The Draining Lake (7 page)

'You think he killed himself.'

'Yes,' said Níels. 'But . . .'

Níels hesitated.

'What?' Erlendur said.

'He was playing some kind of a game, that bloke,' Níels said.

'How so?'

'She said his name was Leopold but we couldn't find anyone by that name of the age she said he was; there was no one on our files or in the national register. No birth certificate. No driving licence. There was no Leopold who could have been that man.'

'What do you mean?'

'Either all the records about him had gone missing or . . .'

'Or he was deceiving her?'

'He couldn't have been called Leopold, at least,' Níels said.

'What did she say to that? What did his girlfriend say when you asked her about it?'

'We had the feeling he'd been pulling a fast one on her,' Níels said eventually. 'We felt sorry for her. She didn't even have a photograph of him. What does that tell you? She didn't know a thing about that man.'

'So?'

'We didn't tell her.'

'You didn't tell her what?'

'That we had no files about this Leopold of hers,' Níels said. 'It looked cut and dried to us. He lied to her, then walked out on her.'

Erlendur sat in silence while he tried to work out the implications of what Níels had told him.

'Out of consideration for her,' Níels said.

'And she still doesn't know?'

'I don't think so.'

'Why did you keep it a secret?'

'Probably for the sake of kindness.'

'She's still sitting waiting for him,' Erlendur said. 'They were going to get married.'

'That was what he convinced her of before he left.'

'What if he was murdered?'

'We considered it very unlikely. It's a rare scenario, but admittedly not unknown: men lie their way into women's lives, get . . . how should I put it, comfortable, then disappear. I think she knew deep down. We didn't need to tell her.'

'What about the car?'

'It was in her name. The loan for it was in her name. She owned the car.'

'You should have told her.'

'Perhaps. But would she have been any better off? She would have learned that the man she loved was a confidence trickster. He told her nothing about his family. She knew nothing about him. He had no friends. Forever on sales trips all over the countryside. What does that tell you?'

'She knew that she loved him,' Erlendur said.

'And that's how he paid her back.'

'What did the farmer say, the one he was going to meet?'

'That's all in the files,' Níels said, with a nod and a smile at Elínborg, who was deep in conversation with her publisher. Elínborg had once mentioned that his name was Anton.

'Come on, not everything goes into the files.'

'He never met the farmer,' Níels said, and Erlendur could see how he was trying to recall the details of the case. They all remembered the big cases, the murders or disappearances, every single major arrest, every single assault and rape.

'Couldn't you tell from the Falcon whether or not he met the farmer?'

'We didn't find anything in the car to indicate that he'd been to the farm.'

'Did you take samples from the floor by the front seats? Under the pedals?'

'It's in the files.'

'I didn't see it. You could have established whether he visited the farmer. He would have picked stuff up on his shoes.'

'It wasn't a complicated case, Erlendur. Nobody wanted to turn it into one. The man made himself vanish. Maybe he bumped himself off. We don't always find the bodies. You know that. Even if we had found something under the pedals, it could have been from anywhere. He travelled around the country a lot. Selling agricultural machinery.'

'What did they say at his work?'

Níels thought about the question.

'It was such a long time ago, Erlendur.'

'Try to remember.'

'He wasn't on the payroll, I remember that much, which was rare in those days. He was on commission and worked on a freelance basis.'

'Which means he would have had to pay his taxes himself.'

'As I said, there was no mention of him in the records under the name Leopold. Not a thing.'

'So you reckon he kept that woman when he was in Reykjavík but, what, lived somewhere else?'

'Or even had a family,' Níels said. 'There are blokes like that.'

Erlendur sipped his wine and looked at the perfect tie knot under Níels's shirt collar. He was not a good detective. To him, no case was ever complicated.

'You should have told her the truth.'

'That may well be, but she had happy memories of him. We concluded that it wasn't a criminal matter. The disappearance was never investigated as a murder because no clues were found to warrant it.'

They stopped talking. The guests' murmuring had become a solid wall of noise.

'You're still into these missing persons,' Níels said. 'Why this interest? What are you looking for?'

'I don't know,' Erlendur said.

'It was a routine disappearance,' Níels said. 'Something else was needed to turn it into a murder investigation. No clues ever emerged to give grounds for that.'

'No, probably not.'

'Don't you ever get tired of all this?' Níels asked.

'Sometimes.'

'And your daughter, she's always involved in the same old shit,' said Níels, with his four educated children who had all started beautiful families and lived perfect, impeccable lives, just like him.

Erlendur knew that the whole force was aware of Eva Lind's arrest and how she had attacked Sigurdur Óli. She sometimes ended up in police custody and received no special treatment for being his daughter. Níels had clearly heard about Eva. Erlendur looked at him, his tasteful clothing and his manicured nails, and wondered whether a happy life made people even more boring than they were to start with.

'Yes,' Erlendur said. 'She's as screwed up as ever.'

When Erlendur got home that evening there was no Sindri to welcome him. He had still not turned up when Erlendur went to bed just before midnight. There was no message, nor a telephone number where he could be reached. Erlendur missed his company. He dialled directory enquiries, but Sindri's mobile number was not listed.

He was falling asleep when the telephone rang. It was Eva Lind.

'You know they dope you up in here,' she said in a slurred voice.

'I was asleep,' Erlendur lied.

'They give you tablets to bring you down,' Eva said. 'I've never been so stoned in my life. What are you doing?'

'Trying to sleep,' Erlendur said. 'Were you causing trouble?'

'Sindri stopped by today,' Eva said without answering him. 'He said you'd had a talk.'

'Do you know where he is?'

'Isn't he with you?'

'I think he's left,' Erlendur said. 'Maybe he's at your mother's. Are you allowed to make phone calls from that place whenever you like?'

'Nice to hear from you too,' Eva snarled. 'And I'm not causing any fucking trouble.' She slammed the telephone down on him.

Erlendur lay staring up into the darkness. He thought about his two children, Eva Lind and Sindri Snaer, and their mother, who hated him. He thought about his brother, for whom he had been searching in vain all these years. His bones were lying somewhere. Perhaps deep in a fissure, or higher up in the mountains than he could ever imagine. Even though he had gone far up the mountainsides, trying to work out how high a boy of eight could stray in bad conditions and a blinding blizzard.

'Don't you ever get tired of all this?'

Tired of this endless search.

Hermann Albertsson opened the door to him just before noon the following day. He was a thin man aged around sixty, nimble, wearing scruffy jeans and a red check cotton shirt, and with a broad smile that never seemed to leave his face. From the kitchen came the smell of boiled haddock. He lived alone and always had done, he told Erlendur without being asked. He smelled of brake fluid.

'Do have some haddock,' he said when Erlendur followed him into the kitchen.

Erlendur declined firmly but Hermann ignored him and set a place at the table, and before he knew it he was sitting down with a complete stranger, eating softboiled haddock and buttered potatoes. They both ate the skin of the haddock and the skin of the potatoes, and for an instant Erlendur's thoughts turned to Elínborg and her cookery book. When she'd been working on it she had used him as a guinea pig for fresh monkfish with lime sauce, yellow from the quarter-kilo of butter she had put in it. It took Elínborg all day and night to boil down the fish stock until only four tablespoons remained on the bottom, essence of monkfish; she had stayed up all night to skim off the froth from the water. The sauce is everything, was Elínborg's motto. Erlendur smiled to himself. Hermann's haddock was delicious.

'I did that Falcon up,' Hermann said, putting a large piece of potato in his mouth. He was a car mechanic and for a hobby he restored old cars and then tried to sell them. It was becoming increasingly difficult, he told Erlendur. No one was interested in old cars any more, only new Range Rovers that never faced tougher conditions than a traffic jam on the way to the city centre.

'Do you still own it?' Erlendur asked.

'I sold it in 1987,' Hermann said. 'I've got a 1979 Chrysler now, quite a limo really. I've been under its bonnet for, what, six years.'

'Will you get anything for it?'

'Nothing,' said Hermann, offering him some coffee. 'And I don't want to sell it either.'

'You didn't register the Falcon when you owned it.'

'No,' Hermann said. 'It never had plates when it was here. I fiddled about with it for a few years and that was fun. I drove it around the neighbourhood and if I wanted to take it to Thingvellir or somewhere I borrowed the plates from my own car. I didn't think it was worth paying the insurance.'

'We couldn't find it registered anywhere,' Erlendur said, 'so the new owner hasn't bought licence plates for it either.'

Hermann filled two cups.

'That needn't be the case,' Hermann said. 'Maybe he gave up and got rid of it.'

'Tell me something else. The hubcaps on the Falcon, were they special somehow, in demand?'

Erlendur had asked Elínborg to check the Internet for him and on ford.com they had found photographs of old Ford Falcons. One was black and when Elínborg printed out the image for him, the hubcaps stood out very clearly.

'They were quite fancy,' Hermann said thoughtfully. 'Those hubcaps on American cars.'

'One hubcap was missing,' Erlendur said. 'At the time.'

'Really?'

'Did you buy a new hubcap when you got it?'

'No, one of the previous owners had bought a new set a long time before. The originals weren't on when I bought it.'

'Was it a remarkable car, the Falcon?'

'The remarkable thing about it was that it wasn't big,' Hermann said. 'It wasn't a monster like most American cars. Like my Chrysler. The Falcon was small and compact and good to drive. Not a luxury car at all. Far from it.'

The current owner turned out to be a widow a few years older than Erlendur. She lived in Kópavogur. Her husband, a furniture maker with a fad for cars, had died of a heart attack a few years before.

'It was in good condition,' she said, opening the garage for Erlendur, who was unsure whether she was talking about the car or her husband's heart. The car was covered with a thick canvas sheet which Erlendur asked if he could remove. The woman nodded.

'My husband took a great deal of care over that car,' she said in a weak voice. 'He spent all his time out here. Bought really expensive parts for it. Travelled all over the place to find them.'

'Did he ever drive it?' Erlendur asked as he struggled to untie a knot.

'Only around the block,' the woman said. 'It looks nice but my boys aren't interested in it and they haven't managed to sell it. There aren't many veteran-car enthusiasts these days. My husband was going to put plates on it when he died. He died in his workshop. He used to work alone and when he didn't come home for dinner and wouldn't answer the phone I sent my son round; he found him lying on the floor.'

'That must have been difficult,' Erlendur said.

'There's heart trouble in his family,' the woman said. 'His mother went that way and so did his cousin.'

She watched Erlendur fiddling with the canvas. She did not give the impression of missing her husband much. Perhaps she had overcome her grief and was trying to make a new start.

'What is it with this car, anyway?' she asked.

She had asked the same question when Erlendur telephoned and he could still not find a way to tell her why he was interested in the car without saying what the case involved. He wanted to avoid going into details. Not say too much for the time being. He hardly knew why he was chasing after the car, or whether it would prove useful.

'It was once connected with a police matter,' Erlendur said reluctantly. 'I just wanted to know if it was still around, in one piece.'

'Was it a famous case?' she asked.

'No, not at all. Not famous in the least,' Erlendur said.

'Do you want to buy it or . . . ?' the woman asked.

'No,' Erlendur said. 'I don't want to buy it. Old cars don't interest me as such.'

'As I say, it's in good condition. Valdi, my husband, said the main trouble was the underseal. It had gone rusty and he had to fix it. Otherwise it was all right. Valdi stripped the engine down, scrubbed every bit of it and bought new parts if he needed them.'

She paused.

'He didn't mind spending money on the car,' she said eventually. 'Never bought me anything. But men are like that.'

Erlendur tugged at the sheet, which slipped off the car and onto the floor. For a moment he stood looking along the beautiful sleek lines of the Ford Falcon that had been owned by the man who had disappeared outside the coach station. He knelt down beside one of the front wheels. Assuming that the hubcap was missing when the car was discovered, he wondered where it could possibly have ended up.

His mobile rang in his pocket. It was forensics with information about the Russian equipment in Kleifarvatn. Skipping all the formalities, the head of forensics told him that the device did not appear to have been functional when it was put in the lake.

'Oh?' Erlendur said.

'Yes,' the head of forensics said. 'It was certainly useless before it went into the water. The lake bed is porous sand and the contents of the container are too damaged to be explained by it having lain in water. It wasn't working when it got there.'

'What does that tell us?' Erlendur asked.

'Don't have the foggiest,' the head of forensics said.