The Draining Lake (3 page)

Forensics had erected a large tent over the skeleton. Elínborg stood outside it as she watched Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli hurrying across the dry bed of the lake towards her. It was late in the evening and the media had left. Traffic had increased around the lake after the find was reported, but had died down and the area was quiet again.

'Nice of you to find the time,' Elínborg said as they approached.

'Sigurdur had to stop for a hamburger on the way,' Erlendur grunted. 'What's going on?'

'Come with me,' Elínborg said, opening the tent. 'The pathologist is here.'

Erlendur looked down towards the lake in the evening calm and thought about the fissures in its bed. The sun was still up, so it was completely daylight. Staring up at the white puffs of cloud directly above him, he was still pondering how strange it was that there had once been a lake four metres deep where he was standing.

The forensics team had unearthed the skeleton, which could now be seen in its entirety. There was not a single piece of flesh or scrap of clothing left on it. A woman aged about forty knelt beside it, picking at the pelvis with a yellow pencil.

'It's a male,' she said. 'Average height and probably middle-aged, but I need to check that more carefully. I don't know how long he's been in the water, perhaps forty or fifty years. Maybe longer. But that's just a guess. I can be more precise once I get him down to the morgue to study him properly.'

She stood up and greeted them. Erlendur knew her name was Matthildur and that she had recently been recruited as a pathologist. He longed to ask her what drove her to investigate crimes. Why she didn't just become a doctor like all the others and milk the health service?

'He's been hit over the head?' Erlendur asked.

'Looks like it,' Matthildur said. 'But it's difficult to establish what kind of instrument was used. All the marks around the hole have gone.'

'We're talking about wilful murder?' Sigurdur Óli said.

'All murders are wilful,' Matthildur said. 'Some are just more stupid than others.'

'There's no question that it's murder,' said Elínborg, who had been listening.

She scrambled over the skeleton and pointed down to a large hole that the forensics team had dug. Erlendur went over to her and saw that inside the hole was a bulky black metal box, tied by a rope to the bones. It was still mostly buried in the sand but what appeared to be broken instruments with black dials and black buttons were visible. The box was scratched and dented, it had opened up and there was sand inside.

'What's that?' Sigurdur Óli asked.

'God knows,' Elínborg said, 'but it was used to sink him.'

'Is it some kind of measuring device?' Erlendur said.

'I've never seen anything like it,' Elínborg said. 'Forensics said it was an old radio transmitter. They went off for something to eat.'

'A transmitter?' Erlendur said. 'What kind of transmitter?'

'They didn't know. They've still got to dig it up.'

Erlendur looked at the rope tied around the skeleton and at the black box used to sink the body. He imagined men lugging the corpse out of a car, tying it to the transmitter, rowing out onto the lake with it and throwing the whole lot overboard.

'So he was sunk?' he said.

'He hardly did it himself,' Sigurdur Óli blurted out. 'He wouldn't really go out onto the lake, tie himself to a radio transmitter, pick it up, fall over on his head and still take care to end up in the lake so he'd be sure to disappear. That would be the most ridiculous suicide in history.'

'Do you suppose the transmitter's heavy?' Erlendur asked, trying to contain his irritation with Sigurdur Óli.

'It looks really heavy to me,' Matthildur said.

'Is there any point in combing the bottom of the lake for a murder weapon?' Elínborg asked. 'With a metal detector, if it was a hammer or the like? It might have been thrown in with the body.'

'Forensics will handle that,' Erlendur said, kneeling down by the black box. He rubbed away the sand from it.

'Maybe he was a radio ham,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'Are you coming?' Elínborg asked. 'To my book launch?'

'Don't we have to?' Sigurdur Óli said.

'I'm not going to force you.'

'What's the book called?' Erlendur asked.

'
More Than Just Desserts
,' Elínborg said. 'It's a pun. Justice – get it – and desserts, and it's not just desserts . . .'

'Very droll,' Erlendur said, casting a look of astonishment at Sigurdur Óli, who was trying to smother his laughter.

Eva Lind sat facing him, wearing a white dressing gown with her legs curled up under her on the seat, twiddling her hair around her index finger, circle after circle as if hypnotised. As a rule in-patients were not allowed to receive guests but the staff knew Erlendur well and made no objection when he asked to see her. They sat in silence for a good while. They were in the in-patients' lounge and there were posters on the walls warning against alcohol and drug abuse.

'You still seeing that old bag?' Eva said, fiddling with her hair.

'Stop calling her an old bag,' Erlendur said. 'Valgerdur's two years younger than me.'

'Right, an old bag. You still seeing her?'

'Yes.'

'And . . . does she come round to yours, this Valgerdur woman?'

'She has done, once.'

'And then you meet at hotels.'

'Something like that. How are you doing? Sigurdur Óli sends his regards. He says his shoulder's getting better.'

'I missed. I wanted to hit him over the head.'

'You really can be a bloody idiot sometimes,' Erlendur said.

'Has she left her bloke? She's still married, isn't she, that Valgerdur?'

'It's none of your business.'

'So she's cheating on him? Which means you're shagging a married woman. How do you feel about that?'

'We haven't slept together. Not that it's any of your business. And cut out that filthy language!'

'Like hell you haven't slept together!'

'Aren't you supposed to get medication here? To cure your temper?'

He stood up. She looked up at him.

'I didn't ask you to put me in here,' she said. 'I didn't ask you to interfere in my life. I want you to leave me alone. Completely alone.'

He walked out of the lounge without saying goodbye.

'Say hello to the old bag from me,' Eva Lind called out after him, twiddling her hair as collected as ever. 'Say hello to that fucking old bag,' she added under her breath.

Erlendur parked outside his block of flats and entered the stairwell. When he reached his floor he noticed a lanky young long-haired man loitering by the door, smoking. The upper part of his body was in the shadows and Erlendur could not make out his face. At first he thought it was a criminal who had unfinished business with him. Sometimes they called him when they were drunk and threatened him for encroaching in some way or other upon their miserable lives. The occasional one turned up at his door to argue. He was expecting something like that in the corridor.

The young man stood up straight when he saw Erlendur approach.

'Can I stay with you?' he asked, having trouble deciding what to do with his cigarette butt. Erlendur noticed two dog-ends on the carpet.

'Who are . . .?'

'Sindri,' the man said, stepping from the shadows. 'Your son. Don't you recognise me?'

'Sindri?' Erlendur said in surprise.

'I've moved back into town,' Sindri said. 'I thought I'd look you up.'

Sigurdur Óli was in bed beside Bergthóra when the telephone rang. He looked at the caller ID. Realising who it was, he decided not to answer. On the sixth ring, Bergthóra gave him a nudge.

'Answer it,' she said. 'It'll do him good to talk to you. He thinks you help him.'

'I'm not going to let him think he can call me at home in the middle of the night,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'Come on,' Bergthóra said, reaching over from her side of the bed for the telephone.

'Yes, he's here,' she said. 'Just a minute.'

She handed Sigurdur Óli the telephone.

'It's for you,' she said, smiling.

'Were you asleep?' a voice said at the other end of the line.

'Yes,' Sigurdur Óli lied. 'I've asked you not to call me at home. I don't want you to.'

'Sorry,' the voice said. 'I can't sleep. I'm taking medication and tranquillisers and sleeping tablets but none of them work.'

'You can't just call whenever you please,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'Sorry,' the man said. 'I don't feel too good.'

'Okay,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'It was a year ago,' the man said. 'To the day.'

'Yes,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'I know.'

'A whole year of hell,' the man said.

'Try to stop thinking about it,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'It's time you stopped tormenting yourself like this. It doesn't help.'

'That's easy enough to say,' the man on the telephone said.

'I know,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'But just try.'

'What was I thinking of with those bloody strawberries?'

'We've been through this a thousand times,' Sigurdur Óli said, shaking his head as he glanced at Bergthóra. 'It wasn't your fault. Stop torturing yourself.'

'Of course it was,' the man said. 'Of course it was my fault. It was all my fault.'

Then he rang off.

The woman looked at them in turn, gave a weak smile and invited them in. Elínborg went first and Erlendur closed the door behind them. They had telephoned in advance and the woman had placed crullers and soda cake on the table. The aroma of coffee wafted in from the kitchen. This was a town house in Breidholt suburb. Elínborg had spoken to the woman on the telephone. She had remarried. Her son from the previous marriage was doing a doctorate in medicine in the States. She had had two children with her second husband. Surprised by Elínborg's call, she had taken the afternoon off work to meet her and Erlendur at home.

'Is it him?' the woman asked as she offered them a seat. Her name was Kristín, she was past sixty and had put on weight with age. She had heard on the news about the skeleton that had been found in Lake Kleifarvatn.

'We don't know,' Erlendur said. 'We know it's a male but we're waiting for a more precise age on it.'

A few days had passed since the skeleton had been found. Some bones had been sent for carbon analysis but the pathologist had also used a different method, which she thought could speed up the results.

'Speed up the results how?' Erlendur had asked Elínborg.

'She uses the aluminium smelter in Straumsvík.'

'The smelter?'

'She's studying the history of pollution from it. It involves sulphur dioxide and fluoride and that sort of gunge. Have you heard about it?'

'No.'

'A certain amount of sulphur dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere and falls onto the land and the sea; it's found in lakes near the smelter, such as Kleifarvatn. They've reduced the quantity now with improved pollution control. She said she found a trace in the bones and at a very provisional estimate says the body was put in the lake before 1970.'

'Give or take?'

'Five years either way.'

At this stage the investigation into the skeleton from Kleifarvatn focused on males who had gone missing between 1960 and 1975. There were eight cases in the whole of Iceland. Five had lived in or around Reykjavík.

Kristín's first husband had been one of them. The detectives had read the files. She had reported his disappearance herself. One day he had not come home from work. She'd had his dinner ready for him. Their son was playing on the floor. She bathed the boy, put him to bed and tidied up in the kitchen. Then sat down and waited. She would have watched television, but in those days there were no broadcasts on Thursdays.

This was the autumn of 1969. They lived in a small flat they had recently bought. He was an estate agent and had been given a good deal on it. She had just finished Commercial College when they met. A year later they were married with due ceremony and a year after that their son was born. Her husband worshipped him.

'That's why I couldn't understand it,' Kristín said, her gaze flicking between them.

Erlendur had a feeling that she was still waiting for the husband who had so suddenly and inexplicably vanished from her life. He visualised her waiting alone in the autumn gloom. Calling people who knew him and their friends, telephoning the family, who would quietly gather in the flat over the following days to give her strength and support her in her grief.

'We were happy,' she said. 'Our little boy Benni was the apple of our eye, I'd got a job with the Merchants' Association and as far as I knew my husband was doing well at work. It was a big estate agency and he was a great salesman. He wasn't so good at school, dropped out after two years, but he worked hard and I thought he was happy with life. He never suggested otherwise to me.'

She poured coffee into their cups.

'I didn't notice anything unusual on the last day,' Kristín went on, passing them the dish of crullers. 'He said goodbye to me in the morning, phoned at lunchtime just to say hello and again to say he would be a little late. That was the last I heard from him.'

'But wasn't he having trouble at work, even if he didn't tell you?' Elínborg asked. 'We read the reports and . . .'

'Redundancies were on the way. He'd spoken about it a few days earlier but didn't know who. Then he was called in that day and told that they no longer needed him. The owner told me that later. He said my husband had showed no response to being made redundant, didn't protest or ask for an explanation, just went back out and sat down at his desk. Didn't react.'

'He didn't phone you to tell you?' Elínborg asked.

'No,' the woman said, and Erlendur could sense the sorrow still enveloping her. 'Like I told you, he phoned but didn't say a word about losing his job.'

'Why was he made redundant?' Erlendur asked.

'I never had a satisfactory answer to that. I think the owner wanted to show me compassion or consideration when we spoke. He said they needed to cut back because sales were down, but later I heard that Ragnar had apparently lost interest in the job. Lost interest in what he was doing. After a school reunion he had talked about enrolling again and finishing. He was invited to the reunion even though he had quit school and all his old friends had become doctors and lawyers and engineers. That was the way he talked. As if it brought him down, dropping out of school.'

'Did you link this to his disappearance in any way?' Erlendur asked.

'No, not particularly,' Kristín said. 'I can just as easily put it down to a little tiff we had the day before. Or that our son was difficult at night. Or that he couldn't afford a new car. Really I don't know what to think.'

'Was he depressive?' Elínborg said, noticing Kristín slip into the present tense, as if it had all just happened.

'No more than most Icelanders. He went missing in the autumn, if that means anything.'

'At the time you ruled out the possibility that there was anything criminal about his disappearance,' Erlendur said.

'Yes,' she said. 'I couldn't imagine that. He wasn't involved in anything of that sort. If he met someone who murdered him, it would have been pure bad luck. The thought that anything like that happened never crossed my mind, nor yours at the police. You never treated his disappearance as a criminal matter either. He stayed behind at work until everyone had left and that was the last time he was seen.'

'Wasn't his disappearance ever investigated as a criminal matter?' Elínborg said.

'No,' Kristín said.

'Tell me something else: was your husband a radio ham?' Erlendur asked.

'A radio ham? What's that?'

'To tell the truth I'm not quite sure myself,' Erlendur said, looking to Elínborg for help. She sat and said nothing. 'They're in radio contact with people all around the world,' Erlendur continued. 'You need, or used to need, a quite powerful transmitter to broadcast your signal. Did he have any equipment like that?'

'No,' the woman said. 'A radio ham?'

'Was he involved in telecommunications?' Elínborg asked. 'Did he own a radio transmitter or . . . ?'

Kristín looked at her.

'What did you find in that lake?' she asked with a look of astonishment. 'He never owned a radio transmitter. What kind of transmitter, anyway?'

'Did he ever go fishing in Kleifarvatn?' Elínborg continued without answering her. 'Or know anything about it?'

'No, never. He wasn't interested in angling. My brother's a keen salmon fisherman and tried to get him to go along, but he never would. He was like me in that. We never wanted to kill anything for sport or fun. We never went to Kleifarvatn.'

Erlendur noticed a beautifully framed photograph on a shelf in the living room. It showed Kristín with a young boy, whom he took to be her fatherless son, and he started thinking about his own son, Sindri. He had not realised at once why he had dropped by. Sindri had always avoided his father, unlike Eva Lind who wanted to make him feel guilty for ignoring her and her brother in their childhood. Erlendur had divorced their mother after a short marriage and as the years wore on he increasingly regretted having had any contact with his children.

They shook hands embarrassedly on the landing like two strangers; he let Sindri in and made coffee. Sindri said he was looking for a flat or a room. Erlendur said he didn't know of any vacant places but promised to tell him if he heard of anything.

'Maybe I could stay here for the time being,' Sindri said, looking at the bookcase in the living room.

'Here?' Erlendur said in surprise, appearing in the kitchen doorway. The purpose behind Sindri's visit dawned on him.

'Eva said you had a spare room that's just full of old junk.'

Erlendur looked at his son. There was indeed a spare room in his flat. The old junk Eva had mentioned was his parents' effects, which he kept because he could not bring himself to throw it out. Items from his childhood home. A chest full of letters written by his parents and forebears, a carved shelf, piles of magazines, books, fishing rods and a heavy old shotgun that his grand-father had owned, broken.

'What about your mother?' Erlendur said. 'Can't you stay with her?'

'Of course,' Sindri said. 'I'll just do that, then.'

They fell silent.

'No, there's no space in that room,' Erlendur said eventually. 'So . . . I don't know . . .'

'Eva's stayed here,' Sindri said.

His words were followed by a deep silence.

'She said you've changed,' Sindri said in the end.

'What about you?' Erlendur asked. 'Have you changed?'

'I haven't touched a drop for months,' Sindri said. 'If that's what you mean.'

Erlendur snapped out of his thoughts and sipped his coffee. He looked away from the photograph on the shelf and over at Kristín. He wanted a cigarette.

'So the boy never knew his father,' he said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Elínborg glaring at him, but pretended not to notice. He was well aware that he was prying into the private life of a woman whose husband's mysterious disappearance more than thirty years before had never been satisfactorily resolved. Erlendur's question was irrelevant to the police investigation.

'His stepfather has treated him well and he has a very good relationship with his brothers,' she said. 'I can't see what that has to do with my husband's disappearance.'

'No, sorry,' Erlendur said.

'I don't think there's anything else, then,' Elínborg said.

'Do you think it's him?' Kristín asked, standing up.

'I don't think it's very likely,' Elínborg said. 'But we need to look into it more closely.'

They stood still for an instant as if something remained to be said. As if something was in the air that needed to be put into words before their meeting would be over.

'A year after he went missing,' Kristín said, 'a body was washed ashore on Snaefellsnes. They thought it was him but it turned out not to be.'

She clasped her hands.

'Sometimes, even today, I think he might be alive. That he didn't die at all. Sometimes I think he left us and moved to the countryside – or abroad – without telling us, and started a new family. I've even caught glimpses of him here in Reykjavík. About five years ago I thought I saw him. I followed this man around like an imbecile. It was in the shopping centre. Spied on him until I saw that of course it wasn't him.'

She looked at Erlendur.

'He went away, but all the same . . . he'll never go away,' she said with a sad smile playing across her lips.

'I know,' Erlendur said. 'I know what you mean.'

When they got into the car Elínborg scolded Erlendur for his callous question about Kristín's son. Erlendur told her not to be so sensitive.

His mobile rang. It was Valgerdur. He'd been expecting her to get in touch. They had met the previous Christmas when Erlendur had been investigating a murder at a hotel in Reykjavík. She was a biotechnician and they had been in a very on-off relationship since then. Her husband had admitted to having an affair but when it came to the crunch he did not want to end their marriage; instead he had humbly asked her to forgive him and promised to mend his ways. She maintained that she was going to leave him, but it had not happened yet.

'How's your daughter doing?' she asked, and Erlendur told her briefly about his visit to Eva Lind.

'Don't you think it's helping her, though?' Valgerdur asked. 'That therapy?'

'I hope so, but I really don't know what will help her,' Erlendur said. 'She's back in exactly the same frame of mind as just before her miscarriage.'

'Shouldn't we try to meet up tomorrow?' Valgerdur asked him.

'Yes, let's meet up then,' Erlendur agreed, and they said goodbye.

'Was that her?' Elínborg asked, aware that Erlendur was in some kind of relationship with a woman.

'If you mean Valgerdur, yes, it was her,' Erlendur said.

'Is she worried about Eva Lind?'

'What did forensics say about that transmitter?' Erlendur asked, to change the subject.

'They don't know much,' Elínborg said. 'But they do think it's Russian. The name and serial number were filed off but they can make out the outline of the odd letter and think it's Cyrillic.'

'Russian?'

'Yes, Russian.'

There were a couple of houses at the southern end of Kleifarvatn and Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli gathered information about their owners. They telephoned them and asked in general terms about missing persons who could be linked to the lake. It was fruitless.

Sigurdur Óli mentioned that Elínborg was busy preparing for the publication of her book of recipes.

'I think it'll make her famous,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'Does she want to be?' Erlendur asked.

'Doesn't everyone?' Sigurdur Óli said.

'Cobblers,' Erlendur said.