Strange Shores (3 page)

‘Plenty of people have heard of the British soldiers but not many remember Matthildur nowadays,’ said Bóas, walking ahead of Erlendur with the fox nodding over his shoulder. ‘She disappeared in the same storm. According to her husband, she was planning to hike over to Reydarfjördur on the same path as the soldiers, via the pass. It was a route she’d taken before. But when they asked the British if they’d seen her, they swore they hadn’t.’

‘Shouldn’t they have run into each other?’ asked Erlendur.

‘They were in the same area at the same time, caught up in the same storm. And they were approaching from opposite directions, so by rights they should have met. Then again they were busy fighting for their lives, so maybe they missed her. The soldiers were all accounted for in the end but no trace of Matthildur was ever found. A search party was sent out when they discovered she hadn’t arrived in Reydarfjördur. But that was later.’

‘What did her husband have to say?’

‘Just that her mother lived in Reydarfjördur and Matthildur had decided to visit her by a path she reckoned she knew. He said he’d tried to dissuade her but she’d been adamant. The way he described it, you’d have thought she was fated to go.’

‘Why didn’t he go with her?’

‘I don’t know. But he told people where she was headed before the news broke about the British soldiers. He wasn’t aware they were in the same area.’

‘Did he say she’d gone missing?’

‘No, just that she’d set out on the journey.’

‘Is that significant?’

‘Like I said, you’d have expected the soldiers to have run into her or at least seen her, though of course visibility may have been too poor. But when people asked her family in Reydarfjördur if they’d been expecting her, they had no idea she was planning a visit, either then or at any other time.’

‘Why didn’t she go by boat or car?’ asked Erlendur. ‘There was a perfectly good road between Eskifjördur and Reydarfjördur by then.’

‘She wanted to walk. Apparently she’d been talking for some time about making the trip. The British too; they were bored and the expedition was meant to liven things up during a quiet period. They didn’t have any particular business in Eskifjördur, but it’s a beautiful walk in good weather, as you’ll know. And there was nothing to suggest a storm was brewing.’

‘So she’d mentioned her plans to her husband?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she discuss it with anyone else?’

‘I don’t know. I doubt it.’

They gazed down at the village slumbering by the peaceful fjord.

‘What do you think happened then?’ asked Erlendur.

‘Search me,’ said Bóas. ‘I haven’t the foggiest.’

After Erlendur had knocked several times and waited in vain for the woman in the window to answer, he opened the door and walked in uninvited. He didn’t know why she had failed to respond but it occurred to him that she might be incapacitated somehow. He found the door to the sitting room. The woman had not moved from her post by the window and when he greeted her, she didn’t answer, merely continued to contemplate the view.

He moved closer and said good day again, at which she turned her head and glared up at him, looking outraged.

‘I didn’t invite you in.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have rung beforehand to let you know I was coming.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m sorry, I’ll leave.’

The woman perching on the cushion was tiny and grey-haired; around eighty, he guessed, with piercing eyes that were now fixed sharply on him. She was holding a pair of binoculars. He thought he had gone too far; he shouldn’t have barged in like that. He had no business intruding on people’s private lives. When she didn’t answer the door he should have left her to her own devices.

‘I have no intention of selling this house,’ she announced. ‘I’ve told you people a thousand times. A thousand times. I’m not going to be packed off to a nursing home and I’m utterly opposed to these developments. You lot can just clear off back to Reykjavík and take all your rubbish with you! I want nothing to do with aluminium barons!’

He paused in the doorway. ‘But I don’t want to buy your house. I’m not involved with the smelter.’

‘Oh. Who are you then?’

‘I wanted to talk to you about your sister, Matthildur – the one who died.’

The woman studied him. She obviously hadn’t heard the name for years and couldn’t hide her astonishment that a complete stranger should have entered her house and asked about Matthildur.

‘We get no peace from Reykjavík hotshots wanting to buy everything up around here,’ she said at last. ‘I thought you were one of them.’

‘Well, I’m not.’

‘There’s no end to the strange goings-on these days.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Who did you say you were?’ she asked.

‘I’m a police officer from Reykjavík. I’m on holiday and –’

‘How do you know about my sister?’ the old woman interrupted.

‘I heard about her.’

‘How?’ she asked sharply.

‘When I was a child,’ said Erlendur, ‘and I was talking about her the other day with a fox-hunter I met on the moors. His name’s Bóas. I don’t know if you’re acquainted with him.’

‘I ought to be – I taught him when he was a lad. The naughtiest boy at the village school. But what’s Matthildur to you?’

‘As I said, I was told her story when I was young, so I asked Bóas about her and . . .’

Erlendur didn’t know how to explain his long-standing fascination with the fate of this woman who had once lived near his home but had no other connection to him. After all, he was an outsider, no relation, and only ever came out east on flying visits, years apart. Although he had grown up here until his early teens, he didn’t know any of the locals, hadn’t kept in touch with anyone or come back until he was an adult. Whether he liked it or not, his life was in Reykjavík now.

Yet part of him would forever belong to this place, a witness to the helplessness of the individual when confronted by the pitiless forces of nature.

‘. . . I’m interested in stories about ordeals in the wilderness,’ he finished bluntly.

THE WOMAN’S DEMEANOUR
changed. She asked his name and he told her, saying he was just passing through, only stopping in the East Fjords for a few days. She shook his hand and introduced herself as Hrund. As he took in the view from the window, he realised that far from watching, let alone waiting for him, she had been spying on the progress of the enormous pylons that were being erected above the town to connect with the smelter further down the fjord. At her invitation, he sat down on an old sofa that creaked in protest, while she took a chair facing him, neat and, now that some kind of understanding had been established between them, inquisitive. He elaborated on his interest in accidents in the mountains, easing the conversation round to Matthildur’s disappearance in the great storm of January
1942,
when the British servicemen had famously come to grief.

There had originally been four sisters, daughters of a couple who had moved to Reydarfjördur in the
1920
s, fleeing a miserable living on a small croft in the northern district of Skagafjördur. Their father, who came of an East Fjords family, had taken over a relative’s smallholding, but according to Bóas he was a heavy drinker who made a mess of running the place and was killed in an accident some years after the move. His wife, left on her own with four daughters to support, had managed to turn around the fortunes of the farm with the help of her neighbours, married a local man and saw her daughters safely into adulthood. The two eldest had left, moving right across the country to Reykjavík, while Matthildur had married a fisherman from Eskifjördur, the neighbouring fjord. At the time she went missing they had been together for a couple of years but had no children. Hrund, the youngest of the sisters, had got hitched to a local and stayed on in Reydarfjördur.

‘They’re all dead, my sisters,’ Hrund said. ‘I didn’t have much contact with the two who moved to Reykjavík. It was years between their visits. We did exchange the odd letter but that was it really, though Ingunn’s son moved out here as a young man and still lives in Egilsstadir. He’s in a care home now. We’re not in touch. As for Matthildur, I have nothing but good memories of her, though I was only thirteen when she died. She was considered the prettiest sister – you know how people talk – perhaps because of what happened to her. As you can imagine, her loss was a terrible tragedy for the family.’

‘I gather she’d been planning to walk over here to see your mother.’

‘That’s what her husband Jakob said. She got caught in the same storm as the British soldiers. Maybe you know the story?’

Erlendur nodded.

‘They had no luck finding Matthildur, though they made a huge effort, both here in Reydarfjördur and over on the Eskifjördur side where she started out.’

‘I hear there was torrential rainfall,’ Erlendur said, ‘and the rivers were in spate. They think one of the British soldiers drowned in the Eskifjördur River and got washed down to the sea.’

‘Yes, that’s why they combed all the beaches. Maybe she was carried out to sea. It seemed by far the most likely explanation to us.’

‘They say it was a miracle that so many of the soldiers survived,’ Erlendur commented. ‘Maybe people thought they’d exhausted the store of good luck. Did anyone else know of her plan to go over to Reydarfjördur? Aside from her husband, that is?’

‘I don’t think so; at least, she didn’t warn us she was coming.’

‘And no one saw her? She didn’t stop anywhere along the way? There were no witnesses who spotted her heading up to the moor?’

‘The last time anyone saw her was when she said goodbye to Jakob. According to him, she was well prepared, and had a packed lunch as she expected the walk to take all day. She left at the crack of dawn because she wanted to get to Reydarfjördur in good time, so there wouldn’t have been many people about when she left. And she wasn’t planning to stop anywhere either.’

‘The British claimed not to have seen any sign of her.’

‘No.’

‘Though she was on the same path.’

‘Yes, but they would hardly have been able to see a thing in that weather.’

‘And your mother didn’t know she was coming, did she?’

‘Bóas
has
done a thorough job of filling you in.’

‘He told me the whole story, yes.’

‘Jakob was . . .’

Hrund looked out of the window, as she did all day every day, sitting at her post, armed with her cushion and binoculars. When dusk fell, the glow from the construction site lit up the landscape. She gave a wry smile.

‘What extraordinary times we’re living through,’ she said, with an abrupt change of subject, and started talking about the local developments that she simply could not come to terms with: the aluminium smelter, the huge dam at Kárahnjúkar, the destruction of a majestic canyon in order to build a reservoir that was to become the largest man-made lake in Iceland. Erlendur understood that she welcomed none of it. He automatically thought of Bóas and his hostility to the transformation. During their descent from the moors, the farmer had told him of the suspicions that had arisen at the time of Matthildur’s disappearance and lingered on in the memories of the locals. Though most of them were pushing up the daisies by now, according to Bóas, or had grown old and peculiar.

‘Jakob Ragnarsson didn’t have an easy time of it,’ Hrund said, taking up the subject again after her digression.

‘In what way?’

‘Well, as the months went by, various rumours started to do the rounds. People even claimed she haunted him – persecuted him until he died. Such a pack of nonsense. As if my sister would come back as a ghost.’

‘What did your family think? Was there any reason to doubt his story?’

‘There was never any investigation,’ said Hrund. ‘But when Matthildur’s body failed to turn up, people became suspicious that Jakob was hiding something, as you might expect. There were dark mutterings that she’d been running away from him when she went out in that storm – that she’d never meant to go to Reydarfjördur. That he’d driven her out of the house. I expect Bóas probably laid it on a bit thick to you.’

Erlendur shook his head. ‘He didn’t mention that. What happened to Jakob? He was killed in an accident, wasn’t he?’

‘He drowned and was buried in Djúpivogur. That was several years after Matthildur vanished. His boat capsized in Eskifjördur Fjord during a storm and both men on board died.’

‘So that was the end of that.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Hrund. ‘Matthildur was never found. And years later a young boy went missing on the moor. He was never found either. It’s an unforgiving country.’

‘Yes,’ Erlendur said. ‘That’s true.’

‘Are you looking into that case as well?’

‘No.’

‘People said she haunted Jakob and dragged him to his death – they even blamed her for his accident. Utterly absurd. But Icelanders love making up ghost stories. Things went so far that one of the pall-bearers at Jakob’s funeral claimed to have heard him moaning as he was lowered into the grave. Complete codswallop, of course. And that wasn’t all.’

‘I once heard some talk about the British,’ Erlendur prompted.

‘Yes, there were rumours that she’d been involved with them. That she was pregnant – she’d been having an affair with a soldier and secretly fled the country with him. She was supposedly so ashamed that she never even wrote home.’

‘And died abroad?’

‘Yes, or died shortly after leaving the country. They questioned the troops stationed in the area but no one had heard a thing. Because it was rubbish, of course – preposterous.’

‘Are there any surviving friends or relatives of Jakob that I could talk to?’

‘They’re pretty thin on the ground. He came from Reykjavík, you know; lived with his mother’s brother in Djúpivogur to begin with, but the uncle died years ago of course. Maybe you should have a word with Ezra. He was a friend of Jakob’s.’

HE IS ENVELOPED
by cold and darkness, assailed by a flood of images of people and past events that he cannot hold back. There is no distinguishing time and place – he is everywhere and nowhere at once.