The Draining Lake de-6 Read online

  When she opened the door two men were standing before her. One looked a rather sorry sight, round-shouldered and wearing a peculiarly mournful expression on his face. The other one was younger and much nicer — handsome, really.

  Erlendur watched her staring with interest at Sigurdur Oli and could not suppress a smile.

  “It’s about Lake Kleifarvatn,” he said.

  Once they had sat down in her living room Sunna told them what she and her colleagues at the Energy Authority believed had happened.

  “You remember the big south Iceland earthquake on the seventeenth of June 2000?” she said, and they nodded. “About five seconds afterwards a large earthquake also struck Kleifarvatn, which doubled the natural rate of drainage from it. When the lake started to shrink people at first thought it was because of unusually low precipitation, but it turned out that the water was pouring down through fissures that run across the bed of the lake and have been there for ages. Apparently they opened up in the earthquake. The lake measured ten square kilometres but now it’s only about eight. The water level has fallen by at least four metres.”

  “And that’s how you found the skeleton,” Erlendur said.

  “We found the bones of a sheep when the surface had dropped by two metres,” Sunna said. “But of course it hadn’t been hit over the head.”

  “What do you mean, hit over the head?” Sigurdur Oli said.

  She looked at him. She had tried to be inconspicuous when she looked at his hands. Tried to spot a wedding ring.

  “I saw a hole in the skull,” she said. “Do you know who it is?”

  “No,” Erlendur said. “He would have needed to use a boat, wouldn’t he? To get so far out onto the lake.”

  “If you mean could someone have walked to where the skeleton is, the answer’s no. It was at least four metres deep there until quite recently. And if it happened years back, which of course I know nothing about, the water would have been even deeper.”

  “So they were on a boat?” Sigurdur Oli said. “Are there boats on that lake?”

  “There are houses in the vicinity,” Sunna said, staring into his eyes. He had beautiful eyes, dark blue under delicate brows. “There might be some boats there. I’ve never seen a boat on the lake.”

  If only we could row away somewhere, she thought to herself.

  Erlendur’s mobile began ringing. It was Elinborg.

  “You ought to get over here,” she said.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Come and see. It’s quite remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  3

  He stood up, switched on the television news and groaned. There was a lengthy report on the skeleton found at Lake Kleifarvatn, including an interview with a detective who said that there would be a thorough investigation of the case.

  He walked over to the window and looked out towards the sea. On the pavement in front of him he saw the couple who walked past his house every evening, the man a few steps ahead as usual, the woman trying to keep up with him. While walking they were in conversation; the man talking over his shoulder and she at his back. They had been passing the house for years and had long since ceased to pay attention to their surroundings. In the past they would occasionally look up at the house and at the other buildings on the street by the sea, and into the gardens. Sometimes they even stopped to admire a new swing or work being carried out on fences and terraces. No matter what the weather or the time of year, they always took their walk in the afternoon or the evening, always together.

  On the horizon he saw a large cargo ship. The sun was still high in the sky although it was well into the evening. The brightest period of the year lay ahead, before the days began growing shorter again and then shrinking to nothing. It had been a beautiful spring. He had noticed the first golden plovers outside his house in mid-April. They had followed the spring wind in from the continent.

  It had been late summer when he had first sailed abroad. Cargo ships were not so enormous in those days and were not containerised. He remembered the deckhands lugging fifty-kilo sacks around the hold. Remembered their smuggling stories. They knew him from his spell in a summer job at the harbour and enjoyed telling him how they duped the Customs officers. Some stories were so fantastic that he knew they were making them up. Others were so tense and exciting that they had no need to invent any details. And there were stories he was never allowed to hear. Even though they knew he would never tell. Not the communist from that posh school!

  Never tell.

  He looked back to the television. He felt as though he had spent his whole life waiting for this report on the news.

  He had been a socialist for as far back as he could remember, like everyone on both sides of his family. Political apathy was unheard of and he grew up loathing the conservatives. His father had been involved in the labour movement since the early decades of the twentieth century. Politics was a constant topic of discussion at home; they particularly despised the American base at Keflavik which the Icelandic capitalist class cheerfully accepted. It was Icelandic capitalists who benefited the most from the military.

  Then there was the company he kept, his friends from similar backgrounds. They could be very radical and some were eloquent speakers. He remembered the political meetings well. Remembered the passion. The fervent debates. He attended the meetings with his friends who, like him, were finding their feet in the party’s youth movement; he listened to their leader’s thunderous haranguing of the rich who exploited the proletariat, and the American forces who had them in their pocket. He had heard this repeated over and again with the same unwavering and heartfelt conviction. Everything he heard inspired him, because he had been raised as an Icelandic nationalist and hardline socialist who never doubted his views for one moment. He knew the truth was on his side.

  A recurrent theme at their meetings was the American presence at Keflavik and the tricks that Icelandic money-grubbers had pulled to allow a foreign military base to be established on Icelandic soil. He knew how the country had been sold to the Americans for the capitalists to grow fat on, like parasites. As a teenager, he was outside Parliament House when the ruling class’s lackeys stormed out of it with tear gas and truncheons and beat up those protesting against Iceland’s entry into NATO. The traitors are lapdogs of US imperialism! We’re under the jackboot of American capitalism! The young socialists had no shortage of slogans.

  He belonged to the oppressed masses himself. He was swept along by the fervour and the eloquence and the just notion that all men should be equal. The bosses should work alongside the labourers in the factory. Down with the class system! He had a genuine and steadfast faith in socialism. He felt the need to serve the cause, to persuade others and to fight for all the underprivileged, the workers and the oppressed.

  Arise ye workers from your slumbers…

  He took full part in discussions at the meetings and read what the youth movement recommended. There was plenty to be found in libraries and bookshops. He wanted to leave his mark. In his heart he knew that he was right. Much of what he had heard from the young socialist movement filled him with a sense of justice.

  Gradually he learned the answers to questions about dialectical materialism, the class struggle as the vehicle of history, about capitalism and the proletariat, and he trained himself to garnish his vocabulary with phrases from the great revolutionary thinkers as he read more and became increasingly inspired. Before long he had surpassed his comrades in Marxist theory and rhetoric and caught the eye of the youth-movement leaders. Elections to party posts and the drafting of resolutions were important activities and he was asked whether he wanted to join the party council. He was then eighteen. They had founded a society at his school called “The Red Flag’. His father decided that he should have the benefit of an education, the only one of the four children. For that, he was forever grateful to his father.

  In spite of everything.

  The youth movement published a broadsheet and hel
d regular meetings. The chairman was even invited to Moscow and came back full of tales about the workers” state. Such magnificent development. People were so happy. Their every need catered for. The cooperatives and centralised economy promised unprecedented progress. Post-war reconstruction outstripped all expectations. Factories sprouted up, owned and run by the state, by the people themselves. New residential districts were being built in the suburbs. All medical services were free. Everything they had read, everything they had heard, was true. Every word of it. O, what times!

  Others had been to the Soviet Union and described a different experience. The young socialists remained unmoved. The critics were servants of capitalism. They had betrayed the cause, the struggle for a fair society.

  The Red Flag meetings were well attended and they managed to draft in more and more members. He was unanimously elected chairman of the society and was soon noticed by the Socialist Party’s top brass. In his final year at school it was clear that he was future leadership material.

  He turned from the window and walked over to the photograph hanging above the piano, taken at the school-leaving ceremony. He looked at the faces under the traditional white caps. The male students in front of the school building wearing black suits, the girls in dresses. The sun was shining and their white caps glittered. He was second-best student of the year. Only a hair’s breadth from coming top of the school. He stroked his hand over the photograph. He missed those years. Missed the time when his conviction had been so strong that nothing could break it.

  In his last year at school he was offered a job on the party paper. In his summer vacation he had worked as a docker, got to know the labourers and deckhands, and talked politics with them. Many of them were outright reactionaries and they called him “the communist’. He was interested in journalism and knew that the paper was one of the pillars of the party. Before he started there, the chairman of the youth movement took him to the deputy leader’s house. The deputy leader, a skinny man, sat in a deep armchair polishing his spectacles with a handkerchief and telling them about the establishment of a socialist state in Iceland. Everything that soft voice said was so true and so right that a chill ran down his spine as he sat in the little living room, devouring every word.

  He was a good student. History, mathematics or any other subject came equally easily to him. Once a piece of knowledge entered his mind he retained it for instant recall. His memory and gift for study proved useful in journalism and he was a quick learner. He worked and thought fast, and could do long interviews without needing to jot down more than a few sentences. He knew that he was not an impartial reporter, but nor was anyone else in those days.

  He had planned to enrol that autumn at the University of Iceland, but was asked to stay on at the paper for the winter. He didn’t need to think twice. In the middle of the winter the deputy leader invited him home. The East German Communist Party was offering places for several Icelandic students at the University of Leipzig; if he accepted one he would have to make his own way there but would be provided with board and lodging.

  He had wanted to go to Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union to see the post-war reconstruction for himself. To travel, discover different cultures and learn languages. He wanted to see socialism in action. He had been considering applying to the University of Moscow and had still not made up his mind when he visited the deputy leader. Wiping his spectacles, the deputy leader said that studying in Leipzig was a unique opportunity for him to observe the workings of a communist state and train to serve his own country even better.

  The deputy leader put on his glasses.

  “And serve the cause,” he added. “You’ll like it there. Leipzig’s a historical city and has links with Icelandic culture. Halldor Laxness visited his friend the poet Johann Jonsson there. And Jon Arnason’s collection of folk tales was published by Hinrich Verlag of Leipzig in 1862.”

  He nodded. He had read everything Laxness had written about socialism in Eastern Europe and admired his powers of persuasion.

  The idea that he could go by ship and work his passage occurred to him. His uncle knew someone at the shipping company. Securing the passage was no problem. His family were ecstatic. None of them had been abroad, to say nothing of studying in another country. It would be such an adventure. They wrote to each other and telephoned to discuss the wonderful news. “He’ll turn out to be something,” people said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he ended up in government!”

  The first port of call was in the Faroe Islands, then Copenhagen, Rotterdam and Hamburg. From there he took the train to Berlin and slept the night at the railway station. The following day, at noon, he boarded a train to Leipzig. He knew that nobody would be there to welcome him. He had an address written on a note in his pocket and asked for directions when he reached his destination.

  Sighing heavily, he stood in front of the school photo-graph, looking at the face of his friend from Leipzig. They had been in the same class at school. If only he had known then what would happen.

  He wondered whether the police would ever discover the truth about the man in the lake. He consoled himself with the thought that it was such a long time ago and that what had happened no longer mattered.

  No one cared about the man in the lake any more.

  4

  Forensics had erected a large tent over the skeleton. Elinborg stood outside it as she watched Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli hurrying across the dry bed of the lake towards her. It was late in the evening and the media had left. Traffic had increased around the lake after the find was reported, but had died down and the area was quiet again.

  “Nice of you to find the time,” Elinborg said as they approached.

  “Sigurdur had to stop for a hamburger on the way,” Erlendur grunted. “What’s going on?”

  “Come with me,” Elinborg said, opening the tent. “The pathologist is here.”

  Erlendur looked down towards the lake in the evening calm and thought about the fissures in its bed. The sun was still up, so it was completely daylight. Staring up at the white puffs of cloud directly above him, he was still pondering how strange it was that there had once been a lake four metres deep where he was standing.

  The forensics team had unearthed the skeleton, which could now be seen in its entirety. There was not a single piece of flesh or scrap of clothing left on it. A woman aged about forty knelt beside it, picking at the pelvis with a yellow pencil.

  “It’s a male,” she said. “Average height and probably middle-aged, but I need to check that more carefully. I don’t know how long he’s been in the water, perhaps forty or fifty years. Maybe longer. But that’s just a guess. I can be more precise once I get him down to the morgue to study him properly.”

  She stood up and greeted them. Erlendur knew her name was Matthildur and that she had recently been recruited as a pathologist. He longed to ask her what drove her to investigate crimes. Why she didn’t just become a doctor like all the others and milk the health service?

  “He’s been hit over the head?” Erlendur asked.

  “Looks like it,” Matthildur said. “But it’s difficult to establish what kind of instrument was used. All the marks around the hole have gone.”

  “We’re talking about wilful murder?” Sigurdur Oli said.

  “All murders are wilful,” Matthildur said. “Some are just more stupid than others.”

  “There’s no question that it’s murder,” said Elinborg, who had been listening.

  She scrambled over the skeleton and pointed down to a large hole that the forensics team had dug. Erlendur went over to her and saw that inside the hole was a bulky black metal box, tied by a rope to the bones. It was still mostly buried in the sand but what appeared to be broken instruments with black dials and black buttons were visible. The box was scratched and dented, it had opened up and there was sand inside.

  “What’s that?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

  “God knows,” Elinborg said, “but it was used to sink him.”
/>   “Is it some kind of measuring device?” Erlendur said.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Elinborg said. “Forensics said it was an old radio transmitter. They went off for something to eat.”

  “A transmitter?” Erlendur said. “What kind of transmitter?”

  “They didn’t know. They’ve still got to dig it up.”

  Erlendur looked at the rope tied around the skeleton and at the black box used to sink the body. He imagined men lugging the corpse out of a car, tying it to the transmitter, rowing out onto the lake with it and throwing the whole lot overboard.

  “So he was sunk?” he said.

  “He hardly did it himself,” Sigurdur Oli blurted out. “He wouldn’t really go out onto the lake, tie himself to a radio transmitter, pick it up, fall over on his head and still take care to end up in the lake so he’d be sure to disappear. That would be the most ridiculous suicide in history.”

  “Do you suppose the transmitter’s heavy?” Erlendur asked, trying to contain his irritation with Sigurdur Oli.

  “It looks really heavy to me,” Matthildur said.

  “Is there any point in combing the bottom of the lake for a murder weapon?” Elinborg asked. “With a metal detector, if it was a hammer or the like? It might have been thrown in with the body.”

  “Forensics will handle that,” Erlendur said, kneeling down by the black box. He rubbed away the sand from it.

  “Maybe he was a radio ham,” Sigurdur Oli said.

  “Are you coming?” Elinborg asked. “To my book launch?”