Hypothermia

by Arnaldur Indridason

  The organised search lasted for more than a week but, to cut a long story short, the boy was never found. There were a great many conjectures about his fate because it was as if the earth had simply swallowed him up. Some thought he had drowned in the Eskifjördur River and been carried down to the sea, others that he had been driven by the weather higher up into the mountains than anyone had envisaged. Others still thought he must have been lost in the bogs above the head of Eskifjördur fjord as he was making his way home.

  Sveinn Erlendsson’s grief at the fate of his sons was said to be terrible to behold. Later the rumour arose in the neighbourhood that his wife Áslaug had warned her husband against taking both boys with him on to the moor that day but that he had ignored her warning.

  The elder brother recovered from his frostbite but was said to have been left gloomy and withdrawn by his ordeal. He was reputed to have continued searching for his brother’s remains for as long as the family lived at Bakkasel.

  Two years after these events, the family left the district and moved to Reykjavík and Bakkasel was left derelict, as we have said.

  Erlendur closed the book and ran his hand over the worn cover. Eva Lind sat silently facing him on the sofa. A long moment passed before she reached for the packet of cigarettes on the table.

  ‘Gloomy and withdrawn?’ she asked.

  ‘Old Dagbjartur didn’t mince his words,’ Erlendur said. ‘He needn’t have been so blunt. He didn’t know if I was gloomy or withdrawn. He never met me. He was barely acquainted with your grandparents. He learnt his information from members of the search party. People have no business printing gossip and rumour and dressing it up as the truth. He hurt my mother in a way that was quite uncalled-for.’

  ‘And you as well.’

  Erlendur shrugged.

  ‘It was a long time ago. I haven’t been keen to advertise the existence of this account, probably out of respect for my mother. She wasn’t happy with it.’

  ‘Was it true? Didn’t she want you to go with your father?’

  ‘She was against it. But later on she didn’t blame him for what happened. Of course she was grief-stricken and angry but she knew it wasn’t a question of guilt or innocence. It was a question of survival, survival in the battle against nature. The journey had to be made. There was no way of knowing beforehand that it would turn out to be so dangerous.’

  ‘What happened to your father? Why didn’t he do anything?’

  ‘I never really understood that. He came down from the moor in a state of shock, convinced that Bergur and I were both dead. It was as if he’d lost the will to live. He himself only survived by the skin of his teeth after we were separated, and when it grew dark and night fell and the storm intensified your grandmother said it was as if he simply gave up. He sat on the edge of his bed in his room and took no further interest in what was going on. Admittedly he was exhausted and suffering from frostbite. When he heard I’d been rescued he revived a little. I crept into his room and he took me in his arms.’

  ‘He must have been glad.’

  ‘He was, of course, but I . . . I felt oddly guilty. I couldn’t understand why I was spared while Bergur died. I still don’t really understand. I felt as if I must have caused it in some way, as if it was my fault. Little by little I shut myself in with those thoughts. Gloomy and withdrawn. Maybe he was right after all.’

  They sat in silence until finally Erlendur laid the book aside.

  ‘Your grandmother left everything in good order when we moved. I’ve been to derelict farms where it seems as if people have walked out in a hurry and never looked back. Plates on the table, crockery in the cupboards, furniture in the living room, beds in the bedrooms. Your grandmother emptied our house and left nothing behind, took our furniture to Reykjavík and gave the rest of the stuff away. No one cared to live there after we left. Our home fell derelict. That’s a peculiar feeling. On the last day we walked from room to room and I felt a strange emptiness that has stayed with me ever since. As if we were leaving our life behind in that place, behind those old doors and blank windows. As if we no longer had a life. Some power had taken it away from us.’

  ‘Like it took Bergur?’

  ‘Sometimes I wish he’d leave me in peace. That a whole day would pass without him entering my thoughts.’

  ‘But it doesn’t?’

  ‘No. It doesn’t.’

  21

  Erlendur sat in his car outside the church, smoking and brooding on coincidences. He had long pondered the way simple coincidence could decide a person’s fate, decide their life and death. He knew examples of such coincidence from his work. More than once he had surveyed the scene of a murder that was committed for no motive whatsoever, without any warning or any connection between murderer and victim.

  One of the cruellest examples of such a coincidence was that of a woman who was murdered on her way home from the supermarket in one of the city suburbs. The shop was one of a handful in those days that opened in the evenings. She encountered two men who were well known to the police. They meant to rob her but she clung on to her bag with a peculiar obstinacy. One of the repeat offenders had a small crowbar with him and struck her two heavy blows on the head. She was already dead by the time she was brought in to Accident and Emergency.

  Why her? Erlendur had asked himself as he stood over the woman’s body one summer’s evening twenty years ago.

  He knew that the two men who had attacked her were walking time bombs; in his view it had been inevitable that they would commit a serious crime one day, but it was by complete coincidence that their paths had crossed that of the woman. It could have been someone else that evening, or a week, a month, a year later. Why her, in that place, at that time? And why did she react as she did when she encountered them? When did the sequence of events begin that was to end with this murder? he asked himself. He was not for a moment trying to absolve the criminals of blame, only to examine the life that had ended in a pool of blood on a Reykjavík pavement.

  He discovered that the woman was from the countryside and had lived in the city for more than seven years. Because of redundancies in the fisheries she had moved there with her two daughters and her husband from the fishing village where she’d been born. The trawler that their community relied on had been sold to another district, the prawn catch failed. Perhaps her final journey really began there. The family settled in the suburbs. She had wanted to move closer to the town centre but the same kind of flat would have been considerably more expensive there. That was another nail in her coffin.

  Her husband found work in the construction business and she became a service rep for a phone company. The company moved their headquarters, making it harder for her to travel to work by public transport, so she handed in her notice. She was taken on as a caretaker at the local elementary school and liked the job; she got on well with the children. She went to work on foot every day and became a keen walker, dragging her husband out every evening, walking around the neighbourhood and only missing her breather if the weather was really bad. Their daughters were growing up. The eldest was nearing her twentieth birthday.

  Her time was running out. That fateful evening the family were all at home and the elder daughter asked her mother for home-made ice cream. With that she set the chain of events in motion. They were out of cream and one or two other minor ingredients. The mother went out to the shop.

  The younger daughter offered to run over for her but her mother said no, thanks. She fancied an evening stroll and caught her husband’s eye. He said he didn’t feel like it. There was a repeat on television of an Icelandic documentary featuring interviews with people from the countryside, some of them real oddballs, and he didn’t want to miss it. Perhaps that was one of the coincidences. If the programme hadn’t been on, he would have gone with her.

  The mother went out and never came back.

  The man who inflicted her death blow said that she wouldn’t let go of her handbag, no matter what they did. It turned o
ut that the woman had withdrawn a large amount of cash earlier that day for the birthday present she planned to buy her daughter, and was carrying it in her bag. That was why she held on to it so tightly. She never normally carried so much money around.

  That too was a coincidence.

  She lost her life that summer’s evening with her daughter’s birthday present on her mind; all she had done wrong was to live her ordinary life and take loving care of her family.

  Erlendur stubbed out his cigarette and stepped out of the car. He looked up at the church, a cold, grey lump of concrete, and thought to himself that the architect must have been an atheist. At any rate, he couldn’t see how the building could have been raised to the glory of God; if anything, it would have been to the glory of the company that supplied the concrete.

  The vicar Eyvör was sitting in her office, talking on the phone. She gestured at a chair. He waited for her to finish her conversation. There was a cupboard containing a cassock, ruff and other vestments standing half-open in the office.

  ‘Back again?’ Eyvör said, having finished her conversation. ‘Is it still about María?’

  ‘I read somewhere that cremations are becoming increasingly popular,’ he said, hoping to avoid giving her a direct answer.

  ‘There are always people who choose that course and leave strict instructions to that effect. People who don’t want their body to rot in the ground.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with the Christian faith, then?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘I understand Baldvin had María cremated,’ Erlendur said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That it was her wish.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘She never discussed it with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did Baldvin discuss her wishes with you?’

  ‘No. He didn’t. He simply told me that it was what she would have wanted. We don’t require any proof of that sort of thing.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Her death seems to be preying on you,’ Eyvör commented.

  ‘Maybe,’ Erlendur said.

  ‘What do you think happened?’

  ‘I think she must have been suffering very badly,’ he said. ‘Very badly, for a long time.’

  ‘I think so too. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t as surprised as many other people about what happened.’

  ‘Did she talk to you at all about her visions, hallucinations or anything like that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing about believing she had seen her mother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Visits to mediums?’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’

  ‘What did you talk about, if I may ask?’

  ‘Naturally it’s confidential,’ Eyvör said. ‘I can’t tell you in any detail, and anyway I don’t think it had any direct bearing on the way she chose to leave this world. We generally discussed religion.’

  ‘Any aspect in particular?’

  ‘Yes. Sometimes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Forgiveness. Absolution. Truth. How it sets people free.’

  ‘Did she ever talk to you about what happened at Lake Thingvallavatn when she was a child?’

  ‘No,’ Eyvör said. ‘Not that I remember.’

  ‘About her father’s death?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry I can’t help you at all.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Erlendur said, standing up.

  ‘Though I can perhaps tell you one thing. We often discussed life after death, as I think I mentioned to you when we last talked. She was . . . what can I say . . . she became increasingly fascinated by the subject as the years went by, especially, of course, after her mother died. What she really wanted was proof of something of the kind and I had the feeling she was prepared to go quite a long way if necessary to obtain that proof.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Eyvör leant forward over the desk. Out of the corner of his eye Erlendur glimpsed her vicar’s ruff in the cupboard.

  ‘I think she was ready to go all the way. But that’s just my opinion and I wouldn’t want you to spread it any further. Let’s keep it between ourselves.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘I just got that impression.’

  ‘So her suicide was . . .?’

  ‘Her search for answers. I think. I know I shouldn’t talk like this but from my knowledge of her over the last few years I could well believe that she was quite simply searching for answers.’

  When Erlendur was back in his car, driving away from the church, his mobile phone rang. It was Sigurdur Óli. Erlendur had asked him to run a check on María’s mobile phone and Baldvin had willingly given his consent. In the days leading up to her death she had been in contact with people about her academic work, with Karen about the holiday cottage and with her husband, both at the hospital and on his mobile.

  ‘Her last call from the mobile was made the evening she hanged herself,’ Sigurdur Óli said, without beating about the bush.

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘At twenty to nine.’

  ‘So she must have been alive then?’

  ‘Apparently. The call lasted ten minutes.’

  ‘Her husband said she called him from the cottage that evening.’

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Sigurdur Óli asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What is it with this case? The woman killed herself; is there any more to it than that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you realise you’re investigating it as if it was murder?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Erlendur said. ‘I don’t think she was murdered. I want to know why she committed suicide, that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Erlendur said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘I thought you were only interested in missing-person cases.’

  ‘Suicide is a missing-person case too,’ Erlendur said and hung up on him.

  The medium greeted María at the door and invited her in, They had a lengthy chat before the seance proper began, Magdalena made a good impression on María, She was warm and understanding and solicitous, just as Andersen had been, but María found it different talking to a woman, She wasn’t as shy with Magdalena, And it seemed that Magdalena’s psychic powers were stronger, She was more receptive, knew more, could see more and further than Andersen.

  They sat down in the living room and Magdalena gradually eased them into the seance proper, María took in little of the flat or its furnishings, Baldvin had obtained the number from his colleague at the hospital and she had immediately called Magdalena who said she could meet her straight away, María received the impression that the psychic lived alone.

  ‘I sense a strong presence,’ Magdalena said, She closed her eyes and opened them again, ‘A woman has made contact,’ she continued, ‘Ingibjörg, Does that sound familiar?’

  ‘My grandmother’s name was Ingibjörg,’ María said, ‘She died a long time ago.’

  ‘She’s very distant. You weren’t close.’

  ‘No, I hardly knew her, She was my father’s mother.’

  ‘She’s terribly sad.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She says it wasn’t your fault what happened.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She’s talking about an accident,’ Magdalena said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s water, Someone who drowned.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A tragic accident, the old woman says.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you familiar with . . . There’s a painting, is it a painting of water? It’s a picture of Lake Thingvallavatn, Does that sound familiar?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you, There’s . . . there’s a man who . . . It’s unclear, a picture or painting . . . There’s a woman who calls herself Lovísa, does that ring any bells?’

  ‘Yes.�
��

  ‘She’s related to you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you, She’s young . . . I . . . hardly more than twenty.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s smiling. There’s so much light around her. There’s a radiance around her. She’s smiling. She says that Leonóra’s with her and is content.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She says you’re not to worry. . . . She says Leonóra’s feeling wonderful, She says . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She says she’s looking forward to seeing you again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She wants you to know that she’s happy, It’ll be wonderful when you come, Wonderful.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She says you mustn’t be afraid, She says you’re not to worry, Everything will be fine, Whatever you do, She says that whatever you decide to do . . . it’ll . . . she says it’ll turn out well, You mustn’t worry, Everything will turn out fine.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s a beautiful aura around this woman, She . . . There’s a radiance coming from her. . . . She’s telling you . . . are you familiar with . . . there’s a writer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A French writer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s smiling, It’s . . . the woman with her . . . she’s . . . she says she’s feeling better now, All the . . . all the pain . . .’

  Magdalena squeezed her eyes shut.

  ‘They’re fading . . . ’

  She opened her eyes but it took her a while to recover her bearings.

  ‘Was . . . was that all right?’ she asked.

  María nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ she said quietly, ‘Thank you.’

  When María got home she told Baldvin what had happened at the seance, She was in an emotional state, declaring that she had not expected such unequivocal messages and was surprised at who had made contact during the seance, She hadn’t thought about her maternal grandmother since she was a little girl and she had only ever heard people talk about her great-aunt Lovísa, She was her maternal grandmother’s sister, who had died young of typhoid fever.