Page 44 of The Darkness
‘Well, I wasn’t handling the case, so I wouldn’t know.’
‘Who is supposed to be handling it, then?’ Hulda asked impatiently.
Ólíver shook his head. ‘It doesn’t look like anyone’s handling it, not directly. The file’s still open. She’s bound to turn up eventually.’
Hulda nodded. ‘I see.’
‘Maybe she’s left the country,’ he suggested, looking hopeful. ‘By sea? Who knows? That would take care of the problem, so to speak.’ He grinned.
‘Did they search for her?’
‘Not in any systematic way, as far as I can see. We did ask around, but there were no real leads.’
‘Don’t tell me: no one was particularly bothered about finding her because there were other, more pressing matters to be getting on with?’
‘You could put it like that,’ Ólíver replied, not even having the grace to look ashamed. Though, to give him his due, he had at least begun to take her more seriously. Maybe she had been a bit hard on Ólíver; she wasn’t usually this rude, but the last couple of days had been extremely trying.
‘You couldn’t possibly give me a lift, could you?’ she asked, more politely than before. She was still tired and aware of a dull throbbing behind her eyes.
‘Where to?’
‘To the cove where Elena’s body was found. What’s it called again? Flekkuvík?’
Ólíver looked as if he were about to refuse, but she backed up her request with a ferocious scowl to show that she wouldn’t take no for an answer. In the end, he agreed with bad grace. ‘OK, let’s get a move on, then.’
VIII
He climbed into the bunk directly above hers. Though the proximity made her deeply uncomfortable, there wasn’t much she could do about it.
She had placed one of the candles on the chair beside the bed to give herself a little light. Their head torches were lying on the table where he had put them after switching them off, insisting that they needed to spare the batteries. She struggled into her sleeping bag, no easy task when bundled up in a thick jumper and woollen underwear, and wriggled down as far as she could. Then she blew out the candle, and the blackness closed in, relieved only, after a moment, by the faint grey outlines of the windows.
God, she was so cold, so terribly cold. The chill seemed to spread through her whole body. She tried to close the neck of her sleeping bag, clutching it tightly around her so the heat wouldn’t escape, and finally resorted to tucking her head inside as well, closing the gap until there was only a tiny opening for her nose and mouth. Yet even then she couldn’t get warm.
Normally, she was quick to drop off, but not here, in these alien surroundings. She lay, waiting for sleep to come, trying in vain to conquer her sense of suffocation.
IX
Ten minutes after leaving Keflavík, they took the turn-off to Vatnsleysuströnd.
‘Just five minutes further along the coast,’ said Ólíver, heaving a sigh. ‘And after that you’ll have a bit of a hike down to the sea, if you’re sure you can be bothered.’
‘We’ll have a hike, you mean,’ said Hulda, as if nothing could be more natural. ‘You’re coming with me to show me the spot.’
At this, Ólíver gave a resigned nod.
He pulled up beside a track that looked as if it led down to the shore. It had been blocked off with a pile of rocks. ‘This is as far as we can go by car,’ he announced. ‘There’s no way round the barrier.’
The cove was further away than Hulda had expected, and the weather was lousy, too. Was she really going to put herself through this ordeal?
‘How long will it take us to walk there?’ she asked doubtfully.
Ólíver gave her a measuring look, his expression betraying what he was thinking: how fast could an old woman like her be expected to move?
‘Quarter of an hour either way, give or take,’ he guessed, then, with a glance at his watch, added: ‘Look, I really haven’t got time for this and, anyway, it’s not like there’s anything to see down there.’
It was his reaction that tipped the scales. He was annoying her so much – though, in fairness, that might be partly the fault of her hangover – that she decided she was damn well going to drag him all the way down to the sea.
‘We’ll just have to make the best of it,’ she said briskly, getting out of the car and setting off down the track. A glance over her shoulder revealed that Ólíver was following, albeit reluctantly. It was still drizzling and the wind was gusting hard here by the coast, but she found the effect invigorating. With any luck, it would blow away the cobwebs and, with them, the remnants of her headache. Being close to the sea improved her mood, too: she could feel her tension easing with every step. They trudged along the rough stony track, heads down into the wind, surrounded on either side by the moss-carpeted lava-field, which possessed its own brand of desolate beauty. Apart from the odd bird flying overhead, she and Ólíver were the only moving figures in the landscape. You’d never guess that there were farms not far off, since this area was sufficiently out of the way that you could be quite alone here. As she walked, Hulda wondered what in the world Elena had been doing in such a lonely spot: had she come here of her own accord and died by accident? Had she taken her own life, or had she been lured here and murdered by some person unknown?
