‘Among other things, but the downside is that they were forced to bring the whole operation forward and it’s ended up being a bit of a rush job – all because you went and interviewed him without permission.’
Hulda swore under her breath.
‘And there’s a risk he’ll have been busy destroying records in the interim, which is a bugger. You’d better be prepared for them to call you about your conversation with him. They’ll want to know if he gave anything away, what information you were acting on …’
Hulda sighed. ‘Yes, OK … Though I’ve nothing new to give them.’
‘Then I’m afraid you’ll just have to put up with the hassle. This whole thing’s a total fiasco, but don’t let it get to you.’
Any more than it already has, she thought as she rang off. Hulda felt truly guilty over having potentially ruined her colleagues’ investigation, knowing how much effort they must have put into it.
She hated making mistakes.
She really hated making mistakes.
When she was young, doing her school homework, her grandmother used to be constantly looking over her shoulder, checking every answer, every composition, whether it was grammar, maths, geography, history … And her criticisms had often been both harsh and unfair, Hulda felt. Time and time again, her grandmother had told her that she had to do better, that she was too slow, that she had to outperform the boys to have any chance of succeeding in life. She had often been brought to tears by these exchanges.
Only as an adult had she learned the concept of constructive criticism, something completely alien to her grandmother.
And now, yet again, she felt the shame of having made a mistake.
She could do better than this.
XVIII
This time, Hulda didn’t waste time going to the house but marched straight round to Bjartur’s garage and knocked on the door. As she did so, she noticed a neat sign in the window: ‘Bjartur Hartmannsson, interpreter and translator.’
He answered the door quickly and looked surprised to see Hulda.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello, Bjartur, me again,’ she said apologetically, aware that she was forever tilting at windmills, on a mission to solve a case that was almost certainly a lost cause.
‘Well, well,’ he said with a smile, scratching his blond thatch. ‘Looks like I’m becoming an old friend of the police.’
Hulda wondered idly how old he was; she hadn’t bothered to look him up but guessed that, despite his boyish appearance, he must be pushing forty. The woman – presumably his mother – who had answered the door on Hulda’s first visit had looked to be around seventy.
‘Plenty to do?’ she asked in a friendly voice.
‘Yeah, sure, well … not so much in the translation line, but plenty of Russian tour groups. I swear the tourist dollar’s the only thing keeping Iceland afloat these days. But things are quiet today. I’m just … writing, you know, working on my book.’
The surge in tourism since the collapse of the Icelandic banking system – and the subsequent collapse of the Icelandic króna – was certainly helping to get the country back on track, since the tourists brought in valuable foreign currency. The outlook was a bit brighter than before, but the financial crisis had cast a long shadow, and Hulda, momentarily distracted, reflected that tourism would do little to boost her personal finances. Her job didn’t pay that well, and now all she had to look forward to was a fixed income from her government pension.
‘Come in,’ Bjartur said, breaking into her thoughts. ‘It’s still a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. I haven’t got round to buying a chair for visitors so you’ll have to make do with the bed.’ He turned red. ‘I mean, you know, you’ll have to sit on the bed.’
Hulda found a space free of clutter where she could park herself while Bjartur sat down in his superannuated office chair. The air in the room was unpleasantly stuffy: Hulda’s unexpected arrival had given him no chance to open a window.
‘Do you live out here in the garage?’ she asked curiously.
‘Yes, I do, actually. I sleep and work in here. It’s more private, you see. Mum and Dad have the house, but I couldn’t live with them any longer. It all got too much, living on top of each other like that. Unfortunately, there’s no basement or I’d have moved down there, but they let me do up the garage.’
Hulda wanted to ask why he hadn’t simply moved into a flat of his own but didn’t like to, in case it sounded rude.
Bjartur seemed to guess the unspoken question: ‘There’s no point getting a flat of my own, not yet; it’s way too expensive, whether you rent or buy. House prices are going through the roof and I don’t have a regular income. It’s all pretty hand to mouth – translation work, tour-guide gigs. Sometimes I’m rushed off my feet, especially in the summers, but often there’s not enough work to go round. I’m managing to save up a bit, though. It’ll all work out in the end. And Mum and Dad are getting on, so they’re bound to want to downsize at some point.’
Or die, Hulda read from his expression.
‘I wanted to ask you a small favour,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes? What’s that?’
She handed him the envelope of papers Albert had passed on to her.
‘It contains some documents that Elena’s lawyer dug out. I don’t know if there’s anything of interest, but “no stone unturned”, and all that.’ She smiled, making light of it.
‘I get you. How’s the investigation going, by the way? I see you’re still on the case.’
‘Yes … sure, I’m not planning to give up,’ she lied. The truth was that she would happily have abandoned it right now. Today of all days, when she was still reeling from the news Magnús had broken to her, pursuing this case was the last thing she felt like doing, though it was the only thing she had left.
There was no getting
