‘There was a different voice . . .’ the woman said.
‘Different?’
‘Yes, not yours.’
‘What did it say?’
‘It said I should be careful.’
‘I don’t know what it was,’ the medium said. ‘I don’t remember any—’
‘It reminded me . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘It reminded me of my father.’
‘The cold . . . doesn’t come from there. The intense cold I’m feeling. It’s directly connected to you. There’s something dangerous about it. Something you should beware of.’
Silence.
‘Is everything all right?’ the medium asked.
‘What do you mean, “beware of”?’
‘I don’t know. But the cold doesn’t bode well. I do know that.’
‘Can you summon my mother?’
‘I don’t summon anyone. She’ll appear if it’s appropriate. I don’t summon anyone.’
‘It was so brief.’
‘I’m afraid there’s not much I can do about that.’
‘He seemed very angry. He said: “You don’t know what you’re doing.” ’
‘You’ll have to decide for yourself what you want to read into that.’
‘Can I come again?’
‘Of course. I hope I’ve been able to help you a little.’
‘You have, thank you. I thought perhaps . . .’
‘What?’
‘My mother died of cancer.’
‘I understand,’ Erlendur heard the medium say sympathetically. ‘You didn’t tell me. Is it long since she died?’
‘Nearly two years.’
‘And did she make contact here?’
‘No, but I can sense her. I can sense her presence.’
‘Has she given you any sign? Have you been to any other psychics?’
A lengthy silence followed the question.
‘I’m sorry,’ the medium said. ‘Of course, it’s none of my business.’
‘I’ve been waiting for her to come to me in a dream but she hasn’t.’
‘Why have you been waiting for that?’
‘We made . . .’
Pause.
‘Yes?’
‘We made a pact.’
‘Oh?’
‘She . . . we talked about . . . that she would give me a sign.’
‘What sort of sign?’
‘If there was life after death she was going to send me a message.’
‘What kind of message? A dream?’
‘No, not a dream. But I’ve been waiting to dream about her. I do so long to see her again. Our sign was a bit different.’
‘You mean . . . Has she done it, has she given you a sign?’
‘Yes, I think so – the other day.’
‘What was it?’ the medium asked, the eagerness evident in his voice. ‘What was the sign? What kind of sign was it supposed to be?’
There was another long pause.
‘She was Professor of French at the university. Her favourite author was Marcel Proust and his work
In Search of Lost Time
. She had all seven volumes in French in a beautifully bound edition. She said she would use Proust. The sign would mean yes, there was life after death.’
‘And what happened?’
‘You think I’m mad.’
‘No, I don’t. People have been preoccupied with the question of whether there is life after death since time immemorial. We’ve been trying to find the answer for thousands of years, both scientifically and on a personal level, like you and your mother. It’s not the first time I’ve heard a story like this. And I don’t judge people.’
His words were followed by a long hiatus. Erlendur sat in his chair, engrossed. There was something strangely alluring about the dead woman’s voice, something unwavering and steadfast that Erlendur believed in. He was extremely sceptical about what she was saying and convinced that seances like the one he was listening to were of no use to anyone, and yet he was certain that the woman genuinely believed what she was saying, that what she had experienced was real to her.
Finally the silence was broken.
‘At first, after my mother died, I sat in the living room staring at Proust’s works, not daring to take my eyes off them. Nothing happened. Day after day I sat watching the bookcase. I even slept in front of the books. Weeks passed. Months. The first thing I did when I woke up in the morning was to look at the bookcase. The last thing I did at night was to check if anything had happened. Gradually I realised that it was pointless and the more I thought about it and the longer I stared at the bookshelves, the better I understood why nothing was happening.’
‘And why was it? What did you realise?’
‘It dawned on me over time and I was immensely grateful. My mother was helping me through my grief. She’d given me something to focus on after her death. She knew I’d be devastated, whatever she said. She did her best to prepare me for her death; we used to have long conversations until she became too weak to talk. We discussed death and how she would send me a sign. But of course all that happened was that she made the process of grieving easier for me.’
Silence.
‘I don’t know if you understand me.’
‘I do. Go on.’
‘Then the other day, almost two years after my mother died – I’d given up watching the bookshelves and Proust by then – I woke up one morning and went to put on the coffee and fetch the paper, and when I was on my way back to the kitchen I happened to glance into the living room and . . .’
The machine hissed in the silence that followed the woman’s words.
‘What?’ the medium whispered.
‘It was lying open on the floor.’
‘What was?’
‘
Swann’s Way
by Marcel Proust. The first volume in the series.’
Another long silence.
‘Is that why you came to me?’
‘Do you believe in life after death?’
‘Yes,’ Erlendur heard the medium whisper. ‘I do. I believe in life after death.’
When Erlendur woke up early next morning, his thoughts returned to the old man who had visited him at the police station to ask for news of his son, almost thirty years after the boy’s disappearance. It was one of the first cases that Erlendur had kept open long after everyone else had given up on it. In those days the CID had been based in an industrial estate in Kópavogur. He remembered from around the same time two other missing-person cases that he had not investigated himself but whose details he was familiar with nonetheless. One, which had occurred several weeks earlier, involved a young man who had left a party in Keflavík with the intention of walking to the neighbouring village of Njardvík, but had never arrived there. It was winter and a blizzard had blown up during the night. Search parties were sent out and after three days one of his shoes was found down by the tide-line. He had been on the right track but seemed to have been driven by the storm towards the sea. Nothing had been heard of him since. He had been wearing a shirt, with no coat or sweater, when he left the party and had been drunk, according to his fellow partygoers.
The other case concerned a young girl from the northern town of Akureyri. She was studying at the university and rented a flat in Reykjavík but it was impossible to tell exactly when she had disappeared. When her landlord did not receive his rent in advance for the month, he went round to chase up the money but found no one home. She did not have any compulsory classes at the university because she was writing up her biology dissertation at the time. Moreover, she was an only child and her parents were abroad on a two-month trip around Asia and were only in sporadic contact with her. By the time her parents came home and went to visit their daughter in town, she had vanished. The landlord let them into the flat. Everything was as it should have been, as if she had just popped out for a moment. Her textbooks lay open on the tables where she had been working on the dissertation. There were a couple of glasses in the sink and she had not made the bed. She had been in telephone contact with her friends in Akureyri some time before and two of her fellow students had heard from her and assumed that she had gone north to Akureyri some weeks earlier. To lend support to this theory, the battered old Austin Mini that she drove was also missing.
Erlendur went into the kitchen and turned on the coffee-maker. He put some bread in the toaster, buttered it when it was done, then brought out the cheese and marmalade. He pondered what he had heard on the tape that Karen had lent him and wondered what to do about it. He now had a better appreciation of María’s state of mind before she’d killed herself.
His thoughts moved on to Sindri and Eva and his ex-wife Halldóra. He couldn’t envisage a meeting between Halldóra and himself, whatever importance Eva Lind might place on bringing them together. Erlendur very rarely thought of Halldóra because when he did so it raked up memories of all the fights and quarrels they had had before he’d walked out on her and their two children. The divorce had been brewing for a long time. He had wanted to do everything in his power to mitigate its effects but every time he had hinted to her that he wished to end the relationship and move out, she’d cut him off, saying it was absurd, that they could work through their problems, and anyway she wasn’t aware of any problems and had no idea what he was talking about.
Erlendur flicked through the papers but couldn’t shake off the memory of María’s voice and her words to the medium. The seance could not have been held long ago; on the tape she had talked of it being just under two years since her mother died, and neither, clearly, had it been her first meeting with the medium. He contemplated the powerful bond between María and her mother. It must have been exceptional. They had probably been brought even closer by the father’s death at Lake Thingvallavatn and had supported each other through thick and thin. Could it be anything other than coincidence that María had found the book on the floor, the same book that they had agreed would be a sign of the afterlife? Or had someone else taken a hand in events? Had María told someone, her husband or someone else, about the pact with her mother in the interval between Leonóra’s death and the book’s falling from the shelf, and subsequently forgotten the fact? Had she herself unwittingly removed the book from the shelf and failed to put it back properly? He couldn’t say. The recording ended with María explaining that she had come to the medium because of the sign that she thought she had been sent by her mother; she had wanted to receive confirmation, to make contact with her mother if possible and to learn to be reconciled to her death. The suicide indicated that María had not been reconciled; that, on the contrary, the whole business had finally tipped her over the edge.
Erlendur tried to find a reason for the strangely powerful urge that had gripped him when he’d listened to the tape. An urge to know more, to become better acquainted with the woman who had taken her life, with her friends and family, and to find out why her life had followed the path that was to end in a noose at the holiday cottage. He wanted to get to the bottom of the matter, wanted to track down the medium and interrogate him, dig up the story of the accident on Lake Thingvallavatn, find out who María was. He thought about the voice that had warned María to be careful, that she didn’t know what she was doing. Where had that deep, gruff voice come from?
Erlendur sat at the kitchen table, his coffee forgotten, unsure why he was wasting time on this, and his thoughts strayed back to his mother in the basement flat where she had moved after his father’s death. She had worked in a fish factory, as tirelessly industrious as ever, and Erlendur used to visit her regularly, sometimes bringing along his dirty laundry. She would feed him and then they used to sit and listen to the radio or else he would read to her; his mother with her eternal knitting – perhaps a scarf that she would later give him. They had little need to talk; the companionable silence was enough for them.
She had still only been middle-aged when his father had died but there was never anyone else in her life. She said she enjoyed being alone. She kept in touch with friends and relatives out east, and former neighbours who had also moved to Reykjavík. Iceland was changing; people were drifting away from the countryside. She assured Erlendur that she never felt lonely in the city but he bought her a television anyway. She was always self-reliant and rarely asked him to do anything for her.
They hardly ever talked of Bergur who had been snatched from them with such shocking suddenness. At times she would make some general remark about the boy or both brothers, but she never talked of the loss of her son. To her, it was a private matter and Erlendur respected her reticence.
‘Your father would have liked to know before he died,’ she once remarked when he was with her. They had been sitting in silence most of the evening. Erlendur always visited his mother on the anniversary of the day it had happened, the day when he and his younger brother had been caught in the blizzard with his father.
‘Yes,’ Erlendur replied. He knew what his mother meant.
‘Do you think we’ll ever know?’ she asked, looking up from the book that he had brought her. He had finally summoned up the courage to show it to her late that evening, unsure if he was doing the right thing.