The Day is Dark (35 page)

Friðrikka had said nothing while Thóra was speaking to the girl, but had been listening carefully. She was pale and tired-looking and still seemed a little shaky after having discovered the corpse in the freezer. ‘Do you think they’ll find Oddný Hildur?’ she said now. It was clear that she’d been startled by the story about souls who pulled people down into the ice. No one wanted to imagine a loved one in those circumstances, no matter how far-fetched a notion it seemed.

‘Probably.’ Thóra said this with great conviction, though she was far from certain. The woman could have died out in the open in any one of a million different places – or been put anywhere, if she had died by human hand. There must be animals out in the wild who would take advantage of such an easy meal, though at that moment Thóra could not think of any scavengers native to the area. She had no idea whether polar bears and other indigenous fauna ate only freshly killed prey, or whether everything was considered edible in times of hardship. Considering how little food there was, she assumed the latter. It was extremely likely that neither hide nor hair of the woman would ever be found.

‘We’ve got to get her home and bury her. She can’t stay here.’ Friðrikka was gazing at the multicoloured tablecloth.

‘Aren’t you forgetting Dóri and Bjarki?’ Eyjólfur was sitting at the end of the table, staring out through the window at the choppy sea. ‘Don’t we need to find them too?’

Apparently these two couldn’t agree on anything. If one of them said the sky was blue, the other would say green. ‘Of course it also applies to them. It just came out that way.’ Thóra couldn’t believe she was starting the day by listening to more of their bickering. She looked back at the clock on the wall, irritated at the time difference. Her children had already gone to school by the time she’d woken up, so she would have to wait until later in the day to reach them by phone, and her longing to hear their voices had become almost unbearable. Little Orri could rarely be persuaded to come on the phone and talk to her, so she would have to wait until she came home to hear him. He only ever spoke to the television remote control, which he thought was a telephone. ‘I think I’ll go online and see if I can find Arnar’s telephone number.’ She removed the napkin from her lap and stood up. Now they could argue as much as they wanted.

The online yellow pages turned out to have ten Arnar Jóhannessons listed, and although many of them had middle names that didn’t help Thóra at all. None of them was listed as being an engineer. She asked Matthew to try to dig up his number through the bank, and then went over to the exit to read about the Tupilak. The display had just a few paragraphs of text and a photograph of a hideous creature that did not look anything like what they had found, but more like a rather bony dog carcass with the face of a man. According to the display this was a being that shamans created from various parts of dead animals, birds and human bones. It was further noted that the most powerful ones were made with bones from a child. The Tupilak was created in a secret place out in the wilderness, where the shaman bestowed life on the monster by allowing it to suck semen from his penis. Thóra shuddered slightly at that, but forced herself to continue. After this, the Tupilak was cast into the sea to seek out its victim and kill it. Of course there was a catch: the being was unpredictable and liable to turn on and attack its creator – or anyone else that it met – especially if the enemy was a more powerful shaman than the one who had sent it out. The Tupilak could also cause illness and decimate entire communities, either with epidemics or by killing individuals one by one. This would have fitted in very neatly with the story about the dead settlers of Kaanneq, thought Thóra. The display further revealed that the phenomenon inspired real fear in the natives of former times, even though now it was considered just an entertaining story for tourists; and that since no original Tupilaks had been preserved, at the turn of the twentieth century the locals had started creating things that they thought resembled the creature for the benefit of Europeans. It was uncertain whether the imitation resembled the original version that people feared so much, because the Tupilak was considered so dangerous that it was always destroyed after it had done its job. Or, as legend had it, sometimes it was also buried in the ground or the ice.

Thóra went back over to Matthew. ‘I think I have an explanation for the bone figurine we found in the cab of the drilling rig,’ she said. ‘It could be a Tupilak that the original villagers made and then buried. That would fit with the story the girl told us earlier.’

‘Is that good or bad?’ Matthew seemed somewhat distracted as he stabbed at the keyboard.

‘Bad for the bank’s case. It would be silly to refer to force majeure and then hold up a little statue made of bone. No matter how ugly it is.’

Matthew stopped typing. ‘I don’t think I’ll be mentioning it, then.’

‘The only thing I can think of is that it might be necessary for archaeological excavations to be conducted in the area. That way we’d buy ourselves a little time. If it is a Tupilak, then it’s potentially the only specimen to have been preserved in its original form.’

Matthew suddenly looked interested. ‘That would be better than nothing, at least.’

‘Did you get an answer to your query about Arnar?’ Thóra looked at the long list of unopened e-mail messages in Matthew’s mailbox. Hers had looked the same the night before, but she had decided not to open them until she got home.

‘Not yet – I was sending this. I also found the e-mail address of the director of Berg Technology and sent him an enquiry. He has to have some information about his employees. I asked him to name others in the group whom he considers might be able to help us, too, but he hasn’t responded yet.’

‘Is there no office that you can call?’ Thóra took her phone out of her pocket.

Berg Technology’s phone was answered by a polite but firm woman who did not introduce herself, and Thóra spoke briefly to her to explain her business and its connection with the bank. When she had finished she asked for the phone number of Arnar Jóhannesson.

‘That figures,’ said Thóra when she hung up. ‘We have to wait for a response from the director or your friends at the bank. Arnar is undergoing treatment at Vogur and it’s not possible to reach him.’

‘That’s no good.’ Matthew seemed to take this even worse than Thóra. ‘It would have been nice to be able to explain the bones in the drawers to the police when they contact us again. I’m not sure we’ll get out of here until that matter is settled.’

‘But what about the man in the freezer? Even if we were to wheedle an answer out of someone about the bones, it doesn’t seem very likely that people would be willing to discuss the discovery of the body with us over the phone.’

‘Hopefully the police will conclude that the body was put there recently. I doubt it’s been stored there for very long. It must have been put in the freezer after the group left the area.’

Thóra did not reply to this. What did she know? Whoever stored the human bones in the desk drawers could just as well have put the body in the freezer. Just then, a new message appeared in Matthew’s inbox.

Chapter 28

23 March 2008

The e-mail was from the CEO of Berg, who was in the Azores. The man was obviously quite agitated, since the future of his company depended on reaching an agreement about the project with Arctic Mining. The message’s content was quite confusing and didn’t reveal much about how he planned to make up for the delays in Greenland, once his crew could be persuaded to go back to work there. He said that he had convinced two of the company’s other drillers, who were finishing up a job elsewhere, to take over from Bjarki and Dóri; it was clear that he believed them to be dead. He expressed certainty that he could persuade the others to return to work if some explanation were found for what had happened at the work site, and hinted that Thóra and Matthew should come up with a story about how the men had gone for a hike in the mountains that had ended badly, thus providing a rational explanation for their disappearance. If that failed, they should send all the employees a strictly worded message that their wages would be docked and they would be prosecuted if they didn’t go straight back to work. However, the conclusion of this strange message was a list of the telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of all the employees who now refused to return to Greenland. It was not a large group, and Thóra and Matthew divided the task between themselves, with her phoning them one by one and Matthew sending e-mails to those she couldn’t reach or who refused to speak to her.

‘What a charming bunch of people – I don’t think.’ Thóra hung up on the fifth person on the list and watched as Matthew started typing him a follow-up e-mail. ‘Anyone would think they’d all conspired to keep their mouths shut.’

‘They might have got themselves a lawyer,’ said Matthew, grinning at Thóra. ‘That would be terrible.’ Thóra made do with nudging Matthew lightly with her elbow. She felt that he rather deserved the chance to stand up for himself after yesterday evening. While attempting to find a news programme on the TV in their room he had, much to his satisfaction, come across a station in German. However, his happiness was subdued somewhat when he realized that all the programme consisted of was young women walking around stark naked, enthusiastically caressing their own bodies and chewing on pearl necklaces that for some reason they didn’t seem inclined to take off. Thóra had teased Matthew about how peculiar the news from his homeland was, and flicked over to the channel at regular intervals to check whether there were any actual news updates.

She tried the two numbers that supposedly belonged to Arnar Jóhannesson; one was his home phone, which no one answered, and the other his mobile, but either it was switched off or there was no signal where he was. That came as no surprise; if the man was in rehab, he might have lost his phone on a drunken binge or handed it over when he checked in. Thóra wondered whether she should call Vogur Hospital and ask to speak to him, but decided to wait in the hope that one of the others could be persuaded to open up. She continued down the list, which now had only two employees left on it. She was fairly optimistic that they would be more easily convinced to talk about things than the others she’d reached. One didn’t answer, and as she tried the last one, Sigmundur Pétursson, she said to Matthew: ‘Well, keep your fingers crossed.’ It rang three times, then a husky male voice answered unenthusiastically. After introducing herself, Thóra said, ‘I’d like to know whether you could possibly explain to me the provenance of the bones found in the office building. It’s really important, as the police are on site searching for the missing people.’ She added this last bit of information in the hope of keeping the man calm and avoiding hammering one more nail into the project’s proverbial coffin. The employees would never return if they expected to run straight into the police. ‘They need to rule out the possibility that the bones belong to Bjarki or Dóri, and it would speed things up if it were possible to explain how they ended up there.’ This was much further than she’d got in her previous calls.

‘The bones, yes.’ Pétursson sounded serious. ‘They’re not Bjarki’s or Dóri’s. You can tell that to the policemen.’

‘I doubt that will be enough for them,’ said Thóra. ‘I’ll have to give them a more detailed explanation if the investigation is not to be delayed by an examination of the remains, which would in turn delay further searches for the missing persons.’ This was a white lie; obviously the team who would conduct the examination of the bones was not the same one who was searching the area. ‘So this could be very important for your co-workers: if they’ve made it to shelter somewhere they could still be alive.’

At first she heard only the man’s heavy breathing, but then he spoke, slowly and determinedly, and Thóra did not doubt the validity of what he said.

‘We found a grave. In the area we were supposed to clear to make a track for the drilling rig.’

‘And were these bones inside the grave?’ Thóra waved her hand between Matthew’s face and the computer screen to draw his attention to the fact that the phone calls were finally producing results.

‘Yes. They were buried, if you can call it that. They were lying in a kind of animal-skin bag beneath a pile of stones.’

‘A cairn,’ said Thóra. ‘They’d been interred beneath a cairn. How come they weren’t all broken into pieces, if they were lying underneath a pile of rocks?’

‘They were small rocks, so I’d say that’s not so weird. Maybe the bag protected them as well. I don’t know.’

‘Where was this exactly?’ Maybe there would still be traces, which would help convince the police of the story’s validity. ‘Is it possible to find the place?’

Pétursson gave a joyless laugh. ‘Yes, it’s possible. But it’s disappeared beneath the track. It was at the very end of it, right at the place where the drilling rig is now.’

Thóra wiped the image of the bag from her mind and focused on the conversation. ‘What did you do with the bag? Do you know where it is?’

‘It got thrown away. It was pretty disgusting, you know, since a corpse had decomposed in it. There were holes in it where foxes had probably got in, since the stones were piled a bit haphazardly and there was enough space for a creature that size to squeeze through. Anyway, we threw the bag away.’

‘Where?’ Thóra couldn’t imagine rubbish trucks driving around the work site, so it was likely that the bag was still where it had been thrown.

‘We put all the rubbish into a large container next to the cafeteria, but it was taken from there and buried on a regular basis in a place set aside for the purpose. If I remember correctly the container was emptied after we threw away the bag.’

Perhaps there was still some hope regarding the fate of the bag, if it turned out to be important. Friðrikka and Eyjólfur should be able to point them to the spot where rubbish was buried, so she needn’t waste any of this conversation getting a better description of its location. ‘So it was just bones and nothing else – no clothing, nothing that might suggest the person’s identity?’