Hypothermia

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The other case concerned a young girl from the northern town of Akureyri. She was studying at the university and rented a flat in Reykjavík but it was impossible to tell exactly when she had disappeared. When her landlord did not receive his rent in advance for the month, he went round to chase up the money but found no one home. She did not have any compulsory classes at the university because she was writing up her biology dissertation at the time. Moreover, she was an only child and her parents were abroad on a two-month trip around Asia and were only in sporadic contact with her. By the time her parents came home and went to visit their daughter in town, she had vanished. The landlord let them into the flat. Everything was as it should have been, as if she had just popped out for a moment. Her textbooks lay open on the tables where she had been working on the dissertation. There were a couple of glasses in the sink and she had not made the bed. She had been in telephone contact with her friends in Akureyri some time before and two of her fellow students had heard from her and assumed that she had gone north to Akureyri some weeks earlier. To lend support to this theory, the battered old Austin Mini that she drove was also missing.

Erlendur went into the kitchen and turned on the coffee-maker. He put some bread in the toaster, buttered it when it was done, then brought out the cheese and marmalade. He pondered what he had heard on the tape that Karen had lent him and wondered what to do about it. He now had a better appreciation of María’s state of mind before she’d killed herself.

His thoughts moved on to Sindri and Eva and his ex-wife Halldóra. He couldn’t envisage a meeting between Halldóra and himself, whatever importance Eva Lind might place on bringing them together. Erlendur very rarely thought of Halldóra because when he did so it raked up memories of all the fights and quarrels they had had before he’d walked out on her and their two children. The divorce had been brewing for a long time. He had wanted to do everything in his power to mitigate its effects but every time he had hinted to her that he wished to end the relationship and move out, she’d cut him off, saying it was absurd, that they could work through their problems, and anyway she wasn’t aware of any problems and had no idea what he was talking about.

Erlendur flicked through the papers but couldn’t shake off the memory of María’s voice and her words to the medium. The seance could not have been held long ago; on the tape she had talked of it being just under two years since her mother died, and neither, clearly, had it been her first meeting with the medium. He contemplated the powerful bond between María and her mother. It must have been exceptional. They had probably been brought even closer by the father’s death at Lake Thingvallavatn and had supported each other through thick and thin. Could it be anything other than coincidence that María had found the book on the floor, the same book that they had agreed would be a sign of the afterlife? Or had someone else taken a hand in events? Had María told someone, her husband or someone else, about the pact with her mother in the interval between Leonóra’s death and the book’s falling from the shelf, and subsequently forgotten the fact? Had she herself unwittingly removed the book from the shelf and failed to put it back properly? He couldn’t say. The recording ended with María explaining that she had come to the medium because of the sign that she thought she had been sent by her mother; she had wanted to receive confirmation, to make contact with her mother if possible and to learn to be reconciled to her death. The suicide indicated that María had not been reconciled; that, on the contrary, the whole business had finally tipped her over the edge.

Erlendur tried to find a reason for the strangely powerful urge that had gripped him when he’d listened to the tape. An urge to know more, to become better acquainted with the woman who had taken her life, with her friends and family, and to find out why her life had followed the path that was to end in a noose at the holiday cottage. He wanted to get to the bottom of the matter, wanted to track down the medium and interrogate him, dig up the story of the accident on Lake Thingvallavatn, find out who María was. He thought about the voice that had warned María to be careful, that she didn’t know what she was doing. Where had that deep, gruff voice come from?

Erlendur sat at the kitchen table, his coffee forgotten, unsure why he was wasting time on this, and his thoughts strayed back to his mother in the basement flat where she had moved after his father’s death. She had worked in a fish factory, as tirelessly industrious as ever, and Erlendur used to visit her regularly, sometimes bringing along his dirty laundry. She would feed him and then they used to sit and listen to the radio or else he would read to her; his mother with her eternal knitting – perhaps a scarf that she would later give him. They had little need to talk; the companionable silence was enough for them.

She had still only been middle-aged when his father had died but there was never anyone else in her life. She said she enjoyed being alone. She kept in touch with friends and relatives out east, and former neighbours who had also moved to Reykjavík. Iceland was changing; people were drifting away from the countryside. She assured Erlendur that she never felt lonely in the city but he bought her a television anyway. She was always self-reliant and rarely asked him to do anything for her.

They hardly ever talked of Bergur who had been snatched from them with such shocking suddenness. At times she would make some general remark about the boy or both brothers, but she never talked of the loss of her son. To her, it was a private matter and Erlendur respected her reticence.

‘Your father would have liked to know before he died,’ she once remarked when he was with her. They had been sitting in silence most of the evening. Erlendur always visited his mother on the anniversary of the day it had happened, the day when he and his younger brother had been caught in the blizzard with his father.

‘Yes,’ Erlendur replied. He knew what his mother meant.

‘Do you think we’ll ever know?’ she asked, looking up from the book that he had brought her. He had finally summoned up the courage to show it to her late that evening, unsure if he was doing the right thing.

‘I don’t know,’ Erlendur said. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was a long time ago.’

She carried on reading.

‘What a pack of nonsense this is,’ she commented eventually, looking up from the book again.

‘I know,’ Erlendur said.

‘What business is it of other people’s, this stuff about me and your father? What has it got to do with anyone else?’

He didn’t answer.

‘I don’t want anyone to read this,’ his mother said.

‘Well, we can’t stop them,’ he pointed out.

‘And the stuff he says about you.’

‘It doesn’t bother me.’

‘Has this just been published?’

‘Yes, it’s the third volume in the series. The final volume. It came out just before Christmas. Do you know the man who wrote it? This Dagbjartur?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He must have been talking to the local farmers.’

‘Yes, that’s what I thought. It’s very detailed and most of what he says is correct.’

‘He has no right to say that about your father and me.’

‘Of course not.’

‘It’s not fair on him.’

‘No, I know.’

‘Where did the man get it from?’

‘I don’t know.’

His mother closed the book.

‘It’s a load of nonsense; I don’t want anyone to read it,’ she repeated.

‘No,’ he said.

‘No one,’ she said, handing him the book. He saw that she was fighting back tears. ‘As if it was his fault,’ she said. ‘As if it was anybody’s fault. It’s nonsense!’

Erlendur took the book. Perhaps he should not have shown it to her. Or should at least have prepared her better for ‘Tragedy on Eskifjördur Moor’, as the chapter was called. He didn’t intend to show anyone else the account. His mother was right; there was no need to draw attention to what was written there.

The winter that the volume containing the story of the brothers’ ordeal was published, Erlendur’s mother came down with flu. He wasn’t aware of it, being wholly taken up with work, and she was unwilling to put him to any inconvenience. She went back to work before she was fully recovered, suffered a relapse and took to her bed again, seriously ill this time. When she finally got in touch with Erlendur she was more dead than alive. The infection had seriously affected her heart. He forced her to go to hospital but there was little they could do. She was only in her early sixties when she died.

Erlendur took a sip of his coffee and found it was cold. He stood up, went into the living room and took down the third volume from the bookcase. It was the same copy that his mother had been reading all those years ago. She had been aggrieved with the author of the account, feeling that he had been too hard on the family. Erlendur agreed; the book contained assertions about matters that were nobody else’s business – however true they might have been. His children, Sindri and Eva, knew of the existence of the account but he had been reluctant to show it to them. Perhaps for his father’s sake. Perhaps because of his mother’s reaction.

He replaced the book on the shelf and the puzzle of the woman from Grafarvogur returned to haunt him. What had led her to that noose? What had happened at Lake Thingvallavatn the day her father died? He wanted to know more. It would have to be his own private investigation and he would have to proceed cautiously, so as not to arouse suspicion; talk to people, make deductions, just as he would in any other case. He would need to lie about the reason for his prying; invent some fictional assignment. But then, it wouldn’t be the first time he had done something of which he was not exactly proud.