The contents of the next page brought her up short. It was blank apart from one line: the name Karítas Karlsdóttir, a telephone number and an e-mail address. She frowned, surprised that this information should have been included, and wondered if it was by accident or design. Reaching for the phone, she tried the number – but it had been disconnected. Similarly, when she tried to send an e-mail it bounced straight back. The details must have been included in error.
She was still thoughtfully contemplating the pile of documents when Matthew and Sóley got home with the food. Throughout supper her mind kept returning to the yacht and the papers and she responded automatically to Sóley’s comments without taking in what she said.
After supper, Thóra resumed her reading. She was longing to discuss the case with Matthew out of earshot of Sóley, but had to wait until they left the table and her daughter returned to her homework. For all she knew the little girl might be turned off boats for life if she got wind of the yacht affair. Ever since seeing a news item about a flight attendant who saved a child from choking on a gobstopper, Sóley had refused to touch boiled sweets – and that had been three years ago. ‘What do you know about boats, Matthew?’
‘Next to nothing. They’re used to catch fish, carry freight and travel by sea or on inland waterways.’ He smiled. ‘Any help?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I’ve taken on a case connected to the mystery yacht. I was allowed on board this morning, and the atmosphere was really eerie. Maybe it was just because I’m unused to boats in general, let alone luxury yachts. But that’s not the main point. The case involves a life insurance claim and it’s bound to be trickier to pursue than it would be for a death in normal circumstances.’
‘I imagine you’d need to know quite a bit about boats.’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’ Thóra fetched her laptop. As it was early in the month, Gylfi had not yet managed to use up all their foreign download credit, which meant they were not restricted to browsing Icelandic pages. ‘Do you think it’s common for people to vanish from a boat and never be seen again?’
Matthew shrugged. ‘It’s not unheard of but I’ve no idea how common it is. I remember one story that had a big impact on me as a boy, though I can’t vouch for it. It was about a ghost ship that went on sailing the seas long after her crew disappeared. I can’t remember her name, though. Why don’t you try searching on-line? If nothing comes up, presumably that’ll mean this type of incident is unusual or a one-off. Though I don’t really see how that’ll help you.’
‘I’m just curious. I can’t get that creepy atmosphere out of my mind.’ She paused before adding: ‘I can’t really describe it but I felt as if the people were still there, as if they didn’t realise they were supposed to have vanished. Silly, isn’t it?’
‘Yes and no.’ Matthew didn’t smile, clearly not finding the idea all that ludicrous. ‘There can be an odd feeling associated with a place where someone has recently died. In my experience it can muddle your thoughts and give you odd fancies. When I visited a murder scene for the first time, in the police, I caught myself hearing non-existent noises and thinking someone was touching me. It was only because I was new to the horror of it all.’
Thóra felt comforted. It sounded sensible; although she had seen a few scary things – including dead bodies – in her line of work, she was hardly an old hand and her mind simply hadn’t been able to process the unfamiliar situation in a rational manner. In other words, she wasn’t going mad – or hopefully not. It was a pity she couldn’t ask Bella if she’d had a similar experience, but that was out of the question: Thóra was not prepared to expose any weakness that Bella might exploit.
She searched for information about Karítas’s foreign husband, Gulam. It was unlikely to help, but she wanted to know more about the background to the case. The Icelandic papers had carried reports of his bankruptcy because of his links to the local banking crisis, but business news bored her so she had only skimmed the headlines at the time. When she tapped his name into the search engine, remarkably few results came up considering the scope of his activities. Presumably he was keen to keep a low profile. It seemed he was a major investor in other people’s companies rather than an empire-builder on his own account, and this allowed him to operate largely under the radar.
The articles that did come up divided roughly into three categories: Icelandic schadenfreude over his financial collapse, passing references to his investments in international business news items, and finally foreign gossip columns about the jet set in which he featured more or less as an extra. Thanks to Karítas’s presence, these stories tended to find their way into the Icelandic news, where the couple’s importance was inevitably exaggerated. Icelanders were fascinated by any of their countrymen who moved in exalted circles abroad, especially if they had done well for themselves, and that was certainly true of this young woman who seemed, moreover, to enjoy basking in the limelight.
It was this third category that drew Thóra’s attention most; she had felt a certain curiosity about the woman since Karítas had indirectly entered her life. These articles made no mention of the stock market or share prices, focusing instead on gala dinners and glitzy parties, largely from the point of view of which designer labels the guests were wearing. Gulam was not a big enough fish to earn the couple a starring role; when they appeared in a picture it was almost invariably as a filler at the end of a series of photos. Gulam never appeared without Karítas on his arm and Thóra suspected that without her the photos wouldn’t have been published at all. His Icelandic wife was unusually glamorous, but where she could easily have been a model with her statuesque physique, her husband was short and squat with a fleshy face and a comb-over that must have been the first thing she saw every time she looked down at him. Nevertheless, one would have thought he was a fairy-tale prince by the way she clung to him in all the pictures; her slender arm, in a succession of expensive dresses, crooked round his plump, black-sleeved elbow. The contrast was striking: where he was pallid and invariably dressed like an undertaker, she was perma-tanned and clothed in vibrant hues; where he was balding, she had a long, thick mane of blond hair, generally worn loose. His jowls were flabby, her cheekbones high. He shunned all ornament, she was adorned with jewels on every available part of her body. Where his teeth were small and not particularly well cared for, hers were large, straight and a brilliant white, as if ordered from a catalogue. It was hardly surprising that she was always baring them in a grin for the photographer, while her husband scowled. Their union was a true marriage of opposites.
When it became clear that her trawl through the celebrity news was not throwing up any leads, Thóra abandoned this tack and started searching instead for information about Karítas herself. A stub article in the Icelandic media revealed that she was nearly thirty years younger than her husband and had met him while she was working for a Reykjavík hotel where he had been a guest. Her exact position was not specified, but three months later they were married; he for the third time, she for the first. She had no children from this marriage or any other relationship. Another article claimed that when her husband was threatened with bankruptcy, Karítas had demanded a divorce. Thóra vaguely recalled having seen a headline about this when she was at the supermarket. The divorce can hardly have come out of the blue since it was painfully obvious what had attracted her to her husband in the first place. It was the same old story, and all talk of love at first sight rang rather hollow; strange how Thóra had never heard of any marriages between beautiful young women and penniless older men. Still, what did it matter? People were attracted to different things; as long as the arrangement made both parties happy it didn’t do any harm, whatever their motivation. But in this case their happiness had been short-lived: Karítas had sued for divorce after only four years of marriage.