On A Small Island

by Grant Nicol

  The first note was found at a veterinary clinic in Mosfellsbær; the second at the scene of a murder in Hafnarfjörður at the farm belonging to the father of the two women who have recently disappeared, Einar Dagsson.

  It would appear that all four crimes are related but Detective Grímur Karlsson, who is in charge of the case, declined to comment on what the connection might be.

  Despite every effort to contact the women, their whereabouts are still not known. Fears are held for their safety and anyone with any information regarding either Elín or Kristjana Einarsdóttir is asked to contact the police immediately.

  Underneath the article were photos of my two sisters. Seeing their smiling faces looking back at me from the newsprint, I was overcome by an indescribable dread that I would never see either of them again. In this torment there would be an abyss that I would either see in time and avoid, or be consumed by. There was no way of knowing yet which it would be.

  CHAPTER 18

  Not wanting my melancholy to overwhelm me I set my newspaper down and went back to the counter for another coffee. The seat I had chosen was at the front window on the first floor of the shop and afforded me a great view of the street below. The position gave me the feeling that I was the one doing the watching and not the other way around. It was hard not to think that if I was to be the next target of these madmen then it was entirely plausible I was already being watched.

  I decided on a single shot of espresso the second time around. I didn’t need a caffeine overdose adding to my already rampant state of paranoia. Upon returning to my seat overlooking the windswept pedestrians on Austurstræti I noticed something had changed. My newspaper was no longer sitting on the page I had left it opened to. There wasn’t a soul in sight anywhere near my seat or on the whole floor, for that matter. Apart from the coffee shop the place was deserted.

  The obituaries column in the classifieds had been left staring back up at me. Not the cheeriest of pages in the paper but after a quick check I realised I didn’t know anyone unfortunate enough to have made the grade that particular day. I assumed that some nosy person had decided to have a read of my paper while I was getting my coffee and left it at that.

  It wasn’t until I turned back to the article I had been reading that I realised what had really happened in my absence. If the man in front of me in line for coffee hadn’t argued about where his Americano was in the barista’s list of coffees to make then I very well may have got a look at whoever had left me the note. This time it didn’t aspire to any sort of contrived references; it had a much more direct approach.

  Next to the church in Hella you will find Inga Rós and her daughter. If you heed what they have to say, they will tell you all you need to know about your sisters.

  The way I saw it there were two routes clearly open to me at this point. I could do the sensible thing, pick up the phone and call Grímur to tell him what I had just found, or I could do what he would most probably refer to as the stupid thing.

  In the end I decided on the obvious course of action for someone who had never been particularly good at heeding advice. I picked up the phone and called Stefán Jón to tell him we were going for a drive, to Hella.

  CHAPTER 19

  By the time the dark gravel cliffs of Hveragerði loomed up on our left, the rain had started to come down like some sort of warning from above. We had just passed a small church, upon the cross of which a single raven had been perched despite the power of the torrential downpour. The stubborn refusal of the bird to seek shelter from the storm gave me the distinct impression that it had been waiting especially for us to pass, for as soon as I remarked on its presence and turned to point it out to Stefán Jón it had taken flight and disappeared from sight.

  I had been trying to justify my somewhat hasty decision to myself by talking Stefán Jón through it as he drove.

  ‘It could be nothing, right? We’re just checking it out to make sure it’s not some sort of hoax. After all, it could be nothing more than an elaborate ruse.’

  I looked across at him waiting impatiently for the moral support that didn’t appear to be forthcoming.

  ‘Well?’ I demanded. A response of any sort, even a non-committal grunt would have sufficed.

  ‘Either that or we both wind up in jail,’ he joked but we both knew what Grímur would say if he knew what we were doing.

  The town of Selfoss came and went as we continued our journey east through the ever-intensifying rain. The wind had mercifully dropped in strength as the storm moved its way across the country but it had done precious little to ease the conditions outside.

  The biting wind had simply been replaced by a ceaseless downpour that threatened to be even more unpleasant to be exposed to. Conversation was in short supply as Stefán Jón concentrated on the road and I fixated on what our quest actually meant in the grand scheme of things.

  If I’d stopped long enough to examine whatever it was we were doing I would have come to the conclusion any reasonable person would. I should have simply passed the information on to Grímur and let the police do their job. The only thing was that from what I had seen so far, that wasn’t going to bring my sisters back to me and I had simply run out of patience.

  Eventually, we crossed the bridge over the Ytri-Rangá River and arrived in the tiny town of Hella. Some caves nearby had once been home to Irish monks around the time of the settlement of the country by the Vikings, but that was all I knew about the place.

  The small wooden church with its distinctive red roof wasn’t hard to find and as we pulled up in front of it I wondered what it was exactly we were supposed to be looking for. The note had said to look for Inga Rós and her daughter next to the church.

  As far as I could see there wasn’t anything next to the church. Apart for the graveyard.

  Now that I looked around the place I realised why we had been sent there. It hadn’t been to talk to anybody at all; it had been to find a story that lay somewhere beneath the cold hard soil of that little church’s graveyard. We were looking for the kind of truths that only the dead can hold on to. I swore quietly under my breath as I let this sink in.

  Stefán Jón and I looked at each other and without swapping a word he pulled his woollen hat tightly over his head and opened his door.

  ‘I’ll be back soon, I expect,’ he said quietly and with that he stepped out of the car leaving me in the relative luxury of the vehicle’s shelter.

  With his shoulders hunched against the downpour he wandered in and out of the rows of old and not so old gravestones. Eventually, he seemed to have found what he was looking for as he bent over at the waist and appeared to start talking to one of the headstones. Maybe all that rain had begun to leak through his hat. I assumed the peculiarity of the situation had got the better of him and he had taken to conversing with himself. Or even worse, with the dead. Either way I held concerns for his sanity, not to mention his general health as he was sure to be soaked through to the skin by now. Eventually, he came jogging back to the car with rain bouncing off his shoulders.

  He threw himself back into his seat and slammed the door behind him.

  ‘Good Lord, it’s wet out there,’ he said as he shook his hat out and wiped his face with his hand.

  ‘Another minute and I’d have ended up halfway down to the sea.’

  ‘What were you saying to yourself over there? As far as conversations go for you it seemed quite involved.’

  He smiled his charming, slightly cocky smile at me and laughed.

  ‘I wasn’t talking to myself. There’s an old man over there tending to one of the graves.’

  ‘In this weather?’

  ‘I know, you’d think he would have picked a better day for it.’

  ‘Well, what did he have to say?’

  ‘The two graves he was looking after belong to Inga Rós Gylfadóttir and Erla Diðriksdóttir.’

  ‘Inga Rós and her daughter?’

  ‘Yes, this old man was none other than Diðrik himself
. They were his wife and daughter.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Yeah, they’re buried right next to each other.’

  ‘Did you tell him why we were here?’

  ‘Of course. When I started telling him the story about your sisters he said he’d also heard something about it on the news but as it was all happening in Reykjavík he hadn’t paid too much attention. He was at a loss to say what the connection might be between his family and yours. Frankly, I think he thought we had wasted a trip coming all the way down here.’

  As I looked about the rain-swept fields surrounding Hella I thought he might just be right. We must have been out of our minds.

  ‘There has to have been some reason why the note brought us all the way down here. It couldn’t have been just to waste all this time, could it?’

  Or get us out of Reykjavík... but I couldn’t even bring myself to voice that concern aloud.

  ‘I don’t know. He seemed pretty sure there wasn’t any way his wife or daughter could have had anything to do with what has been going on in Reykjavík. I just can’t really imagine how they might be connected.’

  There was nothing for it but to go find the old man myself and ask him questions until something fell into place.

  There simply had to be a connection and I was going to find it. There was no way we were heading back to the city empty handed.

  ‘Wait here, I’m going to talk to him,’ I said and hopped out of the car into the pouring rain.

  For some reason I hadn’t even brought a hat with me. Of all the days we could have chosen to go chasing ghosts in the rain. As soon as we got back home I was going to get my head examined. It was going to be a very long trip home for both of us in soaking wet clothes and nothing to show for our efforts.

  I made my way over to where I thought I’d seen Stefán Jón talking to himself. I soon found myself rubbing the water from my eyes wondering what the hell was wrong with me. Either I had lost my bearings on the sodden trek through the headstones or my eyes were playing tricks on me. I was convinced I was in the right spot but there was no old man to be seen no matter where I looked. It was as if he’d crawled into one of the graves and disappeared.

  I bent over to make sure that I was standing in the right place. Right in front of me, side by side, stood the headstones of Inga Rós Gylfadóttir and Erla Diðriksdóttir, no doubt about it. I could feel the rain starting to run down the inside of the back of my jacket and the futile nature of what we were doing started to incense me.

  I found myself wanting to kick the headstones and demand they tell me what I was doing there. From what I could see at my feet, Diðrik had done a lovely job of tidying around the headstones. Not a weed had been left to prosper anywhere near the graves of his loved ones. The story that the headstones told was somewhat more disturbing, however. Erla had died at the rather tender age of fifteen in November of 1991, surely the result of some sort of accident.

  It would seem this early departure from her parents’ life had led in some way to her mother’s passing. Inga Rós had been buried just a few short months later in February of 1992. There had to be a story of some kind there. Perhaps that was what we had been sent to investigate. It pretty much had to be.

  I hurried through the rain to the church itself. Even if it proved to be deserted, as I imagined it might, it would provide me with some much needed respite from the rain, which was proving to be unyielding in its onslaught.

  I opened the front door and stepped inside. The first thing I saw was an old lady cleaning down the side of a row of pews. She appeared to be the building’s only occupant so I made my way over to her trying in vain not to drip everywhere as I went. She turned slowly to greet me as I approached.

  ‘Hello there.’

  ‘Hello. I was wondering if you could help me. My friend was just talking to an old man outside who was tending to a couple of graves.’

  She laughed as if I’d just told her a joke.

  ‘In this weather, are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. His name was Diðrik. He was at the graves of his wife and daughter. Maybe you know him.’

  The old lady looked at me with what might have easily been mistaken for suspicion.

  ‘I know who you’re talking about but he hasn’t been seen here in a while. If you were talking to him out at those graves it would be the first time he’s visited them in almost a year. He comes down on the anniversary of their deaths but apart from that we don’t see much of him any more.’

  ‘Really? My friend was definitely just talking to him. It would seem that he left before I could ask him a couple of questions. I’m curious about how Erla and Inga Rós died. You wouldn’t be able to tell me, would you?’

  ‘I would, but I’m not sure that it’s any of your business. What is it exactly that brings you out here on such a day as this?’

  I told her who I was and who my sisters were and that Stefán Jón and I had ventured out into the countryside looking for an answer to what had happened to them.

  She also had heard about the ‘goings on in the big city’ as she put it. I told her about the note that had been left for me in the bookshop and she looked at me with what might only be described as sheer disbelief. I was forced to retrieve it from my jeans pocket where I had forgotten all about it. It had survived being out in the rain with me but only just. It would not be presented to Grímur as forensic evidence anytime in the near future.

  I unfolded it ever so carefully in front of the old dear as she looked on as if awaiting some kind of divine proclamation. By the time I had it open and she’d read it her opinion of me had been swayed to the good and it seemed that I was to be humoured after all.

  ‘Young Erla died just over twenty years ago now. She was only young at the time.’

  ‘Fifteen years old.’

  ‘Yes, that’d be about right. There was an accident out at the family farm one night. One of the barns caught alight and the girl got herself trapped in that barn somehow. She was burned alive in there, the poor thing. Her mother took it hard and she took her own life a handful of months later. Sad tale, but I don’t see what it could have to do with you and your troubles. It seems that no matter which family you belong to there is always trouble of one sort or another to look out for.’

  She suggested I visit Diðrik at his farmhouse if I wanted to know anything more. She suggested that I show him the note, too, as it would be my only chance of getting him to talk about it. Otherwise he would consider me to be a city-dwelling lunatic, much as she had.

  There was no hint of humour in her voice when she told me this. She gave me directions to the old farmhouse where he still lived, albeit on his own now. I thanked her for her time and made my way back outside to see Stefán Jón, who was doing his best to get out of some of his damper clothes without leaving the car again.

  ‘So, what did he have to tell you?’

  ‘That’s the weird thing. He was gone by the time I got over there. He must have got sick of getting soaked out there and decided to go home.’

  Stefán Jón looked a little surprised.

  ‘Must have, I guess. Was there anyone in the church?’

  ‘A little old lady who told me how they died and where Diðrik lives.’

  ‘I guess that’s where we’re off to now then.’

  ‘It’s not far from here and it seems a waste to come all this way and not talk to him properly.’

  ‘And this time we can do it inside. How did they die? Is there an obvious connection?’

  ‘Not that I can see. Erla was killed in a barn fire and her mother killed herself out of grief. You tell me if there’s a connection there.’

  Stefán Jón just shrugged and shook his head. It was obviously no clearer to him than it was to me.

  ‘I still think it’s an odd day for doing a spot of gardening at the local graveyard,’ Stefán Jón said as we pulled away from the church. ‘No matter how little else you have to do all day.’

  ‘Maybe he likes a bit of pea
ce and quiet. The lady in the church said that he usually only comes down once a year. It could be that he only likes coming out here when he knows there’ll be no one else around.’

  ‘Well, if that’s the case, he couldn’t have picked a better day for it.’

  CHAPTER 20

  Following the instructions I’d received from the old lady it didn’t take long at all to find Diðrik’s farm. The whole area was dotted with numerous colourfully corrugated iron barns all along the banks of the Ytri-Rangá River. Our journey took us out of town some way, towards the foothills of the local volcanoes.

  By the time we’d reached old Diðrik’s place both Stefán Jón and I were feeling rather sorry for ourselves. The cold had begun to seep into our clothing in a way that threatened to never leave. The occasional looks that we shared were silent pleas for one of us to just say what the both of us wanted to hear. That it was time to call an end to our wild goose chase and head home to our warm flats and hot showers. But neither of us had the inclination to say it. For what were probably our own reasons, we were both determined to forge ahead with our quest to find the old man and thereby discover why exactly it was we were there.

  Diðrik’s farm had a certain air of dilapidation about it. The term rundown could be used to describe many rural homesteads but with this farm it really fitted the bill. It looked as though he had probably held on to the place out of fear of moving away rather than anything else.

  Any pretence of the place being run as an actual farm had been given up long ago. I could only imagine that after he lost his daughter and wife in quick succession he had also, to some extent, lost the will to go on. I know I would have. Someone probably would have had to stop me finding a good solid piece of farmhouse and stringing myself up by the neck from it for good measure. The fact that he hadn’t and still took the time to tend to their graves in the pouring rain said a great deal about the man and made me want to meet him all the more.