“He died,” his mother said with a hint of accusation in her voice. “And that’s that.”
“But he was different,” Simon said. “You would be different.”
“If he hadn’t died? If Mikkelina hadn’t fallen ill? If I hadn’t met your father? What’s the point of thinking like that?”
“Why is he so nasty?”
He asked her this repeatedly and sometimes she answered, sometimes she just said nothing as if she herself had searched for the answer to that question for years without getting any closer to it. She just stared past Simon, alone in the world, and talked to herself sadly and remotely, as if nothing she said or did mattered any more.
“I don’t know. I only know that we’re not to blame. It’s not our fault. It’s something inside him. I blamed myself at first. Tried to find something I was doing wrong that made him angry, and I tried to change it. But I never knew what it was and nothing I did made any difference. I stopped blaming myself long ago and I don’t want you or Tomas or Mikkelina to think the way he acts is your fault. Even when he curses and abuses you. It’s not your fault.”
She looked at Simon.
“The little power that he has in this world, he has over us, and he doesn’t intend to let go of it. He’ll never let go of it.”
Simon looked at the drawer where the carving knives were kept.
“Is there nothing we can do?”
“No.”
“What were you going to do with the knife?”
“I told you. I was checking how sharp it was. He likes the knives kept sharp.”
Simon forgave his mother for lying because he knew she was trying, as always, to protect him, safeguard him, ensure that their terrible life as a family would have the least effect on his.
When Grimur got home that evening, filthy black from shovelling coal, he was in exceptionally good spirits and started talking to their mother about something he had heard in Reykjavik. He sat down on a kitchen stool, told her to bring him some coffee and said her name had cropped up at work. He didn’t know why, but the coalmen had been talking about her and claimed she was one of them. One of the doomsday kids who were conceived in the Gasworks.
She kept her back turned to Grimur and didn’t say a word. Simon sat at the table. Tomas and Mikkelina were outside.
“At the Gasworks!?”
Then Grimur laughed an ugly, gurgling laugh. Sometimes he coughed black phlegm from the coal dust and was black around the eyes, mouth and ears.
“In the doomsday orgy in the fucking gas tank!” he shouted.
“That’s not true,” she said softly, and Simon was surprised because he had seldom heard her contest anything Grimur said. He stared at his mother and a shiver ran down his spine.
“They fucked and boozed all night because they thought the end of the world was nigh and that’s where you came from, you twat.”
“It’s a lie,” she said, more firmly than before, but still without looking up from what she was doing at the sink. Her back remained turned to Grimur and her head dropped lower onto her chest and her petite shoulders arched up as if she wanted to hide between them.
Grimur had stopped laughing.
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“No,” she said, “but it’s not true. It’s a misunderstanding.”
Grimur got to his feet.
“Is it a misunderstanding,” he mimicked her voice.
“I know when the gas tank was built. I was born before then.”
“That’s not what I heard. I heard your mother was a whore and your father was a tramp and they threw you in the dustbin when you were born.”
The drawer was open and she stared down into it and Simon saw her glaring at the big carving knife. She looked at Simon then back down at the knife and for the first time he believed that she was capable of using it.
12
Skarphedinn had arranged for a big white tent to be put up over the excavation site and when Erlendur went inside it out of the spring sunshine he saw the incredibly slow progress they had made. By the foundation they had cut an area of ten square metres and the skeleton was embedded in one edge of it. The arm still pointed up, as before, and two men were kneeling with brushes and spoons in their hands, picking away at the dirt and sweeping it into pans.
“Isn’t that a bit too painstaking?” Erlendur asked when Skarphedinn walked up to greet him. “You’ll never get it finished like that.”
“You just can’t be too careful in an excavation,” Skarphedinn said as pompously as ever, proud that his methods were producing results. “And you, of all people, ought to be aware of that,” he added.
“Aren’t you just using this for field training?”
“Field training?”
“For archaeologists? Isn’t this the class you teach at the university?”
“Listen, Erlendur. We’re working methodically. There’s no other way to do it. Believe me.”
“Yes, maybe there’s no rush,” Erlendur said.
“We’ll get there in the end,” Skarphedinn said, running his tongue over his fangs.
“They tell me the pathologist is in Spain,” Erlendur said. “He’s not expected back for a few days. So we do have plenty of time, I suppose.”
“Who could it be, lying there?” Elinborg asked.
“We can’t determine whether it’s a male or a female, a young body or an old one,” Skarphedinn said. “And maybe it’s not our job to do so either. But I don’t think there’s the slightest doubt any more that it was a murder.”
“Could it be a young, pregnant woman?” Erlendur asked.
“We’ll have that settled soon,” Skarphedinn said.
“Soon?” Erlendur said. “Not if we go on at this rate.”
“Patience is a virtue,” Skarphedinn said. “Remember that.”
Erlendur would have told him where to stick his virtue if Elinborg had not interrupted.
“The murder doesn’t have to be connected with this place,” she said out of the blue. She had agreed with most of what Sigurdur Oli had said the day before, when he started criticising Erlendur for being too preoccupied with his first hunch about the bones: that the person buried there had lived on the hill, even in one of the chalets. In Sigurdur Oli’s opinion it was stupid to concentrate on a house that used to be there and people who may or may not have lived in it. Erlendur was at the hospital when Sigurdur Oli delivered this sermon, and Elinborg decided to hear Erlendur’s views on it.
“He could have been murdered in, say, the west of town, and brought over here,” she said. “We can’t be sure that the murder was actually committed on the hill. I was discussing this with Sigurdur Oli yesterday.”
Erlendur rummaged deep in his coat pockets until he found his lighter and cigarette packet. Skarphedinn gave him a disdainful look.
“You don’t smoke inside the tent,” he snarled.
“Let’s go outside,” Erlendur said to Elinborg, “We don’t want to make virtue lose its patience.”
They left the tent and Erlendur lit up.
“Of course you’re right,” he said. “It’s by no means certain that the murder, if indeed it was a murder, was committed here. As far as I can see,” he continued, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke, “we have three equally plausible theories. First, it’s Benjamin Knudsen’s fiancee, who got pregnant, disappeared, and who everyone thought had thrown herself into the sea. For some reason, possibly jealousy, as you say, he killed the girl and hid the body here by his chalet; and was never the same man afterwards. Second, someone was murdered in Reykjavik, even in Keflavik or Akranes for that matter; anywhere around the city. Brought here, buried and forgotten. Third, there’s a possibility that people lived on this hill, committed a murder and buried the body on their doorstep because they had nowhere else to go. It might have been a traveller, a visitor, maybe one of the British who came here in the war and built the barracks on the other side of the hill, or the Americans who took over from them, or maybe a member of the household.”