“Often and later and was crooked,” Elinborg finished the sentence for him. “Could crooked mean she was lame?”
“Wouldn’t he have written ‘lame’ then?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“What happened to that house?” Elinborg asked. “There’s no sign of it on the hill.”
“Maybe you’ll find that out for us in Benjamin’s cellar or from his niece,” Erlendur said to Sigurdur Oli. “I clean forgot to ask.”
“All we need is the names of the residents and then to check them against the list of missing persons from that time, and it’s all sewn up. Isn’t that obvious?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Not necessarily,” Erlendur said.
“Why not?”
“You’re only talking about the people who were reported missing.”
“Who else that went missing should I be talking about?”
“The disappearances that go unreported. You can’t be sure that everyone tells the police when someone disappears from their lives. Someone moves to the countryside and is never seen again. Someone moves abroad and is never seen again. Someone flees the country and is slowly forgotten. And then there are travellers who freeze to death. If we have a list of people who were reported to have got lost and died in the area at that time, we ought to examine that too.”
“I think we can all agree that it’s not that sort of case,” Sigurdur Oli said in an authoritative tone that was beginning to get on Erlendur’s nerves. “It’s out of the question that this man, or whoever it is lying there, froze to death. It was a wilful act. Someone buried him.”
“That’s precisely what I mean,” said Erlendur, who was a walking encyclopaedia about ordeals in the wilderness. “Someone sets off from a farm, say. It’s the middle of winter and the weather forecast is bad. Everyone tries to dissuade him. He ignores their advice, convinced he’ll make it. The strangest thing about stories of people who freeze to death is that they never listen to advice. It’s as if death lures them. They seem to be doomed. As if they want to challenge their fate. Anyway. This man thinks he’ll succeed. Except when the storm breaks, it’s much worse than he could have imagined. He loses his bearings. Gets lost. In the end he gets covered over in a snowdrift and freezes to death. By then he’s miles off the beaten track. That’s why the body’s never found. He’s given up for lost.”
Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli exchanged glances, uncertain of what Erlendur was driving at.
“That’s a typical Icelandic missing person scenario and we can explain it and understand it because we live in this country and know how the weather suddenly turns bad and how the story of that man repeats itself at regular intervals without anyone questioning it. That’s Iceland, people think, and shake their heads. Of course, it was a lot more common in the old days when almost everyone travelled on foot. Whole series of books have been written about it; I’m not the only one who’s interested in the subject. Modes of travel have only really changed over the past 60 to 70 years. People used to go missing and although you could never reconcile yourself to it, you understood their fate. There were rarely grounds for treating such disappearances as police or criminal matters.”
“What do you mean?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“What was that lecture all about?” Elinborg said.
“What if some of these men or women never set off from the farm in the first place?”
“What are you getting at?” Elinborg asked.
“What if people said so-and-so had set off for the moors or for another farm or went to lay a fishing net in the lake and was never heard of again? A search is mounted, but he’s never found and is given up for lost.”
“So the whole household conspires to kill this person?” Sigurdur Oli said, sceptical about Erlendur’s hypothesis.
“Why not?”
“Then he is stabbed or beaten or shot and buried in the garden?” Elinborg added.
“Until one day Reykjavik has grown so big that he can’t rest in peace any longer,” Erlendur said.
Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg looked at each other and then back at Erlendur.
“Benjamin Knudsen had a fiancee who disappeared under mysterious circumstances,” Erlendur said. “Around the time that the chalet was being built. It was said that she threw herself into the sea and Benjamin was never the same afterwards. Seems to have had plans to revolutionise the Reykjavik retail trade, but he went to pieces when the girl disappeared and his burgeoning ambition evaporated.”
“Only she didn’t disappear at all, according to your new theory?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Oh yes, she disappeared.”
“But he murdered her.”
“Actually I find it difficult to imagine that,” Erlendur said. “I’ve read some of the letters he wrote to her and judging from them he wouldn’t have touched a hair on her head.”
“It was jealousy then,” said Elinborg, an avid reader of romances. “He killed her out of jealousy. His love for her seems to have been genuine. Buried her up there and never went back. Finito.”
“What I’m thinking is this,” Erlendur said. “Isn’t a young man overreacting a bit if he turns senile when his sweetheart dies on him? Even if she commits suicide. I gather that Benjamin was a broken man after she went missing. Could there be something more to it?”
“Could he have kept a lock of her hair?” Elinborg pondered, and Erlendur thought she still had her mind on pulp fiction. “Maybe inside a picture frame or a locket,” she added. “If he loved her that much.”
“A lock of hair?” Sigurdur Oli repeated.
“He’s so slow on the uptake,” said Erlendur, who had grasped Elinborg’s train of thought.
“What do you mean, a lock of hair?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“That would rule her out if nothing else.”
“Who?” Sigurdur Oli looked at them in turn. “Are you talking about DNA?”
“Then there’s the lady on the hill,” Elinborg said. “It would be good to track her down.”
“The green lady,” Erlendur said thoughtfully, apparently to himself.
“Erlendur,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Yes?”
“Obviously she can’t be green.”
“Sigurdur Oli.”
“Yes?”
“Do you think I’m a total idiot?”
The telephone on Erlendur’s desk rang. It was Skarphedinn, the archaeologist.
“We’re getting there,” Skarphedinn said. “We could uncover the rest of the skeleton in two days or so.”
“Two days!” Erlendur roared.
“Or thereabouts. We haven’t found anything yet that looks like a weapon. You might think we’re being a little meticulous about it, but I think it’s better to do the job properly. Do you want to come and take a look?”
“Yes, I was on my way,” Erlendur said.
“Maybe you could buy some pastries on the way,” Skarphedinn said, and in his mind’s eye Erlendur could see his yellow fangs.
“Pastries?”
“Danish pastries,” Skarphedinn said.
Erlendur slammed down the phone, asked Elinborg to join him in Grafarholt and told Sigurdur Oli to go to Benjamin’s cellar to try to find something about the chalet that the merchant built but apparently lost all interest in after his life turned to misery.
On the way to Grafarholt, Erlendur, still thinking about people who went missing and were lost in snowstorms, remembered the story about Jon Austmann. He froze to death, probably in Blondugil in 1780. His horse was discovered with its throat slit, but all that was found of Jon was one of his hands.
It was inside a blue knitted mitten.