‘Oh, what the hell,’ Hulda muttered, and set off unhurriedly after him, reflecting that, even if someone found out, she couldn’t be sacked twice.
As she entered the hut she could feel her heart beating faster in anticipation, the old adrenaline pulsing through her veins, and with that her brain suddenly seemed to awake from its torpor: Amena’s elusive comment, which had been niggling at her for the last couple of hours, came to her in a flash. The evening before she died, Elena had sat talking for ages on the phone in the hostel lobby. But Hulda now clearly recalled the receptionist telling her that international calls were blocked. And Elena only really spoke Russian. Was it possible that she had been talking to Bjartur?
Bjartur.
Where had he got to? She couldn’t see him anywhere inside the tiny hut. Before she could look round, she felt a heavy blow land on her head.
XXIII
It took a while to clean the hut, hampered by the dark, and even then it was clear that he would have to come back as soon as possible with stronger products to try to obliterate any remaining traces. He felt oddly detached, as though some other man had hit the woman over the head with the axe and he was saddled with the job of cleaning up after him. In a way, he felt sorry for Katja, yet at the same time he was furious with her for behaving so foolishly. She didn’t deserve to die but, in the circumstances, his reaction had been the only one possible.
A glance at the hut’s guestbook confirmed that days, even weeks, tended to pass between visits at this time of year, so he should be able to get away with it if he came straight back this evening.
But right now, the priority was to dispose of the body.
He had zipped it into her sleeping bag then dragged it all the way back to his car, confident that the falling snow would cover his tracks fairly quickly. In the dark hours before dawn, in the dead of winter, far from civilization, he was confident of being able to act without being seen or interrupted. The problem was how to get rid of the body. All the solutions he came up with would entail a risk, some greater than others.
In the end, he made up his mind to drive into the interior, heading for the nearest ice cap. He knew of a belt of crevasses that would be ideal for his purpose. The final stretch was inaccessible by car, but in these freezing, snowy conditions it would be safe to cover it on skis. Such a thing would never have been possible in summer, when the glaciers were crawling with tourists, but at this time of year it was worth the risk. So that’s where he was going now, and that’s where he would make sure that Katja disappeared for ever.
XXIV
For too long, Hulda had closed her eyes to the truth. She had lived with the devastating consequences of that fact for quarter of a century now. She wasn’t sure when she had realized what was going on but, by then, it was already too late. This she blamed partly on denial, partly on her blindness to what was going on right under her nose. The hideous irony of it didn’t escape her. After all, she had prided herself on her powers of perception, regarded herself as one of the best detectives on the force, precisely because nothing ever got past her, because she had a knack of seeing through all the lies and deception well ahead of her colleagues.
But when the crime was being committed in her own home, she hadn’t noticed a thing.
Or hadn’t wanted to notice.
Confronting the fact had been almost unthinkable. She had been in love with Jón for most of her adult life; they had married young, and he had always treated her well, been an honest, trustworthy husband. Their love had blossomed, at least for a time, and it had been true love; she remembered the first year of their courtship, she had been swept off her feet by this handsome, suave man, who seemed so urbane and worldly. So it had been all too easy to overlook certain clues, to convince herself that they meant something different.
They had both been so happy when Dimma was born, such proud parents. But when she turned ten, their daughter’s behaviour had undergone a change and she’d become moody and withdrawn, suffering from bouts of depression. Yet still Hulda hadn’t twigged. She had allowed herself the luxury of living in ignorance, persuading herself that the cause couldn’t lie at home.
Naturally, Hulda had tried to talk to her daughter. She’d asked her why she was feeling so bad, what had happened to upset her, but Dimma had proved stubbornly uncommunicative, refusing to provide any answers, determined to suffer in silence. In moments of desperation, Hulda even wondered, ridiculously, if they had somehow brought this on themselves by choosing such an unusual name for their daughter: Dimma, meaning ‘darkness’. It was as if they had condemned her from birth, although they had only chosen the name for its nice, poetic ring. In her saner moments, she dismissed such thoughts as foolish nonsense.
In hindsight, Hulda regretted that she hadn’t put more pressure on Dimma, that she hadn’t demanded an answer. The child had been trapped in a desperate dilemma, sinking further into the abyss with every day that passed.
In those last few weeks before Dimma killed herself at only thirteen years old, Hulda’s sleep had been restless, as though she had a foreboding of disaster. Yet even so, she had failed to intervene with the forcefulness that might have saved
