The Draining Lake Read online

  Instead of going home that evening he drove out of the city, past Grafarholt in the direction of Mosfellsbaer. He took a slip road towards a large farmhouse and turned off it nearer the sea until he reached the land that Haraldur and his brother Jóhann had farmed. Haraldur had given him only limited directions and had tried to be as unhelpful as possible. He refused to tell Erlendur whether the old farm buildings were still standing, claiming to know nothing about them. His brother Jóhann had died suddenly from a heart attack, he said. Not everyone's as lucky as my brother Jói, he added.

  The buildings were still standing. Summer chalets had been built here and there on the old farmland. Judging from the trees growing around some of them, they had been there some time. Others were recent. Erlendur saw a golf course in the distance. Although it was late in the evening, he could see a few souls hitting balls, then strolling after them in the warm sun.

  The farm buildings were dilapidated. A small farmhouse and sheds near it. The house was clad with corrugated iron. At one time it had been painted yellow, but the colour had almost entirely faded. Rusty corrugated-metal sheets were hung on the outside of the house; others had surrendered to the wind and weather and fallen to the ground. Most of the roofing sheets had been blown out to sea, Erlendur imagined. All the windows were broken and the front door was missing. Nearby stood the ruins of a small toolshed adjoining a cattle shed and barn.

  He stood in front of the ruined farmhouse. It was almost like his childhood home.

  Stepping inside, he entered a small hallway, then a narrow corridor. On the right was a kitchen and a laundry room, and a little pantry was to the left. An antiquated Icelandic cooker was still in the kitchen, with three hotplates and a small oven, rusted through. At the end of the corridor were two bedrooms and a living room. The floorboards creaked in the quiet of the evening. He did not know what he was looking for. He did not know why he had come there.

  He went down to the sheds. Looking along the row of stalls in the cattle shed and into the barn, he could see a dirt floor. When he walked around the corner he could make out traces of a dung heap behind the cattle shed. A door hung on the toolshed, but when he pulled at it, it came off its hinges, fell to the ground and broke with what sounded like a heavy groan. Inside the toolshed were racks with little compartments for screws, nuts and bolts, and nails on the walls to hang tools from. The tools were nowhere to be seen. The brothers had doubtless taken everything serviceable with them when they moved to Reykjavík. A broken workbench was propped at an angle against the wall. A tractor bonnet rested on a heap of indeterminate iron objects on the floor. A felloe from the rear wheel of a tractor lay over in one corner.

  Erlendur walked farther inside the toolshed. Did he come here, the driver of the Falcon? Or did he take a coach to some rural destination? If he did come here, what was he thinking? It had been late in the day when he'd left Reykjavík. He'd known that he did not have much time. She would wait for him in front of the dairy shop and he did not want to be late. But he did not want to rush the brothers. They were interested in buying a tractor from him. It would not take much to clinch the sale. But he did not want to give the impression of being pushy. It could jeopardise the deal if he appeared overexcited. Yet he was in a hurry. He wanted to get it all finished.

  If he did come here, why didn't the brothers say so? Why should they be lying? They had no vested interests. They did not know the man in the least. And why was one hubcap missing from his car? Had it fallen off? Was it stolen outside the coach station? Was it stolen here?

  If he was the man in the lake with a broken skull, how did he end up there? Where did the device tied to him come from? Was it relevant that he sold tractors and machinery from the Eastern bloc? Was there a connection?

  Erlendur's mobile rang in his pocket.

  'Yes,' he answered curtly.

  'You leave me alone,' said a voice he knew well. He knew the voice particularly well when it was in this state.

  'I intend to,' he said.

  'You do that, then,' the voice said. 'You leave me alone from here on. Just stop interfering in my life for—'

  He rang off. It was more difficult to switch off the voice. It echoed in his head: stoned, angry and repulsive. He knew that she must be in a den somewhere with someone whose name might be Eddi and was twice her age. He tried not to think about the life she led in too much detail. He had repeatedly done everything in his power to help her. He did not know what else to try. He was completely at a loss about his junkie daughter. Once he would have tried to locate her. Run off and found her. Once he would have persuaded himself that when she said 'leave me alone' she actually meant 'come and help me'. Not any more. He did not want to any more. He wanted to tell her: 'It's over. You can take care of yourself.'

  She had moved in with him that Christmas. By then, after a short break when she'd had a miscarriage and been confined to hospital, she had begun taking drugs again. In the New Year he could sense her restlessness and she would disappear for varying lengths of time. He went after her and took her back home, but the next morning she would be gone. It went on like that until he stopped chasing her, stopped pretending that it made any difference what he did. It was her life. If she chose to live it in that way, that was up to her. He was incapable of doing more. He had not heard of her for more than two months when she hit Sigurdur Óli on the shoulder with the hammer.

  He stood out in the yard looking over the ruins of a life that once had been. He thought about the man who owned the Falcon. About the woman who was still waiting for him. He thought about his own daughter and son. He looked into the evening sun and thought about his dead brother. What had he been thinking about in the blizzard?

  How cold it was?

  How nice it would be to get back home into the warm?

  The next morning, Erlendur went back to the woman waiting for the man who drove the Falcon. It was a Saturday and she was not working. He rang in advance and she had coffee ready for him, even though he had specifically asked her not to go to any trouble for him. They sat down in her living room as before. Her name was Ásta.

  'Of course, you always work weekends,' she said, adding that she worked in the kitchen at the City Hospital in Fossvogur.

  'Yes, things are often busy,' he said, taking care not to answer her in too much detail. He could have taken this weekend off. But the Falcon case had piqued his curiosity and he felt a strange, pressing need to get to the bottom of it. He did not know why. Perhaps for the sake of the woman sitting opposite him who had done menial work all her life, who still lived alone and whose weary expression reflected how life had passed her by. It was just as if she thought that the man she had once loved would come back to her, as he had before, kiss her, tell her about his day at work and ask how she had been doing.

  'The last time we came you said you didn't believe that another woman was involved,' he said cautiously.

  On the way to see her, he had had second thoughts. He did not want to ruin her memories. He did not want to destroy anything she clung to. He had seen that happen so often before. When they arrived at the home of a criminal whose wife just stared at them, unable to believe her own eyes and ears. The children behind her. Her fortress crumbling all around her. My husband! Selling drugs? You must be mad!

  'Why are you asking about that?' the woman said, sitting in her chair. 'Do you know more than I do? Have you found out something? Have you uncovered something new?'

  'No, nothing,' Erlendur said, flinching inwardly when he sensed the eagerness in her voice. He described his visit to Haraldur and how he had located the Falcon, still in good shape and stored away in a garage in Kópavogur. He also told her that he had visited an abandoned farm near Mosfellsbaer. Her partner's disappearance, however, remained as much a mystery as ever.

  'You said you had no photographs of him, or of you together,' he said.

  'No, that's right,' Ásta said. 'We'd known each other for such a short time.'

  'So no photograph ever app
eared in the papers or on television when he was declared missing?'

  'No, but they gave a detailed description. They were going to use the photo from his driving licence. They said they always kept copies of licences, but then they couldn't find it. Like he hadn't handed it in, or they'd mislaid it.'

  'Did you ever see his driving licence?'

  'Driving licence? No, not that I remember. Why were you asking about another woman?'

  The question was delivered in a harder tone, more insistent. Erlendur hesitated before he opened the door on what, to her mind, would surely be hell itself. Maybe he had proceeded too quickly. Certain points needed closer scrutiny. Maybe he should wait.

  'There are instances of men who leave their women without saying goodbye and start a new life,' he said.

  'A new life?' she said, as if the concept was beyond her comprehension.

  'Yes,' he said. 'Even here in Iceland. People think that everyone knows everyone else, but that's a long way from the truth. There are plenty of towns and villages that few people ever visit, except perhaps at the height of summer, maybe not even then. In the old days they were even more isolated than today – some were even half cut-off. Transportation was much worse then.'

  'I don't follow,' she said. 'What are you getting at?'

  'I just wanted to know if you'd ever contemplated that possibility.'

  'What possibility?'

  'That he got on a coach and went home,' Erlendur said.

  He watched her trying to fathom the unfathomable.

  'What are you talking about?' she groaned. 'Home? Home where? What do you mean?'

  He could see that he had overstepped the mark. That despite all the years that had gone by since the man disappeared from her life, an unhealed wound still remained, fresh and open. He wished he had not gone so far. He should not have approached her at such an early stage. Without having anything more tangible than his own fantasies and an empty car outside the coach station.

  'It's just one of the hypotheses,' he said in an effort to cushion the impact of his words. 'Of course, Iceland's too small for anything like that,' he hurried to say. 'It's just an idea, with no real foundation.'

  Erlendur had spent a long time wondering what could possibly have happened if the man had not committed suicide. When the notion of another woman began to take root in his mind he started losing sleep. At first the hypothesis could not have been simpler: on his travels around Iceland the salesman had met all sorts of people from different walks of life: farmers, hotel staff, residents of towns and fishing villages, women. Conceivably he had found a girlfriend on one of his trips and in time came to prefer her to the one in Reykjavík, but lacked the courage to tell her so.

  The more Erlendur thought about the matter, the more he tended to believe that, if another woman was involved, the man must have had a stronger motive to make himself disappear; he had started to think about a word that entered his mind outside the abandoned farm in Mosfellsbaer that had reminded him of his own house in east Iceland.

  Home.

  They had discussed this at the office. What if they reversed the paradigm? What if the woman facing him now had been Leopold's girlfriend in Reykjavík, but he had a family somewhere else? What if he had decided to put an end to the dilemma he had got himself into, and settled for going home?

  He sketched for the woman the broad outlines of these ideas and noticed how a dark cloud gradually descended over her.

  'He wasn't in any trouble,' she said. 'That's just nonsense you're coming out with. How could you think of such a thing? Talking about the man like that.'

  'His name isn't very common,' Erlendur said. 'There are only a handful of men with that name in the whole country. Leopold. You didn't know his ID number. You have very few of his personal belongings.'

  Erlendur fell silent. He remembered that Níels had kept from her the indications that Leopold had not used his real name. That he had tricked her and claimed to be someone he was not. Níels had not told Ásta about these suspicions because he felt sorry for her. Now, Erlendur understood what he meant.

  'Perhaps he didn't use his real name,' he said. 'Did that ever occur to you? He was not officially registered under that name. He can't be found in the records.'

  'Someone from the police called me,' the woman said angrily. 'Later. Much later. By the name of Briem or something like that. Told me about your theory that Leopold might not have been who he claimed to be. Said I should have been told immediately, but that there had been a delay. I've heard your ideas and they're ridiculous. Leopold would never have sailed under a false flag. Never.'

  Erlendur said nothing.

  'You're trying to tell me he might have had a family that he went back to. That I was only his fiancée in the city? What kind of rubbish is that?'

  'What do you know about this man?' Erlendur persisted. 'What do you really know about him? Is it very much?'

  'Don't talk like that,' she said. 'Please don't put such stupid notions to me. You can keep your opinions to yourself. I'm not interested in hearing them.'

  Ásta stopped talking and stared at him.

  'I'm not—' Erlendur began, but she interrupted him.

  'Do you mean he's still alive? Is that what you're saying? That he's still alive? Living in some village?'

  'No,' Erlendur said. 'I'm not saying that. I just want to explore that possibility with you. None of what I've been saying is any more than guesswork. There needn't be any grounds for it, and at the moment there are no grounds for it. I only wanted to know if you could recall anything that might give us reason for supposing so. That's all. I'm not saying anything is the case because I don't know anything is the case.'

  'You're just talking rubbish,' she said. 'As if he'd just been fooling around with me. Why do I have to listen to this?!'

  While Erlendur tried to convince her, a strange thought slipped into his mind. From now on, after what he had said and could not retract, it would be much greater consolation for the woman to know that the man was dead, rather than to find him alive. That would cause her immeasurable grief. He looked at her, and she seemed to be thinking something similar.

  'Leopold's dead,' she said. 'There's no point telling me otherwise. To me, he's dead. Died years ago. A whole lifetime ago.'

  They both fell silent.

  'But what do you know about the man?' Erlendur repeated after some while. 'In actual fact?'

  Her look implied that she wanted to tell him to give up and go.

  'Do you seriously mean that he was called something else and wasn't using his real name?' she said.

  'Nothing of what I've said need necessarily have happened,' Erlendur emphasised once again. 'The most likely explanation, unfortunately, is that for some reason he killed himself.'

  'What do we know about other people?' she suddenly said. 'He was a quiet type and didn't talk much about himself. Some people are full of themselves. I don't know if that's any better. He said a lot of lovely things to me that no one had ever told me before. I wasn't brought up in that kind of family. Where people said nice things.'

  'You never wanted to start again? Find a new man. Get married. Have a family.'

  'I was past thirty when we met. I thought I'd end up an old maid. My time would run out. That was never the plan, but somehow that was how it turned out. Then you reach a certain age and all you have is yourself in an empty room. That's why he . . . he changed that. And even though he didn't say much and was away a lot, he was still my man.'

  She looked at Erlendur.

  'We were together, and after he went missing I waited for several years, and I'm probably still waiting. When do you stop? Is there any rule about it?'

  'No,' Erlendur said. 'There's no rule.'

  'I didn't think so,' she said, and he felt painfully sorry for her when he noticed that she was starting to weep.