When it was all too late, he felt a strange presence beside him. He glanced across at the passenger seat and saw Eva Lind sitting there, staring at him and smiling. She was no longer a little girl but grown up and looking terrible in a filthy blue anorak with clumps of dirt in her hair, rings under her eyes, sunken cheeks and black lips. He noticed that, in her broad smile, some of her teeth were missing.
He wanted to say something to her but could not get the words out. Wanted to shout at her to throw herself from the car, but something held him back. Some kind of calmness about Eva Lind. Total indifference and peace. She looked away from him to the lorry and began to laugh.
An instant before they struck the lorry he started from sleep and called his daughter’s name. It took him a while to get his bearings, then he laid his head back on the pillow and a strangely melancholic song crept up on him and ushered him back to a dreamless sleep.
I know tonight you’ll come to me …
25
Niels did not remember Haraldur’s brother Johann very clearly or really understand why Erlendur was making a fuss that he went unmentioned in the reports about the missing person. Niels was on the telephone when Erlendur interrupted him in his office. He was talking to his daughter who was studying medicine in America — a postgraduate course in paediatric medicine, as a matter of fact, Niels said proudly when he got off the telephone, as if he had never told anyone this before. In fact he hardly spoke about anything else. Erlendur could not have cared less. Niels was approaching retirement and dealt mainly with petty crimes now, car theft and minor burglaries, invariably telling people to try to forget it, not press charges, that it was just a waste of time. If they found the culprits they would make a report, but to no real purpose. The offenders would be released immediately after interrogation and the case would never go to court. In the unlikely event that it did, when enough petty crimes had been accumulated, the sentence would be ridiculous and an insult to their victims.
“What do you remember about this Johann?” Erlendur asked. “Did you meet him? Did you ever go to their farm near Mosfellsbaer?”
“Shouldn’t you be investigating that Russian spying equipment?” Niels retorted, took a pair of nail clippers from his waistcoat pocket and began manicuring himself. He looked at his watch. It would soon be time for a long and leisurely lunch.
“Oh yes,” Erlendur said. “There’s plenty to do.”
Niels stopped trimming his nails and looked at him. There was something in Erlendur’s tone that he disliked.
“Johann, or Joi as his brother called him, was a bit funny,” Niels said. “He was backward, or a halfwit as you used to be allowed to say. Before the political-correctness police ironed out the language with all their polite phrases.”
“Backward how?” Erlendur asked. He agreed with Niels about the language. It had been rendered absolutely impotent out of consideration for every possible minority.
“He was just dim,” Niels said and resumed his manicure. “I went up there twice and talked to the brothers. The elder one spoke for them both — Johann didn’t say much. They were completely different. One was nothing but skin and bone with a whittled face, while the other was fatter with a sort of childish, sheepish expression.”
“I can’t quite picture Johann,” Erlendur said.
“I don’t remember him too well, Erlendur. He sort of clung on to his brother like a little boy and was always asking who we were. Could hardly talk, just stammered out the words. He was like you’d imagine a farmer from some remote valley with straw in his hair and wellington boots on his feet.”
“And Haraldur managed to persuade you that Leopold had never been to their farm?”
“They didn’t need to persuade me,” Niels said. “We found the car outside the coach station. There was nothing to suggest that he’d been with the brothers. We had nothing to work with. No more than you do.”
“You don’t reckon the brothers took the car there?”
“There was no indication of that,” Niels said. “You know these missing-persons cases. You would have done exactly the same with the information we had.”
“I located the Falcon,” Erlendur said. “I know it was years ago and the car must have been all over since then, but something that could be cow dung was found in it. It occurred to me that if you’d bothered to investigate the case properly, you might have found the man and been able to reassure the woman who was waiting for him then and has been ever since.”
“What a load of old codswallop,” Niels groaned, looking up from trimming his nails. “How can you imagine anything so stupid? Just because you found some cow shit in the car thirty years later. Are you losing it?”
“You had the chance to find something useful,” Erlendur said.
“You and your missing persons,” Niels said. “Where are you going with this, anyway? Who put you on to it? Is it a real case? Says who? Why are you reopening a thirty-year-old non-case which no one can figure out anyway, and trying to make something of it? Have you raised that woman’s hopes? Are you telling her you can find him?”
“No,” Erlendur said.
“You’re nuts,” Niels said. “I’ve always said so. Ever since you started here. I told Marion that. I don’t know what Marion saw in you.”
“I want to make a search for him in the fields out there,” Erlendur said.
“Search for him in the fields?” Niels roared in astonishment. “Are you crackers? Where are you going to look?”
“Around the farm,” Erlendur said, unruffled. “There are brooks and ditches at the bottom of the hill which lead all the way out to sea. I want to see whether we can’t find something.”
“What grounds have you got?” Niels said. “A confession? Any new developments? Bugger all. Just a lump of shit in an old heap of scrap!”
Erlendur stood up.
“I just wanted to tell you that if you plan to make a song and dance about it, I must point out how shoddy the original investigation was because there are more holes in it than a—”
“Do as you please,” Niels interrupted him with a hateful glare. “Make an arse of yourself if you want to. You’ll never get a warrant!”
Erlendur opened the door and went out into the corridor.
“Don’t cut your fingers off,” he said and closed the door behind him.
Erlendur had a brief meeting with Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg about the Lake Kleifarvatn case. The search for further information about Lothar Weiser was proving slow and difficult. All enquiries had to go through the German embassy, which Erlendur had managed to offend, and they had few leads. As a formality they sent an inquiry to Interpol and the provisional answer was that it had never heard of Lothar Weiser. Quinn from the US embassy was trying to persuade one of the Czech embassy officials from that period to talk to the Icelandic police. He could not tell what these overtures would deliver. Lothar did not seem to have associated with Icelanders very much. Enquiries among old government officials had led nowhere. The East German embassy’s guest lists had been lost a long time ago. There were no guest lists from the Icelandic authorities for those years. The detectives had no idea how to find out whether Lothar had known any Icelanders. Nobody seemed to remember the man.
Sigurdur Oli had requested help from the German embassy and Icelandic ministry of education in providing a list of Icelandic students in East Germany. Not knowing which period to focus on, he started by asking about all students from the end of the war until 1970.