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.
“Doesn’t every family have its secrets?” Bara said eventually, her back still turned on Elinborg.
“I imagine so,” Elinborg said.
“It wasn’t my father,” Bara said reluctantly. “I don’t know why I lied to you about his death. It just slipped out. If you want to play the psychologist you can say that deep down inside I wanted to confess everything to you. That I’d kept silent for so long that when you started talking about Solveig the floodgates opened. I don’t know.”
“Who was it then?”
“His nephew,” Bara said. “His brother’s son, from Fljot. It happened on one of her summer visits.”
“How did your family find out?”
“She was completely different when she came back. Mum… our mother noticed immediately, and of course it would have been impossible to conceal for long.”
“Did she tell your mother what happened?”
“Yes. Our father went up north. I don’t know any more about that. By the time he came back, the boy had been sent abroad. So the local people said. Grandfather ran a large farm. There were only two brothers. My father moved south here, set up a business and became wealthy. A pillar of society.”
“What happened to the nephew?”
“Nothing. Solveig said he’d had his way with her. Raped her. My parents didn’t know what to do, they didn’t want to press charges with all the legal fuss and gossip it would bring. The boy came back several years later and settled here in Reykjavik. Had a family. He died about 2,0 years ago.”
“What about Solveig and the baby?”
“Solveig was ordered to have an abortion but she refused. Refused to get rid of the baby. Then one day she disappeared.”
Bara turned round to face Elinborg.
“You could say it destroyed us, that summer trip to Fljot. Destroyed us as a family. It has certainly shaped my whole life. Covering up. Family pride. It was taboo. We could never mention it. My mother made sure of that. I know that she talked to Benjamin, later. Explained the matter to him. That made Solveig’s death nobody’s business but her own. Solveig’s, that is. Her secret, her choice. We were all right. We were pure and respectable. She went mad and threw herself into the sea.”
Elinborg looked at Bara and suddenly felt pity for the lie that she had been forced to live.
“She did it by herself,” Bara went on. “Nothing to do with us. It was her business.”
Elinborg nodded.
“She’s not lying up there on the hill,” Bara said. “She’s lying on the bottom of the sea and she’s been there for more than 60 terrible years.”
Erlendur sat down beside Eva Lind after talking to her doctor, who said the same as before: her condition was unchanged, only time could tell the outcome. He sat at his daughter’s bedside, wondering what to talk to her about this time, but could not make up his mind.
Time went by. The intensive care ward was quiet. Occasionally a doctor walked past the door, or a nurse in soft white shoes that squeaked against the linoleum.
That squeaking.
Erlendur watched his daughter and, almost automatically, started to talk to her in a low voice, telling her about a missing person that he had puzzled over for a long time and perhaps, even after all those years, had yet to understand fully.