Someone to Watch Over Me (25 page)

No one seemed to have known about her or to have expected her to call. She actually spent a large part of each conversation rattling off the same spiel about the reason for her call, and convincing people that her aim wasn’t to free a guilty man but an innocent one, but she’d expected that. Few parents would be overjoyed to hear from the lawyer of a man believed to have killed their son or daughter, and Thóra was actually surprised she’d been able to hold a conversation with relatives who were still grieving. Perhaps it was because Jakob had been acquitted of criminal charges, even though this was because he was unfit for trial.

Thóra had her work cut out digging up the right names of the victims’ parents, because it transpired few of them had been questioned by the police or called as witnesses in court. But with the help of the obituaries she eventually managed to make a list of the requisite names. However, no obituaries appeared to have been written about Natan Úlfheiðarson, and of the three Úlfheiðars in the phone directory, only two were old enough for him to have been their son. In the end, Thóra found his mother by Googling the boy’s name. Her search brought up a blog to which Natan’s aunt had uploaded photos of a family reunion, and in one of them Natan, his mother, and his maternal uncle were named in the caption. Thóra spent some time looking closely at the young man in the photo, as well as at his mother. She couldn’t escape the thought that perhaps this was a picture of the man who had had sex with Lísa, although in the photo he looked as innocent as could be. He and his mother sat at a cloth-covered table with white coffee cups and matching plates in front of them. Natan’s mother, Úlfheiður, appeared slightly older than Thóra, and if the photo was anything to go by, she was quite a solemn person. Her brother didn’t seem any livelier; neither of them looked like the life and soul of the party, and the empty chairs on either side of them seemed to confirm this. Perhaps the entire family was cast from the same mould.

Natan was more difficult to work out than his mother and uncle. The helmet on his head made him look a bit odd, even before you got to the huge grin that stretched from ear to ear – in marked contrast to his tablemates – or noticed that he only had one eye open. Thóra’s understanding of epilepsy was limited, but the helmet was probably meant to protect his head if he suffered a seizure. The young man’s expression suggested that he was also developmentally impaired, either as part and parcel of his epilepsy or yet another burden that he’d been born with. Of course it was also possible that the photographer had told a joke the boy found hilarious, then had clicked the shutter at an unfortunate moment. Natan’s jolliness was incongruous, anyway, against the sadness on his mother’s and uncle’s faces.

Finally Thóra had drawn up a list containing the phone numbers and addresses of the relatives of the four residents who’d died in addition to Tryggvi. In one case it appeared that the parents were divorced, since the mother and father of Sigríður Herdís Logadóttir lived in separate locations.

The overwhelming feeling she experienced once she’d called everyone on the list was fatigue. Fatigue and sadness, though she wasn’t sure why since none of the parents had complained about either their lot or that of their child, and they all seemed to be bearing up remarkably well. Their stories of painful struggles with the system as they sought decent housing for their child were without exception told with a complete lack of self-pity, and Thóra wondered whether rejection and obstacles strengthened people and helped them to deal with things more stoically. Úlfheiður, Natan’s mother, was the only one who’d sounded rather cold. The photograph did indeed appear to have captured her character rather well. She didn’t seem bothered that the wrong man might have been held responsible for her son’s death, leaving the guilty party still on the loose. She described her son’s illness to Thóra as if reading the text off a sheet of paper, betraying no emotion, but seemed happy to speak at length about him. At first Natan had appeared normal, but before he’d even left the maternity ward he had started having seizures and had remained behind in hospital when she went home. The nerve cells in his brain didn’t work as they should have; they were overactive, according to his mother, and he was among those unlucky epileptics for whom medication wasn’t very effective. He then underwent an operation, but it was unsuccessful, leaving him with the possibility of suffering a seizure at any time. He lost the sight in one eye when he was eight, after hitting his face on the edge of a table during a fit.

By this point in her story the woman sounded tired of going over it all again. She began to talk faster, telling Thóra how each fit had further damaged Natan’s brain, and by the last one he’d been in a very bad way. Since Úlfheiður was a single parent and worked day and night to make ends meet, she couldn’t afford to have him at home any longer, especially as the economy declined. He was subsequently moved to a facility for seriously disabled children, coming home only for occasional overnight stays, as well as two weeks in the summer. He’d lived there for around fifteen years, at which point he’d passed the age limit for that home, had moved to the new residence and died. Although Úlfheiður’s account seemed callous, Thóra doubted that she’d always been like that; ori-ginally she must surely have been besotted with her child, like other mothers were. Obviously her circumstances had forced her to let go of her son and along the way her soul must have got damaged. Unless she was just naturally cold-hearted.

Úlfheiður had nothing much to say about the centre; she had rarely visited because she had no car and there were no buses – the area was a ghost town. She had met few people on the rare times that she’d gone, and actually only remembered one woman, who she described as stuck-up. The woman had given her a dirty look when in the course of conversation it came up that Úlfheiður was visiting the place for the first time, two months after it had opened. Úlfheiður snorted as she said this and for the first time Thóra detected a hint of emotion in her voice – she had been hurt by the other mother’s reaction.
Of course she was always hanging around, even though her son didn’t even know she was there
, she told Thóra
. At least Natan was aware of me and wanted me to be there.
Thóra had no interest in hearing more about the friction between her and Fanndís, and steered the conversation to Jakob, though she didn’t find out much; Úlfheiður barely remembered him. She wasn’t necessarily convinced that he’d started the fire; that could certainly have been someone else. But she couldn’t be persuaded to name any names and Thóra got the feeling that she’d only really said it to please her.

At the end of the conversation Thóra asked cautiously about Natan’s sex drive, but the woman said she knew nothing about that; she’d simply never thought about it. Before they said their goodbyes, Úlfheiður told her that she tried to think as little as possible about the fire; she’d long since come to terms with her son’s death, as she’d known since he was born that he wouldn’t live long. As Úlfheiður said this, Thóra stared at the image of Natan on the screen, smiling from ear to ear at the family reunion, happy with his life, unaware that some people would see it as simply a long, drawn-out fight to the death.

Although the conversation with Úlfheiður had been difficult, it was a walk in the park compared to the talk she had with Lísa Finnbjörnsdóttir’s parents. Her mother had answered the phone but could barely be persuaded to say anything, except that they’d chosen to let the crime against their daughter be forgotten so that her name wouldn’t be dragged posthumously through the justice system and her case sensationalised in the papers. She agreed when asked whether Einvarður had assisted them in putting a stop to further investigation of the case, but flatly denied that he or anyone else had influenced their decision. She’d then put her husband on the phone and made him finish the conversation, which mainly consisted of him trying to persuade Thóra not to name Lísa directly in the petition to reopen Jakob’s case. There was no way Thóra could agree to this and a long time was spent bickering over the man’s further attempts to persuade her to change her mind, which she deftly deflected. At the same time, she tried to coax out of him the names of those who could have raped his daughter. If he was telling the truth – and he appeared to be sincere in all of his answers – then he had thought about this a great deal, but Thóra could get nothing out of him. The call concluded with him begging Thóra one last time to allow his daughter to rest in peace. He sounded as if he were on his knees.

Other than this she didn’t get much out of the phone calls, though the investigation continued to make slow progress. For example, after speaking to the girl’s parents, Thóra was fairly certain that Sigríður Herdís Logadóttir had had nothing to do with the fire; she had been both blind and deaf, as well as seriously mentally disabled. Lísa Finnbjörnsdóttir was also ruled out, which left only two other residents, Natan and Tryggvi, neither of whom seemed likely either. Nothing in the interviews with the parents suggested they had any information that might prove useful; the only new thing that came to light was that Tryggvi’s unconventional therapy had been disruptive, since it seemed to have caused him unnecessary suffering. However, none of them wanted to go into this in any detail, as it hardly mattered given what happened later. Sigríður Herdís’s mother said that she’d actually complained to the director that Tryggvi’s wailing was causing her distress during her visits to her daughter. She believed her complaint had forced them to switch his therapy to a more conventional kind, because she hadn’t noticed any noises on subsequent visits. Thóra asked her when she’d lodged this complaint, and she replied that it had been about three weeks before the fire. Neither she nor the other parents knew the name of Tryggvi’s therapist, although Thóra assumed that he was on Glódís’s list. She concluded her conversation with the woman and looked up Glódís’s e-mail address, then emailed her to ask. The man must have known Tryggvi quite well and could hopefully tell her what he’d been capable of. It was getting late, so she didn’t expect to receive a response from the director that day.

After speaking to the parents of all of the residents, she had nothing to indicate that the fire was connected to their offspring at all. Ultimately, it seemed more likely to have involved a member of staff, or someone else otherwise linked to the unit. There was no logical reason for any of the young people living there to have wanted to kill the others, and the more Thóra thought about it, the harder she found it to come up with any motive for such an evil act. If the aim was to hide Lísa Finnbjörnsdóttir’s pregnancy, nobody could argue that this was the best way to do it; there had been no obvious attempt to make the fire look like an accident, and it would have been easier to suffocate Lísa, since she was confined to her bed. In fact, it was the very manner of her death that had precipitated an autopsy, so if somebody had killed her in order to hide her condition their strategy had been extraordinarily stupid. Perhaps the plan hadn’t been to hide the deed, but rather to detract attention from Lísa by making all the residents and the night watchmen suffer the same fate as her. Still, what Thóra found most troubling was the fact that no one seemed to have known that the girl was pregnant, which in turn made it difficult to state in the petition that the fire might have been intended to hide this fact. Of course somebody may have known about the pregnancy, but Thóra had no way of proving it. According to Glódís the girl’s periods had been irregular, to say the least, and her pregnancy was so recent when she died that she had no noticeable bump. So perhaps the question was how the perpetrator could have known about the pregnancy at all.

No matter what the reason for the fire, it was clear from the number of lives lost that it had been reckless and illogical. Potentially, then, the act of someone of limited intelligence, someone who didn’t comprehend the consequences of their actions – unless the perpetrator had deliberately made it look that way. But why, and who could it be? There weren’t many possibilities, but still Thóra’s mind spun in endless circles.

Who had sent her the text messages, and why? Who had known that the fire alarm system was offline? Was it a coincidence that the same lawyer had defended both Jakob and his creepy friend Jósteinn? Did the words
look at me
, which Jakob had repeated to her, have any significance? Had the residents been unhappy with their living conditions, unbeknownst to their parents, and was that significant? Why had only one staff member been on duty, not two – and who had been aware of this?

But the complexity of the case was not Thóra’s only problem. There were very few precedents for a petition to reopen a case, so other than the laws themselves, she didn’t have much to go on; and although these were clear, they weren’t particularly detailed. The case had to satisfy at least one of four criteria for the Supreme Court to approve the petition: new evidence that had come to light; an accusation that the police, the prosecution, the judge or other parties had prejudiced the case, especially through falsified evidence or false testimony; reasonable suspicion that the evidence presented in the case had been wrongly evaluated; or the discovery of substantial flaws in the prosecution of the case in court. Since any retrial required the prior authorization of the Supreme Court, Thóra didn’t need to present a perfect defence immediately, but merely demonstrate unequivocally that one or more of these prerequisites was met. If the petition were approved, the case would move to the next level.

She still hadn’t come across anything to suggest any element of wrongdoing on the part of the police, prosecutor or judge, though there was the question of whether Lísa’s pregnancy should have been made clearer. As the autopsy report was part of the case files she couldn’t present the pregnancy as new evidence, even though this detail hadn’t come up in court. The third criterion, however – insufficient evaluation of the evidence – could be enough to reopen the case; she was thinking not only of Lísa’s condition, but also of Jakob’s description of the angel with a suitcase, which in her opinion had not been dealt with appropriately in court. If it was true that he had tried to inform the police of this detail, then his testimony had not been recorded; at least, Thóra couldn’t find it in the reports or other files. She was also interested in the fourth requirement, the one concerning flaws in the prosecution of the case, and Ari’s performance in this regard. Although it would be tough to prove that he hadn’t acted in his client’s best interests, Thóra was convinced of it. The best thing would be if she were to unearth new evidence. Then they could run the case back through the system, with a fairer outcome.