Oblivion (3 page)

‘Then there are these,’ he added, handing Erlendur one of the cowboy boots. ‘They might get us somewhere. Genuine leather. Newish. Not widely available here, as far as I know. The staff of the shoe shops in town might recognise them. Might even know who bought them. You don’t see many people walking around here in cowboy boots. Not Icelanders, anyway. We’re analysing the dirt on the soles to see if that can provide any clue to where he’s been, but the mud from the lagoon has more or less obliterated the evidence.’

Erlendur contemplated the boot. It was made of brown leather, the sole showed only light wear, and the decoration on the calf depicted a coiling lasso. He surveyed the rest of the clothing, the jeans, the checked shirt.

‘Can you tell where the boots come from? Where they were made?’

‘Louisiana. There’s a label inside.’

‘I’m sensing an American theme here.’

‘Maybe he’d visited the States recently,’ suggested the technician. ‘It’s a possibility.’

‘Or he was a Yank himself,’ said Erlendur.

‘Yes, or that.’

‘From the base?’

The head of forensics shrugged. ‘Not necessarily, but we can’t rule it out either.’

‘There are five or six thousand Americans out there on Midnesheidi, aren’t there? Servicemen and their families?’

‘Round about that. The lagoon’s not exactly on their doorstep, but it’s near enough that you’ll need to take the base into account.’

ERLENDUR HADN’T BEEN
down this street in a long while. But Dagbjört, the girl who once lived here, was seldom far from his thoughts. One winter’s morning, more than a quarter of a century ago, she had vanished without trace. The question of what happened to her had never been resolved. Erlendur had come across her files when he first joined the police. She had been on her way to the Women’s College from her home in the west of town when she disappeared as if the ground had swallowed her up. Erlendur had followed her route to the school many times, past the former site of Camp Knox, the old barracks slum, onto Hringbraut and down towards the lake, passing Melavellir and the old graveyard on Sudurgata. People did go missing like this in Iceland from time to time, but for some reason this incident in particular had touched a nerve with Erlendur. He had read and reread the police reports and press coverage, and had walked all possible routes between her home and the school. He had sometimes toyed with the idea of talking to people – relatives or friends – who had known her, but he had never actually gone ahead or embarked on any kind of systematic investigation. It had all happened a long time ago and there was every reason to believe that the girl had taken her own life, yet she would not leave Erlendur alone, no matter how hard he tried to push her away and forget the case. She haunted him like a ghost risen from the grave, ensuring that he was subject to constant reminders of her.

This time it was the obituaries. Only this morning he had been reading her father’s. Her mother had died some years back. There were two notices, both of which touched on the incident obliquely. One had been written by a former colleague of her father who described him as a loyal and reliable workmate, who had been good company in happy times but had never really recovered from the loss of his daughter. The other was written by the dead man’s sister and traced his early years, saying that they came from a large, close-knit family, and that later he and his wife had lost the apple of their eye in a way that defied all comprehension. Erlendur, detecting an old bitterness in her words, guessed that time had not succeeded in softening the pain. But then it rarely did.

It was nearly midnight when Erlendur finally left the street and headed home. He had noticed that Dagbjört’s old house was vacant and there was an estate agent’s notice in the kitchen window. The wind was still blowing from the north and was forecast to continue for the next few days. Loose snow swirled alongside the pavement and Erlendur hugged his coat tighter around him as he strode away.

He and Marion had stayed late in the office that evening, reviewing the case of the man in the lagoon. More than twenty-four hours had passed since the body had been found but so far no one had come forward to report him missing or say they recognised him by the detailed description that had been released to the press. The man seemed to have neither family nor friends. When Erlendur returned from his meeting with the head of forensics, he had found Marion resting on the battered sofa in the office. Marion had brought the sofa along from CID’s old headquarters on Borgartún where they used to be based when they came under the state prosecutor’s office.

‘An American?’ Marion had exclaimed irritably when Erlendur reported his conversation with forensics.

‘It’s one possibility,’ said Erlendur.

‘A serviceman, you mean?’

Erlendur shrugged. ‘Don’t forget the international airport’s located in the military zone. Our man could have flown in from anywhere in the world. We can’t take it for granted he’s an Icelander. And we can’t be certain he wasn’t thrown out of a plane over the lagoon. A plane from a domestic airport like Reykjavík. Though it could equally have come from the base.’

‘Where are you going with this?’ asked Marion.

‘Maybe we should start by checking all flights over the area in the last few days. We’re probably talking light aircraft. The question is, should we submit a request to the base as well and find out if the Defense Force are missing one of their men?’

‘On the basis of the cowboy boots?’

‘All his clothes – nearly all of them – had American labels. Though of course most of them could have been bought in Reykjavík, so that doesn’t tell us much per se.’

‘No. What else do we have?’

‘The proximity to the base.’

‘So you want to link the American clothing to the naval base and conclude from this that we’re dealing with a soldier? Isn’t it a bit of a long shot?’

‘Maybe,’ said Erlendur. ‘But when you take into account the clothing and the proximity, it hardly seems unreasonable to send an inquiry to the military authorities. If the man had been found on the other side of the country in Raufarhöfn, I wouldn’t be considering this angle. But it might just turn out that the army are missing one of their men.’

‘They’re under no obligation to inform us if so.’

‘But at least we’d have checked the possibility.’

‘Won’t they have heard about the discovery of the body by now?’

‘Presumably.’

‘Surely they’d have got in touch if they suspected he was one of theirs?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Erlendur. ‘I don’t know how their minds work. Seems to me that lot go their own sweet way without taking too much notice of us.’

‘
That lot
? Are you opposed to the army?’

‘Is that relevant?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Marion. ‘Are you?’

‘I’ve always been opposed to the army,’ said Erlendur.

He was standing in a stiff northerly breeze near the place where Camp Knox used to be during the Second World War, when the country was occupied, first by the British, then by the Americans. The site was now buried beneath the Vesturbær swimming pool and other buildings, mostly residential. Nothing remained of the old army barracks. Named after Frank Knox, the then US Secretary of the Navy, and originally serving as the American naval operating base in Iceland, Camp Knox had been one of the largest of the eighty such camps constructed in and around Reykjavík during the Allied occupation. The camps had all gone now, though they had enjoyed a remarkable afterlife as a solution to the post-war housing shortage. Once the soldiers had departed, Icelanders from the countryside had moved in their droves into the prefab Quonset and Nissen huts with their curving roofs and walls; in their heyday as many as three thousand people had lived in the former camps.

Erlendur remembered the last gasp of these barracks slums. They had been slowly but surely coming to the end of their existence when he first moved to the city. He remembered Múli Camp and another big one on Skólavörduholt near the modern town centre. There he had encountered the worst poverty he had ever seen. The huts, which were constructed from corrugated iron, flimsy fibreboard and even cardboard, had never been intended as civilian housing and offered hopelessly inadequate protection against the Icelandic climate. Drainage and sewage disposal were primitive at best, rat infestations were endemic, and although plenty of decent, respectable people lived there, the camps were notorious for their grim conditions and colourful occupants. The residents were sneeringly referred to as ‘Campies’ and said to stink of the camp.

If the police report was to be believed, the girl’s route to school in the mornings would have passed the old barracks. During the search for her, particular stress had been laid on finding out if she had entered the camp. A number of the huts were searched, along with the ramshackle sheds and lean-tos they had spawned, and the residents were questioned about whether they had seen the girl. Many of them assisted in the search. But this proved no more successful than any of the other efforts to find her.

The reason Camp Knox had been subjected to particular scrutiny was that, shortly before she went missing, the girl had confided in a friend that she had met a boy from the camp, and the friend had interpreted her words as meaning that she had fallen for him.

The boy’s identity never came to light.

IT WAS PAST
midnight and Marion Briem had fallen asleep on the office sofa when the desk phone suddenly started ringing. All the other staff had gone home and the shrill sound repeatedly shattered the deep silence in the building. Marion awoke, rose from the sofa and snatched up the receiver.

‘What the hell? What time is it?’

‘Marion?’

‘Yes?’

‘Sorry … is it very late?’

It was the pathologist. Marion sat down at the desk, checking the clock.

‘Couldn’t it wait till morning?’

‘What, oh, yes, of course,’ said the pathologist. It was well known that Marion liked to nap on the office sofa and would sometimes spend the night there. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you. What time is it anyway?’

‘Twelve minutes past midnight.’

‘Oh, that late? Sorry, I didn’t realise. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I should be off home myself. I am sorry, I had no idea how late it was.’

Marion knew that the pathologist, Herbert, had lost his wife several years ago and now lived alone. They’d had no children, and once she was gone, he had only an empty house to return to. It didn’t cross his mind to try and meet another woman. Marion had once raised the possibility with him when they were down at the morgue but his reaction had been lukewarm.

‘What’s up?’ asked Marion, feeling more awake. ‘Any news?’

‘Hadn’t we better leave it till tomorrow?’

‘No, come on, out with it. You’ve woken me up now. The damage is done.’

‘He bit his nails.’

‘The man from the lagoon?’

‘Bit them down to the cuticles. Probably an old habit from childhood. That doesn’t help us, unfortunately.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, we might have been able to find some residual traces under his nails – if he’d been in a fight, for example.’

‘Ah, I’m with you.’

‘I get the impression he worked with his hands. Did some job involving a workshop. The lagoon cleaned them to some extent but I found traces of dirt, grease and oil around his fingernails, or what’s left of them. It’s all I can think of. A garage. Machine shop. Something along those lines.’

‘Grease?’

‘Yes, and it’s not just the dirt.’

The pathologist explained to Marion that he’d noticed the man’s hands were covered in small cuts or abrasions, old and new, as well as being calloused from manual labour. He recognised the signs since his own brothers were both mechanics. It was this that had led him to suspect that the body was that of a tradesman or labourer. He was no more than thirty-five years old and enough of his teeth were still intact for them to be compared to dental records if he couldn’t be identified by other means.

‘Do you think the lagoon was supposed to conceal this?’ asked Marion. ‘The dirt on his hands? The small cuts?’

‘I think the lagoon was intended to conceal his body, that’s all. But of course it’s not my place to express an opinion.’

‘Can you see anything to suggest that he might have been American? An American from the base? A foreigner?’

‘A serviceman, you mean?’

‘Yes, maybe.’

‘He was wearing cowboy boots and –’

‘That’s not enough. Did you find anything that could link him to the base? Anything that could place him at Keflavík? Erlendur was talking about the possibility.’

‘Not that I noticed. But there’s another detail I should mention,’ said the pathologist. His voice suddenly sounded threadbare, as if the late hour was catching up with him.

‘Yes?’

‘All the evidence is that the man died as the result of falling from a great height, as we’ve discussed. From what I can deduce, he landed on a smooth surface, a pavement or tarmac, maybe even a concrete floor.’

‘Yes, you’ve already told us that.’

‘Well, perhaps I am repeating myself, but there are so many strange aspects to this death. Like, for example, the fact that he landed flat on his face without raising his arms to protect himself. I don’t believe he fell directly into the lagoon from a plane, as you two were suggesting. If that were the case the impact would have mainly come from hitting water. No, the surface he landed on was much harder.’

‘In other words he fell from a great height,’ said Marion, yawning. ‘Everything points to that. So there are only three possibilities: accident, suicide or murder. If it was an accident or suicide, it’s very puzzling that anyone would have wanted to hide his body in a mudbath. But if it was murder, it’s much easier to understand why the perpetrator would have wanted to cover his tracks. I believe we can rule out suicide, in any case. Involuntary manslaughter or an accident aren’t inconceivable, but then we have to ask ourselves why it wasn’t reported. Murder is by far the most plausible conclusion.’