Silence of the Grave (9 page)

11

It was decided that Erlendur, Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg would handle the Bones Mystery, as the media was calling it, by themselves. The CID couldn't afford to put more detectives onto what was not a priority case. An extensive narcotics investigation was in full swing, using up a great deal of time and manpower, and the department could not deploy any more people on historical research, as their boss Hrólfur put it. No one was sure yet that it was even a criminal case at all.

Erlendur dropped in at the hospital early the next morning on his way to work, and sat by his daughter's bedside for two hours. Her condition was stable. There was no sign of her mother. For a long while he sat in silence, watching his daughter's thin, bony face, and thought back. Tried to recall the time he'd spent with his daughter when she was small. Eva Lind had just turned two when her parents separated, and he remembered her sleeping between them in their bed. Refusing to sleep in her cot, even though, because they only had a small flat with that single bedroom, a sitting room and kitchen, it was in their bedroom. She climbed out of hers, flopped into the double bed and snuggled up between them.

He remembered her standing by the door of his flat, well into her teens by then, after she had tracked down her father. Halldóra flatly refused to allow him to see the children. Whenever he tried to arrange to meet them she would hurl abuse at him and he felt that every word she said was the absolute truth. Gradually he stopped calling them. He had not seen Eva Lind for all that time and then suddenly there she was, standing in his doorway. Her expression looked familiar. Her facial features were from his side of the family.

"Aren't you going to invite me in?" she said after he had taken a long stare at her. She was wearing a black leather jacket, tattered jeans and black lipstick. Her nails were painted black. She was smoking, exhaling through her nose.

There was still a teenage look about her face, almost pristine.

He dithered. Caught unawares. Then invited her inside.

"Mum threw a wobbler when I said I was coming to see you," she said as she walked past him, trailing smoke, and slammed herself down in his armchair. "Called you a loser. Always says that. To me and Sindri. 'A fucking loser, that father of yours.' And then: 'You're just like him, fucking losers.'"

Eva Lind laughed. She searched for an ashtray to put out her cigarette, but he took the butt and stubbed it out for her.

"Why . . ." he began, but did not manage to finish the sentence.

"I just wanted to see you," she said. "Just wanted to see what the hell you look like."

"And what do I look like?" he asked.

She looked at him.

"Like a loser," she said.

"So we're not that different," he said.

She stared at him for a long time and he thought he detected a smile.

*

When Erlendur arrived at the office, Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli sat down with him and told him how they had learned nothing more from the present owners of Róbert's chalet. As the new owners put it, they had never noticed any crooked woman anywhere on the hill. Róbert's wife had died ten years before. They had two children. One of them, the son, died around the same time at the age of 60, and the other, a woman of 70, was waiting for Elínborg to call on her.

"And what about Róbert, will we get anything more out of him?" Erlendur asked.

"Róbert passed away last night," Elínborg said with a trace of guilt in her voice. "He'd had enough of life. Seriously. I think he wanted to call it a day. A miserable old vegetable. That's what he said. God, I'd hate to waste away in hospital like that."

"He wrote a few words in a notebook just before he died," Sigurdur Óli said. "She killed me."

"Aiee, that sense of humour," groaned Elínborg.

"You don't need to see any more of him today," Erlendur said, nodding in Sigurdur Óli's direction. "I'm going to send him to Benjamín's cellar to dig out some clues."

"What do you expect to find there anyway?" Sigurdur Óli said, the grin on his face turning sour.

"He must have written something down if he rented out his chalet. No question of it. We need the names of the people who lived there. The National Statistics Office doesn't seem likely to find them for us. Once we have the names we can check the missing persons register and whether any of these people are alive. And we need an analysis to determine the sex and age as soon as the skeleton is fully uncovered."

"Róbert mentioned three children," Elínborg said. "At least one of them must still be alive."

"Well, this is what we've got to go on," Erlendur said. "And it's not much: a family of five lived in a chalet in Grafarholt, a couple with three children, at some time before, during or after the war. They are the only people we know to have lived in the house, but others could have been there too. It doesn't look as though they were registered as living there. So for now we can assume that one of them is buried there, or someone connected with them. And someone connected with them, the lady Róbert remembered, used to go up there . . ."

"Often and later and was crooked," Elínborg finished the sentence for him. "Could crooked mean she was lame?"

"Wouldn't he have written 'lame' then?" Sigurdur Óli asked.

"What happened to that house?" Elínborg asked. "There's no sign of it on the hill."

"Maybe you'll find that out for us in Benjamín's cellar or from his niece," Erlendur said to Sigurdur Óli. "I clean forgot to ask."

"All we need is the names of the residents and then to check them against the list of missing persons from that time, and it's all sewn up. Isn't that obvious?" Sigurdur Óli said.

"Not necessarily," Erlendur said.

"Why not?"

"You're only talking about the people who were reported missing."

"Who else that went missing should I be talking about?"

"The disappearances that go unreported. You can't be sure that everyone tells the police when someone disappears from their lives. Someone moves to the countryside and is never seen again. Someone moves abroad and is never seen again. Someone flees the country and is slowly forgotten. And then there are travellers who freeze to death. If we have a list of people who were reported to have got lost and died in the area at that time, we ought to examine that too."

"I think we can all agree that it's not that sort of case," Sigurdur Óli said in an authoritative tone that was beginning to get on Erlendur's nerves. "It's out of the question that this man, or whoever it is lying there, froze to death. It was a wilful act. Someone buried him."

"That's precisely what I mean," said Erlendur, who was a walking encyclopaedia about ordeals in the wilderness. "Someone sets off from a farm, say. It's the middle of winter and the weather forecast is bad. Everyone tries to dissuade him. He ignores their advice, convinced he'll make it. The strangest thing about stories of people who freeze to death is that they never listen to advice. It's as if death lures them. They seem to be doomed. As if they want to challenge their fate. Anyway. This man thinks he'll succeed. Except when the storm breaks, it's much worse than he could have imagined. He loses his bearings. Gets lost. In the end he gets covered over in a snowdrift and freezes to death. By then he's miles off the beaten track. That's why the body's never found. He's given up for lost."

Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli exchanged glances, uncertain of what Erlendur was driving at.

"That's a typical Icelandic missing person scenario and we can explain it and understand it because we live in this country and know how the weather suddenly turns bad and how the story of that man repeats itself at regular intervals without anyone questioning it. That's Iceland, people think, and shake their heads. Of course, it was a lot more common in the old days when almost everyone travelled on foot. Whole series of books have been written about it; I'm not the only one who's interested in the subject. Modes of travel have only really changed over the past 60 to 70 years. People used to go missing and although you could never reconcile yourself to it, you understood their fate. There were rarely grounds for treating such disappearances as police or criminal matters."

"What do you mean?" Sigurdur Óli said.

"What was that lecture all about?" Elínborg said.

"What if some of these men or women never set off from the farm in the first place?"

"What are you getting at?" Elínborg asked.

"What if people said so-and-so had set off for the moors or for another farm or went to lay a fishing net in the lake and was never heard of again? A search is mounted, but he's never found and is given up for lost."

"So the whole household conspires to kill this person?" Sigurdur Óli said, sceptical about Erlendur's hypothesis.

"Why not?"

"Then he is stabbed or beaten or shot and buried in the garden?" Elínborg added.

"Until one day Reykjavik has grown so big that he can't rest in peace any longer," Erlendur said.

Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg looked at each other and then back at Erlendur.

"Benjamín Knudsen had a fiancée who disappeared under mysterious circumstances," Erlendur said. "Around the time that the chalet was being built. It was said that she threw herself into the sea and Benjamín was never the same afterwards. Seems to have had plans to revolutionise the Reykjavik retail trade, but he went to pieces when the girl disappeared and his burgeoning ambition evaporated."

"Only she didn't disappear at all, according to your new theory?" Sigurdur Óli said.

"Oh yes, she disappeared."

"But he murdered her."

"Actually I find it difficult to imagine that," Erlendur said. "I've read some of the letters he wrote to her and judging from them he wouldn't have touched a hair on her head."

"It was jealousy then," said Elínborg, an avid reader of romances. "He killed her out of jealousy. His love for her seems to have been genuine. Buried her up there and never went back. Finito."

"What I'm thinking is this," Erlendur said. "Isn't a young man overreacting a bit if he turns senile when his sweetheart dies on him? Even if she commits suicide. I gather that Benjamín was a broken man after she went missing. Could there be something more to it?"

"Could he have kept a lock of her hair?" Elínborg pondered, and Erlendur thought she still had her mind on pulp fiction. "Maybe inside a picture frame or a locket," she added. "If he loved her that much."

"A lock of hair?" Sigurdur Óli repeated.

"He's so slow on the uptake," said Erlendur, who had grasped Elínborg's train of thought.

"What do you mean, a lock of hair?" Sigurdur Óli said.

"That would rule her out if nothing else."

"Who?" Sigurdur Óli looked at them in turn. "Are you talking about DNA?"

"Then there's the lady on the hill," Elínborg said. "It would be good to track her down."

"The green lady," Erlendur said thoughtfully, apparently to himself.

"Erlendur," Sigurdur Óli said.

"Yes?"

"Obviously she can't be green."

"Sigurdur Óli."

"Yes?"

"Do you think I'm a total idiot?"

The telephone on Erlendur's desk rang. It was Skarphédinn, the archaeologist.

"We're getting there," Skarphédinn said. "We could uncover the rest of the skeleton in two days or so."

"Two days!" Erlendur roared.

"Or thereabouts. We haven't found anything yet that looks like a weapon. You might think we're being a little meticulous about it, but I think it's better to do the job properly. Do you want to come and take a look?"

"Yes, I was on my way," Erlendur said.

"Maybe you could buy some pastries on the way," Skarphédinn said, and in his mind's eye Erlendur could see his yellow fangs.

"Pastries?"

"Danish pastries," Skarphédinn said.

Erlendur slammed down the phone, asked Elínborg to join him in Grafarholt and told Sigurdur Óli to go to Benjamín's cellar to try to find something about the chalet that the merchant built but apparently lost all interest in after his life turned to misery.

On the way to Grafarholt, Erlendur, still thinking about people who went missing and were lost in snowstorms, remembered the story about Jon Austmann. He froze to death, probably in Blöndugil in 1780. His horse was discovered with its throat slit, but all that was found of Jon was one of his hands.

It was inside a blue knitted mitten.

*

Simon's father was the monster in all his nightmares.

It had been that way for as long as he could remember. He feared the monster more than anything else in his life, and when it attacked his mother all that Simon could think of was coming to her defence. He imagined the inevitable battle like an adventure story in which the knight vanquishes the fire-breathing dragon, but in his dreams Simon never won.