The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jonasson (ap literature book list .txt) 📕

pulled up a chair where you’re sitting now and put his cards on the table. He said he was looking for Hilmar Thór. He said he knew I was his sister and threatened to kill me if I didn’t tell him where my brother was. I managed to grab a knife and hold him off for long enough to escape from the house, and that was when Thór took over …’

‘Really it was self-defence,’ Thór said, speaking up for the first time. ‘I had to protect myself and my sister. The bastard deserved to die and that’s all there is to it.’

‘What happened?’ Una repeated.

‘I was listening from the cellar. When I heard him threatening Hjördís, I grabbed a piece of wood, ran upstairs and hit him. Things couldn’t go on like that. And once he’d seen me, that was it. After that there was no hope that we’d be left in peace.’

Una was finding it hard to breathe. Thór had more or less admitted to murder, yet behaved as if it was no big deal. Justified it by claiming he’d been saving himself and his sister and that the dead man had had no right to live …

Una tried to put herself in his shoes; in the situation of a man who had been on the run, in hiding, for all these years … Who’d finally been cornered and struck out in self-defence. Who was she to judge what was right and wrong when it came to the shadowy underworld he was mixed up in?

She took stock of what she had learned. Patrekur was dead. He’d been murdered the night before the Christmas concert. After which the brother and sister had coolly turned up to church as if nothing had happened.

‘What did you do with him?’ Una asked, swallowing.

Hjördís glanced at Thór.

‘I put him in his car and … and drove it to the edge of the cliff in the middle of the night, then pushed it over. Hjördís followed me so she could give me a lift back. As you know, you can reach the main road from our farm without being seen from the houses down by the sea.’

‘And … are you confident they won’t find him?’

‘Well, fortunately no one’s looking for him up here. The sea will take care of the rest. All we can do is hope for the best.’

Another silence fell. Una felt a growing disquiet. The events the brother and sister had described seemed so unbelievable and yet were so terrifyingly real. A man had been killed, but somehow Una hardly cared. She was merely glad that the reckoning had resulted in Patrekur dying and not Thór. How she regretted now that she had ever called the police.

‘I don’t know what to say.’ She let out a long breath. ‘I have to go now. I need time to think about all this.’ She got shakily to her feet.

‘You won’t betray us,’ Hjördís said, half rising, with a look of sudden menace.

‘No, I won’t,’ Una reassured her, realizing, as she said it, that this was the way it would have to be. She looked Hjördís steadily in the eye, sensing that there was almost nothing this woman wouldn’t do to protect her brother. And then Una remembered what Hjördís had said: I was going to deal with him myself.

‘Hjördís,’ she said. ‘What were you going to do? How were you planning to deal with him? You said you’d had a plan that didn’t work out …’

Hjördís hesitated. ‘I … I was going to poison him.’

‘What?’

‘Yes. I didn’t know quite what effect it would have but I made a strongly seasoned stew for supper and left it on the table. I laid a place for him, then made myself scarce. Thór was hiding in the cellar. I’d told Patrekur that supper was included in the price of the room. But I didn’t want to be there in case he got suspicious because I wasn’t having any stew myself.’

‘So … what went wrong?’

Hjördís faltered. ‘I just don’t know. I think he ate the food. At least, the plate was dirty when I came back later. But he seemed fine, as if it hadn’t affected him at all.’

‘What did you give him? What kind of poison? It wouldn’t necessarily have worked straight away.’ Una had a flashback to her medical lectures.

‘Paracetamol. It was the strongest thing I could find in the cupboard. A hell of a lot of pills, crushed up in the stew. I’d heard somewhere that it’s dangerous in large quantities.’

Una nodded and took a sip of the cold, bitter coffee. ‘Yes, that’s right. But I don’t think it would take effect immediately. I’m fairly sure it would take …’ She broke off in mid-sentence.

She felt hot and cold, then faint, as if the whole room was spinning.

As the days passed, one after another, in the monotony of prison life, Björg had come to recognize the importance of hope.

Days, months, years …

A faint spark of hope could keep a person alive even when it seemed certain that there was no way out.

That’s what made days like this one so difficult; when the despair was there waiting to ambush her the moment she opened her eyes in the morning, when she felt so crushed by futility that she couldn’t move, couldn’t get out of her hard bed, couldn’t eat, couldn’t speak. On those days the isolation seemed all the more oppressive, her loss of freedom impossible to bear.

She was overwhelmed by the urge to give up; she didn’t have the energy to keep fighting, to keep tilting at those windmills, at those people who had locked her up, against their better judgement.

Yet, through all her despair, she knew, or rather trusted, that things had to get better.

That maybe tomorrow would be a better day.

XXXVIII

Una closed her eyes and waited for the spell of dizziness to pass. She felt sick.

When she opened her eyes again, the faintness was gone. The half-siblings were still sitting there, in