“That’s a lot of work for some old bones,” Elinborg said peevishly, kicking at the gravel around the foundation where she stood. “What are you doing?” she then asked, almost accusingly.
“Never you mind,” Erlendur said and rang off.
He walked back into intensive care wearing a thin green paper smock with a gauze over his mouth. Eva Lind lay in a big bed in a single room on the ward. She was connected to all kinds of equipment and devices that Erlendur had never even seen before and an oxygen mask covered her mouth and nose. He stood by the bed head, looking down at his daughter. She was in a coma. Had not yet regained consciousness. Over what he could see of her face, an air of peace reigned which Erlendur had not seen before. A calmness unfamiliar to him. When she lay like that her features became stronger, her brows sharper, her cheeks stretching the skin and her eyes sunk into their sockets.
He had called emergency services when he could not manage to bring Eva Lind back to consciousness where she lay in front of the old maternity home. He felt a weak pulse and laid his coat over her, trying to tend to her as best he could, but not daring to move her. The next thing he knew, the same ambulance turned up that had come to Tryggvagata, with the same doctor in it. Eva Lind was gently lifted onto a stretcher and slid inside the ambulance, which sped off the short distance remaining to Accident and Emergency.
She was sent straight into surgery that lasted almost the rest of the night. Erlendur paced the little waiting room by the operating theatre, wondering whether he ought to let Halldora know. He baulked at phoning her. In the end he found some kind of solution. He woke up Sindri Snaer, told him about his sister and asked him to contact Halldora so that she could visit the hospital. They exchanged a few words. Sindri was not planning to come to the city anytime soon. Saw no reason to make a journey just for Eva Lind’s sake. Their conversation faded out.
Erlendur chain smoked beneath a sign that said smoking was strictly prohibited — until a surgeon wearing a gauze mask walked past and gave him a dressing-down for infringing the ban. Erlendur’s mobile rang when the doctor had gone. It was Sindri with a message from Halldora: “It would do Erlendur good to take on some of the responsibility for once.”
The surgeon who had led the operating team spoke to Erlendur towards the morning. The prognosis wasn’t good. They hadn’t been able to save the baby and it was uncertain whether Eva Lind herself would pull through.
“She’s in a very bad state,” said the surgeon, a tall but delicate man aged around 40.
“I understand that,” Erlendur said.
“Persistent malnutrition and drug abuse. There’s not much chance the baby would have been born healthy so… although it’s a nasty thing to say of course…”
“I understand,” Erlendur said.
“Did she ever contemplate an abortion? In cases like this it’s…”
“She wanted to have the baby,” Erlendur said. “She thought it could help her, and I encouraged her too. She wanted to stop. There’s some tiny part of Eva that wants to escape from this hell. A tiny part that sometimes comes out and wants to give it all up. But normally it’s a completely different Eva who’s in charge. More ferocious and merciless. Some Eva who eludes me. Some Eva who seeks this destruction. This hell.”
Realising that he was talking to a man he did not know in the slightest, Erlendur fell silent.
“I can imagine it’s difficult for parents to have to go through this,” the surgeon said.
“What happened?”
“Placenta abruptio.A massive internal haemorrhage that occurred when the placenta was torn, combined with toxic effects that we are still awaiting the results on. She lost a lot of blood and we haven’t managed to bring her back to consciousness. That need not mean anything in particular. She’s extremely weak.”
After a pause the surgeon said, “Have you contacted your people? So they can be with you or…”
“There aren’t any ‘my people’,” Erlendur said. “We’re divorced. Her mother and I. I’ve let her know. And Eva’s brother. He’s working in the countryside. I don’t know whether her mother will come here. It’s like she’s had enough. It’s been very tough for her. All the time.”
“I understand.”
“I doubt that,” Erlendur said. “I don’t understand it myself.”
He took out a couple of small plastic bags and a box of pills from his coat pocket and showed them to the doctor.
“She might have taken some of this,” he said.
The surgeon took the drugs from him and looked at them.
“Ecstasy?”
“Looks like it.”
“That’s one explanation. We identified a number of substances in her blood.”
Erlendur hesitated. He and the surgeon said nothing for a while.
“Do you know who the father is?” the surgeon asked.
“No.”
“Do you think she knows?”
Erlendur looked at him and shrugged in resignation. Then they fell silent again.
“Is she going to die?” Erlendur asked after some time.
“I don’t know,” the surgeon said. “We can only hope for the best.”
Erlendur hesitated about asking his question. He’d been grappling with it, horrific as it was, without reaching any conclusion. He was not certain that he wanted to insist. In the end he went ahead.
“Can I see it?”
“It? You mean…?”
“Can I see the foetus? Can I have a look at the baby?”
The surgeon looked at Erlendur without the slightest hint of surprise on his face, only understanding. He nodded and told Erlendur to follow. They walked along the corridor and into an empty room. The surgeon pressed a button and the fluorescent lights on the ceiling flickered before shedding a bluish white light around the room. He went over to a cold steel table and lifted up a little blanket to reveal the dead baby.
Erlendur looked down and stroked his finger across its cheek.
It was a girl.
“Will my daughter come out of this coma, can you tell me that?”
“I don’t know,” the doctor said. “It’s impossible to tell. She’ll have to want to herself. It depends a lot on her.”
“The poor girl,” Erlendur said.
“They say that time heals all wounds,” the surgeon said when he felt Erlendur was about to lose his grip. “That’s just as true of the body as of the mind.”
“Time,” Erlendur said, putting the blanket back over the baby. “It doesn’t heal any wounds.”
7
He sat by his daughter’s bedside until about six in the evening. Halldora did not turn up. Sindri Snaer kept his word and did not come to the city. There was no one else. Eva Lind’s condition was unchanged. Erlendur had neither eaten nor slept since the previous day, and was exhausted. He was in touch with Elinborg by telephone during the day and decided to meet her and Sigurdur Oli at the office. He stroked his daughter’s cheek and kissed her on the forehead when he left.
He didn’t talk about the night’s events when he sat down with Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg at their meeting that evening. The two of them had heard through the station grapevine about what had happened to his daughter, but didn’t dare ask about it.
“They’re still scratching their way down to the skeleton,” Elinborg said. “It’s going terribly slowly. I think they’re using toothpicks now. The hand you found is sticking up out of the ground, they’re down to the wrist. The medical officer examined it, but the only definite thing he can say is that it’s a human with fairly small hands. Not much joy there. The archaeologists haven’t found anything in the soil to suggest what happened or who is buried there. They think they’ll have dug down to the torso late tomorrow afternoon or evening, but that doesn’t mean we’ll get any neat answers about who it is. Naturally, we’ll have to search elsewhere for those.”