Voices de-5

by Arnaldur Indridason

  “I can’t work him out really,” Erlendur said. “I don’t know exactly what he’s doing here and I don’t know exactly what he’s hiding.”

  He didn’t want to go into details about Wapshott, nor talk about the child pornography and the sentences he had received in the UK for sex crimes. He didn’t feel that was an appropriate topic of conversation with Valgerdur, besides which Wapshott had the right, in spite of everything, that Erlendur did not go blathering about his private life to everyone he met.

  “I expect you’re much more accustomed to this than I am,” Valgerdur said.

  “I’ve never taken a saliva sample from a man who has been knocked to the floor and lies there screaming and shouting.”

  Valgerdur laughed.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I mean, I haven’t sat down by myself with a man other than my husband for — I guess it must be thirty years. So you have to excuse me if I act … sheepish.”

  “I’m just as clumsy,” Erlendur said. “I don’t have much experience either. It’s almost a quarter of a century since I divorced my wife. You can count the women in my life on three fingers”

  “I think I’m divorcing him,” Valgerdur said gloomily, looking at Erlendur.

  “What do you mean? Divorcing your husband?”

  “I think it’s over between us and I wanted to apologise to you.”

  “To me?”

  “Yes, you,” Valgerdur said. “I’m such an idiot,” she groaned. “I was going to use you to take revenge.”

  “I don’t follow,” Erlendur said.

  “I hardly know myself. It’s been awful ever since I found out.”

  “What?”

  “He’s having an affair.”

  She said this just like any other fact she had to live with and Erlendur couldn’t discern how she felt, sensed only the emptiness behind her words.

  “I don’t know when it started or why,” she went on.

  Then she stopped talking and Erlendur, at a loss for something to say, kept silent as well.

  “Did you cheat on your wife?” she suddenly asked.

  “No,” Erlendur said. “It wasn’t like that. We were young and we weren’t compatible.”

  “Compatible,” Valgerdur repeated after him, vacantly. “What’s that?”

  “And you’re going to divorce him?”

  “I’m trying to get my bearings,” she said. “It may depend on what he does.”

  “What kind of an affair is it?”

  “What kind? Is there any difference between affairs?”

  “Has it been going on for years or has he just started? Has he had more than one maybe?”

  “He says he’s been with the same woman for two years. I haven’t had the guts to ask him about the past, whether there were any others. That I never knew about. You never know anything. You trust your people, your husband, and the next thing you know is one day he starts talking about the marriage, then that he knows this woman and he’s known her for two years, and you’re like a total idiot. Don’t realise what he’s talking about. Then it turns out they’ve been meeting at hotels like this one …”

  Valgerdur stopped.

  “Is she married, this woman?”

  “Divorced. She’s five years younger than him.”

  “Has he given any explanation for the affair? Why he-?”

  “Do you mean whether it’s my fault?” Valgerdur interjected.

  “No, I didn’t mean …”

  “Maybe it is my fault,” she said. “I don’t know. There have been no explanations. Just anger and incomprehension, I think.”

  “And your two sons?”

  “We haven’t told them. They’ve both left home. Not enough time for ourselves while they were there, too much time when they’d moved out. Maybe we didn’t know each other any longer. Two strangers after all those years.”

  They fell silent.

  “You don’t have to apologise to me for anything,” Erlendur said eventually, looking at her. “Far from it. I’m the one who should apologise for not being straight with you. For lying to you.”

  “Lying to me?”

  “You asked why I was interested in deaths in the mountains, in storms and up on the moors, and I didn’t tell you the truth. It’s because I’ve hardly ever talked about it and find it difficult, I suppose. I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business. Not my children’s business either. My daughter had a near-fatal experience and I thought she was going to die — it was only then that I felt the need to talk about it to her. To tell her about it”

  “Talk about what?” Valgerdur asked. “Was it something that happened?”

  “My brother froze to death,” Erlendur said. “When he was eight. He was never found and still hasn’t been found.”

  He had told a complete stranger, a woman at a hotel bar, what had been weighing down his heart for almost as long as he could remember. Maybe it was a long-awaited dream. Maybe he did not want to wage that war any longer.

  “There’s a story about us in one of those books on. tragedies that I’m always reading,” he said. “The story of what happened when my brother died, the search and the gloom and grief that engulfed our home. A remarkably accurate account actually, related by one of the leaders of the search party, which a friend of my father’s wrote down. All our names are given, it describes our household and my father’s reaction, which was considered strange because he was overwhelmed by total hopelessness and self-recrimination, and sat in his room rigid and staring into space while everyone else was searching for all they were worth. We weren’t asked permission when the account was published and my parents were extremely upset by it. I can show it to you some time if you want.”

  Valgerdur nodded.

  Erlendur began to tell her, she sat and listened, and when he had finished she leaned back in her seat and sighed.

  “So you never found him?” she said.

  Erlendur shook his head.

  “Long after this happened, even sometimes today, I imagine he’s not dead. That he got down from the moor, weatherbeaten and having lost his memory, and that I’ll meet him some time later. I look for him in crowds and try to imagine what he looks like. Apparently this is not an uncommon reaction when no bodily remains are found. I know that from being in the police. Hope lives on when nothing else is left.”

  “You must have been close,” Valgerdur said. “You and your brother.”

  “We were good friends” Erlendur said.

  They sat in deep silence, watching the hustle and bustle at the hotel from their respective worlds. Their glasses were empty and neither thought of ordering more. A good while passed until Erlendur cleared his throat, leaned over to her and asked her in a hesitant voice a question that had been preying on his mind ever since she started talking about her husband’s infidelities.

  “Do you still want to take revenge on him?”

  Valgerdur looked at him and nodded.

  “But not yet,” she said. “I can’t…”

  “No,” Erlendur said. “You’re right. Of course.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about one of those missing persons you’re so interested in? That you’re always reading about.”

  Erlendur smiled, thought for a moment and then started telling her about a man who disappeared right in front of everyone’s eyes: Jon Bergthdrsson, a thief from Skagafjordur.

  He went out onto the sea ice off the Skagi coast to fetch a shark that had been hauled up through a hole in the ice the previous day. Suddenly a southerly wind set in, it began to rain and the ice split and drifted out to sea with Jon on it. Rescuing him by boat was ruled out because of the storm, and the ice drifted northwards out of the fjord, driven by the southerly wind.

  The last time Jon was seen was through a pair of binoculars as he scurried back and forth across the iceberg on the distant northern horizon.

  29

  The soft bar music had a soporific effect and they sat in silence until Valgerdur reached over and
took hold of his hand.

  “I’d better be going now” she said.

  Erlendur nodded and they both stood up. She kissed him on the cheek and stood pressed up against him for a moment.

  Neither of them noticed when Eva Lind walked into the bar and saw them from a distance. Saw them stand up, saw her kiss him and apparently snuggle up against him. Eva Lind shuddered and marched over.

  “Who’s this old cow?” Eva said, staring at them.

  “Eva,” Erlendur reproached her, startled at suddenly seeing his daughter in the bar. “Be polite.”

  Valgerdur held out her hand and Eva Lind looked at it, looked Valgerdur in the face and then back at the outstretched hand. Erlendur watched them both in turn and ended up glaring at Eva.

  “Her name’s Valgerdur and she’s a good friend of mine,” he said.

  Eva Lind looked at her father and at Valgerdur again but did not shake her hand. With an embarrassed smile, Valgerdur turned round. Erlendur followed her out of the bar and watched her cross the lobby. Eva Lind went over to him.

  “What was that?” she said. “Have you started buying the tarts at the bar here?”

  “How could you be so rude?” Erlendur said. “How could you think of behaving like that? It’s none of your business. Leave me in bloody peace!”

  “Right! You can go poking your nose into my business 24-fucking-7 but I’m not allowed to know who you’re shagging at this hotel!”

  “Stop talking such filth! What makes you think you can talk to me like that?”

  Eva Lind stopped but glared angrily at her father. He stared at her, furious.

  “What the hell do you want from me, child?” he shouted in her face, then ran after Valgerdur. She had left the hotel and through the revolving doors he saw her stepping into a taxi. When he came out onto the pavement in front of the hotel he saw the taxi’s red rear lights fading in the distance and finally vanish around the corner.

  Erlendur cursed as he watched the tail lights disappear. Not in any mood to go back to the bar where Eva Lind was waiting for him, he went back inside absent-mindedly and down the stairs to the basement, and before he realised he was in the corridor where Gudlaugur’s room was. He found a switch and turned it on, and the few remaining working bulbs cast a gloomy light onto the corridor. He fumbled his way along until he reached the little room, opened the door and turned on the light. The Shirley Temple poster greeted his eyes.

  The Little Princess.

  He heard light footsteps along the corridor and Eva Lind appeared in the doorway.

  “The girl upstairs said she saw you go down to the basement,” Eva said, looking into the room. Her gaze stopped at the bloodstains on the bed. “Was it here that it happened?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Erlendur said.

  “What’s that poster?”

  “I don’t know,” Erlendur said. “I don’t understand the way you act sometimes. You shouldn’t go calling her an old cow and refuse to shake her hand. She hasn’t done you any harm.”

  Eva Lind said nothing.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself? Erlendur said.

  “Sorry,” Eva said.

  Erlendur didn’t reply. He stood staring at the poster. Shirley Temple in a pretty summer frock with a ribbon in her hair, smiling in Technicolor. The Little Princess. Made in 1939, based on the story by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Temple played a lively girl who was sent to a London boarding school when her father went abroad: he left her in the care of a harsh headmistress.

  Sigurdur Oli had found an entry about the film on the Internet It left them none the wiser about why Gudlaugur had hung up the poster in his room.

  The Little Princess, Erlendur thought to himself.

  “I couldn’t help thinking about Mum,” Eva Lind said behind him. “When I saw her with you at the bar. And about me and Sindri, who you’ve never shown any interest in. Started thinking about all of us. Us as a family, because however you look at it we are still a family. In my mind anyway.”

  She stopped.

  Erlendur turned to face her.

  “I don’t understand that neglectfulness,” she went on. “Especially towards me and Sindri. I don’t get it. And you’re not exactly helpful. Never want to talk about anything that involves you. Never talk about anything. Never say anything. It’s like talking to a brick wall.”

  “Why do you need explanations for everything?” Erlendur said. “Some things can’t be explained. And some things don’t need to be explained.”

  “Says the cop!”

  “People talk too much,” Erlendur said. “People should shut up more often. Then they wouldn’t give themselves away so much.”

  “You’re talking about criminals. You’re always thinking about criminals. We’re your family!”

  They fell silent.

  “I’ve probably made mistakes,” Erlendur said at last. “Not with your mother, I think. Though I might have. I don’t know. People get divorced all the time and I found living with her unbearable. But I definitely did wrong by you and Sindri. And perhaps I didn’t even appreciate it until you found me and started visiting me, and sometimes dragged your brother along with you. Didn’t realise that I had two children I hadn’t been in touch with for the whole of their childhood, who’d gone astray so early in life, and I started wondering whether my lack of action played any part in it. I’ve thought a lot about why that was. Just like you. Why I didn’t go to court and secure my parental rights, fight tooth and nail to have you with me. Or try harder to persuade your mother and reach an agreement. Or just hang around outside your school to kidnap you.”

  “You just weren’t interested in us,” Eva Lind said. Isn’t that the point?”

  Erlendur said nothing.

  “Isn’t that the point?” Eva repeated.

  Erlendur shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I wish it were that simple.”

  “Simple? What do you mean?”

  “I think…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know how to put this. I think…”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I lost my life up on the moors too.”

  “When your brother died?”

  “It’s hard to explain and maybe I can’t. Maybe you can’t explain everything and some things may be better left unexplained.”

  “What do you mean, lost your life?”

  “I’m not… a part of me died.”

  “Please…”

  “I was found and rescued, but I died too. Something inside me. Something I had before. I don’t know exactly what it was. My brother died and I think something inside me died too. I always felt he was my responsibility, and I failed him. That’s the way I’ve felt ever since. I’ve been guilty that it was me and not him who survived. I’ve avoided looking anything in the face ever since. And even if I wasn’t directly neglected, the way I neglected you and Sindri, it was as if I no longer mattered. I don’t know if I’m right and I never will know, but I felt it as soon as I came down from the moor and I’ve felt it ever since.”

  “All these years?”

  “You can’t measure time in feelings.”

  “Because it was you and not him who survived.”

  “Instead of trying to rebuild something from the ruins, which I think I was trying to do when I met your mother, I dug myself down deeper into it because it’s comfortable there and it looks like sanctuary. Like when you take drugs. It’s more comfortable that way. That’s your sanctuary. And as you know, even if you are aware that you’re doing other people wrong, your own self matters most. That’s why you go on taking drugs. That’s why I dig myself down over and again into the snowdrift.”

  Eva Lind stared at her father, and although she did not fully comprehend him, she realised that he was making an absolutely candid attempt to explain what had puzzled her all the time and had prompted her to track him down when she did. She understood that she had penetrated a place within him that no one else had ever been to, not eve
n him, except to make sure that everything there remained undisturbed.

  “And that woman? Where does she come into the picture?”

  Erlendur shrugged, and started to close the door that had come ajar.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  They stayed silent for a while until Eva Lind made her excuses and left. Unsure which direction to take, she peered into the darkness at the end of the corridor, and Erlendur suddenly noticed she was sniffing at the air like a dog.

  “Can you smell that?” she said, sticking her nose up into the air.

  “Smell what?” Erlendur said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Hash,” Eva Lind said. “Dope. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never smelted hash?”

  “Hash?”

  “Can’t you smell it?”

  Erlendur went out into the corridor and started sniffing into the air as well.

  “Is that what it is?” he said.

  “You’re asking the expert,” she said.

  She was still sniffing at the air.

  “Someone’s been smoking hash down here, and not very long ago,” she said.

  Erlendur knew that forensics had lit up the end of the corridor when the body was taken away, but was uncertain whether it had been fine-combed.

  He looked at Eva Lind.

  “Hash?”

  “You’re on the scent,” she said.

  He went back into the room, took a chair and placed it in the corridor underneath one of the functional light bulbs, which he unscrewed. The bulb was scorching and he had to use the sleeve of his jacket to grip it. He found a blown bulb at the dark end of the corridor and swapped them. Suddenly it was illuminated and Erlendur jumped down from the chair.

  At first they could see nothing of note, until Eva Lind pointed out to her father how spotlessly clean the alcove at the end seemed to be compared with the rest of the corridor. Erlendur nodded. It was as if every single spot on the floor had been cleaned and the walls wiped down.

  Erlendur got down on all fours and scanned the floor. Heating pipes ran along all the walls at floor level and he looked under the pipes and crawled alongside them.