“It’s repulsive to tell you that. Making up a story just to poison our relationship.”
“Actually, I believe her.”
“Eva…”
“Shut up.”
“I’ll tell you why it can’t be true. Why I could never…”
“I don’t believe you!”
“Eva… I had…”
“Shut your gob. I don’t believe a word you say.”
“Then you ought to get out of here,” he said.
“Yeah, right,” she provoked him. “Get rid of me.”
“Get out!”
“You’re repulsive!” she shouted, and stormed out.
“Eva!” he called after her, but she was gone.
He neither heard from her nor saw her until his mobile rang when he was standing over the skeleton on the hill two months later.
Erlendur sat in his car, smoking and thinking that he should have reacted differently, swallowed his pride and tracked Eva down when his anger abated. Told her again that her mother was lying, he would never have suggested an abortion. Never could have. And not leave her to send him an SOS. She was simply not mature enough to go through all this, did not realise what she had got herself into and had no sense of her responsibility.
Erlendur feared breaking the news to her when she regained consciousness. If she regained consciousness. For the sake of doing something, he picked up the phone and called Skarphedinn.
“Just show a little patience,” the archaeologist said, “and stop phoning me all the time. We’ll let you know when we’ve got down to the bones.”
Skarphedinn was acting as though he had taken over the investigation, he became more arrogant by the day.
“When will that be?”
“Difficult to say,” he said, and Erlendur imagined his yellow teeth beneath his beard. “We’ll just have to see. Leave us in peace to get on with the job.”
“You must be able to tell me something. Was it a man? A woman?”
“Patience is the key to every puzzle…”
Erlendur hung up on him. He was lighting another cigarette when the phone rang. It was Jim from the British embassy. Ed and the US embassy had discovered a list with the names of Icelandic employees at the depot and Jim had just received it by fax. He had not found anything himself about Icelandic employees while the British ran the depot. There were nine names on the list and Jim read them to Erlendur over the phone. Erlendur did not recognise any of them and gave Jim the fax number at his office so that he could send it there.
He drove into Vogar and parked, as before, some distance from the basement that he had burst into in search of Eva Lind. He waited, wondering what it was that made men behave the way that this one did towards his wife and child, but the conclusion he reached was the usual one: they were bloody idiots. He couldn’t articulate what he wanted to do with that man. Whether he intended anything more than spying on him from his car. He couldn’t erase from his mind the memory of the little girl with cigarette burns on her back. The man denied having done anything to the child and the mother backed up his claim, so the authorities could do little else apart from take the child away from them. The man’s case was with the Director of Public Prosecutions. Maybe he would be charged. Maybe not.
Erlendur pondered the options available to him. There weren’t many, and all of them were bad. If the man had gone back to the flat the night he was looking for Eva Lind and the baby was sitting on the floor with burns on its back, Erlendur would have attacked the sadist. Several days had elapsed since then and he could not attack him out of the blue for what he had done. Could not go straight up and thump him, although that was what he most wanted to do. Erlendur knew he could not talk to him. Men like that laughed at threats. He would laugh in Erlendur’s face.
Erlendur didn’t see anyone entering or leaving the building for the two hours he sat in his car smoking.
In the end he gave up and drove to the hospital to see his daughter. Tried to forget all this, like so much else he had needed to forget in the past.
20
Elinborg got a call from Sigurdur Oli when she reached her office. He told her that Benjamin was probably not the father of the child his fiancee had been expecting, which brought their engagement to an end. Plus Solveig’s father had hanged himself after his daughter disappeared, and not before as her sister Bara had at first said.
Elinborg called in at the National Statistics Office and browsed through the death certificates before driving up to Grafarvogur. She didn’t like being lied to, especially by condescending posh women.
Bara listened to Elinborg recount what Elsa had said about the unidentified father of Solveig’s child and she remained as stony faced as ever.
“Have you heard this before?” Elinborg asked.
“That my sister was a whore? No, I haven’t heard that before and I don’t understand why you’re serving it up to me now. After all these years. I don’t understand it. You ought to let my sister rest in peace. She doesn’t deserve being gossiped about. Where did this… this Elsa woman get her story from?”
“From her mother,” Elinborg said.
“And she heard it from Benjamin?”
“Yes. He didn’t tell anyone about it until he was on his deathbed.”
“Did you find a lock of her hair at his house?”
“We did, as it happens.”
“And you’ll send it for tests with the bones?”
“I expect so.”
“So you think he killed her. That Benjamin, that weed, killed his fiancee. I think it’s ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. It’s beyond me how you can believe it.”
Bara stopped talking and grew thoughtful.
“Will it be in the papers?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” Elinborg said. “The bones have been given a lot of publicity.”
“That my sister was murdered, I mean?”
“If that’s the conclusion we come to. Do you know who could have been the father of her child?”
“Benjamin was the only one.”
“Was there never mention of anyone else? Didn’t your sister talk to you about any other man?”
Bara shook her head.
“My sister was not a tart.”
Elinborg cleared her throat.
“You told me your father committed suicide some time before your sister disappeared.”
They fleetingly looked each other in the eye.
“I think you should be leaving now,” Bara said, standing up.
“I wasn’t the one who started talking about your father. I checked his death certificate at the National Statistics Office. Unlike some people, the Statistics Office rarely tells lies.”
“I have nothing more to say to you,” Bara said, but without her earlier arrogance.
“I don’t think you would have mentioned him unless you wanted to talk about him. Deep down inside.”
“Bloody rubbish!” she spat out. “Are you playing the psychologist now?”
“He died six months after your sister went missing. His death certificate doesn’t specify that he killed himself. No cause of death is given. Probably too posh to use the word suicide. Died suddenly at his home, it says.”
Bara turned her back on Elinborg.
“Is there any chance that you could start telling me the truth?” Elinborg said, standing up as well. “What did your father have to do with it? Why did you mention him? Who got Solveig pregnant? Was it him?”
She received no response. The silence between them was almost tangible. Elinborg looked around the spacious lounge, at all the beautiful articles, the paintings of her and her husband, the expensive furniture, the black pianoforte, a prominently placed photograph of Bara with the leader of the Progressive Party. What an empty life, she thought.