Thóra raised her eyebrows but didn’t reply. Jakob’s interests had to take priority. ‘But are you sure you don’t know this Bjarki Emil? Maybe he called himself Emil?’
Lena looked again at the printout of the photograph and shook her head slowly and hesitantly. ‘I don’t think so. Of course I might have met him, but I meet so many people, really. He does seem a tiny bit familiar though.’
Thóra watched the people streaming past the café. This was one of those new places that catered to the younger crowd, and it sold organic coffee that was supposedly purchased directly from farmers. She was too old to fall for this spiel, but it did make her wonder whether other coffee was stolen from farmers at gunpoint. Still, the coffee tasted good – and who was she to say that wasn’t partly because she could sip it with a clear conscience? Lena had suggested this place to Matthew when he called, as she was studying there at the time, and on Matthew and Thóra’s arrival the average age of the café’s patrons had risen signifi-cantly. Lena had been sitting at a small table with three of her friends, all hunched over their textbooks. When she spotted them in the doorway she left her friends and the three of them had taken seats by the window facing Laugavegur Avenue.
‘Well, it would be good if you could try to remember,’ said Thóra, turning back to Lena. She had a feeling that she knew more about this Bjarki than she wanted to admit. Of course it was possible that she was genuinely unsure whether she’d met him and therefore wanted to say as little as possible. ‘Just keep thinking about it, would you? Sometimes once they’ve mulled it over, people remember a small detail.’
Matthew spoke up for the first time since Lena had given up lying about what had happened at the residence when Friðleifur and Margeir were on duty. ‘How much did it cost per session?’ He shifted in his chair, which was far too small for a fully grown man.
‘I have no idea. They told me three thousand, but as I said to you just now, I didn’t know that it was something they did all the time. I actually thought it seemed a fair price. They could probably have charged much more – well, a bit more, anyway.’
‘And what exactly was included?’ It looked like Matthew hadn’t understood this fully, which was to be expected. Perhaps he thought he’d misheard – it wouldn’t have been the first time.
‘Well, I don’t know everything, of course – I can only say what they offered me and my friend.’
‘Which was?’ Matthew clearly wanted to get this sorted out.
‘She was given intravenous sugar water, on a drip. That, and oxygen.’
‘And she sobered up?’ Thóra asked, unable to hide her scepticism. Lena’s story was so different from everything she’d imagined that she found it nearly as difficult as Matthew to accept what the girl was saying.
‘Absolutely.’ Lena spread out her hands. ‘It was unbelievable, like magic. Maybe she didn’t sober up completely, but at least we could go downtown. She’d been totally wasted when we arrived and she certainly didn’t regret spending the money.’
‘So let me get this straight – you found out about this when Friðleifur mentioned it to you one morning?’
‘I might not have explained this well enough, but I used to sit with him in his office on Sunday mornings when Mum was with Tryggvi. When I asked him about the beer cans in the rubbish bin, he said he’d been helping a friend of his who’d needed to sober up. The guy who’d come with him had been drinking beer. Then he told me how he’d gone about helping him and invited me to drop by if I ever got into trouble. When my friend got completely smashed I decided to try it. Another friend of ours drove us.’ She seemed to be struggling to overcome her anger, but it still showed on her face. ‘That’s him in the photograph that was taken while my friend was on the oxygen, the one that ended up on Facebook. I still don’t understand how you found me there, because I untagged it.’ She saw that they weren’t going to answer this, so she continued: ‘It was a bit of a drag, because it took such a long time. Maybe that was why they didn’t charge more. He said he could also cure hangovers using the same method but he did that less often because they were only there during the night and early in the morning on the weekends. Most people are hungover when they wake up around noon, but maybe people needed to go to work in the morning or something.’
‘Where did this oxygen treatment take place, might I ask?’
‘Oh.’ Lena shut her eyes but opened them again immediately. Her face was scarlet. ‘God, I just wish I’d never gone there. And you know what the worst thing is in all of this? We’re not even friends any more. I’m in all this mess because of her.’
Thóra and Matthew’s sympathy for the death of her friendship was limited. ‘Where did the oxygen treatment take place, Lena?’ repeated Thóra.
The young woman’s cheeks turned even redder. She seemed to be aware that soon there would be no going back and she still believed she could persuade Thóra and Matthew to keep this information to themselves. ‘Inside one of the apartments, where there was an oxygen supply in the wall.’
‘An empty apartment?’
‘Uh… no. My…’ She looked angry again. ‘My ex friend went into Lísa’s apartment. I know because I saw Margeir go in with her and I knew exactly where each person lived.’
‘And Lísa had nothing to say about this, or what?’ Matthew didn’t know as much about the residents as Thóra did and he obviously didn’t remember what condition Lísa had been in.
‘She wasn’t conscious, so it didn’t matter to her.’ Lena didn’t look Thóra in the eye when she said this. ‘I don’t think.’
‘And did she sit in a chair during the treatment, this friend of yours?’ Thóra was virtually crossing her fingers in the hope that this had been the case.
‘I don’t know, but I would think so. I didn’t go in.’ The hot flush in Lena’s cheeks was nearly gone. ‘You’ve got to believe me that I regret this massively and I do know it wasn’t right. But it wasn’t me who was most in the wrong. It was Friðleifur and Margeir. It’s their fault.’
‘We’re not judging you, Lena. The only thing we’re interested in is whether Jakob is innocent. However, I must admit that I don’t quite understand why you wanted to meet Matthew and me. I’d have thought you’d want to avoid drawing attention to yourself.’
Lena’s friends were closing their books and putting them into their rucksacks. Lena watched them but didn’t seem about to go anywhere. ‘I was hoping to find out how your investigation was going. Mum and Dad never tell me anything and I was afraid that you’d suspect Tryggvi; I actually just wanted to find out whether you thought he was in the frame. Then I was afraid that you’d found this out and that you’d make a big deal out of it. I just wanted to get an idea of what was going on.’
‘Why did you think that we would start suspecting Tryggvi?’ Thóra saw that Lena’s friends were just about to stand up; they turned round to try to make eye contact with her, but to no avail. ‘We don’t suspect any one person. Not yet.’
‘I was just worried. Maybe it wasn’t logical, but I was worried about Mum and Dad. They seemed really freaked out when this investigation started. I sort of confusedly connected it directly to Tryggvi; I got the feeling that they’d heard he was being investigated. I wanted to be involved and I thought I could get information from you. If I’ve wasted your time, I apologize. I wasn’t thinking clearly.’
‘You must have had some specific reason for believing your brother would end up under the microscope?’ As Thóra said this, Lena’s girlfriends stood up and appeared to be fussing about a bit with Lena’s stuff. Things were doubtless complicated by the fact that it wasn’t just her textbooks, but also a huge coat, a rucksack and a sports bag that she’d left with them. Thóra hoped that it would take them plenty of time to find what they were looking for so that she could get an answer to her question.