The Draining Lake Read online

  'What do you remember about this Jóhann?' Erlendur asked. 'Did you meet him? Did you ever go to their farm near Mosfellsbaer?'

  'Shouldn't you be investigating that Russian spying equipment?' Níels retorted, took a pair of nail clippers from his waistcoat pocket and began manicuring himself. He looked at his watch. It would soon be time for a long and leisurely lunch.

  'Oh yes,' Erlendur said. 'There's plenty to do.'

  Níels stopped trimming his nails and looked at him. There was something in Erlendur's tone that he disliked.

  'Jóhann, or Jói as his brother called him, was a bit funny,' Níels said. 'He was backward, or a halfwit as you used to be allowed to say. Before the political-correctness police ironed out the language with all their polite phrases.'

  'Backward how?' Erlendur asked. He agreed with Níels about the language. It had been rendered absolutely impotent out of consideration for every possible minority.

  'He was just dim,' Níels said and resumed his manicure. 'I went up there twice and talked to the brothers. The elder one spoke for them both – Jóhann didn't say much. They were completely different. One was nothing but skin and bone with a whittled face, while the other was fatter with a sort of childish, sheepish expression.'

  'I can't quite picture Jóhann,' Erlendur said.

  'I don't remember him too well, Erlendur. He sort of clung on to his brother like a little boy and was always asking who we were. Could hardly talk, just stammered out the words. He was like you'd imagine a farmer from some remote valley with straw in his hair and wellington boots on his feet.'

  'And Haraldur managed to persuade you that Leopold had never been to their farm?'

  'They didn't need to persuade me,' Níels said. 'We found the car outside the coach station. There was nothing to suggest that he'd been with the brothers. We had nothing to work with. No more than you do.'

  'You don't reckon the brothers took the car there?'

  'There was no indication of that,' Níels said. 'You know these missing-persons cases. You would have done exactly the same with the information we had.'

  'I located the Falcon,' Erlendur said. 'I know it was years ago and the car must have been all over since then, but something that could be cow dung was found in it. It occurred to me that if you'd bothered to investigate the case properly, you might have found the man and been able to reassure the woman who was waiting for him then and has been ever since.'

  'What a load of old codswallop,' Níels groaned, looking up from trimming his nails. 'How can you imagine anything so stupid? Just because you found some cow shit in the car thirty years later. Are you losing it?'

  'You had the chance to find something useful,' Erlendur said.

  'You and your missing persons,' Níels said. 'Where are you going with this, anyway? Who put you on to it? Is it a real case? Says who? Why are you reopening a thirty-year-old non-case which no one can figure out anyway, and trying to make something of it? Have you raised that woman's hopes? Are you telling her you can find him?'

  'No,' Erlendur said.

  'You're nuts,' Níels said. 'I've always said so. Ever since you started here. I told Marion that. I don't know what Marion saw in you.'

  'I want to make a search for him in the fields out there,' Erlendur said.

  'Search for him in the fields?' Níels roared in astonishment. 'Are you crackers? Where are you going to look?'

  'Around the farm,' Erlendur said, unruffled. 'There are brooks and ditches at the bottom of the hill which lead all the way out to sea. I want to see whether we can't find something.'

  'What grounds have you got?' Níels said. 'A confession? Any new developments? Bugger all. Just a lump of shit in an old heap of scrap!'

  Erlendur stood up.

  'I just wanted to tell you that if you plan to make a song and dance about it, I must point out how shoddy the original investigation was because there are more holes in it than a—'

  'Do as you please,' Níels interrupted him with a hateful glare. 'Make an arse of yourself if you want to. You'll never get a warrant!'

  Erlendur opened the door and went out into the corridor.

  'Don't cut your fingers off,' he said and closed the door behind him.

  Erlendur had a brief meeting with Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg about the Lake Kleifarvatn case. The search for further information about Lothar Weiser was proving slow and difficult. All enquiries had to go through the German embassy, which Erlendur had managed to offend, and they had few leads. As a formality they sent an inquiry to Interpol and the provisional answer was that it had never heard of Lothar Weiser. Quinn from the US embassy was trying to persuade one of the Czech embassy officials from that period to talk to the Icelandic police. He could not tell what these overtures would deliver. Lothar did not seem to have associated with Icelanders very much. Enquiries among old government officials had led nowhere. The East German embassy's guest lists had been lost a long time ago. There were no guest lists from the Icelandic authorities for those years. The detectives had no idea how to find out whether Lothar had known any Icelanders. Nobody seemed to remember the man.

  Sigurdur Óli had requested help from the German embassy and Icelandic ministry of education in providing a list of Icelandic students in East Germany. Not knowing which period to focus on, he started by asking about all students from the end of the war until 1970.

  Meanwhile, Erlendur had ample time to absorb himself in his pet topic, the Falcon man. He realised full well that he had almost nothing to go on if he wanted a warrant to mount a full-scale search for a body on the brothers' land near Mosfellsbaer.

  He decided to drop in on Marion Briem, whose condition was improving slightly. The oxygen tank was still at the ready but the patient looked better, talking about new drugs that worked better than the old ones and cursing the doctor for 'not knowing his arse from his elbow'. Erlendur thought Marion Briem was getting back on form.

  'What are you doing sniffing around here all the time?' Marion asked, sitting down in the chair. 'Don't you have anything better to do?'

  'Plenty,' Erlendur said. 'How are you feeling?'

  'I'm not having any luck dying,' Marion said. 'I thought I might have died last night. Funny. Of course that can happen when you're lying around with nothing to do but wait for death. I was certain it was all over.'

  Marion sipped from a glass of water with parched lips.

  'I suppose it's what they call astral projection,' Marion said. 'You know I don't believe in that crap. It was a delirium while I dozed. No doubt brought on by those new drugs. But I was hovering up there,' Marion said, staring up at the ceiling, 'and looked down on my wretched self. I thought I was going and was completely reconciled to it in my heart. But of course I wasn't dying at all. It was just a funny dream. I went for a check-up this morning and the doctor said I was a bit brighter. My blood's better than it's been for weeks. But he didn't give me any hope for the future.'

  'What do doctors know?' Erlendur said.

  'What do you want from me anyway? Is it the Ford Falcon? Why are you snooping around on that case?'

  'Do you remember if the farmer he was going to visit near Mosfellsbaer had a brother?' Erlendur asked on the off chance. He did not want to tire Marion, but he also knew that his old boss enjoyed all things mysterious and strange.

  Eyes closed, Marion pondered.

  'That lazy bugger Níels talked about the brother being a bit funny.'

  'He says he was a halfwit, but I don't know what that means, exactly.'

  'He was backward, if I remember correctly. Big and strong but with the mind of a child. I don't think he could really speak. Just babbled nonsense.'

  'Why wasn't this investigation pursued, Marion?' Erlendur asked. 'Why was it allowed to peter out? It would have been possible to do so much more.'

  'Why do you say that?'

  'The brothers' land should have been combed. Everyone took it for granted that the salesman never went there. No doubts were ever raised. It was all cut and
dried; they decided the man committed suicide or left the city and would come back when it suited him. But he never did come back and I'm not certain that he killed himself.'

  'You think the brothers killed him?'

  'I'd like to look into that. The backward one's dead but the elder brother's at an old people's home here in Reykjavík and I reckon he'd have been capable of attacking someone on the slightest pretext.'

  'And what would that be?' Marion asked. 'You know you have no motive. He was going to sell them a tractor. They had no reason to kill him.'

  'I know,' Erlendur said. 'If they did, it was because something happened out there when he called on them. A chain of events was set in motion, perhaps by sheer coincidence, which led to the man's death.'

  'Erlendur, you know better than that,' Marion said. 'These are fantasies. Stop this nonsense.'

  'I know I have no motive and no body and it was years ago, but there's something that doesn't fit and I'd like to find out what it is.'

  'There's always something that doesn't gel, Erlendur. You can never balance all the columns. Life's more complicated than that, as you of all people ought to know. Where was the farmer supposed to have got the Russian spying equipment to sink the body in Kleifarvatn?'

  'Yes, I know, but that might be another, unrelated case.'

  Marion looked at Erlendur. There was nothing new about detectives becoming absorbed in cases that they were investigating and then getting completely obsessed by them. It had often happened to Marion, who knew that Erlendur tended to take the most serious cases to heart. He had a rare sensitivity, which was both his blessing and his curse.

  'You were talking about John Wayne the other day,' Erlendur said. 'When we watched the western.'

  'Have you dug that up?' Marion said.

  Erlendur nodded. He had asked Sigurdur Óli, who knew about all things American and was a mine of information about celebrities.

  'His name was Marion too,' Erlendur said. 'Wasn't it? You are namesakes.'

  'Funny, isn't it?' Marion said. 'Because of the way I am.'

  26

  Benedikt Jónsson, the retired agricultural-machinery importer, greeted Erlendur at the door and invited him in. Erlendur's visit had been delayed. Benedikt had been to see his daughter who lived outside Copenhagen. He had just returned home and gave the impression he would have liked to stay longer. He said he felt very much at home in Denmark.

  Erlendur nodded intermittently while Benedikt rambled on about Denmark. A widower, he appeared to live well. He was fairly short with small, fat fingers and a ruddy, harmless-looking face. He lived alone in a small, neat house. Erlendur noticed a new Mercedes jeep outside the garage. He thought to himself that the old businessman had probably been shrewd and saved up for his old age.

  'I knew I'd end up answering questions about that man eventually,' Benedikt said when at last he got to the point.

  'Yes, I wanted to talk about Leopold,' Erlendur said.

  'It was all very mysterious. Someone was bound to start wondering in the end. I should probably have told you the truth at the time but . . .'

  'The truth?'

  'Yes,' Benedikt said. 'May I ask why you're enquiring about this man now? My son said you'd questioned him too and when I spoke to you on the phone you were rather cagey. Why the sudden interest? I thought you investigated the case and cleared it up back then. Actually, I was hoping you had.'

  Erlendur told him about the skeleton found in Lake Kleifarvatn and that Leopold was one of several missing persons being investigated in connection with it.

  'Did you know him personally?' Erlendur asked.

  'Personally? No, I can hardly say that. And he didn't sell much either, in the short time he worked for us. If I remember correctly he made a lot of trips outside the city. All my salesmen did regional work – we sold agricultural machinery and earth-moving equipment – but none travelled as much as Leopold and none was a worse salesman.'

  'So he didn't make you any money?' Erlendur said.

  'I didn't want to take him on in the first place,' Benedikt said.

  'Really?'

  'Yes, no, that's not what I mean. They forced me to, really. I had to sack a damn good man to make room for him. It was never a big company.'

  'Wait a minute, say that again. Who forced you to hire him?'

  'They told me I mustn't tell anyone so . . . I don't know if I should be blabbing about it. I felt quite bad about all that plotting. I'm not one for doing things behind people's backs.'

  'This was decades ago,' Erlendur said. 'It can hardly do any harm now.'

  'No, I guess not. They threatened to move their franchise elsewhere. If I didn't hire that bloke. It was like

  I'd got caught up in the Mafia.'

  'Who forced you to take on Leopold?'

  'The manufacturer in East Germany, as it was then. They had good tractors that were much cheaper than the American ones. And bulldozers and diggers. We sold a lot of them although they weren't considered as classy as Massey Ferguson or Caterpillar.'

  'Did they have a say in which staff you recruited?'

  'That was what they threatened,' Benedikt said. 'What was I supposed to do? I couldn't do a thing. Of course I hired him.'

  'Did they give you an explanation? Why you ought to recruit that specific person?'

  'No. None. No explanation. I took him on but never got to know him. They said it was a temporary arrangement and, like I told you, he wasn't in the city much, just spent his time rushing back and forth around the country.'

  'A temporary arrangement?'

  'They said he didn't need to work for me for long. And they set conditions. He wasn't to go on the payroll. He was to be paid as a contractor, under the table. That was pretty difficult. My accountant was continually querying that. But it wasn't much money, nowhere near enough to live on, so he must have had another income as well.'

  'What do you think their motive was?'

  'I don't have a clue. Then he disappeared and I never heard any more about Leopold, except from you lot in the police.'

  'Didn't you report what you're now telling me at the time he went missing?'

  'I haven't told anyone. They threatened me. I had my staff to think of. My livelihood depended on that company. Even though it wasn't big we managed to make a bit of money and then the hydropower projects started up. The Sigalda and Búrfell stations. They needed our heavy plant machinery then. We made a fortune out of the hydropower projects. It was around the same time. The company was growing. I had other things to think about.'

  'So you just tried to forget it?'

  'Correct. I didn't think it was any skin off my nose, either. I hired him because the manufacturer wanted me to, but he was nothing to do with me as such.'

  'Do you have any idea what could have happened to him?'

  'None at all. He was supposed to meet those people outside Mosfellsbaer but didn't turn up, as far as we know. Maybe he just abandoned the idea or postponed it. That's not inconceivable. Maybe he had some urgent business to attend to.'