‘I don’t suppose Benjamín knew what to do when Thorson suddenly turned up out of the blue, all set to expose his father and grandfather. He claims he didn’t go to see Thorson with the intention of killing him. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. A moment of madness. He thought the problem would go away if the old man did.’
‘What about the grandfather?’ asked Birgitta.
‘Benjamín got the impression that his grandfather didn’t have a lot of respect for women. It was a different era. Men saw nothing wrong in taking advantage of them. Then there was the social upheaval brought about by the war. Benjamín thought that perhaps in his grandfather’s eyes the girl up north and Rósamunda had represented everything he despised about the Situation. Innocent though they were, they were made to pay the price for the behaviour of other women. Though at this remove it’s impossible to know what was going through his head. For all Benjamín knows, there may have been other girls who landed in his clutches and never dared say a word.’
‘Stefán never forgot the girls,’ said Birgitta as they walked slowly back to the cemetery gates. ‘Even after all these years.’
‘No, he was never satisfied,’ said Konrád. ‘Never happy with the way it ended.’
Later that evening Beta dropped in on her brother, and he told her the whole story. She sat in the kitchen listening to Konrád’s account without a word, and afterwards was silent and pensive for a long while.
‘It must have come as a nasty shock for this Benjamín when his dad started rambling on about Rósamunda, and the horrific truth came out,’ she said at last.
‘He wouldn’t have known which way to turn,’ agreed Konrád. ‘Then Thorson pops up, then me. The whole thing was blowing up in his face.’
‘All his family’s dirty laundry about to be exposed.’
‘Yes.’
‘And his dad a former cabinet minister and all.’
‘He wanted to protect his reputation — his family’s reputation.’
‘Just like you’re always trying to defend your dad?’
‘I’m not “always” trying to defend him.’
‘Odd that he should have been connected to all this,’ said Beta.
‘Yes, but then he was mixed up in a lot of things.’
‘I’ll never forget the moment when Mum told me the news. That he’d been stabbed outside the abattoir and no one knew who’d done it. Somehow I didn’t care. I actually think I was relieved. I didn’t miss him at all. He was despicable to Mum — to a lot of people. And Mum said he was well on the way to turning you into the same kind of good-for-nothing.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Konrád. ‘OK, he had his faults but he had his good moments too. I know how he treated Mum, how he drove her away.’
‘It’s called domestic violence, Konrád. She fled all the way east to Seydisfjördur. He only hung on to you to get even with her. That was typical. He was a nasty piece of work, Konrád. He drank, he was violent and he got sucked into crime.’
‘I know all that. I was there, remember? It was ugly, and I’ve never forgiven him for what he did to Mum.’
‘Yet you’ve always tried to defend him! You’re always trying to find excuses for him. Like that Benjamín did, and his father before him.’
‘That’s not the same —’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Beta. ‘You bloody men, you’re all the same. Too bloody spineless to face up to the truth.’
‘Calm down,’ said Konrád.
‘No, you calm down!’ Beta got to her feet. Then, after a moment, she added in a less agitated tone: ‘Do you think we’ll ever find out what happened? By the abattoir?’
It was a question they used to ponder a great deal, but as time wore on the incident faded into the background, and these days they hardly ever discussed who could have stabbed their father to death and why. Beta was inclined to be more judgemental. She felt he had brought it on himself. But Konrád couldn’t agree.
‘No, I doubt it,’ he said.
‘It’s unlikely at this stage?’
‘Yes, not much chance now.’
52
Flóvent stood near the stage, watching the newly elected president of the Republic of Iceland deliver a speech to his countrymen who were huddled against the rain, having gathered in their thousands around the stands at Thingvellir, all the way up the Almannagjá ravine and down the River Öxará to the very shores of the lake. They had thronged here from all over the country to celebrate their new-found freedom as citizens of Europe’s youngest republic. The King of Denmark had sent a congratulatory telegram despite his private dismay at being called on to surrender the colony in the middle of the war. The D-Day landings had recently taken place. News had reached them of catastrophic Allied losses on the beaches of Normandy. Flóvent often thought of Thorson and fervently hoped that he had survived the slaughter.
The new president’s speech echoed across the historic assembly site with the rain, and Flóvent was proud that day of being an Icelander, despite his anxiety about the future and his sense of unease. He was living in treacherous times; the world was in turmoil, and there was still a foreign military power occupying the land.
As he stood by the stage, studying the ranks of parliamentarians massed behind the president, Flóvent spotted the cold profile of Hólmbert’s father between upturned collar and hat. Their eyes met for an instant and the MP inclined his head.
Flóvent had tried not to dwell too much on Jónatan’s tragic death, had tried to bury the memory he found so hard to endure. But it hadn’t really worked. He stamped his feet and raised his eyes to gaze out over the lake into the wide blue yonder, and as he did so the shades of two girls came flying back to haunt him, one from the dark corner behind the National Theatre, the other from the cliffs of Dettifoss. As though they were begging him not to forget but to stand vigil over their memory, as though they were the only thing of true value in this newly independent land.
53
Deep in a remote cleft in the lava, too deep for the roar of the waterfall to reach, lies the realm of eternal cold and darkness. The cleft narrows as it deepens, its rugged walls sheer and perilous, its depths inaccessible even to raven and fox. The walls are overgrown with ferns and mosses, down which water seeps from the nearby springs, transforming the fissure into a fairy-tale palace in frosty weather. At the bottom a cold silence reigns, which neither the moaning of the wind nor the crying of birds can break, ensuring that the palace’s only guest, the unfortunate elf maiden, never wakes from her long sleep.