The buildings were still standing. Summer chalets had been built here and there on the old farmland. Judging from the trees growing around some of them, they had been there some time. Others were recent. Erlendur saw a golf course in the distance. Although it was late in the evening, he could see a few souls hitting balls, then strolling after them in the warm sun.
The farm buildings were dilapidated. A small farmhouse and sheds near it. The house was clad with corrugated iron. At one time it had been painted yellow, but the colour had almost entirely faded. Rusty corrugated-metal sheets were hung on the outside of the house; others had surrendered to the wind and weather and fallen to the ground. Most of the roofing sheets had been blown out to sea, Erlendur imagined. All the windows were broken and the front door was missing. Nearby stood the ruins of a small toolshed adjoining a cattle shed and barn.
He stood in front of the ruined farmhouse. It was almost like his childhood home.
Stepping inside, he entered a small hallway, then a narrow corridor. On the right was a kitchen and a laundry room, and a little pantry was to the left. An antiquated Icelandic cooker was still in the kitchen, with three hotplates and a small oven, rusted through. At the end of the corridor were two bedrooms and a living room. The floorboards creaked in the quiet of the evening. He did not know what he was looking for. He did not know why he had come there.
He went down to the sheds. Looking along the row of stalls in the cattle shed and into the barn, he could see a dirt floor. When he walked around the corner he could make out traces of a dung heap behind the cattle shed. A door hung on the toolshed, but when he pulled at it, it came off its hinges, fell to the ground and broke with what sounded like a heavy groan. Inside the toolshed were racks with little compartments for screws, nuts and bolts, and nails on the walls to hang tools from. The tools were nowhere to be seen. The brothers had doubtless taken everything serviceable with them when they moved to Reykjavik. A broken workbench was propped at an angle against the wall. A tractor bonnet rested on a heap of indeterminate iron objects on the floor. A felloe from the rear wheel of a tractor lay over in one corner.
Erlendur walked farther inside the toolshed. Did he come here, the driver of the Falcon? Or did he take a coach to some rural destination? If he did come here, what was he thinking? It had been late in the day when he’d left Reykjavik. He’d known that he did not have much time. She would wait for him in front of the dairy shop and he did not want to be late. But he did not want to rush the brothers. They were interested in buying a tractor from him. It would not take much to clinch the sale. But he did not want to give the impression of being pushy. It could jeopardise the deal if he appeared overexcited. Yet he was in a hurry. He wanted to get it all finished.
If he did come here, why didn’t the brothers say so? Why should they be lying? They had no vested interests. They did not know the man in the least. And why was one hubcap missing from his car? Had it fallen off? Was it stolen outside the coach station? Was it stolen here?
If he was the man in the lake with a broken skull, how did he end up there? Where did the device tied to him come from? Was it relevant that he sold tractors and machinery from the Eastern bloc? Was there a connection?
Erlendur’s mobile rang in his pocket.
“Yes,” he answered curtly.
“You leave me alone,” said a voice he knew well. He knew the voice particularly well when it was in this state.
“I intend to,” he said.
“You do that, then,” the voice said. “You leave me alone from here on. Just stop interfering in my life for—”
He rang off. It was more difficult to switch off the voice. It echoed in his head: stoned, angry and repulsive. He knew that she must be in a den somewhere with someone whose name might be Eddi and was twice her age. He tried not to think about the life she led in too much detail. He had repeatedly done everything in his power to help her. He did not know what else to try. He was completely at a loss about his junkie daughter. Once he would have tried to locate her. Run off and found her. Once he would have persuaded himself that when she said “leave me alone” she actually meant “come and help me’. Not any more. He did not want to any more. He wanted to tell her: “It’s over. You can take care of yourself.”
She had moved in with him that Christmas. By then, after a short break when she’d had a miscarriage and been confined to hospital, she had begun taking drugs again. In the New Year he could sense her restlessness and she would disappear for varying lengths of time. He went after her and took her back home, but the next morning she would be gone. It went on like that until he stopped chasing her, stopped pretending that it made any difference what he did. It was her life. If she chose to live it in that way, that was up to her. He was incapable of doing more. He had not heard of her for more than two months when she hit Sigurdur Oli on the shoulder with the hammer.
He stood out in the yard looking over the ruins of a life that once had been. He thought about the man who owned the Falcon. About the woman who was still waiting for him. He thought about his own daughter and son. He looked into the evening sun and thought about his dead brother. What had he been thinking about in the blizzard?
How cold it was?
How nice it would be to get back home into the warm?
The next morning, Erlendur went back to the woman waiting for the man who drove the Falcon. It was a Saturday and she was not working. He rang in advance and she had coffee ready for him, even though he had specifically asked her not to go to any trouble for him. They sat down in her living room as before. Her name was Asta.
“Of course, you always work weekends,” she said, adding that she worked in the kitchen at the City Hospital in Fossvogur.
“Yes, things are often busy,” he said, taking care not to answer her in too much detail. He could have taken this weekend off. But the Falcon case had piqued his curiosity and he felt a strange, pressing need to get to the bottom of it. He did not know why. Perhaps for the sake of the woman sitting opposite him who had done menial work all her life, who still lived alone and whose weary expression reflected how life had passed her by. It was just as if she thought that the man she had once loved would come back to her, as he had before, kiss her, tell her about his day at work and ask how she had been doing.
“The last time we came you said you didn’t believe that another woman was involved,” he said cautiously.
On the way to see her, he had had second thoughts. He did not want to ruin her memories. He did not want to destroy anything she clung to. He had seen that happen so often before. When they arrived at the home of a criminal whose wife just stared at them, unable to believe her own eyes and ears. The children behind her. Her fortress crumbling all around her. My husband! Selling drugs? You must be mad!
“Why are you asking about that?” the woman said, sitting in her chair. “Do you know more than I do? Have you found out something? Have you uncovered something new?”
“No, nothing,” Erlendur said, flinching inwardly when he sensed the eagerness in her voice. He described his visit to Haraldur and how he had located the Falcon, still in good shape and stored away in a garage in Kopavogur. He also told her that he had visited an abandoned farm near Mosfellsbaer. Her partner’s disappearance, however, remained as much a mystery as ever.
“You said you had no photographs of him, or of you together,” he said.
“No, that’s right,” Asta said. “We’d known each other for such a short time.”