“So no photograph ever appeared in the papers or on television when he was declared missing?”
“No, but they gave a detailed description. They were going to use the photo from his driving licence. They said they always kept copies of licences, but then they couldn’t find it. Like he hadn’t handed it in, or they’d mislaid it.”
“Did you ever see his driving licence?”
“Driving licence? No, not that I remember. Why were you asking about another woman?”
The question was delivered in a harder tone, more insistent. Erlendur hesitated before he opened the door on what, to her mind, would surely be hell itself. Maybe he had proceeded too quickly. Certain points needed closer scrutiny. Maybe he should wait.
“There are instances of men who leave their women without saying goodbye and start a new life,” he said.
“A new life?” she said, as if the concept was beyond her comprehension.
“Yes,” he said. “Even here in Iceland. People think that everyone knows everyone else, but that’s a long way from the truth. There are plenty of towns and villages that few people ever visit, except perhaps at the height of summer, maybe not even then. In the old days they were even more isolated than today — some were even half cut-off. Transportation was much worse then.”
“I don’t follow,” she said. “What are you getting at?”
“I just wanted to know if you’d ever contemplated that possibility.”
“What possibility?”
“That he got on a coach and went home,” Erlendur said.
He watched her trying to fathom the unfathomable.
“What are you talking about?” she groaned. “Home? Home where? What do you mean?”
He could see that he had overstepped the mark. That despite all the years that had gone by since the man disappeared from her life, an unhealed wound still remained, fresh and open. He wished he had not gone so far. He should not have approached her at such an early stage. Without having anything more tangible than his own fantasies and an empty car outside the coach station.
“It’s just one of the hypotheses,” he said in an effort to cushion the impact of his words. “Of course, Iceland’s too small for anything like that,” he hurried to say. “It’s just an idea, with no real foundation.”
Erlendur had spent a long time wondering what could possibly have happened if the man had not committed suicide. When the notion of another woman began to take root in his mind he started losing sleep. At first the hypothesis could not have been simpler: on his travels around Iceland the salesman had met all sorts of people from different walks of life: farmers, hotel staff, residents of towns and fishing villages, women. Conceivably he had found a girlfriend on one of his trips and in time came to prefer her to the one in Reykjavik, but lacked the courage to tell her so.
The more Erlendur thought about the matter, the more he tended to believe that, if another woman was involved, the man must have had a stronger motive to make himself disappear; he had started to think about a word that entered his mind outside the abandoned farm in Mosfellsbaer that had reminded him of his own house in east Iceland.
Home.
They had discussed this at the office. What if they reversed the paradigm? What if the woman facing him now had been Leopold’s girlfriend in Reykjavik, but he had a family somewhere else? What if he had decided to put an end to the dilemma he had got himself into, and settled for going home?
He sketched for the woman the broad outlines of these ideas and noticed how a dark cloud gradually descended over her.
“He wasn’t in any trouble,” she said. “That’s just nonsense you’re coming out with. How could you think of such a thing? Talking about the man like that.”
“His name isn’t very common,” Erlendur said. “There are only a handful of men with that name in the whole country. Leopold. You didn’t know his ID number. You have very few of his personal belongings.”
Erlendur fell silent. He remembered that Niels had kept from her the indications that Leopold had not used his real name. That he had tricked her and claimed to be someone he was not. Niels had not told Asta about these suspicions because he felt sorry for her. Now, Erlendur understood what he meant.
“Perhaps he didn’t use his real name,” he said. “Did that ever occur to you? He was not officially registered under that name. He can’t be found in the records.”
“Someone from the police called me,” the woman said angrily. “Later. Much later. By the name of Briem or something like that. Told me about your theory that Leopold might not have been who he claimed to be. Said I should have been told immediately, but that there had been a delay. I’ve heard your ideas and they’re ridiculous. Leopold would never have sailed under a false flag. Never.”
Erlendur said nothing.
“You’re trying to tell me he might have had a family that he went back to. That I was only his fiancee in the city? What kind of rubbish is that?”
“What do you know about this man?” Erlendur persisted. “What do you really know about him? Is it very much?”
“Don’t talk like that,” she said. “Please don’t put such stupid notions to me. You can keep your opinions to yourself. I’m not interested in hearing them.”
Asta stopped talking and stared at him.
“I’m not—” Erlendur began, but she interrupted him.
“Do you mean he’s still alive? Is that what you’re saying? That he’s still alive? Living in some village?”
“No,” Erlendur said. “I’m not saying that. I just want to explore that possibility with you. None of what I’ve been saying is any more than guesswork. There needn’t be any grounds for it, and at the moment there are no grounds for it. I only wanted to know if you could recall anything that might give us reason for supposing so. That’s all. I’m not saying anything is the case because I don’t know anything is the case.”
“You’re just talking rubbish,” she said. “As if he’d just been fooling around with me. Why do I have to listen to this?!”
While Erlendur tried to convince her, a strange thought slipped into his mind. From now on, after what he had said and could not retract, it would be much greater consolation for the woman to know that the man was dead, rather than to find him alive. That would cause her immeasurable grief. He looked at her, and she seemed to be thinking something similar.
“Leopold’s dead,” she said. “There’s no point telling me otherwise. To me, he’s dead. Died years ago. A whole lifetime ago.”
They both fell silent.
“But what do you know about the man?” Erlendur repeated after some while. “In actual fact?”
Her look implied that she wanted to tell him to give up and go.
“Do you seriously mean that he was called something else and wasn’t using his real name?” she said.
“Nothing of what I’ve said need necessarily have happened,” Erlendur emphasised once again. “The most likely explanation, unfortunately, is that for some reason he killed himself.”
“What do we know about other people?” she suddenly said. “He was a quiet type and didn’t talk much about himself. Some people are full of themselves. I don’t know if that’s any better. He said a lot of lovely things to me that no one had ever told me before. I wasn’t brought up in that kind of family. Where people said nice things.”
“You never wanted to start again? Find a new man. Get married. Have a family.”
“I was past thirty when we met. I thought I’d end up an old maid. My time would run out. That was never the plan, but somehow that was how it turned out. Then you reach a certain age and all you have is yourself in an empty room. That’s why he… he changed that. And even though he didn’t say much and was away a lot, he was still my man.”