She looked at Erlendur.
“I should have called for help. Of course I should have called the police … but … it … it was so disgusting, so unnatural … that I ran away. That was the only thing I thought of. Getting away. To escape from that terrible place and not let a single person see me.”
She paused.
“I think I’ve always been fleeing him. Somehow I’ve always been running away from him. All the time. And there…”
She sobbed gently.
“We should have tried to patch things up much earlier. I should have arranged that long before. That’s my crime. Dad wanted that too, in the end. Before he died.”
They fell silent and Erlendur looked out of the window, and noticed that it was snowing less.
“The most terrifying thing was …”
She stopped, as if the thought was unbearable.
“He wasn’t dead, was he?”
She shook her head.
“He said one word, then he died. He saw me in the doorway and groaned my name. That he used to call me. When we were little. He always called me Steffi.”
And they heard him say your name before he died. Steffi.”
She looked at him in surprise.
“They who?”
Suddenly Eva Lind was standing in the open doorway. She stared at Stefania and at Erlendur, then at Stefania again and shook her head.
“How many women have you got on the go anyway?” she said, with an accusatory look at her father.
33
He couldn’t discern any change in Osp. Erlendur stood watching her working, wondering if she would ever show remorse or guilt for what she had done.
“Have you found her, that Steffi?” she asked when she saw him in the corridor. She dumped a pile of towels into the laundry bin, took some fresh ones and put them in the room. Erlendur walked closer and stopped in the doorway, his thoughts elsewhere.
He was thinking about his daughter. He had managed to convince her who Stefania actually was, and when Stefania left he asked Eva Lind to wait for him. Eva sat down on the bed and he could tell at once that she was altered, she was back to her old ways. She launched into a tirade against him for everything that had gone wrong in her life and he stood and listened without saying a word, without objecting or enraging her even further. He knew why she was angry. She was not angry with him but with herself, because she had crashed. She could control herself no longer.
He didn’t know what drug she was using. He looked at his watch.
“Are you in a hurry to go somewhere?” she said. “Rushing off to save the world?”
“Can you wait for me here?” he said.
“Piss off she said, her voice hoarse and ugly.
“Why do you do this to yourself?”
“Shut up.”
“Will you wait for me? I wont be long and then we’ll go home. Would you like that?”
She didn’t answer. Sat with bowed head, looking out of the window at nothing.
“I won’t be a minute,” he said.
“Don’t go,” she pleaded, her voice less harsh now. “Where are you going?”
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“What’s wrong!” she barked. “Everything’s wrong. Everything! This fucking bloody life. That’s what’s wrong, life. Everything’s wrong in this life! I don’t know what it’s for. I don’t know why we live it. Why! Why??”
“Eva, it’ll be—”
“God, how I regret not having her,” she groaned.
He put his arm around her.
“Every day. When I wake up in the morning and when I fall asleep at night. I think about her every single day and what I did to her.”
“That’s good,” Erlendur said. “You ought to think about her every day”
“But it’s so hard and you never break out of it. Never. What am I supposed to do? What can I do?”
“Don’t forget her. Think about her. Always. She helps you that way”
“How I wish I’d had her. What kind of a person am I? What kind of person does something like that? To her own child.”
“Eva.” He put his arm around her, she huddled up to him and they sat like that on the edge of the bed while the snow quietly settled over the city.
When they had been sitting for some time Erlendur whispered to her to wait for him in the room. He was going to take her home and celebrate Christmas with her. They looked at each other. Calmer now, she gave a nod.
But now he was standing at the door of a room on the floor below watching Osp at work. He couldn’t stop thinking about Eva. He knew he had to hurry back to her, take her home, be with her and spend Christmas with her.
“We talked to Steffi,” he called into the room. “Her proper name’s Stefania and she was Gudlaugur’s sister.”
Osp came out of the bathroom.
“And what, does she deny everything, or…?”
“No, she doesn’t deny anything,” Erlendur said. “She knows where her fault lies and she’s wondering what went wrong, when it happened and why. She’s feeling bad but is beginning to come to terms with it. It’s tough for her because it’s too late for her to make amends.”
“Did she confess?”
“Yes,” Erlendur said. “Most of it. In effect. She didn’t confess in so many words but she knows the part she played.”
“Most of it? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Osp walked through the doorway past him to fetch detergent and a cloth, then went back into the bathroom. Erlendur walked inside and watched her cleaning as he had done before when the case was still open and she was a kind of friend of his.
“Everything, really,” he said. “Except the murder. That’s the only thing she’s not going to own up to.”
Osp sprayed cleaner onto the bathroom mirror, unmoved.
“But my brother saw her,” she said. “He saw her stab her brother. She can’t deny that. She can’t deny being there.”
“No,” Erlendur said. “She was down in the basement when he died. It just wasn’t her who stabbed him.”
“Yes, Reynir saw it,” she said. “She can’t deny it”
“How much do you owe them?”
“Owe them?”
“How much is it?”
“Owe who? What are you talking about?”
Osp rubbed the mirror like her life depended on it, like it would all be over if she stopped, the mask would drop and she would have to give up. She went on spraying and polishing, and avoided looking herself in the eye,.
Erlendur watched her and a phrase from a book he once read about paupers in times of old crossed his mind: she was a bastard child of the world.
“Elinborg is a colleague of mine who just checked your record at the crisis centre. The rape crisis centre. It was about six months ago. There were three of them. It took place in a hut by Lake Raudavatn. That was all you said. You claimed not to know who they were. They snatched you one Friday night when you were in town, took you to that hut and raped you one after the other.”
Osp went on polishing the mirror and Erlendur couldn’t see whether what he said had the slightest effect on her.
“In the end you refused to identify them and refused to press charges”
Osp did not say a word.
“You work at this hotel but you don’t earn enough to clear your debts and you don’t earn enough to cover your habit. You’ve managed to keep them at bay with small payments and they give you more stuff, but they’ve been threatening you and you know they follow through with their threats”
Osp did not look at him.
“There’s no pilfering at this hotel, is there?” Erlendur said. “You said that to hoodwink us, lead us on a wild goose chase.”
Erlendur heard a noise it he corridor and saw Elinborg and four police officers in front of the door. He gestured to her to wait.