Hypothermia (27 page)

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Authors: Arnaldur Indridason

BOOK: Hypothermia
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‘It could be,’ Baldvin said. ‘I’m not going to—’
‘Could we do it here?’ María asked. ‘Here at home?’
‘María . . . ’
‘Is it very dangerous?’
‘María, I can’t—’
‘Is it very dangerous?’
‘That
 . . .
that depends, Are you seriously considering it?
’
‘Why not?’ María said, ‘What have I got to lose?
’
‘Are you sure?’ Baldvin said.
‘Did you lock the gate?
’
María asked
.
‘Yes, I locked it when I came in.
’
‘He looked horrible,’ María said, ‘Horrible.
’
‘Who?’
‘Dad. I know he’s not happy, Hecan’t be happy
. I
know that, Hewasn’t meant to go like that, Hewasn’t meant to die like that, It should never have happened.
’
‘What are you talking about?
’
‘Tell me more about this Tryggvi,’ María said. ‘What happened exactly? How would you go about something like that? What would you need to make it work?’
27
 
Erlendur called his daughter early on Sunday morning and asked if she would like to come for a drive. He wanted to spend the day driving around the Reykjavík area, looking at lakes. Eva Lind was asleep when he rang and it took her a while to grasp what he was saying. She was unenthusiastic but Erlendur would not accept no for an answer. Surely she didn’t have much to do that Sunday, any more than she ever did. It was not as if she went to church, after all. Finally she gave in. Erlendur tried to get hold of Sindri Snaer but received a message saying that either his phone was switched off or he was out of range. Valgerdur was working all weekend.
Under normal circumstances he would have made the trip alone and been happy to do so, but this time he wanted Eva’s company; naturally he was fed up with his own, as she was quick to point out during their phone conversation. He smiled. Eva Lind was in a better humour than usual, even though her idea of bringing Erlendur and Halldóra together had led nowhere and her dream of establishing a better relationship between her parents seemed doomed to failure.
Neither mentioned the subject as they drove out of town together. It was a beautiful autumnal day. The sun shone low over the Bláfjöll range and the weather was still but cold. They stopped off at a kiosk where Erlendur bought them some sandwiches and cigarettes. He had made a thermos of coffee before leaving home. There was a blanket in the boot. It occurred to him as he drove away from the shop that he had never been for a Sunday outing with Eva Lind before.
They began with a small circuit of the city. He had studied detailed maps of Reykjavík and its vicinity, and was surprised at the vast number of lakes that were to be found in a relatively small area. They were almost uncountable. He and Eva Lind started at Lake Ellidavatn where a new suburb had sprung up, then did a circuit of Raudavatn on a decent road, before continuing to Reynisvatn which had now disappeared behind the new suburb of Grafarholt. From there they drove past Langavatn and had a view of numerous little lakes on Middalsheidi Moor before slowly proceeding to Mosfellsheidi. They inspected Leirvogsvatn beside the road to Thingvellir, followed by Stíflisdalsvatn and Mjóavatn. It was late by the time they descended to Thingvellir, turned north and passed Sandkluftavatn which lay beside the road north of Hofmannaflöt on the route over the pass at Uxahryggir and down the Lundarreykjadalur valley. They picnicked beside Litla-Brunnavatn, just off the road to Biskupsbrekka.
Erlendur spread out the blanket and they stretched their legs and tucked into the sandwiches from the kiosk. He took out some chocolate biscuits and poured them two cups of coffee, then gazed across the treeless landscape to Thingvellir and Hofmannaflöt beneath Mount Ármannsfell, where people in the Middle Ages used to entertain themselves with horse fights. He had visited various second-hand bookshops in search of the lake book that Davíd might conceivably have been intending to buy. The only one that seemed to fit the bill had been published just before Davíd had gone missing and was called simply
Lakes in the Reykjavík Area
. It was a handsome volume, lavishly illustrated with photographs of lakes and their surroundings, taken in different seasons. Eva Lind leafed through the book, studying the pictures.
‘If you think she fell in one of these lakes then all I can say is good luck finding her,’ she remarked, sipping her coffee.
Erlendur had told her about Gudrún, or Dúna, who had disappeared thirty years ago without anyone knowing exactly when. He told her about Gudrún’s fascination with lakes and said that he did not think it was completely far-fetched to link her disappearance to another missing-person case, that of a young man called Davíd. Eva Lind was intrigued by the idea that Davíd might have met the girl shortly before he vanished. Erlendur imagined that the book might have been intended for Gudrún. She and Davíd would only just have met at that point, so recently that no one except Davíd’s friend Gilbert would have had any inkling of it. Information about their budding relationship had not emerged until many years later when Gilbert moved home to Iceland from Denmark.
Eva Lind found her father’s theory rather implausible and said as much. Erlendur nodded but pointed out that the one important detail that these two cases had in common was that there was so little information to go on. Nothing was known about Davíd’s disappearance. And all that was known about Gudrún was that her car had vanished with her and had never been found.
‘What if they knew each other?’ Erlendur said, gazing out over Litla-Brunnavatn. ‘What if Davíd bought the lake book for her? What if they went for that last drive together? We know when Davíd went missing. The report of Gudrún’s disappearance reached the police just over a fortnight later. That’s why we never connected the two cases, but she might well have gone missing at the same time as him.’
‘Then good luck finding them,’ Eva Lind repeated. ‘There must be a thousand lakes that fit the bill if you think that’s what they went to look at. It’s like fucking Finland. Wouldn’t it be simpler to assume that they drove into the sea, drove off the docks somewhere?’
‘We dragged all the main harbours for her car,’ Erlendur said.
‘Couldn’t they both have just committed suicide separately?’
‘Yes, of course. That’s what we’ve thought up to now. I . . . It’s a completely new idea to link them. I’m rather taken with it. There’s been no progress on these cases for decades, then suddenly it emerges that she was fascinated by lakes and that he mentioned buying a book about lakes, a subject he had never shown the slightest interest in before.’
Erlendur took a sip of coffee.
‘And on top of that his father is dying and will probably never receive any sort of answer to his questions. Any more than the boy’s mother – who is already dead. I’m thinking of that, too. Of answers. They should have some kind of answer. People don’t just walk out of their homes and disappear. They always leave some trace. Except in these two cases. That’s what they have in common. There’s no trace. We have nothing to go on. In either case.’
‘Granny never got any answers,’ Eva Lind said, lying back on the blanket and staring up at the sky.
‘No, she never got any answers,’ Erlendur agreed.
‘Yet you never give up,’ Eva said. ‘You keep on looking. You go out east.’
‘Yes, I do. I go out east. I walk over to Har
đ
skafi and up on to Eskifjördur Moor. I camp there sometimes.’
‘But you never find anything.’
‘No. Nothing but memories.’
‘Aren’t they enough?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Hardskafi? What’s that?’
‘It’s a mountain. Your grandmother thought Bergur had died up there. I don’t know why she thought that. It was some intuition. He would have had to have been carried quite a way off course if so, but the wind was blowing in that direction and obviously we both sought shelter from the wind. She often went over there, right up until we moved away from the countryside.’
‘Have you climbed the mountain?’
‘Yes – it’s easy enough to climb, in spite of its forbidding name.’
‘Have you stopped going there, then?’
‘I hardly ever climb up there any more, I content myself with looking.’
Eva Lind reflected on his words.
‘Of course, you’re bloody past it now.’
Erlendur smiled.
‘Have you given up, then?’ Eva Lind asked.
‘The last thing your grandmother asked was whether I had found my brother. That was the last thing that passed through her mind before she died. I’ve sometimes wondered if she found him . . . if she found him in the next life. Not that I myself believe in the afterlife at all – I don’t believe in God or hell – but your grandmother believed in all that. It was part of her upbringing. She was convinced that the life of toil here on Earth was neither the beginning nor the end. In that sense she was reconciled to dying and she talked of Bergur’s being in good hands. With his people.’
‘Old people talk like that,’ Eva Lind said.
‘She wasn’t old. She died in her prime.’
‘Don’t they say that those whom the gods love die young?’
Erlendur looked at his daughter.
‘I don’t think the gods have ever loved me,’ she continued. ‘Or at least I can’t imagine it. I don’t know why they should, either.’
‘I’m not sure that people should place their fates in the hands of the gods, whoever they are,’ Erlendur said. ‘You make your own fate.’
‘You can talk. Who made your fate? Didn’t your father take you into the mountains in crazy weather? What was he doing taking his children up there? Have you never asked yourself that? Don’t you ever get angry when you think about it?’
‘He didn’t know any better. He didn’t arrange for us to be caught in the storm.’
‘But he could have acted differently. If he’d thought about his kids.’
‘He always took great care of us boys.’
Neither of them spoke. Erlendur watched a car head east over Uxahryggir and turn off towards Thingvellir.
‘I always hated myself,’ Eva Lind said at last. ‘And I was angry. Sometimes so angry I could have burst. Angry with Mum and with you and with school and with the scum who bullied me. I wanted to be free of myself. I didn’t want to be me. I loathed myself. I abused myself and let other people abuse me too.’
‘Eva . . .’
Eva Lind stared up at the cloudless sky.
‘No, that’s how it was,’ she said. ‘Anger and self-loathing. Not a good combination. I’ve thought about it a lot since I discovered that what I did was only the natural consequence of something that had begun before I was born. Something I had absolutely no control over. Most of all I was angry with you and Mum. Why did you ever have me? What were you thinking of? What did I bring into the world? What was my inheritance? Nothing but the mistakes of people who never knew each other and never wanted to get to know each other.’
Erlendur grimaced.
‘That wasn’t your only inheritance, Eva,’ he said.
‘No, maybe not.’
They were silent.
‘Isn’t this turning out to be a great Sunday drive?’ Eva Lind said at last, with a glance at her father.
Another car drove at a leisurely pace along the road over Biskupsbrekka and turned off towards Lundarreykjadalur. It contained a couple with two children; a little dark-haired girl waved at them from the child seat in the back. Neither of them waved back and the little girl watched them, crestfallen, until she vanished from sight.
‘Do you think you can ever forgive me?’ Erlendur asked, looking at his daughter.
She didn’t answer him but stared up at the sky with her arms behind her head and her legs crossed.
‘I know people are responsible for their own fates,’ she said at last. ‘Someone stronger and cleverer than me would have made a different fate for herself. Wouldn’t have given a shit about you two – which is the only answer, I think, instead of ending up hating oneself.’
‘I never intended you to hate yourself. I didn’t know.’
‘Your dad probably didn’t mean to lose his son.’
‘No. He didn’t.’
By the time they left Uxahryggir and drove down Lundarreykjadalur to Borgarfjördur it was growing dark. They didn’t stop to picnic by any more lakes and sat largely without talking on their drive home through the Hvalfjördur tunnel and around the Kjalarnes peninsula. Erlendur drove his daughter to her door. It was dark by the time they said their goodbyes.
It had been a good day by the lakes and he told her so. She nodded and said they should do it more often.
‘If they disappeared in one of the lakes around here you’ve got as much chance of finding them as you have of winning the lottery.’

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