‘What makes you think she might have been involved with an American?’ the husband cut in, leaning forwards in his chair.
‘The doctor must have told you what he discovered during the post-mortem,’ said Flóvent. ‘How your daughter lost her life and how she’d used the services of —’
‘He said she’d had an abortion recently,’ interrupted the woman.
‘That’s right. Were you aware of that?’
‘No, we had no idea.’ The woman struggled to control her voice. ‘The poor child. It breaks my heart to think about it. She never told us and I... I didn’t notice anything. No doubt I should have done but... she hid it so well.’
‘Was it an American soldier who did this to her?’ asked her husband.
‘I really don’t know,’ said Flóvent. ‘But it’s a possibility we have to consider, given the current situation in Reykjavík.’
‘Was it the same man who got her in the family way?’
‘We can’t rule it out,’ said Flóvent. ‘But we don’t know for sure. We know nothing of the circumstances that led to Rósamunda losing her life.’
The couple sat in silence, their hands in their laps, and Flóvent was deeply moved by their plight, by their wordless grief, their bewilderment in the face of such an incomprehensible tragedy.
‘She was so beautiful and such a good girl,’ said the woman, her voice thick with tears. ‘I just don’t understand how something like this could happen to her. Just can’t begin to understand it.’
12
As Konrád sat beside Vigga’s bed waiting for her to wake up, his thoughts drifted back to the little street where he grew up: Skuggasund. Even in his earliest memories, the war had been over for several years, though the prosperity that it brought was still very much in evidence. But the years that followed had been tough. The Shadow District used to be its own little world, with its shops and businesses, large and small. It was intersected from west to east by Lindargata, bracketed by high culture at one end and the meat-packing trade at the other. At the western end, the National Theatre turned its back to the street as if it were too grand for the neighbourhood. It was flanked by the National Library, for those who thirsted after knowledge, and the High Court, for those who had strayed from the path of virtue. At the eastern end, the autumn lambs would fall eerily silent at the gates of the abattoir. Between these poles, the properties ranged from shacks clad in corrugated iron to modern houses built of concrete, with two or even three storeys; some well maintained, others dilapidated, their small back gardens facing south into the sun. It was here, in one of the poorest basement slums, that Konrád had grown up.
The inhabitants, an assortment of labourers, artisans and toffs, got on with their lives in relative harmony. There were drinkers and teetotallers. Those who went to church on Sundays a little the worse for wear and celebrated the word of God with a twinge of conscience, chiming in wholeheartedly when the minister intoned: ‘... and forgive us our trespasses’. And those who donned their fedoras and strolled through town with their lady wives — showing off a new coat perhaps — removing their hats and decorously greeting others of their kind. While their wives gazed into shop windows, exclaiming over a beautiful dress or tasteful hat direct from Copenhagen or London, the men would squint out to sea with narrowed eyes, keeping track of the ships, or they would follow the progress of a magnificent new automobile, gliding down Austurstræti like a glittering dream. At noon the savoury smell of roasting meat would waft into every corner of the house, and the afternoon would pass in a satisfied doze until coffee time. That was how Sundays used to be. And there was always some hungover bloke standing at a window wearing nothing but a vest, trying to recruit a boy to run down to the shop and fetch him a cold Pilsner, yelling after him ‘Keep the change!’
It was all so vivid to Konrád that he would often revisit it in his mind. Unusually for the time, his mother had worked outside the home and been the one to put food on the table. His father, on the other hand, rarely held down a job, and was involved in all kinds of dodgy schemes, most of them illegal. As Konrád got older he discovered that petty crimes and lawbreaking were his father’s daily bread. His parents didn’t have a large family to provide for, just him and his sister Elísabet. Konrád recalled the visitors who used to come to their home: relatives from the north, friends of his mother, his father’s more dubious associates. The heyday of the fraudulent seances had been before he was born, but he remembered his dad’s tales about the meetings held in their little flat. His father never adopted the role of medium himself, freely admitting that he was a lousy actor. The psychics, sometimes male, sometimes female, used to warm up by asking if the names Gudrún or Sigurdur — some of the most common in the country — meant anything to those present; if anyone was familiar with a painting of Mount Esja or knew why a smell of mothballs should suddenly assail the medium’s senses.
At the height of these seances, the sitting-room tables would levitate and the chairs shift as if by magic; a rumbling would be heard, and the most extraordinary details would surface from the past. The sitters latched on to these purported connections to the deceased, their hearts gladdened that life had conquered death and that death was only a door to another, better world. Of course, the entire thing was a hoax cooked up by Konrád’s father and his associates. They used to toy with the feelings of the bereaved, merely for the sake of swindling a few krónur out of them. When, years later, these shameless deceptions came up in conversation, Konrád’s father showed no sign of contrition. He’d spotting an opening, he said, when the Icelandic Society for Psychical Research was at the height of its popularity in the late thirties and forties. The society had gained particular fame as a result of two incidents. One was the disinterment and reburial in Skagafjördur of the remains of Solveig of Miklabær, an eighteenth-century woman, the subject of a celebrated ghost story; the other was the extraordinary peregrinations undertaken by the bones of the beloved nineteenth-century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson, all the way from the Danish capital Copenhagen to his birthplace of Hraun in Öxnadalur, before finally coming to rest at the ancient assembly site of Thingvellir. Their spirits had allegedly made contact at seances organised by the society, and it seemed only right to comply with their desire for reburial. In such a heady atmosphere, Konrád’s father’s psychic agency had prospered. Some of the mediums he worked with genuinely believed they had the gift but just needed a little leg-up to get things going. Others were simply good actors, sensitive to the reactions and body language of the credulous, and ingenious at extracting information from them.
Hearing a faint moan from Vigga, Konrád took the liberty of lifting the duvet from her face. There she lay, all sunken cheeks and toothless jaw, her wrinkled skin as dry as parchment, grey tufts of hair plastered to her skull. Her eyes opened a fraction.
‘Vigga?’ whispered Konrád. ‘Can you hear me?’
No reaction.
‘Vigga?’ he said again, louder this time.
The old woman didn’t move a muscle, merely stared dimly into space.
‘I don’t know if you remember me. My name’s Konrád and I used to live near you in the Shadow District.’
She didn’t stir, and he lapsed into silence. The girl who looked after Vigga had told him she was only occasionally compos mentis. The girl didn’t think she had long to live, but admitted that she would have said the same several years ago too, adding that she was an amazingly tough old bird.