‘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?
Chapter 22
‘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.’