The Girl Who Died, Ragnar Jonasson [small books to read .TXT] 📗

wasn’t going to answer, then she said: ‘Thrá. I thought I’d told you.’

‘No, I don’t think so. It’s an unusual name.’

‘Yes, I suppose so …’ Salka trailed off.

‘I was wondering, do you by any chance know what happened?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She died.’

‘Do you know how?’

‘What does it matter?’ Salka asked, glaring at Una, her voice abruptly sharpening. ‘It was, what, nearly sixty years ago.’

‘I was only wondering,’ Una said awkwardly.

‘I invited you to live here out of the goodness of my heart,’ Salka said with sudden vehemence. ‘You have no reason to stick your nose into my family’s private history, Una.’

‘No … no, of course not.’

Salka stood up. ‘I’m going to bed. Maybe it would be best … maybe it would be best if we could find somewhere else for you to live before this evening.’

Without another word, she left the room.

They had told her that if she confessed, she would be released from solitary confinement immediately. So she had confessed. For a while she had even started to believe in her own guilt, but now the doubts were beginning to stir again. Nothing had changed; she was still confined in the cramped cell, alone in the world, utterly broken. The bastards hadn’t kept any of their promises, but from time to time they dragged her off for further interviews, perhaps more out of habit than necessity now, because she couldn’t tell them anything else. They repeated their former promises that this would soon be over; that she would be spared this torment once she had been charged and from then on the case would proceed in a conventional manner. She could live with that, she thought; it was the isolation that was killing her.

They told her about the two men who had been involved with her in the murders of Hannes and Hilmar, gave her a detailed description of how the three of them had dumped the bodies in the lava-fields. She could picture the scenes, exactly as they had been told to her; see herself taking part in the murders, then driving the bodies south along the coast, and helping to fling them into a fissure. Yet it seemed, from what she had been told, that their bodies still hadn’t turned up. They had even taken her out to the endless dark lava-fields of the Reykjanes Peninsula and asked her to point to the exact spot, but she couldn’t because they had never told her where it was.

In spite of this, she had done her best to please them by pointing at random and trying to focus, to think. If it was all true, if she and her two associates had really murdered Hannes and Hilmar, she ought at least to be able to recognize some landmarks that would help the police to locate their bodies. Perhaps this was the last piece of the puzzle that they had been waiting for, the key that would finally put an end to her ordeal.

XV

As she made her way shakily from the sitting room up to the attic, Una felt as if the walls had come to life and were screaming at her, as if they were heaving in time to her own intakes of breath. She had no idea what had just happened. Why would Salka do this to her?

Naturally, Salka had gone through a terrible experience, so perhaps that was the explanation. Shock and grief had left her a bit unbalanced.

It hit Una with a sickening blow that now she really was alone and friendless in the village. Everyone was against her, and perhaps they had been all along. She had been thrown out on her ear; rendered homeless from one minute to the next. It felt as if the walls were pressing in on her and, when she reached the top of the stairs, she hardly recognized her little flat any more. She had been living there for more than four months, but had it ever really been home ? And where was she to go now? Was there any reason for her to stay on in the village – with only one pupil – now that the only person who had wanted a teacher brought in from outside had turned against her?

Tired though she was after her bad night, Una immediately got busy, taking out her cases and her belongings. Either she could get in her car and go straight home to Reykjavík or she could knock on Thór’s door and ask him for help. She would have liked to ring first, but that was out of the question as the phone was downstairs in Salka’s part of the house and she had no intention of setting foot in there again.

Una tore her clothes out of the wardrobes and dumped them in a heap on the bed, in a state of high emotion. There was some food in the fridge; should she leave it behind? And several – actually rather a lot of – empty wine bottles that she hadn’t yet got round to throwing away. It would probably be best to take them out to the car as well and dispose of them discreetly when she got back to Reykjavík. But for that she would need more plastic bags.

She lined up the empty bottles on the floor, almost without thinking what she was doing, then paused. She needed a bit more time to think before she took an irrevocable decision. She decided to venture out in the cold and walk up the hill to the farm. Thór and Hjördís must be up by now, since they would have to feed the sheep. After surveying her belongings, she sank down on a kitchen chair for a moment and drew a deep breath. Outside, the wind was raging, but inside the house there was no sound at all. There, in the midst of the quiet, she became aware of a peculiar sense of loss. It wasn’t Edda she missed but the other girl who