The Day is Dark

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  ‘Then you don’t know how the bones ended up in the drawers?’

  ‘Yes, I do know, although I’d really rather forget it.’ Arnar fell silent, but then continued when Thóra said nothing. ‘I couldn’t help noticing that most of the people in the office building had their eye on the skull and were bickering about who should be allowed to keep it. Should it be the man who first found the cairn, or the one who opened it, or the one who noticed the bag, and so on. It was disgusting to listen to, like most things that went on in that office. I was the only one who laid no claim to the bones, since I didn’t want them. I found it all to be in extremely poor taste.’

  ‘What about Friðrikka and Oddný Hildur? Did they try to claim the bones?’

  ‘Oddný Hildur had vanished and Friðrikka had left. It was last January. In the end it was decided that the bones would be divided through a game of chance. A game of bingo, to be precise.’

  ‘They played bone bingo?’ Thóra exclaimed.

  ‘It was supposed to be one of the activities for the Midwinter Feast, which was being planned at the time. The bingo game was to be the highlight of the evening, as far as I could tell. I didn’t go, any more than I went to any of the other activities and events that passed for a social life there. I wasn’t usually invited, but I wouldn’t have been interested anyway.’

  Thóra felt sorry for the man, but now was not the time to discuss the harassment he had experienced, or to sympathize with him. ‘So the bingo game decided who got what?’

  ‘Yes. The skull was the main prize, but the other bones were divided into several different lots. Not everyone won some. Far from it. Bjarki and Dóri, for example, didn’t win any, and they were rather upset. They’d been the most excited about getting some, preferably the entire skeleton.’

  ‘I understand.’ Thóra felt rather lost in this strange conversation. At least now she had an explanation for the little note found lying under the skull, G-57. Was it that number that had granted the skull to its new owner? ‘But if your friend didn’t kill Oddný Hildur, then who did? Do you have any theories you’d like to share with me?’

  ‘No.’ Although the answer was curt, there was no anger in it. ‘I’ve only just found out that this is a murder case – I honestly thought she’d got lost and died of exposure. Thinking about it, most if not all of the Berg employees could be suspects. Everyone except for me and Friðrikka, of course. Oddný Hildur was the only one who was decent to me, so as you can imagine I was absolutely beside myself when she disappeared. Of course the others were shocked but I don’t know how deep their shock went. She’d fallen out of favour after drawing the CEO’s attention to the way they treated me. That didn’t make the men very happy, but instead of dropping it they started bullying Oddný Hildur as well. Idiots.’

  ‘So the group found out that Oddný Hildur had complained?’

  ‘Yes. Not from me, that’s for certain. I guess the owner hadn’t been very discreet about it, which is nothing new for him.’

  Recalling the CEO’s awkward e-mail to Oddný Hildur, Thóra could well imagine. ‘Is it conceivable that someone was trying to play a prank on her in revenge, but that it got out of control and she died accidentally? Maybe the two drillers?’

  Arnar thought it over. ‘I don’t know. It seems quite a stretch, but I’m damned if I know. Neither Bjarki, Dóri nor anyone else acted in a way that led me to suspect they might have done anything like that.’

  Thóra tried not to feel too disappointed, but she had thought she’d get more out of him. ‘Who knows, maybe it was just an accident, even though the circumstances are very peculiar.’ She smiled ruefully and decided to tell Arnar what her clever theory had been. ‘I got a little ahead of myself there. I was starting to imagine that the drillers killed her by mistake, regretted it when they were left alone at the camp and killed themselves. With poison.’ However, her fantastic hypothesis did not explain how they wound up cut into pieces and dumped on an island.

  ‘Yes, well, no. They didn’t kill themselves.’ Arnar cleared his throat. ‘I killed them.’

  Chapter 33

  24 March 2008

  After Thóra hung up she couldn’t bring herself to stand up from her seat in the farthest corner of the hall. She needed to digest what Arnar had told her at the end of their conversation. It was entirely possible that the man had completely lost his mind and that his story was total fabrication, but she doubted it. He was far too serious for that, and his descriptions too precise. It also explained so much that it was difficult to imagine any other explanation.

  Thóra signalled to Matthew to follow her a short distance away from the group and told him everything she had learned, adding that Arnar wanted the Greenlandic police to be informed of his involvement in the case. It took Matthew a little while to absorb the story too, and he had to ask numerous questions before he could fully grasp what had occurred. They were forced to converse in low voices in the little waiting room so that their colleagues wouldn’t hear about any of this before the authorities did. The Greenlandic police were the only ones in any position to determine the validity of the story, and there could be grave consequences if the group went home with snippets of hearsay about such a serious matter.

  It took them some time to convince the young policeman standing watch in the waiting room that they desperately needed to speak to his boss. The officer was supposed to ensure that none of the Icelanders left the terminal, and he obviously intended to carry out his task to the letter. In the end he saw that they would not give up and conceded to their demands. He said something incomprehensible into the radio and shortly afterwards they heard a car crunch to a stop in the gravel car park outside the terminal. The chief investigator strutted in and indicated that they should accompany him to the reception area. The others in the group watched in amazement, but none of them had asked yet what was going on. If they had, the answer would have been pretty succinct: None of your business. Dr Finnbogi did in fact call out after them and ask where they were going, but neither of them turned around or answered him.

  They all sat down at a little table where Thóra informed the police officer what she wanted, choosing her words carefully so as to be taken seriously. She asked that the conversation take place in English, since she worried that her inexpert Danish could lead to misunderstandings.

  ‘So Arnar Jóhannesson says that he killed the two drillers?’ The policeman had pulled out a small notebook as soon as Thóra began speaking, and now he scribbled something in it as she continued her story. ‘But not the woman – is that right?’

  ‘Yes. He denies that, and he sounded very convincing. He thought she’d died of exposure. Just as everyone else seemed to believe.’

  ‘All except for one person, I expect. It’s almost certain that she was murdered. We’re transporting her body to Nuuk for an autopsy, but we sent photos of her injuries to the coroner and his conclusion was that she’d been struck with some sort of blunt instrument. Possibly even a hammer.’

  ‘Oh.’ Thóra tried not to let this throw her off-course. Oddný Hildur’s demise did not seem to be connected to those of Bjarki and Dóri, judging by what she’d learned from Arnar, so it was unnecessary to dwell on it now. So she began to tell the officer everything she knew about Arnar’s dealings with the drillers and the harassment that had taken place at the isolated work camp. She had only mentioned it to him in passing before, since she hadn’t realized how integral it was to the mystery of the drillers’ fate.

  ‘In other words, he lashed out in self-defence against their bullying and killed them?’ The officer did not seem overly surprised at this explanation, since no one reason for committing murder was better than any other.

  ‘Before I go on, I feel it’s only right to mention that I’m not entirely sure he can be directly connected with the men’s murder.’ Thóra smiled, feeling her cheeks flush in embarrassment. ‘In a legal sense, it’s not entirely clear, although Icelandic law may prove me wrong. Morally, there is no question
of his involvement, although it’s difficult to know whether he has fully realized the consequences of his actions.’

  ‘This is not a court of law. Tell me simply what the man told you, and then others will determine who should be blamed.’

  ‘It has to do with the “bone bingo” at the Midwinter Feast that I told you about during questioning yesterday. Bjarki and Dóri, the men who were found on the island, tried hard to win the skull to use as a decoration in their office. When they missed out on the main prize they were very disappointed and complained about it constantly. According to Arnar, the others put the bones they’d won in their desk drawers while they waited for these two to calm down, since they’d all had enough of their grumbling and didn’t want to provoke it by leaving the bones on display. Their disappointment probably explains what happened after the group left. It appears Bjarki and Dóri also found a body where they had been instructed to drill. They caught a glimpse of it beneath the ice at the mouth of a cave in the forbidden area and decided after a lot of head-scratching to dig it out and bring it to the camp to tease their co-workers, or even use it to make a whole skeleton that they could brag about to the others. They also found several old artefacts that they hoped were of some value, and started by digging those out. Among other things they found the objects that we gave to you, including the little statue that they thought was a genuine Tupilak. They were understandably very excited, since no such object has been found preserved before. They knew the history of the area well enough and thought that the man in the ice was one of the original inhabitants of the village who died of hunger, and that the Tupilak in question had called down the curse on the settlement.’

  ‘Did you hear this from Arnar?’

  ‘Yes, and it’s what Bjarki told him. I’ll come to that.’ Thóra went on with her story. ‘They had a hard time freeing the man from the ice so they decided to use the drill. After breaking up the ice around the body by drilling and chopping at it, the body was still stuck, since they couldn’t drill beneath it. That’s when they got the idea of drilling through the body and pulling it out with the drill shaft.’ Thóra hesitated. ‘Since they wanted to keep the bones intact they were careful to position the drill so that it wouldn’t damage the spine. That explains the hole penetrating one of the lungs.’

  ‘Why not the stomach or the abdomen? Then they would have kept the ribcage intact.’ The police officer asked the same question that Thóra had thought of. It was easier to accept the story by putting themselves in the shoes of these dimwits.

  ‘They had to sacrifice some of the ribs to get a hold on the body, according to Arnar. If they had gone through the abdomen the drill would just have jerked straight out and not pulled the body free. The ribs gave them some grip. This at least explains the hole in the corpse in the freezer – because obviously this is the same man. They took him there while they were deciding what to do with him.’

  The policeman’s pen moved rapidly over the page and it quickly filled up. Before he turned to the next page he skimmed over what he had already written. ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘At first, nothing. They freed the corpse from the ice, brought it back with them and put it in the freezer. The next day Dóri felt a bit weak and two days later he was seriously ill. At first they thought it was just the flu and Dóri pumped himself full of painkillers, but he just got worse. Then Bjarki began to display the same symptoms, two days after Dóri first started feeling bad. He had begun to suspect that Dóri was seriously ill. He searched the Internet to try to find out what infectious diseases were going around but found nothing that fitted with their symptoms. In the end blood started pouring from Dóri’s eyes, nose and mouth, and his face turned dark blue. So Bjarki dragged him out of his apartment and over to their office. There, he put him in front of the video camera so that a doctor could see what was going on and give them some advice. It was late in the evening. Bjarki himself had a high fever and it didn’t help matters when Dóri lost consciousness in front of the computer. So Bjarki didn’t finish his filming, and he began to panic. He might have been delirious, but he apparently considered it possible that the Tupilak, or the curse that had been put on the area, was punishing them for tampering with the body. He left Dóri behind but the camera was connected to the computer, with everything set up for recording.’

  ‘And how does Arnar know all of this? Was he there, after all?’

  ‘No, Bjarki called him that night and told him everything I’m recounting to you right now, and doubtless other things that Arnar forgot to tell me about. Bjarki actually tried to call the emergency services in Iceland to get in touch with a doctor or the police, but the number doesn’t work if you call it from a different country. So he started phoning his colleagues one by one, after giving up trying to contact friends and acquaintances. That fits with his other co-worker’s story, which I’ve already told you. It had got late and the time difference wasn’t in his favour, so no one answered. No one but Arnar. In some ways that was deeply ironic. In his despair, Bjarki forgot that Arnar wasn’t exactly indebted to him; in his shock he described the situation to him and said that he thought Dóri was dying, and that he was too.’ Thóra stopped, and the policeman looked up at her. ‘That put Arnar’s conscience to the test. And he decided to keep quiet and do nothing.’

  ‘Did they both die that night? Why didn’t the man call someone in the morning when he realized that there was no help on the way from Arnar?’

  ‘He couldn’t; Arnar made sure of that. Instead of making an honest attempt to come to Bjarki’s assistance as he had promised him, Arnar called his friend Naruana and asked him to go up to the camp, disconnect the satellite dishes and remove the keys from the cars and snowmobile. He told him that this was a well-deserved prank, but didn’t let Naruana know his actual purpose. Naruana was quite drunk and didn’t question anything; he simply went up to the camp and did as he was asked, and more. Instead of disconnecting the satellite dishes he tried his best to destroy them, and since he couldn’t find the keys to the cars or the snowmobile he put sugar in the petrol tanks. In other words, in doing this Naruana became the reason – unwittingly – for the men not being able to get to a doctor to receive the help that might have saved their lives. Before Naruana did these things Arnar accessed the server via the remote connection and deleted all the images of the body in the ice, or so he believed, in order to throw those who would later want to know what had happened off the scent. He himself said that at the time he had been half-crazed with hatred and not thinking clearly.’

  ‘I see.’ The police officer looked up from his notebook at Thóra. ‘And Arnar didn’t have a change of heart straight afterwards, phone Naruana back and try to call him off? Sometimes people regret what they did in the heat of the moment and try to limit the damage they’ve caused.’

  Thóra replied that she couldn’t speak for the man’s actions; she could only relay what Arnar had told her. ‘It may be relevant that as soon as he made his fateful decision he started drinking again. He said that he went to the liquor store the next morning and stocked up. The binge lasted until he enrolled in treatment. I would imagine his regret played a large part in his tumble off the wagon.’

  ‘So. The men died.’ The officer didn’t mince his words.

  ‘Dóri died first. He never regained consciousness and died in the office without Bjarki being able to drag him back to his apartment. Two days later Bjarki died.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand. How could anyone know that, since the men were disconnected from the outside world?’

  ‘Bjarki told Naruana about it.’ Thóra explained in more detail: ‘The day that Dóri died Bjarki set off for the village in the hope of either finding assistance or phoning for it. He was very weak and clearly seriously ill, but he made it to his destination on skis. But his fortitude didn’t pay off. None of the villagers would open their doors to him or listen to his cries for help. Only Naruana. He saw him from a distance on his way home from the pier and offered to
take him back to the camp. The skis are probably still outside Naruana’s house, if that would help your investigation.’

  ‘Do we know why he did this? I’d have expected him to be the one most inclined to avoid the Icelanders, in light of the damage he’d done at the camp.’

  ‘You’ll have to ask him about that, but maybe he wanted to prevent Bjarki from speaking to anyone else. In any case, he took him back up to the camp on a snowmobile he borrowed from someone. He also probably lied to Bjarki about help being on its way. Naruana found Dóri dead in the office and realized that things were a lot more serious than Arnar had led him to believe. I understand that he thought he saw on Dóri’s body, and on Bjarki’s face, the same marks that had led his sister to her death. It frightened him. He was convinced that the curse on the area was manifesting itself again and he got out of there as quickly as possible. Bjarki had no strength to chase him and instead lay there alone and exhausted, and he seems to have died shortly afterwards. He was lying in the corridor near the coffee room.’

  ‘What about the dismemberment of the bodies? How did that happen?’

  Thóra’s throat was dry from talking non-stop, but she continued. ‘Naruana called Arnar after returning home and told him that one of the men was dead and the other was going the same way. Arnar, who was totally smashed at the time, asked him to dispose of the bodies, throw them out on the ice, take them somewhere where they would be eaten by animals or just do something so that they wouldn’t be found. He hoped that people would think that Bjarki and Dóri had died of exposure, like Oddný Hildur.’