“I’m not certain I do,” Elsa said, somewhat calmer now.
“But I can go on looking in the cellar, can’t I?” he said.
“Yes, of course. I can hardly stop you doing that.”
He finished his tea and went down to the cellar, still thinking about Bergthora. He did not keep a lock of her hair in a locket, and did not feel he needed anything to remind him of her. Not even her photograph in his wallet, like the pictures of wife and children that some men he knew carried around. He felt bad. He needed to talk things over with Bergthora. Sort it all out.
He didn’t want to be like Erlendur at all.
Sigurdur Oli looked through Benjamin Knudsen’s belongings until midday, then popped out to a fast-food joint, bought a hamburger that he barely nibbled at, and read the papers over coffee. Around two he headed back to the cellar, cursing Erlendur for his obstinacy. He had not found the slightest clue as to why Benjamin’s fiancee had disappeared, nor any evidence of wartime tenants apart from Hoskuldur. He had not found the lock of hair that Elinborg was so convinced about after reading all those romances. It was Sigurdur Oli’s second day in the cellar and he was at the end of his tether.
Elsa was at the door when he returned, and she invited him in. He tried to find an excuse to turn down the invitation, but was not quick enough to manage it without sounding rude, so he followed Elsa into the sitting room.
“Did you find anything down there?” she asked, and Sigurdur Oli knew that behind this helpful-sounding remark she was in fact actually trying to wheedle information out of him. It didn’t occur to him that she might be lonely, which was the impression Erlendur had just minutes after entering her gloomy house.
“I haven’t found that lock of hair, anyway,” Sigurdur Oli said, nursing his tea. She had been waiting for him. He looked at her, wondering what was in the offing.
“No,” she said. “Are you married? Sorry, of course that’s none of my business.”
“No, that’s… yes, no, not married but living with my partner,” Sigurdur Oli said, awkwardly.
“Any children?”
“No, no children,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Pardon?”
“Why haven’t you had any children?”
What’s going on here? Sigurdur Oli thought, sipping his tea to win time.
“Stress, I suppose. So busy at work all the time. We’re both in demanding jobs and, well, there’s no time.”
“No time for children? Have you really got anything better to do with your time? What does your girlfriend do?”
“She’s a partner in a computer firm,” Sigurdur Oli said, poised to thank her for the tea and say he needed to get going. He did not plan to be interrogated about his private life by some posh old maid who had clearly gone strange from living alone, the way women like her eventually do — until they end up snooping around everyone’s private business.
“Is she a good woman?” Elsa asked.
“Her name’s Bergthora,” said Sigurdur Oli, on the verge of becoming impolite. “She’s a terribly good woman.” He smiled. “Why are you…?”
“I’ve never had a family,” Elsa said. “Never had any children. Nor a husband for that matter. I don’t care about that, but I would have liked children. They’d be 30 today, perhaps. In their thirties. I sometimes think about that. Grown-up. With their own children. I don’t really know what happened. Suddenly you’re middle-aged. I’m a doctor. Not many women studied medicine when I enrolled. I was like you, I didn’t have the time. Didn’t have time for a life of my own. What you’re doing now isn’t your own life. It’s just work.”
“Yes, well, I suppose I should…”
“Benjamin didn’t have a family either,” Elsa went on. “That was all he wanted, a family. With that girl.”
Elsa stood up and so did Sigurdur Oli. He expected her to say goodbye, but instead she went over to a large oak cabinet with beautiful glass doors and carved drawers, opened one of them, took out a little Chinese trinket box, lifted the lid and pulled out a silver locket on a slender chain.
“He did keep a lock of her hair,” she said. “There’s a photograph of her in the locket too. Her name was Solveig.” Elsa gave a hint of a smile. “The apple of Benjamin’s eye. I don’t think that’s her buried on the hill. The thought is unbearable. That would mean Benjamin harmed her. He didn’t. Couldn’t. I’m convinced of that. This lock of hair will prove it.”
She handed Sigurdur Oli the locket. He sat down again, opened it carefully and saw a tiny lock of black hair on top of a photograph of its owner. Without touching the hair he manoeuvred it onto the lid of the necklace to be able to see the photograph. It showed the petite face of a girl of 20, dark-haired with beautifully curved eyebrows above big eyes staring enigmatically into the lens. Lips that suggested determination, a small chin, her face slender and pretty. Benjamin’s fiancee. Solveig.
“Please excuse me for holding back,” Elsa said. “I’ve thought the matter over and weighed it up and I couldn’t bring myself to destroy that lock of hair. Whatever emerges from the investigation.”
“Why did you conceal it?”
“I needed to think things over.”
“Yes, but even…”
“It gave me quite a shock when your colleague — Erlendur, isn’t it? — started insinuating that it might be her up there, but once I’d thought more about it…” Elsa shrugged as if in resignation.
“Even if the DNA test proves positive,” Sigurdur Oli said, “that doesn’t necessarily mean that Benjamin murderered her. The analysis won’t give any answers to that. If that is his fiancee up on the hill, there could be another reason besides Benjamin…”
Elsa interrupted him.
“She… what’s it called these days… she dumped him. ‘Broke off their engagement’ is probably the old phrase. Back when people used to get engaged. She did it the day that she disappeared. Benjamin didn’t reveal that until much later. To my mother, on his deathbed. She told me. I’ve never told anyone before. And I would have taken it to my grave if you hadn’t found those bones. Do you know yet whether it’s a male or a female?”
“Not yet, no,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Did he say anything about why she broke off their engagement? Why she left him?”
He sensed Elsa hesitating. They looked each other in the eye and he knew she had already given too much away to back down now. He felt that she wanted to tell him what she knew. As if she were bearing a heavy cross and the time had come to put it down. At last, after all these years.
“It wasn’t his child,” she said.
“Not Benjamin’s child?”
“No.”
“She wasn’t pregnant by him?”
“No.”
“So whose was it?”
“You have to understand that times were different then,” Elsa said. “Today women have abortions like going to the dentist. Marriage has no special meaning even if people want to have children. They live together. They separate. Start living with someone else. Have more children. Split up again. It wasn’t like that. Not in those days. Having a child out of wedlock used to be unthinkable for women. It brought shame, they would be outcasts. People were merciless, they called them tarts.”
“So I gather,” Sigurdur Oli said. His mind turned to Bergthora and it gradually dawned on him why Elsa had been asking about his private life.
“Benjamin was prepared to marry her,” Elsa continued. “Or at least that’s what he later told my mother. Solveig didn’t want that. She wanted to break off their engagement and told him so straight out. Just like that. Without any warning.”
“Who was the father then?”
“When she left Benjamin she asked him to forgive her. For leaving him. But he didn’t. He needed more time.”