The Darkness Knows
- Автор: Indridason Arnaldur
- Серия: Detective Konrad #1
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Harvill Secker/Penguin Random House UK
- ISBN: 978-1-78730-232-7
- Переводчик: Victoria Cribb
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Darkness Knows». Краткое содержание книги:
The case: impossible to solve. Until now.
A frozen body is discovered in the icy depths of Langjökull glacier, apparently that of a businessman who disappeared thirty years before. At the time, an extensive search and police investigation yielded no results-one of the missing man’s business associates was briefly held in custody, but there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him.
Now the associate is arrested again and Konrád, the retired policeman who originally investigated the disappearance, is called back to reopen the case that has weighed on his mind for decades.
When a woman approaches him with new information that she obtained from her deceased brother, progress can finally be made in solving this long-cold case.
The police had knocked on the doors of the neighbouring houses in search of witnesses, but none of the occupants had been able to shed any light on the incident. It had happened in the early hours of the morning and the residents of the street had been sound asleep. No one had seen or heard a thing.
Konrád noticed a man coming along the road towards him and recognised him at once. It was one of his old playmates from the area. He hadn’t seen him for years, perhaps not since they’d both been caught up in the Friday-afternoon rush hour at the long-vanished Ríki. His name was Magnús and they used to call him Maggi Pefsi in the old days because of his inability to pronounce ‘Pepsi’. Konrád didn’t know if this nickname had survived and hadn’t liked to ask on the few occasions when they had crossed paths as adults. Magnús had always been amazingly stubborn. Konrád had once seen him force down a whole raw onion that the kids had stolen from the Lúllabúd corner shop, simply to win a bet of a paltry ten aurar. The clearest memory he had of Maggi Pefsi was of the tears pouring down the boy’s cheeks as he chomped his way through the onion out of sheer pig-headedness.
‘If it isn’t Konrád,’ Maggi said, holding out his hand. ‘Wh... what are you doing in this neck of the woods?’
Konrád shook his hand. They were around the same age, Maggi perhaps a couple of years older, though he had been rather a timid, introverted character as a boy, perhaps because of his stammer. He had lived with his mother in a pretty, well-kept house on Lindargata, and still lived there now. His mother was long dead and Maggi had never married, never moved out of the area or found the right person to spend his life with. At one time he had at least made an effort to change this, but his mother had been very critical of potential girlfriends and extremely disapproving of any attempt on his part to make her share him. Despite his obstinacy in other matters, Maggi had never had the guts to stand up to his mother and so he had been left alone in the world when she died.
‘You never moved,’ Konrád observed.
‘No, and I’m not likely to now,’ Maggi said. ‘Just having a look around for old times’ sake, are you?’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Konrád said. ‘It’s a while since I’ve been down this way.’
‘I don’t know what I’m still doing here,’ Maggi said, wiping a drip from his nose with the back of his hand. ‘Everything else has gone, G... God knows. Everything except me.’
‘The area’s almost unrecognisable.’
‘Life’s pretty unb... unbearable here nowadays, what with the racket from the student flats they’ve built where the Ríki used to be, and those m... monstrosities they’ve built all the way down to the sea. You remember what the view used to be like, over the sound and the islands, all the way to Mount Esja? Well, that’s all been taken away and those p... p... piles have been p... plonked down right in our faces. Who would dream of p... putting up walls like that to b... block the view for everyone else? Building high-rises at the bottom of the slope and overshadowing the entire existing area?’
‘They saw it as ripe for development,’ Konrád said drily.
‘Well, they can get st... stuffed. Arseholes.’
‘You’re telling me.’
‘It’s all gone: the abattoir, the timber yard, the Kveldúlfsskáli fish-processing building, B... Broadcasting House, Lúllabúd and all the rest of the shops. Everything except the National Theatre, and I never go there.’
‘Tell me something — do you by any chance remember an accident in this street some years ago?’
‘Accident?’
‘A pedestrian was hit by a car...’
‘You m... mean, when Villi died?’
‘Yes, did you know him?’ Konrád asked, surprised.
‘Not really, he hadn’t lived here long. I spoke to him m... maybe twice. A nice lad, if that’s what you’re asking. The police never found the driver, did they?’
Konrád shook his head. ‘You didn’t see anything yourself?’ he asked.
‘N... no,’ Maggi said. ‘Vigga said she f... found him. You remember her.’
‘Yes, I remember Vigga,’ Konrád said, recalling the woman who used to live in a dilapidated house on the street and who had scared the living daylights out of him as a child. She used to look like a tramp with her layers of ragged jumpers, her wild mop of grey hair and the grim lines of her face that never softened. He had a feeling she’d even done a spell in the dreaded Kleppur Asylum. As kids, they had taken care never to lose a ball in her garden. At times she used to shriek curses at them if they so much as dared to walk past her house. She had even been known to stop and scold children on the pavement outside for no good reason. If a child wandered into the area selling stamps and unwittingly knocked on her door, he risked a slap and an earful of abuse. Sometimes she dragged kids inside her house to read them the riot act. All this did was turn the children in the area against her. They used to play pranks on her and torment her by breaking her windows or banging on her door and running away. Once someone had even set fire to her lean-to.
‘As a matter of fact, I went to see her about something not that long ago,’ Konrád said, thinking back to when he’d turned to Vigga for help over the complicated wartime case in which his father had been involved. But he couldn’t remember coming across any mention of her in the police reports on Villi’s accident.
‘Yes, she died back in the summer, p... poor thing. Spent several years in a nursing home, c... crazier than ever.’
‘She’s dead is she?’ It was the first Konrád had heard of it.
‘It was all very low-key,’ Maggi said. ‘I told them at the home to get in touch with me when she kicked the b... bucket, because she didn’t have any family of her own. So I took c... care of the rest, as they say. She wanted to be cremated. Her ashes are in the cremation plot in Fossvogur. Imagine living that long and still telling the world to go f... fuck itself. She made it to a hundred, you know.’
‘Her name isn’t mentioned in the police file on the accident.’
‘They wouldn’t have known. She didn’t tell anyone. She only told me about it a c... couple of years ago, when I looked in on her at the nursing home and the accident happened to c... come up in conversation.’
‘What did she say?’
‘It was all very vague. I just happened to m... mention Villi because he used to rent the place next door to her. She seemed to remember him. Said she’d found him on the p... pavement. Something like that. I d... didn’t know whether to take her seriously.’
‘Then what?’
‘That was it.’
‘She said she’d found him on the pavement?’
‘I don’t remember exactly what she said but it was something like that.’
‘Did she help him? Did she talk to him?’
‘I couldn’t get any more out of her. She was pretty confused, poor thing. Out of it, you know. She thought she was b... being attacked by all kinds of weird creatures that only she could see.’
‘What did you and Villi talk about the couple of times you met him?’ Konrád asked. ‘Do you remember at all?’
‘He was a Valur supporter like me. It was something about football. Nothing imp... important. He was a good lad. It was tragic what happened to him.’
The two old playmates stood there for a while without speaking.
‘You never got to the b... bottom of that b... business with your dad, did you?’ Maggi asked eventually.
Konrád looked at him. ‘No.’
‘Strangest thing.’
‘Yes, the strangest thing,’ Konrád agreed, hoping Maggi wouldn’t pursue the subject.
‘Did you hear about Polli?’ Maggi said suddenly, a new thought occurring to him. ‘He’s d... dead. Heart attack. Mind you, he’d got bloody fat. I used to work with him at the shipyard in the old days.’