‘Let’s go inside.’ Lára pulled at him. ‘If I inhale any more, my lungs will fill up with salt.’
‘Let’s go, Daddy,’ Bylgja pleaded. ‘I don’t want to stay out here any longer.’ Ægir tried to hide how fervently he agreed with her. Suddenly, he felt a longing to sweep up his daughters in his arms and lock them as deep inside the yacht as possible. Keen as he was to avoid ending up on the sea bed, his fear that his daughters might share the same fate was infinitely stronger.
Later, Ægir thought the pills had probably helped. They had managed to take them before anyone was sick and that may have made all the difference. The Coke was tepid, and barely drinkable, but Ægir had insisted they each finish a can, if only to have something to throw up if the worst came to the worst.
‘Is that the picture you were talking about?’ Only now had his wooziness receded sufficiently for him to notice his surroundings. He pointed to an offensively ornate gilded frame containing a canvas of a young woman, presumably Karítas. The rather kitsch subject matter was totally out of kilter with the frame, which would have been more appropriate for an old master.
‘Yes. Beautiful, isn’t she?’ Lára was watching him beadily for his reaction.
‘I can’t really tell from here. She’s all right, I suppose.’
Lára reached out a foot from the armchair where she was sprawled and gave him a little kick. ‘Don’t talk rubbish. Take a better look.’
Ægir rose with difficulty. He felt weak, as if after a strenuous effort, perhaps as a result of constantly having to ride the waves. ‘The things I do for you.’ The twins looked up from the colouring books that had been hurriedly purchased for them in Lisbon. They had recovered much quicker than their parents and had soon grown bored of lying on their sofa. Karítas’s eyes seemed to follow Ægir, growing slightly larger once he was close to the painting. Although there was no denying that the young woman was gorgeous, she was not Ægir’s type: too perfect, too manicured, too conscious of her own beauty. Too plastic. Or at least that was the impression she gave. Her hair was what Ægir had chiefly noticed when he leafed past pictures of her in the papers. From what he recalled it was extraordinarily thick and healthy, perhaps the only part of her that hadn’t been artificially enhanced. The artist had clearly been of the same opinion, judging by the painstaking care he had taken over this feature. While the rest of the painting was executed in a rather perfunctory fashion, her blond mane cascaded over her shoulders in perfect waves which may well have been due to artistic licence. Ægir couldn’t remember whether her hair had been straight or wavy in the photos he had seen. The light paint tones were fairly successful in capturing her natural colour, so different from the bleached-out effect that so many young women seemed to favour these days. But the other colours in the painting were cruder and more garish, like the huge red jewel in the necklace Bylgja had mentioned, which looked more like a Christmas-tree decoration than a precious gem. The same applied to her clothes and the matching nail polish on her fingers and toes. Her tanned skin also seemed too uniform and flat, as if her slender limbs had been modelled on those of a Barbie doll, with unnaturally smooth joints. There was a hint of Barbie, too, in the way her bust was completely out of proportion to her slim figure.
He bent closer to examine the necklace, puzzled as to why it should have made such an impact on the women in his family. The chain was a simple affair of gold or white gold and the massive red jewel in its heart-shaped setting nestled between the sitter’s splendid breasts. It was studded all around the edge with white stones that Ægir took to be diamonds. Suspended from the bottom of the heart was a blue teardrop – presumably also precious. ‘What are red gems called again?’
‘Rubies,’ Lára replied, with surprising promptness for one who did not own much jewellery herself and as a rule took little interest in it. She had a few pieces she’d received as Confirmation gifts, as well as a ring and necklace he had given her when they were courting. Later she’d told him that it was a testament to the strength of her love that their relationship had survived those presents. He had not seen her wear any proper jewellery for years, not since the twins were born by caesarean section, when she had put on the necklace and forced the ring onto her swollen finger in the belief that they would bring good luck. Perhaps she hadn’t needed any luck since then, but Ægir found himself wishing suddenly that she had brought them along on this trip.
‘There was an article on that necklace in The Week. It cost her husband a fortune and she’s never parted from it. He gave it to her as a wedding present.’
‘What?’ Ægir swung round. ‘You mean I was supposed to give you a wedding present? For some reason I thought the guests took care of that.’
Lára grinned, looking much brighter. ‘No. Anyway, don’t ask me. Maybe it’s a custom among the super-rich abroad. Don’t worry, you didn’t commit any faux pas. Though, strictly speaking, according to Icelandic tradition you should have given me a bridal gift the morning after. Still, it’s not as if the wedding night was our first time and I needed some sort of reward.’ She sat up properly. ‘So, what do you think of her? Be honest.’
‘Nice looking, but not my type.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Lára’s disbelief was obvious. The girls looked from one to the other, waiting eagerly for their father’s reaction.
‘No, I mean it. She looks too perfect to be any fun. Besides, beautiful people tend to be a bit odd; everyone treats them differently, so they never develop their inner self.’ As he turned away from the painting he felt the woman’s eyes boring into his back. ‘I’m not saying it applies to everyone and it’s not based on any kind of scientific evidence, but I’m sure it’s true. She lacks some quality.’
Lára looked delighted. ‘You’re a pretty good judge of character. From what I can gather she’s a complete airhead. In interviews she comes across as really shallow and conceited.’
Arna was reproachful. ‘You’re always saying we’re beautiful, Daddy. Does that make us bad?’
His daughters’ little faces under their soft, fine hair were the most beautiful he had ever laid eyes on. But that beauty lay in their small imperfections: the slightly too-big teeth, the crooked smiles, the freckles and uneven eyebrows; Bylgja’s smeary glasses that she had wiped with her fingers after coming inside.
‘As I said, the rule’s not infallible. Far from it. But people who think about nothing but their appearance soon lose their charm. Not you, though. Never you.’
‘Good.’ Arna seemed satisfied.
Bylgja was pensive. She was holding a red wax crayon, which lay quite still in her unusually steady hand. ‘The woman in my dream wasn’t bad, just unhappy. Maybe it wasn’t her.’
‘Or I’ve got it all wrong and she’s actually a really nice person.’ Ægir grinned. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time I was mistaken.’
The red crayon sank towards the half-completed picture. ‘I hope so, Daddy. I hope she’s nice.’ Bylgja began colouring again. The red wax covered an ever-larger area of the page; from where Ægir was standing it looked as if the crayon was slowly bleeding to death.
Chapter 7
It turned out that it was far from unheard-of for people to vanish without trace at sea. The stories Thóra discovered on-line kept her glued to the screen for ages, so it was not only exasperation with her menfolk that kept her up long after everyone else had gone to bed. The fascination of the stories lay in the very aspect that presented the greatest problem for her: without exception they remained unexplained. The fate of the Lady K’s crew and passengers would no doubt be the same: to live on as characters in a tale of mystery, their names and the other facts of the case gradually forgotten.