House of Evidence Read Free

he was born, is there…Arriving at Bakkasel, where we shall overnight.

I t was almost eight o’clock, and Morgunbladid had still not been delivered. Halldór Benjamínsson opened the front door and looked around for the paperboy. He didn’t want to start breakfast before the newspaper arrived. An eight-inch-thick blanket of snow had fallen during the night, greeting him at the threshold.
    “Halldór, dear, your tea is getting cold,” his wife, Stefanía, called from the kitchen.
    He closed the door and went back inside. He was tall and slim, with a bit of a paunch. His gray hair, thinning a little, was carefully combed with a part on the right side. He wore spectacles with a thin gold frame. His face usually bore a benevolent expression, though this morning he was feeling grouchy.
    “Can’t you read yesterday’s paper, dear?” asked Stefanía.
    “I’ve already read it.”
    He looked at the kitchen table. There were two teacups and saucers, and plates with toast beside them. A fat teapot stood there, too, with red tea-bag labels dangling from underneath the lid.
    He examined the pattern on the china as he bit into his toast. Gold wreaths and braids atop a white glaze—it had been a wedding present from nearly thirty-five years earlier; during the first years oftheir marriage, it had been used for best times only, but it had long since entered daily use, with another set reserved for special occasions. There were fewer cups than there used to be, though.
    “Will you be working for long?” Stefanía asked.
    “Probably not,” Halldór replied, glancing at his wife. She was wearing a long bathrobe, but apart from that there was nothing to indicate that she had just woken up. Her blond hair was carefully combed and her modest makeup was in place.
    “You remember we’ve got a bridge evening here,” she reminded him.
    “Yes,” he lied.
    “It’s only once a month and there’s no television tonight anyway,” she said.
    “I’ll try and come home early.”
    “Since we’re playing here, I must make a cake. What sort would you like?”
    “Apple cake.”
    “I made apple cake last time. We can’t serve it again.”
    “Make something else, then.”
    “I’ll make apple cake if that’s what you really want.”
    From the lobby came the snap of the lid of the mailbox and a faint thud as the paper landed on the floor inside.
    “About time,” he said, rising to get the paper.
    He glanced over the front page as he came back into the kitchen.
    “Vietnam: Peace Clearly in Sight but No Timeline Yet,” the headline read. He turned the paper over. “Trawls Still Being Cut,” read one headline under the fold, and another said, “Twenty-One Trawlers Out of Action if Strike Goes Ahead.”
    Halldór had been a policeman all his working life, and was now a senior officer at the detective division in Reykjavik, in spiteof the fact that he had always found the job tedious, and in the beginning had only accepted it as a stopgap measure.
    When he moved to the city with his elderly parents early on during the Depression, work had been scarce. He was a good prospect, however—a tall, polite young man. A member of parliament from his home district, who knew his father and knew that he had left behind many relatives in his constituency, had found Halldór a job with the police, where he had come to earn a reputation for conscientiousness and good handwriting. Halldór wrote better reports than almost anyone else, and this was one of the reasons he was offered a job in the detective division. He accepted it in order to get out of the uniform. Much later he had been given a promotion, when his turn came, on grounds of seniority.
    When he was younger, he had sometimes thought about becoming a schoolmaster and teaching spelling, but then he had discovered that children scare him; he found it easier to deal with criminals. He had become used to this life, or else he lacked the courage to change it.
    Halldór glanced at the clock