The Mist, стр. 41
‘I mean exactly what I say. You can’t excuse behaviour like this day after day, right through Christmas, by dismissing it as just a phase she’s going through. Or that all teenagers are like that. Look, I know Dimma’s our only child, the only teenager we’ve ever had to deal with, but no way can you expect me to believe that this is normal. It can’t possibly be normal.’
‘Calm down, love. We’ll sort it out together.’ He blocked her way, then turned and walked resolutely in the direction of Dimma’s room. He knocked, politely at first. ‘Let’s just see, love. I’ll talk to her. I’ll take care of this.’ Then he added, as if it had only just dawned on him: ‘Why aren’t you at work?’
‘I can’t work with this going on, Jón. And we’ll take care of this together. I’m not letting you shoulder all the responsibility.’
There was no answer from inside the room.
Jón rapped again, a little louder than before.
‘Dimma!’ he called. ‘Let us in. Your mum’s home from work.’
‘Dimma, darling,’ Hulda interrupted, ‘open the door for us. I need to talk to you. We have to talk.’
There was still no response. But in her imagination Hulda could hear Dimma saying: We needed to talk a long time ago. Why only now, Mum? Why not before?
The same sense of unease took hold of her, even more powerfully than before, and for the first time Hulda was properly frightened.
She pushed Jón out of the way. ‘Open the door, Dimma! Open up!’ She started pounding with both fists on the flimsy old door that was keeping them apart from their daughter, half expecting Jón to try and stop her, to tell her to take it easy, to wait and see, but he hung back. Perhaps he had finally accepted that the situation was serious.
‘Open up!’ Hulda banged harder than before, her knuckles aching. It occurred to her that Dimma might have slipped out in the night and gone … gone where? Her door was locked from the inside and there was no way of climbing out of her window, as it didn’t open far enough. No, she was in there, she had to be, so why wasn’t she answering?
Before Hulda knew what she was doing, she had started violently kicking the door.
‘Hulda, let’s…’ Jón gently caught hold of her arm.
‘We’re going to get into our daughter’s room,’ she said in a voice that brooked no opposition, and kicked the door again, as hard as she could.
‘Dimma, please open up!’ Jón shouted.
Then he shoved Hulda aside and pushed his shoulder against the door with all his strength. When nothing happened, he took a few steps back and ran at it. It didn’t give but came close.
He rammed it again and this time there was a loud crack and the door flew wide open.
Hulda couldn’t see inside because Jón was blocking her view, but then she dodged round him and looked in.
The sight that met her eyes was so unspeakably, so unimaginably horrific that it robbed her of almost every last ounce of strength. With all that was left to her, she screamed at the top of her voice.
PART TWOTwo months later – February 1988
I
The days following Hulda and Jón’s discovery of Dimma’s body were lost in a haze.
Hulda could remember the moment when Jón broke the door open, but almost immediately afterwards a sort of amnesia had descended, blotting out the subsequent events. The trauma had proved too much even for a tough policewoman like her, although she had experienced her share of grim sights during her years on the force.
She had been wandering around in a stupor ever since. But even that hadn’t prevented her from finally seeing things in their true light. When she looked back at the events leading up to her daughter’s death, she realized just how blind she had been. The resulting mental torture was beyond anything she had ever known. Her mind was racked one minute with self-accusations, the next with violent hatred towards Jón. As the numbness began to recede, she couldn’t bear to be at home. She had to get out, go to work – do something, anything, to disperse her thoughts and give her a temporary respite from this hell on earth.
And now, here she was, having just landed in the small town of Egilsstadir, the largest community in the east of Iceland, accompanied by two forensic technicians whose job it was to carry out the crime-scene investigation. The journey east had brought no improvement in the weather, especially not here, so far inland. Snow lay deep on the ground and pewter-coloured clouds hung low over the open landscape, almost brushing the tops of the distant fells. The milky waters of the long, narrow lake were grey and bleak under the wintry sky, the stands of dark pine forest along its shores making the scene appear strangely un-Icelandic.
They were met at the airport by a middle-aged representative of the local force called Jens, who had come to pick them up in a big police four-by-four. Hulda would have preferred to take the wheel herself, as she hated being driven by other people, but she could hardly ask this man, who turned out to be an inspector, to move over into the passenger seat for her.
Even in the off-roader, the journey turned out to be far from easy. Away from the lake, the landscape was harsh and treeless. The roads were treacherously icy and the snow grew deeper the further they travelled from the town, making progress achingly slow. They were driving through what seemed an interminably long, empty, U-shaped valley between rugged hills when the inspector broke the silence.
‘Not far now to the farm,’ he remarked. ‘The road’s been more or less impassable since Christmas. No one had seen or heard from the couple – Einar and Erla, that is – for a couple of months and they couldn’t be reached by phone either, so I