Silence Of The Grave rmm-2

by Arnaldur Indridason

  She had her back to him, but he knew it was her. A woman of his age, sitting and stooping, plump in a bright purple jogging suit under her brown coat, putting a handkerchief to her nose and talking to Eva Lind in a low voice. What she was saying, he couldn't hear. He noticed she had dyed her hair, but apparently quite some time ago because a white strip was visible at the roots where she parted it. He worked out how old she must be now. Three years older than he was.

  He had not seen her close up for two decades. Not since he walked out and left her with the two children. She, like Erlendur, had not remarried, but she had lived with several men, some better than others. Eva Lind told him about them when she was older and started seeking his company.

  Although the girl was suspicious of him at first, they had nonetheless reached a certain understanding and he tried to help her whenever he could. The same applied to the boy, who was much more distant from him. Erlendur had virtually no contact with his son.

  Erlendur watched his ex-wife and backed further down the corridor. He wondered whether to join her, but could not bring himself to. He expected trouble and did not want a scene in this place. Did not want that kind of scene anywhere. Did not want it in his life if he could avoid it. They had never properly come to terms with their failed relationship which, Eva Lind told him, was what hurt her the most.

  How he had left.

  He turned round and walked slowly down the corridor, thinking about the love letters in Benjamin K.'s cellar. Erlendur could not remember properly, and the question remained unanswered when he got home, slumped in the armchair and allowed sleep to push it out of his mind.

  Had Halldora ever been his sweetheart?

  11

  It was decided that Erlendur, Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg would handle the Bones Mystery, as the media was calling it, by themselves. The CID couldn't afford to put more detectives onto what was not a priority case. An extensive narcotics investigation was in full swing, using up a great deal of time and manpower, and the department could not deploy any more people on historical research, as their boss Hrolfur put it. No one was sure yet that it was even a criminal case at all.

  Erlendur dropped in at the hospital early the next morning on his way to work, and sat by his daughter's bedside for two hours. Her condition was stable. There was no sign of her mother. For a long while he sat in silence, watching his daughter's thin, bony face, and thought back. Tried to recall the time he'd spent with his daughter when she was small. Eva Lind had just turned two when her parents separated, and he remembered her sleeping between them in their bed. Refusing to sleep in her cot, even though, because they only had a small flat with that single bedroom, a sitting room and kitchen, it was in their bedroom. She climbed out of hers, flopped into the double bed and snuggled up between them.

  He remembered her standing by the door of his flat, well into her teens by then, after she had tracked down her father. Halldora flatly refused to allow him to see the children. Whenever he tried to arrange to meet them she would hurl abuse at him and he felt that every word she said was the absolute truth. Gradually he stopped calling them. He had not seen Eva Lind for all that time and then suddenly there she was, standing in his doorway. Her expression looked familiar. Her facial features were from his side of the family.

  "Aren't you going to invite me in?" she said after he had taken a long stare at her. She was wearing a black leather jacket, tattered jeans and black lipstick. Her nails were painted black. She was smoking, exhaling through her nose.

  There was still a teenage look about her face, almost pristine.

  He dithered. Caught unawares. Then invited her inside.

  "Mum threw a wobbler when I said I was coming to see you," she said as she walked past him, trailing smoke, and slammed herself down in his armchair. "Called you a loser. Always says that. To me and Sindri. 'A fucking loser, that father of yours.' And then: 'You're just like him, fucking losers.'"

  Eva Lind laughed. She searched for an ashtray to put out her cigarette, but he took the butt and stubbed it out for her.

  "Why. ." he began, but did not manage to finish the sentence.

  "I just wanted to see you," she said. "Just wanted to see what the hell you look like."

  "And what do I look like?" he asked.

  She looked at him.

  "Like a loser," she said.

  "So we're not that different," he said.

  She stared at him for a long time and he thought he detected a smile.

  *

  When Erlendur arrived at the office, Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli sat down with him and told him how they had learned nothing more from the present owners of Robert's chalet. As the new owners put it, they had never noticed any crooked woman anywhere on the hill. Robert's wife had died ten years before. They had two children. One of them, the son, died around the same time at the age of 60, and the other, a woman of 70, was waiting for Elinborg to call on her.

  "And what about Robert, will we get anything more out of him?" Erlendur asked.

  "Robert passed away last night," Elinborg said with a trace of guilt in her voice. "He'd had enough of life. Seriously. I think he wanted to call it a day. A miserable old vegetable. That's what he said. God, I'd hate to waste away in hospital like that."

  "He wrote a few words in a notebook just before he died," Sigurdur Oli said. "She killed me."

  "Aiee, that sense of humour," groaned Elinborg.

  "You don't need to see any more of him today," Erlendur said, nodding in Sigurdur Oli's direction. "I'm going to send him to Benjamin's cellar to dig out some clues."

  "What do you expect to find there anyway?" Sigurdur Oli said, the grin on his face turning sour.

  "He must have written something down if he rented out his chalet. No question of it. We need the names of the people who lived there. The National Statistics Office doesn't seem likely to find them for us. Once we have the names we can check the missing persons register and whether any of these people are alive. And we need an analysis to determine the sex and age as soon as the skeleton is fully uncovered."

  "Robert mentioned three children," Elinborg said. "At least one of them must still be alive."

  "Well, this is what we've got to go on," Erlendur said. "And it's not much: a family of five lived in a chalet in Grafarholt, a couple with three children, at some time before, during or after the war. They are the only people we know to have lived in the house, but others could have been there too. It doesn't look as though they were registered as living there. So for now we can assume that one of them is buried there, or someone connected with them. And someone connected with them, the lady Robert remembered, used to go up there. ."

  "Often and later and was crooked," Elinborg finished the sentence for him. "Could crooked mean she was lame?"

  "Wouldn't he have written 'lame' then?" Sigurdur Oli asked.

  "What happened to that house?" Elinborg asked. "There's no sign of it on the hill."

  "Maybe you'll find that out for us in Benjamin's cellar or from his niece," Erlendur said to Sigurdur Oli. "I clean forgot to ask."

  "All we need is the names of the residents and then to check them against the list of missing persons from that time, and it's all sewn up. Isn't that obvious?" Sigurdur Oli said.

  "Not necessarily," Erlendur said.

  "Why not?"

  "You're only talking about the people who were reported missing."

  "Who else that went missing should I be talking about?"

  "The disappearances that go unreported. You can't be sure that everyone tells the police when someone disappears from their lives. Someone moves to the countryside and is never seen again. Someone moves abroad and is never seen again. Someone flees the country and is slowly forgotten. And then there are travellers who freeze to death. If we have a list of people who were reported to have got lost and died in the area at that time, we ought to examine that too."

  "I think we can all agree that it's not that sort of case," Sigurdur Oli said in an authoritative
tone that was beginning to get on Erlendur's nerves. "It's out of the question that this man, or whoever it is lying there, froze to death. It was a wilful act. Someone buried him."

  "That's precisely what I mean," said Erlendur, who was a walking encyclopaedia about ordeals in the wilderness. "Someone sets off from a farm, say. It's the middle of winter and the weather forecast is bad. Everyone tries to dissuade him. He ignores their advice, convinced he'll make it. The strangest thing about stories of people who freeze to death is that they never listen to advice. It's as if death lures them. They seem to be doomed. As if they want to challenge their fate. Anyway. This man thinks he'll succeed. Except when the storm breaks, it's much worse than he could have imagined. He loses his bearings. Gets lost. In the end he gets covered over in a snowdrift and freezes to death. By then he's miles off the beaten track. That's why the body's never found. He's given up for lost."

  Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli exchanged glances, uncertain of what Erlendur was driving at.

  "That's a typical Icelandic missing person scenario and we can explain it and understand it because we live in this country and know how the weather suddenly turns bad and how the story of that man repeats itself at regular intervals without anyone questioning it. That's Iceland, people think, and shake their heads. Of course, it was a lot more common in the old days when almost everyone travelled on foot. Whole series of books have been written about it; I'm not the only one who's interested in the subject. Modes of travel have only really changed over the past 60 to 70 years. People used to go missing and although you could never reconcile yourself to it, you understood their fate. There were rarely grounds for treating such disappearances as police or criminal matters."

  "What do you mean?" Sigurdur Oli said.

  "What was that lecture all about?" Elinborg said.

  "What if some of these men or women never set off from the farm in the first place?"

  "What are you getting at?" Elinborg asked.

  "What if people said so-and-so had set off for the moors or for another farm or went to lay a fishing net in the lake and was never heard of again? A search is mounted, but he's never found and is given up for lost."

  "So the whole household conspires to kill this person?" Sigurdur Oli said, sceptical about Erlendur's hypothesis.

  "Why not?"

  "Then he is stabbed or beaten or shot and buried in the garden?" Elinborg added.

  "Until one day Reykjavik has grown so big that he can't rest in peace any longer," Erlendur said.

  Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg looked at each other and then back at Erlendur.

  "Benjamin Knudsen had a fiancee who disappeared under mysterious circumstances," Erlendur said. "Around the time that the chalet was being built. It was said that she threw herself into the sea and Benjamin was never the same afterwards. Seems to have had plans to revolutionise the Reykjavik retail trade, but he went to pieces when the girl disappeared and his burgeoning ambition evaporated."

  "Only she didn't disappear at all, according to your new theory?" Sigurdur Oli said.

  "Oh yes, she disappeared."

  "But he murdered her."

  "Actually I find it difficult to imagine that," Erlendur said. "I've read some of the letters he wrote to her and judging from them he wouldn't have touched a hair on her head."

  "It was jealousy then," said Elinborg, an avid reader of romances. "He killed her out of jealousy. His love for her seems to have been genuine. Buried her up there and never went back. Finito."

  "What I'm thinking is this," Erlendur said. "Isn't a young man overreacting a bit if he turns senile when his sweetheart dies on him? Even if she commits suicide. I gather that Benjamin was a broken man after she went missing. Could there be something more to it?"

  "Could he have kept a lock of her hair?" Elinborg pondered, and Erlendur thought she still had her mind on pulp fiction. "Maybe inside a picture frame or a locket," she added. "If he loved her that much."

  "A lock of hair?" Sigurdur Oli repeated.

  "He's so slow on the uptake," said Erlendur, who had grasped Elinborg's train of thought.

  "What do you mean, a lock of hair?" Sigurdur Oli said.

  "That would rule her out if nothing else."

  "Who?" Sigurdur Oli looked at them in turn. "Are you talking about DNA?"

  "Then there's the lady on the hill," Elinborg said. "It would be good to track her down."

  "The green lady," Erlendur said thoughtfully, apparently to himself.

  "Erlendur," Sigurdur Oli said.

  "Yes?"

  "Obviously she can't be green."

  "Sigurdur Oli."

  "Yes?"

  "Do you think I'm a total idiot?"

  The telephone on Erlendur's desk rang. It was Skarphedinn, the archaeologist.

  "We're getting there," Skarphedinn said. "We could uncover the rest of the skeleton in two days or so."

  "Two days!" Erlendur roared.

  "Or thereabouts. We haven't found anything yet that looks like a weapon. You might think we're being a little meticulous about it, but I think it's better to do the job properly. Do you want to come and take a look?"

  "Yes, I was on my way," Erlendur said.

  "Maybe you could buy some pastries on the way," Skarphedinn said, and in his mind's eye Erlendur could see his yellow fangs.

  "Pastries?"

  "Danish pastries," Skarphedinn said.

  Erlendur slammed down the phone, asked Elinborg to join him in Grafarholt and told Sigurdur Oli to go to Benjamin's cellar to try to find something about the chalet that the merchant built but apparently lost all interest in after his life turned to misery.

  On the way to Grafarholt, Erlendur, still thinking about people who went missing and were lost in snowstorms, remembered the story about Jon Austmann. He froze to death, probably in Blondugil in 1780. His horse was discovered with its throat slit, but all that was found of Jon was one of his hands.

  It was inside a blue knitted mitten.

  *

  Simon's father was the monster in all his nightmares.

  It had been that way for as long as he could remember. He feared the monster more than anything else in his life, and when it attacked his mother all that Simon could think of was coming to her defence. He imagined the inevitable battle like an adventure story in which the knight vanquishes the fire-breathing dragon, but in his dreams Simon never won.

  The monster in Simon's dreams was called Grimur. It was never his father or Dad, just Grimur.

  Simon was awake when Grimur tracked them down in the fish factory dormitory in Siglufjordur, and heard when he whispered to their mother how he was going to take Mikkelina up to the mountain and kill her. He saw his mother's terror, and he saw when she suddenly seemed to lose all control, slammed herself against the bed head and knocked herself out. Grimur slowed down then. He saw when Grimur brought her round by repeatedly slapping her face. The boy could smell Grimur's acrid stench and he buried his face in the mattress, so afraid that he asked Jesus to take him up to heaven, there and then.

  He did not hear any more of what Grimur whispered to her. Just her whimpering. Repressed, like the sound of a wounded animal, and mingling with Grimur's curses. Through a crack in his eyes he saw Mikkelina staring through the darkness in indescribable terror.

  Simon had stopped praying to his God and stopped talking to his "good brother Jesus", even though his mother said never to lose faith in him. Although convinced otherwise, Simon had stopped talking to his mother about it because he could tell from her expression that what he said displeased her. He knew that no one, least of all God, would help his mother to overcome Grimur. For all he had been told, God was the omnipotent and omniscient creator of heaven and earth, God had created Grimur like everyone else, God kept the monster alive and God made it attack his mother, drag her across the kitchen floor by the hair and spit on her. And sometimes Grimur attacked Mikkelina, "that fucking moron", as he called her, beating her and mocking her, and sometimes he attacked Simon
and kicked him or punched him, one time with such force that the boy lost one of his upper teeth and spat blood.

  "My good brother Jesus, the friend of every child. ."

  Grimur was wrong about Mikkelina being retarded. Simon had a feeling that she was more intelligent than the rest of them put together. But she never said a word. He was certain she could talk but did not want to. Certain she had chosen silence, from the way she was just as scared of Grimur as the others were, perhaps more so because Grimur sometimes talked about how they ought to throw her on the rubbish dump with that pushchair contraption of hers, she was useless anyway and he was fed up with watching her eat his food without doing anything around the house except be a burden. He said she made them a laughing stock, the whole family and him too, because she was a moron.

  Grimur made sure that Mikkelina could hear when he talked like this, and he laughed at her mother's feeble attempts to curtail the abuse. Mikkelina didn't mind him ranting at her and calling her names, but she didn't want her mother to suffer for her sake. Simon could tell that when he looked at her. Mikkelina's relationship with him had always been close, much closer than with little Tomas, who was more of a puzzle, more of a loner.

  Their mother knew that Mikkelina was not retarded. She did regular exercises with her, but only when Grimur was not there to see it. Helped her to limber up her legs. Lifted her withered arm, which was twisted inwards and stiff, and rubbed her paralysed side with an ointment that she made from wild herbs from the hill. She even thought that Mikkelina would be able to walk one day. She put her arm around her and tottered with her back and forth across the floor, urging her on and encouraging her.

  She always spoke to Mikkelina like any other normal, healthy child, and told Simon and Tomas to do the same. She included her in everything they did together when Grimur was not at home. The mother and daughter understood each other. And her brothers understood her too. Every movement, every expression on her face. Words were superfluous, even if Mikkelina knew the words but never used them. Her mother had taught her to read and the one thing she enjoyed more than being carried out to lie in the sun was reading, or being read to.