The sounds had stopped altogether. ‘Lenny!’ Abby called at the top of her lungs, in the hope that her shout would rouse him if he was falling into a booze-induced sleep. Spending the night outside in 4°C couldn’t be a good idea. After all, no one would dream of taking a nap inside a fridge, especially not in shorts.
Lenny didn’t answer. The silence was so complete that for a split second Abby wondered if she’d gone deaf. But then the rustling started up again, moving rapidly closer, as if Lenny were running towards the tent. He hadn’t passed out then. But why wasn’t he answering?
She called out again.
No reply.
As before, the sounds stopped the moment she shouted, as if Lenny paused every time she called his name. What was wrong with him? She waited until the swishing and crackling started up again, then yelled: ‘Lenny!’ No answer, just a sudden silence. When she heard the noise again it was right behind the tent. Abby slipped one foot into her shoe, wincing with pain as her blisters rubbed against the toe.
The lantern chose that moment to conk out, leaving Abby crouching there in the gloom, shivering in her knickers, T-shirt and one shoe. Her hearing was more sensitive now she couldn’t see anything and she could make out every footstep Lenny took in the dry grass beside the tent until he was standing outside the door.
‘Lenny!’
No answer.
‘Lenny?’ Abby didn’t like this at all.
The harsh tearing of the zip was as unsettlingly loud as before, if not louder. It sounded like someone ripping through leather. Abby peered at the faint outline of Lenny outside the tent opening. He paused for a moment, then bent to come inside.
It was only then that Abby realised.
It wasn’t Lenny at all.
It was a complete stranger.
The following morning, the farmer happened to be passing when he spotted a tent out in the pasture. Pulling over, he jumped out of the car, climbed over the fence and stormed across the rough, tussocky ground until he was standing in front of what turned out to be a cheap, rickety tent that would no doubt be blown out to sea the moment the wind picked up properly. He got ready to give the occupants a bollocking. From the bikes lying beside it, he assumed there must be two of them. But he hesitated when he noticed that the tent flap was open. There was no sound from inside and no one answered when he called out. He bent down to look in.
The tent was empty. There was camping gear and clutter everywhere, but no people. Seeing what a tip it was, he wasn’t surprised the campers had ignored his sign. You couldn’t see the groundsheet for their belongings, and everything, including the walls of the tent, was splattered with dark stains. It looked as if a tin of something inedible had exploded in there. How was it possible to make such a disgusting mess?
The farmer stood up and looked around. Anger began to course through his veins when he spotted the blackened remains of a fire not far from the tent. But he couldn’t see any sign of the occupants. Not in the field, or in the birch scrub, on the mountainside or on the road. He dithered, irritated, wondering if they had maybe caught a bus to one of the popular tourist attractions in the region, like the Gullfoss Falls or the hot springs at Geysir.
Well, wherever they’d gone, there was no way he was going to hang around waiting for them, so he turned and went back to his car. The breeze was growing stronger and he could hear the open tent door flapping behind him.
Bloody foreigners.
That evening he passed the same way again but by then the tent and the bicycles had gone. All that remained to show that anyone had ever been there was the patch where the fire had been, ringed with blackened stones.
August
Chapter 3
Friday
There were a number of things Huldar could have happily done without in this life, top of the list being corpses and boat rides, which made the present double whammy seem particularly unfair. He had been struggling manfully to hide his distress and was managing OK until the boat stopped its forward momentum and began rocking gently from side to side, up and down. Then, to his great dismay, his nausea began to rise and fall in sympathy.
The voyage out hadn’t been nearly as bad: as long as the boat was ploughing through the waves he’d been able to cope, but now that it had stopped, everything was in motion inside him; an unhappy reminder of his one-off spell as a deckhand in his youth. That trip had begun well too but ended badly, with the result that he hadn’t been invited back. Not that he would ever in a million years have accepted the offer. There had to be more to life than hanging over a rail, clinging desperately to the hope that he wouldn’t lose his guts as well as his breakfast during the next bout of vomiting. When he disembarked he had promised himself that he would never again set foot on a boat.
But fate had other ideas. Since being a fisherman was out, he had trained as a carpenter, before subsequently joining the police, both of which had seemed safe bets if you wanted to avoid the sea. How ironic. You never could tell where life was going to take you.
‘There you are.’
Huldar glanced round. He had taken up position by the rail, concentrating hard on the thin dark strip of solid ground visible between sea and sky. During his brief, abortive career as a deckhand, his crewmates had told him that focusing on a fixed point would help combat seasickness. But it hadn’t worked then and time had done nothing to increase its efficacy. He was feeling just as bad now as he had been before he left the group by the other rail on the pretext that he wanted a smoke. Nothing could be further from his mind, but it had sounded better than saying: ‘Excuse me while I go and throw up.’
‘Feeling a bit under the weather?’ Erla stopped beside Huldar, her head tilted to one side, examining his face. He didn’t need a mirror to tell him that he was as white as a corpse. Now that he saw her close up, he thought she was looking a bit peaky too, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. No one in Iceland could boast a healthy tan after the wettest summer in a hundred years.
‘No. I’m fine.’ Huldar knew she wouldn’t believe him but he didn’t care. He’d been brought up never to betray any sign of weakness and it was too late to change now. That was why he hadn’t hesitated for a moment when Erla asked him to accompany her on this trip – in spite of his old vow; in spite of the fact that he knew what the voyage would do to him. He wasn’t only trying to save face: things between him and Erla had improved recently and he wanted to keep it like that. If he’d said no, she was bound to have taken it the wrong way, and he was fed up with constantly having to patch up their relationship. If only she were a man, he could have turned down the job without her reading anything into it beyond the simple fact that he didn’t want to go. At least he was straightforward like that, he reasoned, whereas his five sisters never took anything at face value and were capable of interpreting the most innocent of comments in the worst possible way.
‘What about you?’ Huldar retorted. He’d seen her looking better.
‘Nothing wrong with me.’ Drawing slightly away, Erla blinked and swallowed. Her eyelids stayed closed a beat too long for her answer to be believable. So they were both in the same boat, so to speak. ‘You’re missing all the fun,’ she continued, through clenched jaws. ‘The submarine’s found the spot. We saw something that looked like bones on the screen. Maybe from a finger or wrist. Small, anyway. It’s possible they were carried off by a crustacean or something and that the rest of the skeleton’s further away, but at least we’re on the right track.’
A heavy cable had been paid out over the opposite rail down into the choppy sea. It was connected to a small, remote-controlled submarine that was busy scouring the seabed for human remains and sending back information via the cable. Huldar gathered that police searches of the seabed were usually conducted in deeper waters, which was a more laborious operation involving sonar and submarines that could only take stills which couldn’t be viewed until the vessel had resurfaced. This was the first time the new sub had been deployed and, despite the inherent
grimness of the situation, few of them could hide their excitement as footage of the seabed was instantly relayed to deck.
Apparently Huldar was the only person on board who wasn’t riveted by the visuals on screen. Before nausea had threatened to unman him, he had stood with the others, underwhelmed by the footage of murky water and the uneven seabed, with the occasional small marine creature darting or scuttling out of view and the odd tuft of billowing seaweed; a drab, colourless world.
Even if Erla was suffering, it had apparently done nothing to dampen her interest. She was a real trouper. Normally Huldar would have claimed he was too, but there were limits. He had seen photos of the leg that had turned up in a fishing net at these coordinates and that had been quite enough for him. He felt absolutely no need to see the other one, should the submarine blunder across it on the seabed.
When Erla had shown him the photos he had been in better shape, capable of holding it together enough to scrutinise them carefully. A faded, lace-up Nike trainer, with two leg bones projecting from it, and a glimpse of something grisly in the shoe. He hadn’t lingered on the picture taken after the shoe had been removed, since he had already seen enough to grasp the situation. A bare foot, size forty-one, belonging either to a woman with big feet or a man with small ones – or possibly to an adolescent.
Erla balanced nimbly as the boat took a sudden, vigorous plunge. For a moment she looked as if she were going to win her battle with the motion but then she gave up and grabbed the rail with both hands, sticking her head over it, closing her eyes and heaving a deep, gasping breath, as if she’d been underwater too long. There was no longer any doubt: she was seasick too. But Erla toughed it out. She turned her head back to Huldar and carried on as if nothing had happened. ‘Anyway, hopefully there’ll be other body parts nearby.’
‘Yes, hopefully.’ Huldar tried to force his lips into a smile. Of course he was hoping the rest of the skeleton would be found but his mind was busy working out the best way to avoid having to see it, particularly if they managed to bring it up. For this purpose, they had a second, specially equipped, unmanned submarine, since the sea here was still too deep for a diver, even though they were over a ridge on the continental shelf. The last depth reading Huldar had heard before he abandoned the others was eighty-three metres.
‘It would be great if we found some that were intact enough to help us make a quick identification. I’d welcome a skull with a complete set of teeth.’
Huldar chipped in with what he would rather they found: ‘Or a coat or other clothing with some form of waterproof ID or a credit card in the pocket.’
‘Yes. Or that.’ Erla didn’t seem optimistic about the chances. The colour drained from her face again and she exhaled with a grimace. ‘The real bugger is not having a clue how fast a body decomposes on the Icelandic seabed.’
‘Yes. That is a bugger.’ Or not. On their way to the harbour Huldar had forced himself to skim through the conclusions of the few existing studies on the subject. Before getting in the car, Erla had given him a printout of an article detailing the results of a foreign experiment on the decomposition of pigs’ carcases that had been placed on the seabed in order to observe the process. According to the researchers, pigs resembled humans in that they were large, hairless and had the same bacterial flora in their digestive tracts. The decomposition rate of the carcases was therefore thought to be similar to that of the body of an adult human. In the event, two of the pigs had been reduced to skeletons within a month, while the third had taken considerably longer. Just reading about it had made Huldar so queasy that he had failed to take in exactly what it was that had caused the discrepancy. All he had grasped was that it related to the differing amounts of oxygen present in the water where the carcases were located. He hadn’t a clue about the oxygen content of the sea off Iceland, or indeed of any other variables that, according to the study, could make a difference.
‘The bones on screen looked completely clean, like the ones sticking out of the shoe. So we probably won’t find any soft tissue, assuming we find anything else apart from those finger or wrist bones. Perhaps the rest of the skeleton is buried in the sand.’ Erla’s short hair was being whipped around by the wind and she tried in vain to tuck it behind her ears. ‘It’s bloody lucky the shoe had preserved some flesh. That should simplify the DNA analysis.’
‘Yes.’ Huldar turned his gaze towards land again in the hope that it would finally prove to be a fixed point. The thought of the rotting flesh in the shoe wasn’t helping matters.
Erla’s stomach seemed to be unaffected by the subject, judging by the way she persisted in discussing it. ‘Let’s hope the deceased’s clothes were thick enough to delay the sea creatures’ activity, like the shoe did. Though we’re still left with the problem that the head has probably been picked clean. Unless part of the scalp has survived. I gather that hair works a bit like clothes in that way.’
Huldar took a deep breath. He had to change the subject if he wasn’t going to lose his breakfast. ‘Who do you think it is?’ he asked desperately. ‘A suicide? A tourist who was washed out to sea from some popular destination like the beach at Reynisfjara?’
Erla shrugged. ‘Haven’t a clue. Until we know how long the body’s been in the sea, there’s no point speculating. It’ll go before the Identification Commission anyway. If anything suspicious turns up, they’ll call us in to investigate. But that’s unlikely.’
The commission had been set up to identify the victims of major accidents and natural disasters, as well as any random human remains that turned up, as in this case. Huldar had recently been offered a position on the board as deputy representative of the Police Commissioner, but had turned it down without a moment’s pause. He had absolutely no desire to expose himself to any more corpses than the ones he already encountered in the line of duty.
Erla released her grip on the rail, enough to give Huldar a nudge. ‘Anyway, come on. I didn’t put myself through this to miss all the fun.’
Huldar mumbled that he’d come in a minute, and turned back to the rail the instant Erla had gone. He stared fixedly at the distant shore, trying to picture himself there, with both feet planted on terra firma. Then he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, as Erla had done. Slowly but surely it worked and he felt well enough to rejoin the others.
No sooner had he reached them than the little group poring over the screen emitted a yelp of excitement. Apparently they had spotted the other leg. More clean bones emerging from a shoe that was mostly buried in sand.
The mood of the group quickly became subdued again when they remembered why they were there. This reaction wasn’t uncommon in their job: successes or victories were no occasion for celebration when you were dealing with the dead.
Erla was the first to notice that Huldar was hanging back. Looking round, she gave him a genuine smile, the colour returned to her cheeks. It suited her and he responded with a pale smile of his own. ‘You’ll miss the whole thing if you don’t come over. We’ve obviously hit exactly the right spot.’ Clearly, the body parts hadn’t been scattered far and wide by an army of crustaceans as she had feared. ‘Don’t you want to see?’
‘I’m good.’ Huldar’s worry that Erla would insist proved groundless. Something else had appeared on screen to capture the group’s attention.
‘Those look like arm bones to me.’ The representative of the Coast Guard tapped the screen. ‘Don’t you think?’
The man in charge of the submarine fiddled with the remote control as the group pressed in for a closer look.
Erla stretched, tried and failed to fold her arms over the bulky lifebelt, then let them drop to her sides. ‘Yes. They can’t be anything else. Aren’t those fingers lying beside the bigger arm bones?’
‘Possibly, though there are lots of other small bones that connect the arm to the hand and fingers, so it’s hard to tell. There aren’t enough there for a whole hand.’ The diving expert appeared to be well up on human anatomy. Noticing everyone looking
at him, he added in explanation: ‘I worked as a paramedic for several years.’
They all turned back to the screen and the search continued. But despite circling the spot for some time, they didn’t see much more. A few more finger bones and a single bone from an upper arm, poking out of the sand. No coat or other item of clothing, let alone any form of ID or credit card.
After that, there was nothing but sand and more sand, the odd stone and, finally, the murky void. Eventually, Erla agreed to the captain’s suggestion that they should abandon the quest for the moment and bring up what they had found so far. A deterioration in the weather had been forecast for that evening and the captain advised turning back as soon as possible.
Huldar knew Erla well enough to be sure that she would have preferred to carry on searching – to hell with seasickness and rough weather – until they all keeled over with exhaustion. Thank God, the decision wasn’t entirely hers. Huldar had managed to soldier on so far, but if the sea got any rougher, he’d be lost.
The first submarine was hauled up on deck and the second one, which was equipped to collect the human remains, was lowered in its place. As the bones began to come up, one after the other, dread of seeing rotting flesh made it harder and harder for Huldar to control his stomach. The pitching of the bloody boat was to blame; the wind had picked up and the swell with it.
When the last batch, consisting of the other leg plus shoe, arrived on deck, Huldar was too late to look away. But what he saw surprised him so much that he temporarily forgot his curdling insides. He even bent closer to check he wasn’t mistaken, then called from where he was crouching: ‘Erla, have a look at this.’
She came up beside him. ‘What?’
Huldar pointed at the shoe. ‘It’s not a Nike. It’s an Adidas.’
Erla instantly squatted down beside him and inspected it. ‘Shit, that’s weird. Could the person have been in such a state that they jumped in the sea with odd shoes on? I suppose what you’re wearing isn’t going to be the first thing on your mind when you’re about to end it all.’
The Doll Page 3
