Into Oblivion

by Arnaldur Indridason

  ‘You should try it sometime,’ said Caroline, smiling in spite of her anxiety. ‘It’s fun.’

  24

  The house stood strangely dark and silent in the chilly evening air as Erlendur walked up to the door and unlocked it. The last owners had moved out some time ago and put it on the market, and Erlendur had received permission from the estate agent to view it on his own. The agent had told him he couldn’t work out why there was so little interest in the property. Admittedly the house was small by today’s standards and required some modernisation, but it was a solidly built pre-war concrete structure with plenty of scope for a family and a good-sized garden, he said, as if Erlendur were a potential buyer. Erlendur explained that he wanted to view the house for purely personal reasons; that it held memories for him – which was not a complete lie. The estate agent nodded, familiar with such requests. With people who saw their childhood home on the market and went to look round to indulge in a little nostalgia. Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to take Erlendur there himself as it was late and he had to get off home, but Erlendur was welcome to borrow the keys and return them tomorrow. Erlendur had casually mentioned that he was a policeman.

  He felt an odd frisson as he stepped into the narrow entrance hall. There was a rail for coats and a wide shelf above it for hats, scarves and gloves. He detected a faint smell of damp and suspected the roof had once leaked. A frosted-glass door led through to a small passage with a kitchen to the right, a sitting room straight ahead and a staircase up to the attic floor where the bedrooms were. He stood for a while in the quiet house, taking in his surroundings by the dim glow of the street lights: the worn carpet, the walls with the lighter rectangles where pictures had been taken down, the curtainless windows.

  The kitchen faced the street and had a ‘For Sale’ sign with the estate agent’s telephone number in the window. The fittings, heavy wooden cupboards with worn handles, appeared to be original. There was a small table under the window. He tried to recapture the smells of the past, the echo of voices from the days when all had been brightness and colour in here. Dagbjört’s parents had moved out shortly after her disappearance and the house had undergone two changes of owner since then. Now it stood like a derelict farm in the heart of the city, lifeless and dead. It put Erlendur in mind of his parents’ croft in the East Fjords, which stood exposed to the rain and wind. It gave him the same sense of transience, and he lamented that nothing could halt the passing of time.

  The sitting room, which faced the back, had two large windows and a door from which three steps led down to the garden. Erlendur went over to one of the windows and looked out at the trees and shrubs in their winter sleep, the frosty lawn, the rose beds and currant bushes. The garden had been well cared for, the grass cut and neatly edged, the branches pruned.

  Dagbjört had been learning the piano. When describing the house to him, her aunt had said that her parents had bought her an old upright that used to stand in the sitting room. Erlendur pictured it against one wall, the three-piece suite in the middle by the windows, and the dining table at the far end. He assumed the piece of furniture that housed the gramophone had also been kept in here. In his imagination he heard the excited chatter of the schoolgirls as they gathered for Dagbjört’s birthday; the strains of ‘Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee’.

  He walked slowly up the stairs. They emitted a friendly creaking like a polite reminder to treat the empty house with respect. The landing was carpeted and Erlendur found himself in another narrow passage with three doors leading off it. The one nearest him stood ajar and pushing it open he entered the master bedroom. He didn’t want to turn on the light; it felt somehow like trespassing. There was a faint illumination from the street and now that his eyes had adjusted to the gloom he could see quite well. The ceiling was high next to the landing but sloped down under the eaves on the other side of the room. A dormer window looked out over the street. There was a built-in wardrobe which was full height by the door but slanted down with the incline of the roof.

  Next to the master bedroom was a small bathroom with a sink and bathtub and a mirror fixed to a medicine cabinet. Opposite this was Dagbjört’s room which overlooked the neighbour’s garden. After a brief hesitation, Erlendur stepped inside. For years he had been wondering about the girl who used to live here, about her life and fate, and now here he was, standing in her room, and although families had come and gone through the house since then, he felt he had never been closer to her than at this moment.

  The first thing he noticed was that the view from the window was partly obscured by a stand of tall fir trees belonging to the next-door garden. Walking over, he looked out and saw that the plot on that side had long been neglected, the trees and shrubs allowed to grow wild and unchecked. The firs would have been considerably smaller a quarter of a century ago, so Dagbjört would have had a good view of her neighbour’s house. Erlendur wondered if the same people still lived there. He could just glimpse the upstairs windows but couldn’t see any lights.

  He imagined that her bed must have been under the window, so she could have gazed out at the moon and stars and confided her secrets to them. He ran his hand over the cold walls, feeling the bumps and small cracks, and before he knew what he was doing he had begun to tap them and listen. The exterior walls were made of whitewashed concrete, the interior ones of wood, clad in some sort of insulating material. In those days insulation had sometimes consisted of no more than old newspapers and other rubbish, and Erlendur thought this might be the case here, judging by the hollow sound the walls gave off. He noticed a small door under the eaves which he assumed led to a storage space. The floor was made of varnished boards and he tapped those here and there as well. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He hadn’t come here to search for anything in particular, only to breathe in the atmosphere and acquaint himself with the house where she had lived. Well, he had done that now and had no wish to linger; he needed and intended to leave, but before he did so he would just check what was behind the little door under the eaves.

  It sat flush with the wall and Erlendur hadn’t noticed it until he’d started his tapping. The door was no more than a metre high and had a small keyhole but no frame. It was locked and Erlendur, who had nothing on him but a car key, tried his best to force it open, without success. He cast around for the key, then went downstairs to the kitchen again, turned on the light and started pulling out drawers in search of some implement to open the door with. In one drawer he unearthed three keys of varying sizes and dates, and took these up to the bedroom. The smallest key fitted the door under the eaves.

  Erlendur lit a match and shone it into the cavity which was small, narrow and cold. There was nothing inside. He assumed the occupants of the house had used it to store the usual kinds of belongings that weren’t required every day. The match burnt out and, lighting another, he shone it over the floor and up under the roof. In his heedlessness, he held the flame too long against the ceiling lining and singed it. Startled, he extinguished the match and ran a hand over the surface, terrified that he had set fire to it. As he fumbled in the dark, his fingers brushed against something that was poking out of the lining; it felt like a piece of paper.

  Erlendur lit a third match and shone it up under the ceiling, carefully this time. He saw that he had burnt a small hole in the lining. He thanked his lucky stars that he hadn’t been stupid enough to set the house on fire with his tampering. Through the hole, which was no larger than a coin, he glimpsed the roof timbers but when he illuminated the surrounding area better he spotted a split in the lining. That was where his fingertips had brushed against some unevenness; something that had been pushed into the crack for concealment and remained there ever since.

  With great difficulty he managed to extract it from behind the lining paper: a few folded notes or sheets of paper. Having made sure there was nothing else in this odd little space under the eaves, he moved over to the dormer window to peer at what he had in his hands. There wasn’t enou
gh light, so he went into the bedroom that faced the street. It was slightly less dark in there and he could get a better idea of his discovery.

  What he had in his hands turned out to be a few lined pages of diary size. The handwriting was for the most part pretty and neat, but in places it degenerated into a scrawl. On one page the name ‘Dagbjört’ had been copied out repeatedly in the margins, as if she had been practising her signature. The pages were like a message in a bottle from the past, a message which Dagbjört had not intended anyone to read yet couldn’t quite bring herself to throw away. Some of the entries were dated, others not. Erlendur saw how her writing had matured from the first notes to what appeared to be the last. Several years had passed in the interim and they showed a young girl growing up. The oldest contained a declaration of love from when she was in the final year of junior school. She had a crush on a boy called Tommi and had decorated his name with small red hearts. Another page revealed she had been angry that day with an unnamed girl in her class. The last note consisted of only a few sentences, scribbled down the day she celebrated her eighteenth birthday.

  It’s so horribly creepy. I don’t know if I can even tell Daddy and Mummy. He seems so harmless. And he’s our neighbour. He thinks I can’t see him. He stands in his window in the dark, staring at me while I’m getting ready for bed. When I turn off the lights and peer out, I can see him lurking in the shadows. God, it’s so bizarre. What’s he doing? Why does he stare in at me like that?

  Erlendur read the girl’s words again before finally raising his eyes from the pages, his mind filled with the silence of the house, the cruelty of fate, ignorance and oblivion.

  25

  On the way back to town Marion stopped off at the old sanatorium, having meant to go there for a while but never finding the time or the right occasion. Now that occasion had arrived out of the blue, postmarked Denmark. Over the years, the urge to visit the sanatorium had become more and more infrequent and it was a long time since Marion had last walked up the hill to Gunnhildur’s Cairn. If patients made it up here in the old days it was a sign they were on the road to recovery. Marion had been admitted to Vífilsstadir, the TB sanatorium, as a child, with only one working lung, and had watched as other children the same age died.

  The pavilion where the patients used to lie and recuperate in the fresh air still stood to the west of the main building but was dilapidated from years of disuse and neglect. After parking near the pavilion, Marion lingered briefly among the broken windows and flaking paint. The lights from the hospital cast a faint glow over the surroundings down as far as the lake. Now that TB had been eradicated, the hospital treated patients for other types of respiratory disorder.

  Standing in the run-down pavilion, feeling the cold, Marion recalled the visitors who used to come at weekends and talk to their loved ones through the windows of the hospital because they weren’t allowed inside. Many of Marion’s most painful memories were associated with this place, and also with a spell at the Kolding Sanatorium in Denmark, arranged by Marion’s grandmother, which had eventually led to recovery. There had been another Icelander there, a girl called Katrín, who had survived a severe case of pulmonary tuberculosis thanks to a procedure known as thoracoplasty, which involved sacrificing several ribs on one side so the infected lung could be collapsed and cleaned out. Their friendship had developed over the years into a kind of love affair, though Katrín had lived abroad for the most part, working for charity organisations around the world.

  The letter from her mother, which had arrived that morning, was in Marion’s pocket, read, reread and read again until the words were etched into the memory. Katrín’s mother wrote that her daughter was dead. She had been diagnosed with cancer the year she sailed out to Iceland and ended her relationship with Marion. At the time she had only expected to live another twelve months at most. But in the event she had lasted another seven years. According to her wishes she had been cremated and her ashes scattered in Kolding Fjord.

  Marion took the letter out now and read it one more time by the faint illumination from the hospital, and thought about Erlendur and his fascination with people who met sudden deaths in accidents, perished from exposure or were lost in the mountains. Once, finding him immersed in this sort of account, Marion had tried to understand what was going through his mind. The young policeman was a frequent source of curiosity to Marion since he seemed so independent in his thinking, was old-fashioned in his manner, never spoke about himself, disliked city life, and took little interest in the times he lived in except when they got on his nerves. He was single-minded, felt no need whatsoever to wear his heart on his sleeve and was perpetually absorbed by this peculiar fixation with ordeals and disappearances.

  ‘What is it about people’s suffering and death that you find so gripping?’ Marion had asked.

  ‘You can learn a lot about people from these stories,’ Erlendur had replied.

  ‘Who all just happen to have lost their lives in unusual circumstances?’

  ‘You could put it like that.’

  ‘But what’s so instructive about that? About people getting lost? Dying? What is it you learn from that?’

  Erlendur clearly found this hard to answer.

  ‘Why are you asking?’ he said at last.

  ‘Because I’d like to know,’ said Marion. ‘You’re the only person I’ve ever met who’s obsessed with this subject.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say I was obsessed.’

  ‘Well, you must admit you have an unusual fascination with these tales of ordeals.’

  ‘What interests me are stories about survivors,’ said Erlendur. ‘People who escape with their lives from dangerous situations in the Icelandic wilderness. How do they cope? Why do some live while others don’t, though the circumstances are similar? Why do some get into trouble and others not? What mistakes do people make? How can you avoid them?’

  ‘I reckon there’s more to it.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I get the feeling these stories have a personal significance for you.’

  ‘No, I …’

  ‘Am I wrong?’

  Erlendur stared at Marion, as if unsure whether to speak his mind.

  ‘I suppose it’s not exactly … not really about the people who get lost or die, but …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘… but the people left behind, left to struggle with the questions raised by the events.’

  ‘You mean you’re interested in those left behind to cope with the grief and loss?’

  ‘Yes, maybe that’s it,’ said Erlendur. ‘They matter too. “Which am I? The one who lives, or the one who died?” I sometimes wonder.’

  ‘Are you a fan of Steinn Steinarr?’

  ‘I think people who experience profound grief feel as if a part of themselves has died, and in my opinion he captures that very well.’

  Marion read the letter again, thinking back to this conversation with Erlendur and the quotation from Steinn Steinarr’s poem ‘Time and Water’.

  Enclosed in the letter had been a small piece of folded paper which, when opened, turned out to contain a pinch of Katrín’s ashes. Katrín’s mother would not herself have come up with the idea of sending them. She must have done it at Katrín’s behest, as a final farewell between them. Marion could think of nowhere better to scatter the ashes than the pavilion, and holding out the paper, watched the dust gradually disperse in the wind.

  Marion refolded the letter from Denmark, put it back in the envelope and pocketed it again, then gazed over to where the ashes had become one with the darkness, reflecting on Steinn Steinarr’s enigma of life and death until the pale blue eyes blurred over with tears.

  26

  Two days later Erlendur received an unexpected phone call from Caroline. She asked for Marion first, but to everyone’s surprise Marion had taken sick leave, an almost unheard of event. Learning that Marion wasn’t available, Caroline asked to speak to Erlendur instead. He was taken aback as he
’d heard that their meeting had not gone well. He was sitting in his office, going through the old files on the Dagbjört case yet again. He knew he shouldn’t be spending time on this now as the investigation into Kristvin’s death was top priority. But Dagbjört wouldn’t leave him alone, especially since Erlendur had established that the same man was still living next door.

  The reason for Caroline’s call was simple. She had managed to track down the woman who had been having an affair with Kristvin.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Erlendur.

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Caroline impatiently, ‘or I wouldn’t be calling. You two can meet her if you like. She’s prepared to tell you all she knows, on condition we don’t expose her affair, if possible.’

  ‘That’s her problem, isn’t it?’

  ‘I didn’t make any promises.’

  ‘Marion’s not in today,’ said Erlendur. ‘But I could be with you in an hour.’

  ‘Get moving then,’ said Caroline, and gave him brief directions before saying a brusque goodbye.

  Later she explained to Erlendur how, following her meeting with Marion at the bowling alley, she had gone about identifying the woman. It turned out she lived in the enlisted quarters they had visited a few days earlier. She had stayed in Caroline’s mind because of her manner during the original interviews; the unease she had tried to conceal as she stood at the door of her apartment, fielding questions from the Icelandic police about whether she had known Kristvin. The woman had been alone at home and Caroline had felt instinctively that she was hiding something. So she went down to the PX, where the woman worked, struck up conversation with her and asked her in more detail about the grey Toyota Corolla and Kristvin. The woman stuck to her story, expressed surprise at the questions and repeated that she didn’t know the Icelander.