Voices (32 page)

She looked at Erlendur.

'I didn't realise it was that hard. That hard to kill someone.'

Elínborg appeared in the doorway and gestured to Erlendur that she couldn't understand why they didn't arrest the girl.

'Where's the knife?' Erlendur asked.

'The knife?' Ösp said, walking over to him.

'The one you used.'

She paused for a moment.

'I put it back where it belongs,' she said eventually. 'I cleaned it as well as I could in the staff coffee room, then got rid of it before you came.'

'And where is it?'

'I put it back where it belongs.'

'In the kitchen, where the cutlery's kept?'

'Yes.'

'The hotel must own five hundred knives like that,' Erlendur said in desperation. 'How are we supposed to find it?'

'You could start in the buffet'

"The buffet?'

'Someone's sure to be using it'

34

Erlendur handed over Ösp to Elínborg and the officers and hurried up to his room where Eva Lind was waiting for him. He put his card in the slot and threw the door open to find that she had opened the big window completely and was sitting on the windowsill, looking down at the snow falling to the ground several floors below.

'Eva,' he said calmly.

Eva said something he couldn't make out.

'Come on, dear,' he said, approaching her cautiously.

'It looks so easy,' Eva Lind said.

'Eva, come on,' Erlendur said in a low voice. 'Home.'

She turned around. She took a long look at him, and then nodded.

'Let's go,' she said quietly, stepped down onto the floor and closed the window.

He walked over to her and kissed her on the forehead.

'Did I rob you of your childhood, Eva?' he said in a low voice.

'Eh?' she said.

'Nothing,' he said.

Erlendur took a long look into her eyes. Sometimes he could see white swans in them.

Now they were black.

*

Erlendur's mobile rang in the lift on the way down to the lobby. He recognised the voice at once.

'I just wanted to wish you a merry Christmas,' Valgerdur said, and she seemed to be whispering down the phone.

'You too,' Erlendur said. 'Merry Christmas.'

In the lobby, Erlendur glanced into the dining room packed with tourists gorging themselves on the Christmas Eve buffet and chattering away in all imaginable languages, their joyful murmuring spreading all over the ground floor. He couldn't help thinking that one of them was holding a murder weapon in his hands.

He told the head of reception that Rósant may well have been responsible for sending the woman who slept with him that night and who demanded payment afterwards. The man replied that he was beginning to suspect something of the sort. He had already informed the owners of the hotel about what manager and head waiter were up to, but did not know how they would tackle the matter.

Erlendur caught a glimpse of the hotel manager looking in astonishment at Eva Lind. He was going to pretend he hadn't noticed him, but the manager darted into his path.

'I' just wanted to thank you, and of course you don't need to pay for your stay!'

'I've already settled,' Erlendur said. 'Goodbye.'

'What about Henry Wapshott?' the manager asked, blocking Erlendur's way. 'What are you going to do with him?'

Erlendur stopped. He was holding Eva Lind by the hand and she looked at the manager with drowsy eyes.

"We're sending him home. Was there anything else?'

The manager dithered.

'Are you going to do anything about those lies the girl told you about the conference guests?'

Erlendur smiled to himself.

'Are you worried about that?'

'It's all lies.'

Erlendur put his arm around Eva Lind and they set off towards the front door.

'We'll see,' he said.

When they crossed the lobby Erlendur noticed people stopping all about and looking around. The sentimental Christmas songs were no longer jingling through the speakers, and Erlendur smiled to himself when he heard that the reception manager had agreed to his request and changed the music on the sound system. He thought about the records. He had asked Stefanía where she thought they might be, but she didn't know. Had no idea where her brother kept them, and was uncertain whether they would ever be found.

Gradually the murmuring in the dining room died down. The guests exchanged astonished looks and peered up at the ceiling in search of the wondrously beautiful song that reached their ears. The staff stopped in their tracks to listen. Time seemed to stand still.

They left the hotel and in his mind Erlendur sang the beautiful hymn in chorus with the young Gudlaugur, and sensed once again the deep yearning in the boy's voice.

O Father, turn me into a light for all my life's short stay...

Now read the first chapter of
Arnaldur Indridason's next novel

The Draining Lake

available now from
Harvill Secker

1

She stood motionless for a long time, staring at the bones as if it should not be possible for them to be there. Any more than for her.

At first she thought it was another sheep that had drowned in the lake, until she moved closer and saw the skull half-buried in the lake bed and the shape of a human skeleton. The ribs protruded from the sand and beneath them could be seen the outlines of the pelvis and thigh bones. The skeleton was lying on its left side so she could see the right side of the skull, the empty eye sockets and three teeth in the upper jaw. One had a large silver filling. There was a wide hole in the skull itself, about the size of a matchbox, which she instinctively thought could have been made by a hammer. She bent down and stared at the skull. With some hesitation she explored the hole with her finger. The skull was full of sand.

The thought of a hammer crossed her mind again and she shuddered at the idea of someone being struck over the head with one. But the hole was too large to have been left by a hammer. She decided not to touch the skeleton again. Instead, she took out her mobile and dialled emergency services.

She wondered what to say. Somehow this was so completely unreal. A skeleton so far out in the lake, buried on its sandy bed. Nor was she on her best form. Visions of hammers and matchboxes. She found it difficult to concentrate. Her thoughts were roaming all over the place and she had great trouble rounding them up again.

It was probably because she was hung-over. After planning to spend the day at home she had changed her mind and gone to the lake. She had persuaded herself that she must check the instruments. She was a scientist. She had always wanted to be a scientist and knew that the measurements had to be monitored carefully. But she had a splitting headache and her thoughts were far from logical. The National Energy Authority had held its annual dinner dance the night before and, as was sometimes the way, she had had too much to drink.

She thought about the man lying in her bed at home and knew that it was on his account that she had hauled herself off to the lake. She did not want to be there when he woke up and hoped that he would be gone when she returned. He had come back to her flat after the dance but was not very exciting. No more than the others she had met since her divorce. He hardly talked about anything except his CD collection and carried on long after she had given up feigning any interest. Then she fell asleep in a living-room chair. When she woke up she saw that he had got into her bed, where he was sleeping with his mouth open, wearing tiny underpants and black socks.

'Emergency services,' a voice said over the line.

'Hello – I'd like to report that I've found some bones,' she said. 'There's a skull with a hole in it.'

She grimaced. Bloody hangover! Who says that sort of thing? A skull with a hole in it. She remembered a phrase from a children's rhyme about a penny with a hole in it. Or was it a shilling?

'Your name, please,' said the neutral emergency-services voice.

She straightened out her jumbled thoughts and stated her name.

'Where is it?'

'Lake Kleifarvatn. North side.'

'Did you pull it up in a fishing net?'

'No. It's buried on the bed of the lake.'

'Are you a diver?'

'No, it's standing up out of the bed. Ribs and the skull.'

'It's on the bottom of the lake?'

'Yes.'

'So how can you see it?'

'I'm standing here looking at it'

'Did you bring it to dry land?'

'No, I haven't touched it,' she lied instinctively.

The voice on the telephone paused.

'What kind of crap is this?' the voice said at last, angrily. 'Is this a hoax? You know what you can get for wasting our time?'

'It's not a hoax. I'm standing here looking at it'

'So you can walk on water, I suppose?'

'The lake's gone,' she said. 'There's no water any more. Just the bed. Where the skeleton is.'

'What do you mean, the lake's gone?'

'It hasn't all gone, but it's dry now where I'm standing. I'm a hydrologist with the Energy Authority. I was recording the water level when I discovered this skeleton. There's a hole in the skull and most of the bones are buried in the sand on the bottom. I thought it was a sheep at first.'

'A sheep?'

'We found one the other day that had drowned years ago. When the lake was bigger.'

There was another pause.

'Wait there,' said the voice reluctantly. 'I'll send a patrol car.'

She stood still by the skeleton for a while, then walked over to the shore and measured the distance. She was certain the bones had not surfaced when she was taking measurements at the same place a fortnight earlier. Otherwise she would have seen them. The water level had dropped by more than a metre since then.

The scientists from the Energy Authority had been puzzling over this conundrum ever since they'd noticed that the water level in Lake Kleifarvatn was falling rapidly. The authority had set up its first automatic surface-level monitor in 1964 and one of the hydrologists' tasks was to check the measurements. In the summer of 2000 the monitor seemed to have broken. An incredible amount of water was draining from the lake every day, twice the normal volume.

She walked back to the skeleton. She was itching to take a better look, dig it up and brush off the sand, but imagined that the police would be none too pleased at that. She wondered whether it was male or female and vaguely recalled having read somewhere, probably in a detective story, that their skeletons were almost identical: only the pelvises were different. Then she remembered someone telling her not to believe anything she read in detective stories. Since the skeleton was buried in the sand she couldn't see the pelvis, and it struck her that she would not have known the difference anyway.

Her hangover intensified and she sat down on the sand beside the bones. It was a Sunday morning and the occasional car drove past the lake. She imagined they were families out for a Sunday drive to Herdísarvík and on to Selvogur. That was a popular and scenic route, across the lava field and hills and past the lake down to the sea. She thought about the families in the cars. Her own husband had left her when the doctors ruled out their ever having children together. He remarried shortly afterwards and now had two lovely children. He had found happiness.

All that she had found was a man she barely knew, lying in her bed in his socks. Decent men became harder to find as the years went by. Most of them were either divorced like her or, even worse, had never been in a relationship at all.

She looked woefully at the bones, half-buried in the sand, and was close to tears.

About an hour later a police car approached from Hafnarfjördur. It was in no hurry, lazily threading its way along the road towards the lake. This was May and the sun was high in the sky, reflecting off the smooth surface of the water. She sat on the sand watching the road and when she waved to the car it pulled over. Two police officers got out, looked in her direction and walked towards her.

They stood over the skeleton in silence for a long time until one of them poked a rib with his foot.

'Do you reckon he was fishing?' he said to his colleague.

'On a boat, you mean?'

'Or waded here.'

"There's a hole,' she said, looking at each of them in turn. 'In the skull.'

One officer bent down.

'Well,' he said.

'He could have fallen over in the boat and broken his skull,' his colleague said.

'It's full of sand,' said the first one.

'Shouldn't we notify CID?' the other asked.

'Aren't most of them in America?' his colleague said, looking up into the sky. 'At a crime conference?'

The other officer nodded. Then they stood quietly over the bones for a while until one of them turned to her.

'Where's all the water gone?' he asked.

'There are various theories,' she said. 'What are you going to do? Can I go home now?'

After exchanging glances they took down her name and thanked her, without apologising for having kept her waiting. She didn't care. She wasn't in a hurry. It was a beautiful day by the lake and she would have enjoyed it even more in the company of her hangover if she had not chanced upon the skeleton. She wondered whether the man in the black socks had left her flat and certainly hoped so. Looked forward to renting a video that evening and snuggling up under a blanket in front of the television.

She looked down at the bones and at the hole in the skull.

Maybe she would rent a good detective film.