‘Have you been talking to that old bag upstairs?’ asked Vera. ‘She hates my guts. Everything she says about me is a lie. You shouldn’t take any notice of her.’
‘She told us about the men you entertained,’ said Thorson, ‘while Eyvindur was away on his sales trips. She says it was more than just a couple of soldiers.’
‘Yes, I bet she did.’
‘She’s not the only one who mentioned it.’
‘What, am I on trial here?’ asked Vera, grinding her cigarette under her heel. ‘Do you think I’m the only woman in Reykjavík who’s friendly with soldiers?’
‘Was Eyvindur aware of that fact?’ asked Flóvent.
‘Why are you asking me that? You don’t think I did anything to him, do you?’
‘We’re just making routine enquiries,’ said Flóvent.
‘He’d heard a rumour in town — gossip,’ said Vera. ‘Flung it in my face, but did it in his usual way — hesitating, stammering, insinuating things. I don’t know why I didn’t just tell him the truth. I suppose I felt sorry for him. Perhaps I wanted to protect him. I should have told him it was over between us — what little there was. I pretended to be terribly hurt and offended that he’d listen to gossip like that. Somehow I didn’t feel ready to tell him the truth — that I was planning to leave him. Maybe I should have told him straight away. It would have been the honest thing to do, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud. Anyway, I’m not sure he’d have wanted to hear the truth. He said we should talk about it properly when he got back. I didn’t say anything but I knew it was over. When he left, I took my chance. I moved out here, started working for the army, started supporting myself. I suppose it wasn’t very nice of me to disappear like that. But it wouldn’t have changed anything if I’d done it differently. I’d still have left him. I know that sounds callous, especially now that he’s... that he’s dead, but that’s the way it is.’
‘Did you ever see Eyvindur again after that?’ asked Thorson.
‘Yes, once. He came round here — he’d found out where I was — and showed me some money he’d got hold of. Begged me to come back to him.’
‘Where did he get the money?’
‘I don’t know. It was nothing to boast about. I suppose he must have had a good trip. I didn’t ask. After that he left.’
‘It doesn’t seem like you had much time for him,’ said Flóvent.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I did, actually. Look, I just wanted you to know how things were. Eyvindur isn’t... wasn’t a bad man, far from it, but I knew our relationship was never going to work out. He wasn’t willing to admit it. I had tried to talk to him about it but he didn’t want to hear.’
‘Was Billy the one who helped you move?’ asked Thorson.
‘Yes.’
‘In the middle of the night?’
‘I couldn’t face the neighbours and their prying eyes, so I bolted. There wasn’t much to take. My clothes. That was about it. We didn’t own a lot. I left the rest behind.’
‘What about the other soldiers?’
‘Other soldiers? What do you mean?’
‘According to the neighbours, you used to have visitors at night. There were quite a lot of soldiers hanging around your place.’
‘They can say what they like. It was only Billy and... well, his mates. They sometimes came with him.’
‘And partied all night?’
‘Is that against the law? And it wasn’t all night. The stupid old cow. You shouldn’t take any notice of her. Was she saying I was some kind of tart? She can talk. I sometimes see her daughter hanging around the camp here and she’s not washing their clothes, I can tell you that. The old bitch. The bloody old busybody.’
33
They asked if she lived in the house where she worked and she said yes, she slept in a little room in the attic. She invited them in, and as they entered the laundry, Thorson and Flóvent offered their apologies and said they wouldn’t take up much of her time. They just had a few more questions concerning Eyvindur and Felix. For example, did she have any idea what Eyvindur could have been doing at Felix’s flat? She busied herself with the washing and said no, she didn’t, but she did remember how astonished Eyvindur had been to bump into Felix aboard the Súd and discover that they were in the same line of work. Their paths hadn’t crossed for donkey’s years before that, not since they were at school. They hadn’t been in the same form because they came from such different backgrounds, but in spite of that they had been friends once. Their friendship had ended when Felix just lost interest in Eyvindur one day.
Though Eyvindur didn’t talk much about the past, Vera gathered that he’d had a rough home life and few friends, so his relationship with Felix had meant a lot to him. Eyvindur’s mother might never have existed for all he mentioned her, but he’d spoken briefly about his father after he and Vera lost the rooms they were renting and he was forced to throw himself on the mercy of his uncle. Only then did she learn that his father had done time for a variety of offences, including assault, which had come as quite a surprise to her since Eyvindur himself wouldn’t have said boo to a goose.
The encounter on board the Súd had not been a particularly cordial one, according to Eyvindur. He and Felix had very little to say to one another. Eyvindur had wanted to ask him why their friendship had ended so suddenly when they were boys. Vera understood from Eyvindur that he kept going round to the doctor’s house to ask after Felix and had been told each time that he wasn’t home, until finally Felix himself had said he wanted nothing more to do with him and that he was to stop bothering them.
But Eyvindur didn’t like to talk about it and changed the subject whenever Vera asked about his old friend. He wasn’t one for reminiscing, but he would chat about his sales trips, though mostly he just harped on about his failures. It had rankled that Felix was far more successful than him, and that had got him started on Runki, another salesman whose feats Eyvindur could only dream of.
Now that she came to think of it, Eyvindur had mentioned one thing that had struck him as very odd. Felix had taken great pains to cover as wide an area as possible on his sales trips. He would trek to the most out-of-the-way places where only a few souls scratched a living. Other salesmen knew they weren’t worth the trouble, yet Felix had been determined to visit them. Eyvindur couldn’t imagine it was worth his while, however gifted a salesman he was.
‘It may sound like a strange question, but did Eyvindur happen to mention where any of these places were?’ asked Thorson. ‘Were they close to any military facilities, for example?’
Vera shook her head. She didn’t think he’d mentioned that. Now that she had got over her indignation at the gossip they’d had repeated, she was friendly and willing to chat despite the late hour. She answered their questions thoughtfully and sensibly, and, at their prompting, tried to search her memory for anything she might have forgotten. Yet Flóvent’s thoughts kept returning to her upstairs neighbour, who had called her sex mad and accused her of being a soldier’s whore. And then there was the brown envelope he had found on the living room floor. She had cheated on Eyvindur, then walked out on him, straight into the arms of a British soldier. When Flóvent looked for traces of sorrow or remorse, for any kind of emotional turmoil, he could see none. The news didn’t seem to touch her at all, now that she had got over her initial surprise. Either she was more heartless than he had thought or the news hadn’t truly hit home yet.
‘Why do you ask about military facilities?’ she said. ‘Was Felix interested in them for some reason?’
‘We don’t know,’ said Thorson.