They said goodbye and Erlendur lumbered into the kitchen to make coffee. He was still deep in thought. Could a medium say which side people were on if they were-halfway between life and death? Without accepting it in the slightest, he thought to himself that if it offered consolation to people who had lost loved ones, he was not going to oppose it. It was consolation that mattered, not where it came from.
The seething coffee burned his tongue when he sipped it. He avoided thinking about what was really haunting him that night and morning, and managed to keep it at bay.
More or less.
Ex-US army colonel Edward Hunter cut more an Icelandic than an American figure when, dressed in a buttoned-up woollen sweater and sporting a scraggy white beard, he welcomed Erlendur and Elinborg to his detached house in Kopavogur. His hair was unkempt and a little scruffy, but he was both friendly and polite when he shook them by the hand and told them just to call him Ed. In that respect he reminded Erlendur of Jim. He told them his wife was in the States, visiting his sister. Himself, he went there less and less.
On their way to visit Ed, Elinborg told Erlendur that, according to Bara, Benjamin’s fiancee was wearing a green coat when she went missing. Elinborg thought this interesting, but Erlendur stifled any further discussion by saying rather brashly that he did not believe in ghosts. Elinborg had the feeling the subject was closed.
Ed showed them into a large sitting room and Erlendur saw scant evidence of the military life as he took a look around: in front of him were two gloomy Icelandic landscape paintings, Icelandic ceramic statues and framed family photographs. Nothing that reminded Erlendur of military service or World War II.
Having expected them, Ed had coffee, tea and biscuits ready, and after a polite chat, which rather bored all three of them, the old soldier went into action and asked how he could help. He spoke almost flawless Icelandic, in short, concise phrases as if the discipline of the army had taught him to keep to the bare essentials.
“Jim at the British embassy told us you served here during the war, including a spell with the military police, and were involved in a case concerning the depot at the present site of Grafarholt golf course.”
“Yes, I play golf there regularly now,” Ed said. “I heard the news of the bones on the hill. Jim told me you thought they might belong to one of our men. British or American.”
“Was there some kind of incident at the depot?” Erlendur asked.
“They used to steal,” Ed said. “It happens at most depots. I guess you’d call it ‘wastage’. A group of soldiers stole provisions and sold them to the Icelanders. It started on a very small scale, but gradually they got more confident and in the end it became quite a large operation. The quartermaster was in on it with them. They were all sentenced. Left the country. I remember it well. I kept a diary and browsed through it after Jim phoned. It all came back to me, the theft. I also rang my friend from that time, Phil, who was my superior. We went over it together.”
“How was the theft discovered?” Elinborg asked.
“Greed got the better of them. Theft on the scale they were practising is difficult to conceal, and rumours about irregularities spread.”
“Who was involved?” Erlendur took out a cigarette and Ed nodded to show that he did not mind him smoking. Elinborg gave Erlendur a reproachful look.
“Civilians. Mostly. The quartermaster was the highest ranked. And at least one Icelander. A man who lived on the hill. On the other side from the depot.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“No. He lived with his family in an unpainted shack. We found a lot of merchandise there. From the depot. I wrote in my diary that he had three children, one of them handicapped, a girl. The other two were boys. The mother…”
Ed fell silent.
“What about the mother?” Elinborg said. “You were going to say something about the mother.”
“I think she had a pretty rough time.” Ed fell silent again and grew pensive, as if trying to transport himself back to that distant time when he investigated the theft, walked into an Icelandic house and encountered a woman whom he could tell was the victim of violence. And not only the victim of a single, recent attack; it was obvious that she suffered persistent and systematic abuse, both physical and psychological.
He barely noticed her when he entered the house with four other military policemen. The first thing he saw was the handicapped girl lying on her makeshift bed in the kitchen. He saw the two boys standing side by side next to her, transfixed and terrified as the soldiers burst in. He saw the man leap up from the kitchen table. They had arrived unannounced and clearly he was not expecting them. They could tell at a glance whether people were tough. Whether they posed a threat. This man would not give them any trouble.
Then he saw the woman. It was very early spring and gloomy, and it took him a moment to adjust to the dark inside. As if hiding, the woman stood where he thought he could see a passage leading to other rooms. At first he took her for one of the thieves, trying to make a getaway. He marched up to the passage, drawing his gun from its holster. Shouted down the passage and pointed his gun into the darkness. The crippled girl started screaming at him. The two boys pounced on him as one, shouting something he did not understand. And out of the darkness came the woman, whom he would never forget as long as he lived.
Immediately he realised why she was hiding. Her face was badly bruised, her upper lip puffed up and one eye so swollen that she could not open it. She looked at him in fear with the other eye, then bowed her head as if by instinct. As if she thought he was going to hit her. She was wearing one tattered dress on top of another, her legs bare but for socks and scruffy old shoes. Her dirty hair hung down to her shoulders in thick knots. For all he could tell, she limped. She was the most miserable creature he had ever seen in his life.
He watched her trying to calm her sons and understood that it was not her appearance that she was trying to hide.
She was hiding her shame.
The children fell silent. The older boy huddled up against his mother. Ed looked over at the husband, walked up to him and hit him round the face with a resounding slap.
“And that was that,” Ed concluded his account. “I couldn’t control myself. Don’t know what happened. Don’t know what came over me. It was incomprehensible, really. You were trained, you know, trained to face anything. Trained to keep calm whatever happened. As you can imagine, it was crucial to keep your self-control at all times, with a war going on and all that. But when I saw that woman… when I saw what she’d had to put up with — and clearly not just that once — I could visualise her life at that man’s hands, and something snapped inside me. Something happened that I just couldn’t control.”
Ed paused.
“I was a policeman in Baltimore for two years before war broke out. It wasn’t called domestic violence then, but it was just as ugly all the same. I came across it there too and I’ve always been repelled by it. I could tell right away what was going on, and he’d been stealing from us too… but, well, he was sentenced by your courts,” Ed said, as if trying to shake out of his mind the memory of the woman on the hill. “I don’t think he got much of a sentence. He was sure to be back home beating up his poor wife before a couple of months were up.”
“So you’re talking about serious domestic violence,” Erlendur said.
“The worst imaginable. It was appalling, the sight of that woman,” Ed said. “Plain appalling. As I say, I could see straight away what was going on. Tried to talk to her, but she couldn’t understand a word of English. I told the Icelandic police about her, but they said there wasn’t a lot they could do. That hasn’t changed much, I understand.”