‘Why didn’t he want to come home, if he could have?’ Ari asked. ‘If he had, he wouldn’t have ended up in prison and died.’

‘Maybe not,’ Úrsúla said. ‘When I was young I couldn’t understand it either. I often went downtown to look for him and ask him to come home. But he was an alcoholic so he wasn’t really able to make his own decisions.’

‘Can you be an alcoholic suddenly?’ Ari asked, eyes wide with horror. ‘Could Dad become an alcoholic?’

‘Of course not, you idiot,’ Herdís hissed, giving what had become the standard answer to her brother’s questions.

‘Talk nicely to each other, please,’ Úrsúla said, brushing a stray lock of hair away from her face. ‘Your dad’s not an alcoholic,’ she told Ari. ‘If anything, it’s a struggle to get him to have a drink.’

She winked at Nonni and he laughed. She was about to embark on a longer explanation of alcoholism when Ari steered the conversation in another direction.

‘Was there a lot of blood on him?’ he asked.

Úrsúla nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see for myself, which is just as well, but I read all the court documents and they said there was a lot of blood because he was so badly hurt. The reason he died was because there was bleeding in his brain where he was hit so hard.’

‘But why isn’t this Pétur in prison?’ Herdís asked. ‘Why’s he on the street?’

‘He was in hospital for a long time after that, in a secure unit, because he wasn’t right in the head and the judge decided that he hadn’t known what he was doing. So when he recovered, he was allowed out.’

Herdís looked thoughtful, and Ari closed his eyes and curled himself up deep in the duvet, as if he wanted to give his mind a rest.

‘But it’s not a hundred per cent certain that Pétur was the one 223who beat my father so badly,’ Úrsúla added. ‘There were also two police officers on duty who…’ She saw from the expression on Nonni’s face that she had ventured onto dangerous ground, so she pulled back. ‘Maybe we’ll never know exactly how your grandfather lost his life. We might have to accept that it was some kind of mishap, some sort of terrible accident. Perhaps we’ll have to live with the uncertainty.’

The children were silent. She kissed the top of Herdís’s head, and then reached for Ari’s hand, planting a kiss on his palm as she had done since he had been tiny. It could well be that she was telling the children the truth, that they would have to accept living with this uncertainty. But the more she thought about the newspaper clipping that Pétur had slipped into her pocket, the more her doubts grew.

100

‘Hello there, old man,’ said the amiable young fellow behind the counter in the kiosk at Hlemmur. ‘What do gentlemen of the road have to say today?’