The Darkness Knows by Arnaldur Indridason

Author:Arnaldur Indridason [Indridason, Arnaldur]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

30

That evening, Elísabet paid her brother a visit. She was single and had begun to look increasingly to Konrád for company in recent years. She worked in a library, and when he asked how it was going she gave her usual answer: fortunately there was enough to do. People still read books. She also volunteered at Stígamót, the counselling service for survivors of sexual abuse, though she rarely talked about that, but then she had always been unforthcoming about personal matters. She was a big woman, with raven-black hair, a face that tapered towards the chin, and sharp brown eyes above a long, pointed nose. Her clothes were designed to hide her figure: thick jumpers, as many as two or three in cold weather, thick skirts and galoshes. She had a colourful collection of woolly hats as well, and would often cram two on her head at once.

‘Are they still investigating the Sigurvin murder?’ Beta asked, after she had sat with Konrád for a while and was on the point of leaving. ‘Are you involved?’

‘I didn’t intend to be,’ he said, ‘but I keep being drawn in.’

Hardly knowing where to begin, he told her about Villi and his sister, Herdís, and the man Villi had seen on Öskjuhlíd. The police were currently evaluating this new information. But Konrád didn’t feel that his meetings with Olga and the chaplain really counted as part of the inquiry. That was just his retirement hobby. He had taken early retirement, fed up with police work, and had never felt any desire to return to his job. Perhaps it was just another sign of what had become a common theme in his life recently: he lacked purpose and resolve, which, when you stopped to think about it, was odd for a man his age. He smoked cigarillos but wasn’t a smoker. He dabbled in criminal investigations without being a policeman. And, strangest of all to him, he was a pensioner but didn’t feel remotely old.

Perhaps these were natural feelings for someone later in life. Konrád was one of the last Icelanders to have been born under the old Danish monarchy. The day after his birth in 1944, Iceland had been declared an independent republic in the pouring rain at Thingvellir. For a brief moment of his life, so brief it was almost immeasurable, he’d had a Danish king.

He had been a sunny-tempered child and never let it bother him that he had a slightly withered arm. His left arm had less strength and mobility than his right and appeared noticeably weaker. When he was old enough to ask about the difference, having observed that everyone else he knew had two equally strong arms, his mother had explained that it had happened during his birth. He hadn’t wasted too much thought on it. Since he didn’t know what it was like to have two sound arms, he had nothing for comparison. All he knew was that he was a bit different from other people. He had

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