I Remember You

Chapter 14

On his way to the police station to meet Dagný, Freyr thought about coincidences. His shift had passed unbearably slowly, as if he were wading through treacle. Incredibly, Freyr had somehow managed to do his job without his colleagues and patients noticing how out of sorts he was. Still, he couldn’t refrain from virtually running out of the hospital when his shift ended. When he got into his car he stuck the key in the ignition with a trembling hand. Dagný had promised to look into the disappearance of the boy in Ísafjörður nearly sixty years ago, and while Freyr was occupied with work he hadn’t been thinking about how this tragedy could be linked to his son’s case – it had taken all his energy to concentrate on the down-to-earth problems of his patients. Now that he’d had time to consider this question on the way to the police station, his feeble hope that there might finally be an explanation for Benni’s disappearance had dwindled.

The two disappearances were strikingly similar, yet so far apart in time that there couldn’t possibly be a connection between them. And yet. He didn’t like coincidences, which more often than not turned out not to have any explanation at the end of the day. But what was a coincidence? Wasn’t it when similar things occurred within a short interval? Could sixty years be considered a short interval? If two meteorites landed in the same place on Earth several centuries, or even millennia, apart, you’d call it a coincidence. But what about events in people’s lives? Wasn’t the occurrence of similar events with a break of several decades – spanning more than two generations, even – too long a time to merit the term coincidental? He wasn’t sure. Children didn’t often disappear without a trace, though it was unfortunately more common than rocks crashing down through the Earth’s atmosphere. The less frequently something happened, the longer the amount of time there could be between events for them still to be coincidental. So was this coincidence, then? Freyr couldn’t decide, and his mental turmoil was accompanied by a feeling of hopelessness, making it impossible for him to focus on anything.

He knew it would help to talk through this out loud, make sentences out of his ideas and see how they sounded. Another person’s questions would also help him to get his thoughts on track, yet he still said nothing and couldn’t bring himself to air them as he sat next to Dagný at the police station. Instead he tightened his grip on the edge of the sturdily built table in front of them, doubtless chosen for its durability, and flipped with his other hand through the old police reports he was forcing himself to concentrate on. Judging by the serious look on Dagný’s face, there was no lack of focus on her part. Yet she must have been tired, with a long working day behind her. If she weren’t being so obliging to him, she would have gone home long ago. ‘I don’t think we’ll find out anything more about this.’ Dagný placed the final piece of yellowed paper on the stack in front of her. The old-fashioned black lettering on the report made Freyr think vaguely of the sound of striking typewriter keys. ‘Of course the boy might be mentioned in other reports, since his disappearance attracted some attention, but we can hardly go through all the reports made by the Ísafjörður police in search of it.’ She smiled sadly at him. ‘I enquired about this through a colleague of mine who’s retiring from the department. He remembered it from his childhood and was absolutely certain that the boy was never found. So we haven’t missed anything.’

‘No.’ Freyr re-read the final report that seemed to have been made about the case. It was dated to the feast of St Þorlákur, 23 December 1953, almost two months after the boy disappeared. A man thought he’d seen a shabbily dressed boy behaving oddly on the beach near the harbour late in the evening, in the blistering cold, and the description fitted Bernódus perfectly. The boy had stood there still as stone, staring down as icy seawater washed over his feet. When the man called to him and said that he was going to come down onto the beach himself, the boy had disappeared, making the man think he had probably fallen into the sea. His search of the beach proved fruitless, so he notified the police. The investigation was neither long nor detailed, since there was little that could be done about the situation. The child wasn’t found and there were no signs of his whereabouts that evening, nor the next day when the search was renewed. The man was asked to describe the child in more detail, and it seems that a clear-sighted police officer had realized that the boy’s tattered clothing fitted with the description of the boy who’d gone missing in the autumn. ‘The investigation of the boy’s disappearance seems to have come to a swift end. At least it was far more detailed in Benni’s case. I hope this is a sign of changed times and doesn’t reflect the difference in the two boys’ social statuses.’ Bernódus had been the son of a single father with a drinking problem and mental health issues, while Benni had had two reliable and concerned parents, who would never have settled for anything less than a full investigation.

‘I suppose it’s a bit of both. The police’s working methods have changed, as they have in other professions.’ Dagný took the papers they’d gathered and stood up to go and photocopy them. ‘If you and your wife hadn’t involved yourselves in the search for your son, it’s entirely possible that it would have been called off earlier. The attention would probably have been directed more towards you if you’d seemed unnaturally interested in the details of the case, but in any case, the behaviour of family members always has an influence, one way or another.’ She arranged the papers on the desk into a tidy pile. ‘In fact, I looked over the files in your son’s case in the light of his possible connection to these other cases, and I must say that the police considered you extremely suspicious for a time.’ She studied him, obviously wondering how he’d react.

Freyr didn’t try to evade it, since there was no reason to. ‘I already told you that; I’m not trying to avoid discussing it. It was awful for a while; I was almost out of my mind with worry about my son, and on top of that I was afraid I’d be wrongfully arrested. Amazingly, though, I actually didn’t give a damn about myself; it simply didn’t occur to me to care, we were so busy grieving at Benni’s disappearance.’

‘I understand that.’ Dagný was still staring at him. ‘Did you ever find out what happened to the insulin? The stuff that was missing from the package?’

Freyr relaxed his grip on the edge of the table and rubbed his temple. ‘No, it was never found. The drugs never left my sight and I’m well aware that it made the police suspicious at the time, but everything I said was true, and it was all corroborated. I hope there’s nothing to the contrary in the reports, but I’m absolutely certain that the police believed me. I didn’t take the insulin out of the box.’ If he had a hundred krónur for every time he’d wondered about this, he would be a rich man, though unfortunately he had never come to any satisfactory conclusion. He was convinced he’d either been given an incomplete prescription at the hospital pharmacy, and that there’d never been more than one syringe pen in the box, or that the missing needles had fallen out of the box without his noticing it. He’d gone to the hospital to pick up the drug, been given it in a box inside a little bag, and hadn’t given it another thought. He’d been in a hurry to get back to his office, where he’d stayed for around two hours before realizing he had to get home.

Even today his heart ached at the thought; what had he been thinking, not going straight home? Of course what awaited him at his office had appealed to him more than the idea of helping Sara and her sister bake and prepare for the birthday party. But still. He had never regretted anything more, though there was nothing he could do about it now; the best he could do was push the thought of it firmly aside.

‘It was a terrible day in every way,’ he said. On his way home he’d been delayed even more; he’d been in an accident with a trailer and become even more stressed about the frosty welcome he’d face from Sara. He hadn’t noticed the trailer attached to the back of a car he needed to overtake at the exit from Ártúnsbrekka. His car wasn’t badly damaged, though the trailer had been dented and its coupling rather bent out of shape. In fact the only time that he hadn’t had the paper bag containing the prescription within reach was when he’d got out of his car at the petrol station to speak to the angry driver and fill out insurance papers while the man examined the damage to his trailer. The bag had been lying on the front passenger seat, and he had thought nothing of it. ‘I think either the drug was missing from the box from the start, or else it was stolen at the petrol station, though that’s less likely. Surely I would have noticed if someone had sneaked into the car while I was standing next to it.’

‘Nothing showed up on the petrol station’s security cameras?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. We parked all the way at the end of the forecourt, since there wasn’t enough space for two cars, and only the car with the trailer appears in the video. But as I said, I doubt very much that anyone could have got into the car without my knowledge, and even if they did manage to, they would probably have taken the bag and not bothered to get the syringes out of their box.’

‘Yes. Probably.’ Dagný’s expression was unreadable. ‘It’s not really relevant now. I was just curious. It struck me when I read it.’

As Freyr watched Dagný leave the room he tried to imagine what sort of person could have treated the disappearance of his own child with the sort of disregard that Bernódus’s father had shown. He couldn’t understand it in the light of his own experience. The man hadn’t even bothered to report his son missing; that task had fallen to the school nurse. She’d complained to the boy’s teacher when he didn’t turn up for a medical check-up and was told that the boy hadn’t shown up for school that morning. The nurse then called his home and was informed by the father that he wasn’t in his bed. It was then that he reported it to the police, who went straight to his house. In the first statement taken from the father, he said that he hadn’t even noticed whether his son had come home from school the previous day: he’d fallen asleep over a bottle he’d managed to get his hands on and when he woke up he assumed the boy had gone to school. He’d only realized that something was wrong when the school called to ask whether his son was ill. He’d looked into the boy’s room and noticed that the bed hadn’t been slept in that night.

Although the officer who’d written the report had clearly put some effort into wording it carefully, without passing judgement, it was obvious how much the negligent father disgusted him. It would have been impossible to hide it completely, except by leaving out anything said by the man, who neither had any idea where his son might be nor appeared to be in any particular rush to find out. In the father’s final statement, taken about two weeks after the disappearance, the police force’s patience with him appeared to have worn thin. Among other things, he had said it might be for the best if his son wasn’t found, as then he wouldn’t have to pay for his funeral. Freyr was so flabbergasted that he had to read this again to be sure he hadn’t misread it. He would personally give anything in the world to have the bones of his son returned and lay them to rest in consecrated ground.

Of course the man had been ill. As a psychiatrist, Freyr was interested in learning about his history, but he doubted any data on him was available. There was nothing in the reports about what had become of Bernódus’s mother, or whether she’d been similarly unfortunate. Freyr could probably find out by asking some of the town’s older residents, and he immediately thought of the old teacher who was his patient. However, the father and his son had only lived a short time in Ísafjörður and there was nothing in the files about where they’d moved from. Hopefully the old man would have a better recollection of the boy’s story, which must have been a topic of conversation at the school after his disappearance. Freyr hadn’t been interested in discussing this with him when he’d visited him that morning, but he would tomorrow.

The noise of the photocopier, which had carried into the meeting room, stopped. ‘Would you like a coffee, maybe?’ Dagný appeared in the doorway with two sets of paper, the yellowed originals and the bright white copies. ‘I don’t need to brew it or anything. We’ve got a coffee machine.’

Freyr shook his head. ‘No thanks.’ For the moment he wanted nothing. The memory of how Sara had wasted away after Benni’s disappearance suddenly resurfaced. She’d only eaten when he ordered her to, and their sex life had evaporated completely. Her apathy was total. He felt his heart contract when he compared in his mind the old, curvy Sara, full of happiness and life, with the husk that remained, living only out of habit. Although his fears that he could end up on the same path might be unfounded, he had to remain conscious of the danger. Sara hadn’t realized where she was heading when she declined her first cup of coffee.

Freyr stretched. ‘Actually yes, I will.’ He forced himself to watch Dagný turn in the doorway to go and fetch the coffee, and admired her slim hips and the shapely backside her loose-fitting police uniform didn’t quite conceal. With that he felt a bit better, and relaxed even more when he took a sip of the strong coffee.

‘It’s not clear from this whether Halla had any ties to Bernódus other than being his classmate at the primary school.’ Dagný sat back down next to him and started putting the old reports back into folders. ‘Or if she did, it escaped the notice of the officers investigating the case.’ She shook her head as if to jolt her brain into proper working order. ‘Something caused Halla to become obsessed with the boy.’ Dagný ran a hand through her cropped hair. ‘But no matter how I try, I can’t think of any sort of connection that might form between kids of that age that would last for decades after one of them had died. Even if they’d been best friends, which I find rather unlikely. According to the school’s information, Bernódus was unsociable and mostly kept to himself. I’m sure someone would have mentioned if he’d had a close friend.’

Freyr agreed. He also knew that children like Bernódus, who had no support from relatives and were emotionally neglected, were usually social outcasts. They hardly ever had a ‘best friend’ and were lucky not to be constantly bullied. ‘Of course it’s possible that his disappearance traumatized her at the time and that the shock resurfaced when her mental health started to deteriorate. Children are sensitive at that age, and serious events in their formative years can leave permanent scars.’ He looked at Dagný. ‘And of course it’s also possible that someone was responsible for Bernódus’s death and that she witnessed it or knew about it.’

‘No, that can’t be it.’ Dagný frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t she just have said something?’

‘There could be many reasons. Maybe she was afraid of being next; maybe she didn’t realize what she’d seen until afterwards, when it was too late; maybe she felt ashamed that she hadn’t done anything to help Bernódus, or wanted to protect those who played a part in his disappearance.’

‘Like who?’ Dagný’s initial doubts about Freyr’s theory seemed to be dwindling.

‘A close relative, for example. Apparently Halla’s father was also a drunk. Perhaps he had a propensity for violence too.’

Dagný nodded thoughtfully. Her hair, sticking up where she had tousled it, echoed the movement a moment later, as if it had needed an instant to collect itself. ‘That would explain a few things, I suppose. I wouldn’t want to keep that kind of thing a secret all my life.’ She rocked in her chair and crossed her legs. ‘Do you think she might have suppressed her memory of it only to have it spring up in her head later and drive her to kill herself?’

Freyr smiled. ‘It’s extremely rare for that kind of thing to occur; in fact it’s fiercely debated in the literature whether it happens at all, even though repressed memories are often discussed in the media – in connection with sex crimes against children, for example. It’s never been proven either way. I’d be really surprised if that were the case here.’

‘Have you given any more thought to how this could be connected to your son?’ Dagný looked him in the eye. She seemed slightly nervous and as a result maintained the eye contact a little too long. Freyr felt a bit like he was taking an oral exam. ‘I mean, have you come across anything that might explain Halla’s interest in him? He seemed to be on her mind as much as Bernódus.’

‘I didn’t think of anything, and I don’t believe she had anything at all to do with me, my son or my family.’ Freyr pulled the photocopied reports towards him. ‘Her relationship with Benni was only in her mind and it’s anyone’s guess why she imagined it.’

‘It’s still a bit weird. Don’t you think?’ Dagný continued to hold his gaze. ‘Your son disappears, you move here, and then an old case turns up in which a boy disappears in a similar manner.’

It would have been simplest to deny it, write it off as an incredible coincidence and then steer the conversation onto something else. But instead he decided to take the opportunity, since Dagný had brought it up, to say what was on his mind. ‘I think it’s more than strange. It’s crazy, in fact. If I weren’t so freaked out by it I might be able to gather my thoughts and work it out. It’s just so bizarre that I don’t really know where to begin.’ Freyr took a sip of his coffee, which was now lukewarm, and continued: ‘My son and Bernódus don’t seem to have anything in common except for their disappearances. There are decades between them. They don’t appear to be related; I checked on it in the Book of Icelanders just now. It’s been too long since Bernódus disappeared for the same person to have taken them away. Of course everything points to these cases being entirely unrelated, but I still can’t bring myself to accept it. Especially given that the names Benni and Bernódus both appear in the letter that Halla left behind, and in the text messages filling her phone. Those two things can’t be coincidence in my opinion, though I can’t stretch my mind enough to connect them.’

Dagný gave him a faint smile. ‘I couldn’t agree with you more. Of course I was hoping you would notice something we’d missed in the files, but I’m not really surprised you didn’t. I assure you, we’ve continued to investigate every angle concerning Halla: we’ve spoken to her widower, her children, her former colleagues, but no one knows anything and everyone is equally surprised when we bring up your son, let alone Bernódus.’ She reached for some papers that she’d brought with her to the meeting room but hadn’t touched since putting them down. ‘Both her husband and her daughter say that she had little or no communication with her friends in recent years, so there’s not much to be had from them. But she had been trying to rekindle childhood friendships. Some from that group had moved away, so she spent a lot of time on the phone and her husband complained bitterly of the high phone bill. One of the women lived in Ísafjörður, but she died shortly before all this started with Halla. The widower and his daughter are fairly certain that this woman’s death was what prompted Halla to seek out her old friends – she realized that she didn’t have that long. He also said, after you spoke to him about it, that he’d thought a lot about the religious reawakening she’d experienced and thought that the woman’s death had inspired it as well. Halla had wanted to ensure a place for herself in heaven as death drew nearer.’

‘And how does this all relate to her having sought out old friends?’ Freyr hoped Dagný was just telling him details from the police investigation. The mystery was complicated enough without adding senior citizens from all over the country.

Dagný handed him two of the pages. One was a copy of the school photo that he was now all too familiar with, and the other was a list of the names that had been scribbled in. He went over it. Lárus Helgason, Védís Arngrímsdóttir, Silja Konráðsdóttir, Jón Ævarsson and Steinn Gunnbjörnsson. ‘As you can see, Halla’s old friends are the same as the ones defaced in the photo all those years ago. And as we know, most of them are now dead. After Halla started tracking them down they all passed away, one after another.’

Freyr pushed the list back over to Dagný. The photo remained there in front of him, Bernódus’s pitiful face looking out at him. ‘Did you speak to this Lárus, the one who’s still alive?’

‘Yes and no.’ Dagný folded the paper. ‘He hung up on us when we told him our business, and since he lives in Reykjavík we can’t check whether he would give us a warmer welcome in person. I’d prefer not to get the police down south involved in this for the moment. I’m simply not sure how I could describe the case to them in a way that made sense.’

Freyr looked away from the photo, which was on the verge of hypnotizing him. ‘How did the others die? It’s not entirely unexpected when people are over seventy, but all the same, it’s a pretty high mortality rate in such a short amount of time.’

Dagný cleared her throat. ‘Well, none of them died of health issues – neither long nor short illnesses. Védís bled to death after an accident, Jón died from complications from burns, Silja died of exposure, Steinn was run over, and Halla was a clear case of suicide.’

Freyr let Dagný’s words sink in as he tried to draw conclusions about the group based on these sad statistics. He wished he had a piece of paper and a pen to make some notes. ‘Has anyone investigated these incidents? Found out whether there’s reason to assume they’re connected?’

‘No, they haven’t. You need a special warrant to ask for that kind of information, and since it involves a number of different police authorities, it would take ages. These people lived all over the country. I also don’t think we can really pursue it. It would be difficult to explain why we need this information; nothing suggests that any crimes were committed and we’ve got no reason to be asking questions.’ Dagný stopped for a second and took a deep breath. ‘Plus there’s one more thing.’

This didn’t sound good, but he asked nonetheless. ‘What?’

‘The first person from the group to die, Védís…’ Dagný didn’t finish her sentence, instead handing Freyr yet another sheet of paper that appeared to be the preface to an autopsy report. ‘She lived here in Ísafjörður, so I was able to find out how she died. As you can see, she died three years ago in an accident in her garden.’ Dagný licked her dry lips. ‘She fell onto some open garden shears, with the result that the major artery in her neck was cut, along with her oesophagus. Don’t ask me how it’s possible to be so unlucky, but it’s all described in the report and no one disputed that it was an accident.’

‘Stranger things have happened.’ The coffee was too cold for Freyr to risk another sip, but he took one anyway. ‘Did you know this woman?’

‘Not exactly, but I remember her. She was very unusual; she sometimes held séances at her home. But that’s irrelevant.’ Dagný grimaced slightly. ‘I wanted to draw your attention to something else – the date of the accident.’

Freyr looked for it in the summary. He had to read the date twice to be sure, though he’d seen this same numerical sequence more often than he could count. His mouth dry, he muttered: ‘It’s the day that Benni disappeared.’

‘And there’s this, too.’ Dagný pointed to the line above the date of death. ‘She lived in the same house as you do now. She died in your garden, in other words.’ She looked at him even more intensely. ‘Coincidence?’