Into Oblivion

by Arnaldur Indridason

  ‘Especially if he’d sunk properly. Nobody comes out here. Except the odd psoriasis sufferer.’

  ‘Did you have to interrogate her about her condition?’ asked Marion, watching the woman’s car speeding away. ‘You’ve got to stop prying into people’s personal lives.’

  ‘She was upset. You saw that. I was trying to distract her.’

  ‘You’re a policeman, not a priest.’

  ‘The body would probably never have been found if it weren’t for that woman’s psoriasis,’ said Erlendur. ‘Don’t you find that … a bit …?’

  ‘Of a strange coincidence?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve known stranger. Bloody hell, it’s cold,’ said Marion, opening the car door.

  ‘What’s this place called, by the way? Do you know?’ asked Erlendur, surveying the power station with its billows of steam rising to the sky and dispersing into the night. The answer came back instantly.

  ‘Illahraun,’ said Marion, the know-all, getting into the car. ‘Formed during the eruption of 1226.’

  ‘Evil Lava?’ said Erlendur, opening the driver’s door. ‘That’s all we need.’

  4

  The following day the pathologist confirmed their suspicion that the man’s death had not been caused by a beating. He couldn’t count all the broken bones and calculated that the victim must have fallen at least twenty metres. The pattern of fractures indicated that he had not landed feet first, nor did the pathologist think he had tried to break his fall with his arms. All the indications were that he had landed face down on a very hard surface. After a preliminary examination, the pathologist expressed doubt that the man could have fallen off a cliff on the Reykjanes Peninsula. For one thing, the surface the man landed on appeared to have been smooth, and, for another, he could find no evidence to suggest the man had been on the seashore or in the mountains. Not from his clothes, at any rate. He was dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, with only a shirt on underneath. On his feet he wore cowboy boots with heels, pointed toes and cut-out decorations.

  ‘What kind of mudbath did you pull the poor guy out of?’ asked the pathologist. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  He was a stooped, elderly figure nearing retirement, white-haired and gaunt, with a large pair of horn-rimmed glasses on his nose. He wore a white coat with an apron over the top. The cadaver lay on the table in the cold, unforgiving glare of the lights. There was a tray of scalpels and forceps beside it, and the room stank sickeningly of formalin, disinfectant and open human torsos. Erlendur was ill at ease; he would never get used to the smell of this place and its association with death. He tried not to look at the body more than absolutely necessary. Marion, who had thicker skin, was undisturbed by the sterile environment and the sight that confronted them on the pathologist’s slab.

  ‘He was found in the run-off lagoon from the power station at Svartsengi,’ said Marion. ‘That’s where all the mud comes from. It’s rumoured to have healing powers.’

  ‘Healing powers?’ repeated the pathologist, momentarily diverted.

  ‘It’s supposed to be effective against psoriasis,’ explained Erlendur.

  ‘You learn something new every day,’ said the pathologist.

  ‘Did you notice any sign of skin disease on the body?’

  ‘No, Marion. You can forget the idea that he was there because of psoriasis.’

  ‘Could he have fallen out of a plane?’

  ‘A plane?’

  ‘For example. Judging by the state of him, it must have been a fairly substantial drop.’

  ‘All I can say at this stage is that he must have fallen from a great height onto an extremely hard surface,’ said the pathologist. ‘I don’t know about a plane. Though I wouldn’t rule it out.’

  ‘Can you give us an idea how long he was in the water?’ asked Marion.

  ‘Not long. Two, maybe three days at the outside. I may need to take another look but that’s my provisional estimate.’

  ‘He’s not wearing a wedding ring,’ remarked Erlendur, darting a glance at the corpse. ‘There’s no mark left by one, is there?’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ said the pathologist. ‘I didn’t find anything on him, no keys or wallet. Nothing that could tell you who he is. His clothes have already been passed on to forensics. He doesn’t have any major scars resulting from accidents or operations; no tattoos either.’

  ‘What about his age?’

  ‘We’re talking about a man in his prime, maybe thirtyish. Height just under one eighty; well proportioned, lean and muscular – or was, poor fellow. No one’s asked after him yet, have they?’

  ‘No,’ said Erlendur. ‘Nobody’s missed him. At least, the police haven’t been alerted.’

  ‘And no one saw him fall?’

  ‘No. We’ve nothing to go on at present.’

  ‘How about a traffic accident?’ asked Marion. ‘Any chance of that?’

  ‘No, out of the question – wrong sort of injuries,’ said the pathologist, raising his eyes from the body and pushing his glasses back up his nose. ‘I think we have to work on the assumption that he died as the result of a fall. And, as I pointed out, I can’t see any signs that he tried to break it in any way. He simply fell and landed in a horizontal, prostrate position. I don’t know if that means anything to you. It’s conceivable he wouldn’t have had time to raise his arms. Or didn’t want to. The drop was clearly a very long one and we’re talking about a high velocity at the moment of impact.’

  ‘If he didn’t stick his arms out, and landed flat on his face, as you say, are you … are you implying suicide?’ asked Erlendur.

  ‘It’s possible,’ said the pathologist, pushing his glasses up again. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps you shouldn’t discount it.’

  ‘Bit unlikely, isn’t it?’ said Marion. ‘If that was the case, why would someone have wanted to hide the body?’

  ‘I’m simply trying to interpret the pattern of fractures,’ said the pathologist. ‘I still have to conduct a more detailed analysis and the sooner you two get out of my hair, the sooner I’ll be able to get on with it.’

  Forensics had a tricky job identifying the comings and goings over the lava field between the Grindavík road and the lagoon. The night after the body was found snow fell in the area, obscuring any tracks in the moss or beside the pool. The diver had been unable to find anything in the mud on the bottom. Conditions were challenging, the water was cloudy and visibility was virtually nil. The police put out an appeal for witnesses who had travelled along the Grindavík road in the days preceding the discovery of the body, in the hope that someone might have seen a vehicle in the area. No one came forward.

  Erlendur was greeted by the head of the forensics team, a man in his early sixties, who was poring over the clothing that had been removed from the corpse: underwear, jeans, checked shirt, socks, leather jacket and the cowboy boots. The forensics lab was located on the top floor of CID headquarters. Following the recent creation of the State Criminal Investigation Department, they had been moved from Borgartún in Reykjavík and found themselves plonked in the middle of a semi-industrial zone in the neighbouring town of Kópavogur.

  Erlendur, who had risen from the ranks of the regular police and only been with CID for two years, was still learning the ropes and getting acquainted with the other staff. He worked for the most part with Marion Briem, one of the longest-serving detectives, who had originally been responsible for encouraging him to apply for promotion to CID. Erlendur had dragged his feet for several years but eventually, tiring of interminably circling town in a patrol car, he had decided to go for it and got in touch with Marion.

  ‘About time,’ Marion had said. ‘You knew you’d end up here one day.’

  Erlendur couldn’t deny that the role of detective appealed to him. He had already had a brief insight into what it involved when he had taken it upon himself, while still a uniformed officer, to conduct a private investigation into the drowning of a Reykjavík tramp in t
he old peat diggings on Kringlumýri. The police had dismissed the man’s death as an accident, but Erlendur, who had encountered the victim on his beat, eventually established that he had been murdered. Impressed by the way he had solved the case entirely on his own, with no assistance from CID, Marion had invited him to get in touch if he ever felt like doing more of this kind of work. It took Erlendur a while to make the transition, but Marion’s reaction when he finally did was quite right: Erlendur had known all along that he would end up a detective.

  The sediment from the lagoon had been painstakingly washed off the dead man’s clothes and everything adhering to the fabric, such as hairs and dirt, had been subjected to close analysis.

  ‘It’s mostly just residue,’ said the head technician. ‘I’m guessing he was probably dumped in that mud hole to hide something.’

  ‘Something on the body?’

  ‘Yes. We won’t find much now. But the clothes can tell us a thing or two. For example, it looks to us as though they all come from the States. The jeans are a famous brand. So’s the leather jacket. The shirt doesn’t have a label, though, and could just as well have been bought at Men’s Clothing on Hverfisgata. The underwear’s an American make. We don’t know about the socks. Black. Hardly worn. The leather jacket’s seen the most wear and tear, as you can tell by the elbows.’ The technician held up the garment for Erlendur to inspect.

  ‘Then there are these,’ he added, handing Erlendur one of the cowboy boots. ‘They might get us somewhere. Genuine leather. Newish. Not widely available here, as far as I know. The staff of the shoe shops in town might recognise them. Might even know who bought them. You don’t see many people walking around here in cowboy boots. Not Icelanders, anyway. We’re analysing the dirt on the soles to see if that can provide any clue to where he’s been, but the mud from the lagoon has more or less obliterated the evidence.’

  Erlendur contemplated the boot. It was made of brown leather, the sole showed only light wear, and the decoration on the calf depicted a coiling lasso. He surveyed the rest of the clothing, the jeans, the checked shirt.

  ‘Can you tell where the boots come from? Where they were made?’

  ‘Louisiana. There’s a label inside.’

  ‘I’m sensing an American theme here.’

  ‘Maybe he’d visited the States recently,’ suggested the technician. ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘Or he was a Yank himself,’ said Erlendur.

  ‘Yes, or that.’

  ‘From the base?’

  The head of forensics shrugged. ‘Not necessarily, but we can’t rule it out either.’

  ‘There are five or six thousand Americans out there on Midnesheidi, aren’t there? Servicemen and their families?’

  ‘Round about that. The lagoon’s not exactly on their doorstep, but it’s near enough that you’ll need to take the base into account.’

  5

  Erlendur hadn’t been down this street in a long while. But Dagbjört, the girl who once lived here, was seldom far from his thoughts. One winter’s morning, more than a quarter of a century ago, she had vanished without trace. The question of what happened to her had never been resolved. Erlendur had come across her files when he first joined the police. She had been on her way to the Women’s College from her home in the west of town when she disappeared as if the ground had swallowed her up. Erlendur had followed her route to the school many times, past the former site of Camp Knox, the old barracks slum, onto Hringbraut and down towards the lake, passing Melavellir and the old graveyard on Sudurgata. People did go missing like this in Iceland from time to time, but for some reason this incident in particular had touched a nerve with Erlendur. He had read and reread the police reports and press coverage, and had walked all possible routes between her home and the school. He had sometimes toyed with the idea of talking to people – relatives or friends – who had known her, but he had never actually gone ahead or embarked on any kind of systematic investigation. It had all happened a long time ago and there was every reason to believe that the girl had taken her own life, yet she would not leave Erlendur alone, no matter how hard he tried to push her away and forget the case. She haunted him like a ghost risen from the grave, ensuring that he was subject to constant reminders of her.

  This time it was the obituaries. Only this morning he had been reading her father’s. Her mother had died some years back. There were two notices, both of which touched on the incident obliquely. One had been written by a former colleague of her father who described him as a loyal and reliable workmate, who had been good company in happy times but had never really recovered from the loss of his daughter. The other was written by the dead man’s sister and traced his early years, saying that they came from a large, close-knit family, and that later he and his wife had lost the apple of their eye in a way that defied all comprehension. Erlendur, detecting an old bitterness in her words, guessed that time had not succeeded in softening the pain. But then it rarely did.

  It was nearly midnight when Erlendur finally left the street and headed home. He had noticed that Dagbjört’s old house was vacant and there was an estate agent’s notice in the kitchen window. The wind was still blowing from the north and was forecast to continue for the next few days. Loose snow swirled alongside the pavement and Erlendur hugged his coat tighter around him as he strode away.

  He and Marion had stayed late in the office that evening, reviewing the case of the man in the lagoon. More than twenty-four hours had passed since the body had been found but so far no one had come forward to report him missing or say they recognised him by the detailed description that had been released to the press. The man seemed to have neither family nor friends. When Erlendur returned from his meeting with the head of forensics, he had found Marion resting on the battered sofa in the office. Marion had brought the sofa along from CID’s old headquarters on Borgartún where they used to be based when they came under the state prosecutor’s office.

  ‘An American?’ Marion had exclaimed irritably when Erlendur reported his conversation with forensics.

  ‘It’s one possibility,’ said Erlendur.

  ‘A serviceman, you mean?’

  Erlendur shrugged. ‘Don’t forget the international airport’s located in the military zone. Our man could have flown in from anywhere in the world. We can’t take it for granted he’s an Icelander. And we can’t be certain he wasn’t thrown out of a plane over the lagoon. A plane from a domestic airport like Reykjavík. Though it could equally have come from the base.’

  ‘Where are you going with this?’ asked Marion.

  ‘Maybe we should start by checking all flights over the area in the last few days. We’re probably talking light aircraft. The question is, should we submit a request to the base as well and find out if the Defense Force are missing one of their men?’

  ‘On the basis of the cowboy boots?’

  ‘All his clothes – nearly all of them – had American labels. Though of course most of them could have been bought in Reykjavík, so that doesn’t tell us much per se.’

  ‘No. What else do we have?’

  ‘The proximity to the base.’

  ‘So you want to link the American clothing to the naval base and conclude from this that we’re dealing with a soldier? Isn’t it a bit of a long shot?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Erlendur. ‘But when you take into account the clothing and the proximity, it hardly seems unreasonable to send an inquiry to the military authorities. If the man had been found on the other side of the country in Raufarhöfn, I wouldn’t be considering this angle. But it might just turn out that the army are missing one of their men.’

  ‘They’re under no obligation to inform us if so.’

  ‘But at least we’d have checked the possibility.’

  ‘Won’t they have heard about the discovery of the body by now?’

  ‘Presumably.’

  ‘Surely they’d have got in touch if they suspected he was one of theirs?’

  ‘Perhaps,�
� said Erlendur. ‘I don’t know how their minds work. Seems to me that lot go their own sweet way without taking too much notice of us.’

  ‘That lot? Are you opposed to the army?’

  ‘Is that relevant?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Marion. ‘Are you?’

  ‘I’ve always been opposed to the army,’ said Erlendur.

  He was standing in a stiff northerly breeze near the place where Camp Knox used to be during the Second World War, when the country was occupied, first by the British, then by the Americans. The site was now buried beneath the Vesturbær swimming pool and other buildings, mostly residential. Nothing remained of the old army barracks. Named after Frank Knox, the then US Secretary of the Navy, and originally serving as the American naval operating base in Iceland, Camp Knox had been one of the largest of the eighty such camps constructed in and around Reykjavík during the Allied occupation. The camps had all gone now, though they had enjoyed a remarkable afterlife as a solution to the post-war housing shortage. Once the soldiers had departed, Icelanders from the countryside had moved in their droves into the prefab Quonset and Nissen huts with their curving roofs and walls; in their heyday as many as three thousand people had lived in the former camps.

  Erlendur remembered the last gasp of these barracks slums. They had been slowly but surely coming to the end of their existence when he first moved to the city. He remembered Múli Camp and another big one on Skólavörduholt near the modern town centre. There he had encountered the worst poverty he had ever seen. The huts, which were constructed from corrugated iron, flimsy fibreboard and even cardboard, had never been intended as civilian housing and offered hopelessly inadequate protection against the Icelandic climate. Drainage and sewage disposal were primitive at best, rat infestations were endemic, and although plenty of decent, respectable people lived there, the camps were notorious for their grim conditions and colourful occupants. The residents were sneeringly referred to as ‘Campies’ and said to stink of the camp.