Pétur appeared to consider the question.
‘Yes, I think so. Of course, I didn’t know her very well, but… that said, I probably knew her better than most people did. She didn’t have that many friends, but I’m not sure that necessarily means someone’s lonely. Mind you, she’d been through an awful lot of hardship in her life and I could see the pain in her eyes at times. She’d lost her husband and her daughter. She didn’t talk about them much, though; in fact, she didn’t talk about her late husband at all. That struck me as odd.’
‘She was on the point of retiring, wasn’t she?’
‘She was asked to take early retirement. I believe she was upset by that. Her job meant everything to her. Anyway, she and I got on well – I think she appreciated the company. I’m sure we could have had fun together.’ There was a note of regret in his voice.
‘Her father rang me once, from America,’ Helgi said, a little diffidently. ‘Did she have much contact with him?’
Pétur seemed non-plussed by this.
‘Her father? That can’t be right. She never met him. She told me she’d gone to America to try and track him down but that he was already dead by then. He was an American soldier who’d been briefly stationed in Iceland, as far as I could gather.’
The phone call Helgi had received, when he had only just moved into the office, had stayed with him. He remembered the conversation almost word for word. The man had said to tell her that her dad, Robert, had called, and that he’d like to hear from her. He’d said she’d know how to reach him: ‘No, there was no doubt about it,’ Helgi told Pétur. ‘The man who rang me – or rather who rang Hulda’s office phone – said he was her father.’
‘Well I never – how extraordinary. How can that be possible?’ Pétur frowned. ‘Unless the man she met while she was over there was actually…’ He was no longer speaking to Helgi but to himself. ‘Could she have been lying to me? Did she perhaps meet him? Or didhelie to her…’
Helgi didn’t say anything for a while, but when he finally felt it was time to break the poignant silence he remarked: ‘And nothing has been seen or heard of Hulda since then.’
‘No, not after that last evening. Or rather, the next day, when she rang me to postpone a dinner we’d arranged. We were still planning to meet up, though. We had a date, like two giddy schoolkids – that’s what it felt like. We were going to climb up Esja together.’
‘It’s all very strange,’ Helgi said; then, worried thismight be misconstrued, he added: ‘Her disappearance, I mean.’
Pétur didn’t respond to this or appear likely to volunteer anything further on the subject.
‘Her disappearance was investigated, up to a point,’ Helgi continued eventually. ‘I wasn’t involved, but I assume they interviewed you…’
‘Only in a very perfunctory way. I believe there were two reasons for that.’ Pétur paused and cleared his throat. ‘On the one hand, I suspect her colleagues didn’t take the matter as seriously as they should have done. She had no family and wasn’t properly appreciated at work. No one missed her.’ He was silent for a long moment. ‘Except me.’
Although his voice was firm, without a tremor, somehow his strength of feeling shone through.
Helgi allowed the words to hang in the air for a while.
‘Two reasons, you said?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You said there were two reasons.’
‘Right, yes. The other deciding factor was that everyone seemed convinced she had taken her own life. Gone off into the mountains, not intending to come back.’
‘But we know that was wrong, is that what you’re saying?’
‘Of course it was wrong.’ Pétur raised his voice. ‘She was planning to meet me. And she most certainly wasn’t having suicidal thoughts. Why on earth would she have wanted to kill herself, Helgi?’
Helgi got the impression the question was rhetorical.
‘She’d experienced a series of terrible tragedies; her life had been infinitely sad. And although I admit I hadn’t known her very long, let me tell you something, Helgi: I don’t believe Hulda had ever been happier than she was right before she went missing.’
2012
Sunday, 4 November
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Helgi.’
The woman on the phone didn’t introduce herself, but he recognized the slightly arrogant ring to her voice. Yet, in spite of that, he instinctively warmed to Lovísa.
‘You’re not disturbing me,’ he replied, then waited, hoping that there had been a development at last. That the author had knocked on the door of her friend, completely unaware that anyone had been searching for her.
