Sindri looked along the bookshelves in the living room. There was almost nothing but books in the flat.
Erlendur’s expression remained unchanged, his eyes cold as marble.
“Eva said you were always looking into missing persons,” Sindri said.
“Yes,” Erlendur said.
“Is it because of your brother?”
“Perhaps. Probably.”
“Eva said you told her you were her missing person.”
“Yes,” Erlendur said. “Just because people disappear doesn’t mean they’re necessarily dead,” he added, and into his mind came the image of a black Ford Falcon outside Reykjavik coach station, one hubcap missing.
Sindri did not want to stay. Erlendur invited him to sleep on the sofa but Sindri declined and they said goodbye. For a long while after his son had left, Erlendur sat in his chair wondering about his brother and Eva Lind — the little he remembered of her from when she was small. She was two when they separated. Sindri’s description of her childhood had struck a nerve and he saw his strained relationship with Eva in a different, sadder light.
When he fell asleep, shortly after midnight, he was still thinking about his brother and Eva and himself and Sindri, and he dreamed a bizarre dream. The three of them, him and his children, had gone out for a drive. The kids were in the rear and he was behind the wheel, and he could not tell where they were because there was bright light all around them and he couldn’t make out the landscape. Yet he still felt the car was moving and that he needed to steer it more carefully than usual because he could not see. Looking in the rear-view mirror at the children sitting behind him, he could not distinguish their faces. They looked as if they might be Sindri and Eva, but their faces were somehow blurred or wreathed in fog. He thought to himself that the children could not be anyone else. Eva did not look more than four years old. He saw that they were holding hands.
The radio was on and a seductive female voice was singing:
I know tonight you’ll come to me …
Suddenly he saw a gigantic lorry heading for him. He tried to sound the horn and slam on the brakes but nothing happened. In the rear-view mirror he noticed that the children had gone and felt an indescribable sense of relief. He looked out at the road ahead. He was approaching the lorry at full speed. A crash was inevitable.
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?”