Silence of the Grave (8 page)

Deathly silence fell in the kitchen.

Suddenly he grabbed her by the head and slammed it down on her plate, which broke, then he snatched her up by the hair and threw her backwards, off her chair and onto the floor. He swept the crockery from the table and kicked her chair into the wall. She was dazed by the fall. The whole kitchen seemed to be spinning. She tried to get back to her feet although she knew from experience that it was better to lie motionless, but some perverse spirit within her wanted to provoke him.

"Keep still, you cow," he shouted at her, and when she had struggled to her knees he bowed over her and screamed:

"So you want to stand up, then?" He pulled her by the hair and slammed her face-first into the wall, kicking her thighs until she lost all the strength in her legs, shrieked and dropped back to the floor. Blood spurted from her nose and she could barely hear him shouting for the ringing in her ears.

"Try standing up now, you filthy cunt!" he screeched.

This time she lay still, huddled up with her hands protecting her head, waiting for the kicks to rain down upon her. He raised his foot and slammed it with all his might into her side, and she gasped with the scorching pain in her chest. Bending down, he grabbed her hair, lifted her face up and spat in it before slamming her head back against the floor.

"Dirty cunt," he hissed. Then he stood up and looked at the shambles after his assault. "Look what a mess you always make, you fucker," he blared down at her. "Clear it up this minute or I'll kill you!"

He backed slowly away from her and tried to spit at her again, but his mouth was dry.

"Fucking creep," he said. "You're useless. Can't you ever do anything right, you fucking useless whore? Aren't you going to realise that some day? Aren't you going to realise that?"

He didn't care if she was left marked. He knew there was no one who would interfere. Visitors were rare. Occasional chalets lay scattered around the lowlands, but few people ever went to the hill, even though the main road between Grafarvogur and Grafarholt ran nearby, and no one who had any business called on that family.

The house they lived in was a large chalet that he rented from a man in Reykjavík; it was half built when the owner lost interest in it and agreed to rent it to him cheaply if he would finish it. At first he was enthusiastic about working on the house and had almost completed it, until it turned out that the owner did not care either way, and afterwards it began to fall into disrepair. It was made of timber and consisted of an adjacent sitting room and kitchen with a coal stove for cooking, two rooms with coal stoves for heating and a passage between the rooms. In the mornings they fetched water from a well near the house, two buckets every day that were put up on a table in the kitchen.

They had moved there about a year before. After the British occupation of Iceland people flocked to Reykjavik from the countryside in search of work. The family lost their basement flat. Could not afford it any more. The influx meant housing became expensive and rents soared. When he took charge of the half-built chalet in Grafarholt and the family moved out there he started looking for work that suited his new situation and found a job delivering coal to the farms around Reykjavik. Every morning he walked down to the turning to Grafarholt where the coal lorry would pick him up and drop him off again in the evening. Sometimes she thought his sole reason for moving out of Reykjavik was that no one would hear her screams for help when he attacked her.

One of the first things she did after they moved to the hill was to get the redcurrant bushes. Finding it a barren place, she planted the bushes on the south side of the house. They were supposed to mark one end of the garden that she planned to cultivate. She wanted to plant more bushes, but he thought it was a waste of time and forbade her to do it.

She lay motionless on the floor, waiting for him to calm down or go into town to meet his friends. Sometimes he went to Reykjavik and did not come back until the next morning. Her face was ablaze with pain and she felt the same burning in her chest as when he had broken her ribs two years before. She knew that it was not the potatoes. Any more than the stain he noticed on his freshly washed shirt. Any more than the dress she sewed for herself, but that he thought was tarty and ripped to shreds. Any more than the children crying at night, for which he blamed her. "A hopeless mother! Make them shut up or I'll kill them!" She knew he was capable of that. Knew that he could go that far.

The boys darted out of the kitchen when they saw him attack their mother, but Mikkelína stayed put as usual. She could hardly move unassisted. There was a divan in the kitchen where she slept and spent all the day as well because that was the easiest place to keep an eye on her. Generally she kept still after he came in, and when he started thrashing her mother she would pull the blanket over her head with her good hand, as if trying to make herself disappear.

She did not see what happened. Did not want to see. Through the blanket she heard him shouting and her mother shrieking in pain, and she shuddered when she heard her smash into the wall and slump to the floor. Huddled up under her blanket, she started to recite silently to herself:

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

When she stopped, it was quiet again in the kitchen. For a long while the girl did not dare to pull the blanket away. She peeped out from beneath it, warily, but could not see him. Down the passage she saw the front door open. He must have gone out. The girl sat up and saw her mother lying on the floor. She threw off her blanket, crawled down from her sleeping place and pulled her way across the floor and under the table to her mother, who was still lying hunched up and motionless.

Mikkelína snuggled up to her mother. The girl was thin as a rake and weak, and found the hard floor difficult to crawl across. Normally, if she needed to move, her brothers or mother carried her. He never did. He had repeatedly threatened to "kill that moron". "Strangle that monster on that disgusting bed! That cripple!"

Her mother did not move. She felt Mikkelína touch her back and then stroke her head. The pain in her ribcage did not let up and her nose was still bleeding. She didn't know whether she had fainted. She had thought he was still in the kitchen, but since Mikkelína was up and about that was out of the question. Mikkelína feared her stepfather more than anything else in her life.

Gingerly her mother straightened herself, moaning with pain and clutching the side he had kicked. He must have broken her ribs. She rolled over onto her back and looked at Mikkelína. The girl had been crying and she wore a terrified expression. Shocked at the sight of her mother's bloody face, she burst into tears again.

"It's all right, Mikkelína," her mother sighed. "We'll be all right."

Slowly and with great difficulty she got to her feet, supporting herself against the table.

"We'll survive."

She stroked her side and felt the pain piercing her like a sword.

"Where are the boys?" she asked, looking down at Mikkelína on the floor. Mikkelína pointed to the door and made a noise that conveyed agitation and terror. Her mother had always treated her like a normal child. Her stepfather never called her anything but "the moron", or worse. Mikkelína had contracted meningitis at the age of three and wasn't expected to live. For days the girl had been at death's door at Landakot hospital, which was run by nuns, and her mother was not allowed to be with her no matter how she pleaded and cried outside the ward. When Mikkelína's fever died down she had lost all power of movement in her right arm and her legs, and also in her facial muscles, which gave her a crooked expression, one eye half-closed and her mouth so twisted that she could not help dribbling.

The boys knew they were incapable of defending their mother: the younger one was seven and the older one twelve. By now they knew their father's state of mind when he attacked her, all the invective he used to work himself up to it and then the rage that seized him when he screamed curses at her. Then they would flee the scene. Simon, the older one, went first. He would grab his brother and snatch him away too, pulling him along like a frightened lamb, petrified that their father would turn his wrath upon them.

One day he would be able to take Mikkelína with them.

And one day he would be able to defend his mother.

The terrified brothers ran out of the house and headed for the redcurrant bushes. It was autumn and the bushes were in bloom, with thick foliage and little red berries swollen with juice that burst in their hands when they picked them to fill tins and jars that their mother had given them.

They threw themselves to the ground on the other side of the bushes, listening to their father's curses and oaths and the sound of breaking plates and their mother's screams. The younger boy covered his ears, but Simon looked in through the kitchen window that cast its yellowish glow out into the twilight, and he forced himself to listen to her howls.

He had stopped covering his ears. He had to listen if he was to do what he needed to do.

10

Elsa was not exaggerating about the cellar in Benjamín's house. It was packed with junk and for a moment Erlendur found the prospect too daunting. He wondered about calling in Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli, but decided to keep that on hold. The cellar measured about 90 square metres and was partitioned off into a number of different-sized rooms, with no doors or windows, full of boxes and more boxes, some labelled, but most not. There were cardboard boxes that once contained wine bottles and cigarettes, and wooden crates, in all conceivable sizes and filled with an endless assortment of rubbish. In the cellar were also old cupboards, chests, suitcases and sundry items that had accumulated over a long time: dusty bicycles, lawn mowers, an old barbecue grill.

"You can rummage through that as you please," Elsa said when she followed him down. "If there's anything I can help you with, just call me." She half pitied this frowning detective who seemed somewhat absent-minded, shabbily dressed in his tatty cardigan under an old jacket with worn patches on the elbows. She sensed a certain sorrow about him when she talked to him and looked him in the eye.

Erlendur gave a vague smile and thanked her. Two hours later he found the first documents from Benjamín Knudsen the merchant. He had an awful time working through the cellar. Everything was disorganised. Old and more recent junk was mixed up in huge piles that he had to examine and move in order to make progress into the heap. However, the further he slowly made his way across the floor, the older the rubbish seemed to be that he was sorting through. He felt like having a coffee and a cigarette and he wondered whether to pester Elsa or go out for a break and find a cafe.

Eva Lind never left his thoughts. He had his mobile on him and was expecting a call from the hospital at any moment. His conscience plagued him for not being with her. Maybe he should take a few days off, sit beside his daughter and talk to her as the doctor had urged him to. Be with her instead of leaving her in intensive care, unconscious, with no family or comforting words, all by herself. But he knew he could never sit idly waiting by her bedside. Work was a form of salvation. He needed it to occupy his mind. Prevent himself from thinking the worst. The unthinkable.

He tried to concentrate as he worked his way through the cellar. In an old desk he found some invoices from wholesalers addressed to Knudsen's shop. They were handwritten and difficult to decipher, but they seemed to involve deliveries of goods. Similar bills were in the desk cupboard and Erlendur's first impression was that Knudsen had run a grocery. Coffee and sugar were mentioned on the invoices, with figures beside them.

Nothing about work on a chalet far outside Reykjavik where the city's Millennium Quarter was now being built.

Eventually the urge for a cigarette got the better of Erlendur and he found a door in the cellar that opened onto a beautifully kept garden. The flowers were just beginning to bud after the winter, although Erlendur paid no particular attention to that as he stood hungrily smoking. He quickly finished two cigarettes. The mobile rang in his jacket pocket when he was about to go back to the cellar. It was Elínborg.

"How's Eva Lind doing?" she asked.

"Still unconscious," Erlendur said curtly. Did not want any small talk. "Any developments?" he asked.

"I talked to that old chap, Róbert. He owned a chalet up by the hill. I'm not quite sure what he was going on about, but he remembered someone roaming around in your bushes."

"Bushes?"

"By the bones."

"The redcurrant bushes? Who was it?"

"And then I think he died."

Erlendur heard Sigurdur Óli giggle in the background.

"The person in the bushes?"

"No, Róbert," Elínborg said. "So we won't be getting anything more out of him."

"And who was it? In the bushes?"

"It's all very unclear," Elínborg said. "There was someone who often used to go there later. That was really all I got out of him. Then he started to say something. Said 'green lady' and then it was all over."

"Green lady?"

"Yes. Green."

"Often and later and green," Erlendur repeated. "Later than what? What did he mean?"

"As I said, it was very disjointed. I think it might have been . . . I think she was . . ." Elínborg hesitated.

"Was what?" Erlendur asked.

"Crooked."

"Crooked?"

"That was the only description he gave of the person. He'd lost the power of speech and he wrote down that one word, 'crooked'. Then he fell asleep and I think something happened to him because the medical team rushed in to him and . . ."

Elínborg's voice faded out. Erlendur mulled over her words for a while.

"So it looks like a lady often used to go to the redcurrant bushes some time later."

"Perhaps after the war," Elínborg said.

"Did he remember anyone living in the house?"

"A family," Elínborg said. "A couple with three children. I couldn't get any more out of him about that."

"So people did live around there, by the bushes?"

"It looks that way."

"And she was crooked. What's being crooked? How old is Róbert?"

"He's . . . or was . . . I don't know . . . past 90."

"Impossible to tell what he means by that word," Erlendur said as if to himself. "A crooked woman in the redcurrant bushes. Does anyone live in Róbert's chalet? Is it still standing?"

Elínborg told him that she and Sigurdur Óli had talked to the present owners earlier that day, but there had been no mention of any woman. Erlendur told them to go back and ask the owners directly whether any people, specifically a woman, had ever been seen around the area of the redcurrant bushes. Also to try to locate any relatives that Róbert may have had to find out whether he'd ever talked about the family on the hill. Erlendur said he would spend a little more time rummaging around in the cellar before going to the hospital to visit his daughter.

He returned to browsing through Benjamín's things, wondering as he looked around the cellar if it would not take several days to plough through all the junk in there. He squeezed his way back to Benjamín's desk which as far as he could tell contained only documents and invoices connected with his shop. Erlendur did not remember it, but it was apparently on Hverfisgata.

Two hours later, after drinking coffee with Elsa and smoking a further two cigarettes in the back garden, he reached the grey painted chest on the floor. It was locked but had the key in it. Erlendur had to strain to turn it and open the chest. Inside were more documents and envelopes tied up with an elastic band, but no invoices. A few photographs were mixed in with the letters, some framed and others loose. Erlendur looked at them. He had no idea who the people in the photographs were, but assumed that Benjamín himself was in some. One was of a tall, handsome man who was starting to develop a paunch and was standing outside a shop. The occasion was obvious. A sign was being mounted over the door:
KNUDSEN'S SHOP.

Examining more photographs, Erlendur saw the same man. On some of them he was with a younger woman and they smiled at the camera. All the photographs were taken outdoors and always in sunshine.

He put them down, picked up the bundle of envelopes, and discovered they contained love letters from Benjamín to his bride-to-be. Her name was Sólveig. Some were merely very brief messages and confessions of love, others more detailed with accounts of everyday incidents. They were all written with great affection for his sweetheart. The letters appeared to be arranged in chronological order and Erlendur read one of them, though somewhat reluctantly. He felt as if he were prying into something sacrosanct, and felt almost ashamed. Like standing up against a window and peeping in.

My sweetheart,

How terribly I miss you, my beloved. I have been thinking of you all day and count the minutes until you come back. Life without you is like a cold winter, so drab and empty. Imagine, you being away for two whole weeks. I honestly do not know how I can stand it.

Yours lovingly
Benjamín K.

Erlendur put the letter back in its envelope and took out another from further down the pile, which was a detailed account of the prospective merchant's intention to open a shop on Hverfisgata. He had big plans for the future. Had read that in big cities in America there were huge stores selling all kinds of merchandise, clothes as well as food, where people chose off the shelves what they wanted to buy. Then put it in trolleys that they pushed around the shop floor.

He went to the hospital towards evening, intending to sit by Eva Lind's side. First he phoned Skarphédinn, who said that the excavation was making good progress, but refused to predict when they would get down to the bones. They had still not found anything in the soil to indicate the cause of the Millennium Man's death.

Erlendur also phoned Eva Lind's doctor before setting off, and was told that her condition was unchanged. When he arrived at intensive care he saw a woman wearing a brown coat, sitting by his daughter's bedside, and he was almost inside the room when he realised who it was. He tensed up, stopped in his tracks and slowly backed through the door until he was out in the corridor, looking at his ex-wife from a distance.

She had her back to him, but he knew it was her. A woman of his age, sitting and stooping, plump in a bright purple jogging suit under her brown coat, putting a handkerchief to her nose and talking to Eva Lind in a low voice. What she was saying, he couldn't hear. He noticed she had dyed her hair, but apparently quite some time ago because a white strip was visible at the roots where she parted it. He worked out how old she must be now. Three years older than he was.

He had not seen her close up for two decades. Not since he walked out and left her with the two children. She, like Erlendur, had not remarried, but she had lived with several men, some better than others. Eva Lind told him about them when she was older and started seeking his company.

Although the girl was suspicious of him at first, they had nonetheless reached a certain understanding and he tried to help her whenever he could. The same applied to the boy, who was much more distant from him. Erlendur had virtually no contact with his son.

Erlendur watched his ex-wife and backed further down the corridor. He wondered whether to join her, but could not bring himself to. He expected trouble and did not want a scene in this place. Did not want that kind of scene anywhere. Did not want it in his life if he could avoid it. They had never properly come to terms with their failed relationship which, Eva Lind told him, was what hurt her the most.

How he had left.

He turned round and walked slowly down the corridor, thinking about the love letters in Benjamín K.'s cellar. Erlendur could not remember properly, and the question remained unanswered when he got home, slumped in the armchair and allowed sleep to push it out of his mind.

Had Halldóra ever been his sweetheart?