The wake, p.17
The Wake, page 17
part #2 of Black Ice Series
‘We’re leaving. Get dressed and come down. No hanging about.’ Ragga reached out and for a moment he thought she was going to caress his cheek but her hand continued past his head to the switch on the wall behind him. A reading lamp clicked on, hurting his eyes, and Trausti raised a hand to shield them. Ragga gave him another shake and said: ‘Hurry up.’ Then she left his room without closing the door behind her.
Resisting the urge to switch off the light and go back to sleep, Trausti braced himself, sat up and swung his legs out from under the warm duvet. It wouldn’t be a problem; he was used to waking up after too little sleep. He was also used to starting the day by jumping in the shower but there was no time for that now. He dragged on his clothes, but the moment he straightened up properly, he realised how badly he’d needed that shower. He still felt groggy with sleep.
The others were waiting downstairs, blinking blearily, though Leifur was visibly in the worst state. Ragga seemed the most alert. Trausti would have given anything for a coffee but didn’t dare mention it in case they thought it was a good idea. It would only delay the evil hour, and it was best to get this over with. The sooner they set off, the sooner they would be back and he could return to bed and try to forget about this crazy nocturnal adventure.
‘Right. About time.’ Ragga stood up, blew out a breath, and picked up a bag from the floor. It contained the cleaning products and cloths they had found in a store cupboard the previous evening, after they had taken the decision to obliterate all signs of their presence from Gugga’s house. To reduce the risk of being seen, they had voted to go in the middle of the night. Only Trausti had regarded it as a bad idea but he had been overruled. His argument that it was far more suspicious to go round at night than during the day had been dismissed by the others. But in his view it was still valid. If a neighbour had insomnia and happened to look out of the window, they were bound to remember the group, maybe even make a note of their number plate. Whereas by daylight people didn’t usually pay much attention to what other people were doing, as long as they behaved normally. Not that it could be taken for granted that they were capable of that, judging by the way they had succeeded in arousing the suspicions of a passer-by the day before.
Leifur was the last to rise to his feet. He held on to the back of his chair and swayed unsteadily. Trausti noticed the wine glass on the table in front of him, which looked as if it had recently been emptied. ‘You’re not drunk, are you, Leifur?’
‘Nah.’
He wasn’t fooling anyone.
Sigga made a face. ‘He’s been boozing all night. Him and Ari.’
Trausti looked from Leifur to Ari. So they hadn’t gone to bed after smoking their cigars. Ari didn’t appear to be in quite such a rough state, but that was no surprise. He had more self-control and rarely got completely wasted. It happened, but not often. He was too concerned about his image. Leifur, on the other hand, had never had any self-discipline. He always jumped in at the deep end, whatever he did. ‘There’s no point you coming with us, Leifur,’ Trausti said. ‘You’d better stay here.’
But, as is often the case with drunks, rational arguments made no impression on Leifur. ‘I’m coming too. There’s nothing wrong with me.’ The way he slurred didn’t exactly help his cause.
Trausti opened his mouth to object but Ragga got in first: ‘We’ve already been over this and I have no intention of repeating the conversation. If you hadn’t overslept, Trausti, you could have had your say. It’s pointless arguing about it. He’s determined to come.’
This was going to be even more of a shitshow than Trausti had feared when he went to bed. The chances that Leifur would take care while cleaning, and leave behind fewer traces than he had the first time round were slim at best. Trausti resolved to follow him every step of the way around Gugga’s house, to make sure their clean-up wouldn’t be rendered completely futile. It meant he wouldn’t be much use himself, but that couldn’t be helped.
Before going out to the car, Ragga asked if they all had their gloves. They’d found only one pair of rubber gloves in the house, but as everyone had come dressed for winter, they had decided that leather gloves and one pair of mittens from their luggage would serve just as well to prevent fingerprints. Ragga checked the pockets of Leifur’s coat herself to make sure he was telling the truth as he nodded with exaggerated movements of his head.
The town was perfectly quiet as they entered it. For once, there was no wind, and a thin veil of fog lay over everything, dimming the streetlights. The higher they got, the thicker the fog became. Perhaps it was just low cloud, sitting on the island, but whatever the cause, the weather was to their advantage. Fog muffled sound and reduced visibility.
When they got out of the car, they were careful to close the doors quietly. Trausti kept an eye on Leifur, who was most likely to forget himself and slam his door. Leifur, noticing this, leaned in towards Trausti, his finger raised to his lips, making a loud shushing noise. Presumably this was intended to demonstrate that he was perfectly on the ball. But the strong blast of alcohol merely confirmed to Trausti that his friend was pissed out of his skull.
Before Ragga opened the front door, they all donned their gloves, and again Trausti was alarmed by the state of Leifur, who seemed unable to get his fingers into the right holes. In the end Trausti had to help him on with them like a kid at nursery school. The mittens would have been easier to put on him but Leifur couldn’t be trusted not to tear them off in frustration and leave a trail of fingerprints around the house.
After they had eased the front door shut behind them, they paused in the entrance hall, none of them making a move. Trausti guessed the others were thinking, like him, that this whole enterprise was unbelievably stupid. All apart from Leifur, who was probably wondering where the toilet was or whether he’d be able to find something to drink.
Ari yawned, then whispered, as if they were still standing outside in the street: ‘Wait a minute, how were we planning to do this?’ They had carefully gone over their plans yesterday evening, recalling in detail which rooms they had entered and what they had touched. Perhaps Ari was drunker than he appeared. Or just very tired. The third possibility was one Trausti was reluctant to contemplate but, try as he might, he couldn’t help wondering whether Ari hadn’t been paying attention to their discussion because he’d been busy hatching his own plans for the visit. But why he should do that was beyond Trausti.
He had to admit that Leifur deserved some credit for stopping them yesterday when they’d been about to google on their phones how best to destroy fingerprints and biological traces. He had fetched his laptop and used a VPN to search without leaving a trail. Not that they’d learnt much from this, as all the websites he’d found had been American and recommended products that were only available over there. Even if they could find the equivalents from Icelandic manufacturers, they wouldn’t be able to go to the shops and stock up on bleach and hydrogen peroxide. People were bound to notice. The cleaning products they’d found in the holiday house had all turned out to be environmentally friendly. Unfortunately, protecting the environment and preventing global warming weren’t priorities for those whose sole purpose was to destroy biological traces. None of these products contained the chemicals required for the job. Nevertheless, they would have to do.
In the end, they had convinced themselves that it wasn’t DNA so much as fingerprints that were the main problem, but that didn’t stop them from using their phone torches to illuminate the floor and other surfaces in order to find and remove any hairs they might have left behind. Flakes of skin would hardly matter. The most important thing was to get rid of the most obvious evidence that they had been in the house. That would do. It would have to do.
Before they left the hall, Ragga distributed cloths to the group, then sprayed them with cleaning fluid. ‘The idea is to wipe everything we touched. Each and every one of us.’ Ragga looked pointedly at Ari as she continued: ‘As we agreed. Remember to turn on as few lights as possible. And switch them off again as soon as you move on to the next room.’
Just then, Trausti came the closest he had ever been to suffering a heart attack when an unidentifiable noise started up somewhere in the house. It sounded as if it was coming from the sitting room, which was only a few steps away. His heart was going like the clappers and there was a sharp pain under his ribs. Judging from the others’ expressions, they were equally thrown – all except Leifur, that is, who didn’t seem to have noticed. He was too fascinated by the cloth in his hands, gazing at it in wonder as if he had no idea where it had materialised from.
‘What was that?’ Sigga whispered, her eyes almost completely round with fear. ‘Is there somebody there?’
None of them knew the answer to that. The sound came again, a low humming and a quiet click, as if someone had tapped a pencil on a tabletop. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Sigga said, but her order didn’t carry its usual authority as she was forced to whisper. ‘Now.’
Leifur opened his mouth and Trausti reacted fast, clapping a hand over it and stifling whatever he had been about to say. The odds were overwhelming that Leifur would forget to whisper. Still with one hand over his friend’s mouth, Trausti raised a finger to his own lips and shushed him quietly. Then, taking Leifur’s shoulder in a light grip, he pulled him carefully with him as he backed towards the front door. This turned out to be a mistake. Leifur lost his balance and bashed his shoulder against the wall. Trausti’s hand wasn’t enough to smother the resulting yelp of pain.
The noise was like a dam bursting. They all stampeded into the entrance hall, jostling to get out, abandoning any idea of being stealthy. It was too late now. While Sigga was fumbling with the latch, Trausti glanced round and saw the cause of the alarm. ‘Don’t open it,’ he said at normal pitch.
The others turned, astonished, but their tension eased when they saw the movement on the floor behind him. ‘Christ. Are they trying to kill us?’ Ari blew out a breath. A robot vacuum cleaner was busy dancing its zigzag progression across the parquet. There was nobody else in the house; the gadget had simply started up in obedience to its timer.
When they had recovered from the shock, they filed one after the other into the rooms they had entered on their previous visit. Trausti gripped Leifur’s shoulder when he showed signs of wandering off. ‘Better stick together,’ he said.
Leifur obeyed without a struggle. He seemed to have sobered up a bit but his eyelids were drooping. Trausti decided it would be best to begin in the bathroom. It was small enough that he would be able to keep a close eye on his piss-artist of a friend while he was wiping clean the pill bottles, blister packs and any other surfaces they had touched.
‘I feel sick.’
Leifur made no protest when Trausti steered him to sit down on the toilet seat.
‘Try to focus on something else.’ Trausti opened the medicine cabinet, his thoughts going to the Ritalin it contained. That would perk Leifur up a bit, but, on second thoughts, a perky Leifur was probably the worst thing that could happen in the circumstances. It would only make him even more unpredictable.
‘Like what?’
‘Anything. Think about Gugga. Remember the old times with her.’ Trausti wiped a pill bottle with his cloth, replaced it, then picked up the next.
‘Gugga. She was all right. Mind you, she could be a bloody bitch at times.’
‘I don’t know. Aren’t we all a mixture of good and bad? Isn’t the most important question which weighs heaviest in the end?’ Trausti glanced at Leifur, who made a face as if he had no idea what Trausti was on about. ‘Just focus on her good points.’
‘Yeah. Right.’
Leifur lapsed into silence and Trausti shot him a look to make sure he wasn’t about to topple head first into the bath or something. But in spite of rocking to and fro, he seemed not to have lost his balance. The rocking was rhythmic, rather than inadvertent. Leifur stopped and blew out a breath. ‘I can’t do it. I just keep remembering her going on and on about her mother. How ill she was and how much pain she was in. It was a real downer when you were trying to have a laugh.’
Trausti remembered that period in Gugga’s life. Every time she had a drink inside her, she was like a broken record. As Leifur said, it had been a real mood killer. Trausti had borne the brunt of it because he was studying medicine, and he’d sometimes had to smother a yawn. She’d ranted on about pain and hospital services and Icelandic law. Why shouldn’t her mother be prescribed cannabis if it would make her feel better? Why couldn’t she get to choose when she’d had enough and wanted to die? What would come after death? Of course he’d had no answers to any of these questions, since he was only a student, focused on what might come up in the exams rather than the big existential questions. ‘Gugga was having a hard time. You must see that.’
Leifur ignored this. ‘She was a bitch to Gudrún too.’
Trausti wiped clean the last pill bottle and turned his attention to the blister packs and packets. It came back to him now that Leifur used to fancy Gudrún; although he had never admitted as much, it had been blindingly obvious to the others. Still, Leifur was right about Gugga’s attitude to Gudrún: Gugga was always picking on her or talking about her behind her back. They had been like chalk and cheese: Gudrún rather earnest and not much of a party animal; Gugga always up for a laugh. Instead of simply accepting their differences, Gugga had never been able to let it go if Gudrún declined an invitation because she didn’t feel like joining in or preferred not to drink.
Now, confronted by all these drugs and with more experience under his belt, Trausti had a better insight into the reason for Gugga’s inability to leave Gudrún alone to enjoy her healthy lifestyle. Gugga had taken it as personal criticism or felt that Gudrún despised the rest of them. Clearly, Gugga had been well on the way to developing a dependency on drugs or alcohol – or both. And, as is common with those wrestling with the demons of addiction, she was determined that everyone else should join in the fun. That way it was easier for her to kid herself that her behaviour was normal.
‘I reckon Gugga killed Gudrún.’ Leifur started to take off his gloves.
Trausti swooped to prevent him. ‘We don’t know that. If Gudrún died that night, it was probably from natural causes. Or alcohol poisoning. She wasn’t used to drinking, so she wouldn’t have known her own limits.’ Trausti had no intention of confiding in Leifur about the suspicions he’d had the night before. The last thing the friends needed now was for Leifur to start rambling drunkenly about poisoning and murder. ‘She could have choked on her own vomit,’ he continued. ‘Maybe she just passed out drunk and we misinterpreted the situation.’ This was far too complicated for Leifur to follow in his befuddled state. Trausti wondered if he ought to add something to simplify matters. Then he realised that it didn’t matter: Leifur probably wasn’t even listening. But it turned out he was wrong.
‘Gudrún hardly drank a thing. She had two glasses max.’ Leifur raised two fingers. ‘Two.’
He must be mistaken. Trausti’s memories of the later part of the evening were worryingly hazy, but some things stood out pretty sharply. Oddly enough, Gudrún had been in high spirits, which was quite out of character for her. As a rule, she had been serious and slow to smile, though he suspected that was partly out of embarrassment about her braces. But that evening he remembered her beaming round at them all. She had to have downed a fair amount of booze. Perhaps not enough to give her alcohol poisoning, but there was no question that she’d needed help getting to bed. So it stood to reason that she had been drunk. What other explanation could there be? Trausti was about to close the medicine cabinet, when he paused, his gaze arrested by all the pills. Maybe Leifur was on to something.
Could Gugga have had access to this many drugs in the old days? Could she have been so ill disposed towards Gudrún that she’d slipped something into her punch to get rid of her? The idea was ludicrous. Gugga had repeatedly nagged Trausti to tell her which drugs her mother could take to put an end to her suffering. Indeed, she’d begged him for help in getting hold of the necessary pills, which made it highly improbable that she’d already had access to them. Trausti had ducked out of all such conversations, which hadn’t been that hard, as Gugga had usually been totally wasted by the time she brought up the subject. It was easy enough to change the subject when you were talking to a drunk. Unless it had all been an elaborate ploy on Gugga’s part? Perhaps her mother hadn’t wanted to put an end to her life at all. Most people didn’t opt for that way out, however wretched their sufferings, regarding any sort of life as better than none. After all, there was nothing awaiting them after death but the eternal void. Was it possible that those absurd conversations had actually been about Gudrún, not Gugga’s mother?
No, out of the question. Trausti had a vivid memory of Gugga’s descriptions of the dreadful ordeal suffered by her mother, who’d had squamous cell carcinoma, a type of skin cancer that had attacked her mouth and throat. The treatment had deprived her of all her enjoyment of life, ruining her appearance and making it almost impossible for her to eat. It was only too believable that she wouldn’t have wanted to go on living in that state. Especially since the surgeons kept having to remove more and more of her face and neck. The drugs Gugga had nagged him about had unquestionably been for her mother. That would have been infinitely more important to Gugga than any desire to poison Gudrún just because she found her a bit boring. Gugga had even approached some of the others in the group with the same request when Trausti proved obdurate. Ari had once shoved her away when she started describing her mother’s illness in the hope of getting him to help her. He had always been terribly squeamish. The fact Gugga was offering to pay generously for the pills wouldn’t have made any difference.
