He resumed his shovelling.
XXVIII
The advantage of darkness is that there are no shadows.
Hulda closed her eyes.
She decided to stop struggling. Give up the fight.
The suffocating sense of claustrophobia was horrific, indescribable, yet, oddly, she felt a kind of peace descending on her, once she had resigned herself to the inevitable, to the realization that no one was coming to her rescue now, that these were her final moments of life. She would never have to endure the humiliation of being prosecuted for professional misconduct. In the event of her death, Magnús would drop the proceedings against her, she was sure of that. Her thoughts flew to Pétur. He would be waiting for her. Perhaps he had been trying to call her. And he would have to wait for ever.
Her face was almost completely covered with earth now.
Above all, death offered a merciful way out: an end to the nightmares. The long-desired absolution. Peace. For the last twenty years and more, Hulda had been trying to atone for what she had done, for the act that weighed so heavily on her soul, by showing understanding and sympathy to the guilty. At times, this had led her to cross a line, as in the case of Emma. The woman had committed a crime, driven her car into a paedophile, but Hulda had understood her all too well.
She didn’t know how long she had left. Perhaps only a few brief seconds.
At that moment, she almost wished she believed in a higher power. She had gone to church regularly with her grandparents as a child, but later, after the death of her daughter, the last vestiges of her faith had deserted her.
Her thoughts returned to Jón and Dimma.
Once, she had loved no one in the world as much as those two, her husband and her daughter. But when she found out that Jón had been subjecting Dimma to unspeakable cruelty, her love had been transformed into hate. In one fell swoop, she had lost them both: Dimma had taken her own life; Jón had been transformed into a monster. Her hatred had grown and intensified every day, swelling into a vast, uncontrollable rage. What he had done could never be forgiven, yet he was alive and Dimma was not. Every time Hulda saw him, she thought of Dimma. Her daughter was dead, she had failed her, and yet she was flooded with a mother’s love more powerful even than when Dimma had been alive.
She had to erase Jón from her life. But divorcing him wouldn’t be enough and she had no desire to drag the family through a public sexual-abuse inquiry. That was out of the question. No, she wanted everything to remain fine on the surface, but Jón had to go, and he had to pay for his hideous crimes.
In the event, it had proved quite easy.
Jón had a heart condition, but he could have lived to a ripe old age with the right medication.
Hulda had replaced his pills with a useless substitute, and then waited, hoping the change would have some effect, that he would – one fine day – simply fall asleep and never wake up again.
Of course, she knew what she was doing was wrong. Not only wrong but murder, pure and simple. Yet she pushed these feelings away, focusing on the job at hand, on getting rid of Jón. And hopefully finding a little peace. The desire for justice was overwhelming; she had to avenge her daughter’s death. But, more than that, she couldn’t bear the thought of Jón being allowed to live any longer.
After the plan came to her, she never really had any second thoughts. They came later; too late.
In the end, she had had enough of waiting. One day, she came home for lunch, knowing that Jón would be there. She deliberately picked a fight with him and kept at it mercilessly, working Jón up into such a state that he suffered a massive cardiac arrest.
He fell to the living-room floor, unable to speak, unable to cry out, but he was still alive. He looked at her, his eyes pleading. He couldn’t know what she’d done, and Hulda felt no urge to explain. She just stood there and watched him die, thinking of Dimma. She felt nothing; no regrets, but no pleasure either. And then, when he was finally gone, there was a feeling of relief, that it was over at last.
Hulda knew she could finally move on. Nothing would ever be normal again, of course, but she had done what she had to do.
She had killed a man who had committed a crime worse than murder.
She left him on the floor and went back to work.
Later, she came home, ‘found’ the body and called an ambulance. And that was that.
A man with a weak heart drops dead before his time. Nothing unusual about that. His daughter had killed herself not long before; it had all proved a great strain. There wasn’t a whisper of suspicion about the real reason for Dimma’s suicide, let alone that there might have been anything unnatural about Jón’s death. Everyone’s sympathies lay with his wife, who was, moreover, a police officer. Of course, there was no inquest. And, of course, she got away with it, but hardly a night had passed since then when Jón hadn’t revisited her in her dreams. She had committed murder and got away with it, but discovered that she couldn’t live with the fact.
So perhaps it was a fitting punishment, she thought, that her life should end in this cruel manner.
Hulda tried not to panic, though the earth was blocking her airways now, making her choke. She waited for
