Karl lived on Reynimelur in a pretty house divided into three flats with a neatly kept garden. His wife Ulrika was German and she shook Elinborg’s hand firmly. The couple wore their age well and were both fit. It might be the golf, Elinborg thought to herself. They were very surprised by this unexpected visit and looked blankly at each other when they heard the reason.
“Is it someone who studied in Leipzig that you found in the lake?” Karl asked. Ulrika went into the kitchen to make coffee.
“We don’t know,” Elinborg said. “Do either of you remember a man by the name of Lothar in Leipzig?”
Karl looked at his wife, who was standing in the kitchen doorway.
“She’s asking about Lothar,” he said.
“Lothar? What about him?”
“They think it’s him in the lake,” Karl said.
“That’s not quite right,” Elinborg said. “We aren’t suggesting that’s the case.”
“We paid him to clear everything,” Ulrika said. “Once.”
“Clear everything?”
“When Ulrika came back to Iceland with me,” Karl said. “He had influence and was able to assist us. But for a price. My parents scraped it together — and Ulrika’s parents in Leipzig too, of course.”
“And Lothar helped you?”
“Very much,” Karl said. “He charged for it so it wasn’t just a favour, and I think he helped other people too, not just us.”
“And all it involved was paying money?”
Karl and Ulrika exchanged glances and she went into the kitchen.
“He mentioned that we might be contacted later, you know. But we never were and never would have entertained the idea. Never. I was never in the party after we came back to Iceland, never went to meetings or the like. I gave up all involvement in politics. Ulrika was never political, she had an aversion to that sort of thing.”
“You mean you would have been given tasks?” Elinborg said.
“I have no idea,” Karl said. “It never came to that. We never met Lothar again. Thinking back, it’s sometimes hard to believe what we actually experienced in those years. It was a completely different world.”
“The Icelanders called it “the charade”,” Ulrika said, having rejoined them. “I always thought that was an apt way to describe it.”
“Are you in contact with your university friends at all?” Elinborg asked.
“Very little,” Karl said. “Well, we bump into each other in the street sometimes, or at birthday parties.”
“One of them was called Emil,” Elinborg said. “Do you know anything about him?”
“I don’t think he ever came back to Iceland,” Karl said. “He always lived in Germany. I haven’t seen him since… is he still alive?”
“I don’t know,” Elinborg said.
“I never liked him,” Ulrika said. “He was a bit sleazy.”
“Emil was always a loner. He didn’t know many people. He was said to do the authorities” bidding. I never saw that side of him.”
“And you don’t know anything else about this Lothar character?”
“No, nothing,” Karl said.
“Do you have any photographs of the students from Leipzig?” Elinborg asked. “Of Lothar or anyone else?”
“Not Lothar and definitely not Emil, but I do have one of Tomas and his girlfriend. Ilona. She was Hungarian.”
Karl stood up and walked across the living room to a large cupboard. He took out an old album and flicked through it until he found the photograph, which he handed to Elinborg. It was a black-and-white snap of a young couple holding hands. The sun was shining on them and they were smiling into the camera.
“It’s taken in front of Thomaskirche,” Karl said. “A few months before Ilona disappeared.”
“I heard about that,” Elinborg said.
“I was there when they came to get her,” Karl said. “It was awful. The brutality. No one found out what happened to her and I don’t think Tomas ever recovered.”
“She was very brave,” Ulrika said.
“She was a dissident,” Karl said. “That was frowned upon.”
Erlendur knocked on Haraldur’s door at the old people’s home. Breakfast had just finished and the clatter of plates could still be heard from the canteen. Sigurdur Oli was with him. They heard Haraldur shout something from inside and Erlendur opened the door. Haraldur was sitting up in bed, his head lowered, staring down at the floor. He looked up when they entered the room.
“Who’s that with you?” he asked when he saw Sigurdur Oli.
“He works with me,” Erlendur said.
Instead of greeting Sigurdur Oli, Haraldur shot him a warning look. Erlendur sat on a chair facing Haraldur. Sigurdur Oli remained standing and leaned against the wall.
The door opened and another grey-haired resident put his head in.
“Haraldur,” he said, “there’s choir practice in room eleven tonight.”
Without waiting for an answer, he closed the door again.
Erlendur gaped at Haraldur.
“Choir practice?” he said. “Surely you don’t go in for that?”
“”Choir practice” is code for a booze-up,” Haraldur grunted. “I hope I don’t disappoint you.”
Sigurdur Oli grinned to himself. He was having trouble concentrating. What he had said to Elinborg that morning was not entirely true. Bergthora had been to the doctor, who had told her that it was fifty-fifty. Bergthora had tried to be positive when she related this, but he knew that she was in torment.
“Let’s get a move on,” Haraldur said. “Maybe I didn’t tell you the whole truth, but I can’t see why you need to go around sticking your nose into other people’s affairs. But… I wanted…”
Erlendur sensed an unusual hesitation in Haraldur when the old man lifted his head to be able to look him in the face.
“Joi didn’t get enough oxygen,” he said, looking back at the floor. “That was why. At birth. They thought it was all right, he grew properly, but he turned out different. He wasn’t like the other kids.”
Sigurdur Oli indicated to Erlendur that he had no idea what the old man was talking about. Erlendur shrugged. Something about Haraldur had changed. He was not his usual self. He was in some way milder.
“It turned out that he was a bit funny,” Haraldur continued. “Simple. Backward. Kind inside but couldn’t cope, couldn’t learn, never knew how to read. It took a long time to emerge and we took a long time to accept it and come to terms with it.”
“That must have been difficult for your parents,” Erlendur said after a long silence, once Haraldur seemed unlikely to say anything else.
“I ended up looking after Joi when they died,” Haraldur said at last, his eyes trained on the floor. “We lived out there on the farm, barely scraping a living towards the end. Had nothing to sell but the land. It was worth quite a lot because it was so close to Reykjavik and we made a fair bit on the deal. We could buy a flat and still have money left over.”
“What was it you were going to tell us?” Sigurdur Oli said impatiently. Erlendur glared at him.
“My brother stole the hubcap from the car,” Haraldur said. “That was the whole crime and now you can leave me alone. That’s the long and the short of it. I don’t know how you can make such a fuss about it. After all these years. He stole a hubcap! What kind of a crime is that?”
“Are we talking about the black Falcon?” Erlendur asked.
“Yes, it was the black Falcon.”
“So Leopold did visit your farm,” Erlendur said. “You’re admitting that now.”
Haraldur nodded.
“Do you think you were right to sit on this information for your whole life?” Erlendur asked angrily. “Causing everyone unnecessary trouble?”
“Don’t you go preaching to me,” Haraldur said. “It won’t get you anywhere.”