She held her breath and closed her eyes.
The next thing she knew was her father grabbing her by the arm so tightly that it hurt, and hearing him moan: “Oh my God!”
She opened her eyes and saw her father’s face, pale as death, and when she looked up at the stage she saw Gudlaugur trying to sing, but something had happened to his voice. It was like yodelling. She rose to her feet, looked all around the auditorium behind her and saw that people had started to smile and some were laughing. She ran up onto the stage to her brother and tried to lead him away. The choirmaster came to her assistance and eventually they managed to take him backstage. She saw her father standing rigid in the front row, staring up at her like the god of thunder.
When she lay in bed that evening and thought back to that terrible moment her heart missed a beat, not from fear or horror at what had happened or how her brother must have felt, but from a mysterious glee for which she had no explanation and which she repressed like an evil crime.
“Did you have a guilty conscience about those thoughts?” Erlendur asked.
“They were completely alien to me,” Stefania said. “I’d never thought anything like that before.”
“I don’t suppose there’s anything abnormal about gloating over other people’s misfortunes,” Erlendur said. “Even people close to us. It may be an instinct, a kind of defence mechanism for dealing with shock.”
“I shouldn’t be telling you this in such detail,” Stefania said. “It doesn’t paint a very appealing picture of me. And you may be right. We all suffered shock. An enormous shock, as you can imagine.”
“What was their relationship like after this happened?” Erlendur asked. “Gudlaugur and his father.”
Stefania ignored his question.
“Do you know what it’s like not to be the favourite?” she asked instead. “What it’s like just being ordinary and never earning any particular attention. It’s like you don’t exist. You’re taken for granted, not favoured or shown any special care. And all the time someone you consider your equal is championed like the chosen one, born to bring infinite joy to his parents and the whole world. You watch it day after day, week after week and year after year and it never ceases, if anything it increases over the years, almost … almost worship.”
She looked up at Erlendur.
“It can only spawn jealousy,” she said. “Anything else would not be human. And instead of suppressing it the next thing you know is that you’re nourished by it, because in some odd way it makes you feel better.”
“Is that the explanation for gloating over your brother’s misfortune?”
“I don’t know,” Stefania said. “I couldn’t control that feeling. It hit me like a slap in the face and I trembled and shivered and tried to get rid of it, but it wouldn’t go. I didn’t think that could happen.”
They fell silent.
“You envied your brother,” Erlendur said then.
“Maybe I did, for a while. Later I began to pity him.”
“And eventually hate him.”
She looked at Erlendur.
“What do you know about hate?” she said.
“Not much,” Erlendur said. “But I do know that it can be dangerous. Why did you tell us that you hadn’t been in contact with your brother for almost three decades?”
“Because it’s true,” Stefania said.
“It’s not true,” Erlendur said. “You’re lying. Why are you lying about that?”
“Are you going to send me to prison for lying?”
“If I need to I will,” Erlendur said. “We know that you came to this hotel five days before he was murdered. You told us you hadn’t seen or been in contact with your brother for decades. Then we discover that you came to the hotel a few days before his death. On what business? And why did you lie to us?”
“I could have come to the hotel without meeting him. It’s a big hotel. Did that ever occur to you?”
“I doubt that. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you came to the hotel just before he died.”
He saw that she was prevaricating. Saw that she was mulling over whether to take the next step. She had patently prepared herself to give a more detailed account than at their first meeting, and now was the moment to decide whether to take the plunge.
“He had a key? she said in such a low voice that Erlendur could barely hear it. “The one you showed to me and my father.”
Erlendur remembered the key ring that was found in Gudlaugur’s room and the little pink penknife with a picture of a pirate on it. There were two keys on the ring, one that he thought was a door key and the other that could well fit a chest, cupboard or box.
“What about that key?” Erlendur asked. “Did you recognise it? Do you know what it fits?”
Stefania smiled.
“I have an identical key,” she said.
“What key is it?”
“It’s the key to our house in Hafnarfjordur.”
“You mean your home?”
“Yes,” Stefania said. “Where my father and I live. The key fits the basement door at the back of the house. Some narrow steps lead up from the basement to the hall and from there you can get into the living room and kitchen.”
“Do you mean …?” Erlendur tried to work out the implications of what she was saying. “Do you mean he went in the house?”
“Yes.”
“But I thought you weren’t in contact. You said you and your father hadn’t had anything to do with him for decades. That you didn’t want to have any contact with him. Why were you lying?”
“Because Dad didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?”
“That he came. Gudlaugur must have missed us. I didn’t ask him, but he must have done. For him to do that.”
“What was it precisely that your father didn’t know?”
“That Gudlaugur sometimes came to our house at night without us being aware, sat in the living room without making a sound and left before we woke up. He did it for years and we never knew.”
She looked at the bloodstains on the bed.
“Until I woke up in the middle of the night once and saw him.”
24
Erlendur watched Stefania, her words racing through his mind. She was not as haughty as at their first meeting when Erlendur had been outraged at her lack of feeling for her brother, and he thought he may have judged her too quickly. He knew neither her nor her story well enough to be able to sit on his high horse, and suddenly he regretted his remark on her lack of conscience. It was not up to him to judge others, though he was always falling into that trap. To all intents and purposes he knew nothing about this woman who had suddenly turned so pitiful and terribly lonely in front of him. He realised that her life had been no bed of roses, first as a child living in her brother’s shadow, then a motherless teenager and finally a woman who never left her father’s side and probably sacrificed her life for him.
A good while passed in this way, each of them engrossed in their respective thoughts. The door to the little room was open and Erlendur went out into the corridor. All of a sudden he wanted to reassure himself that no one was outside, no one was eavesdropping. He looked along the poorly lit corridor but saw nobody. Turning round, he looked down to the end, but it was pitch dark. He thought to himself that anyone who went down there would have had to walk past the door and that he would have noticed. The corridor was empty. All the same, he had a strong feeling that they were not alone in the basement when he went back into the room. The smell in the corridor was the same as the first time he went there: something burning that he could not place. He did not feel comfortable. His first sight of the body was etched in his mind and the more he found out about the man in the Santa suit, the more wretched was the mental image he preserved and knew he could never shake off.