The Flatey Enigma

by Ingolfsson, Viktor Arnar

  Reverend Veigar in Reykhólar remembered Gaston Lund very well but had not heard from him, nor expected to hear from him. He had only stayed one night in Reykhólar. The hotel owner in Stykkishólmur confirmed that Lund had not stayed at the hotel overnight, after the boat arrived from Flatey. The bus for Reykjavik was leaving the following morning, so he assumed he must have stayed somewhere else in the village, if he had arrived on the boat.

  The driver of the Stykkishólmur bus was at his home in Reykjavik. “I can’t even remember who was on my bus yesterday,” he answered when Grímur asked him whether he remembered a Danish passenger on September 4 last year.

  Finally, there was a message from the detective division in Reykjavik. Gaston Lund had stayed in Hotel Borg for two nights when he came to Iceland and left his case in storage while he was traveling around the country. The case had been kept in a storage room in the hotel’s basement and had been forgotten. This was why no one had wondered why it hadn’t been collected.

  Kjartan and Grímur sat at the telephone exchange until dinnertime, continuing with their enquiries. Stína, the head of the telephone exchange, and her colleague in Stykkishólmur stayed open long past their normal working hours, eavesdropping on the conversations with excitement.

  More information arrived from the Danish embassy. Gaston Lund had traveled from Copenhagen to Norway in mid-July. He was single, somewhat eccentric in his habits, and apparently liked to keep to himself. His colleagues at the University of Copenhagen knew he intended to go to Bergen, Trondheim, and Stiklestad in Norway, but he had never mentioned any visit to Iceland. Questions soon began to be asked when he failed to turn up to deliver his lecture at the manuscript symposium and to teach at the university. An extensive search was then launched in Norway. There had been a ferry accident near Bergen at the beginning of September, and people were starting to wonder whether he might have been among the victims. The fact that the professor had been found dead on a deserted in Iceland made headlines in Copenhagen.

  On the state radio news there had been a long report on the case, and the district magistrate from Patreksfjördur was quoted as saying that there was an investigation underway.

  “…In 1647 Bishop Brynjólfur visited the West Fjörds and celebrated mass in the church of Flatey on the twelfth Sunday after trinity, which was the fifteenth of September. Brynjólfur then offered to buy the Flatey Book, first for money and then for land, but his offer was rejected. But when Jón Finnsson then followed the bishop to the ship, he handed him the good manuscript. One can assume that the bishop intended to print the book in Latin translation for learned men, but he did not have the king’s authorization to run a printing press in Skálholt because the bishop of Hólar had exclusive printing rights in Iceland.

  “The Danish king Fridrik III reigned between 1648 and 1670. He had a keen interest in ancient knowledge and in 1656 wrote to Bishop Brynjólfur, instructing him to send him any antiquities, old stories, and documents that could be found in Iceland to increase His Majesty’s collection in the Royal Library. The bishop then communicated the king’s request to the Court of Legislature of the Althing, and in the same year he dispatched the Flatey Book abroad and it has been in the Royal Library ever since. Fridrik III acquired the Flatey Book as the king of Iceland, and one therefore needs to regard it as belonging to the Icelandic state. These are the reasons why Icelanders are currently requesting the book to be returned to Iceland, and this concludes this history of the Flatey Book.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Högni continued working on the seal pups when Grímur and Kjartan went off to the telephone exchange. All of the fur had been pinned to the gable of the hut, but there was still a lot of meat left on the carcasses and the fat was meant to be melted into oil.

  Little Nonni came walking down the shore with a dented milk canister in his hand and timidly greeted the teacher.

  “Have you read that Indian story I lent you yet, Nonni my friend?” Högni asked.

  “Yeah, twice.”

  “Twice? That was unnecessary. We can go to the library together and see if we can find another fun book that you haven’t read yet.”

  “I’m reading The Flying Dutchman. Dad got a loan of it.”

  “That’s not a nice book.”

  “I know. It’s really spooky.”

  “Yes. It’s got a lot of ghosts in it. I wouldn’t lend that book to small children.”

  “I only read it during the day and at night keep it where the potatoes are stored. That way I don’t get too scared.”

  “I see. Have you planted the potatoes yet?”

  “Yeah, yeah, almost all of them.”

  “Have you caught any seal pups this spring?”

  “No, none. Dad and Grandpa went out to check the net by Ketilsey this morning, but didn’t catch anything. It’s my fault, Dad says.”

  “Why is it your fault?”

  “I shat on the island and the seals smell the smell, Dad says. But I’m sure it’s more the dead man who’s to blame. The smell off him was a lot worse.”

  Högni found an old washing bucket and chucked some pieces of seal meat into it.

  “There you go, lad. Take that home to your dad. Bring the bucket back tomorrow. Then we can go to the library and find something fun to read. Remember that books are your best friend,” he said, smiling.

  Nonni took the bucket and placed it under his arm. Then, fully focused, he started walking toward home without saying thank you or good-bye.

  “Can you help me to understand the questions and answers in the Flatey enigma?” he asked.

  “I can try to,” she answered.

  Then she read out the questions one by one, looked at the answers that she had on the piece of paper, and then looked up the relevant chapter in the Munksgaard edition of the book, with well-trained fingers. She ran her finger along the text, maybe read a few lines out loud, but generally only vaguely explained what the chapter was about. He nodded silently if the answers were identical, but otherwise read out the alternative answers. In this manner they went through all of the forty questions, one after another…

  CHAPTER 17

  Saturday, June 4, 1960

  The eastern winds subsided during the night, and when dawn broke, the sun shone and a stillness hung over Breidafjördur. The water in the strait was dark blue and as smooth as a mirror, except for those spots where the tide swirled between the islets and shallows.

  Kjartan gazed out of his bedroom window and recalled the old proverb that said that sunshine was of little use to the man with no sun in his heart. He took a few deep breaths and then started to pick up his clothes.

  Grímur and Högni had long left to go out and check on the seal nets by the time Kjartan finally stepped outside. Ingibjörg was in the kitchen stirring baking dough and listening to music on the radio. There was yellow dough in a large bowl, which she held firmly under her left arm as she stirred it vigorously with a big baking paddle in her right hand. In the shuffle some flour had been sprinkled over the table. Kjartan saw that the eggs she was using for the baking were big and had black spots on them.

  “Those are great black-backed gull eggs from the spring,” she said as he picked one up to examine it. “There’s no need to spare any of those eggs in these recipes. There’s plenty of them at this time of the year, and they’re fine for baking, even if they’re a bit old and have started to gestate,” she added.

  Kjartan drank his morning coffee and ate a slice of bread with lamb pâté. He was gradually starting to feel better and more comfortable about his stay with the district officer and his wife, although he was still plagued by worries about the investigation. For a moment he managed to forget himself, though, by staring out the kitchen window at two white wagtails that were hopping between stones on the embankment; he whistled a few notes to the radio.

  To his relief, Ingibjörg continued with her kitchen work and did not initiate any conversation with him. It was good to sit like that and just think a little. He al
so feared that if they started talking together, the conversation would soon veer toward his personal affairs, and that was something he was eager to avoid. He didn’t want to tell any lies, so it was best just to keep his mouth shut.

  But he certainly had plenty of work to do. He intended to meet the islanders who had a motorboat at their disposal that would have been sturdy enough to make a journey to Ketilsey in the month of September, and he now asked Ingibjörg who they might be. She answered that there were only five, three once you excluded Valdi from Ystakot and Grímur, the district officer himself.

  Ingibjörg listed the others as she broke another egg and added it to the baking dough: “There’s Ásmundur, the storekeeper of the island store. He owns Alda, a beautiful white rowboat with a motor mounted on board. Then there’s Gudjón, my brother in Rádagerdi, who has Ellidi, a six-ton open motorboat with a little wheelhouse on it, and Sigurbjörn, the farmer in Svalbardi, who owns Lucky, an old-fashioned motorboat; it’s green. They’re all decent, sensible, honest, and honorable people.”

  Kjartan gave a start. Lucky could be the name of a boat. It had never occurred to him. There didn’t have to be any connection with the message the man in Ketilsey tried to leave behind, but it needed to be borne in mind in the investigation.

  Kjartan knew the way to Rádagerdi, and Benny was alone at home and still painting the window. He seemed to be glad of the interruption; he put down his brush and lit a cigarette.

  “Mom and my sister Rósa are up in the shed milking the cows, and Dad’s with Sigurbjörn in Svalbardi, cutting his hair for the mass tomorrow,” he said when Kjartan inquired about the other members of the household.

  “Cutting hair?” Kjartan wasn’t sure he had heard right.

  “Yeah, Dad can cut hair a bit. He cuts it quite short, though, and it can be quite sore because his clippers aren’t as sharp as they used to be. That’s why I don’t want him to cut my hair. Sometimes a barber comes over from Stykkishólmur on the mail boat and cuts people’s hair while the boat goes off to Brjánslækur. I prefer him. He knows how to cut hair with style. You can buy brilliantine from Ásmundur at the island store.”

  Benny stuck his smoldering cigarette into his mouth, took a comb out of his back pocket, and combed his blond hair back over his forehead.

  “This is how Elvis combs his hair,” he explained, losing his cigarette as he did.

  Kjartan said good-bye and walked away toward Svalbardi while Benny was searching for his cigarette stub in the rhubarb patch that grew along the walls of the house.

  As luck would have it, Kjartan bumped into the farmers Sigurbjörn and Gudjón together. Sigurbjörn was sitting on a stool in front of the entrance to the Svalbardi farmhouse with an old sheet over his shoulders that was tied around his neck. Gudjón stood over Sigurbjörn cutting his hair. In addition to them, there were two women in the yard, probably a mother and daughter, washing bedclothes in a large basin. The youngest, a pretty girl of about fifteen or sixteen, looked at Kjartan with curiosity but coyly averted her gaze when he returned the stare.

  Gudjón in Rádagerdi was a well-groomed man in his forties, freshly shaven with dark hair, which was meticulously combed back with hair wax. He was wearing pressed beige pants and a checked cotton shirt with a red scarf around his neck. Sigurbjörn, on the other hand, was somewhat older with a choppy mop of gray hair on one side of his head that had not been cut yet. The other side was crew-cut, revealing bluish white skin underneath. His feet were clad in woolen socks and rubber shoes that protruded from under the sheet.

  This method of cutting hair struck Kjartan as being closer to sheepshearing than hairdressing. The cutting was also proceeding slowly because the clippers were stiff and painful on Sigurbjörn’s head.

  Kjartan introduced himself, and the others greeted him.

  “Mild weather,” Kjartan then said, for the sake of saying something.

  “Yes,” Sigurbjörn answered, “it’s been like this all spring. Better weather than any of the oldest women can remember, I think. The arctic terns have never come this early to nest; I think it can only end in disaster. Ouch, ouch, take it easy with those bloody clippers, Gutti pal.”

  “You mean you think the weather’ll get worse?” Kjartan asked, scanning the air, unable to spot a single cloud. But then he got down to business: “But anyway, you know why I’m here on the island, don’t you? Can I ask you a few questions?”

  Gudjón stopped cutting and straightened a moment. “Yeah, sure, of course,” he said, intrigued.

  “It’s been established that the body that was found on Ketilsey was that of a Danish man who stayed here with the priest last year, Professor Gaston Lund,” said Kjartan.

  “Yes. We heard that straightaway yesterday,” Gudjón answered.

  “Do either of you remember the man?”

  Gudjón shook his head, but Sigurbjörn nodded and answered, “Yeah, yeah, I sure do. I remember the man very well. I had an argument with him.”

  “Oh?” Kjartan was all ears.

  “Yeah, or as much as I could. He was trying to speak Icelandic, the poor lad, and it wasn’t altogether easy to understand what he was saying.”

  “Could he make himself understood, though?”

  “He could speak some old Icelandic and that kind of thing. He learned it from the manuscripts, he said. Then he’d practiced speaking modern Icelandic with Icelandic students in pubs in Copenhagen. They obviously taught him some swear words and curses.”

  “Did he curse a lot?” Kjartan asked.

  Sigurbjörn smiled and shook his head. “No, no.”

  “What did you argue about?”

  “I asked him when he was going to give us the Flatey Book back, and he said it was going to stay in Copenhagen. The best scholars were there, he said. Then I asked him some questions about Sverrir’s saga to test his knowledge, but he couldn’t answer much. We then tried to reason about it a little more, but I think it’s fair to say that we were just unable to understand each other.”

  Sigurbjörn grinned at the memory of it, but then he turned serious and said, “Of course, it was terrible for him to perish out on Ketilsey like that.”

  Gudjón seconded this with a nod.

  “Where did you meet?” Kjartan asked.

  “In the library. Hallbjörg in Innstibaer let him in to look at our Munksgaard edition of the book. He was very impressed by how it was kept in a glass case. I don’t think they treat the original manuscript any better. He took several photographs. Then he was going to have a crack at the old riddle. That was when I asked whether he was going to return the manuscript to us, but he wouldn’t hear a word of it.”

  Kjartan said, “We know that the deceased left the priest on September fourth and intended to take the mail boat to Stykkishólmur. We don’t know if he ever boarded the boat. If not, is it possible that he may have left the island on some other boat? Could he have gone on one of your boats?”

  Gudjón and Sigurbjörn looked at each other and both shook their heads.

  “We go out very little that early in September,” Sigurbjörn said, “except maybe to collect the hay on the outer islands when it’s been cut. Later we take a few trips to the mainland to collect the sheep from their summer grazing. We never sail south to Stykkishólmur or anywhere in that direction at that time of the year. Anyone who needs to travel south takes the mail boat.”

  Kjartan persisted: “Is it possible that someone would have taken him on one of your boats without you knowing?” he asked.

  “Taken the boat in secret, you mean?” Gudjón asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That would be a first on these islands.”

  “Could it have happened? There’s a first time for everything.”

  Gudjón and Sigurbjörn looked at each other and both shook their heads again.

  “No,” they said in unison, and Sigurbjörn added: “I think I would notice it straightaway if someone else had landed my boat.”

  Gudjón seconded him with a nod.


  “Have you any idea, then, of how he could have reached Ketilsey?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t fall off the mail boat on the way to Stykkishólmur,” said Gudjón. “The crew would definitely have noticed it if a passenger they had picked up in Flatey failed to disembark in Stykkishólmur. Especially in September when there are normally very few passengers on the boat. They’re very observant and conscientious.”

  Kjartan wondered whether he should also mention that the Danish man had probably written the word Lucky with pebbles on Ketilsey, but he decided against it. He had no way of knowing if it was connected to Sigurbjörn’s boat and could not think of how to formulate his question. Feeling the farmers could be of no more use to him for the moment, Kjartan said good-bye and headed back toward the village. Glancing back, he could see that the men were deep in conversation and seemed to have forgotten about the haircut altogether.

  She read, “Question one: It will come near when it is God’s wish. First letter. King Sverrir was going to his ship on a small rowboat when an arrow struck the bow over his head and another one came close to his knee. The king sat there and did not flinch, and his companion said, ‘Dangerous shot, sire.’ The king answered, ‘It will come near when it is God’s wish.’ The answer is ‘dangerous shot,’ and the first letter is d.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Detective Dagbjartur sat at the National Library with Egill, the reception manager from Hotel Borg, who was skimming through the newspapers of the last months. Egill was supposed to try to recognize the man who had inquired about Professor Lund the previous autumn. The reception manager was sure he had seen pictures of the man in the papers, and now they had to flip through them until they found him. This was their second day on this task, and it was proceeding slowly. Egill carefully studied all the photographs of men and occasionally stumbled on snippets of articles that drew his attention. Dagbjartur just sat there patiently, yawning and cleaning his nails. He had set himself a very clear and delimited task, which at best could be stretched out for another day or two. This temporarily freed him of petty criminals and paperwork. A press release had been dispatched to the papers that morning requesting the man to come forward, and it read as follows: “The man who entered Hotel Borg at the end of August of last year and enquired about Gaston Lund from Denmark is asked to contact the police in Reykjavik.” The notice would not be appearing before next Wednesday at the earliest. Whitsunday was upon them and no papers would be coming out.