Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg said nothing.
“Nothing in their lives suggests anything is wrong,” Erlendur went on. “Nothing suggests that he’s depressed. He’s going to fetch her after work. Then he doesn’t arrive. He leaves work to meet someone but doesn’t show up and disappears for ever. There are hints that he may have caught a coach out of the city. There are other signs that he committed suicide. That would be the most obvious explanation for his disappearance. Many Icelanders suffer serious depression, although most keep it well concealed. And there’s always the possibility that someone did him in.”
“Isn’t it just a suicide?” Elinborg asked.
“We have no official record of a man by the name of Leopold who went missing at that time,” Erlendur said. “It seems he was lying to his girlfriend. Niels, who was in charge of the case, thought nothing of his disappearance. He even believed that the man lived somewhere else but had been having an affair in Reykjavik. If it wasn’t just a straightforward suicide.”
“So he had a family out in the countryside and the woman in Reykjavik was his mistress?” Elinborg said. “Isn’t that reading a bit too much into his car being found outside the coach station?”
“You mean he might have got himself back home to the other end of the country and stopped shagging in Reykjavik?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Shagging in Reykjavik!” Elinborg fumed. “How can poor Bergthora stand you?”
“That theory needn’t be any more daft than any of the others,” Erlendur said.
“Can you get away with bigamy in Iceland?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“No,” Elinborg said firmly. “There are too few of us.”
“In America they make public announcements about guys like that,” Sigurdur Oli said. “They have special programmes about that type of missing person, criminals and bigamists. Some murder their family, disappear, then start a new one.”
“Naturally, it’s easier to hide in America,” Elinborg said.
“That may well be,” Erlendur said. “But isn’t it simple enough to lead a double life even for a while in a small community? He spent a lot of time in rural places, this man, weeks on end sometimes. He met a woman in Reykjavik and maybe he fell in love or maybe she was just a fling. When the relationship became serious he decided to break it off.”
“A sweet little urban love story,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“I wonder if the woman from the dairy shop had considered that possibility,” Erlendur said thoughtfully.
“Didn’t they announce that this Leopold had gone missing?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
Erlendur had already checked and found a brief announcement in the newspapers describing the man’s disappearance, along with a request for anyone who had seen him to contact the police. It gave a description of what he was wearing, his height and the colour of his hair.
“It led nowhere,” Erlendur said. “He’d never been photographed. Niels said to me that they never told the woman they couldn’t find any record of him.”
“They didn’t tell her that?” Elinborg said.
“You know what Niels is like,” Erlendur said. “If he can avoid trouble, he does. He had the feeling that the woman had been duped and I’m sure he felt she’d been through enough. I don’t know. He’s not particularly…”
Erlendur did not finish the sentence.
“Maybe he’d found a new girlfriend,” Elinborg suggested, “and didn’t dare tell her. There’s no greater coward than a cheating male.”
“Here we go,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Didn’t he travel around the country selling, what, agricultural machinery?” Elinborg said. “Wasn’t he always roaming the farms and villages? Perhaps we can’t rule out that he met someone and started a new life. Didn’t dare tell his girlfriend in Reykjavik.”
“And has been in hiding ever since?” Sigurdur Oli interjected.
“Of course things were completely different in 1970,” Erlendur said. “It took a whole day to drive to Akureyri — the main road around Iceland hadn’t been finished. Transportation was much worse and regional communities were much more isolated.”
“You mean there were all kinds of nowhere places that nobody ever visited,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“I once heard a story about a woman,” Elinborg said, “who had this terrific boyfriend and everything was just fine until one day when he phoned her and said he was breaking it off, and after beating about the bush a bit he admitted he was going to marry someone else the next week. His girlfriend never heard any more of him. Like I say: there’s no limit to what creeps men can be.”
“So why was Leopold in Reykjavik under false pretences?” Erlendur asked. “If he didn’t dare tell his girlfriend that he’d met someone outside the city and started a new life? Why this game of hide-and-seek?”
“What does anyone know about these characters?” Elinborg said in a resigned tone.
They all fell silent.
“What about the body in the lake?” Erlendur finally asked.
“I think we’re looking for a foreigner,” Elinborg said. “It’s ridiculous to think it’s an Icelander with Russian spy equipment tied around him. I just can’t imagine it.”
“The Cold War,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Weird times.”
“Yes, weird times,” Erlendur said.
“To me, the Cold War was always the fear of the end of the world,” Elinborg said. “I always remember thinking that. Somehow you could never escape it. Doomsday constantly looming over you. That’s the only Cold War I knew.”
“One little fuse blows and ka-boom!” Sigurdur Oli said.
“That fear has to come out somewhere,” Erlendur said. “In what we do. In what we are.”
“You mean in suicides, like the man who drove the Falcon?” Elinborg said.
“Unless he’s alive and well and happily married in Sheepsville,” Sigurdur Oli said. He rolled up his baguette wrapping and threw it on the floor beside a nearby rubbish bin.
When Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg had left, Erlendur’s phone rang. On the other end was a man he did not recognise.
“Is that Erlendur?” the voice said, deep and angry.
“Yes — who is this?” Erlendur said.
“I want to ask you to leave my wife alone,” the voice said.
“Your wife?”
The words caught Erlendur completely off guard. It did not occur to him that the voice was talking about Valgerdur.
“Understand?” the voice said. “I know what you’re up to and I want you to stop.”
“It’s up to her what she does,” Erlendur said when it finally registered that this was Valgerdur’s husband. He remembered what Valgerdur had said about his affair and how meeting Erlendur had initially been an attempt on her part to get even with him.
“You leave her alone,” the voice said, more menacingly.
“Get lost,” Erlendur said and slammed down the phone.
15
Omar, the retired director general of the Foreign Ministry, was about eighty, completely bald, nimble and clearly pleased to have visitors; he had a broad face with a large mouth and chin. He complained bitterly to Erlendur and Elinborg about having been forced to retire when he turned seventy, still in fine fettle and with his capacity for work unimpaired. He lived in a large flat in Kringlumyri which he said he had swapped his house for after his wife died.
Several weeks had passed since the hydrologist from the Energy Authority had stumbled across the skeleton. It was now June and unusually warm and sunny. The city had unwound after the gloom of winter, people dressed more lightly and seemed somehow happier. Cafes had put out tables and chairs on the pavements in the continental fashion and people sat in the sunshine drinking beer. Sigurdur Oli was taking his summer holiday and barbecued whenever the chance arose. He invited Erlendur and Elinborg over. Erlendur was reluctant. He had not heard from Eva Lind but thought she was no longer in therapy. As far as he knew she had completed it. Sindri Snaer had not been in touch.