Category:

Resuming his seat on the sofa, he opened the book, a worn copy of A Puzzle for Fools by Patrick Quentin. He could remember listening to a play based on the novel, broadcast on Icelandic National Radio when he was a teenager. It had been quite well done, as far as he could recall. The book centred on a series of murders at a hospital—or sanatorium—where the protagonist, Peter Duluth, had been admitted for alcoholism. Quite an unusual topic for a book that had been published in the golden age of the detective novel, on the eve of the Second World War. The story had been on Helgi's mind recently in connection with his dissertation. Deaths at a sanatorium...

He read a few more pages but couldn't focus. Perhaps the book just wasn't very good, but he thought it more likely that the police, or rather his upstairs neighbour, had unsettled him. Maybe it would be better to put the book aside for now, to finish at the weekend, and try to get some sleep instead. He would bed down on the sofa, as usual after one of their rows. It was always him who had to make the sacrifice.

He laid the book gently on the coffee table; he always took great care of the collection. They were his treasures, these old detective novels, even though they might not fetch much of a price if sold.

Helgi was eager to get to sleep; as a rule, he had no problems dropping off and he really needed to gather his strength for the job of finishing his dissertation. The subject was so unusual that he had been rather surprised when his tutor in the UK had agreed to it.

A blanket and a cushion would have to take the place of pillow and duvet tonight, but that didn't matter; he was used to it and the flat was perfectly warm.

Helgi took off his white shirt and hung it over the back of a chair.

His heart missed a beat.

Just as well his colleagues in the police hadn't noticed the small red bloodstain on the sleeve.

1983

Tinna ploughed through the rain, head down, clutching her coat tightly around herself. The sky was unusually grey and in the downpour everything seemed to merge into one: clouds, pavement; even the houses appeared drab and colourless. All other sounds had faded into the background and the only thing she could hear was the drumming of the rain, but then there was hardly another soul about in the streets of Akureyri at a quarter to seven on a Saturday morning. It was a relief to reach the car and get inside out of the wet.

Tinna was young; it wasn't that long since she had graduated from her nursing degree. As a native of the north Icelandic town of Akureyri, she had initially been over the moon to get a job there after finishing her studies in Reykjavík, since it meant she could be close to her parents and extended family. In practice, though, it had been a bit of a comedown to return to the quiet little town on the fjord after a taste of life in the big city. Although it was known as the capital of the north, Akureyri had a population of only thirteen thousand people, and Tinna was already finding it claustrophobic to be surrounded again by the faces she had grown up with. If she wanted to expand her social circle, she was beginning to realize that she would have to head back south at some point.

But, for now, the job at the old sanatorium wasn't bad, though the place was eight kilometres out of town, so not exactly within walking distance of her flat. Her work wasn't quite as demanding as she could have wished either, but she supposed it represented a decent enough start to her career. Although the tuberculosis patients were long gone—the last one had departed before Tinna was born—the hospital was still overshadowed by its association with the disease they used to call the 'white death'. And the locals still spoke of the place with an awed dread, despite the hospital standing empty, with the sole exception of the wing where Tinna worked. The department had no patients but was concerned with diagnostics, research and the development of workflow processes in health care. Meanwhile, a bunch of people down south in Reykjavík were busy debating the best possible use the old sanatorium buildings could be put to in future.

Tinna had gone to bed late, having sat up half the night with her old friend Bigga, and now she was fighting off tiredness. The weather didn't help. How she would have loved to turn round and go home, crawl under her duvet and fall asleep again with the ticking of the rain in her ears. Perhaps she should have called in sick, but that wouldn't have created a very good impression. She would just have to grit her teeth and slog through this morning's shift, then have a coffee and hope the day would gradually pick up after that.