‘Well, we’ll see.’
He had the feeling it was going to be a long day.
2012
Friday, 2 November
The winter Helgi had experienced up north had now begun to show its claws to the inhabitants of the south-west. If the thermometer in the car was to be believed, it was around freezing, but with the bitter northerly that was blowing, the real temperature was probably far colder.
He had trouble locating Elín’s house in Mosfellsbær, the small town about twenty minutes’ drive north of Reykjavík, close to the brooding hulk of Mount Esja. It didn’t help that she seemed to live on the edge of the settlement, in an area where he hadn’t expected to find any houses. It wasn’t quite as far out into the countryside as Gljúfrasteinn, the former home of the writer Halldór Laxness, but Helgi found himself dwelling on thoughts of Iceland’s Nobel laureate as he drove, since this was very much Laxness’s old stamping ground.
Elín’s home turned out to be a detached house, almost entirely camouflaged from the road by trees.
Helgi’s colleagues had already conducted a thorough search of the property, looking for any clues to Elín’s whereabouts, but so far nothing useful had emerged from it. Today, Helgi would have a chance to explore the house on his own and breathe in the atmosphere of literary creativity.
The walls were lined with bookshelves, on which Elín’s own novels had a prominent place, in various languages, but not, apparently, in any particular order.
Helgi lingered for a long time in front of the shelves, scanning the titles. In his view, books told you a lot about their owners, and this collection clearly wasn’t one of those chosen purely for decorative purposes. He sensed, and could see from the evidence of the creased spines and worn covers, that these books had been read. Crime fiction occupied much of the space, as in his own library, and although he had never been a big fan of Elín’s work, it felt like a privilege to pass through the wall that separated the author from her readers. He saw Nordic, British and American crime novels, mostly in the original languages. And in the far corner of one bookcase he spotted a clutch of familiar titles: Icelandic translations of Agatha Christie, some of them vintage – rare titles that Helgi owned copies of himself but which were hard to come by these days – as well as some modern translations and a recent crime novel that Helgi had heard of, by the translator of some of the Christies. He was tempted to take one or two of these down from the shelves, just to flick through the pages, but he controlled the impulse. He had come here to takea look around as part of the investigation, not to root about in Elín’s possessions.
This was the heart of the house, he assumed, though he was fairly sure that Elín had written her books in a different room.
He found the study upstairs. There was a handsome oak desk by the window and a leather office chair. The walls were painted in dark shades, perhaps to evoke the murky atmosphere that characterized Elín’s stories. There were no bookshelves in here. Instead, the walls were hung with beautiful Kjarval drawings. The only volume on display was the dog-eared Icelandic dictionary on the desk. There was also a large assortment of pens. This was where Elín had handwritten her bestsellers. Helgi peered into the drawers of the desk but couldn’t find anything of interest, just bills and other admin-related papers, as well as a few notebooks filled with indecipherable scribblings. He could take a closer look at them later, if necessary. On the corner of the desk lay an envelope that looked as if it contained a birthday card. Helgi yielded to the temptation to open it. Elín hadn’t yet written the name of the recipient on the front; inside, there were two tickets to a football match in London.
The bedroom was clean and tidy, and the bed had been made, though Elín would probably have done that anyway, regardless of whether she had been intending to leave the house for a longer or shorter time. His general impression was of a house whose owner had not intended to leave for good. It was a living home, with newspapersand glasses on the kitchen table, half-read books beside the bed, and a Kjarval drawing propped up on the floor in the hall, presumably a recent addition to the collection which Elín hadn’t got round to hanging.
Yet Elín might never come home. In which case the house would remain exactly as it was, and nothing would be touched until a relative or friend took on the job of handling her estate. And no more novels would be written at that trusty desk.
He felt the weight of his responsibility; it was up to him to solve this mystery, which could be a matter of life and death. Up to him to ensure that the depressing prospect didn’t become a reality.
All at once, he felt an urgent need to get out of the house; he felt oppressed in here, even among all the books. They would have to go to a new home, he found himself inadvertently thinking, though of course that wasn’t the main priority.
He hastened outside into the wintry weather. Not only was it freezing out there, but dusk had stolen up on him, cloaking the landscape in shadow. Perhaps he had been ambushed by this alien feeling of pessimism because daylight had fled during the short time he was in Elín’s house.
For a while he just stood there, the door closed behind him, breathing in the icy air and watching the twilight dissolve into night. There were times, like now, when he felt he wasn’t cut out for this job. There was too much tragedy involved. It was the puzzles he loved, the challenge of working out patterns that eluded other people, of piecingtogether facts, intuitions and clues. Indeed, it struck him that the aspects of being a detective that appealed to him most were the very things he was seeking in his beloved whodunnits.
Yes, maybe the whole thing was a mistake and he was in the wrong line of work.
1976
‘I’m not happy about this.’
Hulda felt a knot of anxiety tightening in her stomach.
She was sitting facing her boss, Hördur. Although sparing with his praise, in practice he had been quite good to her. She preferred having him as a boss to most of the other senior officers in the police, yet she never really knew what he was thinking. Perhaps it was a deliberate strategy on his part, a way of controlling his underlings, or perhaps he was just a bad manager.
For a horrible moment, she believed he was about to give her the sack on the grounds that her performance hadn’t been up to scratch, although she knew this wasn’t fair. She worked longer hours than almost anyone else in her position and never overlooked anything of importance. ‘Don’t get lost in the detail,’ Hördur had once told her. If anything, she had taken this as praise.
‘I’m sorry?’ she said now.
‘Oh, that’s just me, starting in the middle of a thought.Look, they want us to talk to Einar, at the old penitentiary. The lad who robbed the bank.’
Hulda nodded.
Like most people, she was familiar with the bank robbery just over ten years previously – the ‘big robbery’, as it was called – in which a security guard, a man approaching retirement age, had lost his life. It had been carried out by two masked men, but the police had only succeeded in arresting one of them. The Einar in question hadn’t quite been caught red-handed, but as good as, and he had confessed to the crime after a long series of interrogations. But he had never shopped his accomplice, which meant the crime had only ever been half solved. Einar was currently serving a sixteen-year prison sentence.
‘Why?’ Hulda asked. ‘I thought he’d been interviewed repeatedly over the years?’
‘He’s been a bit under the weather lately. It seems prison doesn’t agree with him. It’s a sad story, depressing. A young man, in his prime, with everything to look forward to, taking a disastrous decision like that. An armed robbery in Reykjavík – need I say more? Of course, he didn’t mean to hurt anybody – he’s claimed that repeatedly, and I believe him – but you can’t walk into a bank with a loaded shotgun and assume that nothing will go wrong.’
