She sighed.
“Later it was like he’d never existed.”
They had read the reports. She reported his disappearance early the following morning. The police went to her home. He was reported missing in the newspapers and on radio and television. The police told her he would surely turn up soon. Asked whether he drank or whether he had ever disappeared like this before, whether she knew about another woman in his life. She denied all these suggestions but the questions made her consider the man in completely different terms. Was there another woman? Had he ever been unfaithful? He was a salesman who drove all over the country. He sold agricultural equipment and machinery, tractors, hay blowers, diggers and bull-dozers, and travelled a lot. Maybe several weeks at a time on the longest trips. He had just returned from one when he disappeared.
“I don’t know what he could have been doing up at Kleifarvatn,” she said, glancing from one detective to the other. “We never went there.”
They had not told her about the Soviet spying equipment or the smashed skull, only that a skeleton had been found where the lake had drained and that they were investigating persons reported missing during a specific period.
“Your car was found two days later outside the coach station,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“No one there recognised my partner from the descriptions,” the woman said. “I had no photos of him. And he had none of me. We hadn’t been together that long and we didn’t own a camera. We never went away together. Isn’t that when people mostly use cameras?”
“And at Christmas,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Yes, at Christmas,” she agreed.
“What about his parents?”
“They’d died long before. He’d spent a lot of time abroad. He’d worked on merchant ships and lived in Britain and France too. He spoke with a slight accent, he’d been away that long. About thirty coaches left the station heading all over Iceland between the time he disappeared and when the car was found, but none of the drivers could say if he had been on board one. They didn’t think so. The police were certain that someone would have noticed him if he’d been on a coach, but I know they were just trying to console me. I think they supposed he was on a bender in town and would turn up in the end. They said worried wives sometimes called the police when their husbands were out drinking.”
The woman fell silent.
“I don’t think they investigated it very carefully,” she eventually said. “I didn’t feel they were particularly interested in the case.”
“Why do you think he took the car to the coach station?” Erlendur asked. He noticed Sigurdur Oli jotting down the remark about the police work.
“I haven’t got the faintest idea.”
“Do you think someone else could have driven it there? To throw you off the track, or the police? To make people think he’d left town?”
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “Of course I wondered endlessly whether he had simply been killed, but I don’t understand who was supposed to have done it and even less why. I just can’t understand it.”
“It’s often plain coincidence,” Erlendur said. “There needn’t always be an explanation. In Iceland there’s rarely a real motive behind a murder. It’s an accident or a snap decision, not premeditated and in most cases committed for no obvious reason.”
According to police reports, the man had gone on a short sales trip early that day and intended to go home afterwards. A dairy farmer just outside Reykjavik was interested in buying a tractor and he was planning to drop by to try to clinch the sale. The farmer said the man had never called. He had waited for him all day, but he had never showed up.
“Everything seems hunky-dory, then he makes himself disappear,” Sigurdur Oli said. “What do you personally think happened?”
“He didn’t make himself disappear,” the woman retorted. “Why do you say that?”
“No, sorry,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Of course not. He disappeared. Sorry.”
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “He could be a bit depressive at times, silent and closed. Perhaps if we’d had children… maybe it would all have turned out differently if we’d had children.”
They fell silent. Erlendur imagined the woman waiting outside the dairy shop, anxious and disappointed.
“Was he in contact with any embassies in Reykjavik at all?” Erlendur asked.
“Embassies?”
“Yes, the embassies,” Erlendur said. “Did he have any connections with them, the Eastern European ones in particular?”
“Not at all,” the woman said. “I don’t follow… what do you mean?”
“He didn’t know anyone from the embassies, work for them or that sort of thing?”
“No, certainly not, or at least not after I met him. Not that I knew of.”
“What kind of car did you have?” Erlendur asked. He could not remember the model from the files.
The woman pondered. These strange questions were confusing her.
“It was a Ford,” she said. “I think it was called a Falcon.”
“From the case files, it doesn’t look as if there were any clues to his disappearance in the car.”
“No, they couldn’t find anything. One of the hubcaps had been stolen, but that was all.”
“In front of the coach station?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“That’s what they thought.”
“A hubcap?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to the car?”
“I sold it. I needed the money. I’ve never had much money.”
She remembered the licence plate and mechanically repeated the number to them. Sigurdur Oli wrote it down. Erlendur gestured to him, they stood up and thanked her for her time. The woman stayed put in her chair. He thought she was bitterly lonely.
“Where did all the machinery he sold come from?” Erlendur asked, for the sake of saying something.
“The farm machinery? It came from Russia and East Germany. He said it wasn’t as good as the American stuff, but much cheaper.”
Erlendur could not imagine what Sindri Snaer wanted from him. His son was completely different from his sister Eva, who felt Erlendur had not pressed hard enough for the right to see his children. They would never have known he existed if their mother had not been forever bad-mouthing him. When Eva grew up she tracked down her father and vented her anger mercilessly. Sindri Snaer did not seem to have the same agenda. He neither grilled Erlendur about destroying their family nor condemned him for taking no interest in him and Eva when they were just children who believed their father was bad for walking out on them.
When Erlendur got home Sindri was boiling spaghetti. He had tidied up the kitchen, which meant he had thrown away a few microwave-meal packets, washed a couple of forks and cleaned inside and around the coffee machine. Erlendur went into the living room and watched the television news. The skeleton from Lake Kleifarvatn was the fifth item. The police had taken care not to mention the Soviet equipment.
They sat in silence, eating the spaghetti. Erlendur chopped it up with his fork and spread it with butter while Sindri pursed his lips and sucked it up with tomato ketchup. Erlendur asked how his mother was doing and Sindri said he had not heard from her since he’d come to the city. A chat show was starting on the television. A pop star was recounting his triumphs in life.
“Eva told me at New Year that you had a brother who died,” Sindri said suddenly, wiping his mouth with a piece of kitchen roll.
“That’s right,” Erlendur said after some thought. He had not been expecting this.
“Eva said it had a big effect on you.”
“That’s right.”
“And explains a bit what you’re like.”