‘Yes, actually.’ Ægir forced a wry smile. ‘The body’s disappeared. Someone tipped it overboard while I was diving and it floated past me. I thought I was seeing things but it turns out the freezer’s empty.’
Lára opened her mouth and shut it again. Her eyes implored Ægir either to retract his words or admit he was pulling her leg. Clearly, she overestimated his sense of humour. ‘How could that happen?’ Without waiting for an answer she leapt to her feet and tugged at him. ‘Where are the girls?’
‘They’re below. Where we left them.’ Ægir rose too, cursing himself for leaving them unsupervised. He had wanted to shield them from witnessing the tension between their parents. When he last saw them they had been sitting up in bed watching a film whose rating neither he nor Lára had had the presence of mind to check. The girls had been so absorbed, and hopefully still were, that it was unlikely any attempt to drag them away would have succeeded. Besides, there was a world of difference between disposing of a dead body and harming living children. ‘Wait here; I’ll check on them.’ He almost shoved Lára back onto the sofa. Though there was no reason to suspect any harm had come to them, he didn’t want her to be first on the scene.
Halli had cottoned on to what was happening and dragged his attention away from the window, which suggested that Thráinn had indeed ordered him to keep an eye on them. When they stood up, he looked around in confusion, as if he was considering forbidding them to leave the saloon. But once Ægir had induced Lára to sit down again, Halli seemed reassured. Plainly, she was the one under suspicion, since there was no way he himself could have thrown the body overboard when he was underwater at the time. Still, he found it so ludicrous that the captain could imagine for one minute that Lára had had anything to do with it that he almost burst out laughing. Then he realised that just as he had automatically assumed that a member of the crew must have been responsible, so the captain had almost certainly sought outside his own ranks for the guilty party. People never suspect those closest to them. But the captain’s relationship with his crew was completely different from Ægir’s with Lára. They had known each other for a decade, while the crew were strangers to one another who had been assembled to perform a specific task. Perhaps it was a sign of Thráinn’s leadership skills that he should automatically side with his men. Or perhaps it was a sign that he was a fool.
‘I’ll fetch the girls. Don’t worry – Halli will wait with you.’ Ægir walked calmly out of the saloon, quickening his pace as soon as the door closed behind him. He did not run, however. Rationally, he knew his worries were unnecessary. Under normal circumstances he would not even have been moving this fast, but the situation could in no way be described as normal. Only now did he truly acknowledge to himself that something was seriously amiss on board and that the corpse in the freezer was only part of it. This boat was quite simply a bad place. He breathed more easily as he approached the twins’ door and heard the sound of the film.
They were still sitting where he had left them, side by side with their backs bolt upright against the headboard. When he appeared in the doorway they muttered a barely audible greeting but did not raise their eyes from the screen. The film must be incredibly gripping since he usually merited at least a grin. ‘What, not even a hello?’ He pulled a sad face.
‘It’s a really good film. Don’t talk to us now.’
The yacht lurched suddenly and Ægir grabbed the door frame. ‘Sorry, girls. I’m afraid you’re going to have to turn it off and come upstairs to join me and your mother. You can pause it, can’t you?’
They turned their heads, their faces frightened. For the thousandth time he marvelled at the magic of genes. He took it for granted that they were identical in appearance but it was beyond him to understand how a cluster of cells could be arranged in such a way as to make the responses of two individual human beings so alike. At times they moved in unison, as if performing synchronised swimming on dry land. This was one of those moments. They even blinked simultaneously, under furrowed brows. ‘Why?’ Uttered with one voice, naturally. ‘It’s nearly finished.’
‘Because the sea’s so rough that we want to have you near us. You can watch the film any time you like; it’s not going anywhere.’
They ceased to act as one; Arna folded her arms mutinously while Bylgja drew up her legs and said with relentless logic: ‘If we can watch it any time why can’t we watch it now?’
‘You know what I mean. Don’t twist my words. Your mother’s waiting upstairs and she’ll be worried if we don’t hurry back.’ He picked up the remote control. ‘There’s a TV in the saloon, so you can carry on watching it there if you like.’ When he switched off the television, the room was plunged into darkness. ‘Why have you drawn the curtains? Was the light shining on the screen?’
‘No. We didn’t want to see out. It was gross.’ This time it was Arna who answered.
‘Gross? That’s hardly the right word, sweetheart. The weather may be rough or stormy, but it’s not gross.’
‘We’re not talking about the weather.’
‘Oh?’ Ægir was puzzled. ‘What then? The waves?’
‘No.’ Bylgja shook her head, frowning. ‘The woman. She fell past the window into the sea. We both saw her when we came downstairs earlier. I’d seen you getting in the water and we wanted to watch you dive. We weren’t allowed out on deck so we had to come down here to watch out of our window. Upstairs you only get a view of the deck. But it turns out that our window faces the other way, so we couldn’t see you – only the woman falling. We thought it was Mummy at first but when she was lying in the sea we got a better look and realised it wasn’t her.’
Ægir swallowed a lump in his throat. ‘Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?’ Now at least it was possible to establish that the woman had been thrown from the deck above the girls’ cabin. He had been lowered into the sea on the other side of the ship, so for him to have caught sight of it the body must have been pulled under the keel by the current.
‘No, we weren’t,’ they replied in chorus.
‘There’s no woman on board apart from your mother and she’s sitting upstairs in the saloon.’ Perhaps this was the wrong thing to say; they might have to give a statement to the police later and it was unfair to confuse them like this.
‘It wasn’t Mummy, it was the woman in the painting. Wearing the same dress and everything.’ Bylgja shuddered. ‘Her face looked horrible. Then she sank.’
Ægir took a deep breath, making a heroic effort to control his features. If this was true, the woman in the freezer must have been Karítas. He recalled the material of the garment that had been billowing about the gruesome body and conceded that it may well have been the same dress. The colours had looked duller but then the sea would mute them, as it did sound.
‘I told you they wouldn’t believe us.’ Arna got up from the bed. ‘You never believe us.’
‘Of course I do.’ Ægir groped for the right words, for some way to distract their attention. His mind was blank. ‘Why didn’t you fetch your mother? Or someone else?’