TÓMASARHAGI, REYKJAVÍK,
FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, 0600 GMT
Kristín woke up in
the early hours with a sinking feeling about the day ahead. She
knew the matter with the businessman was not over and that she was
bound to encounter him again, maybe even later that day. Another
source of worry was the knowledge that her brother was out on
Vatnajökull in the middle of winter; he was experienced but you
never knew how extreme the weather might become. After a bad
night’s sleep, she got up shortly before six, took a quick shower
and put on the coffee. Sometimes she missed having someone there to
share her worries with.
Not that she minded
living alone. She had lived for three years with a man she met
after coming home from university in the States, a lawyer like her.
But once the honeymoon period was over he had become increasingly
domineering and she was relieved not to have to put up with his
overbearing behaviour any longer. He had been so different when
they first met, so witty and entertaining. He used to make her
laugh and spoiled her with gifts and surprises. But all that had
gradually dried up once they had moved in together; he had landed
his fish, and at times she felt as if he was tearing out the
hook.
Although she had
always been independent, she was by nature quiet, somewhat
introverted, protective of her privacy, and did not mind the
absence of a man about the house. The sex had been nothing to write
home about either, so she did not miss that. If she felt the urge,
she could satisfy herself and she enjoyed the freedom that gave
her. Enjoyed having the flat on Tómasarhagi to herself; only one
toothbrush in the bathroom; no need to tell anyone where she was
going. She could go out whenever she liked and come home when it
suited her. She loved being alone, not having to pander to anyone
else’s whims.
She had been so
relieved when it was over that she was not sure she ever wanted to
share her home again. Perhaps it was too great a sacrifice.
Children had not crossed her mind. Maybe she was afraid of turning
out like her parents. It had come as a surprise when, after they
had lived together for a while, the lawyer had brought up the
subject of children, saying they should think about starting a
family. She had stared at him blankly and admitted that she had not
given the matter much thought.
‘Then maybe you could
stop fussing over Elías all the time,’ he said. ‘He is not your
child, after all.’
What an extraordinary
statement. Is not your child, she
thought. She had no idea what he was getting at.
‘What do you
mean?’
‘I mean you treat him
like a baby.’
‘Like a baby?’
‘You ring him ten
times a day. He’s forever round here. You’ve always got some reason
to go to town together. He hangs out here in the evenings. Sleeps
on the sofa.’
‘He’s my
brother.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You’re not jealous
of Elías, are you?’
‘Jealous!’ he
snorted. ‘Of course not. But it’s not natural, such an incredibly
close relationship.’
‘Not natural? There
are only the two of us. We’re close. What’s unnatural about
that?’
‘Well, not unnatural
exactly . . . it’s just he’s your brother not your
child. I know he’s much younger than you but he’s almost twenty,
he’s not a kid.’
She was silent for
such a long time that he seized the chance to get up and claim he
had some work to finish at the office.
Shortly afterwards,
their relationship started to go downhill and by the end she had
almost developed an aversion to him. Perhaps he had touched a
nerve, opened her eyes to something she did not want to confront.
She had met other men since but those had been nothing but brief
flings and she had no regrets about any of them, with perhaps one
exception. She regretted the way she had ended that relationship,
the way they had parted. It was her fault and she knew it. Her
sheer bloody ineptitude.
Just occasionally,
when she was alone at home with time on her hands, she would have a
vision of her future stretching out before her, saw herself growing
older in lonely monotony, shrivelling up and dying; no children, no
family, no nothing. Growing old in the oppressive silence of long
summer evenings when she had nothing to do but read documents from
the office. These moments tended to occur when she was disturbed by
the shouts of children outside in the street or when she lay down
in the evenings, feeling the weariness spreading through her body.
Sometimes she thought the process was already happening, felt as if
she were trapped inside time: all those long days, all those long,
suffocating days, passed in solitary silence. At times she
appreciated them, at others she wished her life were more eventful,
presented more challenges, required more of her than merely sitting
behind a desk all day and returning to an empty flat in the
evenings.
Elías was her family.
Their mother was dead, they had little contact with their father
and few relatives to speak of. They had coped alone, she and Elías;
taken care of one another. Perhaps the lawyer was right about him
taking up too much of her time, but she had never
minded.
She sat lost in a
reverie over her coffee, leafing absently through the morning paper
until it was time to leave for work. There was not much in the
news. The national bank was in the process of being privatised and
the minister for trade and industry was quoted as dismissing the
need for legislation to diversify share ownership. The site of a
Viking Age farm had been uncovered in the west of the country, and
the Russian president Boris Yeltsin was due to celebrate his
sixty-eighth birthday. It was quarter to nine when she left home.
Sunrise was still nearly two hours off and the snow was falling
thickly. She toiled slowly through the drifts. The traffic was
heavy; people were in a hurry to get to work once they had dropped
off their youngest children at the day nursery and seen the older
ones off to school. The snow muffled the noise of the cars but a
thick haze of exhaust fumes hung over the city. Kristín did not
have a car; she preferred to walk, especially when the snow was
deep like this. Distances were short in Reykjavík compared to
California where she used to live; there you could talk about
distance. Reykjavík had a population of only just over a hundred
thousand but there were times when the locals behaved as if they
lived in a giant metropolis, refusing to go anywhere without a car,
even if it took only five minutes on foot.
On arriving at the
office she was informed that the chairman of the Trade Council was
waiting to see her, together with the foreign minister’s aide. What
now? she wondered, bracing herself for the worst. Once the men had
taken a seat in her office, they explained to Kristín that the man
with the portable freezing plants, Runólfur Zóphaníasson, had made
threats against the chairman of the Trade Council, which were
considered serious enough for the police to be notified. He had
called the chairman late last night, apparently sober but raging
about the advice he had received in connection with his dealings
with Russia. During the call, he had threatened the chairman with
physical violence and there was reason to believe he was in
earnest.
‘But what does this
have to do with me?’ Kristín asked, after they had filled her
in.
‘He mentioned you
specifically by name,’ explained the foreign minister’s aide, a
young party member with political ambitions. ‘I gather he wasn’t
exactly in good humour when he stormed out of here
yesterday.’
‘He did nothing but
hurl abuse as usual so I chucked him out. He threw a chair at the
wall. I ignored his threats, and that made him even madder. What
kind of headcase is he anyway? He thinks there’s some kind of
conspiracy going on. Here at the ministry.’
‘I had the police run
a check on him,’ said the chairman, a plump man, with a small,
kindly face. ‘Runólfur has done a lot of wheeling and dealing in
his time but nothing illegal, as far as they can tell. They went
and had a word with him and he promised to behave, claimed he’d
just lost his temper for a moment, but they warned us to be careful
anyway. They don’t put much faith in his word. I won’t repeat the
language he used about you in my hearing. Apparently he’s furious
about losing a large amount of money in Russia and he blames us for
it.’
‘I don’t really know
the ins and outs of the case,’ Kristín said, ‘though I can assure
you that we never gave him any incorrect information.’
‘Of course not,’ the
aide said. ‘He alleges that we encouraged him to facilitate his
business by sending over goods without any securities but that’s
utter nonsense. It’s not our job to give out that sort of advice.
How people conduct their business deals is entirely their own
responsibility.’
‘Of course,’ Kristín
agreed.
‘Anyway,’ the aide
continued, glancing at his watch. ‘We wanted you to be aware of
developments and to warn you that it wouldn’t hurt to keep your
eyes open. If this Runólfur tries to intimidate you in any way,
you’re to call the police at once. They have been briefed about the
case.’
The meeting ended
soon afterwards and the day’s business began. Kristín did not look
up from her desk until midday when she went out with a couple of
colleagues to a cosy little café near the ministry where she
chatted and glanced through the afternoon paper over coffee and an
omelette. When she returned to the office at one, there were a
number of voicemail messages, including one from her brother saying
he would ring back later. Otherwise the day was entirely
uneventful.
She left work early.
It had stopped snowing and turned into a beautiful, mild January
evening. As it was Friday, she stopped off at a shop on the way
home and bought some food for the weekend. She lived in the ground
floor flat of a neat little two-storey maisonette built of
whitewashed concrete, with a flat roof that had a tendency to leak.
On entering the shared hall she heard the phone ringing inside her
flat before she could even insert the key in the lock. She hastily
opened the door, rushed over to the phone and snatched up the
receiver.
‘Hello,’ said a voice
that she immediately recognised as her brother’s.
‘Elías!’
‘Hello,’ her brother
repeated. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Loud and
clear . . .’
But the connection
was lost and she hung up. She waited beside the phone for a while
in case Elías rang straight back but nothing happened, so she went
and shut the front door, took off her coat and hung it in the
cupboard. She had just sat down at the kitchen table when the phone
rang again.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Is that you, Elías?’
No
answer.
‘Are you on the
glacier?’
No
answer.
‘Elías?’
Down the line she
heard the faint sound of breathing and the suspicion flashed into
her mind that it might be Runólfur. She stopped talking and
listened intently.
‘Who is this?’ she
asked eventually but there was no answer. ‘Is that Runólfur?’ she
asked, adding after a moment’s thought: ‘Pervert!’ and hung
up.
She thought back over
her meeting with the chairman and foreign minister’s aide as she
tucked into a sandwich and drank some orange juice. Later, she took
a pile of documents out of her briefcase and tried to concentrate
on work. Feeling sleepy, however, she lay down on the sofa in the
sitting room and thought about making coffee, until she realised
that she had forgotten to buy any milk. She ought to drag herself
out to the shop before it closed, but could not be bothered and
tiredness overtook her.
Kristín did not know
how long she had been asleep. She got up and put on her jacket and
gloves. The local shop was only round the corner, she really ought
to force herself out. Coffee was no good unless it was made with
hot milk. She had just reached the door when the phone started
ringing again, making her jump.
‘What the hell is
going on?’ she asked, picking up the receiver.
‘Hi, it’s Elías. Can
you hear me?’
‘Elías!’ Kristín
exclaimed. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’ve . . . trying to get hold of
you . . . day. I’m on the
glacier . . .’
The connection was
poor; her brother’s voice kept breaking up.
‘Is everything all
right?’ she asked, still groggy from her nap. She had got up far
too early that morning.
‘Everything’s
grea . . . Two of us . . . taken off
on snowmobiles. Per . . . weather.
It’s . . . dark.’
‘What do you mean,
two of you? Where are the others?’
‘We’re . . . bit of a test
drive . . . fine.’
‘This is hopeless. I
can only hear the odd word. Will you please go back and join the
rest of the team.’
‘We’re turning
round . . . lax. The phone cost
seven . . . thousand. Can’t you hear
me?’
‘Your phone’s
useless!’
‘Don’t be like that.
When . . . you coming . . . glacier
trip with me?’
‘You’ll never get me
to set foot on any bloody glacier.’
She heard her brother
say something unintelligible then call out to his
companion.
‘Jóhann!’ she heard
him shout. ‘Jóhann, what’s that?’ Kristín knew that Jóhann was a
good friend of her brother’s; it was he who had been responsible
for getting him involved with the rescue team in the first
place.
‘What are all those
lights?’ she heard Elías shouting. ‘Are they digging up the
ice?’
‘You should see this.
There’s something happening up here,’ he told his sister, the pitch
of his voice suddenly higher. She heard him turn away from the
phone and shout something to his friend, then turn
back.
‘Jóhann
thinks . . . in the ice,’ he said.
This was followed by
a long pause.
‘They’re coming!’
Elías exclaimed suddenly, the words sounding in fits and starts
over the poor connection. The excitement had vanished and he
sounded panic-stricken, his breathing ragged.
‘Who?’ she asked in
astonishment. ‘Who’s coming? What can you see?’
‘Out of nowhere.
We’re . . . by snowmobiles. They’re
armed!’
‘Who?’
‘They
look . . .
soldiers . . .’
‘Elías!’
‘. . . a
plane!’
But the connection
was abruptly severed and however much she yelled down the phone,
alarm now rising within her, all she could hear was the dialling
tone. She set the receiver gently back into its cradle and stared
blankly at the wall.