Silence of the Grave (16 page)

"I mean, to detract attention from himself."

"I'm not aware that he ever came under any suspicion, and it was quite a long time later that he told my mother all this. It was just before he died."

"He never stopped thinking about her."

"That's what my mother said."

Sigurdur Óli thought for a moment.

"Could the shame have led her to suicide?"

"Definitely. She not only betrayed Benjamín, she was pregnant and refused to say whose child it was."

"Elínborg, the woman I work with, talked to her sister. She said their father committed suicide. Hanged himself. That it was tough for Sólveig because they were particularly close."

"Tough for Sólveig?"

"Yes."

"That's odd!"

"How so?"

"He did hang himself, but it could hardly have upset Sólveig."

"What do you mean?"

"They said he was driven to it by grief."

"Grief?"

"Yes, that's the impression I got."

"Grief over what?"

"His daughter's disappearance," Elsa said. "He hanged himself after she went missing."

17

At long last, Erlendur found something to talk to his daughter about. He had done a lot of research at the National Library, gathering information from newspapers and journals that were published in Reykjavik in 1910, the year that Halley's comet passed the Earth with its tail supposedly full of cyanide. He obtained special permission to browse through the papers instead of running them through the microfilm reader. He loved poring over old newspapers and journals, hearing them rustle and inhaling the scent of yellowed paper, experiencing the atmosphere of the time they preserved on their crisp pages, then, now and for ever.

Evening had set in when he sat down at Eva Lind's bedside and began telling her about the discovery of the skeleton in Grafarholt. He told her about how the archaeologists demarcated small areas above the site of the bones, and about Skarphédinn with his fangs which prevented him from closing his mouth completely. He told her about the redcurrant bushes and Róbert's strange description of the crooked, green lady. He told her about Benjamín Knudsen and his fiancée, who vanished one day, and the effect her disappearance had on her lover as a young man, and he told her about Höskuldur, who had rented the chalet during the war, and of Benjamín's mention of the woman who lived on the hill and who had been conceived in the gas tank the night that everyone thought the world would be destroyed.

"It was the year Mark Twain died," Erlendur said.

Halley's comet was heading towards Earth at an unimaginable speed with its tail full of poisonous gases. Even if the Earth escaped being smashed to smithereens in a collision, people believed, it would pass through the comet's tail and all life would perish; those who feared the worst imagined themselves consumed by fire and acid. Panic broke out, not only in Iceland but all over the world. In Austria, in Trieste and Dalmatia, people sold all they owned for next to nothing, to go on a spree for the short time they assumed they had left to live. In Switzerland, the young ladies' finishing schools stood empty because families thought they should be together when the comet destroyed Earth. Clergymen were instructed to talk about astronomy in laymen's terms to allay people's fears.

In Reykjavik, it was claimed that women took to their beds from fear of doomsday and many seriously believed that, as one of the papers phrased it, "the cold spring that year was caused by the comet". Old people talked of how terrible the weather had been the last time the comet approached Earth.

Around that time, in Reykjavik, gas was hailed as the key to the future. Gas lamps were widely used in the city, although not so extensively as to provide proper street lighting, but people lit their homes with gas as well. The next step planned was to erect a modern gasworks on the outskirts of town to meet the population's entire gas requirement for decades to come. The Mayor of Reykjavik negotiated with a German firm, and Carl Franke, an engineer, duly arrived in Iceland from Bremen and with a team of experts began building the Reykjavik Gasworks. It was opened in the autumn of 1910.

The tank itself was a huge contraption, with a volume of 1500 cubic metres, and was known as the "bell jar" because it floated in water, rising or sinking according to how much gas it contained. Never having beheld such a spectacle, people flocked to watch its construction.

When the tank was nearing completion, a group of people assembled inside it on the night of May 18. They believed that the tank was the only place in Iceland to offer any hope of protection from the comet's poisonous gases. Word spread that there was a party in the tank and people swarmed to take part in a night of wild abandon before doomsday.

Accounts of what went on in the tank that night spread like wildfire for the next few days. It was claimed that drunken revellers held an orgy till dawn, until it was obvious that the Earth would not perish, neither in a collision with Halley's comet nor in the hellfire of its tail.

It was also rumoured that a number of babies were conceived in the tank that night, and Erlendur wondered whether one of them might have met her fate in Grafarholt many years later and been buried there.

"The Gasworks manager's office still stands," he told Eva Lind, unaware whether she could hear him or not. "But apart from that, all sign of the Gasworks has gone. In the end, the power source of the future turned out to be electricity, not gas. The Gasworks was on Raudarárstígur, where Hlemmur bus station is now, and it still performed a useful function despite being a thing of the past; in biting frost and bad weather, homeless people would go inside to warm themselves by the burners, especially at night, and it was often crowded in the tank house in the darkest part of winter."

Eva Lind made no movement while Erlendur told his story. Nor did he expect her to; he did not expect miracles.

"The Gasworks was built on a plot of land called Elsumýrarblettur," he continued, smiling at the irony of Providence. "Elsumýrarblettur stood undeveloped for years after the Gasworks was demolished and the tank was removed. Then a block of offices was built on the site, opposite the bus station. That block now houses the Reykjavik police force. My office is there. Precisely where the tank once stood."

Erlendur paused.

"We're all waiting for the end of the world," he said. "Whether it's a comet or something else. We all have our private doomsday. Some bring it upon themselves. Others avoid it. Most of us fear it, show it respect. Not you. You could never show respect for anything. And you don't fear your own little doomsday."

Erlendur sat quietly watching his daughter and wondered whether it meant anything, talking to her when she did not seem to hear a word he uttered. He thought back to what the doctor said and even felt a hint of relief, talking to his daughter this way. He had seldom been able to talk to her calmly and at ease. The tension between them had coloured their entire relationship and they had not often had the chance to sit down for a quiet conversation.

But they were hardly talking together. Erlendur smiled wryly. He was talking and she was not listening.

In that respect, nothing had changed between them.

Maybe this was not what she wanted to hear. The discovery of the skeleton, the Gasworks, the comet and the orgy. Maybe she wanted him to talk about something completely different. Himself. Them.

He stood up, bent down and kissed her on the forehead and left the room. Engrossed in his thoughts, instead of turning right down the corridor and out of the ward, without noticing it he went in the opposite direction, into intensive care, past dimly lit rooms where other patients lay, their lives in the balance, connected to all the latest equipment. He only snapped out of his trance at the end of the corridor. He was about to turn round when a small woman came out of the innermost room and bumped straight into him.

"Excuse me," she said in a slightly squeaky voice.

"No, excuse me," he said in a fluster, looking all around. "I didn't mean to come this way. I was leaving the ward."

"I was called here," the little woman said. She had very thin hair and was plump with a huge bosom just barely contained by a violet T-shirt, and she was round with a friendly face. Erlendur noticed a wisp of dark moustache over her upper lip. A glance into the room she had emerged from revealed an elderly man lying under a sheet, his face thin and pallid. On a chair beside his bed sat a woman draped in a luxurious fur coat, dabbing a handkerchief to her nose with a gloved hand.

"There are still some people who believe in mediums," the woman said in a low voice, as if to herself.

"Excuse me, I didn't quite catch . . ."

"I was asked to come here," she said, gently leading Erlendur away from the room. "He's dying. They can't do a thing. His wife is with him. She asked me to find out if I could make contact with him. He's in a coma and they say nothing can be done, but he refuses to die. Like he doesn't want to go. She asked me to help, but I couldn't detect him."

"Detect him?" Erlendur said.

"In the afterlife."

"The after . . . are you a medium?"

"She doesn't understand that he's dying. He went out a few days ago and the next thing she knew the police called to tell her about a car crash on the West Road. He was heading for Borgarfjördur. A lorry swerved into his path. They say there's no hope of saving him. Brain-dead."

She looked up at Erlendur, who stared blankly back.

"She's my friend."

Erlendur had no idea what she was talking about or why she was telling him all this in the dimly lit corridor, whispering conspiratorially. He said a rather curt farewell to this woman whom he had never seen before, and was about to walk away when she grabbed his arm.

"Wait," she said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Wait."

"Excuse me, but this is none of my busi . . ."

"There's a boy out there," the little woman said.

Erlendur did not hear properly what she said.

"There's a little boy in the blizzard," she went on.

Erlendur looked at her in astonishment and jerked his arm away from her as if he had been stabbed.

"What are you talking about?" he said.

"Do you know who it is?" the woman asked, looking up at Erlendur.

"I don't have the faintest idea what you're going on about," Erlendur snapped, turned round and strode down the corridor towards the exit sign.

"You have nothing to fear," she called after him. "He accepts it. He's reconciled to what happened. It was nobody's fault."

Erlendur stopped in his tracks, turned slowly round and stared at the little woman at the other end of the corridor. Her persistence was beyond his comprehension.

"Who is that boy?" she asked. "Why is he with you?"

"There is no boy," Erlendur snorted. "I don't know what you mean. I don't know you from Adam and I have no idea what boy you're talking about. Leave me alone!" he shouted.

Then he spun round and stormed out of the ward.

"Leave me alone," he hissed through clenched teeth.

18

Edward Hunter had been an officer with the American wartime forces in Iceland, one of the few members of the military who did not leave when peace was restored. Jim, the secretary at the British embassy, had located him without any great difficulty through the American embassy. He was looking for members of the British and American occupying forces, but according to the Home Office in London, few were still alive. Most of the British troops who went to Iceland lost their lives in combat in North Africa and Italy or on the western front, in the invasion of Normandy in 1944. Only a few Americans stationed in Iceland subsequently went into battle; most stayed for the duration of the war. Several remained behind, married Icelandic women and eventually became Icelandic nationals. One of them was Edward Hunter.

Erlendur received a call from Jim early in the morning.

"I talked to the American embassy and they directed me to this man Hunter. I talked to him myself to save you the bother. I hope that was in order."

"Thank you," Erlendur said.

"He lives in Kópavogur."

"Has he been there since the war?"

"Unfortunately I don't know that."

"But he still lives here, in other words, this Hunter," Erlendur said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

He had not slept well that night, he dozed and had bad dreams. The words of the little thin-haired woman at the hospital the previous evening were preying on his mind. He had no faith in mediums acting as go-betweens for the afterlife, and he did not believe that they could see what was hidden to others. On the contrary, he dismissed them as frauds, every one of them: clever at winkling information out of people and reading body language to establish details about the individual in question, which in half the cases might fit and in the other half might be plain wrong – simple probability. Erlendur scoffed at the subject as bloody nonsense when it had arisen at the office once, to Elínborg's great chagrin. She believed in mediums and life after death, and for some reason she expected him to be open to such ideas. Possibly because he was from the countryside. That turned out to be a huge misunderstanding. He was certainly not open to the supernatural. Yet there was something about the woman at the hospital and what she said that Erlendur could not stop thinking about, and it had disturbed his sleep.

"Yes, he still lives here now," Jim said, with profuse apologies for having woken Erlendur; he thought all Icelanders got up early. He did so himself, the endless spring daylight showed him no mercy.

"Hang on, so he's married to an Icelander?"

"I've spoken to him," Jim said again in his English accent as if he had not heard the question. "He's expecting your call. Colonel Hunter served for a while with the military police in Reykjavik and he remembers an incident in the depot on the hill that he's prepared to tell you about."

"What incident?" Erlendur asked.

"He'll tell you about it. And I'll go on trying to dig up something about soldiers who died or went missing here. You ought to ask Colonel Hunter about that too."

They said goodbye and Erlendur lumbered into the kitchen to make coffee. He was still deep in thought. Could a medium say which side people were on if they were-halfway between life and death? Without accepting it in the slightest, he thought to himself that if it offered consolation to people who had lost loved ones, he was not going to oppose it. It was consolation that mattered, not where it came from.

The seething coffee burned his tongue when he sipped it. He avoided thinking about what was really haunting him that night and morning, and managed to keep it at bay.

More or less.

Ex-US army colonel Edward Hunter cut more an Icelandic than an American figure when, dressed in a buttoned-up woollen sweater and sporting a scraggy white beard, he welcomed Erlendur and Elínborg to his detached house in Kópavogur. His hair was unkempt and a little scruffy, but he was both friendly and polite when he shook them by the hand and told them just to call him Ed. In that respect he reminded Erlendur of Jim. He told them his wife was in the States, visiting his sister. Himself, he went there less and less.

On their way to visit Ed, Elínborg told Erlendur that, according to Bára, Benjamín's fiancée was wearing a green coat when she went missing. Elínborg thought this interesting, but Erlendur stifled any further discussion by saying rather brashly that he did not believe in ghosts. Elínborg had the feeling the subject was closed.

Ed showed them into a large sitting room and Erlendur saw scant evidence of the military life as he took a look around: in front of him were two gloomy Icelandic landscape paintings, Icelandic ceramic statues and framed family photographs. Nothing that reminded Erlendur of military service or World War II.

Having expected them, Ed had coffee, tea and biscuits ready, and after a polite chat, which rather bored all three of them, the old soldier went into action and asked how he could help. He spoke almost flawless Icelandic, in short, concise phrases as if the discipline of the army had taught him to keep to the bare essentials.

"Jim at the British embassy told us you served here during the war, including a spell with the military police, and were involved in a case concerning the depot at the present site of Grafarholt golf course."

"Yes, I play golf there regularly now," Ed said. "I heard the news of the bones on the hill. Jim told me you thought they might belong to one of our men. British or American."

"Was there some kind of incident at the depot?" Erlendur asked.

"They used to steal," Ed said. "It happens at most depots. I guess you'd call it 'wastage'. A group of soldiers stole provisions and sold them to the Icelanders. It started on a very small scale, but gradually they got more confident and in the end it became quite a large operation. The quartermaster was in on it with them. They were all sentenced. Left the country. I remember it well. I kept a diary and browsed through it after Jim phoned. It all came back to me, the theft. I also rang my friend from that time, Phil, who was my superior. We went over it together."

"How was the theft discovered?" Elínborg asked.

"Greed got the better of them. Theft on the scale they were practising is difficult to conceal, and rumours about irregularities spread."

"Who was involved?" Erlendur took out a cigarette and Ed nodded to show that he did not mind him smoking. Elínborg gave Erlendur a reproachful look.

"Civilians. Mostly. The quartermaster was the highest ranked. And at least one Icelander. A man who lived on the hill. On the other side from the depot."

"Do you remember his name?"

"No. He lived with his family in an unpainted shack. We found a lot of merchandise there. From the depot. I wrote in my diary that he had three children, one of them handicapped, a girl. The other two were boys. The mother . . ."

Ed fell silent.

"What about the mother?" Elínborg said. "You were going to say something about the mother."

"I think she had a pretty rough time." Ed fell silent again and grew pensive, as if trying to transport himself back to that distant time when he investigated the theft, walked into an Icelandic house and encountered a woman whom he could tell was the victim of violence. And not only the victim of a single, recent attack; it was obvious that she suffered persistent and systematic abuse, both physical and psychological.

He barely noticed her when he entered the house with four other military policemen. The first thing he saw was the handicapped girl lying on her makeshift bed in the kitchen. He saw the two boys standing side by side next to her, transfixed and terrified as the soldiers burst in. He saw the man leap up from the kitchen table. They had arrived unannounced and clearly he was not expecting them. They could tell at a glance whether people were tough. Whether they posed a threat. This man would not give them any trouble.

Then he saw the woman. It was very early spring and gloomy, and it took him a moment to adjust to the dark inside. As if hiding, the woman stood where he thought he could see a passage leading to other rooms. At first he took her for one of the thieves, trying to make a getaway. He marched up to the passage, drawing his gun from its holster. Shouted down the passage and pointed his gun into the darkness. The crippled girl started screaming at him. The two boys pounced on him as one, shouting something he did not understand. And out of the darkness came the woman, whom he would never forget as long as he lived.

Immediately he realised why she was hiding. Her face was badly bruised, her upper lip puffed up and one eye so swollen that she could not open it. She looked at him in fear with the other eye, then bowed her head as if by instinct. As if she thought he was going to hit her. She was wearing one tattered dress on top of another, her legs bare but for socks and scruffy old shoes. Her dirty hair hung down to her shoulders in thick knots. For all he could tell, she limped. She was the most miserable creature he had ever seen in his life.

He watched her trying to calm her sons and understood that it was not her appearance that she was trying to hide.

She was hiding her shame.

The children fell silent. The older boy huddled up against his mother. Ed looked over at the husband, walked up to him and hit him round the face with a resounding slap.

"And that was that," Ed concluded his account. "I couldn't control myself. Don't know what happened. Don't know what came over me. It was incomprehensible, really. You were trained, you know, trained to face anything. Trained to keep calm whatever happened. As you can imagine, it was crucial to keep your self-control at all times, with a war going on and all that. But when I saw that woman . . . when I saw what she'd had to put up with – and clearly not just that once – I could visualise her life at that man's hands, and something snapped inside me. Something happened that I just couldn't control."

Ed paused.

"I was a policeman in Baltimore for two years before war broke out. It wasn't called domestic violence then, but it was just as ugly all the same. I came across it there too and I've always been repelled by it. I could tell right away what was going on, and he'd been stealing from us too . . . but, well, he was sentenced by your courts," Ed said, as if trying to shake out of his mind the memory of the woman on the hill. "I don't think he got much of a sentence. He was sure to be back home beating up his poor wife before a couple of months were up."

"So you're talking about serious domestic violence," Erlendur said.

"The worst imaginable. It was appalling, the sight of that woman," Ed said. "Plain appalling. As I say, I could see straight away what was going on. Tried to talk to her, but she couldn't understand a word of English. I told the Icelandic police about her, but they said there wasn't a lot they could do. That hasn't changed much, I understand."

"You don't remember their names, do you?" Elínborg asked. "They're not in your diary?"

"No, but you ought to have a report on it. Because of the theft. And he worked in the depot. There are bound to be lists of the employees, of Icelandic workers in the camp on the hill. But maybe it's too long ago."

"What about the soldiers?" Erlendur asked. "The ones your courts sentenced."

"They spent time in military prison. Stealing supplies was a very serious crime. Then they were sent to the front. A death sentence of sorts."

"And you caught them all."

"Who knows? But the thieving stopped. The inventories returned to normal. The matter was resolved."

"So you don't think any of this is connected with the bones we found?"

"I couldn't say."

"You don't recall anyone who went missing from your ranks, or the British?"

"You mean a deserter?"

"No. An unexplained disappearance. Because of the skeleton. If you know who it might be. Maybe an American soldier from the depot?"

"I simply don't have a clue. Not a clue."

They talked to Ed for a good while longer. He gave the impression that he enjoyed talking to them. Seemed to enjoy reminiscing about the old days, armed with his precious diary, and soon they were discussing the war years in Iceland and the impact of the military presence, until Erlendur came to his senses. Mustn't waste time like that. He stood up, and so did Elínborg, and they both thanked him warmly.

Ed stood up to show them out.

"How did you discover the theft?" Erlendur asked at the door.

"Discover it?" Ed repeated.

"What was your lead?"

"Oh, I see. A phone call. Someone phoned the police headquarters and reported a sizeable theft from the depot."

"Who blew the whistle?"

"We never found out, I'm afraid. Never knew who it was."

*

Símon stood by his mother's side and watched, dumbfounded, when the soldier spun round with a mixture of astonishment and rage, walked directly across the kitchen and slapped Grímur around the face so hard that he knocked him to the floor.