Silence of the Grave (15 page)

Simon noticed Grímur pushing Tómas towards Mikkelína, whispering in his ear and smiling the way he did when he made snide remarks at the boys. Their mother noticed nothing and Simon had no real idea what was going on until Tómas went up to Mikkelína, urged on by Grímur, and said:

"Bitch."

Then he went back to Grímur, who laughed and patted him on the head.

Simon looked over to the sink where his mother was standing. Although she could not have helped overhearing, she did not move and showed no reaction at first, as if trying to ignore it. Except that he saw she was holding a knife in one hand, peeling potatoes, and her knuckles whitened as she gripped the handle. Then she turned slowly with the knife in her hand and stared at Grímur.

"That's one thing you shall never do," she said in a quavering voice.

Grímur looked at her and the grin froze on his face.

"Me?" Grímur said. "What do you mean, never do? I didn't do anything. It was the lad. It was my boy Tómas."

Their mother moved a step closer to Grímur, still wielding the knife.

"Leave Tómas alone."

Grímur stood up.

"Are you going to do anything with that knife?"

"Don't do that to him," she said, and Simon sensed she was beginning to back down. He heard a jeep outside the house.

"He's here," Simon shouted. "Mike's here."

Grímur looked out of the kitchen window then back at their mother, and the tension eased for a moment. She put down the knife. Mike appeared in the doorway. Grímur smiled.

When he got back that night he beat their mother senseless. The next morning she had a black eye and a limp. They heard the grunts when Grímur was pummelling her. Tómas crawled into Simon's bed and looked at his brother through the darkness of night, in shock, continually muttering to himself as if that could erase what had happened.

". . . sorry, I didn't mean to, sorry, sorry, sorry . . ."

16

Elsa opened the door for Sigurdur Óli and asked him to join her for a cup of tea. As he watched Elsa in the kitchen, he thought about Bergthóra. They had argued that morning before leaving for work. After rejecting her amorous advances he had begun clumsily to describe his concerns, until Bergthóra became seriously agitated.

"Oh, just a minute," she said. "So we're never supposed to get married? Is that your plan? Is the idea that we just live in limbo with nothing on paper and our children bastards? For ever."

"Bastards?"

"Yes."

"Are you thinking about the big wedding again?"

"Sorry if it bothers you."

"You really want to walk down the aisle? In your wedding dress with a posy in your hand and . . ."

"You have such contempt for the idea, don't you?"

"And what's this about children anyway?" Sigurdur Óli said, and immediately regretted it when he saw Bergthóra's face turn ever darker.

"Do you never want to have children?"

"Yes, no, yes, I mean, we haven't discussed it," Sigurdur Óli said. "I think we need to discuss that. You can't decide on your own whether we have children or not. That's not fair and it's not what I want. Not now. Not straight away."

"The time will come," Bergthóra said. "Hopefully. We're both 35. It won't be long until it's too late. Whenever I try to talk about it you change the subject. You don't want to discuss it. Don't want children or a marriage or anything. Don't want anything. You're getting as bad as that old fart Erlendur."

"Eh?" Sigurdur Óli was thunderstruck. "What was that?"

But Bergthóra had already set off for work, leaving him with an horrific vision of the future.

Elsa noticed Sigurdur Óli's thoughts were elsewhere as he sat in her kitchen staring down at his cup.

"Would you like some more tea?" she asked quietly.

"No, thank you," Sigurdur Óli said. "Elínborg, who's working on this case with me, wanted me to ask if you know whether your uncle Benjamín kept a lock of his fiancée's hair, maybe in a locket or a jar or the like."

Elsa thought about it.

"No," she said, "I don't remember a lock of hair, but I'm not a hundred per cent sure what's down there."

"Elínborg says there should be one. According to the fiancée's sister, who told her yesterday that she gave Benjamín a lock of hair when she went on a trip somewhere, I believe."

"I've never heard about a lock of her hair, or anyone else's for that matter. My family aren't particularly romantic and never have been."

"Are any possessions of hers in the basement? The fiancée's?"

"Why do you want a lock of her hair?" Elsa asked instead of answering his question. She had a prying look on her face which made Sigurdur Óli hesitate. He didn't know how much Erlendur had told her. She saved him the bother of asking.

"You can prove that it's her buried up on the hill," she said. "If you have something from her. You can do a DNA test to find out whether it's her, and if it is, you'll claim my uncle murdered her and left her there. Is that the idea?"

"We're just investigating all the possibilities," Sigurdur Óli said, wanting at all costs to avoid provoking Elsa into a rage on the scale of that he had sparked with Bergthóra just half an hour before. This day was not getting off to a very good start. Definitely not.

"That other detective came here, the sad one, and implied that Benjamín was responsible for his fiancée's death. And now you can all confirm that if you find a lock of her hair. I just don't understand it. That you could think Benjamín capable of killing that girl. Why should he do it? What motive could he have had? None. Absolutely none."

"No, of course not," Sigurdur Óli said to calm her down. "But we need to know who the bones belong to and so far we don't have much to go on apart from the fact that Benjamín owned the house and his fiancée disappeared. Surely you're curious about it yourself. You must want to know whose bones they are."

"I'm not certain I do," Elsa said, somewhat calmer now.

"But I can go on looking in the cellar, can't I?" he said.

"Yes, of course. I can hardly stop you doing that."

He finished his tea and went down to the cellar, still thinking about Bergthóra. He did not keep a lock of her hair in a locket, and did not feel he needed anything to remind him of her. Not even her photograph in his wallet, like the pictures of wife and children that some men he knew carried around. He felt bad. He needed to talk things over with Bergthóra. Sort it all out.

He didn't want to be like Erlendur at all.

*

Sigurdur Óli looked through Benjamín Knudsen's belongings until midday, then popped out to a fast-food joint, bought a hamburger that he barely nibbled at, and read the papers over coffee. Around two he headed back to the cellar, cursing Erlendur for his obstinacy. He had not found the slightest clue as to why Benjamín's fiancée had disappeared, nor any evidence of wartime tenants apart from Höskuldur. He had not found the lock of hair that Elínborg was so convinced about after reading all those romances. It was Sigurdur Óli's second day in the cellar and he was at the end of his tether.

Elsa was at the door when he returned, and she invited him in. He tried to find an excuse to turn down the invitation, but was not quick enough to manage it without sounding rude, so he followed Elsa into the sitting room.

"Did you find anything down there?" she asked, and Sigurdur Óli knew that behind this helpful-sounding remark she was in fact actually trying to wheedle information out of him. It didn't occur to him that she might be lonely, which was the impression Erlendur had just minutes after entering her gloomy house.

"I haven't found that lock of hair, anyway," Sigurdur Óli said, nursing his tea. She had been waiting for him. He looked at her, wondering what was in the offing.

"No," she said. "Are you married? Sorry, of course that's none of my business."

"No, that's . . . yes, no, not married but living with my partner," Sigurdur Óli said, awkwardly.

"Any children?"

"No, no children," Sigurdur Óli said. "Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Pardon?"

"Why haven't you had any children?"

What's going on here? Sigurdur Óli thought, sipping his tea to win time.

"Stress, I suppose. So busy at work all the time. We're both in demanding jobs and, well, there's no time."

"No time for children? Have you really got anything better to do with your time? What does your girlfriend do?"

"She's a partner in a computer firm," Sigurdur Óli said, poised to thank her for the tea and say he needed to get going. He did not plan to be interrogated about his private life by some posh old maid who had clearly gone strange from living alone, the way women like her eventually do – until they end up snooping around everyone's private business.

"Is she a good woman?" Elsa asked.

"Her name's Bergthóra," said Sigurdur Óli, on the verge of becoming impolite. "She's a terribly good woman." He smiled. "Why are you . . . ?"

"I've never had a family," Elsa said. "Never had any children. Nor a husband for that matter. I don't care about that, but I would have liked children. They'd be 30 today, perhaps. In their thirties. I sometimes think about that. Grown-up. With their own children. I don't really know what happened. Suddenly you're middle-aged. I'm a doctor. Not many women studied medicine when I enrolled. I was like you, I didn't have the time. Didn't have time for a life of my own. What you're doing now isn't your own life. It's just work."

"Yes, well, I suppose I should . . ."

"Benjamín didn't have a family either," Elsa went on. "That was all he wanted, a family. With that girl."

Elsa stood up and so did Sigurdur Óli. He expected her to say goodbye, but instead she went over to a large oak cabinet with beautiful glass doors and carved drawers, opened one of them, took out a little Chinese trinket box, lifted the lid and pulled out a silver locket on a slender chain.

"He did keep a lock of her hair," she said. "There's a photograph of her in the locket too. Her name was Sólveig." Elsa gave a hint of a smile. "The apple of Benjamín's eye. I don't think that's her buried on the hill. The thought is unbearable. That would mean Benjamín harmed her. He didn't. Couldn't. I'm convinced of that. This lock of hair will prove it."

She handed Sigurdur Óli the locket. He sat down again, opened it carefully and saw a tiny lock of black hair on top of a photograph of its owner. Without touching the hair he manoeuvred it onto the lid of the necklace to be able to see the photograph. It showed the petite face of a girl of 20, dark-haired with beautifully curved eyebrows above big eyes staring enigmatically into the lens. Lips that suggested determination, a small chin, her face slender and pretty. Benjamín's fiancée. Sólveig.

"Please excuse me for holding back," Elsa said. "I've thought the matter over and weighed it up and I couldn't bring myself to destroy that lock of hair. Whatever emerges from the investigation."

"Why did you conceal it?"

"I needed to think things over."

"Yes, but even . . ."

"It gave me quite a shock when your colleague – Erlendur, isn't it? – started insinuating that it might be her up there, but once I'd thought more about it . . ." Elsa shrugged as if in resignation.

"Even if the DNA test proves positive," Sigurdur Óli said, "that doesn't necessarily mean that Benjamín murderered her. The analysis won't give any answers to that. If that is his fiancée up on the hill, there could be another reason besides Benjamín . . ."

Elsa interrupted him.

"She . . . what's it called these days . . . she dumped him. 'Broke off their engagement' is probably the old phrase. Back when people used to get engaged. She did it the day that she disappeared. Benjamín didn't reveal that until much later. To my mother, on his deathbed. She told me. I've never told anyone before. And I would have taken it to my grave if you hadn't found those bones. Do you know yet whether it's a male or a female?"

"Not yet, no," Sigurdur Óli said. "Did he say anything about why she broke off their engagement? Why she left him?"

He sensed Elsa hesitating. They looked each other in the eye and he knew she had already given too much away to back down now. He felt that she wanted to tell him what she knew. As if she were bearing a heavy cross and the time had come to put it down. At last, after all these years.

"It wasn't his child," she said.

"Not Benjamín's child?"

"No."

"She wasn't pregnant by him?"

"No."

"So whose was it?"

"You have to understand that times were different then," Elsa said. "Today women have abortions like going to the dentist. Marriage has no special meaning even if people want to have children. They live together. They separate. Start living with someone else. Have more children. Split up again. It wasn't like that. Not in those days. Having a child out of wedlock used to be unthinkable for women. It brought shame, they would be outcasts. People were merciless, they called them tarts."

"So I gather," Sigurdur Óli said. His mind turned to Bergthóra and it gradually dawned on him why Elsa had been asking about his private life.

"Benjamín was prepared to marry her," Elsa continued. "Or at least that's what he later told my mother. Sólveig didn't want that. She wanted to break off their engagement and told him so straight out. Just like that. Without any warning."

"Who was the father then?"

"When she left Benjamín she asked him to forgive her. For leaving him. But he didn't. He needed more time."

"And she disappeared?"

"She was never seen again after she said goodbye to him. When she didn't return home that evening they started looking for her and Benjamín wholeheartedly took part in the search. But she was never found."

"What about the father of her child?" Sigurdur Óli asked again. "Who was he?"

"She didn't tell Benjamín. She left without ever letting him know. That's what he told my mother, at least. If he did know, he certainly never told her."

"Who could it have been?"

"Could have been?" Elsa repeated. "It doesn't matter who it
could
have been. The only important thing is who it
was."

"Do you mean the father was involved in her disappearance?"

"What do you think?" Elsa asked.

"You and your mother never suspected anyone?"

"No, no one. Nor did Benjamín, as far as I know."

"Could he have fabricated the whole story?"

"I can't say for sure, but I don't think Benjamín told a lie in his life."