“What do you mean?”
“Either all the records about him had gone missing or…”
“Or he was deceiving her?”
“He couldn’t have been called Leopold, at least,” Niels said.
“What did she say to that? What did his girlfriend say when you asked her about it?”
“We had the feeling he’d been pulling a fast one on her,” Niels said eventually. “We felt sorry for her. She didn’t even have a photograph of him. What does that tell you? She didn’t know a thing about that man.”
“So?”
“We didn’t tell her.”
“You didn’t tell her what?”
“That we had no files about this Leopold of hers,” Niels said. “It looked cut and dried to us. He lied to her, then walked out on her.”
Erlendur sat in silence while he tried to work out the implications of what Niels had told him.
“Out of consideration for her,” Niels said.
“And she still doesn’t know?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why did you keep it a secret?”
“Probably for the sake of kindness.”
“She’s still sitting waiting for him,” Erlendur said. “They were going to get married.”
“That was what he convinced her of before he left.”
“What if he was murdered?”
“We considered it very unlikely. It’s a rare scenario, but admittedly not unknown: men lie their way into women’s lives, get… how should I put it, comfortable, then disappear. I think she knew deep down. We didn’t need to tell her.”
“What about the car?”
“It was in her name. The loan for it was in her name. She owned the car.”
“You should have told her.”
“Perhaps. But would she have been any better off? She would have learned that the man she loved was a confidence trickster. He told her nothing about his family. She knew nothing about him. He had no friends. Forever on sales trips all over the countryside. What does that tell you?”
“She knew that she loved him,” Erlendur said.
“And that’s how he paid her back.”
“What did the farmer say, the one he was going to meet?”
“That’s all in the files,” Niels said, with a nod and a smile at Elinborg, who was deep in conversation with her publisher. Elinborg had once mentioned that his name was Anton.
“Come on, not everything goes into the files.”
“He never met the farmer,” Niels said, and Erlendur could see how he was trying to recall the details of the case. They all remembered the big cases, the murders or disappearances, every single major arrest, every single assault and rape.
“Couldn’t you tell from the Falcon whether or not he met the farmer?”
“We didn’t find anything in the car to indicate that he’d been to the farm.”
“Did you take samples from the floor by the front seats? Under the pedals?”
“It’s in the files.”
“I didn’t see it. You could have established whether he visited the farmer. He would have picked stuff up on his shoes.”
“It wasn’t a complicated case, Erlendur. Nobody wanted to turn it into one. The man made himself vanish. Maybe he bumped himself off. We don’t always find the bodies. You know that. Even if we had found something under the pedals, it could have been from anywhere. He travelled around the country a lot. Selling agricultural machinery.”
“What did they say at his work?”
Niels thought about the question.
“It was such a long time ago, Erlendur.”
“Try to remember.”
“He wasn’t on the payroll, I remember that much, which was rare in those days. He was on commission and worked on a freelance basis.”
“Which means he would have had to pay his taxes himself.”
“As I said, there was no mention of him in the records under the name Leopold. Not a thing.”
“So you reckon he kept that woman when he was in Reykjavik but, what, lived somewhere else?”
“Or even had a family,” Niels said. “There are blokes like that.”
Erlendur sipped his wine and looked at the perfect tie knot under Niels’s shirt collar. He was not a good detective. To him, no case was ever complicated.
“You should have told her the truth.”
“That may well be, but she had happy memories of him. We concluded that it wasn’t a criminal matter. The disappearance was never investigated as a murder because no clues were found to warrant it.”
They stopped talking. The guests” murmuring had become a solid wall of noise.
“You’re still into these missing persons,” Niels said. “Why this interest? What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Erlendur said.
“It was a routine disappearance,” Niels said. “Something else was needed to turn it into a murder investigation. No clues ever emerged to give grounds for that.”
“No, probably not.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of all this?” Niels asked.
“Sometimes.”
“And your daughter, she’s always involved in the same old shit,” said Niels, with his four educated children who had all started beautiful families and lived perfect, impeccable lives, just like him.
Erlendur knew that the whole force was aware of Eva Lind’s arrest and how she had attacked Sigurdur Oli. She sometimes ended up in police custody and received no special treatment for being his daughter. Niels had clearly heard about Eva. Erlendur looked at him, his tasteful clothing and his manicured nails, and wondered whether a happy life made people even more boring than they were to start with.
“Yes,” Erlendur said. “She’s as screwed up as ever.”
12
When Erlendur got home that evening there was no Sindri to welcome him. He had still not turned up when Erlendur went to bed just before midnight. There was no message, nor a telephone number where he could be reached. Erlendur missed his company. He dialled directory enquiries, but Sindri’s mobile number was not listed.
He was falling asleep when the telephone rang. It was Eva Lind.
“You know they dope you up in here,” she said in a slurred voice.
“I was asleep,” Erlendur lied.
“They give you tablets to bring you down,” Eva said. “I’ve never been so stoned in my life. What are you doing?”
“Trying to sleep,” Erlendur said. “Were you causing trouble?”
“Sindri stopped by today,” Eva said without answering him. “He said you’d had a talk.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Isn’t he with you?”
“I think he’s left,” Erlendur said. “Maybe he’s at your mother’s. Are you allowed to make phone calls from that place whenever you like?”
“Nice to hear from you too,” Eva snarled. “And I’m not causing any fucking trouble.” She slammed the telephone down on him.
Erlendur lay staring up into the darkness. He thought about his two children, Eva Lind and Sindri Snaer, and their mother, who hated him. He thought about his brother, for whom he had been searching in vain all these years. His bones were lying somewhere. Perhaps deep in a fissure, or higher up in the mountains than he could ever imagine. Even though he had gone far up the mountainsides, trying to work out how high a boy of eight could stray in bad conditions and a blinding blizzard.
“Don’t you ever get tired of all this?”
Tired of this endless search.
Hermann Albertsson opened the door to him just before noon the following day. He was a thin man aged around sixty, nimble, wearing scruffy jeans and a red check cotton shirt, and with a broad smile that never seemed to leave his face. From the kitchen came the smell of boiled haddock. He lived alone and always had done, he told Erlendur without being asked. He smelled of brake fluid.