‘What did you tell him?’
‘What I told you, that Hólmbert had been visiting the area with our father. Look, I wasn’t quite straight with you when you started asking about the Rósamunda affair. The truth is, we were familiar with the incident because a family friend, a relative of ours really, a young man called Jónatan, was involved in some way that was never properly explained to me. It wasn’t talked about. I suppose it was a skeleton in our family’s closet, so to speak.’
‘So you decided to keep quiet about it?’
‘I’m not in the habit of discussing private matters like that with strangers.’
‘Who was this Jónatan?’
‘He was a student at the university.’
‘Did you say student?’ Konrád remembered Petra saying that Thorson had muttered something about a student as he left. He thought of the notes describing an interview with an unnamed university student. What happened was a tragedy.
‘Yes, apparently he died after being hit by a car. I didn’t know him very well. But my brother Hólmbert and he were friends. And really, that’s all I’ve got to say on the matter. I’m ringing off now. Goodbye.’
45
Thorson picked his way slowly along the path, past graves marked by crosses and headstones which here and there had sunk into the ground, standing crooked, weather-beaten and mossy, their inscriptions nearly illegible. These were the old graves, bearing dates from early last century, from a vanished age. Yet, as Thorson contemplated them, he realised he was older than many of them. A few of the stones dated from the years around the Second World War, and it was to one of these that he made his way now. Since returning to Iceland he had often visited the cemetery and beaten a path to this particular grave. Nowadays the walk took him longer; he used to be quicker on his feet. The years had rolled by, one much the same as the next, for in Iceland he had found the quiet life that he had craved after the war was over. The only surprise was that he should have lived so long. Thorson came to a halt in front of the stone. His mood was lighter than it usually was when he made this pilgrimage. Finally he had news to impart, though he knew it came too late.
Although it had all happened a lifetime ago, Thorson had never quite been able to forget Jónatan or Rósamunda. The other day he had been sitting at the kitchen table, leafing through the papers, when his eye happened to fall on a page of obituaries for a woman who had worked at the dressmaker’s where Rósamunda had once been employed. He remembered the woman’s name and recognised her face from the accompanying photo. She had been a friend of Rósamunda’s. He and Flóvent had interviewed her at the time; she was the girl with the raven-black hair who had told them about Rósamunda’s rape. There couldn’t be many people who remembered the events surrounding the girl’s murder, and their numbers must be rapidly dwindling. He himself was living on borrowed time, and soon there would be no one left who knew or cared about Rósamunda’s fate. Obeying a sudden whim, he decided to go along to the funeral.
The church was packed when Thorson arrived and he took a seat towards the back. The minister chanted out of tune and a choir sang the funeral hymn, after which the congregation was invited to attend a reception in the church hall. There Thorson ran into an old engineering acquaintance. They had both been involved in bridging the rivers on the vast glacial sands east of Vík í Mýrdal, which had led to the long-awaited completion of the Ring Road in 1974. Their conversation came round to the deceased who, it turned out, had worked in the engineer’s office, and Thorson explained that he had met her because she’d once worked for a dressmaking company that had featured in an old murder investigation. The engineer was intrigued, so Thorson filled him in on the details of the Rósamunda case, at which point it emerged that the man knew a woman called Geirlaug, who was a family friend of the dressmaker in question and still in touch with her daughter. But the engineer couldn’t remember the dressmaker’s name.
‘Really?’ said Thorson. ‘She had a daughter?’
‘An only child, I believe,’ said the engineer. ‘Wasn’t there something a bit fishy about that theatre case? Geirlaug was talking about it once.’
‘Fishy? How do you mean?’
‘Oh, I forget what it was.’
‘Something linked to the dressmaker?’
‘Yes, I expect that was it.’
‘Had this Geirlaug been talking to her then?’ asked Thorson.
‘Yes, or to her daughter, I think.’
A couple of days later, unable to shake off his curiosity, Thorson rang the engineer’s friend Geirlaug and asked her for the daughter’s name. She was happy to oblige, informing him that the dressmaker’s daughter was called Petra. When it came to actually contacting her, though, Thorson dithered a little before finally going ahead. He needn’t have worried. Petra was friendly and invited him round. She was the one who provided him with the missing piece: Rósamunda had refused to take any deliveries to the Reykjavík home of the very member of parliament who, together with his son Hólmbert, had been instrumental in implicating Jónatan and persuading Flóvent to drop the investigation.
Rósamunda’s case had haunted Thorson ever since that rainy day when he said farewell to Flóvent on the Reykjavík docks, and all through the fighting that followed and the subsequent years of peace. After his demobilisation, Thorson had headed home to Canada to finish his degree. He had realised his dream of qualifying as a structural engineer, and when his father died after a brief spell in hospital, Thorson decided he had nothing to lose. He sent a speculative letter to Iceland, which resulted in the offer of an engineering contract. He had only intended to spend a few years there, while he tried to achieve some sort of equilibrium after the turmoil of his wartime service. His mother had noticed the change in him since he came home from the fighting in Europe, noticed a tendency to depression, anxiety and tension that was quite unlike her son. Thorson never spoke much about his part in the war, merely commenting that it was nothing to be proud of. Despite being decorated by the Canadian Army for his bravery, he insisted that he was no hero; the real heroes were the comrades he had lost and still missed.
‘What are you going to do in Iceland?’ asked his mother. If anything, she had tried to discourage him from going.
‘Living there agreed with me.’
‘Are you planning to come home again?’
‘Oh, I think so. But I need to go back. To try and recapture the peace of mind I found there. Take a step back. I think it might do me good.’
‘Won’t you give it a little more thought?’ asked his mother as she watched him pack his suitcase.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Thorson. ‘Iceland’s been on my mind a lot since I left. I’d like to see it again.’
‘Is it that murder you told me about? A sense of unfinished business? Is that why you want to go back?’
One evening, when his spirits had been particularly low and he had wanted a break from his futile habit of reliving episodes from the war, Thorson had found himself opening up to his mother about the Rósamunda case. He had often thought back to his time with the military police in Reykjavík, to his collaboration with Flóvent and the way their last investigation had ended. He had brooded over the inquiry and its outcome, wondering whether there was anything they could have done better or at least differently. He had been unable to put the matter to one side and move on, because he blamed himself for what happened. He should have kept a closer eye on Jónatan. Should have taken his mental state into account. He knew the pangs of conscience Flóvent had suffered were, if anything, even worse. There had been no need to put their feelings into words.