Outrage (7 page)

‘We’ve talked about this,’ said Solrun. ‘You shouldn’t repress it. It will only take much longer for you to understand that you’re not at fault at all. You didn’t do anything that led to the assault. You have no reason to blame yourself. You were brutalised. There’s no need to hide away. You don’t need to withdraw from society, or feel unclean. You aren’t, and you never can be.’

‘I’m … just scared,’ said Unnur.

‘Of course,’ said Elinborg. ‘That’s entirely understandable. I’ve sat with women like you. I always tell them it’s a question of how they feel about the offender. Just think what status you accord those animals by shutting yourself up here. It’s not right that they can imprison you. You must show them you’re able to fight back against the harm they want to inflict on you.’

Unnur gazed at Elinborg. ‘But it’s so horrible to know … you can never again … something’s been taken away from me, and I can never, never get it back, and my life can never be as it was.’

‘But that’s how it is,’ said Solrun. ‘For all of us. We can never get things back. That’s why we look to the future.’

‘It happened,’ said Elinborg reassuringly. ‘Don’t dwell on it. If you do, then the bastards win. Don’t let them get away with it.’

Unnur passed the shawl back to her. ‘She smokes. I don’t smoke. And there’s another smell, a perfume - not mine - and then there’s something spicy …’

‘It’s tandoori,’ interjected Elinborg.

‘Do you think she’s the one that attacked him?’

‘That’s a possibility.’

‘Good for her,’ said Unnur through clenched teeth. ‘Good for her, killing him! Good for her, killing that pig!’

Elinborg glanced at Solrun. She thought the young woman seemed to be on the road to recovery already.

When Elinborg got home, late that evening, the boys were in the middle of a blazing row. Aron, the middle child who somehow always felt left out, had had the audacity to go on Valthor’s computer. His older brother was yelling at him, in such a rage that Elinborg had to shout at him to make him shut up. Theodora was listening to her iPod as she did her homework at the dining table, and was ignoring her bickering brothers. Teddi lay on the sofa watching TV. He had picked up fried chicken pieces on the way home, and the containers were scattered around the kitchen, along with cold chips and empty sauce tubs.

‘Why don’t you clear up this mess?’ Elinborg called out to Teddi.

‘Leave it,’ he answered. ‘I’ll do it later. I just want to finish watching this programme …’

Elinborg did not have the energy for an argument. She sat down next to Theodora. A few days earlier they had met Theodora’s teacher to talk about additional study material for her. The teacher was keen to find her something more challenging. They had discussed the possibility that Theodora might take the last three years of compulsory schooling in a single year, if she wished, and enter high school early.

‘It said on the news that you’d found a date-rape drug on that man,’ said Theodora, removing her earphones.

‘How on earth do they get this information?’ sighed Elinborg.

‘Was he a scoundrel?’ asked Theodora.

‘Maybe,’ answered Elinborg. ‘Please don’t ask me about these things.’

‘They said you were looking for a woman who was with him that night.’

‘It’s possible that someone who was there with him attacked him. Now be quiet,’ retorted Elinborg amicably. ‘What did you have to eat at school?’

‘Rye-bread soup. It was horrible.’

‘You’re too fussy about your food.’

‘I eat
your
bread soup.’

‘Of course you do. It’s a work of genius.’

Elinborg had told Theodora that she too had been a fussy eater as a child. She was brought up eating old-fashioned Icelandic food, in old-fashioned Icelandic circumstances. When she described it to her daughter, it was like telling her about life in the Middle Ages. Elinborg’s mother had been a housewife who shopped and then cooked lunch every day. Her father, who had worked in the offices of a fishing company, would come home, eat his meal, then lie down on the sofa to listen to the midday news, which went out at 12.20 p.m. precisely - for the convenience of workers like him. The chimes of the news theme usually rang out just as he swallowed his last bite and put his feet up.

At lunchtime Elinborg’s mother served boiled fish with bread and butter, or made a meat loaf served with mashed or more often boiled potatoes, an invariable accompaniment to every meal.

As for the evening meal, the weekly menus generally followed a strict daily sequence. Elinborg’s mother did all the cooking. On Saturdays they had saltfish, presoaked in a tub in the kitchen - the same tub in which her husband bathed his aching feet. To this day, Elinborg could hardly stomach saltfish. On Sunday there was a roast leg or rack of lamb, with brown gravy made with the meat broth, and caramelised potatoes. To ring the changes they sometimes had lamb chops. The roast was always served with pickled red cabbage and tinned peas. Salted mutton with boiled swedes or horsemeat sausage with a white sauce might crop up on any day, but these were rarities. Mondays always meant fish, unless there were enough leftovers from the Sunday roast, in which case the fish was moved over to Tuesday. It was usually fried in breadcrumbs and served with melted margarine and mayonnaise. Wednesday was air-cured fish, which Elinborg regarded as all but inedible. After it had been boiled for so long that all the windows misted up, an abundance of melted suet was not enough to make the cured fish any more palatable. Wednesday could also be cod roe and liver, which was marginally preferable. Elinborg found the membrane of the roe off-putting, and she never touched the liver. On Thursdays her mother sometimes threw caution to the winds: one memorable Thursday, Elinborg first tasted spaghetti, boiled to within an inch of its life. She found it completely tasteless, but a little more palatable with tomato ketchup. On Friday, fried lamb or pork cutlets in breadcrumbs were accompanied by melted margarine, as with the fried fish.

Week followed week, adding up to months and years of Elinborg’s childhood, with hardly a variation. A ready-made meal was bought perhaps once every two years or so: her father would bring home open sandwiches of smoked lamb on malted bread, or prawns and mayonnaise on white.

Elinborg was nineteen when the first piece of grilled chicken entered her home, in a carton with ‘French fries’. That was another unforgettable day. She did not particularly like either foodstuff and her parents never repeated the experiment. She enjoyed reading about food in books, and often all she remembered from children’s stories and novels were the descriptions of meals and cooking: unfamiliar foreign delicacies, unavailable in Iceland in those days, such as ‘marmalade’, ‘bacon’ and ‘ginger beer’. She recalled reading one day about ‘melted cheese’. It took her some time to understand what it meant. She had never heard of cheese being eaten in any other way than straight from the fridge, sliced on to bread.

Elinborg was picky about certain foods and was a constant source of disappointment to her mother, who was a firm believer in the virtues of boiling: she believed that food was inedible unless reduced to a mush, and she would boil slices of haddock for twenty-five to thirty minutes. Elinborg was always terrified of choking on a fish bone at the kitchen table. She did not like the fatty breadcrumb coating of the cutlets, found the meat bland and flavourless, and the caramelised potatoes were disgusting. Lamb’s liver in onion sauce, served on Tuesdays except when her mother plumped for hearts and kidneys, she simply could not get down. Nor did she think heart or kidney could be considered proper food. Her culinary blacklist was endless.

It came as no surprise to Elinborg when her father suffered a heart attack in his early sixties. He survived, and her parents were still living in the same place, Elinborg’s childhood home. Both were now retired, but remained alert and self-sufficient. Her mother still boiled her air-cured fish until the windows misted over.

When it had become clear that Elinborg’s fussiness about food was incurable, and as she grew old enough to find her way around the kitchen, her parents allowed her to start cooking for herself, using whatever her mother had bought. She would take some of the haddock or cutlets, or the fish loaf served on Thursdays after the pasta experiment came to an end, and prepare something that she really wanted to eat. And she developed an interest in cookery: she always asked for cookbooks for Christmas and birthday presents, subscribed to recipe clubs, and read cookery columns in the papers. Yet she did not necessarily want to be a chef; she just wanted to prepare food that was not inedible.

By the time Elinborg left home she had had some impact on the family’s eating habits, while other aspects of their life had changed of their own accord. Her father, for instance, no longer came home to eat lunch and lie down to listen to the news. Her mother went out to work and came home exhausted in the evening, relieved that Elinborg was willing to cook. She worked in a grocery shop where she was run off her feet all day long, and every evening she soaked in a hot bath, her feet red and sore. But she was more cheerful than before, as she had always been a sociable person.

Elinborg graduated from high school, left home and rented a small basement flat. During the summer vacations she worked as a police officer, having secured the job through an uncle. She decided to study geology at university. In her teens she had enjoyed travelling around the country with friends, one of whom, who was keen on geology, urged Elinborg to enrol with her. Although she was initially fascinated by the subject Elinborg knew before she graduated that a career in geology was not for her.

She watched Theodora at her homework and wondered what her daughter would do when she grew up. She was interested in science - physics and chemistry - and talked about doing it at university. She also wanted to study abroad.

‘Do you have a blog, Theodora?’ asked Elinborg.

‘No.’

‘Perhaps you’re too young.’

‘No, I think it’s silly. I think it’s ridiculous to go talking about everything I do and say and think. It’s nobody’s business but mine. I have no interest in putting it on the net.’

‘It’s surprising how far people go.’

Theodora looked up. ‘Have you been reading Valthor’s blog?’

‘I didn’t even know he blogged. I only found out by chance.’

‘He writes total nonsense,’ said Theodora. ‘I’ve told him I don’t want him mentioning me.’

‘And?’

‘He says I’m an idiot.’

‘Do you know these girls he writes about at all?’

‘No. He never tells me anything. He tells everyone everything about himself, but he never tells me anything. I gave up trying to talk to him ages ago.’

‘Do you think I should let him know I’ve been reading his blog?’

‘Get him to stop writing about us, at least. He writes about you too, you know. And Dad. I meant to say, but I didn’t want to be a telltale.’

‘How does it work … if I read his blog, am I snooping?’

‘Are you going to talk to him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then maybe you are snooping. I’d been reading it for months before I lost my temper over something he’d written about us, and told him. He wrote that I was a lame swot. I don’t know why he puts it on the net if we’re not allowed to read it without being accused of spying on him.’

‘Months, you say? How long has he been doing it?’

‘Over a year.’

Elinborg did not feel that she was spying on her son by reading a public blog. She did not want to interfere, because she felt he must take responsibility himself, but she was concerned that he was writing too openly about his family and friends.

‘He never tells me anything,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should talk to him. Or your Dad could.’

‘Let him be.’

‘Of course, he’s almost a grown man, he’s at college … I feel I’ve lost touch with him. We used to be able to talk but now we hardly ever do. All I can do these days is read his blog.’

‘Valthor has already moved out - up here,’ said Theodora, tapping at her forehead with a finger. Then she went back to her homework.

‘Did he have any friends?’ asked Theodora after a little while, without taking her eyes off her books.

‘He? Valthor?’

‘The man who was killed.’

‘I assume so.’

‘Have you spoken to them?’

‘No, not me. Other people are tracing them. Why do you ask?’ Her daughter sometimes spoke in riddles.

‘What did he do?’

‘He was a telecoms engineer.’

Theodora looked at her pensively. ‘They meet people.’

‘Yes, they go to people’s homes.’

‘They go to people’s homes,’ Theodora repeated, and returned to her easy maths assignment.

Elinborg’s mobile rang from the pocket of her coat in the hall closet. It was her work phone. She went into the hall to answer it.

‘We’ve just had the preliminary autopsy results for Runolfur,’ said Sigurdur Oli without so much as a hello.

‘Yes?’ said Elinborg. She was annoyed by people who did not identify themselves on the phone, even if they were close colleagues. She glanced at her watch. ‘Couldn’t this have waited until tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘Do you want to know what they found or don’t you?’

‘Sigurdur …’

‘They found Rohypnol,’ said Sigurdur Oli.

‘Yes, I know. I was there with you when they told us.’

‘No, I mean they found Rohypnol
in
Runolfur. Inside him. There was a load of it in his mouth and throat.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘He was up to his eyeballs in the stuff himself!’

8

The manager of the Customer Support Division at the phone company met Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli after lunch. Sigurdur Oli was distracted - he was working on another demanding case and had only half his mind on the Thingholt murder. In addition, his relationship with Bergthora was not improving. He had moved out and their attempts to resolve their differences had failed. She had invited him over one evening recently but they had finished up quarrelling. He did not tell Elinborg. He wanted to keep his personal life private. They had hardly spoken on the way to the phone company except for Elinborg asking if he had heard anything from Erlendur since he left for the East Fjords.