“You’re talking about criminals. You’re always thinking about criminals. We’re your family!”
They fell silent.
“I’ve probably made mistakes,” Erlendur said at last. “Not with your mother, I think. Though I might have. I don’t know. People get divorced all the time and I found living with her unbearable. But I definitely did wrong by you and Sindri. And perhaps I didn’t even appreciate it until you found me and started visiting me, and sometimes dragged your brother along with you. Didn’t realise that I had two children I hadn’t been in touch with for the whole of their childhood, who’d gone astray so early in life, and I started wondering whether my lack of action played any part in it. I’ve thought a lot about why that was. Just like you. Why I didn’t go to court and secure my parental rights, fight tooth and nail to have you with me. Or try harder to persuade your mother and reach an agreement. Or just hang around outside your school to kidnap you.”
“You just weren’t interested in us,” Eva Lind said. Isn’t that the point?”
Erlendur said nothing.
“Isn’t that the point?” Eva repeated.
Erlendur shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I wish it were that simple.”
“Simple? What do you mean?”
“I think…”
“What?”
“I don’t know how to put this. I think…”
“Yes.”
“I think I lost my life up on the moors too.”
“When your brother died?”
“It’s hard to explain and maybe I can’t. Maybe you can’t explain everything and some things may be better left unexplained.”
“What do you mean, lost your life?”
“I’m not… a part of me died.”
“Please…”
“I was found and rescued, but I died too. Something inside me. Something I had before. I don’t know exactly what it was. My brother died and I think something inside me died too. I always felt he was my responsibility, and I failed him. That’s the way I’ve felt ever since. I’ve been guilty that it was me and not him who survived. I’ve avoided looking anything in the face ever since. And even if I wasn’t directly neglected, the way I neglected you and Sindri, it was as if I no longer mattered. I don’t know if I’m right and I never will know, but I felt it as soon as I came down from the moor and I’ve felt it ever since.”
“All these years?”
“You can’t measure time in feelings.”
“Because it was you and not him who survived.”
“Instead of trying to rebuild something from the ruins, which I think I was trying to do when I met your mother, I dug myself down deeper into it because it’s comfortable there and it looks like sanctuary. Like when you take drugs. It’s more comfortable that way. That’s your sanctuary. And as you know, even if you are aware that you’re doing other people wrong, your own self matters most. That’s why you go on taking drugs. That’s why I dig myself down over and again into the snowdrift.”
Eva Lind stared at her father, and although she did not fully comprehend him, she realised that he was making an absolutely candid attempt to explain what had puzzled her all the time and had prompted her to track him down when she did. She understood that she had penetrated a place within him that no one else had ever been to, not even him, except to make sure that everything there remained undisturbed.
“And that woman? Where does she come into the picture?”
Erlendur shrugged, and started to close the door that had come ajar.
“I don’t know,” he said.
They stayed silent for a while until Eva Lind made her excuses and left. Unsure which direction to take, she peered into the darkness at the end of the corridor, and Erlendur suddenly noticed she was sniffing at the air like a dog.
“Can you smell that?” she said, sticking her nose up into the air.
“Smell what?” Erlendur said. “What are you talking about?”
“Hash,” Eva Lind said. “Dope. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never smelted hash?”
“Hash?”
“Can’t you smell it?”
Erlendur went out into the corridor and started sniffing into the air as well.
“Is that what it is?” he said.
“You’re asking the expert,” she said.
She was still sniffing at the air.
“Someone’s been smoking hash down here, and not very long ago,” she said.
Erlendur knew that forensics had lit up the end of the corridor when the body was taken away, but was uncertain whether it had been fine-combed.
He looked at Eva Lind.
“Hash?”
“You’re on the scent,” she said.
He went back into the room, took a chair and placed it in the corridor underneath one of the functional light bulbs, which he unscrewed. The bulb was scorching and he had to use the sleeve of his jacket to grip it. He found a blown bulb at the dark end of the corridor and swapped them. Suddenly it was illuminated and Erlendur jumped down from the chair.
At first they could see nothing of note, until Eva Lind pointed out to her father how spotlessly clean the alcove at the end seemed to be compared with the rest of the corridor. Erlendur nodded. It was as if every single spot on the floor had been cleaned and the walls wiped down.
Erlendur got down on all fours and scanned the floor. Heating pipes ran along all the walls at floor level and he looked under the pipes and crawled alongside them.
Eva Lind saw him stop and fish under the pipe to fetch something that had caught his attention. He got to his feet, walked over to her and showed her what he had found.
“At first I thought it was rat droppings,” he said, holding up a little brown lump between his fingers.
“What is it?” Eva Lind asked.
“It’s a gauze,” Erlendur said.
“A gauze?”
“Yes, containing chewing tobacco that you put under your lip. Someone has thrown away or spat out his chewing tobacco here in this corridor.”
“But who? Who could have been in this corridor?”
Erlendur looked at Eva Lind.
“Someone who’s a bigger tart than I am,” he said.
CHRISTMAS EVE
30
He found out that Osp was working on the floor above his room, and he went up the stairs after having coffee and toast from the breakfast buffet.
He contacted Sigurdur Oli about some information he needed him to gather and phoned Elinborg to find out whether she had remembered to question the woman Stefania claimed to have met at the hotel when she was captured on the security camera. Elinborg had gone out and did not answer her mobile.
Erlendur had lain awake in bed until almost morning, in pitch darkness. When he finally got up he looked out of the hotel window. It would be a white Christmas this year. The snow was setting in seriously. He could see it in the light from the lamp posts. Thick snow fell into the light they shed and formed a kind of backdrop for Christmas Eve.
Eva Lind had said goodbye to him in the basement corridor. She was going to meet him at home that evening. They were going to boil some smoked lamb and when he woke up he started wondering what to give her for Christmas. He had given her small presents after she began spending Christmas with him and she had given him socks, which she admitted she had stolen, and once a pair of gloves, which she said she had bought and he soon lost. She never asked about them. Perhaps the aspect of his daughter’s character that he liked most was that she never asked about anything unless it mattered.
Sigurdur Oli called him with the information. It wasn’t much, but enough to go on. Erlendur didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but thought his hypothesis was worth putting to the test.
He watched her working on her hotel floor as before, until she noticed him. She did not show any particular surprise at seeing him.
“Are you up?” she said, as if he was the laziest guest at the hotel.
“It took me ages to get to sleep,” he said. “Actually I was thinking about you all night.”