Silence of the Grave (3 page)

3

The archaeologists arrived in their fleece jackets and thermal suits, armed with spoons and shovels, and roped off a fairly large area around the skeleton, and by dinner time they had started cautiously digging up the grassy ground. It was still broad daylight, the sun would not set until after 9 p.m. The team comprised four men and two women who worked calmly and methodically, carefully examining each trowelful they took. There was no sign of the soil having been disturbed by the gravedigger. Time and the work on the house foundation had seen to that.

Elínborg located a geologist at the university who was more than willing to assist the police, dropped everything and turned up at the foundation just half an hour after they had spoken. He was middle-aged, black-haired and slim with an exceptionally deep voice, and had a doctorate from Paris. Elínborg led him over to the wall of earth. The police had put a tent over the wall to obscure it from passers-by, and she gestured to the geologist to go in under the flap.

The tent was illuminated by a large fluorescent light, which cast gloomy shadows over to where the skeleton lay. The geologist did not rush anything. He examined the soil, took a handful from the wall and clenched his fist to crumble it. He compared the strata beside the skeleton with those above and below it, and examined the density of the soil around the bones. Proudly he told her how he had once been called in to help with an investigation, to analyse a clump of earth found at the scene of a crime, which made a useful contribution. Then he went on to discuss academic works on criminology and the earth sciences, a kind of forensic geology, if Elínborg understood him correctly.

She listened to him rambling away until she lost her patience.

"How long has he been in there?" she asked.

"Difficult to say," the geologist said in his deep voice, assuming an academic pose. "It needn't be long."

"How long is that, geologically speaking?" Elínborg asked. "A thousand years? Ten?"

The geologist looked at her.

"Difficult to say," he repeated.

"How accurate an answer can you give?" Elínborg asked. "Measured in years."

"Difficult to say."

"In other words, it's difficult to say anything?"

The geologist looked at Elínborg and smiled.

"Sorry, I was thinking. What do you want to know?"

"How long?"

"What?"

"He's been lying here," Elínborg groaned.

"I'd guess somewhere between 50 and 70 years. I still have to do some more detailed tests, but that's what I'd imagine. From the density of the soil, it's out of the question that it's a Viking or a heathen burial mound."

"We know that," Elínborg said, "there are shreds of clothing . . ."

"This green line here," the geologist said and pointed to a stratum in the lowest part of the wall. "This is ice-age clay. These lines at regular intervals here," he continued, pointing further up, "these are volcanic tuff. The uppermost one is from the end of the fifteenth century. It's the thickest layer of tuff in the Reykjavik area since the country was settled. These are older layers from eruptions in Hekla and Katla. Now we're thousands of years back in time. It's not far down to the bedrock as you can see here," he pointed to a large layer in the foundation. "This is the Reykjavík dolerite that covers the whole area around the city."

He looked at Elínborg.

"Relative to all that history, the grave was only dug a millionth of a second ago."

The archaeologists stopped work around 9.30 and Skarphédinn told Erlendur they would be back early the next morning. They had not found anything of note in the soil and had barely started stripping the vegetation above it. Erlendur asked whether they could not speed up the work a little, but Skarphédinn looked at him disdainfully and asked him if he wanted to destroy the evidence. They agreed that there was still no rush to dig down to the skeleton.

The fluorescent light in the tent was switched off. All the reporters had left. The discovery of the skeleton was the main story on the evening news. There were pictures of Erlendur and his team down in the foundation and one station showed its reporter trying to interview Erlendur, who waved his hands in his face and walked away.

Calm had descended upon the estate once more. The banging hammers had fallen silent. Everyone who had been working on their half-built houses had left. Those who had already moved in were going to bed. No children could be heard shouting any more. Two policeman in a patrol car were appointed to watch over the area during the night. Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli had gone home. The forensic squad, who had been helping the archaeologist, had gone home as well by now. Erlendur had spoken to Tóti and his mother about the bone that the boy found. Tóti was elated by all the attention he received. "What a turn up for the books," his mother sighed. Her son finding a human skeleton just lying around. "This is the best birthday I've had," Tóti told Erlendur. "Ever."

The medical student had gone back home, taking his little brother with him. Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli had spoken briefly to him. He described how he had been watching the baby without noticing at first the bone it was gnawing. When he examined it more closely it turned out to be a human rib.

"How could you tell at once that it was a human rib?" Erlendur asked. "It could have been from a sheep, for instance."

"Yes, wasn't it more likely to have been from a sheep?" asked Sigurdur Óli, a city boy who knew nothing about Icelandic farm animals.

"There was no mistaking it," the student said. "I've done autopsy work and there was no question."

"Can you tell us how long you'd estimate that the bones have been buried there?" Erlendur asked. He knew he would eventually be given the findings of the geologist Elínborg had called out, the archaeologist and the forensic pathologist, but he did not mind hearing the student's opinion.

"I took a look at the soil and, based on the rate of decay, we're maybe talking about 70 years. Not much more than that. But I'm no expert."

"No, quite," Erlendur said. "The archaeologist thought the same and he's no expert either."

He turned to Sigurdur Óli.

"We need to check out the records of people who went missing from that time, around 1930 or 1940. Maybe even earlier. See what we can find."

Erlendur stood beside the foundation, in the evening sun, and looked north towards the town of Mosfellsbaer, to Kollafjördur and Mount Esja, and he could see the houses across the bay on Kjalarnes. He could see the cars on the West Road skirt the foot of Úlfarsfell on their way to Reykjavík. He heard a car drive up to the foundation and a man stepped out of it, about the same age as Erlendur, fat, wearing a blue windcheater and a peaked cap. He slammed the door and looked at Erlendur and the police car, the disturbed ground by the foundation and the tent covering the skeleton.

"Are you from the taxman?" he asked brashly, walking over to Erlendur.

"Taxman?" Erlendur said.

"Never a bloody moment's peace from you," the man said. "Have you got a writ or . . . ?"

"Is this your land?" Erlendur asked.

"Who are you? What's this tent? What's going on here?"

Erlendur explained to the man, who said his name was Jon, what had happened. It turned out that he was a building contractor and owned the building plot; he was on the verge of bankruptcy and plagued by debt collectors. No work had been done on the foundation for some time, but he said he came regularly to check whether the formwork had been vandalised; those bloody kids in these new suburbs who play silly buggers in the houses. He had not heard about the discovery of the skeleton and looked down into the foundation in disbelief while Erlendur explained to him what the police and archaeologists were doing.

"I didn't know about it, and the carpenters certainly wouldn't have seen those bones. Is it an ancient grave then?" Jon asked.

"We don't know yet," Erlendur said, unwilling to give any further information. "Do you know anything about that land over there to the east?" he asked, pointing towards the redcurrant bushes.

"All I know is that it's good building land," Jon said. "I didn't think I'd live to see the day that Reykjavik would spread all the way out here."

"Maybe the city's grown out of all proportion," Erlendur said. "Do redcurrants grow wild in Iceland, would you happen to know?"

"Redcurrants? No idea. Never heard of it."

They talked briefly before Jon drove away again. Erlendur gained the impression that his creditors were about to expropriate the land, but that there was a glimpse of hope if he could manage to squeeze out yet another loan.

Erlendur intended to go home himself. The evening sun shed a beautiful red glow on the western sky, spreading in from the sea and across the land. It was beginning to cool down.

He scrutinised the dark swathe. He kicked at the soil and strolled around, unsure why he was dithering. There was nothing waiting for him at home, he thought, swinging his foot at the dirt. No family to welcome him, no wife to tell him what her day had been like. No children to tell him how they were doing at school. Only his clapped out television, an armchair, a worn carpet, wrappers from takeaway meals in the kitchen and whole walls of books that he read in his solitude. Many of them were about missing persons in Iceland, the tribulations of travellers in the wilds in days of old, and deaths on mountain roads.

Suddenly he felt something hard against his foot. It was like a little pebble standing up out of the dirt. He nudged at it a few times with his toe, but it stood firm. He bent down and began carefully to claw the soil away from it. Skarphédinn had told him not to move anything while the archaeologists were away. Erlendur pulled at the pebble half-heartedly but could not manage to free it.

He dug deeper, and his hands were filthy by the time he finally reached a similar pebble, then a third and fourth and fifth. Erlendur got down on his knees, scooping up dirt around him in all directions. The object came gradually into view and soon Erlendur stared at what, as far as he could make out, was a hand. Five bony fingers and the bone of a palm, standing up out of the earth. He rose slowly to his feet.

The five fingers were spread apart as if the person down there had stretched out a hand to clutch at something or defend himself, or perhaps to beg for mercy. Erlendur stood there, thunderstruck. The bones stretched up towards him out of the ground like a plea for clemency, and a shiver passed through him in the evening breeze.

Alive, Erlendur thought. He looked in the direction of the redcurrant bushes.

"Were you alive?" he said to himself.

At that very moment his mobile rang. Standing in the calm of evening, engrossed in his thoughts, he took a while to realise the phone was ringing. He took it out of his coat pocket and answered it. At first all he could hear was rumbling.

"Help me," said a voice that he recognised immediately. "Please."

Then the call was cut off.

4

He could not tell where the call came from. His mobile's screen display said "Unknown". It was the voice of his daughter, Eva Lind. He winced as he stared at the phone, like a splinter that had pierced his hand, but it did not ring again. He could not call back. Eva Lind had his number and he remembered that the last time they spoke was when she called him to say she never wanted to see him again. He stood transfixed, dumbfounded, waiting for a second call that never came.

Then he leaped into his car.

He had not been in touch with Eva Lind for two months. In itself there was nothing unusual about that. His daughter had been living her life without giving him much chance to interfere in it. She was in her twenties. A drug addict. Their last meeting had ended with yet another furious argument. It was in the block of flats where he lived and she stormed out, saying that he was repulsive.

Erlendur also had a son, Sindri Snaer, who had little contact with his father. He and Eva Lind were infants when Erlendur walked out and left them with their mother. Erlendur's wife never forgave him after their divorce and did not allow him to see the children. He increasingly regretted having let her decide. They sought him out themselves when they were old enough.

The calm spring dusk was descending over Reykjavik when Erlendur sped out of the Millennium Quarter, onto the main road and into the city. He checked that his mobile was switched on and put it on the front seat. Erlendur did not know much about his daughter's personal life and had no idea where to start looking for her until he remembered a basement flat in the Vogar district where Eva Lind had been living about a year before.

First he checked whether she had gone to his flat, but Eva Lind was nowhere to be seen. He ran around the block where he lived and up the other staircases. Eva had a key to his flat. He called out to her inside the flat, but she wasn't there. He wondered about telephoning her mother, but couldn't bring himself to do so. They had hardly spoken for 20 years. He picked up the phone and called his son. He knew that his children kept in contact with each other, albeit intermittently. He found out Sindri's mobile number from directory enquiries. It turned out that Sindri was working out of town and had no idea of his sister's whereabouts.

Erlendur hesitated.

"Bugger it," he groaned.

He picked up the phone again and asked for his ex-wife's number.

"Erlendur here," he said when she answered. "I think Eva Lind's in trouble. Do you know where she could be?"

Silence.

"She called me asking for help but was cut off and I don't know where she is. I think something's wrong."

Still no reply.

"Halldóra?"

"Are you calling me after 20 years?"

He felt the cold hatred still in her voice after all that time and realised that he'd made a mistake.

"Eva Lind needs help, but I don't know where she is."

"Help?"

"I think there's something wrong."

"Is that my fault?"

"Your fault? No. It's not . . ."

"Don't you think I didn't need help? Alone with two kids. You weren't helping me."

"Hall . . ."

"And now your kids have gone off the rails. Both of them! Are you beginning to realise what you've done? What you've done to us? What you've done to me and to your children?"

"You refused to let me see . . ."

"Don't you suppose I haven't needed to sort her out a million times? Don't you think I've never needed to be there for her? Where were you then?"

"Halldóra, I . . ."

"You bastard," she snarled.

She slammed down the phone on him. Erlendur cursed himself for having called. He got into his car, drove to the Vogar district and stopped outside a dilapidated building with basement flats half-submerged in the ground. At one of them he pressed the bell which hung loose from the doorframe, but couldn't hear it ring inside, so he knocked on the door. He waited impatiently for the sound of someone coming to answer it, but nothing happened. He took hold of the handle. The door was not locked and Erlendur stepped cautiously inside. As he entered the cramped hallway he could hear a child's faint crying from somewhere within. A stench of urine and faeces confronted him as he approached the living room.

A baby girl, about a year old, sat on the living-room floor, exhausted from crying. She shivered with heavy sobs, naked apart from a vest. The floor was covered with empty beer cans, vodka bottles, fast-food wrappers and dairy products that had gone mouldy, and the acrid stench mingled with the stink from the baby. There was little else in the living room apart from a battered sofa on which a woman was lying, naked, with her back to Erlendur. The baby paid no attention to him as he moved towards the sofa. He took the woman by the wrist and felt her pulse. There were needle marks on her arm.

A kitchen went off the living room and in a small room beside that Erlendur found a blanket, which he draped over the woman on the sofa. Inside the room was another door, leading to a little bathroom with a shower. Erlendur picked up the baby from the floor, carried her into the bathroom, carefully washed her with warm water and wrapped her in a towel. The baby stopped crying. Between her legs her skin was raw with a rash from urine. He presumed that the baby must be starving, but could not find anything edible to give her apart from a little bar of chocolate which he happened to have in his pocket. He broke off a lump and gave it to the baby while talking to her in a soothing voice. When he noticed the marks on her arms and back, he grimaced.

He found a cot, tossed away the beer can and hamburger wrapper that were inside it, and gently laid the baby down. Seething with rage, he went back into the living room. He didn't know whether the heap on the sofa was the baby girl's mother. Nor did he care. He snatched the woman up and carried her into the bathroom, laid her on the floor of the shower and sprayed ice-cold water over her. She twitched, gasped for breath and screamed as she tried to protect herself from it.

Erlendur kept spraying the woman for a good while before he turned off the water, threw the blanket in to her, led her back into the living room and made her sit down on the sofa. She was awake but dazed and looked at Erlendur with slothful eyes. Looked all around as if something was missing. Suddenly she remembered what it was.

"Where's Perla?" she asked, shivering beneath the blanket.

"Perla?" Erlendur said angrily. "That's the kind of name you give to a puppy!"

"Where's my girl?" the woman repeated. She looked 30 or so, with hair cut short, wearing make-up that had run under the shower and was now smeared all over her face. Her upper lip was swollen, she had a bump on her forehead and her right eye was bruised and blue.

"You've no right even to ask about her," Erlendur said.

"What?"

"Stubbing out cigarettes on your baby?"

"What? No! Who . . . ? Who are you?"

"Or is it the brute who beats you up who does that too?"

"Beats me up? What? Who are you?"

"I'm going to take Perla away from you," Erlendur said. "I'm going to catch the man who does that to her. So you need to tell me two things."

"Take her away from me?"

"A girl used to live here a few months back, maybe a year ago, do you know anything about her? Her name's Eva Lind. Slim, black hair . . ."

"Perla's a pest. Cries. All the time."

"Poor you . . ."

"It drives him crazy."

"Let's start with Eva Lind. Do you know her?"

"Don't take her away from me. Please."

"Do you know where Eva Lind is?"

"Eva moved out months ago."

"Do you know where to?"

"No. She was with Baddi."

"Baddi?"

"He's a bouncer. I'll tell the papers if you take her away. What about that? I'll tell the papers."

"Where is he a bouncer?"

She told him. Erlendur stood up and called an ambulance and the emergency shift at the Child Welfare Council, giving a brief account of the circumstances.

"Then there's the second thing," Erlendur said as he waited for the ambulance. "Where's that bastard who beats you up?"

"Leave him out of this," she said.

"So he can keep doing it? Is that what you want?"

"No."

"So where is he?"

"It's just . . ."

"Yes, what? What's just . . ."

"If you're going to take him . . ."

"Yes."

"If you're going to take him, make sure you kill him. If you don't, he'll kill me," she said with a cold smile at Erlendur.

Baddi was muscular with an unusually small head, and he worked as a bouncer at a strip club called Count Rosso in the centre of Reykjavik. He hadn't been on the door when Erlendur arrived, but another bouncer of a similar build had told Erlendur where he could find him.

"He's taking care of the privates," the bouncer had said, and Erlendur didn't understand him immediately.

"The private dancing," the bouncer explained. "Private shows." Then he rolled his eyes in resignation.

Erlendur walked inside the club which was lit up with dull red lights. There was one bar in the room, a few tables and chairs and a couple of men watching a young girl sliding up against a metal pole on a raised dance floor to the monotonous beat of a pop tune. She looked at Erlendur, started dancing in front of him as if he were a likely customer, and slipped off her tiny bra. Erlendur gave her a look of such profound pity that she became flustered and lost her footing, then regained her balance and wriggled away from him before dropping her bra casually to the floor in an attempt to preserve some dignity.

Trying to work out where the private shows might be held, he saw a long corridor directly opposite the dance floor and walked over to it. The corridor was painted black with stairs at the end leading down to the basement. Erlendur could not see very well, but he inched his way down the stairs until he reached another black corridor. A lonely red light bulb hung down from the ceiling and at the end of the corridor stood a huge beefy bouncer with his stout arms crossed over his chest, and he glared at Erlendur. In the corridor between them were six doors, three on either side. He could hear the sound of a violin playing melancholy music in one of the rooms.

The muscular bouncer walked up to Erlendur.

"Are you Baddi?" Erlendur asked him.

"Where's your girl?" the bouncer demanded, his little head protruding like a wart on top of his fat neck.

"I was about to ask
you
that," Erlendur said in surprise.

"Me? No, I don't set up the girls. You have to go upstairs and get one and then bring her down here."

"Oh, I see," Erlendur said, realising the misunderstanding. "I'm looking for Eva Lind."

"Eva? She quit ages ago. Were you with her?"

Erlendur stared at him.

"Quit ages ago? What do you mean?"

"She was here sometimes. How do you know her?"

A door opened along the corridor and a young man walked out, zipping up his flies. Erlendur could see a naked girl bending down to pick up some clothes from the floor in the room. The young man squeezed past them, patted Baddi on the shoulder and disappeared up the stairs. The girl in the room looked Erlendur in the face, then slammed the door.

"Do you mean down here?" Erlendur said in astonishment. "Eva Lind was down here?"

"Long time ago. There's one who looks just like her in this room," Baddi said with all the enthusiasm of a used-car salesman, and pointed to a door. "She's a medical student from Lithuania. And that girl playing the violin. Did you hear her? She's in some famous school in Poland. They come over here. Make some money. Then go on studying."

"Do you know where I can find Eva Lind?"

"We never say where the girls live," Baddi said with a peculiarly beatific expression.

"I don't want to know where the girls live," Erlendur said wearily. He took care not to lose his temper, knew he had to be cautious, had to obtain the information diplomatically, even though he felt most of all like wringing the man's neck. "I think Eva Lind's in trouble and she asked me to help her," he said as calmly as he could possibly manage.

"And who are you, her dad?" Baddi said sarcastically, with a giggle.

Erlendur looked at him, wondering how he could get a hold on that little bald head. The grin froze on Baddi's face when he realised that he had scored a bull's-eye. By accident as usual. He slowly took one step backwards.

"Are you the cop?" he asked.

Erlendur nodded.