The Flatey Enigma

by Ingolfsson, Viktor Arnar

  Jóhanna looked at him, aghast. “That’s correct, there’s an ample supply in the pharmacy, but your suggestion is preposterous.”

  “Well, let’s see. Lund is asleep in your living room. Maybe you needed to give him an injection or something to keep him as unconscious as possible? Then you took him out on a boat to the most forsaken island you knew of in Breidafjördur. We know that considerable fuel vanished from one of the boats on the island at that time. You know how to handle a motorboat, don’t you? You know I can easily check on this.”

  “Yes, I can handle a boat all right. But I haven’t a clue of where Ketilsey is in the fjord. And I don’t have the physical strength to carry a sleeping man on my own, let alone onto a boat and then off it again.”

  “Perhaps your late father gave you a hand moving him? Maybe he was in better shape last autumn than he was lately. And happy to avenge himself. The man could also have been transported on a handcart. There are several of those on the island.”

  “This is in very poor taste.”

  “Yes, well you can’t really prettify an atrocity like this. The retribution was clearly meant to be memorable and final. How do you think that man felt when he woke up and realized where he was?”

  Jóhanna gave Lúkas a long stare before answering: “How do I think he felt? I’ll tell you. For the first few hours he was angry. Then very angry. He yelled and yelled and shouted and shouted. Then he was cold, and when night fell he was scared. Then he got very cold and even more terrified, and he cried. When the sun rose in the morning, he was thirsty and hungry and very tired. He gathered some driftwood and built himself some shelter by placing the wood against a crag. He packed some gravel and seaweed around the sticks and then crawled inside and lay down. Maybe he slept for one or two hours, and then woke up again shivering from the cold. Then it started to rain. He found an old plastic flask drifting on the shore and was able to collect some of the water that was running down the rocks. He drank and drank, but he got badly drenched in the rain. He crawled into the shelter and it didn’t rain on him. But he was already wet, and when night fell again, he was colder than ever before. He lay there shivering for many hours until he couldn’t take it anymore, and he crawled out and ran to try and get some warmth into his bones. It helped a bit, but it hadn’t stopped raining, so he got even wetter and colder. The day after the rain stopped and the sun appeared. He managed to sleep a few hours. Then he went down to the shore in search of something edible. He turned over stones, picked some copepods, and dug up some lugworm. He found shellfish. He shoved it into his mouth and washed it down with the water without chewing. He couldn’t bear the thought of biting into those bugs. He arranged the stones in the grass so that they would form a big SOS. Four days later he had a cold, a day after that a bad cough, and then he contracted pneumonia. Then he arranged some little pebbles on a flat rock and tried to write some kind of message. He coughed and coughed until he threw up and developed a high fever. And then he died.”

  Lúkas was dumbstruck. Eventually it was Thórólfur who asked, “How do you know all this?”

  “This isn’t something I know,” Jóhanna answered, “but I can imagine it, and I can tell you that I’ve thought about him every single hour since I saw him in that casket, and felt a great deal for him. I’ve tried to place myself in his footsteps, tried to convince myself that it went swiftly and that the pain wasn’t unbearable. But everything you’ve said here is pure supposition. I’m in no way responsible for this nightmare Gaston Lund got himself into. The events in my house were exactly as I described them to you.”

  Thórólfur peered at her skeptically. “Yeah sure, give it to me all again then, in every detail.”

  “Professor Lund knocked on our door and told me what he’d come for. I welcomed him in and immediately recognized him. He obviously didn’t recognize me because I had only been a child when I had been with my father in Copenhagen. I was just about to give him his seasickness tablets when he saw my father through the door. It took them both a moment to decide how they were going to take this reunion, but then they embraced and it was all just like the good old days. They had so much to talk about, and time was precious. Lund told my father that he’d been to the library to try and solve the Flatey enigma. He had the answers to all the questions but couldn’t test them by getting them to fit with the final key. He couldn’t figure out the methodology. My father had spent endless hours at the library poring over the string of letters that constitute the final key. He discovered that if the letters were placed in a certain order, they formed a sentence. If the letters in the answers were placed in the correct order, following the same pattern, they formed the last two lines of the poem and thereby the solution to the whole riddle, the Aenigma Flateyensis. Lund was very taken by all this and decided to go back to the library to test his answers using this method. My father could lend him the key to the library. We could already see the mail boat heading south on its way from Brjánslækur, so he didn’t have much time. We never saw him after that, so we presumed he’d caught the boat. I later walked up to the library and it wasn’t locked and the key was on the table.”

  “But he didn’t catch the mail boat?” said Thórólfur.

  “No, it seems not. He must have run to the library, sat down, and started to arrange the letters. The mail boat was steadily approaching, and he finally didn’t dare to wait there any longer. The last thing he did was to write down the key on a piece of paper so that he could continue later. We found that note in his pocket. But that was against the rules of the game.”

  “So he was doomed to some mishap, according to folk belief,” said Thórólfur.

  “So they say, but I don’t believe in that stuff. In fact, I think it’s just a perfectly honorable and innocent game. But when people start connecting it with accidents and deaths, I think that’s going too far.”

  Question thirty-two: Who made Earl Hákon’s crotch itch? Third letter. Thorleifur visited the earl in Hladir on Christmas Eve, disguised as a beggar. The earl had him brought before him and asked him for his name. “My name is an unusual one,” the man answered. “I’m Nídung, the son of Gjallandi, and I come from Syrgisdalir in cold Sweden. I have traveled widely and visited many chieftains. I’ve heard a lot about your nobility.”

  The earl said, “Is there something you excel at, old man, to enable you to mix with chieftains?”

  Nídung wanted to recite a poem he had composed to the earl. But as the poem was being recited, the earl was puzzled to feel a terrible itch spread all over his body and particularly around his thighs so that he could barely sit still. He had himself scratched with combs wherever they could reach, and three knots were made in a coarse cloth so that two men could pull it between his thighs. The earl started to take a dislike to the poem. The answer is “Thorleifur Ásgeirsson,” and the third letter is o.

  Kjartan said, “Here the guest writes ‘Nídung.’ So the answer is either o or d.”

  CHAPTER 49

  The coroner’s preliminary report on Bryngeir’s body, which had been transported by van from Stykkishólmur earlier that day, was expected in the afternoon. Dagbjartur was sent over to collect the results firsthand because it was sometimes difficult to decipher these documents. If there was something in it that was difficult to understand, it was always best to have it explained on the spot. Sometimes it was possible to get the coroner to talk off the record about certain aspects that he would never have put down on paper except until maybe several weeks into the investigation. There seemed to be little doubt about the cause of the reporter’s death, but it needed to be confirmed. Further data might have come to light, such as some indication of the perpetrator’s physical strength, or whether he was left-or right-handed, etc.

  Dagbjartur met coroner Magnús Hansen in the examination room. Two humanoid shapes covered with sheets lay on separate slabs in the center of the room. Dagbjartur was relieved to see that the examination seemed to be over. He had witnessed plenty of autopsies over the
years and never found them enticing. If at all possible, he preferred to avoid being present.

  “You’re certainly keeping us busy these days,” said Magnús. He was a tall man in his sixties, big boned with a big aquiline nose. He made quite an imposing figure as he towered over Dagbjartur in his long white coat, rubber apron, and white hat. A white surgical mask dangled loosely from his throat over his apron. Poised on the tip of his nose were glasses that he never seemed to look through, and he was holding copious sheets of notes in his hands.

  Dagbjartur nodded and backed off a step. He was fearfully respectful of Magnús, who was famous for the pleasure he took in winding up investigators he considered to be too cocky.

  “Do you have anything for us?” he humbly asked.

  Magnús peered at him over his glasses and came to the conclusion that this little soul wasn’t worth teasing. “There’s not much to say about the first one,” he said. “He’s too far gone to be able to draw any conclusions about the cause of his death. There’s actually little more than a skeleton and shreds of skin around the legs that are held together by the clothing. Some wasted muscle and soft tissue around the bones. Except for the spots the birds got at, of course. There’s only bone left there. There’s almost nothing left of his internal organs, except for some remains of his heart and his enlarged prostate gland, which tells me little about the cause of his death but the fact that he probably had difficulties urinating. All the bones are intact, so they weren’t damaged by any attack. I examined the skull particularly well and saw no sign of any damage to it. There is, therefore, nothing to add to the local doctor’s report, which suggests the man died of exposure. The cause of death is therefore most likely to be hypothermia, unless he had some other underlying condition that kicked in once his resistance was weakened.”

  Magnús stopped talking and peered over his glasses at Dagbjartur again.

  “What about the other guy?” Dagbjartur asked, feeling the onus was now on him to say something.

  “The other guy is another kettle of fish altogether,” said Magnús, perking up. He lifted his papers up to his nose and this time looked through his glasses.

  “This is a very interesting case,” he said. “I first examined the many wounds on the subject’s back.”

  He read from the sheets: “Paravertebral, contiguous to the spine on both sides, bilateral stab wounds piercing subcutaneous tissues and ribs, from the third to the eleventh rib on the right-hand side and the third to the tenth rib on the left-hand side at the intersection with the columna vertebralis.”

  “The columna what?” Dagbjartur asked.

  “Spinal column.”

  “Right.”

  “This was done with two powerful thrusts of a knife on the left side and three on the right side. I’d call these blows more than stabbings, because it takes a lot of power to tear the ribs apart like that. The perpetrator is probably right-handed and used both hands to hold the weapon, which was a very big sharp knife, sword, or even an axe. The lungs were then pulled out through the wounds. There are some scattered shallow fissures on them, probably caused by the friction with the broken ribs. Also fissures on the veins to the lungs for the same reasons.”

  Magnús stopped talking and continued to read in silence.

  “Do you think he died instantly?” Dagbjartur asked.

  Magnús peered at him over his glasses. “What do you think?”

  “Probably, I would imagine.”

  “Yes, he probably would have died quickly if he hadn’t already been dead for a long time.”

  “Huh?”

  “Anyone with an ounce of brains would have been able to see that on the scene, but I guess brains are in short supply in your department.”

  Dagbjartur remained silent. He realized Magnús was launching into one of his rants and that it was best to just let it wash over.

  “There’s no inflammation around the rims of the wounds. Any fool should be able to see that.”

  “That’s true,” said Dagbjartur in a total bluff. He couldn’t think of any colleague of his who would have been capable of recognizing a clue of that kind.

  “The edges of the wounds are a yellowish brown and dry. No bleeding in the adjacent tissue. This is a clear sign that the man was not alive when the wounds were inflicted.”

  “So how did he die then?” Dagbjartur asked.

  “I found a bruise on the back of his head that indicated bleeding in the scalp. This suggested he was subjected to a blow to the head of some kind, which wasn’t fatal, however. But he probably passed out. The cause of death was therefore probably drowning.”

  “Drowning?”

  “Yes. Drowning is difficult to diagnose, especially when the lungs have been messed with like they have in this case. But all the symptoms of drowning are there when you look for them.” Magnús read: “Foam in the larynx, trachea, and bronchi.”

  He stopped reading and gazed at Dagbjartur over his glasses. “Those could also be symptoms of heart failure or carbon poisoning, so I had to exclude that using other methods. But then I looked for other symptoms of drowning.”

  Dagbjartur nodded to show interest.

  Magnús continued to read: “Hyper-inflated lungs, hyper-inflatio pulmonum, with indentations on the surface, under the ribs, pulmonary edema. Liquid in both pleural cavities, bilateral hydrothoraces. Liquid in the cranial cavities and ethmoidal and sphenoidal sinuses. Blood congestion in the bones around the auditory canal. These aren’t all equally reliable indicators, of course, but when you add them all up I’m pretty certain.”

  Dagbjartur was baffled and, after some thought, asked, “So was the man knocked out first, then drowned, and then carved up?”

  “That I don’t know. I just got the results of tests that show that the man was very drunk. The ethanol level in his blood was 3.02 per mil and 2.56 in the urine. He could also have fallen and gotten that head wound before he drowned.”

  Dagbjartur was still ruminating on these results. “Did the man drown at sea?” he asked.

  Magnús pondered. “Is that possible?” he asked.

  “Yes, probably,” Dagbjartur answered. “This happened on a small island surrounded by water.”

  Magnús turned and took two steps toward one of the slabs. He carefully lifted the sheet off the body’s face and beckoned Dagbjartur to approach. The policeman was now seeing Bryngeir for the first time. His white eyebrow was very conspicuous. Magnús stooped over the corpse and examined its eyes. “No, he’s unlikely to have drowned at sea,” he said. “Salty water is a strong irritant of the mucous membrane of the eyes, so if he had, they’d be redder than that. The man probably drowned in clean freshwater.”

  Magnús pulled the sheet back over the body and said, “It should be added that the man had a damaged liver and that he would have died within a few years if he hadn’t stopped drinking.”

  “There’s just one thing I don’t get,” said Dagbjartur. “The report that my colleagues who went to the island sent said that the body was covered in blood on the scene. But if he’d been dead when he was carved up, there shouldn’t have been any bleeding, isn’t that right?”

  “Exactly,” said Magnús with a tinge of recognition in his voice. “Everything therefore indicates that he died lying on his back and even with his legs in the air. The blood accumulated in the back and the cuts then released it. The arteries were also severed, so one could expect to see a lot of blood on the outside of the body.”

  “Can you imagine how he might have drowned in such a position?” Dagbjartur asked.

  “I don’t have any explanation that I could put down on paper with a clear conscience.”

  “But could you hazard an off-the-record guess?”

  Magnús glanced at the detective over his glasses and reflected a moment. Finally, he said, “I once read about a case in a specialized magazine about a man who murdered his three wives at various intervals of a period of some years. He approached them all when they were lying in the bathtub, gra
bbed them by the calves, and hoisted their legs in the air. That way their heads hit the bottom and they drowned without being able to save themselves. There were no wounds on the body, so it was always considered to be an accident. This happened in three different cities, so no one knew of the previous wife when the next one died. Finally someone recognized a pattern between them and the case was investigated. The police tested the method, so a woman who was a good swimmer was asked to lie in the bathtub and then her legs were hoisted in the same way. The woman almost died in the experiment. Don’t quote me on this, but that’s what could have happened, and the man could have been lying with his legs in the air like that for quite some time. The bruise on the head could have been caused by the brim of the bathtub.”

  Question thirty-three: Búi’s response to losing his chin. Fifth letter. In the battle between the Jomsvikings and Earl Hákon, Thorkel jumped from his ship on board Búi’s with a sword in his hand and cut off Búi’s chin and lip, causing a row of his teeth to drop onto the deck. After Bui received the wound, he said, “That Danish woman in Borgundarholm won’t be as keen to kiss me now, if I ever get home.” Búi then struck Thorkel, striking him in the middle and slicing him in two.

  “My father thinks the answer is in the words ‘that Danish woman.’ The fifth letter is d.”

  Kjartan looked at the note containing the list of answers and said, “The guest’s answer was ‘sliced Thorkel in two.’”

  “That means there are two possible answers to this question, the letters d and e.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Thórólfur took a short break from the questioning when a member of the crew from the coast guard ship appeared with a big envelope, which he handed to him. Jóhanna stood up and stepped outside to breathe in some fresh air. Both inspectors were smoking, and the classroom was getting very stuffy. Grímur stood up from his seat in the school corridor and walked outside with her. Högni had gone over to Gudjón in Rádagerdi to help him build the casket for Björn Snorri.