The Draining Lake

by Arnaldur Indridason

  Early that evening he went for another walk, as he sometimes did. As a man of routine he generally followed the same streets in the western quarter and alongside the seashore on Aegisída. He walked slowly and stared in through the windows of the house, expecting to catch a glimpse of Lothar, but saw nothing. Only two windows were lit and he could not discern anyone inside. He was about to go back home when a black Volga suddenly backed out of the drive beside the house and drove down Aegisída away from him.

  He did not know what he was doing. He did not know what he expected to see or what would happen next. Even if he saw Lothar leave the house he would not have known whether to call out or simply follow him. What was he supposed to say to him?

  For the next few evenings he would walk along Aegisída and past the house, and one evening he saw three people leaving it. Two got into a black Volga and drove away while the third, who was Lothar, said goodbye to them and walked up Hofsvallagata towards the city centre. It was about eight o'clock and he followed him. Lothar walked slowly up to Túngata, along Gardastraeti all the way to Vesturgata, where he entered the Naustid restaurant.

  He spent two hours waiting outside the restaurant while Lothar dined. It was autumn and the evenings were beginning to turn noticeably colder, but he was dressed warmly in a winter coat with a scarf and a cap with ear flaps. Playing this childish game of spies made him feel rather silly. He mainly stayed on Fischersund, trying not to let the restaurant door out of his sight. When Lothar finally reemerged, he went down Vesturgata and along Austurstraeti towards the Thingholt district. On Bergstadastraeti, he stopped outside a small shed in the back garden of a house not far from Hótel Holt. The door opened and someone let Lothar in. He did not see who it was.

  He could not imagine what was going on and, driven by curiosity, he hesitantly approached the shed. The street lighting did not reach that far and he inched his way carefully forward in the near-dark. There was a padlock on the door. He crept up to a small window on the side of the shed and peered inside. A lamp was switched on over a workbench and in its light he could see the two men.

  One of them reached out for something under the light. Suddenly he saw who it was and darted back from the window. It was as if he had been hit in the face.

  It was his old student friend from Leipzig, whom he had not seen for all those years.

  Emil.

  He crept away from the shed and back onto the street, where he waited for a long time until Lothar emerged. Emil was with him. Emil vanished into the darkness beside the shed, but Lothar set off again for the west of town. He had no idea what kind of contact Emil and Lothar maintained. As far as he knew, Emil lived abroad.

  He turned all this over in his mind without reaching a conclusion. In the end he decided to visit Hannes. He had done that once before, as soon as he returned from East Germany, to tell him about Ilona. Hannes might know something about Emil and Lothar.

  Lothar went into the house on Aegisída. Tómas waited for a while a reasonable distance away before setting off home, and suddenly the German's strange and incomprehensible sentence at their last encounter entered his mind:

  Take a closer look.

  32

  Driving back from Selfoss, Erlendur and Elínborg discussed Hannes's story. It was evening and there was not much traffic on Hellisheidi moor. Erlendur thought about the black Falcon. There would hardly have been many on the streets in those days. Yet the Falcon was popular, according to Elínborg's husband Teddi. He thought about Tómas, whose girlfriend had gone missing in East Germany. They would visit him at the first opportunity. He still could not work out the link between the body in the lake and the Leipzig students in the 1960s. And he thought about Eva Lind, who was destroying herself in spite of his attempts to save her, and about his son Sindri, whom he did not know in the slightest. He puzzled over all this without managing to organise his thoughts. Giving him a sideways glance, Elínborg asked what was on his mind.

  'Nothing,' he said.

  'There must be something,' Elínborg said.

  'No,' Erlendur said. 'It's nothing.'

  Elínborg shrugged. Erlendur thought about Valgerdur, from whom he had not heard for several days. He knew that she needed time and he was in no hurry either. What she saw in him was a riddle to Erlendur. He could not understand what attracted Valgerdur to a lonely, depressive man who lived in a gloomy block of flats. He asked himself sometimes whether he deserved her friendship at all.

  However, he knew precisely what it was that he liked about Valgerdur. He had known from the first moment. She was everything he was not but would love to be. To all intents and purposes she was his opposite. Attractive, smiling and happy. In spite of the marital problems she had to deal with, which Erlendur knew had had a profound effect on her, she tried not to let them ruin her life. She always saw the upside to any problem and was incapable of feeling hatred or irritation about anything. She allowed nothing to darken her outlook on life, which was gentle and generous. Not even her husband, whom Erlendur regarded as a moron for being unfaithful to such a woman.

  Erlendur knew perfectly what he saw in her. Being with her reinvigorated him.

  'Tell me what you're thinking about,' Elínborg pleaded. She was bored.

  'Nothing,' Erlendur said. 'I'm not thinking about anything.'

  She shook her head. Erlendur had been rather gloomy that summer, even though he had spent an unusual amount of time after work with the other detectives. She and Sigurdur Óli had discussed this and thought he was probably depressed by having virtually no contact with Eva Lind any longer. They knew that he was in anguish about her and had tried to help her, but the girl seemed to have no control over herself. She's a loser, was Sigurdur Óli's stock response. Two or three times Elínborg had approached Erlendur to talk about Eva and ask how she was, but he had brushed her off.

  They sat in deep silence until Erlendur drew up in front of Elínborg's townhouse. Instead of getting straight out of the car, she turned to him.

  'What's wrong?' she asked.

  Erlendur did not reply.

  'What should we do about this case? Do we talk to this Tómas character?'

  'We have to,' Erlendur said.

  'Are you thinking about Eva Lind?' Elínborg asked. 'Is that why you're so quiet and serious?'

  'Don't worry about me,' Erlendur said. 'I'll see you tomorrow.' He watched her walk up the steps to her house. When she went inside he drove away.

  Two hours later, Erlendur was sitting in his chair at home reading when the doorbell rang. He stood up and asked who it was, then pressed the button to open the front door downstairs. After switching on the light in his flat he went to the hallway, opened the door and waited. Valgerdur soon appeared.

  'Perhaps you want to be left alone?' she said.

  'No, do come in,' he said.

  She slipped past him and he took her coat. Noticing an open book by the chair, she asked what he was reading and he told her it was a book about avalanches.

  'And everyone meets a ghastly death, I suppose,' she said.

  They had often talked about his interest in Icelandic lore, historical accounts, biography and books about fatal ordeals at the mercy of the elements.

  'Not everyone. Some survive. Fortunately.'

  'Is that why you read these books about death in the mountains and avalanches?'

  'What do you mean?' Erlendur said.

  'Because some people survive?'

  Erlendur smiled.

  'Maybe,' he said. 'Are you still living with your sister?'

  She nodded. She said she expected to need to consult a lawyer about the divorce and asked Erlendur if he knew any. She said she had never needed a lawyer's advice before. Erlendur offered to ask at work, where he said lawyers were nineteen to the dozen.

  'Have you got any of that green stuff left?' she asked, sitting down on the sofa.

  With a nod he produced the Chartreuse and two glasses. Remembered hearing once that thirty different botanical ingredients w
ere used to achieve the correct flavour. He sat down beside her and told her about them.

  She told him she had met her husband earlier that day, how he had promised to turn over a new leaf and tried to persuade her to move back in. But when he realised that she was intent on leaving him, he had grown angry and in the end had lost control of himself, shouting and cursing at her. They were in a restaurant and he had showered her with abuse, paying no heed to the customers watching in astonishment. She had stood up and walked out without looking back.

  Once she had related the day's events they sat in silence finishing their drinks. She asked for another glass.

  'So what should we do?' she asked.

  Erlendur downed the rest of his drink and felt it scorch his throat. He refilled the glasses, thinking about the perfume on her that he had noticed when she'd walked past him at the door. It was like the scent of a bygone summer and he was filled with a strange nostalgia that was rooted too far back for him to identify properly.

  'We'll do whatever we like,' he said.

  'What do you want to do?' she asked. 'You've been so patient and I was wondering if it is really patience, if it isn't just as much . . . that somehow you didn't want to get involved.'

  They fell silent. The question hung in the air.

  What do you want to do?

  He finished his second glass. This was the question he had been asking himself since he first met her. He did not consider himself to have been patient. He had no idea what he had been, apart from trying to be a support to her. Perhaps he had not shown her sufficient attention or warmth. He did not know.

  'You didn't want to rush into anything,' he said. 'Nor did I. There hasn't been a woman in my life for a long time.'

  He stopped. He wanted to tell her that he had mostly been by himself, in this place, with his books, and that her sitting on his sofa brought him special joy. She was so completely different from everything he was accustomed to, a sweet scent of summer, and he did not know how to handle it. How to tell her this was all he had wanted and yearned for from the moment he saw her. Being with her.

  'I didn't mean to be stand-offish,' he said. 'But this sort of thing takes time, especially for me. And of course you've . . . I mean, it's tough going through a divorce . . .'

  She could see that he felt uncomfortable discussing this sort of thing. Whenever the conversation took that direction he became awkward and hesitant and clammed up. As a rule he did not say very much, which may have been why she felt comfortable in his presence. There was no pretence about him. He was never acting. He probably would have had no idea how to behave if he wanted to try to be different somehow. He was totally honest in everything he said and did. She sensed this and it offered her a security that she had lacked for so long. In him she found a man she knew she could trust.

  'Sorry,' she smiled. 'I wasn't intending to turn this into some kind of negotiation. But it can be nice to know where you stand. You realise that.'

  'Completely,' Erlendur said, feeling the tension between them easing slightly.

  'It all takes time and we'll see,' she said.

  'I think that's very sensible,' he said.

  'Fine,' she said, standing up from the sofa. Erlendur stood up as well. She said something about having to meet her sons, which he did not catch. His thoughts were elsewhere. She walked over to the door and while he helped her put on her coat she could tell he was dithering about something. She opened the door to the corridor and asked if everything was all right.

  Erlendur looked at her.

  'Don't go,' he said.

  She stopped in the doorway.

  'Stay with me,' he said.

  Valgerdur hesitated.

  'Are you sure?' she said.

  'Yes,' he said. 'Don't go.'

  She stood motionless and took a long look at him. He walked up to her, led her back inside, closed the door and began taking off her coat without her offering any objection.

  They made love slowly, smoothly and tenderly, both of them feeling a little hesitation and uncertainty which they gradually overcame. She told him that he was the second man she had ever slept with.

  As they lay in bed he looked up at the ceiling and told her that he sometimes went to the east of Iceland, to his childhood haunts, where he stayed in his old house. There was nothing but bare walls, a half-collapsed roof and little indication that his family had ever lived there. Yet relics of a vanished life remained. Patches of a patterned carpet that he remembered well. Broken cupboards in the kitchen. Windowsills that little hands had once leaned upon. He told her it was nice to go there, to lie down with his memories and rediscover a world that was full of light and tranquillity.

  Valgerdur squeezed his hand.

  He started to tell her a story about the ordeals of a young girl who left her mother's house with no exact idea of where she was going. She had suffered setbacks and was weak-willed – understandably perhaps, because she had never been given what she longed for most of all. She felt something lacking in her life. Felt a sense of betrayal. She ploughed on headlong, driven by a strange self-destructive urge, and sank deeper and deeper until she could go no farther, bound up in her self-annihilation. When she was found she was taken back and nursed to health, but as soon as she had recuperated she disappeared again without warning. She roamed around in storms and sometimes sought shelter where her father lived. He tried his best to keep her out of the tempestuous weather, but she never listened and set off again as if fate held nothing in store for her but destruction.

  Valgerdur looked at him.

  'No one knows where she is now. She's still alive, because I would have heard if she had died. I'm waiting for that news. I've ventured into that storm time and again, found her and dragged her back home and tried to help her, but I doubt whether anyone really can.'

  'Don't be too sure,' Valgerdur said after a long silence.

  The telephone on his bedside table rang. Erlendur looked at it and was not going to answer, but Valgerdur told him that it must be important for someone to call so late at night. Muttering that it must be Sigurdur Óli with some stupid brainwave, he reached over.

  It took him a while to realise that the man on the other end was Haraldur. He was calling from the old people's home and said he had sneaked into the office and wanted to talk to Erlendur.

  'What do you want?' Erlendur asked.

  'I'll tell you what happened,' Haraldur said.

  'Why?' Erlendur asked.

  'Do you want to hear it or not?' Haraldur said.

  'Calm down,' Erlendur said. 'I'll drop by tomorrow. Is that all right?'

  'You do that, then,' Haraldur said, and slammed down the telephone.

  33

  He put the pages that he had written into a large envelope, addressed it and laid it on his desk. Running his hand over the envelope, he thought about the story it contained. He had wrestled with himself about whether to describe the events at all, then decided it could not be avoided. The body had been found in Kleifarvatn. Sooner or later the trail would lead to him. He knew that there was really barely any link between him and the body in the lake, and the police would have their work cut out to establish the truth without his assistance. But he did not want to lie. If all he left behind was the truth, that would be enough.