Silence of the Grave (2 page)

She told him she was bored in service for the merchant. The man was a miser who was always groping at the three girls he employed; his wife was an old hag and a slave-driver. She had no particular plans about what to do. Had never thought about the future. Toil was all she had ever known since her earliest childhood. Her life was not much more than that.

He kept finding excuses for visiting the merchant and frequently called on her in the kitchen. One thing led to another and she soon told him about her child. He said he knew she was a mother. He had asked people about her. This was the first time he revealed an interest in getting to know her better. The girl would soon be three years old, she told him, and fetched her from the backyard where she was playing with the merchant's children.

He asked how many men there were in her life when she came back with her daughter, smiling as if it was an innocent joke. Later he mercilessly used her alleged promiscuity to break her down. He never called the daughter by her name, only nicknames: called her a bastard and a cripple.

She had never had many men in her life. She told him about the father of her child, a fisherman who had drowned in Kollafjördur. He was only 22 when the crew of four perished in a storm at sea. Around the time she found out that she was pregnant. They were not married, so she could hardly be described as a widow. They had planned to marry, but he died and left her with a child born out of wedlock.

While he sat in the kitchen listening, she noticed that the girl did not want to be with him. Normally she was not shy, but she clutched her mother's skirt and did not dare let go when he called her over. He took a boiled sweet out of his pocket and handed it to her, but she just buried her face deeper against her mother's skirt and started to cry, she wanted to go back out with the other children. Boiled sweets were her favourite treat.

Two months later he asked her to marry him. There was none of the romance to it that she had read about. They had met several times in the evening and walked around town or gone to a Chaplin film. Laughing heartily at the little tramp, she looked at her escort. He did not even smile. One evening after they left the cinema and she was waiting with him for the lift he had arranged back to Kjós, he asked her out of the blue whether they shouldn't get married. He pulled her towards him.

"I want us to get married," he said.

In spite of everything, she was so surprised that she did not remember until much later, really when it was all over, that this was not a marriage proposal, not a question about what she wanted.

"I want us to get married."

She had considered the possibility that he would propose. Their relationship had effectively reached that stage. She needed a home for her little girl and wanted a place of her own. Have more children. Few other men had shown an interest in her. Maybe because of her child. Maybe she was not a particularly exciting option, short and quite plump, with angular features, slightly buck teeth, and small but dexterous fingers that never seemed to stop moving. Maybe she would never receive a better proposal.

"What do you say about it?" he asked.

She nodded. He kissed her and they hugged. Soon afterwards they were married in the church at Mosfell. It was a small ceremony, attended by hardly anyone other than the bride and groom, his friends from Kjós and two of her friends from Reykjavik. The minister invited them for coffee after the ceremony. She had asked about his people, his family, but he was taciturn about them. He told her he was an only child, he was still an infant when his father died and his mother, who could not afford to keep him, sent him away to foster parents. Before becoming a farmhand in Kjós he had worked on a number of farms. He did not seem curious about her people. Did not seem to have much interest in the past. She told him their circumstances were quite similar: she did not know who her real parents were. She was adopted and had been brought up in various situations in a succession of homes in Reykjavik, until she ended up in service for the merchant. He nodded.

"We'll make a clean start," he said. "Forget the past."

They rented a small basement flat on Lindargata which was little more than a living room and kitchen. There was an outdoor toilet in the yard. She stopped working for the merchant. He said she no longer needed to earn herself a living. He got a job at the harbour until he could join a fishing boat. Dreamed about going to sea.

She stood by the kitchen table, holding her stomach. Although she had not yet told him, she was certain she was pregnant. It could have been expected. They had discussed having children, but she was not sure how he felt about it, he could be so mysterious. If the baby was a boy, she had already chosen his name. She wanted a boy. He would be called Simon.

She had heard about men who beat their wives. Heard of women who had to put up with violence from their husbands. Heard stories. She could not believe that he was one of them. Did not think him capable of it. It must have been an isolated incident, she told herself. He thought I was flirting with Snorri, she thought. I must be careful not to let that happen again.

She wiped her face and snuffled. What aggression. Although he had walked out he would surely come back home soon and apologise to her. He could not treat her like that. Simply could not. Must not. Perplexed, she went into the bedroom to take a look at her daughter. The girl's name was Mikkelína. She had woken up with a temperature that morning, then slept for most of the day and was still asleep. The mother picked her up and noticed that she was boiling hot. She sat down holding the girl in her arms and started singing a lullaby, still shocked and distracted from the attack.

They stand up on the box,
in their little socks,
golden are their locks,
the girls in pretty frocks.

The girl was panting for breath. Her little chest rose and fell and a vague whistle came from her nose. Her face looked ablaze. Mikkelína's mother tried to wake her, but she did not stir.

She screamed.

The girl was seriously ill.

2

Elínborg took the call about the bones found in the Millennium Quarter. She was alone in the office and on her way out when the telephone rang. After hesitating for a moment she looked at the clock, then back at the telephone. She was planning a dinner party that evening and had spent all day imagining chickens smeared with tandoori. She sighed and picked up the phone.

Elínborg was of an indeterminate age, forty-something, well built without being fat, and she loved food. She was divorced and had four children, including a foster child who had now moved away from home. She had remarried, a car mechanic who loved cooking, and she lived with him and their three children in a small town house in Grafarvogur. She had taken a degree in geology long before, but had never worked in that field. She started working for the Reykjavik police as a summer job and ended up joining the force. She was one of the few female detectives.

Sigurdur Óli was in the throes of wild sex with his partner, Bergthóra, when his beeper went off. It was attached to the belt of his trousers, which were lying on the kitchen floor and beeping intolerably. He knew that it would not stop until he got out of bed. He had left work early. Bergthóra had already been home and had greeted him with a deep, passionate kiss. Things took their natural course and he left his trousers in the kitchen, unplugged the telephone and switched off his mobile. He forgot his beeper.

With a deep sigh Sigurdur Óli looked up at Bergthóra straddling him. He was sweating and red in the face. From her expression he could tell that she was not prepared to let him go just yet. She squeezed her eyes shut, lay down upon him and pumped her hips gently and rhythmically until her orgasm ebbed away and every muscle in her body could relax again.

Himself, he would have to wait for a more suitable occasion. In his life the beeper took priority.

He slipped out from beneath Bergthóra, who lay with her head on the pillow as if knocked out cold.

Erlendur was sitting in Skúlakaffi eating salted meat. He sometimes ate there because it was the only restaurant in Reykjavik that offered Icelandic home cooking the way he would prepare it himself if he could be bothered to cook. The interior design appealed to him as well: brown and shabby veneer, old kitchen chairs, some with the sponge poking up through the plastic upholstery, and the linoleum on the floor worn thin from the trampling boots of lorry drivers, taxi drivers and crane operators, tradesmen and navvies. Erlendur sat alone at a table in one corner, his head bowed over meat, boiled potatoes, peas and turnips drenched with a sugary flour sauce.

The lunchtime rush was long over but he persuaded the cook to serve him some salted meat. He carved himself a large lump, piled potato and turnip on top of it and plastered creamy sauce over the whole trophy with his knife before it all vanished into his gaping mouth.

Erlendur arranged another such banquet on his fork and had just opened his mouth when his mobile phone started to ring where he had left it on the table beside his plate. He stopped the fork in mid-air, glanced at the phone for an instant, looked at the crammed fork and back at the phone, then finally put the fork down with an air of regret.

"Why don't I ever get any peace?" he said before Sigurdur Óli could say a word.

"Some bones found in the Millennium Quarter," Sigurdur Óli said. "I'm heading out there and so is Elínborg."

"What kind of bones?"

"I don't know. Elínborg phoned and I'm on my way over there. I've alerted forensics."

"I'm eating," Erlendur said slowly.

Sigurdur Óli almost blurted out what he had been doing, but managed to stop himself in time.

"See you up there," he said. "It's on the way to Lake Reynisvatn, on the north side beneath the hot water tanks. Not far from the road out of town."

"What's a Millennium Quarter?" Erlendur asked.

"Eh?" Sigurdur Óli said, still irritated about being interrupted with Bergthóra.

"Is it a quarter of a millennium? Two hundred and fifty years? What does it mean?"

"Christ," Sigurdur Óli groaned and rang off.

Shortly afterwards Erlendur pulled up in his battered old car and stopped in the street in Grafarholt beside the foundation of the house. The police had arrived on the scene and sealed off the area with yellow tape, which Erlendur slipped underneath. Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli were down in the foundation, standing by a wall of earth. The medical student who had reported the bones was with them. The mother who was hosting the birthday party had rounded up the boys and sent them back indoors. The Reykjavik district medical officer, a chubby man aged about 50, clambered down one of the three ladders that had been propped up in the foundation. Erlendur followed him.

The media took quite an interest in the bones. Reporters gathered at the scene and the neighbours lined up around it. Some had already moved into the estate while others, who were working on their roofless houses, stood with hammers and crowbars in their hands, puzzled by all the fuss. This was at the end of April in mild and beautiful spring weather.

The forensic team was at work, carefully scraping samples from the wall of earth. They let the soil drop onto little trowels which they emptied into plastic bags. Part of the upper skeleton could be seen inside the wall. An arm was visible, a section of the ribcage and the lower jawbone.

"Is that the Millennium Man?" Erlendur asked, walking up to the wall of earth.

Elínborg cast a questioning glance at Sigurdur Óli, who stood behind Erlendur, pointing his index finger at his head and twirling it around.

"I phoned the National Museum," Sigurdur Óli said, and started scratching his head when Erlendur turned suddenly to look at him. "There's an archaeologist on his way here. Maybe he can tell us what it is."

"Don't we need a geologist too then?" Elínborg asked. "To find out about the soil. The position of the bones relative to it. To date the strata."

"Can't you help us with that?" Sigurdur Óli asked. "Didn't you study that?"

"I can't remember a word of it," Elínborg said. "I know that the brown stuff is called dirt, though."

"He's not six feet under," Erlendur said. "He's a metre down, one and a half at the most. Bundled away there in a hurry. As far as I can see this is the remains of a body. He hasn't been here long. This is no Viking."

"Why do you think it's a him?" the district medical officer asked.

"Him?" Erlendur said.

"I mean," the doctor said, "it could just as easily be a her. Why do you feel sure it's a man?"

"Or a woman then," Erlendur said. "I don't care." He shrugged. "Can you tell us anything about these bones?"

"I can't really see anything of them," the doctor said. "Best to say as little as possible until they pick them out of the ground."

"Male or female? Age?"

"Impossible to tell."

A man wearing jeans and a traditional Icelandic woollen sweater, tall, with a scruffy, greying beard and two yellow dogteeth fangs that protruded out of it through his big mouth, came over to them and introduced himself as the archaeologist. He watched the forensic team at work and asked them for pity's sake to stop that nonsense. The two men with trowels hesitated. They wore white overalls, rubber gloves and protective glasses. To Erlendur they could have been straight out of a nuclear power station. They looked at him, awaiting instructions.

"We need to dig down to him, for God's sake," said Fang, waving his arms. "Are you going to pick him out with those trowels? Who's in charge here anyway?"

Erlendur owned up.

"This isn't an archaeological find," Fang said, shaking his hand. "The name's Skarphédinn, hello, but it's best to treat it as such. You understand?"

"I don't have a clue what you're talking about," said Erlendur.

"The bones haven't been in the ground for any great length of time. No more than 60 or 70 years, I'd say. Maybe even less. The clothes are still on them."

"Clothes?"

"Yes, here," Skarphédinn said, pointing with a fat finger. "And in more places, I'm certain."

"I though that was flesh," Erlendur said sheepishly.

"The most sensible thing to do in this situation, to keep the evidence intact, would be to let my team excavate it using our methods. The forensic squad can help us. We need to rope off the area up here and dig down to the skeleton, and stop chipping away at the soil here. We don't make a habit of losing evidence. Just the way the bones lie could tell us a hell of a lot. What we find around them could provide clues."

"What do you think happened?" Erlendur asked.

"I don't know," Skarphédinn said. "Far too early to speculate. We need to excavate it, hopefully something useful will emerge then."

"Is it someone who's frozen to death and been covered by the earth?"

"No one sinks this deep into the ground."

"So it's a grave."

"It would appear so," Skarphédinn said pompously. "Everything points to that. Shall we say that we'll dig down to it?"

Erlendur nodded.

Skarphédinn strode over to the ladder and climbed up out of the foundation. Erlendur followed close behind. As they stood above the skeleton the archaeologist explained the best way to organise the excavation. Erlendur was impressed by him and everything he said, and soon Skarphédinn was on his mobile phone, calling out his team. He had taken part in several of the main archaeological discoveries in recent decades and knew what he was talking about. Erlendur put his faith in him.

The head of the forensic squad disagreed. He ranted about transferring the excavation to an archaeologist who didn't have the faintest idea about criminal investigations. The quickest way was to chip the skeleton free from the wall to give them scope to examine both its position and the clues – if there were any – about whether an act of violence had been committed. Erlendur listened to this speech for a while and then declared that Skarphédinn and his team would be allowed to dig their way down to the skeleton even if it took much longer than anticipated.

"The bones have been lying here for half a century, a couple of days either way won't make any difference," he said, and the matter was settled.

Erlendur looked around at the new houses under construction. He looked up at the brown geothermal water tanks and to where he knew Lake Reynisvatn lay, then turned and looked east over the grassland that took over where the new quarter ended.

Four bushes caught his attention, standing up out of the brush about 30 metres away. He walked over to them and thought he could tell that they were redcurrant bushes. They were bunched together in a straight line to the east of the foundation and he wondered, stroking his hands over the knobbly, bare branches, who would have planted them there in this no man's land.