suddenly unsure of himself. ‘She didn’t come home for two days.’
‘She never really told us what happened,’ said his wife.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, the poor dear. I expect she must have been with a young man. But she didn’t want to talk about it and we didn’t press her. Though, I don’t know, perhaps it would have been better if we’d insisted. In hindsight.’
‘What did she say?’ Flóvent searched their faces in turn.
‘She said she’d needed a little time to herself. That was it really. Didn’t come home for two days and that’s all she would say.’
‘Was she in some sort of trouble?’
‘Not that we could tell.’
‘And she gave no further explanation?’
The couple exchanged glances again without answering.
‘Had she ever done anything like that before?’ asked Flóvent.
‘No, never,’ said the husband. ‘It was just that one time. We didn’t want to press her. If something had happened and she didn’t want to tell us, that was her business. We thought maybe she’d tell us later. Once it had all blown over.’
‘And did she?’
‘No, she hadn’t by the time she...’
The man trailed off. Flóvent looked at them sitting dejectedly before him. It was plain that they bitterly regretted not doing more when their daughter disappeared the first time. They couldn’t turn back the clock now.
‘She told us not to worry,’ said the woman. ‘That it was nothing to worry about.’
‘Was she seeing a young man at the time?’
‘Not as far as we know,’ said her mother.
‘What about her friends? Did they know anything?’
‘She didn’t have that many friends,’ said the woman. ‘She’d never had a boyfriend, though she easily could have found one, a pretty thing like her. But she did get on well with another girl who worked at the dressmaker’s.’
‘Did she have any contact with her birth family?’ asked Flóvent.
‘No, very little,’ said the man. ‘It was only recently that she began to take an interest in her background. She exchanged letters with her... her father, I suppose I should call him, and was thinking of taking a trip up north sometime soon.’
‘Had she known for long that she had family up there?’
‘She knew from the very start,’ said the woman. ‘It was never a secret, if that’s what you’re asking. We never kept anything from her. Our relationship wasn’t like that. She was our daughter.’
‘Yet she never told you why she didn’t come home for two days?’
They were silent.
‘She must have had her reasons,’ the man said finally.
‘Did she associate with American soldiers at all?’
‘Soldiers?’ said the woman, surprised. ‘No. Not at all. No. Impossible.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because she didn’t want anything to do with them. You can be sure of that — she didn’t know any Americans. Personally, I mean. Of course soldiers may have come into the shop where she worked, but that was all. She definitely didn’t have any other occasion to meet them. She never mentioned it. Not once.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘The day you found her,’ said the man. ‘She went to work and we never saw her again. We went out of town to stay with friends in Selfoss.’
‘It was only a short trip and we assumed she was fine,’ said his wife. ‘We heard on the wireless about the girl behind the theatre but of course it never crossed our minds that it could be our Rósamunda. Then, when we got home yesterday evening she wasn’t there, and she didn’t come back in the night, so early this morning we spoke to the woman who owns the dressmaker’s but she didn’t know where Rósamunda was, only that she hadn’t turned up to work yesterday, so she’d assumed she was ill. Then we began to suspect—’