Silence of the Grave (18 page)

"What do you mean, do?" his mother said.

"When he comes back," Símon said, noticing that Mikkelína and Tómas had stopped playing cards and were now watching him.

"There's plenty of time to think about that," their mother said. "He won't be back for a while."

"But what are you going to do?" Mikkelína and Tómas turned their heads from Simon to their mother.

She looked at Simon, then at the other two.

"He's going to help us," she said.

"Who?" Simon said.

"Dave. He's going to help us."

"What's he going to do?" Simon looked at his mother, trying to work out what she meant. She looked him straight in the eye.

"Dave knows about that sort of person. He knows how to get rid of them."

"What's he going to do?" Simon repeated.

"Don't worry about it," his mother replied.

"Is he going to get rid of him for us?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"I don't know. The less we know, the better, he says, and I shouldn't even be telling you this. Maybe he'll talk to him. Scare him into leaving us alone. He says he has friends in the army who can help him if need be."

"But what if Dave leaves?"

"Leaves?"

"If he leaves Iceland," Simon said. "He won't always be here. He's a soldier. They're always sending troops away. Posting new ones to the barracks. What if he leaves? What will we do then?"

She looked at her son.

"We'll find a way," she said in a low voice. "We'll find a way then."

19

Sigurdur Óli phoned Erlendur, told him about his meeting with Elsa and how she thought that another man – who had got Benjamín's fiancée pregnant – was involved; his identity was unknown. They talked the matter over for a while and Erlendur told Sigurdur Óli what he had found out from the ex-serviceman, Ed Hunter, about the theft from the depot and how a family man from the hill had been arrested for his part in it. Ed believed that the man's wife had been the victim of domestic violence, which corroborated the account given by Höskuldur, who had heard it from Benjamín.

"All those people are dead and buried long ago," Sigurdur Óli said wearily. "I don't know why we're chasing them. It's like hunting ghosts. We'll never meet any of them and talk to them. They're all just part of a ghost story."

"Are you talking about the green woman on the hill?" Erlendur asked.

"Elínborg said Róbert had seen Sólveig's ghost wearing a green coat, so we're involved in a genuine ghost hunt."

"But don't you want to know who's in that grave with one hand sticking up in the air as if they were buried alive?"

"I've spent two days locked in a filthy cellar and I couldn't care less," Sigurdur Óli said. "Couldn't care less about all this old bollocks," he growled, and hung up.

As ever, Erlendur's mind was on Eva Lind, who was lying in intensive care and scarcely expected to live. He was deep in thought about the last argument they had had in his flat, two months before. It was still winter then, with heavy snow, dark and cold. He was not intending to argue with her. He hadn't planned to lose his temper. But she would not give an inch. Any more than usual.

"You can't do that to the baby," he said in yet another effort to persuade her. He assumed that she was five months pregnant. She had pulled herself together when she found out she was pregnant and, after two attempts, looked as though she would manage to kick her drug habit. He gave her all the support he could, but they both knew that it carried little weight and that their relationship was such that the less he involved himself, the more likely she was to succeed. Eva Lind had an ambivalent attitude towards her father. She sought his company, but found fault with everything about him.

"What do you know about that?" she said. "What do you know about children? Sure I can have my baby. And I'm going to have my baby by myself."

He did not know whether she was using drugs or alcohol or a combination of the two, but she was hardly in her right mind when he opened the door for her and let her in. She did not sit on his sofa, she fell onto it. Her belly protruded beneath the unzipped leather jacket, her pregnancy was becoming visible. She was only wearing a thin T-shirt underneath. Outside, the temperature was at least –10°C.

"I thought we'd . . ."

"We haven't anything," she interrupted. "You and me. We haven't anything."

"I thought you'd decided to take care of your baby. Make sure nothing happened to it. Make sure the drugs didn't affect it. You were going to quit, but you're probably above that. You're probably above taking proper care of your child."

"Shut up."

"Why did you come here?"

"I don't know."

"It's your conscience. Isn't it? Your conscience is gnawing at you, and you expect my sympathy for the awful state you're in. That's why you come here. To get some pity and to feel better about yourself."

"Right on. This is just the place to come if you want a conscience, Saint Arsehole."

"You'd decided the name. You remember? If it's a girl."

"You decided it. Not me. You. Like always. You decide everything. If you want to leave then you just leave, don't give a shit about me or anyone else."

"She's supposed to be called Audur. You wanted that."

"Don't you think I know your game? Don't you think I can see through you? You're shit scared . . . I know what I've got in my stomach. I know it's a human being. I know that. You don't have to remind me. There's no need."

"Good," Erlendur said. "Sometimes you seem to forget. Forget there's not just you to think about any more. It's not just you getting stoned. When you get stoned your baby does too, and gets much more damaged by it than you."

He paused.

"Maybe it was a mistake," he said. "Not having an abortion."

She looked at him.

"Fuck you!"

"Eva . . ."

"Mum told me. I know exactly what you wanted."

"What?"

"And you can call her a cheap liar, but I know it's true."

"What are you talking about?"

"She said you'd deny it."

"Deny what?"

"That you didn't want me."

"What?"

"You didn't want me. When you got her pregnant."

"What did your mother say?"

"That you didn't want me."

"She's lying."

"You wanted her to have an abortion . . ."

"That's a lie . . ."

". . . then you pass judgment on me, no matter how I try. Always judging me."

"That's not true. That wasn't even considered. I don't know why she told you that, but it's not true. It wasn't an option. We never even mentioned it."

"She knew you'd say that. She warned me."

"Warned you? When did she tell you all this?"

"When she knew I was pregnant. She said you wanted to send her for an abortion and she said you'd deny it. She said you'd say everything that you've just said."

Eva Lind stood up and walked over towards the door.

"She's lying, Eva. Believe me. I don't know why she said that. I know she hates me, but surely not that much. She's manipulating you against me. You must see that. Saying that sort of thing is . . . is . . . it's repulsive. You can tell her that."

"Tell her yourself," Eva Lind shouted. "If you dare."

"It's repulsive to tell you that. Making up a story just to poison our relationship."

"Actually, I believe her."

"Eva . . ."

"Shut up."

"I'll tell you why it can't be true. Why I could never . . ."

"I don't believe you!"

"Eva . . . I had . . ."

"Shut your gob. I don't believe a word you say."

"Then you ought to get out of here," he said.

"Yeah, right," she provoked him. "Get rid of me."

"Get out!"

"You're repulsive!" she shouted, and stormed out.

"Eva!" he called after her, but she was gone.

He neither heard from her nor saw her until his mobile rang when he was standing over the skeleton on the hill two months later.

Erlendur sat in his car, smoking and thinking that he should have reacted differently, swallowed his pride and tracked Eva down when his anger abated. Told her again that her mother was lying, he would never have suggested an abortion. Never could have. And not leave her to send him an SOS. She was simply not mature enough to go through all this, did not realise what she had got herself into and had no sense of her responsibility.

Erlendur feared breaking the news to her when she regained consciousness. If she regained consciousness. For the sake of doing something, he picked up the phone and called Skarphédinn.

"Just show a little patience," the archaeologist said, "and stop phoning me all the time. We'll let you know when we've got down to the bones."

Skarphédinn was acting as though he had taken over the investigation, he became more arrogant by the day.

"When will that be?"

"Difficult to say," he said, and Erlendur imagined his yellow teeth beneath his beard. "We'll just have to see. Leave us in peace to get on with the job."

"You must be able to tell me
something.
Was it a man? A woman?"

"Patience is the key to every puzzle . . ."

Erlendur hung up on him. He was lighting another cigarette when the phone rang. It was Jim from the British embassy. Ed and the US embassy had discovered a list with the names of Icelandic employees at the depot and Jim had just received it by fax. He had not found anything himself about Icelandic employees while the British ran the depot. There were nine names on the list and Jim read them to Erlendur over the phone. Erlendur did not recognise any of them and gave Jim the fax number at his office so that he could send it there.

He drove into Vogar and parked, as before, some distance from the basement that he had burst into in search of Eva Lind. He waited, wondering what it was that made men behave the way that this one did towards his wife and child, but the conclusion he reached was the usual one: they were bloody idiots. He couldn't articulate what he wanted to do with that man. Whether he intended anything more than spying on him from his car. He couldn't erase from his mind the memory of the little girl with cigarette burns on her back. The man denied having done anything to the child and the mother backed up his claim, so the authorities could do little else apart from take the child away from them. The man's case was with the Director of Public Prosecutions. Maybe he would be charged. Maybe not.

Erlendur pondered the options available to him. There weren't many, and all of them were bad. If the man had gone back to the flat the night he was looking for Eva Lind and the baby was sitting on the floor with burns on its back, Erlendur would have attacked the sadist. Several days had elapsed since then and he could not attack him out of the blue for what he had done. Could not go straight up and thump him, although that was what he most wanted to do. Erlendur knew he could not talk to him. Men like that laughed at threats. He would laugh in Erlendur's face.

Erlendur didn't see anyone entering or leaving the building for the two hours he sat in his car smoking.

In the end he gave up and drove to the hospital to see his daughter. Tried to forget all this, like so much else he had needed to forget in the past.

20

Elínborg got a call from Sigurdur Óli when she reached her office. He told her that Benjamín was probably not the father of the child his fiancée had been expecting, which brought their engagement to an end. Plus Sólveig's father had hanged himself after his daughter disappeared, and not before as her sister Bára had at first said.

Elínborg called in at the National Statistics Office and browsed through the death certificates before driving up to Grafarvogur. She didn't like being lied to, especially by condescending posh women.

Bára listened to Elínborg recount what Elsa had said about the unidentified father of Sólveig's child and she remained as stony faced as ever.

"Have you heard this before?" Elínborg asked.

"That my sister was a whore? No, I haven't heard that before and I don't understand why you're serving it up to me now. After all these years. I don't understand it. You ought to let my sister rest in peace. She doesn't deserve being gossiped about. Where did this . . . this Elsa woman get her story from?"

"From her mother," Elínborg said.

"And she heard it from Benjamín?"

"Yes. He didn't tell anyone about it until he was on his deathbed."

"Did you find a lock of her hair at his house?"

"We did, as it happens."

"And you'll send it for tests with the bones?"

"I expect so."

"So you think he killed her. That Benjamín, that weed, killed his fiancée. I think it's ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. It's beyond me how you can believe it."

Bára stopped talking and grew thoughtful.

"Will it be in the papers?" she asked.

"I have no idea," Elínborg said. "The bones have been given a lot of publicity."

"That my sister was murdered, I mean?"

"If that's the conclusion we come to. Do
you
know who could have been the father of her child?"

"Benjamín was the only one."

"Was there never mention of anyone else? Didn't your sister talk to you about any other man?"

Bára shook her head.

"My sister was not a tart."

Elínborg cleared her throat.

"You told me your father committed suicide some time before your sister disappeared."

They fleetingly looked each other in the eye.

"I think you should be leaving now," Bára said, standing up.

"I wasn't the one who started talking about your father. I checked his death certificate at the National Statistics Office. Unlike some people, the Statistics Office rarely tells lies."

"I have nothing more to say to you," Bára said, but without her earlier arrogance.

"I don't think you would have mentioned him unless you wanted to talk about him. Deep down inside."

"Bloody rubbish!" she spat out. "Are you playing the psychologist now?"

"He died six months after your sister went missing. His death certificate doesn't specify that he killed himself. No cause of death is given. Probably too posh to use the word suicide. Died suddenly at his home, it says."

Bára turned her back on Elínborg.

"Is there any chance that you could start telling me the truth?" Elínborg said, standing up as well. "What did your father have to do with it? Why did you mention him? Who got Sólveig pregnant? Was it him?"

She received no response. The silence between them was almost tangible. Elínborg looked around the spacious lounge, at all the beautiful articles, the paintings of her and her husband, the expensive furniture, the black pianoforte, a prominently placed photograph of Bára with the leader of the Progressive Party. What an empty life, she thought.

"Doesn't every family have its secrets?" Bára said eventually, her back still turned on Elínborg.

"I imagine so," Elínborg said.

"It wasn't my father," Bára said reluctantly. "I don't know why I lied to you about his death. It just slipped out. If you want to play the psychologist you can say that deep down inside I wanted to confess everything to you. That I'd kept silent for so long that when you started talking about Sólveig the floodgates opened. I don't know."

"Who was it then?"

"His nephew," Bára said. "His brother's son, from Fljót. It happened on one of her summer visits."

"How did your family find out?"

"She was completely different when she came back. Mum . . . our mother noticed immediately, and of course it would have been impossible to conceal for long."

"Did she tell your mother what happened?"

"Yes. Our father went up north. I don't know any more about that. By the time he came back, the boy had been sent abroad. So the local people said. Grandfather ran a large farm. There were only two brothers. My father moved south here, set up a business and became wealthy. A pillar of society."

"What happened to the nephew?"

"Nothing. Sólveig said he'd had his way with her. Raped her. My parents didn't know what to do, they didn't want to press charges with all the legal fuss and gossip it would bring. The boy came back several years later and settled here in Reykjavik. Had a family. He died about 2,0 years ago."

"What about Sólveig and the baby?"

"Sólveig was ordered to have an abortion but she refused. Refused to get rid of the baby. Then one day she disappeared."

Bára turned round to face Elínborg.

"You could say it destroyed us, that summer trip to Fljót. Destroyed us as a family. It has certainly shaped my whole life. Covering up. Family pride. It was taboo. We could never mention it. My mother made sure of that. I know that she talked to Benjamín, later. Explained the matter to him. That made Sólveig's death nobody's business but her own. Sólveig's, that is. Her secret, her choice. We were all right. We were pure and respectable. She went mad and threw herself into the sea."

Elínborg looked at Bára and suddenly felt pity for the lie that she had been forced to live.

"She did it by herself," Bára went on. "Nothing to do with us. It was her business."

Elínborg nodded.

"She's not lying up there on the hill," Bára said. "She's lying on the bottom of the sea and she's been there for more than 60 terrible years."

Erlendur sat down beside Eva Lind after talking to her doctor, who said the same as before: her condition was unchanged, only time could tell the outcome. He sat at his daughter's bedside, wondering what to talk to her about this time, but could not make up his mind.

Time went by. The intensive care ward was quiet. Occasionally a doctor walked past the door, or a nurse in soft white shoes that squeaked against the linoleum.

That squeaking.

Erlendur watched his daughter and, almost automatically, started to talk to her in a low voice, telling her about a missing person that he had puzzled over for a long time and perhaps, even after all those years, had yet to understand fully.

He started telling her about a young boy who moved to Reykjavik with his parents, but always missed his countryside home. The boy was too young to understand why they had moved to the city, which at that time was not a city, but a large town by the sea. Later he realised that the decision was a combination of many factors.

His new home felt strange from the start. He had been brought up in simple rural life and isolation – with warm summers, harsh winters and tales about his family who had lived in the countryside all around, most of them crofters and desperately poor for centuries. Those people were his heroes. He heard about them in stories of everyday life that had been told for years and decades, accounts of hazardous journeys or disasters, or tales that were so hilarious that the storytellers would gasp for breath through their laughter or burst into fits of coughing that left them curled up, spluttering and shaking from sheer joy. All these stories were about people he had lived with and known, or those who had lived in the countryside, generation after generation: uncles and nieces, grandmothers and great-grand-mothers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers way back in time. He knew all these characters from stories, even those who were long dead and buried in the little cemetery beside the parish church: midwives who waded icy glacial rivers to help women in childbirth; farmers who heroically rescued their flocks in raging storms; farmhands who froze to death on their way to the sheepcote; drunken clergymen, ghosts and monsters; tales of lives that were part of his own life.

He brought all these tales with him when his parents moved to the city. They bought a wartime bathhouse built by the British military on the outskirts of the city, and converted it into a tiny house because that was all they could afford. Urban life did not suit his father, who had a weak heart and died not long after he moved. His mother sold the bathhouse, bought a cramped little basement flat not far from the harbour and worked in a fish factory. The son did not know what to do when he finished his compulsory schooling. Did manual labour. Building sites. Fishing boats. Saw a vacancy advertised with the police force.

He no longer heard any tales, and they became lost to him. All his people were gone, forgotten and buried in deserted rural areas. He, in turn, drifted through a city that he had no business being in. Knew that he was not the urban type. Could not really tell what he was. But he never lost his yearning for a different life, felt rootless and uncomfortable, and sensed how his last links with the past evaporated when his mother died.

He went to dancehalls. At one of them, Glaumbaer, he met a woman. He had known others, but never for more than casual meetings. This one was different, more steadfast, and he felt that she took control of him. Everything happened too quickly for him to grasp. She made demands of him which he fulfilled without any particular motivation and before he knew it, he had married her and they had a daughter. They rented a small flat. She had big plans for their future and talked about having more children and buying an apartment, quick and tense with a tone of expectation in her voice as if she saw her life on a safe track that nothing would ever overshadow. He looked at her and it dawned on him that he did not really know this woman at all.

They had another child and she became increasingly aware of how distant he was. When their baby son entered the world he was only moderately happy to be a father again and had already begun mentioning that he wanted to put an end to all this, he wanted to leave. She felt it. She asked whether there was another woman, but he just stared blankly without the question even registering. He had never contemplated it. "There must be another woman," she said. "It's not that," he said, and started to explain to her his feelings and his thoughts, but she did not want to hear. She had two children by him and he could not seriously be talking about leaving her. Them. His children.

His children. Eva Lind and Sindri Snaer. Pet names that she chose for them. He did not regard them as part of him. Lacked all paternal feeling, but recognised the responsibility he bore. His duty towards them, which had absolutely nothing to do with their mother or his relationship with her. He said he wanted to provide for the children and divorce amicably. She said there would be nothing amicable about it, as she picked up Eva Lind and clutched her. His impression was that she would use the children to keep hold of him, and that only strengthened the resolution that he could not live with this woman. It had all been one huge mistake from the outset and he should have acted long ago. He had no idea what he had been thinking all that time, but now it had to come to an end.

He tried to get her to agree to him having the children for part of the week or month, but she flatly refused and told him that he would never see them again if he left her. She would see to that.

And then he disappeared. Disappeared out of the life of the little girl of two who was in her nappy and holding a dummy as she watched him walk out of the door. A little, white dummy that squeaked when she bit it.

"We're going about this the wrong way," Erlendur said.

That squeaking.

He bowed his head. He thought the nurse was walking past the door again.

"I don't know what became of that man," Erlendur said in a barely audible voice, looking at his daughter's face, which was more peaceful than he had ever seen it. The outlines clearer. Looked at the equipment that was keeping her alive. Then looked back down at the floor.

A long time passed in this way until he stood up, bent over Eva Lind and kissed her on the forehead.

"He disappeared and I think he's still lost and has been for a long time, and I'm not certain he'll ever be found. It's not your fault. It happened before you came into the world. I think he's looking for himself, but he doesn't know why or exactly what he's searching for, and obviously he'll never find it."

Erlendur looked down at Eva Lind.

"Unless you help him."

Her face like a cold mask in the lamplight from the table next to her bed.