She tried talking about a divorce, but Grimur laughed at her. She did not discuss her condition with the people at the dairy and concealed the fact that she was pregnant. Perhaps, right to the end, she thought that Grimur would recant, that his threats were empty, that when it came to the crunch he would not carry out his threats, that he would be like a father to the child in spite of everything.
In the end she resorted to desperate measures. Not to take vengeance on Grimur, although she had ample reason, but to protect herself and the child she was about to bear.
Mikkelina strongly sensed a growing tension between her mother and Grimur during that tough winter and also noticed a change in Simon that she found no less disturbing. He had always been fond of his mother, but now he hardly left her side from the time he came home from school and she finished work. He was more nervous after Grimur came back from prison on that cold autumn morning. As far as he could, he avoided his father and his anxiety about his mother haunted him more with each day that went by. Mikkelina heard him talking to himself sometimes and occasionally it sounded as if he was talking to someone she could not see who could not possibly be in their house: an imaginary person. Sometimes she heard him say out loud what he had to do to protect their mother and the child she would bear by his friend Dave. How it fell to him to guard her against Grimur. How the baby’s life depended on him. No one else was at hand. His friend Dave would never return.
Simon took Grimur’s threats very seriously. He firmly believed that he would not allow the baby to live. That Grimur would take it and they would never see it. Carry it off up the mountain and come back without it.
Tomas was silent as ever, but Mikkelina sensed a change in him as the winter wore on. Grimur allowed Tomas to spend the night in his room after he forbade the children’s mother to sleep in the double bed and forced her to sleep in Tomas’ bed, which was too small for her and uncomfortable. Mikkelina did not know what Grimur said to Tomas, but soon Tomas adopted a very different attitude towards her. He would not have anything to do with her and distanced himself from Simon as well, despite how close they had always been. Their mother tried to talk to Tomas, but he always backed away from her, angry, silent and helpless.
“Simon’s turning a bit funny,” Mikkelina heard Grimur say to Tomas once. “He’s going funny like your mother. Keep a watch out for him. Make sure you don’t get like him. Because then you’ll turn funny too.”
Once Mikkelina heard her mother talking to Grimur about the baby, the only time he allowed her to speak her mind, as far as she knew. Her mother’s stomach was bulging by then and he prohibited her to work at the dairy any longer.
“You give up your job and say you have to look after your family,” Mikkelina heard him order her.
“But you can say it’s yours,” her mother said.
Grimur laughed at her.
“You can.”
“Shut up.”
Mikkelina noticed that Simon was eavesdropping as well.
“You could easily say it’s your child,” their mother said in a soothing voice.
“Don’t try that,” Grimur said.
“No one needs to know anything. No one need find out.”
“It’s too late to try to put things right now. You should have thought of that when you were out on the moor with that fucking Yank.”
“Or I could have it adopted,” she said cautiously. “I’m not the first one this has happened to.”
“Sure you’re not,” Grimur said. “Half the bloody city’s been screwing them. But don’t think that makes you any better for it.”
“You’ll never need to see it. I’ll give it away as soon as it’s born and you won’t ever need to see it.”
“Everyone knows my wife shags Yanks,” Grimur says. “They all know you’ve been playing the field.”
“No one knows,” she said. “No one. There was no one who knew about me and Dave.”
“How do you think I knew about it, you twat? Because you told me? Don’t you think that kind of story gets around?”
“Yes, but no one knows he’s the father. No one knows.”
“Shut up,” Grimur said. “Shut up or…”
They all waited to see what that long winter would bring and what was in some terrible way inevitable. It began when Grimur slowly began to fall ill.
Mikkelina stared at Erlendur.
“She started to poison him that winter.”
“Poison?” Erlendur said.
“She didn’t know what she was doing.”
“How did she poison him?”
“Do you remember the Dukskot case in Reykjavik?”
“When a young woman killed her brother with rat poison? Yes, it was some time around the beginning of the last century.”
“Mum didn’t intend to kill him with it. She only wanted to make him ill. So she could have the baby and get it out of his way before he found out the baby was gone. The woman from Dukskot fed her brother rat poison. Put big doses in his curds, he even saw her do it but didn’t know what it was, and he managed to tell someone because he didn’t die until several days later. She gave him schnapps with his curds to take the taste away. At the inquest they found phosphorus in his body, which has a slow toxic effect. Our mother knew that story, it was a famous Reykjavik murder. She got hold of rat poison at the Gufunes dairy. Stole small doses which she put in his food. She used very little at a time so that he wouldn’t taste it or suspect anything. Instead of keeping the poison at home she brought back what she needed each time, but when she gave up her job at the dairy she took a large dose home and hid it. She had no idea what effect it would have on him or whether such small doses would even work at all, but after a while the effects seemed to come on. He got weaker, was often ill or tired, vomited. Couldn’t make it to work. Lay in bed suffering.”
“Did he never suspect anything?” Erlendur asked.
“Not until it was too late,” Mikkelina said. “He had no faith in doctors. And of course she didn’t encourage him to go for a check-up.”
“What about when he said they would take care of Dave? Did he ever mention that again?”
“No, never,” Mikkelina said. “He was just bluffing really. Saying things to scare her. He knew that she loved Dave.”
Erlendur and Elinborg were in Mikkelina’s sitting room, listening to her story. They had told her that it was a male skeleton underneath the baby in the grave in Grafarholt. Mikkelina shook her head; she could have told them that before had they not hurried away without saying why.
She wanted to know about the baby skeleton and when Erlendur asked whether she wanted to see it, she said no.
“But I’d like to know when you don’t need it any more,” she said. “It’s about time she was laid to rest in hallowed ground.”
“She?” Elinborg said.
“Yes. She,” Mikkelina said.
Sigurdur Oli told Elsa what the medical officer had discovered: the body in the grave could not be her uncle Benjamin’s fiancee. Elinborg phoned Solveig’s sister, Bara, to tell her the same news.
While Erlendur was setting off with Elinborg to see Mikkelina, Ed called on his mobile to let him know that he still had not managed to find out what became of Dave Welch; he did not know whether he was posted away from Iceland, or even when that might have been. He said he would go on searching.
Earlier that morning Erlendur had gone to intensive care to visit his daughter. Her condition was unchanged and Erlendur sat beside her for a good while, and resumed his tale about his brother who had frozen to death on the moors above Eskifjordur when Erlendur was ten. They were rounding up sheep with their father when the storm broke. The brothers lost sight of their father and soon afterwards of each other. Their father made it back to the farm, exhausted. Search parties were mounted.