“Do have some haddock,” he said when Erlendur followed him into the kitchen.
Erlendur declined firmly but Hermann ignored him and set a place at the table, and before he knew it he was sitting down with a complete stranger, eating softboiled haddock and buttered potatoes. They both ate the skin of the haddock and the skin of the potatoes, and for an instant Erlendur’s thoughts turned to Elinborg and her cookery book. When she’d been working on it she had used him as a guinea pig for fresh monkfish with lime sauce, yellow from the quarter-kilo of butter she had put in it. It took Elinborg all day and night to boil down the fish stock until only four tablespoons remained on the bottom, essence of monkfish; she had stayed up all night to skim off the froth from the water. The sauce is everything, was Elinborg’s motto. Erlendur smiled to himself. Hermann’s haddock was delicious.
“I did that Falcon up,” Hermann said, putting a large piece of potato in his mouth. He was a car mechanic and for a hobby he restored old cars and then tried to sell them. It was becoming increasingly difficult, he told Erlendur. No one was interested in old cars any more, only new Range Rovers that never faced tougher conditions than a traffic jam on the way to the city centre.
“Do you still own it?” Erlendur asked.
“I sold it in 1987,” Hermann said. “I’ve got a 1979 Chrysler now, quite a limo really. I’ve been under its bonnet for, what, six years.”
“Will you get anything for it?”
“Nothing,” said Hermann, offering him some coffee. “And I don’t want to sell it either.”
“You didn’t register the Falcon when you owned it.”
“No,” Hermann said. “It never had plates when it was here. I fiddled about with it for a few years and that was fun. I drove it around the neighbourhood and if I wanted to take it to Thingvellir or somewhere I borrowed the plates from my own car. I didn’t think it was worth paying the insurance.”
“We couldn’t find it registered anywhere,” Erlendur said, “so the new owner hasn’t bought licence plates for it either.”
Hermann filled two cups.
“That needn’t be the case,” Hermann said. “Maybe he gave up and got rid of it.”
“Tell me something else. The hubcaps on the Falcon, were they special somehow, in demand?”
Erlendur had asked Elinborg to check the Internet for him and on ford.com they had found photographs of old Ford Falcons. One was black and when Elinborg printed out the image for him, the hubcaps stood out very clearly.
“They were quite fancy,” Hermann said thoughtfully. “Those hubcaps on American cars.”
“One hubcap was missing,” Erlendur said. “At the time.”
“Really?”
“Did you buy a new hubcap when you got it?”
“No, one of the previous owners had bought a new set a long time before. The originals weren’t on when I bought it.”
“Was it a remarkable car, the Falcon?”
“The remarkable thing about it was that it wasn’t big,” Hermann said. “It wasn’t a monster like most American cars. Like my Chrysler. The Falcon was small and compact and good to drive. Not a luxury car at all. Far from it.”
The current owner turned out to be a widow a few years older than Erlendur. She lived in Kopavogur. Her husband, a furniture maker with a fad for cars, had died of a heart attack a few years before.
“It was in good condition,” she said, opening the garage for Erlendur, who was unsure whether she was talking about the car or her husband’s heart. The car was covered with a thick canvas sheet which Erlendur asked if he could remove. The woman nodded.
“My husband took a great deal of care over that car,” she said in a weak voice. “He spent all his time out here. Bought really expensive parts for it. Travelled all over the place to find them.”
“Did he ever drive it?” Erlendur asked as he struggled to untie a knot.
“Only around the block,” the woman said. “It looks nice but my boys aren’t interested in it and they haven’t managed to sell it. There aren’t many veteran-car enthusiasts these days. My husband was going to put plates on it when he died. He died in his workshop. He used to work alone and when he didn’t come home for dinner and wouldn’t answer the phone I sent my son round; he found him lying on the floor.”
“That must have been difficult,” Erlendur said.
“There’s heart trouble in his family,” the woman said. “His mother went that way and so did his cousin.”
She watched Erlendur fiddling with the canvas. She did not give the impression of missing her husband much. Perhaps she had overcome her grief and was trying to make a new start.
“What is it with this car, anyway?” she asked.
She had asked the same question when Erlendur telephoned and he could still not find a way to tell her why he was interested in the car without saying what the case involved. He wanted to avoid going into details. Not say too much for the time being. He hardly knew why he was chasing after the car, or whether it would prove useful.
“It was once connected with a police matter,” Erlendur said reluctantly. “I just wanted to know if it was still around, in one piece.”
“Was it a famous case?” she asked.
“No, not at all. Not famous in the least,” Erlendur said.
“Do you want to buy it or…?” the woman asked.
“No,” Erlendur said. “I don’t want to buy it. Old cars don’t interest me as such.”
“As I say, it’s in good condition. Valdi, my husband, said the main trouble was the underseal. It had gone rusty and he had to fix it. Otherwise it was all right. Valdi stripped the engine down, scrubbed every bit of it and bought new parts if he needed them.”
She paused.
“He didn’t mind spending money on the car,” she said eventually. “Never bought me anything. But men are like that.”
Erlendur tugged at the sheet, which slipped off the car and onto the floor. For a moment he stood looking along the beautiful sleek lines of the Ford Falcon that had been owned by the man who had disappeared outside the coach station. He knelt down beside one of the front wheels. Assuming that the hubcap was missing when the car was discovered, he wondered where it could possibly have ended up.
His mobile rang in his pocket. It was forensics with information about the Russian equipment in Kleifarvatn. Skipping all the formalities, the head of forensics told him that the device did not appear to have been functional when it was put in the lake.
“Oh?” Erlendur said.
“Yes,” the head of forensics said. “It was certainly useless before it went into the water. The lake bed is porous sand and the contents of the container are too damaged to be explained by it having lain in water. It wasn’t working when it got there.”
“What does that tell us?” Erlendur asked.
“Don’t have the foggiest,” the head of forensics said.
13
The couple walked along the pavement, the man slightly ahead of the woman. It was a glorious spring evening. Rays of sunshine fell on the surface of the sea and in the distance showers of rain tumbled down. It was as if the couple were impervious to the evening’s beauty. They strode forward, the man seemingly agitated. He talked incessantly. His wife followed silently, trying not to be left behind.
He watched them pass his window, looked at the evening sun and thought back to when he was young and the world was beginning to become so infinitely complex and unmanageable.
When the tragedy began.
He completed his first year at the university with flying colours and went back to Iceland in the summer. During the vacation he worked for the party newspaper, writing articles about the reconstruction of Leipzig. At meetings he described being a student there and discussed Iceland’s historical and cultural links with the city. He met leading party members. They had big plans for him. He looked forward to going back. He felt he had a role to play, perhaps a greater one than others. It was said that he was highly promising.