Someone to Watch Over Me (26 page)

As Thóra considered these points, she couldn’t avoid the most difficult question, the one really plaguing her: when all was said and done, was she sure Jakob wasn’t guilty? Perhaps he was more cunning than she gave him credit for, and had had the sense to keep all the apartment doors open so the fire could spread freely. Unlikely though it seemed, it wasn’t out of the question that Jakob had more organizational ability than they credited him with. His innocent appearance might be colouring her view of him, and it was conceivable that there was something in what Glódís and Ari had said about Jakob’s violent tendencies. Perhaps it would help if she could see footage of a typical day at the home – if the filmmaker had such a thing and were willing to share it with her. She really had no firm grasp on what it had really been like there. She wasn’t expecting to see someone scurrying around trying out the door mechanisms, or climbing a stepladder to inspect the sprinkler system, but maybe she would get a better feeling for the conditions that might have set the fateful sequence of events in motion. She didn’t have any further evidence to suggest Jakob’s innocence; for the moment, it looked as though she was relying on lots of small things combining to become greater than the sum of their parts
.

She recalled Jakob’s description of the angel with the suitcase and sighed heavily. She had no idea what he’d meant, but right now the ‘angel’ was just as likely to have started the fire as anyone else.

Thóra logged off the Internet in order to avoid the temptation to sit there reading the day’s news. She needed to get to work, and besides, the news was always rather depressing. Foreign news had always been more exciting than domestic news, but after the bank crash, all that had been reversed. Icelandic drama – yes please! The more she read and heard in passing from better-informed colleagues, the more appalled she was by how events had panned out before the crash. In some ways, Thóra envied her parents, who must surely be the only ones who felt that this was all some sort of misunderstanding. Still, they were victims of the criminal masses and had lost more than most people Thóra knew, although everyone had been affected in some way. She missed the time when everything had been fine; when the nation had celebrated its handball team’s medal in the Olympic Games and the Icelanders’ successes in foreign markets had seemed unstoppable. Now that was all so unreal. She resolved to stop reading about the crash in the mornings; it was unhealthy for anyone to start the day on such a depressing note. It was bad enough having to look at Bella.

‘The coffeemaker’s broken.’ The secretary leaned against the doorframe. It looked as if she had an entire pack of gum in her mouth. ‘It just stopped working.’

‘Broken? Did it stop working and then break, or did it break first then stop working?’ Thóra didn’t know why she was even asking; she had heard something breaking out in the corridor but hadn’t dared to go and see what was happening, since it was followed by Bella’s colourful curses, which still echoed in her ears.

‘It stopped working because it’s broken.’ Bella’s face displayed no flicker of amusement. ‘You’ve got to buy a new one, right now in fact. There’s no way I can spend a day here without coffee.’

‘Isn’t there any instant? We have a kettle somewhere, and I haven’t got time to go and buy a new coffeemaker.’

‘Are you joking? Only wimps drink that stuff. Do I look like a wimp?’

Thóra couldn’t help but answer in the negative. A wimp was the last thing her scowling secretary resembled. She had recently been experimenting with her hair colour and it was currently fluorescent green. This had left her hair extremely dry, which, coupled with its tendency to stick up vertically, made the effect even more alarming. ‘You should have thought of that before you broke the machine. How exactly did you manage it?’ The coffeemaker had stood securely on the table in reception. Maybe Bella had been practising gymnastics and run into it; such a thing wouldn’t be unheard of.

‘I threw my phone at it.’ Bella said this without blinking. ‘The noise it was making was driving me mad.’

Thóra was on the verge of making a maddening noise herself, but she bit her tongue. ‘Then I’m sure you’ll enjoy the whistling of the kettle when you make some instant coffee. I’d put it in the same place – I think it will withstand your attacks better than the coffeemaker.’ Thóra turned to her computer. ‘Now leave me alone, please. I’m busy. Some of us actually do some work here, however alien the concept may seem to you.’ She made a point of not ducking when she turned away; Bella didn’t have anything in her hands that she could throw. Still, it was sensible to stay on your guard, so she watched her secretary out of the corner of her eye as she hovered in the doorway like a thundercloud before turning on her heel and vanishing. Thóra would have to remember to be careful when she left the office later. The filmmaker, Sveinn, had agreed to meet her and although she wouldn’t be able to take any material away, she could watch the video he’d made at the residence. If she noticed anything particularly interesting, he was willing to negotiate with her about making her copies of the material. He had also explained at length that what he had filmed was pretty raw; he hadn’t had a chance to edit it yet and it was unlikely that he ever would, since the project’s financial backing had dried up. That actually suited Thóra fine; if the material was unedited, she was more likely to figure out what she was looking for. She planned to take Matthew with her, since two pairs of eyes were better than one, and he would also be glad to get away from her parents for a bit. Hopefully he would get himself some coffee on the way to the office.

‘Come in, I’ve got everything ready.’ The man who welcomed them was unshaven and hollow-eyed, and was wearing an old tracksuit. Thóra had expected a studio or workshop but should have realized that was unlikely; the address was in a large apartment block in the Breiðholt suburb. At one end of the room all the furniture had been pushed together to make space for a dining table that held three computer screens arranged in a row. There was also a small keyboard and some huge headphones. Next to the table was an office chair on wheels, listing slightly to one side, as if it were as tired as its owner. ‘I work from home, as you can see, so you’ll have to excuse the mess. I would have tidied up if I’d had a bit more warning.’

Thóra briskly reassured him that they weren’t put off by a bit of chaos, before the man could notice Matthew’s look of horror. He couldn’t bear dirt and untidiness, though his cleaning mania had had to relax slightly on moving into a household that included two teenagers and a toddler. Mind you, the mess in Thóra’s house was mainly clothes, shoes, schoolbooks, toys and that kind of thing, strewn haphazardly as if the occupants had had to abandon the house in a great hurry. Sveinn was a different sort of slob altogether. Dirty dishes sat on a low coffee table with knives and forks placed carefully on top, side by side, as if he expected a cleaner to appear, clear everything off the table and ask whether anyone might like a coffee. Beneath the table were KFC buckets. A bath towel lay in a crumpled heap on the back of the sofa, and it also appeared that Sveinn liked to take off his socks in front of the television at the end of the day. A selection of single socks lay in front of the sofa, as if his feet had taken turns pushing a sock off while his hands were otherwise occupied, perhaps working their way through the fried chicken.

Thóra only gave the briefest glance in the direction of the shelving unit holding the television, but couldn’t help noticing the Coke cans standing there as if on display. The rest of the junk on the shelves wasn’t familiar enough for Thóra to distinguish what it was without looking for longer. ‘Pull up some chairs; you’re better off watching it on the computer when the material is this raw, as I said on the phone. The resolution is quite good, so it should be pretty clear.’ Sveinn sat down on the office chair and started setting up the video. ‘What sucks is that I’ll probably never get to use this material.’

‘Was the project killed off by the budget cuts?’ Thóra had settled in next to the table but Matthew was still looking around for a passably clean chair.

‘I’m pretty pissed off about it, though I know money is in short supply these days, and other things are probably taking priority.’ The first frame appeared on screen and Sveinn adjusted the settings to sharpen the image. ‘The project was green-lit in
2003
, and I started working on it a year later. So I was shooting this material for several years – not continuously, of course. But still.’

‘And what was the purpose of the film?’ Thóra watched the man’s tweaking and twiddling without any idea what he was doing.

‘
2003
was the Year of the Disabled Person and this project was the initiative of the Ministry of Welfare; it was supposed to have been a documentary about the situation of the dis-abled today, for those who knew nothing about them as well as those who already had an interest. Obviously I was pretty ignorant about the subject when I started, but I’ve become an expert now. In a hundred years’ time they will be treated completely differently. There’s some incredible stuff in here, but it’s not like I came up with any magic solutions myself.’ When Sveinn was finally happy with the settings he opened the media player. ‘When it burned down, both television stations sought me out and I was offered a lot of money for clips of the place in action.’

‘And did you let them use them?’ Thóra didn’t remember seeing any video clips in the news reports of the fire.

‘No, I didn’t get permission. It’s all owned by the ministry and they prohibited its release. Of course the police were given a copy – without my being paid for it, naturally. It’s fucking bullshit, because I could have used the money. It’s not a very profitable business, let me tell you.’

Thóra muttered vague agreement. ‘You said you saw a lot of strange things while filming the documentary – was any of this at the home that burned down?’

Sveinn turned to her. ‘Well, I don’t remember exactly. I got my material from a variety of places, since the documentary was supposed to give an overview of the situation, and just one centre would never have been enough. It definitely wasn’t the weirdest place I saw, even though the residents’ circumstances were affecting. There are so many levels of disability, and the people at this place were among the most severely afflicted. Most of the people I met were just like you and me; completely capable of getting by in normal society, given the right tools.’ He had moved the cursor into place to start the video, but the mouse appeared to be sticky, since he was holding the button down for a long time. ‘Mental disability is so different from physical that I feel the two groups have little in common. It’s one of the things I think will change over time; the boundaries between them will become clearer.’

Thóra was beginning to think he’d never start the film, but she didn’t want to press him. ‘So you didn’t notice anything unusual there, compared to what you saw elsewhere?’

‘Well, it was new, of course, and meant to be a kind of flagship, despite the way things turned out. Nothing was spared in the design of the centre, but as I understood it the finances ran out and construction standards slipped. I felt as if the residents hadn’t quite come to terms with being moved there and the staff hadn’t settled in either. There was an almost amateurish feeling about the place, compared to the older units I visited.’

‘Could you elaborate?’

‘Oh, I just felt the staff were too young and sometimes kind of clumsy in the way they dealt with the residents.’ Sveinn saw from Thóra’s expression that she’d read more into his words than he’d intended and hurriedly added: ‘Not that they bullied them or anything. They simply hadn’t had time to learn how to deal with them. For example, I saw staff members standing right next to residents and discussing them as if they weren’t there, which is extremely unprofessional.’ He started the film, slightly embarrassed about it, or so it seemed. ‘That might be in one of the clips, actually.’

The quality of the image that appeared on the three screens could have been better, though the cables on the floor in the opening shot suggested that it had been properly lit and sound-recorded. ‘I’ll fast-forward over the parts that aren’t so important. Let me know if I should slow down or rewind.’ They watched closely and Thóra pointed out Glódís to Matthew when she appeared. The director stood with crossed arms and watched from a distance as one of her staff attended to a young woman who sat in a chair, seemingly ignoring the transparent ball in her lap. The care assistant pressed one of the young woman’s hands to her lips and placed the other one on the ball. ‘Ball.’ The woman squeezed the girl’s hand, forcing her to tighten her grip on the ball. She then loosened her grip and folded her own fingers, then got the girl to feel them before moving the girl’s fingers into the same position. ‘Sign language?’ asked Matthew.

Sveinn nodded. ‘The girl was blind and deaf and had some sort of developmental disability to boot. The woman sitting with her is an occupational therapist or developmental therapist or something, but I can’t remember her or the girl’s names.’

‘Sigríður Herdís Logadóttir.’ Thóra had pretty much memorised the names of everyone at the centre and Sigríður Herdís had been the only deaf-blind one. She watched the girl handle the ball and various other things as the therapist handed them to her. Every time the woman handed her something new they repeated the exercise: one hand on the object, the other on the woman’s lips while she told her what the object was called; then they practised making the sign with their hands. From time to time the girl realized what she was holding and was the first to make the sign, at which she received cheerful praise from her therapist. Glódís stood there motionless the whole time, watching. ‘Is this the first video that you shot?’

‘Yes, they run in sequence. Why do you ask?’

‘I was wondering about the centre’s director. She was obviously there to ensure that everything proceeded properly at the start, but surely she couldn’t have followed everyone’s treatment, all the time?’