The Creak on the Stairs Read online

  Akranes 1989

  As the school week drew to a close and the weekend loomed ahead, Elísabet began to get pains in her stomach. Sometimes they were so bad that she had to go and hide in the toilets. She never told her teacher. She didn’t like him much. He was strict and unwilling to talk about anything except what was in their textbooks, yet Elísabet enjoyed school in spite of this. She liked reading and had already graduated to thicker books than most of the other kids – books with fewer illustrations and more words. Books she could lose herself in, so she didn’t even hear when the teacher spoke to her or the bell rang.

  But what she enjoyed most was the time she spent playing with Sara. Ever since that first day at school they had been best friends. Elísabet had never had a friend before and she looked forward to school every day because it meant seeing Sara.

  Sometimes, if she was lucky, she would be left to her own devices at the weekend. Her mother might or might not be home, but Elísabet would run over to Solla’s house when she was hungry and be given supper and even biscuits if she asked nicely. She would play down on the shore or at the playground with Sara. At other times, she would spend the weekend hiding in her room while the people downstairs drank their disgusting booze. On those occasions she avoided going downstairs. She didn’t like the look of her mother’s friends or the things they got up to. One minute there would be loud quarrels, the next bursts of raucous laughter, and people would end up passing out on the sofa or floor. Anyway, her mother banned her from going downstairs when she had friends round, ordering her to stay in her room.

  One woman, who was often there at weekends, used to come up to see her and would cuddle her and say all kinds of things that Elísabet didn’t quite understand. She didn’t mind, though. Sometimes, when she went downstairs, the guests would pull her over and ask her to sit beside them, and laugh at whatever she said, even though she wasn’t trying to be funny. But when they started smashing things and raising their voices, she didn’t dare venture out of her room. Then she would lurk upstairs until they quietened down and she could be sure they had fallen asleep.

  One night she was woken by the squeaking of her door. When she looked up, she saw an unfamiliar face. It was a man who came and sat on her bed and started stroking the duvet. His breath was sour and his eyes seemed menacingly large as he stared at her in the gloom. When she woke up next morning, her nails were bitten down to the quick and there were streaks of blood on her pillow.

  After that she stopped sleeping in her bed at weekends. Instead, she would drag her duvet and pillow into the cupboard under the sloping roof and sleep in there with the door shut. Although the cupboard smelled musty and she was sure there must be creepy-crawlies inside it, she felt safe; sure that no one could get to her in there.

  Monday, 27 November 2017

  Elma opened the fridge and took out a pot of skyr, then buttered herself a flat cake and topped it with a slice of smoked lamb. She took her snack over to the sofa, turned on the TV and started watching a programme without really taking it in.

  It had been a long day. Despite having worked late the previous night due to the discovery of the body, she had gone into the station early this morning, as had Hörður and Sævar. It was rare for dead bodies to turn up in suspicious circumstances in Iceland, let alone in Akranes, and in most cases it was easy to work out what had happened. Murders were almost invariably committed at home, under the influence of alcohol or drugs, by someone close to the victim, who immediately confessed to the crime. But this was different, and the phones had been ringing incessantly with reporters on the hunt for information.

  The problem was that the police had almost no information to give. They didn’t even know the woman’s name as she’d had no ID on her and didn’t appear to have travelled to the scene by car, since no abandoned vehicle had been discovered in the vicinity. As a result, they were considering the possibility that the body had been dumped there; that someone had tried unsuccessfully to dispose of it in the sea. To lend support to this theory, forensics had discovered traces of blood at the scene. When they’d illuminated the area, the trail had been evident, leading from the gravel road by the new lighthouse and out across the rocks to the shore. The bloodstain-pattern analyst called in to examine the photographs was confident that the woman had been dragged from the car park to the shore where she had been found. For a more precise analysis of the cause of death, they would have to wait for the conclusions of the pathologist, who was due back in the country tomorrow. All in all, they had achieved little today other than to speculate about where the woman had come from and who she might be. No one had rung in to say she had disappeared. Currently, the only such notifications related to teenage girls who hadn’t returned home since the weekend and had been reported missing by their anxious parents.

  Elma put down the empty skyr pot and tucked the throw around herself. Everything had happened so fast: new job, new town, new life. It was at times like this that the longing to ring Davíð was almost unbearable. She yearned to hear his voice, to sense his presence. The evening he had gone was like a distant dream, and she kept having to remind herself that it had really happened – that he had really been capable of doing that to her. She was so preoccupied that she started when the phone rang.

  ‘I hope you weren’t asleep because I’ll be outside your house in a couple of minutes.’ It was Sævar. ‘It looks like we’ve got a name.’

  ‘A phone call came through this evening, reporting the disappearance of Elísabet Hölludóttir, a professional pilot, born in 1983. Apparently the reason we weren’t notified earlier is that her husband thought she was in Canada for work. But when she didn’t come home today, he began to get worried and rang the airline. It turns out she didn’t actually take her flight; in fact she called in sick on Friday morning. No one knows where she’s been since then.’ Sævar slowed down as he reached the roundabout at the edge of town. They were on their way to visit the husband who lived right at the head of Hvalfjörður fjord, about half an hour’s drive east of Akranes.

  ‘It sounds like she had some kind of plan – to leave him, maybe?’ Elma rubbed her hands together and checked that the heater was definitely on. She had dashed out of the house wearing only her cardigan, which wasn’t nearly warm enough.

  ‘Yes, that’s what it sounds like, but you never know.’ Sævar shrugged.

  ‘Could someone else have made the call to say she was sick?’

  ‘Good question,’ Sævar said. ‘We’ll be able to contact her phone provider now we’ve got her name. They should have records of all the calls made to or from her phone. If it turns out she did make the call herself, that naturally raises certain suspicions.’

  ‘An affair that ended badly?’ Elma glanced sideways at him.

  ‘Possibly,’ Sævar replied. ‘Apparently she lived in Akranes as a child, though I doubt that’s relevant.’

  ‘In that case I should recognise her, shouldn’t I? Or, even if I don’t, Hörður definitely should,’ Elma said, remembering how the previous evening her boss had claimed to know all the inhabitants of Akranes by sight.

  ‘Not necessarily. She moved away when she was about nine, according to her husband. He wasn’t sure of the year. She’s a pilot and he’s a lawyer with an insurance firm in Reykjavík. Apart from that, he seemed to know next to nothing about her early life.’ Sævar overtook a car that was crawling along the road at a snail’s pace. ‘But we’ll soon know more.

  ‘Are we sure it’s the same woman?’

  ‘Well, the age and description match. There aren’t many women in their thirties who have recently gone missing in Iceland.’

  They were both silent as they drove past the foot of Mount Akrafjall, then, leaving the Skagi Peninsula behind, turned off east to follow the great fjord inland. It was a long time since Elma had taken the road around Hvalfjörður. Until the tunnel under the mouth of the fjord was opened in 1998, cutting some forty-five kilometres off the ring road, getting from Akranes to Reykjav�
�k used to be a far more time-consuming business. The townspeople had to choose between taking the ferry direct to the capital across the choppy waters of Faxaflói Bay or driving the long, slow loop around the fjord. Hvalfjörður was stunningly picturesque by daylight, but now, on a moonless winter night, the water was black and the mountains no more than dark shadows looming in the distance on either side. For much of the way, the drive was enlivened only by the occasional lights of a farm.

  When they finally reached the head of the fjord, the house turned out to be a white, single-storey building with a flat roof and floor-to-ceiling windows. There wasn’t much of a garden, just a lawn and some low posts that lit up the path to the front door. Unlike the other places they had passed along the way, there was no barn or cowshed to suggest that farming went on there. Instead, the house looked as if it had been designed for the upmarket suburb of Garðabær but then been plonked down in the depths of the Icelandic countryside. They parked in the drive behind a black Lexus SUV.

  Elma rang the doorbell and, while they were waiting, read the small metal plaque on the letterbox, on which four names were engraved: Eiríkur, Elísabet, Fjalar and Ernir.

  The man who came to the door was tall with short fair hair. The buttons of his white shirt were straining a little over his stomach and there were large patches of sweat under his arms. After introducing himself as Eiríkur and shaking them by the hand, he showed them into a sitting room that was as starkly modern as the house itself, with its blond-oak parquet flooring, black-and-white furnishings and several pieces Elma recognised from lifestyle magazines, which had probably cost more than all her furniture put together. Eiríkur invited them to take a seat on some armless black-leather chairs and sat down on the sofa facing them. From his expression, they could tell that he was in a bad way. He seemed to be waiting for them to start things off.

  ‘Nice home you’ve got here,’ Sævar said, looking around.

  ‘Thanks,’ Eiríkur replied distractedly. ‘We got in an interior designer.’ It didn’t sound as if he was particularly happy with the result.

  ‘Is that her?’ Elma pointed to a photo on the sideboard behind them, of a heavily pregnant woman standing with her hands resting on her protruding stomach. She had long, dark, wavy hair, luminous dark eyes and a faint, almost invisible, smile on her lips.

  ‘Yes, that’s Beta. Do you think it was her they found?’ Eiríkur’s voice cracked and he coughed.

  Sævar and Elma exchanged glances. It was hard to tell from the picture whether it was the same woman, as it had obviously been taken several years ago, but her long dark hair looked right.

  ‘We’ll soon find out, with your help,’ Sævar said. ‘It would be good if you could begin by telling us what happened. That’s to say, when you last saw her and if anything unusual happened in the days leading up to her disappearance. I know you’ve already spoken on the phone to Hörður, the head of CID, but it would be great if you could repeat for us what you told him.’

  ‘Of course. As I explained to him, Beta was due home this morning. She’s usually back by seven or eight, but she hadn’t arrived by the time I said goodbye to the boys. That wasn’t particularly unusual, though, as flights are often delayed. I’m used to her working irregular hours. You can never rely on her being back by a certain time – that’s just the way it is. I tried to call her during the day but her phone was switched off, which isn’t out of the ordinary either as she generally sleeps until we get back. So I didn’t think anything of it until I got home at around six and discovered that she wasn’t here. That’s when I started to get worried.’ He leant forward on the sofa, his elbows on his knees, and Elma caught a powerful whiff of sweat under his aftershave. ‘I rang the airline at suppertime, and that’s when they told me she’d never turned up to work. That she’d called in sick.’

  ‘Could she have been taken ill? Did you see her leave for work?’

  ‘No, she didn’t leave until after lunch, so we said goodbye to her on Friday morning. She hadn’t been ill and looked fine when I left to go to the office. You don’t think there’s any chance someone attacked her here, at our house?’ Eiríkur asked, tensing up for a moment, then sagging again as he realised: ‘No, that’s impossible. Her car’s gone and so’s the suitcase she always takes with her on flights.’

  ‘Did you notice anything unusual when you got home on Friday?’

  ‘No,’ said Eiríkur. ‘The boys were home. Fjalar has a key. On the days when Beta’s working, they’re often alone here for half an hour or so until I get back. The only thing that was different was that Beta wasn’t here when I came home today.’

  ‘Did she usually drive to work in her own car?’ Elma asked.

  ‘Yes, it’s a grey Ford Focus.’

  ‘And I’m assuming she had a phone?’

  ‘Yes, of course, she always has it on her. That’s why I was so worried when I got home and she wasn’t here. She always gives me a call before she goes to bed but I just assumed she must have forgotten because she was so tired. There’s nothing strange about the fact she didn’t call during her trip either. She’s often exhausted and the time difference … But I should have guessed earlier that something was wrong – she always rings on her way home.’

  Elma felt for Eiríkur as he sat there facing them, looking so bewildered. His eyes were unfocused, his face was pale and shiny, and there were red flecks on his cheeks. She wanted to give him an encouraging smile but was afraid it might seem inappropriate in the circumstances.

  ‘I’m going to show you a picture,’ Sævar said. ‘This is the woman who was found by the lighthouse.’ He drew a photo from an envelope and handed it to Eiríkur. ‘Just take your time. Have a good look at it, then tell us if it could be Elísabet.’

  The photo showed the woman lying with her eyes closed, her body covered with a white sheet, her dark hair forming a stark contrast to her pale face. She could have been asleep and, to Elma’s relief, neither the marks on her neck nor the wound on her head were visible.

  Eiríkur took it and sat there examining it for a moment. Then he got up and put the picture down on the table, saying hoarsely: ‘Yes, that’s her. Please excuse me.’ He disappeared into what Elma guessed must be the bathroom. Her eyes met Sævar’s again. Breaking bad news like this was the hardest part of their job.

  When Eiríkur came back he sat down on the sofa again and stared unseeingly in front of him, his jaw muscles clenched, his eyes red. ‘I … the whole thing’s so unreal, I feel as if I’ll wake up any minute,’ he said in a hollow voice. ‘Who … what do you think happened?’

  ‘We don’t know yet but the nature of her injuries suggests we may be dealing with a suspicious death.’

  ‘Suspicious?’ Eiríkur gaped at them. ‘Injuries? You mean … you mean somebody deliberately killed her?’

  ‘Like I said, we don’t know yet,’ Sævar replied in a level voice. ‘But it’s unlikely her injuries were self-inflicted. You can rest assured that we’ll do all we can to find out what happened.’

  Eiríkur frowned as if he was trying to process the information. When he raised his eyes again, his expression was angry.

  ‘I thought…’ He broke off and was silent for a while. When he started speaking again, his voice was shrill: ‘Are you telling me she was murdered? It just doesn’t make sense. Who would…?’

  ‘Daddy…?’ A small boy was standing in the hall in a pair of pyjamas decorated with yellow cartoon characters, blinking in the bright lights from the sitting room. ‘I need to do a wee-wee.’

  ‘Go ahead, son.’

  No one said anything until the little boy had finished and scampered barefoot back to his room at the end of the hallway.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Sævar said, when they were alone again. ‘Were you aware of anything unusual in the days leading up to Elísabet’s departure? Any phone calls? Did she seem different at all? Was she having problems at work? Anything you can remember?’

  Eiríkur thought. ‘No,’ he said, shaking
his head. ‘I can’t think of anything. Not a single thing.’

  ‘Can you think of any reason why she should have failed to turn up to work and gone to Akranes instead?’

  ‘No, that doesn’t sound like Beta at all. She’s so conscientious. She’d go to work even if she hadn’t slept well, regardless of anything I said. There were times when I didn’t think she was in any fit state to do her job but apparently it can’t be helped in her line of business. Irregular or too little sleep is par for the course.’

  ‘Did she know anyone in Akranes?’

  ‘No. Nobody.’ Eiríkur shook his head emphatically. ‘But she lived there for several years when she was a girl.’ He paused, then went on: ‘She couldn’t stand the place. Flatly refused to go there. We used to do our shopping in Reykjavík or Borgarnes, even though they’re much less convenient. In fact, it was bizarre how much she hated the town. That’s why … that’s why I just can’t understand what she was doing there, of all places.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why she hated the town so much? Do you think there was a specific reason?’

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know. She never explained, just said she had absolutely no desire to go there. She had bad memories of the place. I thought maybe it had something to do with being bullied at school, but I didn’t ask. She made it clear she didn’t want to discuss it.’

  ‘Who did she mainly associate with? Apart from her colleagues at work.’