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Hypothermia

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‘Yes, of course. That’s what we’ve thought up to now. I… It’s a completely new idea to link them. I’m rather taken with it. There’s been no progress on these cases for decades, then suddenly it emerges that she was fascinated by lakes and that he mentioned buying a book about lakes, a subject he had never shown the slightest interest in before.’

Erlendur took a sip of coffee.

‘And on top of that his father is dying and will probably never receive any sort of answer to his questions. Any more than the boy’s mother – who is already dead. I’m thinking of that, too. Of answers. They should have some kind of answer. People don’t just walk out of their homes and disappear. They always leave some trace. Except in these two cases. That’s what they have in common. There’s no trace. We have nothing to go on. In either case.’

‘Granny never got any answers,’ Eva Lind said, lying back on the blanket and staring up at the sky.

‘No, she never got any answers,’ Erlendur agreed.

‘Yet you never give up,’ Eva said. ‘You keep on looking. You go out east.’

‘Yes, I do. I go out east. I walk over to Harđskafi and up on to Eskifjördur Moor. I camp there sometimes.’

‘But you never find anything.’

‘No. Nothing but memories.’

‘Aren’t they enough?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Hardskafi? What’s that?’

‘It’s a mountain. Your grandmother thought Bergur had died up there. I don’t know why she thought that. It was some intuition. He would have had to have been carried quite a way off course if so, but the wind was blowing in that direction and obviously we both sought shelter from the wind. She often went over there, right up until we moved away from the countryside.’

‘Have you climbed the mountain?’

‘Yes – it’s easy enough to climb, in spite of its forbidding name.’

‘Have you stopped going there, then?’

‘I hardly ever climb up there any more, I content myself with looking.’

Eva Lind reflected on his words.

‘Of course, you’re bloody past it now.’

Erlendur smiled.

‘Have you given up, then?’ Eva Lind asked.

‘The last thing your grandmother asked was whether I had found my brother. That was the last thing that passed through her mind before she died. I’ve sometimes wondered if she found him… if she found him in the next life. Not that I myself believe in the afterlife at all – I don’t believe in God or hell – but your grandmother believed in all that. It was part of her upbringing. She was convinced that the life of toil here on Earth was neither the beginning nor the end. In that sense she was reconciled to dying and she talked of Bergur’s being in good hands. With his people.’

‘Old people talk like that,’ Eva Lind said.

‘She wasn’t old. She died in her prime.’

‘Don’t they say that those whom the gods love die young?’

Erlendur looked at his daughter.

‘I don’t think the gods have ever loved me,’ she continued. ‘Or at least I can’t imagine it. I don’t know why they should, either.’

‘I’m not sure that people should place their fates in the hands of the gods, whoever they are,’ Erlendur said. ‘You make your own fate.’

‘You can talk. Who made your fate? Didn’t your father take you into the mountains in crazy weather? What was he doing taking his children up there? Have you never asked yourself that? Don’t you ever get angry when you think about it?’

‘He didn’t know any better. He didn’t arrange for us to be caught in the storm.’

‘But he could have acted differently. If he’d thought about his kids.’

‘He always took great care of us boys.’

Neither of them spoke. Erlendur watched a car head east over Uxahryggir and turn off towards Thingvellir.

‘I always hated myself,’ Eva Lind said at last. ‘And I was angry. Sometimes so angry I could have burst. Angry with Mum and with you and with school and with the scum who bullied me. I wanted to be free of myself. I didn’t want to be me. I loathed myself. I abused myself and let other people abuse me too.’

‘Eva…’

Eva Lind stared up at the cloudless sky.

‘No, that’s how it was,’ she said. ‘Anger and self-loathing. Not a good combination. I’ve thought about it a lot since I discovered that what I did was only the natural consequence of something that had begun before I was born. Something I had absolutely no control over. Most of all I was angry with you and Mum. Why did you ever have me? What were you thinking of? What did I bring into the world? What was my inheritance? Nothing but the mistakes of people who never knew each other and never wanted to get to know each other.’

Erlendur grimaced.

‘That wasn’t your only inheritance, Eva,’ he said.

‘No, maybe not.’

They were silent.

‘Isn’t this turning out to be a great Sunday drive?’ Eva Lind said at last, with a glance at her father.

Another car drove at a leisurely pace along the road over Biskupsbrekka and turned off towards Lundarreykjadalur. It contained a couple with two children; a little dark-haired girl waved at them from the child seat in the back. Neither of them waved back and the little girl watched them, crestfallen, until she vanished from sight.

‘Do you think you can ever forgive me?’ Erlendur asked, looking at his daughter.

She didn’t answer him but stared up at the sky with her arms behind her head and her legs crossed.

‘I know people are responsible for their own fates,’ she said at last. ‘Someone stronger and cleverer than me would have made a different fate for herself. Wouldn’t have given a shit about you two – which is the only answer, I think, instead of ending up hating oneself.’

‘I never intended you to hate yourself. I didn’t know.’

‘Your dad probably didn’t mean to lose his son.’

‘No. He didn’t.’

By the time they left Uxahryggir and drove down Lundarreykjadalur to Borgarfjördur it was growing dark. They didn’t stop to picnic by any more lakes and sat largely without talking on their drive home through the Hvalfjördur tunnel and around the Kjalarnes peninsula. Erlendur drove his daughter to her door. It was dark by the time they said their goodbyes.

It had been a good day by the lakes and he told her so. She nodded and said they should do it more often.

‘If they disappeared in one of the lakes around here you’ve got as much chance of finding them as you have of winning the lottery.’

‘I expect you’re right,’ Erlendur said.

Neither of them spoke for a while. Erlendur ran his hand over the steering wheel of the Ford.

‘We’re so alike, Eva,’ he said, listening to the quiet hum of the engine. ‘You and me. We’re chips off the same block.’

‘You reckon?’ Eva Lind said, getting out of the car.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ Erlendur said.

With that he drove off down the street and towards home, reflecting on all the unresolved issues between his daughter and himself. He fell asleep with the thought that she had not answered his question about whether she would forgive him. It had remained unspoken between them all day as they drove among the lakes, in search of lost souls.

28

The following afternoon Erlendur drove once more to the house in Kópavogur and parked at a discreet distance. Since there were no lights in the windows and he could see no sign of Karólína’s car, he assumed that she hadn’t come home from work yet. He lit a cigarette and settled in patiently to wait. He wasn’t sure how he was going to question the woman. He assumed that Karólína and Baldvin would have talked after his last visit to Grafarvogur; they must be involved in some way, though he wasn’t sure exactly how. Perhaps they had picked up where they’d left off when they were both at drama school and she’d still had dreams of stardom. After a lengthy wait, the little Japanese car pulled up in front of the house and Karólína stepped out. She hurried into the house without looking to right or left, carrying an overflowing bag of groceries. Erlendur allowed half an hour to pass before going up to the house and knocking at the door.

When Karólína came to open it she had changed out of her working clothes into a comfortable outfit of fleece, grey tracksuit bottoms and slippers.

‘Are you Karólína?’ Erlendur asked.

‘Yes,’ she said brusquely, as if he were a salesman who was inconveniencing her.

Erlendur introduced himself as a police officer investigating a recent death at Lake Thingvallavatn.

‘A death?’

‘A woman who killed herself at Thingvellir,’ Erlendur said. ‘Might I come in for a moment?’

‘What’s it got to do with me?’ Karólína asked.

She was as tall as Erlendur, with short dark hair above a high domed forehead and finely arched brows over dark blue eyes. As far as he could tell through the fleece and baggy tracksuit bottoms, she was slender, with a long neck and good figure. Her expression was determined, however, and there was a stubbornness or hardness about her face that was not encouraging. He thought he could recognise what Baldvin saw in her but he did not have time to dwell on the thought. Karólína’s question hung in the air.

‘You’ll have known her husband,’ Erlendur said. ‘The woman’s name was María. She was married to a man called Baldvin. I gather that you two went out together when you were both at drama school.’

‘What of it?’

‘I just wanted to have a little chat with you about it.’

Karólína shot a glance down the road at her neighbours’ house. Then, looking back at Erlendur, she said that they might be more comfortable indoors. Erlendur stepped into the hall and she closed the door behind them. The house consisted of a single storey, with a sitting room, dining room with adjoining kitchen, a lavatory and two rooms on the left as one entered from the hall. It was furnished with handsome furniture, had pictures on the walls and smelled of a combination of Icelandic cooking and the sweet scent of cosmetics and perfumed bath salts, which was most concentrated around the lavatory and the other two rooms. One seemed to be a junk room, the other was Karólína’s bedroom. Through the open door Erlendur glimpsed a large bed against one wall, a dressing table with a good-sized mirror, a sizeable wardrobe and a chest of drawers.