The Flatey Enigma

by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson

  CHAPTER 8

  The deacon’s house was located in the island’s interior, a small low cottage. Even though the man was not tall, he still had to stoop to get through the doorway, once he had parked his cart by the gable of the building. The place comprised a small hallway sectioned off by a partition of rough crate planks, a kitchen, and one room, which served both as a living room and bedroom. Pink floral wallpaper adorned the walls, and the ceiling was of dark wood.

  Thormodur Krakur removed his Sunday best clothes, folded them neatly, and placed them in a green painted chest that stood at the foot of the bed. He then put on his work clothes: old gray overalls, woolen socks, and frayed rubber shoes.

  Gudridur, his wife, was boiling fermented ray and potatoes. She was a stout woman and even shorter than her husband. Because of her bad legs, she sat on a bench by the cooker and used both hands to shift her body to and fro. Her false teeth soaked in a glass of water on the kitchen table. They were a little too big, so Gudridur only put them in when she really needed them at meals.

  “The food smells great,” said Thormodur Krakur as he sauntered into the kitchen and they sat at the table. They folded their hands as the husband intoned, “We thank you, our Lord and Savior, for this meal we are about to receive, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

  As they were eating, Thormodur Krakur described the transportation of the corpse to his wife. Even though he hadn’t actually looked into the casket himself, he could quote the words of the district officer and embellish the story with a few imaginative touches of his own. The topic did nothing to dampen their appetite, and the pieces of ray were rapidly devoured with smacking lips. Gudridur pounded her fish and potatoes into a mush, because even though she had put her teeth in, she found it awkward to chew with them.

  Thormodur Krakur waxed lyrical about the Ketilsey mystery in a long monologue. He couldn’t recall any other event of this kind on the islands over the decades. Shipwrecks and sea accidents had been an inevitable part of the islanders’ lives in his youth, but for a stranger to be stranded out on an island like that was completely new to him. Gudridur concurred with a string of exclamations and finally asked, “Do you think you’d be able to communicate with your late foster father if we took out the Ouija board? Maybe he’d have a message from that stranger.”

  Thormodur Krakur shook his head. “No, not straightaway. My foster father is so unsociable. He’d never deliver a message just like that. Maybe he’ll appear to me in a dream soon and give me some sign. Then we’ll see. The danger with people who perish in a horrific way like that is that they can be troubled spirits.”

  The meal was over, and Gudridur cleared the table and placed the dishes in the sink. It was a time-consuming task because she had to sit on the bench and shift back and forward, using her hands. Then she put some coffee beans into the grinder, while Thormodur Krakur fetched a pile of books in the living room. The pile was carefully wrapped in old newspapers and tied with string. He cautiously unwrapped the books and placed them on the kitchen table. The first book on the top of the pile was an old Bible, below which were four hefty tomes of the Flatey Book, volumes one, two, three, and four, printed in 1944.

  Thormodur Krakur lit a stubbed candle and opened the Bible where a bookmark had been placed. He read a short passage from the fourth book of Genesis out loud, while Gudridur put on the coffee, and then closed the Bible again and took out the second volume of the Flatey Book. He opened it at a bookmark in the middle of the Foster Brothers’ saga and, as they drank their coffee, read a long chapter about Thorgeir Havarsson and his namesake, Thormodur, Kolbrun’s poet. When he had finished reading, he put the books back in their place. Then he went outside again to complete the day’s work. The animals still needed to be tended to before nightfall.

  He fetched the cows in the field and milked them in the shed. Little Nonni from Ystakot came to collect the half pot of milk his family bought from them every day, and Hogni greeted him on his way from the district officer’s house to the school. They chatted for a while, and then Thormodur Krakur filled several buckets of water from the well by the shed and emptied them into the cows’ trough. Finally, he prepared for bed, and it was long past midnight when he turned in.

  “…The Flatey Book is the largest vellum manuscript known to have been written in Iceland. It contains a total of 225 sheets and therefore 450 pages. The book is so large that only two sheets could be obtained from each calfskin, and therefore 113 calfskins went into the making of the book. Of these, 101 went into the main section, which was written in Vididalstunga, and then another twelve went into the additional material, which was written in Reykholar nine decades later. This double-fold sheet is called a folio, but if the calfskin is folded in four it is known as a quarto. The sheets are about forty-two centimeters long and twenty-nine centimeters wide. The preparation of the skin used in the Flatey Book required a great deal of labor, tanning, shaving, and scraping for it to be turned into usable vellum. It can therefore be said that the book is the work of many hands. There are no accounts of this work, so the methods used are unknown. The technique used was probably similar to the one applied to tanning on the mainland, although less lime was probably used…”

  CHAPTER 9

  Friday, June 3, 1960

  Kjartan woke up to repeated cockcrows from the village below. It took him some time to remember where he was and identify the sound. The bed lay under a sloping ceiling, and opposite the headrest a color photograph had been blue-tacked to the wall. The picture was probably of a Norwegian fjord with a big modern ferry set against a backdrop of forested hills and cliffs.

  He heard the cockcrow again and knew it was time to get up, but he was paralyzed by a heavy sense of dread. It was a familiar feeling that sometimes hit him at the beginning of a day, particularly when he was forced to venture into the unknown. But he tried to bite the bullet and shake it off. His shyness and social phobias were the two things that plagued him the most in life. He therefore did his utmost to avoid situations that brought him into too much contact with strangers. But now that he’d been saddled with this assignment that took him from one stranger to another, he had no say in the matter.

  Three fat bluebottles buzzed against the windowpane by the top of his bed. He stood up and gazed through the glass. Two kids were rounding up a black sheep and a lamb in a field on the western side of the island. They were within earshot, and their voices could be heard calling when the ewe turned against them and refused to be led. The sky was slightly overcast but sunny.

  Kjartan got dressed and climbed down the almost vertical staircase from the loft. A strong fragrance of coffee wafted through the kitchen, and the mistress of the household was hanging up washing on the line in the level yard in front of the house. She was dressed in the same woolen clothes she’d worn the day before and was wearing her striped apron. A girl of about eight years of age stood by her side and handed her pegs, which she fished out of an old can of paint.

  Kjartan grabbed the pot of coffee on the stove and poured himself a cup. He then walked outside and looked down at the village. The tide was coming in, and the cluster of houses were reflected in the sea that was filling the cove below the embankment. A number of inhabitants could be seen wandering between the houses, and no one seemed to be in a hurry. Those whose paths crossed paused to chat, both young and old. It was more the hens that seemed to be in a hurry as they darted between the gardens of the houses. Despite the sunshine, there was a breeze and it was quite chilly.

  “Good morning, young man,” Ingibjorg said when she noticed Kjartan had come out.

  “Good morning.”

  “We still have dry weather.”

  “Hmm, yeah.”

  Ingibjorg finished hanging up the last garment.

  “We’re still far from the haymaking season, of course, but it would be good to be able to dry the eiderdown in the sunshine,” she said.

  “Hmm, really? Where is Grimur anyway?” Kjartan asked.

  “They went
out at the crack of dawn to check on the seal nets. They should be back by noon.”

  “Right.”

  “Grimur put up your notice before he left.”

  “Good.”

  “And the telephone exchange will open at ten so you can ring your boss, the district magistrate.”

  She turned to the girl. “Thanks for your help, Rosa darling. Run along and play now.”

  The girl put the can down and skipped away.

  Ingibjorg disappeared into the house with the empty washing basket in her hands.

  Kjartan sat on an old whale bone that lay by the gable of the house and sipped on his coffee. Visibility was good in the clear weather, and he felt he could see a white painted house on the mainland to the north, although it could also have been the remains of some snow.

  The screeching of cliff birds reached him from Hafnarey and fused with the surrounding bleating of sheep. The salted scent of the sea lingered in the breeze.

  Ingibjorg came out again and had removed her apron now, put on a tasseled cap, and draped a knitted shawl over her shoulders.

  “I’ll walk you down to the telephone exchange now,” she said cheerfully.

  They followed the path to the road and headed down toward the village. Ingibjorg walked a lot slower than what he was used to and occasionally halted completely to look at something or chat with the people they bumped into. He waited patiently and responded to the greetings of the people Ingibjorg introduced him to. But he was slightly unnerved by the way people brazenly stared at him as soon as they started nattering with the district officer’s wife.

  Finally they reached the co-operative building. There was a space on one of the store’s doors that was obviously regularly used as a notice board. Some rusty old drawing pins were stuck to it, and a notice advertising the Whitsunday mass next week had recently been put up. Beside it was the notice that Kjartan had typed and stuck up with four new drawing pins. Ingibjorg paused to read it and nodded with a smile, as if to confirm it was all in good order.

  The telephone exchange was in a one-story building above a stone basement, directly opposite the co-op.

  White letters on a blue sign over the door read Post amp; Telegraph Office, and inside there was a small hall, with coat hangers and a small bench, that led into a small reception room. A few gray radio receivers hung on one wall, while on the other there was a cabinet full of compartments for the sorting of mail. A bulky safe stood on a plinth in one corner.

  A small, delicate woman welcomed them with a smile. She was wearing trousers and a sweater, with long hair woven into a thick braid.

  “This is Stina; she’s the head of the telephone exchange and the post office,” Ingibjorg said to Kjartan. Then she explained the reason for their visit: “The assistant magistrate needs to phone his superiors. Are you open yet, Stina?”

  Ingibjorg sat in front of the desk and signaled Kjartan to join her.

  “I’m just opening now. I just have to turn on the generator and switch on the exchange,” Stina answered, slipping on some old work gloves and disappearing behind the door.

  “That’s the only electricity we have here,” Ingibjorg explained a bit further, “the energy this generator produces. There’s actually another generator in the fish factory for the fish processing, but it’s rarely used.”

  Within a few moments they heard the muffled murmur of an engine and the smiling lady reappeared. She slipped on a bulky set of black headphones with an attached microphone and turned on the contraption by flicking a few switches. She waited a moment for the lamps to warm up and then said loudly and clearly: “Stykkisholmur, Stykkisholmur, Flatey radio calling.” She repeated this several times.

  She then put down the headphones and said, “Stykkisholmur will answer in a moment. He sometimes likes to keep you waiting, just to give people the impression that he’s really busy.”

  She turned out to be right. A blast of static soon erupted, and a male voice answered through the speaker on the wall: “Flatey radio, Stykkisholmur answering.”

  “Good morning, Stykkisholmur. We have a call for the district magistrate in Patreksfjordur.”

  “One moment,” the voice answered, followed by a silence. Stina and Ingibjorg solemnly waited without saying a word.

  Kjartan looked out the window facing the village and saw two men standing by the notice in the co-op store. They seemed to be reading it with great interest and then stuck their heads together and looked in the direction of the telephone exchange.

  “Flatey radio, Stykkisholmur. We have the district magistrate of Patreksfjordur on the line.”

  “Go ahead,” Stina said, pointing at a black receiver on the desk in front of Kjartan.

  He picked up the phone. “Hello, hello. Kjartan in Flatey here.”

  The voice at the other end of the line was faint. “Yes, hello, how’s the investigation going?”

  “We’ve recovered the body,” Kjartan answered, “but we still haven’t identified it yet. It seems likely that he was alive when he reached the island but then died of fatigue. He seems to have been lying there for several months after he died.”

  There was a brief silence, after which the magistrate said, “That’s odd. Doesn’t anyone know who he is?”

  “No. The body is unrecognizable.”

  There was another brief silence while the magistrate evaluated the situation.

  “Right then, so you’ll have to send the body to Reykjavik,” he then said.

  “Yes. The casket will be traveling on the mail boat tomorrow.”

  “Good.”

  “Should I come home today?”

  “Today? No, hang on there for a bit and talk to some of the islanders. There must be some way of finding out who took that man to the island.”

  Kjartan wasn’t happy. “I’m not used to this kind of investigative work,” he said.

  “No, but you’ll have to do for now. I’m not going to call in the police from Reykjavik if we can solve this in the district ourselves. District Officer Grimur will help you with your inquiries.”

  “Right then, but what about the notarizations I was supposed to work on?”

  “They can wait another two or three days. Don’t you worry about them; just concentrate on this. Be in touch tomorrow. Good-bye and best of luck.”

  The phone call ended, and Stina let Stykkisholmur know that was enough for now.

  Kjartan handed her a copy of the notice and asked her to read it out over the radio to the other islands.

  “Skaleyjar, Svefneyjar, Latur,” she called into the mouthpiece. “Flatey radio calling.”

  She repeated this three times until the islands answered, each in turn. She had started to read out the notice as they were walking outside.

  “Grimur will be back at lunchtime and you can talk to him about how to proceed,” Ingibjorg said when they were standing outside the telephone exchange. Then she added: “Maybe you should take a walk while you’re waiting for Grimur. Take a look around the island. Visitors normally like to go up to Lundaberg to look at the birds.” She gave him directions.

  Kjartan nodded approvingly, and Ingibjorg said good-bye and walked toward her house at an even slower pace than before. Kjartan started his tour by taking a look around the village. The doors of the co-op were open, but there were no customers to be seen inside. A handcart loaded with several bags of cement was parked in front of the warehouse. The muffled murmur of the generator resounded from the basement, and the sound of a radio voice could be heard coming from the house next door. These sounds blended with the screeches of the birds on the rocks of Hafnarey.

  An elderly woman in a canvas apron was spreading eiderdown on a concrete step above the pier, and an old man was painting a small boat that lay upturned on the edge of the cove. A face was watching him through the priest’s house’s window.

  Kjartan sauntered off, following a narrow gravel path that meandered between the houses. There was a strong smell of chicken shit in the air that fused with t
he scent of the vegetation that had started to flourish nicely in the sunshine, sheltered by the walls of the houses. Garden dock, angelica, and long grass thrived on the fertilizer the hens dropped behind them wherever they went.

  Thormodur Krakur stood in front of an open shed dressed in his work clothes, and some eiderdown had been left out to dry on a white piece of sailcloth at his feet. When he saw Kjartan, he greeted him heartily: “Good morning, Assistant Magistrate. Where are you off to today?”

  Kjartan considered telling him not to call him Assistant Magistrate but then decided not to bother.

  “I’m just taking a look around,” he answered.

  “Good idea,” said Thormodur Krakur. “Can I offer you some fermented shark?”

  “No thanks.”

  “How about some freshly laid arctic tern eggs then?”

  “No thank you, I’m not hungry.”

  “As you wish then. Any news about that Ketilsey fellow?”

  “No, nothing new.”

  “No, huh? Ah well. This doesn’t bode well. I’ve had some bad dreams lately.”