The Draining Lake de-6 Read online

“Tell him to consult a psychiatrist.”

  “He sees one regularly.”

  “Of course, it’s impossible to put yourself in his shoes,” Erlendur said. “He must feel terrible.”

  “Yes,” Sigurdur Oli said.

  “And he’s contemplating suicide?”

  “So he says. And he could easily do something stupid. I just can’t be bothered with it all.”

  “What does Bergthora reckon?”

  “She thinks I can help him.”

  “Strawberries?”

  “I know. I’m always telling him. It’s ridiculous.”

  9

  Erlendur sat listening to an account of someone who had gone missing in the 1960s. Sigurdur Oli was with him. This time it was a man in his late thirties.

  A preliminary examination of the skeleton suggested that the body in Kleifarvatn was that of a man aged between 35 and 40. Based on the age of the accompanying Russian device, it had been left in the lake some time after 1961. A detailed study had been made of the black box discovered under the skeleton. It was a listening device — known in those days as a microwave receiver — which could intercept the frequency used by NATO in the 1960s. It was marked with the year of manufacture, 1961, badly filed off, and such inscriptions as remained to be deciphered were clearly Russian.

  Erlendur examined newspaper reports from 1973 about the Russian equipment being found in Lake Kleifarvatn and most of what Marion Briem had told him fitted the journalists” accounts. The devices had been discovered at a depth of ten metres just off Geirshofdi cape, some distance from where the skeleton had been found. He told Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg about this and they discussed whether it might be linked to their skeleton. Elinborg thought it was obvious. If the police had explored more thoroughly when they’d found the Russian equipment, they might have found the body as well.

  According to contemporary police reports, the divers had seen a black limousine on the road to Kleifarvatn when they went there the previous week. They immediately thought it was a diplomatic car. The Soviet embassy did not answer enquiries about the case, nor did other Eastern European representatives in Reykjavik. Erlendur found a brief report stating that the equipment was Russian. It included listening devices with a range of 160 kilometres which were probably used to intercept telephone conversations in Reykjavik and around the Keflavik base. The devices probably dated from the 1960s, and used valves that had been rendered obsolete by transistor technology. They were battery-powered and would fit inside an ordinary suitcase.

  The woman sitting opposite them was approaching seventy but had aged well. She and her partner had not had children by the time of his sudden disappearance. They were unmarried but had discussed going to the registrar. She had not lived with anyone since, she told them rather coyly but with a hint of regret in her voice.

  “He was so nice,” the woman said, “and I always thought he’d come back. It was better to believe that than to think he was dead. I couldn’t accept that. And never have accepted it.”

  They had found themselves a small flat and planned to have children. She worked in a dairy shop. This was in 1968.

  “You remember them,” she said to Erlendur, “and maybe you too,” she said, looking at Sigurdur Oli. “They were special dairy shops that only sold milk, curds and the like. Nothing but dairy products.”

  Erlendur nodded calmly. Sigurdur Oli had already lost interest.

  Her partner had said he would collect her after work as he did every day, but she stood alone in front of the shop and waited.

  “It’s more than thirty years ago now,” she said, with a look at Erlendur, “and I feel like I’m still standing in front of the shop waiting. All these years. He was always punctual and I remember thinking how late he was after ten minutes had gone by, then the first quarter of an hour and half an hour. I remember how infinitely long it was. It was like he’d forgotten me.”

  She sighed.

  “Later it was like he’d never existed.”

  They had read the reports. She reported his disappearance early the following morning. The police went to her home. He was reported missing in the newspapers and on radio and television. The police told her he would surely turn up soon. Asked whether he drank or whether he had ever disappeared like this before, whether she knew about another woman in his life. She denied all these suggestions but the questions made her consider the man in completely different terms. Was there another woman? Had he ever been unfaithful? He was a salesman who drove all over the country. He sold agricultural equipment and machinery, tractors, hay blowers, diggers and bull-dozers, and travelled a lot. Maybe several weeks at a time on the longest trips. He had just returned from one when he disappeared.

  “I don’t know what he could have been doing up at Kleifarvatn,” she said, glancing from one detective to the other. “We never went there.”

  They had not told her about the Soviet spying equipment or the smashed skull, only that a skeleton had been found where the lake had drained and that they were investigating persons reported missing during a specific period.

  “Your car was found two days later outside the coach station,” Sigurdur Oli said.

  “No one there recognised my partner from the descriptions,” the woman said. “I had no photos of him. And he had none of me. We hadn’t been together that long and we didn’t own a camera. We never went away together. Isn’t that when people mostly use cameras?”

  “And at Christmas,” Sigurdur Oli said.

  “Yes, at Christmas,” she agreed.

  “What about his parents?”

  “They’d died long before. He’d spent a lot of time abroad. He’d worked on merchant ships and lived in Britain and France too. He spoke with a slight accent, he’d been away that long. About thirty coaches left the station heading all over Iceland between the time he disappeared and when the car was found, but none of the drivers could say if he had been on board one. They didn’t think so. The police were certain that someone would have noticed him if he’d been on a coach, but I know they were just trying to console me. I think they supposed he was on a bender in town and would turn up in the end. They said worried wives sometimes called the police when their husbands were out drinking.”

  The woman fell silent.

  “I don’t think they investigated it very carefully,” she eventually said. “I didn’t feel they were particularly interested in the case.”

  “Why do you think he took the car to the coach station?” Erlendur asked. He noticed Sigurdur Oli jotting down the remark about the police work.

  “I haven’t got the faintest idea.”

  “Do you think someone else could have driven it there? To throw you off the track, or the police? To make people think he’d left town?”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “Of course I wondered endlessly whether he had simply been killed, but I don’t understand who was supposed to have done it and even less why. I just can’t understand it.”

  “It’s often plain coincidence,” Erlendur said. “There needn’t always be an explanation. In Iceland there’s rarely a real motive behind a murder. It’s an accident or a snap decision, not premeditated and in most cases committed for no obvious reason.”

  According to police reports, the man had gone on a short sales trip early that day and intended to go home afterwards. A dairy farmer just outside Reykjavik was interested in buying a tractor and he was planning to drop by to try to clinch the sale. The farmer said the man had never called. He had waited for him all day, but he had never showed up.

  “Everything seems hunky-dory, then he makes himself disappear,” Sigurdur Oli said. “What do you personally think happened?”

  “He didn’t make himself disappear,” the woman retorted. “Why do you say that?”

  “No, sorry,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Of course not. He disappeared. Sorry.”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “He could be a bit depressive at times, silent and closed. Perhaps if we’d had childr
en… maybe it would all have turned out differently if we’d had children.”

  They fell silent. Erlendur imagined the woman waiting outside the dairy shop, anxious and disappointed.

  “Was he in contact with any embassies in Reykjavik at all?” Erlendur asked.

  “Embassies?”

  “Yes, the embassies,” Erlendur said. “Did he have any connections with them, the Eastern European ones in particular?”

  “Not at all,” the woman said. “I don’t follow… what do you mean?”

  “He didn’t know anyone from the embassies, work for them or that sort of thing?”

  “No, certainly not, or at least not after I met him. Not that I knew of.”

  “What kind of car did you have?” Erlendur asked. He could not remember the model from the files.

  The woman pondered. These strange questions were confusing her.

  “It was a Ford,” she said. “I think it was called a Falcon.”

  “From the case files, it doesn’t look as if there were any clues to his disappearance in the car.”

  “No, they couldn’t find anything. One of the hubcaps had been stolen, but that was all.”

  “In front of the coach station?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

  “That’s what they thought.”

  “A hubcap?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to the car?”

  “I sold it. I needed the money. I’ve never had much money.”

  She remembered the licence plate and mechanically repeated the number to them. Sigurdur Oli wrote it down. Erlendur gestured to him, they stood up and thanked her for her time. The woman stayed put in her chair. He thought she was bitterly lonely.

  “Where did all the machinery he sold come from?” Erlendur asked, for the sake of saying something.

  “The farm machinery? It came from Russia and East Germany. He said it wasn’t as good as the American stuff, but much cheaper.”

  Erlendur could not imagine what Sindri Snaer wanted from him. His son was completely different from his sister Eva, who felt Erlendur had not pressed hard enough for the right to see his children. They would never have known he existed if their mother had not been forever bad-mouthing him. When Eva grew up she tracked down her father and vented her anger mercilessly. Sindri Snaer did not seem to have the same agenda. He neither grilled Erlendur about destroying their family nor condemned him for taking no interest in him and Eva when they were just children who believed their father was bad for walking out on them.

  When Erlendur got home Sindri was boiling spaghetti. He had tidied up the kitchen, which meant he had thrown away a few microwave-meal packets, washed a couple of forks and cleaned inside and around the coffee machine. Erlendur went into the living room and watched the television news. The skeleton from Lake Kleifarvatn was the fifth item. The police had taken care not to mention the Soviet equipment.

  They sat in silence, eating the spaghetti. Erlendur chopped it up with his fork and spread it with butter while Sindri pursed his lips and sucked it up with tomato ketchup. Erlendur asked how his mother was doing and Sindri said he had not heard from her since he’d come to the city. A chat show was starting on the television. A pop star was recounting his triumphs in life.

  “Eva told me at New Year that you had a brother who died,” Sindri said suddenly, wiping his mouth with a piece of kitchen roll.

  “That’s right,” Erlendur said after some thought. He had not been expecting this.

  “Eva said it had a big effect on you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And explains a bit what you’re like.”

  “Explains what I’m like?” Erlendur said. “I don’t know what I’m like. Nor does Eva!”

  They went on eating, Sindri sucking up spaghetti and Erlendur struggling to balance the strands on his fork. He thought to himself that he would buy some porridge and pickled haggis the next time he happened to pass a shop.

  “It’s not my fault,” Sindri said.

  “What?”

  “That I hardly know who you are.”

  “No,” Erlendur said. “It’s not your fault.”

  They ate in silence. Sindri put down his fork and wiped his mouth with kitchen roll again. He stood up, took a coffee mug, filled it with water from the tap and sat back down at the table.

  “She said he was never found.”

  “Yes, that’s right, he was never found,” Erlendur said.

  “So he’s still up there?”

  Erlendur stopped eating and put down his fork.

  “I expect so, yes,” he said, looking into his son’s eyes. “Where’s this all leading?”

  “Do you sometimes look for him?”

  “Look for him?”

  “Are you still searching for him?”

  “What do you want from me, Sindri?” Erlendur said.

  “I was working out in the east. In Eskifjordur. They didn’t know we…” Sindri groped for the right word… “knew each other, but after Eva told me about that business with your brother I started asking the locals, older people, who were working in the fish factory with me.”

  “You started asking about me?”

  “Not directly. Not about you. I asked about the old days, about the people who used to live there and the farmers. Your dad was a farmer, wasn’t he? My grandad.”

  Erlendur did not answer.

  “Some of them remember it well,” Sindri said.

  “Remember what?”

  “The two boys who went up to the mountains with their father, and the younger boy who died. And the family moved to Reykjavik afterwards.”

  “Which people were you talking to?”

  “People who live out east.”

  “And you were spying on me?” Erlendur said grumpily.

  “I wasn’t spying on you at all,” Sindri said. “Eva Lind told me about it and I asked people about what happened.”

  Erlendur pushed away his plate.

  “So what happened?”

  “The weather was crazy. Your dad got home and the rescue team was called out. You were found buried in a snowdrift. Your dad didn’t take part in the search. People said he sank into self-pity and went off the rails afterwards.”

  “Went off the rails?” Erlendur said angrily. “Bollocks.”

  “Your mum was much tougher,” Sindri went on. “She went out searching every day with the rescue team. And long after that. Until you moved away two years later. She was always going up onto the moors to look for her son. It was an obsession for her.”

  “She wanted to be able to bury him,” Erlendur said. “If you call that an obsession.”

  “People told me about you too.”

  “You shouldn’t listen to gossip.”

  “They said the elder brother, the one who was rescued, came back to the area regularly and walked the mountains and moors. There could be years between his visits and he hadn’t been for several years now, but they always expect him there. He comes alone, with a tent, rents some horses and heads off for the mountains. He returns a week or ten days later, maybe a fortnight, then drives away. He never talks to anyone except when he rents the horses, and he doesn’t say much then.”

  “Are people out east still talking about that?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sindri said. “Not so much. I was just curious and talked to people who remembered it. Remembered you. I talked to the farmer who rents you the horses.”

  “Why did you do all this? You’ve never…”

  “Eva Lind said she understood you better after you told her about it. She always wants to talk about you. I’ve never bothered thinking about you at all. I can’t figure out what you represent to her. You don’t matter to me in the least. That’s fine with me. I’m glad I don’t need you. Never have. Eva needs you. She always has.”

  “I’ve tried to do what I can for Eva,” Erlendur said.

  “I know. She’s told me. Sometimes she thinks you’re interfering, but I think she understands what you�
�re trying to do for her.”

  “Human remains can be found a whole generation later,” Erlendur said. “Even hundreds of years. By sheer chance. There are lots of stories of that happening.”

  “I’m sure,” Sindri said, looking over at the bookshelves. “Eva said you felt responsible for what happened to him. That you lost hold of him. Is that why you go to the east to look for him?”

  “I think…”

  Erlendur stopped short.

  “Your conscience?” Sindri asked.

  “I don’t know whether it’s my conscience,” Erlendur said, with a vague smile.

  “But you’ve never found him,” Sindri said.

  “No,” Erlendur said.

  “That’s why you keep going back.”

  “I like going to the east. Change of surroundings. Being by myself a bit.”

  “I saw the house you lived in. It was abandoned ages ago.”

  “Yes,” Erlendur said. “Way back. It’s half-collapsed. Sometimes I make plans to turn it into a summer house but…”

  “It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

  Erlendur looked at Sindri.

  “It’s nice sleeping there,” Erlendur said. “With the ghosts.”

  When he lay down to go to sleep that night he thought about his son’s words. Sindri was right. He had been to the east during several summers to look for his brother. He could not say why, apart from the obvious reason: to find his mortal remains and close the matter, even though he knew deep down that finding anything at this stage was a forlorn hope. On the first and last night he always slept in the old abandoned farmhouse. He slept on the living-room floor, looking out through the broken windows at the sky and thinking about the old times when he had sat in that same room with his family and relatives or the locals. He looked at the carefully painted door and saw his mother coming in with a jug of coffee and filling the guests” cups in the soft glow of the living-room lights. His father standing in the doorway, smiling at something that had been said. His brother came up to him, shy because of the guests, and asked if he could have another cruller. Himself, he stood by the window gazing out at the horses. Some riders had stopped by, cheerful and noisy.