The Silence of the Sea (33 page)

‘Take it. Take anything you think will help. Of course, it would be nice to have it back afterwards but we’re not intending to sort through their things any time soon. It’s still too upsetting.’ He reached out for the picture and studied it. ‘They both loved drawing. Used to occupy themselves for hours with their crayons, ever since they were tiny. Sigga Dögg’s the same, though she’s too unsettled at the moment. The poor little thing, she can sense that something’s terribly wrong.’

‘Have the child protection authorities been in touch at all since I had a word with their lawyer?’ Thóra looked back at the picture, which Margeir had put down on the kitchen table. The figures’ black eyes were staring at the ceiling, their scarlet mouths grinning crazily. The sight was somehow disturbing and she felt an impulse to cover it up with the credit card statement. But they would continue to smile and nothing would change. She tried to rekindle the hope inside her that the girls would be found alive; perhaps they’d been taken ashore at Grótta and hidden away, or secretly conveyed abroad. The hope was faint, but it was there, nonetheless.

‘Yes, I think so.’ The old man took hold of another drawer handle and dithered, unable to remember if he was opening or closing it. ‘Sorry, my memory’s not working at the moment. They keep ringing. My wife’s on the verge of collapse and I feel as if I’m heading the same way. I keep being overwhelmed by a feeling of hopelessness; we’re not capable of raising her in the long term, and we should just force ourselves to accept it. The money won’t make much difference. There’ll come a point when we open the door to those people and hand her over. It’s so hard when your love for someone harms the very person it’s supposed to protect.’

Thóra laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I do think it’s true that she would be better off with a younger couple. But it’s equally clear that it would be in her best interests to have as much contact with you as possible. You’re her only link to her family and it’ll be incredibly important for her to have you there.’ She withdrew her hand and continued, ‘I’ve been promised a meeting this week with the head of the relevant social services department and I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to arrange things to be as painless as possible for you and Sigga Dögg, while being for the best in the long run. The authorities would have to be heartless to deny you access. Not only heartless: stupid.’

After that they said little. Margeir sat down at the kitchen table, excusing himself on the grounds that he needed to rest for a moment. Thóra continued to search the kitchen but without finding any paperwork relating to money matters. It was the rotten food in the larder that caught her attention; half a loaf of bread covered in green mould and two flat-cakes in the same condition. She closed the door at once but the sour smell lingered in her nostrils. ‘I wonder if it would be okay to chuck out the old bread and stuff?’ She opened the fridge. The situation there was less grim; nothing looked obviously mouldy, though the date on the milk cartons didn’t exactly whet the appetite. ‘I let the police know we’d be looking in and they didn’t object. Apparently they haven’t been round yet and it didn’t sound as if they were planning a visit any time soon. But it would be unfortunate if we threw away something that turned out to be important.’

‘Why should they want to see the house? It’s not as if there’s anything of relevance here.’ Margeir sounded as if he had rallied again; his anger at those who were trying to cast aspersions on the family blazed up, momentarily overshadowing his grief. ‘Anyway, I can’t see what difference an old loaf of bread could make.’

Thóra closed the fridge again and smiled. ‘No. It’s not immediately obvious. Unless to prove that they haven’t been here recently, or to confirm when they left the country.’ Her words sounded so lame that she wished she could add an intelligent comment, but nothing sprang to mind. ‘I’m going to take a quick look upstairs. There’s nothing here.’

Margeir nodded but made no move to stand up. ‘I’ll be here when you come down.’ Thóra suspected that if she left the house without telling him, he would remain sitting at the table for hours, alone with his thoughts and memories.

Upstairs the carpeted landing muffled her footsteps, making it seem even quieter than the floor below. She walked past four open doors, peering into the rooms as she went. There were two fairly tidy children’s rooms, one with bunk beds, presumably the twins’ room, the other full of baby things, which must belong to Sigga Dögg. It contained no bed, only an old chest of drawers and a white-painted table with two small matching chairs. She saw no reason to enter the children’s rooms as it was highly unlikely that she would find what she was looking for in there. The clothes and toys she had promised to fetch for the little girl’s grandmother would have to wait until her main search was over. It wouldn’t help to have to lug around two bursting shopping bags.

She also left out the large bathroom that had apparently been shared by the whole family. It was a mess, which seemed to furnish the most convincing proof that the family had intended to come home. Personally, if she had been planning to abscond she would have washed all the dirty laundry, not left the basket overflowing with socks, T-shirts and underwear. She would also have tidied up the shampoo bottles and thrown away the empty toothpaste tube that lay by the sink, its top on the floor. All the indications were of life being carried on as normal.

The master bedroom seemed smaller than it was due to all the furniture it contained. A cot, its bedclothes unmade, had been fitted in beside the king-size bed. Thóra squeezed between them to reach the bedside table. It didn’t take a genius to work out that it had been used by Lára; on top lay a cheap necklace and reading glasses with pink plastic frames that no man would have been seen dead in. The two drawers contained nothing of interest, only an empty pill card and some dog-eared romantic novels with pictures of muscular men embracing long-haired beauties on their covers. No bank statements.

Ægir’s bedside drawer proved more rewarding. Under some foreign magazines featuring watches and sports cars, she discovered not bank letters but all kinds of work-related papers. Conscious of their fate, Thóra felt that the couple should have used the bed for other activities besides reading love stories, car magazines and work documents. She leafed through the pile of papers in case any of them related to the family’s accounts but found nothing. Instead, she was brought up short by a drawing. It looked like the plans of a ship that bore a striking resemblance to the yacht. Summoning up a mental picture of the cabins on board, she decided that this was indeed a plan of the different decks on the
Lady K
. The yacht’s name did not actually appear anywhere, but the page had been badly photocopied: the drawings were at a slant and it was possible that they had been part of a larger sheet. She sifted through the rest of the papers more attentively, noticing a few other pages that struck her as odd. All contained information about the yacht’s furnishings and equipment, and it was hard to imagine why an employee of the resolution committee would have been reading them in bed. She decided to take the whole pile of papers with her to study in more detail; if there was an explanation for this, it wasn’t immediately obvious. Perhaps Ægir had been required to study the make and design of the vessel for the valuation. But in bed?

When she put her head round the door of the last room on the landing, she hit the jackpot. It had been used as a study and she glimpsed a stack of bills on the small desk beside the computer. Flicking quickly through them she found bank giros for two mortgage payments and the interest on a car loan. The balances on the three loans were higher than she had hoped, but not alarmingly so. Next she scanned the shelves where she spotted several files marked ‘Tax – home’, together with the year, and took away the most recent, which turned out to be full of receipts and bank statements.

When she went downstairs Margeir was still sitting in the kitchen. A battered wallet lay on the table and he was gazing at a photo in a clear plastic pocket. ‘Is that a picture of the girls?’ Thóra put down the file and took a seat opposite him. The chair creaked as if weakened by standing idle for three weeks.

‘Yes, the twins.’ He turned the wallet so that Thóra could see the photo properly. When she picked it up, the smooth, shabby leather felt slippery to the touch. She focused on the picture.

‘Which one of them is this?’ She pointed at the solemn little girl standing beside her exact replica, who in contrast was smiling and had slung an arm round her sister’s shoulders.

Leaning over to see, Margeir replied: ‘Bylgja.’

‘Did she always wear those glasses?’ Thóra pointed at the bright-red frames on the child’s nose.

‘Yes. They were almost identical except that Bylgja was very short-sighted. She hated wearing glasses but she was too young for contact lenses or a laser operation. Her mother went to great lengths to find a pair she was reconciled to. Cheerful, don’t you think?’ Thóra smiled stupidly and agreed. Failing to notice her odd expression, Margeir carried on talking: ‘But there aren’t many pictures of her wearing them. She generally took them off when the camera came out. That’s why I’m so fond of this picture; it shows her the way she usually looked.’

Thóra took another glance, then returned the wallet without comment. Although the photo was small and the quality poor, the red frames were beyond a doubt the pair she had found in the wardrobe on board the yacht. How on earth could they have ended up there? What was the child doing in the cupboard? Almost certainly hiding. The question was: from who?

‘I’m not wasting your time. They were there.’ Thóra stood crimson-faced behind the police officer as he rooted around in the artfully fitted wardrobe with his backside in the air. The fragrance of citrus wood did nothing to alleviate her discomfort, nor did the mirrors on the cupboard doors, which reflected her embarrassment back at her. ‘It was a red and orange cocktail dress and the glasses were tangled up in some dangly bits on the hem.’

‘Could you be mistaken about the colour?’ His voice emerged muffled from among the evening gowns.

‘No. Definitely not. I remember thinking it was hardly surprising the glasses hadn’t been spotted because they were almost the same colour as the dress. But I was preoccupied with Karítas at the time – it didn’t occur to me that they could be significant.’ He didn’t respond, merely continued to dig around among the clothes. ‘You see, I assumed the glasses must have ended up there before the yacht was repossessed.’

The officer extricated himself and rose stiffly to his feet. ‘You should have informed us immediately.’

Thóra blew the fringe out of her eyes, annoyed. It was at least the tenth time he had mentioned this since she met him by the yacht. The same went for his colleague to whom she had reported the discovery of the glasses. She missed her friend with the green eyes and suspected that this man and the one who had answered the phone were the officers he had bawled out for their oversight in relation to Halldór’s body. That would explain their conduct towards her; they must be pleased to be in a position to offload the blame onto somebody else. ‘As I explained, it slipped my mind. I didn’t work out the connection until this morning when I saw a photo of the girl wearing the glasses. She didn’t have them on in the few other pictures I’d seen of her. To give you an idea of how little importance I attached to them, I didn’t even check to see if they were still there the second time I came aboard – even though I opened the closet.’

‘You should have let us know anyway. It’s not up to you to decide what is or isn’t significant.’

‘No. You’re right about that.’ Thóra gritted her teeth and tried to keep her cool. She was aware of a throbbing behind her eyes that threatened to develop into a full-blown headache if she didn’t leave the boat soon. She was clearly not cut out to be a sailor if she was in danger of feeling seasick in port. ‘Of course, I should have rung and told you about every single thing I saw, shouldn’t I? Like the towel in the bathroom. Two towels, actually. But I forgot.’

The policeman stood up straight and although Thóra was tall, he towered over her. The cabin may have been luxurious but it had a low ceiling, which had the effect of accentuating his height and making him seem almost a giant. ‘There’s no call for sarcasm.’

‘No, sorry.’ She relaxed her jaw. If she didn’t want to ruin her good relations with the police she had better find a way to lighten the atmosphere. Better drop the matter and get to the point. ‘Anyway, I don’t understand what can have happened to the dress.’ She opened the wardrobes one after the other and peered inside, though they had already conducted a thorough search. ‘Someone must have taken it.’ She took a step back to get a better view of the one that was open. ‘I couldn’t swear to it, but now I come to think of it some of the other dresses may be missing as well.’ She rubbed off the fingerprint powder that had coated her hands when she opened the doors. A forensics officer had gone round first, taking prints from the cupboards, light switches and the chest of drawers in the cabin, in case any new ones had appeared since the initial examination of the yacht. He had also vacuumed all the wardrobes in search of biological material which might prove that Bylgja or Arna had been hiding inside them. While he was working, Thóra and the policeman had been forced to cool their heels in the corridor, exchanging small talk that became increasingly strained with every moment that passed. Perhaps that was why, once they entered the cabin, they had quickly begun to get on each other’s nerves.

‘They took photographs in here when the yacht first arrived in port, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find out.’ The man looked at the sea of colour suspended from the hangers. ‘Though I don’t understand how you can tell. The wardrobes are so full it doesn’t look as if there’d be room for anything else.’

‘There were more dresses.’ Thóra stepped back still further and made an effort to picture the contents as she had originally laid eyes on them. There was still only one empty hanger, but the garments did not seem as tightly packed. ‘Yup, there were definitely more dresses.’ She closed the door.