“Me and Sindri also talked a lot about your brother who died,” Eva Lind said, lighting her cigarette.
She came right out with it, as if it had no more personal bearing on her than a story in a newspaper. For an instant Erlendur was angry with his daughter. What damn business of hers is that! More than a generation had passed since his brother had died, but Erlendur was still highly sensitive about it. He had not discussed his brother’s death with anyone until Eva wheedled the story out of him one day, and sometimes he regretted having bared his soul to her.
“What were you saying about him?”
“Sindri told me how he heard all about it when he was in a fish factory out east. They remembered you and your brother and our grandparents, people neither of us had ever heard of.”
Sindri had told Erlendur this too. His son had turned up one day, newly arrived in the city, and told him what he had heard about Erlendur and his brother and their father, and their fateful journey up onto the moors when the blizzard struck without warning.
“We talked about the stories he heard,” Eva Lind said.
“The stories he heard?” Erlendur parroted. “What are you and Sindri-?”
“Maybe that was the reason for my dream,” Eva Lind interrupted him. “Because we were talking about him. Your brother.”
“What did you dream?”
“Did you know some people keep diaries about what they dream? I don’t, but my friend writes down everything she dreams. I never dream anything. Or at least I never remember my dreams. I’ve heard that everyone has dreams but only some people can remember them.”
“So tell me what you and Sindri were saying.”
“What was your brother’s name?” Eva asked, ignoring his question.
“Bergur,” Erlendur said. “My brother was called Bergur. What did Sindri hear about us in the east?”
“Shouldn’t he have been found?”
“They did everything they could to find him,” Erlendur said. “Rescue teams and the local farmers, everyone who was able searched for us. I was found. We became separated in the blizzard. He was never found.”
“Yes, but what I mean is, shouldn’t he have been found later on?” Eva said, with the obstinate tone in her voice that Erlendur knew from his own mother. “Body parts, bones?”
Erlendur was perfectly aware what Eva was talking about although he pretended not to be. Sindri had probably heard this story in the east, where people were still talking about the boys who were lost in a blizzard with their father so many years ago. Erlendur had heard many theories before he moved to Reykjavik with his parents. Now his daughter, who knew nothing of the matter apart from the little that Erlendur had told her, was sitting in front of him eager to discuss the theories about his brother’s disappearance. All of a sudden she had turned up at his flat and wanted to discuss his brother, the memories that had tormented him since the age often.
“Not necessarily,” Erlendur said. “Do you mind if we talk about something else?”
“Why don’t you want to discuss it? Why is it so difficult?”
“Was that why you came?” Erlendur asked. “To tell me what you dreamed?”
“Why was he never found?” Eva said.
He could not understand his daughter’s obstinacy. As time passed it had caused interest that his brother’s remains were never found, not even a hat or glove or scarf. Nothing. People had various theories as to why. He avoided brooding on them too much.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “Another time maybe. Tell me about yourself. We haven’t seen each other for ages. What have you been up to?”
“You were there,” Eva said, refusing to leave him alone. “You were in my dream. I’ve never dreamed anything as clear as that. I haven’t dreamed about you since I was little and I didn’t even know what you looked like then.”
Erlendur said nothing. His mother had tried to teach him to interpret dreams, but he had always been reluctant and uninterested. It was only in recent years that his attitude had softened and his interest became roused, in spite of everything. Eva told him that she never had dreams or remembered them, and his mother had said the same. It was not until the age of thirty that his mother started dreaming to any extent, when she suddenly developed the gift of foretelling deaths, births, visitors and many other events with uncanny accuracy. But she did not foresee her son’s death in a dream and he visited her in her sleep only once afterwards. She had described the dream to Erlendur. It was summer and her boy was standing at the door of the farmhouse, leaning up against the doorpost. His back was turned to her and she could only discern his outline. The image persisted for a long while but it was impossible for her to approach him. She felt she was stretching her arms towards him without his noticing her. Then he stood up straight, bowed his head and thrust his hands into his pockets the way he sometimes did, walked out into the summer’s day… and disappeared.
That was six years after it had happened. They had moved to Reykjavik by then.
Erlendur seldom recalled the world of his dreams unless he became too emotionally involved in a case he happened to be investigating. Then he might have bad dreams, although he would not necessarily remember their substance. It took him a long time to digest the fact that Eva had come to see him after all this time to tell him about a dream she had had, involving him and his brother.
“What did you dream, Eva?” he asked falteringly. “What happened in your dream?”
“First tell me how he died.”
“You know that,” Erlendur said. “He froze to death on the moors. A storm blew up and we were buried in a snowdrift.”
“Why was he never found?”
“Where are you heading with all this, Eva?”
“You haven’t told me the whole story, have you?”
“What story?”
“Sindri told me what could have happened.”
“What are they blathering on about out there in the east?” Erlendur said. “What do they reckon they know?”
“In my dream he didn’t die of exposure, you see. And that fits in with what Sindri said.”
“Please drop the subject,” Erlendur said. “Let’s stop. I don’t want to talk about it. Not now. Later, Eva. I promise.”
“But—”
“Surely you can tell,” he interrupted her. “I don’t want to. Maybe you ought to leave. I… I’m very busy. It’s been a rough day. Let’s discuss it better another time.”
He stood up. Eva watched him without saying a word. She could not comprehend his reaction. It was as if the event had just as much effect on Erlendur now as it did at the time; as if he had proved completely incapable of dealing with it for all those years.
“Don’t you want to hear my dream?”
“Not now.”
“Okay,” she said as she stood up.
“Say hello to Sindri from me if you see him,” Erlendur said, running his fingers through his hair.
“I will,” Eva said.
“It was nice seeing you,” he said awkwardly.
“Same here.”
When she had left he stood facing the bookshelves for a long time, as if in another world. Eva had a knack of riling him. No one else could do it in quite the same way. He was not ready to embark on accounts of his brother’s disappearance. Once he had promised to tell Eva the whole story, but nothing had come of it. She could not burst into his life now, insisting on answers whenever she had the urge.
The book he had read aloud from for Marion Briem was lying on the table in the living room and he picked it up. Like so many of his books, it dealt with fatal accidents, but what distinguished it from all the others was that it contained a short narrative of events that had taken place many years before, when a father and his two sons were caught in a violent storm on the moors above Eskifjordur.
Erlendur looked up the story as he had done so often before. The accounts varied in length but most were structured in the same way. First came a heading and a subheading o
r source reference. The story generally opened with a topographical description, followed by the narrative proper and a short postscript. He had read this account more often than anything else in his life and knew it off by heart, word for word. It was impartial and impersonal, despite telling of the lonely death of an eight-year-old boy. It made no mention of the devastation that the incident had left behind in the hearts of those who experienced it. That story would never be written.
16
The police attached the highest priority to locating Niran, who had not been heard of since the previous day. With the help of the school staff, they gathered information about his friends, boys he knew and spent most of his time with at school. A lower-profile and more personal search was also in progress, known only to Erlendur and based on Marion Briem’s memory of Andres’s stepfather. He wanted to keep that line of inquiry quiet because he had the feeling Andres was lying to them. He had done as much in the past.
When word spread that Sunee, the victim’s mother, had spirited her older son away to a safe haven, it became headline news and a talking point all over Iceland. The police were heavily criticised for their ineptitude. Either they had let a key witness slip through their hands or, even worse, they had driven him to flight through their own sheer incompetence. After suspicions were raised that the police had tried to conceal this information, like so much else connected with the investigation, a furore broke out about the information act and lack of cooperation with the media.
Erlendur despised nothing more than having to inform journalists and reporters about “the progress of the investigation’, as it was called. He had long maintained that police investigations had nothing to do with the media and that it could be downright damaging to give constant updates about the latest developments. Sigurdur Oli disagreed. He considered it a matter of course to give information, provided it did not jeopardise the interests of the investigation.
“Interests of the investigation?” Erlendur fumed. “Who invents phrases like that? That lot can stick it where the sun don’t shine. We shouldn’t be releasing any bloody information until we ourselves know what’s happened. It serves no purpose whatsoever.”
They were sitting in Erlendur’s office, with Elinborg. A press conference was to be held later that day in response to demands by the media, but Erlendur had refused to attend. This created quite a rumpus between him and his immediate superiors. The outcome was that Sigurdur Oli would be police spokesman and media liaison, along with the deputy head of Reykjavik CID. Erlendur considered it stupid to waste manpower on such pointless exercises.
He had met Odinn, Elias’s father, the previous day when it transpired that Niran had gone missing again and Sunee refused to disclose his whereabouts. Erlendur went to visit him in the flat on Snorrabraut. Odinn had taken several days off work. He did not look as if he had slept well that night, he was unkempt and in bad shape.
Sigridur, Sunee’s mother-in-law, had also taken leave from work and Sigurdur Oli visited her at her home. She said she had been on her way to see Sunee when she heard the news, and really could not understand what was going on. She had offered to sleep at their flat that night, but Sunee had declined. Sigridur had no idea of her movements and could not imagine what had become of Niran. She wondered why Sunee should take such drastic action. Sigurdur Oli hinted that she might have something to hide from the police, but Sigridur dismissed that as absurd. Rather Sunee was trying to protect the boy, she thought.
The most likely scenario was that Sunee had approached someone within the Thai community in the city. Elinborg spent a long time with her brother Virote. She could not tell whether he was lying when he claimed to know nothing. He was deeply anxious about his sister and Niran and reproached the police for allowing such a thing to happen. Elinborg visited the brother on her own, although he could not speak much more Icelandic than Sunee. She repeatedly asked him about Niran, but Virote stood firm.
“I can well understand if you don’t want to tell me where Niran is,” Elinborg said, “but you have to believe that it’s in his best interests to come out of hiding.”
“I not know about Niran,” Virote said. “Sunee not tell me nothing.”
“You must help us,” Elinborg said.
“I not know nothing.”
“Why did Sunee do this?” Elinborg asked.
“I not know what she do. She afraid. Afraid for Niran.”
“Why?”
“I not know nothing.”
The brother stuck to his guns until Elinborg gave up and left.
“We have to find Niran and tell him he can trust us,” Erlendur said. “Sunee has to understand that.”
“He can hardly spend long in hiding,” Elinborg said. “Surely Sunee will want him to attend Elias’s funeral. Anything else would be out of the question.”
“She could be getting the boy out of the way,” Sigurdur Oli said. “This bizarre twist has turned the spotlight on Niran, on what he knows and what he did. We can’t ignore that.”
“I can’t imagine that he attacked his brother,” Elinborg said. “I just can’t picture it. Maybe he does know something and he’s afraid, but I don’t believe he played any part in what happened.”
“If only we could go by what you can imagine, Elinborg,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Wouldn’t everything be just dandy?”
“There’s nothing bloody “dandy” about it,” Erlendur snapped.
Sigurdur Oli grinned.
“I told Sunee we couldn’t be sure when the body would be released because of the investigation,” Erlendur said. “One possibility is that she’s trying to win time. But time for what?”
“Is she waiting for us to solve the case?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “However we’re supposed to do that.”
“There are some small-scale racial clashes in or around the school,” Erlendur said. “Niran’s mixed up in them somehow. There’s a minor altercation. Elias isn’t necessarily involved but Niran is. When Elias is attacked, Niran disappears or doesn’t come home. When he finally does show up he’s obviously had a major shock. Maybe he saw what happened. Maybe he only heard about it. He was in a state of shock when I found him in the rubbish store. He’d locked himself away in some private place in his mind where he felt safe. Anyway, Niran tells his mother what he knows and she responds by bundling him off into hiding. What does that tell us?”
“That they know what happened,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Niran knows and he’s told his mother.”
Erlendur looked at Elinborg.
“Something happened when Niran was alone with his mother,” she said. “That’s all we can be sure of. Anything else is conjecture. They don’t necessarily know anything. She’s already lost one son and she’s not prepared to lose the only one she has left.”
“What about that little dealer’s claim that Niran and his friends were selling dope?” Erlendur asked.
“You can’t trust a word that girl says,” Elinborg said.
“Could it be that Sunee no longer feels safe among us?” Erlendur said. “Here in Iceland? Could that explain why she’s hidden her son? We can’t begin to understand what it’s really like for immigrants in this country. We can’t begin to understand what it’s like for someone from the other side of the globe to move over here, settle, start a family and try to integrate into Icelandic society. It’s bound to be tough and I think it’s very hard for us to put ourselves in their shoes. Racism may not be an everyday occurrence here but we know that not everyone’s happy with the way society is going.”
“According to surveys, the majority of young Icelanders feel things have gone far enough,” Sigurdur Oli chipped in. “Which shows they’re not exactly keen on multiculturalism.”
“We want foreigners to come here and do shitty jobs at power stations, fish factories and as cleaners, then pack up and leave again when we don’t need them any more,” Elinborg said. “ ‘Thanks for the help, don’t hurry back!’ God forbid that we might get stuck with these people. But if they do insist on
coming here, they can stay away from us. Like the Yanks on the Base who’ve always been kept safely behind fences. Wasn’t it official policy for years that no black people were allowed on the Base? I reckon that’s still a common attitude: that foreigners ought to be kept behind fences.”
“You can’t rule out the possibility that they erect the fences themselves,” Sigurdur Oli said. “It’s not a one-way street. I think you’re oversimplifying. There are also cases of immigrants not wanting to integrate, only marrying within their own group and so on. Wanting to close ranks and ignore what goes on in the wider community.”
“From what I hear, it’s worked out best in the West Fjords,” Elinborg said, “where a variety of nationalities, people from literally dozens of countries, live in a small area and respect each other’s cultural differences and backgrounds while trying to make a life for themselves in Iceland.”
“If I can continue,” Erlendur said, “what I think may have happened is that Sunee sought refuge among her own kind. She doesn’t trust us, so she’s taken Niran somewhere where she thinks he’ll be safer. I reckon we ought to organise our search on that basis. She’s turned to the people she trusts best for protection, her own kind.”
Elinborg nodded.
“Very probably,” she said. “So it’s not necessarily a question of what Niran knows or has done.”
“Only time will tell,” Erlendur said.
By midday the school staff had supplied them with the names of the boys who Niran was believed to spend most of his time with at school and in the neighbourhood. Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg took the list and set off. It contained four names, all of them boys from immigrant families who lived in the school’s catchment area: one of Thai origin, two from the Philippines and one from Vietnam. All except the Thai boy had been born in Asia, moved to Iceland after the age often, and had problems adapting to Icelandic society.
Erlendur spent the rest of the morning making the arrangements for Marion Briem’s funeral. He contacted the funeral director’s, who told him to leave it to them. A date was set and he placed an announcement of the death and funeral in the papers. He was not expecting a large turn-out and didn’t entertain the idea of a reception for long. Marion had left instructions for the funeral, including the name of a minister and a choice of hymns, and Erlendur followed them to the letter.
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