Erlendur was embarrassed; he hadn’t been prepared for this.
‘I’m just interested in missing-persons cases.’
‘Why?’
‘I have been for a long time. I’m fascinated by accounts of accidents and disasters. I come from the East Fjords where there are quite a few stories of that nature. They’ve always been part of my life.’
Instinct told her that he was no longer being completely honest, no longer telling the whole truth, and had closed off the small chink he had opened into his soul. He didn’t meet her eye as he answered her question but lowered his gaze to the table as if afraid she would interrogate him further. She changed the subject.
‘Are you married?’
‘No... no, I’m divorced.’
‘Oh, sorry to hear that.’
‘Yes. So... now you know plenty about me,’ Erlendur said, trying to smile. ‘Everything, really, so—’
‘I don’t believe that for a minute,’ said Svava, smiling in her turn. ‘But enough to be going on with. No one’s asked me about poor Dagbjört for years, then you ring up out of the blue. I won’t deny it’s a shock. You’re the first person to show the slightest interest in her for more than twenty years. So, what do you want to know? How can I be of help?’
10
She was just eighteen when she vanished one dark winter’s day in ’53. Not long before, she had invited some school friends round to celebrate her birthday. The girls played records on the family’s recently acquired gramophone. She had helped her father carry it indoors. It came in an imposing piece of furniture — a large walnut box supported on four legs, with a lid on top and a built-in wireless — and this was given pride of place in the sitting room. They played records that had been released that spring — Alfred Clausen’s ‘Gling gló’, Sigfús Halldórsson’s ‘Dagný’. One of the girls brought round some of the new singles from America that she had managed to procure from the US airbase at Keflavík, including one by Kay Starr, and Doris Day singing ‘Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee’. The girls danced and giggled and, once Dagbjört’s parents were safely out of the way, two of them produced some alcohol they had pinched from home. They shared it round and someone took out a packet of cigarettes and started smoking. The cigarettes were passed round too, a few of the girls puffing and making faces, others inhaling with an air of sophistication. They chatted about the school camping trip to Thórsmörk earlier that autumn and the proposed skiing trip to Hveradalir in the highlands after New Year, and exchanged gossip about who was dating who and the latest exploits of various Hollywood stars. A Dean Martin film was currently showing in the cinemas. They preferred him to Frank Sinatra. As the evening wore on they sang their school song with its lyrics about a bright, happy future, and played Sigfús’s hit single over and over again: ‘... the glorious stars will shine / on our love, our joy and delight, / though the song of the breeze has fallen quiet.’
The girls were close friends and when one morning Dagbjört didn’t turn up to school or for the meeting a group of them had arranged for later that day, they rang her house to ask if she was ill. Dagbjört’s mother said no, she had gone to school as usual, at least as far as she knew. She called out to her daughter, went upstairs to her room, opened the front door and peered down the street, then stepped out into the garden, repeatedly calling her name. After this she phoned her husband at work and asked if he had heard from her or knew where she was. He was nonplussed. As far as he was aware, Dagbjört had gone to school that morning.
When they still hadn’t heard from her by evening, her parents grew seriously alarmed and went out looking for her. They phoned round all their friends and relatives, but no one had any news of their daughter. A number of people came to their house, among them several of Dagbjört’s classmates, neighbours and close relatives, and together they retraced her customary route to school. Perhaps something had happened to her on the way. They looked everywhere, walked the streets, climbed into gardens, conducted a thorough search of Camp Knox, combed the park and area around Lake Tjörnin and the streets at the lower end of Thingholt, near the school. By then the police had got their act together, though opinion at the station was that it was a little premature to call out the search parties. They asked if she had ever done anything like this before but the response was a firm negative: she had never disappeared without trace before. No need to worry too much, the parents were told; their daughter hadn’t even been missing twenty-four hours and there was every likelihood that she would turn up safe and sound before long.
But Dagbjört didn’t turn up. Twenty-four hours passed, then forty-eight, then seventy-two, and still there was no sign of her. Nothing she had said or done in the preceding days had given any clue to her possible movements that morning. She had been her usual self, bright and breezy, bursting with plans as always. She had informed her parents of her wish to continue her education, preferably in medicine, though there were few female doctors in the country at the time. She had told her mother that in the past decade only seven women had completed their medical training in Iceland.
‘So, as I’m sure you can imagine, it was an unspeakably awful time,’ Svava told Erlendur. ‘They said — my brother and his wife Helga — that it was out of the question that she could have taken her own life.’
‘What did they think had happened?’ asked Erlendur.
‘They couldn’t begin to understand it. They thought she must have been injured in some way. Maybe she’d walked along the shore, fallen in the sea and couldn’t save herself. Got swept out by the current. It was so bloody dark, of course — it was the end of November — and for reasons we don’t know she either decided not to go to school and went somewhere else instead or was intercepted on the way. Accepted a lift perhaps. Had some sort of run-in with somebody. We pictured all kinds of situations she could have got into but of course we hadn’t really the faintest idea what happened.’
‘If she had gone somewhere other than school, where might it have been?’
‘I suppose it’s just possible she walked out to Nauthólsvík cove. Went for a swim in the hot water. But that’s clutching at straws. She was young, she loved life and had never shown any hint of depression or anxiety — quite the reverse — she had a very positive outlook, was doing well at school, had a good gang of friends. Her parents said she looked forward to school every day.’
‘There was nothing wrong with the weather that morning, was there?’ asked Erlendur. ‘No chance she’d have had to urgently seek shelter?’
‘No, it was frosty and still,’ said Svava. ‘They combed all the shores here, all the way south to the Reykjanes Peninsula. Never found a thing.’
Svava poured them both more coffee. Erlendur still hadn’t touched his freshly baked doughnut.
‘There was talk of a diary,’ said Erlendur, remembering this detail from the police files. It had not helped the inquiry as it had turned out to contain nothing but the musings and dreams of a growing girl, incidents from school life, books she was reading for her studies and her opinions of the various subjects. The occasional comment about her teachers and fellow pupils, all very innocent. She had also stuck in cuttings from the papers, pictures of actors and so on.
‘Yes, that’s right. I saw it among my brother’s papers. It didn’t help us at all, as you probably know.’
‘You didn’t notice if there were any pages missing, any she’d torn out?’
‘There could well have been. The diary’s a sort of file with loose pages, so it’s impossible to say. You can take them out or add them in as you like. If she removed any, they must have been lost long ago.’