“Bergur,” Erlendur said. “My brother was called Bergur. What did Sindri hear about us in the east?”
“Shouldn’t he have been found?”
“They did everything they could to find him,” Erlendur said. “Rescue teams and the local farmers, everyone who was able searched for us. I was found. We became separated in the blizzard. He was never found.”
“Yes, but what I mean is, shouldn’t he have been found later on?” Eva said, with the obstinate tone in her voice that Erlendur knew from his own mother. “Body parts, bones?”
Erlendur was perfectly aware what Eva was talking about although he pretended not to be. Sindri had probably heard this story in the east, where people were still talking about the boys who were lost in a blizzard with their father so many years ago. Erlendur had heard many theories before he moved to Reykjavik with his parents. Now his daughter, who knew nothing of the matter apart from the little that Erlendur had told her, was sitting in front of him eager to discuss the theories about his brother’s disappearance. All of a sudden she had turned up at his flat and wanted to discuss his brother, the memories that had tormented him since the age often.
“Not necessarily,” Erlendur said. “Do you mind if we talk about something else?”
“Why don’t you want to discuss it? Why is it so difficult?”
“Was that why you came?” Erlendur asked. “To tell me what you dreamed?”
“Why was he never found?” Eva said.
He could not understand his daughter’s obstinacy. As time passed it had caused interest that his brother’s remains were never found, not even a hat or glove or scarf. Nothing. People had various theories as to why. He avoided brooding on them too much.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “Another time maybe. Tell me about yourself. We haven’t seen each other for ages. What have you been up to?”
“You were there,” Eva said, refusing to leave him alone. “You were in my dream. I’ve never dreamed anything as clear as that. I haven’t dreamed about you since I was little and I didn’t even know what you looked like then.”
Erlendur said nothing. His mother had tried to teach him to interpret dreams, but he had always been reluctant and uninterested. It was only in recent years that his attitude had softened and his interest became roused, in spite of everything. Eva told him that she never had dreams or remembered them, and his mother had said the same. It was not until the age of thirty that his mother started dreaming to any extent, when she suddenly developed the gift of foretelling deaths, births, visitors and many other events with uncanny accuracy. But she did not foresee her son’s death in a dream and he visited her in her sleep only once afterwards. She had described the dream to Erlendur. It was summer and her boy was standing at the door of the farmhouse, leaning up against the doorpost. His back was turned to her and she could only discern his outline. The image persisted for a long while but it was impossible for her to approach him. She felt she was stretching her arms towards him without his noticing her. Then he stood up straight, bowed his head and thrust his hands into his pockets the way he sometimes did, walked out into the summer’s day… and disappeared.
That was six years after it had happened. They had moved to Reykjavik by then.
Erlendur seldom recalled the world of his dreams unless he became too emotionally involved in a case he happened to be investigating. Then he might have bad dreams, although he would not necessarily remember their substance. It took him a long time to digest the fact that Eva had come to see him after all this time to tell him about a dream she had had, involving him and his brother.
“What did you dream, Eva?” he asked falteringly. “What happened in your dream?”
“First tell me how he died.”
“You know that,” Erlendur said. “He froze to death on the moors. A storm blew up and we were buried in a snowdrift.”
“Why was he never found?”
“Where are you heading with all this, Eva?”
“You haven’t told me the whole story, have you?”
“What story?”
“Sindri told me what could have happened.”
“What are they blathering on about out there in the east?” Erlendur said. “What do they reckon they know?”
“In my dream he didn’t die of exposure, you see. And that fits in with what Sindri said.”
“Please drop the subject,” Erlendur said. “Let’s stop. I don’t want to talk about it. Not now. Later, Eva. I promise.”
“But—”
“Surely you can tell,” he interrupted her. “I don’t want to. Maybe you ought to leave. I… I’m very busy. It’s been a rough day. Let’s discuss it better another time.”
He stood up. Eva watched him without saying a word. She could not comprehend his reaction. It was as if the event had just as much effect on Erlendur now as it did at the time; as if he had proved completely incapable of dealing with it for all those years.
“Don’t you want to hear my dream?”
“Not now.”
“Okay,” she said as she stood up.
“Say hello to Sindri from me if you see him,” Erlendur said, running his fingers through his hair.
“I will,” Eva said.
“It was nice seeing you,” he said awkwardly.
“Same here.”
When she had left he stood facing the bookshelves for a long time, as if in another world. Eva had a knack of riling him. No one else could do it in quite the same way. He was not ready to embark on accounts of his brother’s disappearance. Once he had promised to tell Eva the whole story, but nothing had come of it. She could not burst into his life now, insisting on answers whenever she had the urge.
The book he had read aloud from for Marion Briem was lying on the table in the living room and he picked it up. Like so many of his books, it dealt with fatal accidents, but what distinguished it from all the others was that it contained a short narrative of events that had taken place many years before, when a father and his two sons were caught in a violent storm on the moors above Eskifjordur.
Erlendur looked up the story as he had done so often before. The accounts varied in length but most were structured in the same way. First came a heading and a subheading or source reference. The story generally opened with a topographical description, followed by the narrative proper and a short postscript. He had read this account more often than anything else in his life and knew it off by heart, word for word. It was impartial and impersonal, despite telling of the lonely death of an eight-year-old boy. It made no mention of the devastation that the incident had left behind in the hearts of those who experienced it. That story would never be written.
16
The police attached the highest priority to locating Niran, who had not been heard of since the previous day. With the help of the school staff, they gathered information about his friends, boys he knew and spent most of his time with at school. A lower-profile and more personal search was also in progress, known only to Erlendur and based on Marion Briem’s memory of Andres’s stepfather. He wanted to keep that line of inquiry quiet because he had the feeling Andres was lying to them. He had done as much in the past.
When word spread that Sunee, the victim’s mother, had spirited her older son away to a safe haven, it became headline news and a talking point all over Iceland. The police were heavily criticised for their ineptitude. Either they had let a key witness slip through their hands or, even worse, they had driven him to flight through their own sheer incompetence. After suspicions were raised that the police had tried to conceal this information, like so much else connected with the investigation, a furore broke out about the information act and lack of cooperation with the media.
Erlendur despised nothing more than having to inform journalists and reporters about “the progress of the investigation’, as it was called. He had long maintained that police investigations had nothing to do with the media and that it could be downright damaging to give constant updates about the latest developments. Sigurdur Oli disagreed. He considered it a matter of course to give information, provided it did not jeopardise the interests of the investigation.