The Draining Lake

by Arnaldur Indridason

  'I'm afraid I cannot assist you with that,' the Secretary said, no longer smiling. 'I've tried to answer you as best I can but there are some things I simply don't know. And that's that.'

  Erlendur and Elínborg stood up. There was a smugness about the man that Erlendur disliked. Your base! What did he know about military bases in Iceland?

  'Was the equipment obsolete, so there was no point in sending it home in a diplomatic bag?' he asked. 'Couldn't you throw it away like any other rubbish? These devices clearly demonstrate that spying went on in Iceland. When the world was much simpler and the lines were clearly drawn.'

  'You can say what you like about it,' the Secretary said, standing up. 'I have to be somewhere else.'

  'The man whose body was found in Kleifarvatn, could he have been at the embassy?'

  'I think that's out of the question.'

  'Or from another Eastern bloc embassy?'

  'I don't think there's the slightest chance. And now I must ask you to—'

  'Are there any persons missing from this period?'

  'No.'

  'You just know that? You don't need to look it up?'

  'I have looked it up. No one is missing.'

  'No one who disappeared and you don't know what became of them?'

  'Goodbye,' the Secretary said, with a smile. He had opened the door.

  'Definitely no one who disappeared?' Erlendur said as he walked out into the corridor.

  'No one,' the Secretary said, and closed the door in their faces.

  Sigurdur Óli was refused a meeting with the US ambassador or his staff. Instead he received a message from the embassy marked 'confidential' which stated that no US citizen in Iceland had been reported missing during the period in question. Sigurdur Óli wanted to take the matter further and insist on a meeting, but his request was denied by the top CID officials. The police would need something tangible to link the body in the lake to the US embassy, the base or American citizens in Iceland.

  Sigurdur Óli telephoned a friend of his, a head of section at the Defence Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to ask whether he could locate any past employee to tell the police about foreign embassy officials in the 1960s and 1970s. He tried to give away as little as possible about the investigation, just enough to arouse his interest, and his friend promised to get back to him.

  Erlendur stood awkwardly, a glass of white wine in his hand, scouring the crowd at Elínborg's book launch. He had found it quite difficult to make up his mind whether to put in an appearance, but in the end he had decided to go. Gatherings annoyed him, the few that came his way. He sipped the wine and grimaced. It was sour. He thought ruefully of his bottle of Chartreuse back home.

  He smiled at Elínborg, who was standing in the crowd and waved to him. She was talking to the press. The fact that a woman from the Reykjavík CID had written a cookery book had prompted quite a lot of publicity and Erlendur was pleased to see Elínborg basking in the attention. She had once invited him, Sigurdur Óli and his wife Bergthóra for dinner to test a new Indian chicken dish that she had said would be in the book. It was a particularly spicy and tasty meal and they had praised Elínborg until she blushed.

  Erlendur did not recognise many people apart from the police officers and was relieved to see Sigurdur Óli and Bergthóra walk over in his direction.

  'Do try to smile for once when you see us,' Bergthóra said, kissing him on the cheek. He drank a toast of white wine, then they toasted Elínborg specially afterwards.

  'When do we get to meet this woman you're seeing?' Bergthóra asked, and Erlendur noticed Sigurdur Óli tensing beside her. Erlendur's relationship with a woman was the talk of the CID, but few dared pry into the matter.

  'One day, perhaps,' Erlendur said. 'On your eightieth birthday.'

  'Can't wait,' Bergthóra said.

  Erlendur smiled.

  'Who are all these people?' Bergthóra said, looking around the gathering.

  'I only know the officers,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'And I think all those fatsos over there are with Elínborg.'

  'There's Teddi,' Bergthóra said, with a wave at Elínborg's husband.

  Someone tapped a spoon against a glass and the murmuring stopped. In a far corner of the room a man began talking and they could not hear a word, but everyone laughed. They saw Elínborg push her way over to him and take out the speech that she had written. They inched closer to hear her and managed to catch her closing thanks to her family and colleagues in the force for their patience and support. A round of applause followed.

  'Are you going to stay long?' Erlendur asked, sounding ready to leave.

  'Don't be so uptight,' Bergthóra said. 'Relax. Enjoy yourself a bit. Get drunk.'

  She snatched a glass of white wine from the nearest tray.

  'Get this inside you!'

  Elínborg appeared from the crowd, greeted them all with a kiss and asked if they were bored. She looked at Erlendur, who took a swig of the sour white wine. She and Bergthóra started talking about a female television celebrity who was there and who was having an affair with some businessman. Sigurdur Óli shook the hand of someone whom Erlendur did not recognise and he was about to sneak out when he bumped into an old colleague. He was nearing retirement, something that Erlendur knew he feared.

  'You've heard about Marion,' the man said, sipping his white wine. 'Buggered lungs, I'm told. Just sits at home suffering.'

  'That's right,' Erlendur said. 'And watches westerns.'

  'Were you making enquiries about the Falcon?' the man asked, emptied his glass and grabbed another from a tray as it glided past them.

  'The Falcon?'

  'They were talking about it at the station. You were looking into missing persons in connection with the Kleifarvatn skeleton.'

  'Do you remember anything about the Falcon?' Erlendur asked.

  'No, not exactly. We found it outside the coach station. Níels was in charge of the investigation. I saw him here just now. Nifty book that girl's written,' he added. 'I was just looking at it. Good photos.'

  'I think the girl's in her forties,' Erlendur said. 'And yes, it's a really good book.'

  He scouted around for Níels and found him sitting on a wide windowsill. Erlendur sat down beside him and recalled how he had once envied him. Níels had a long police career behind him and a family that anyone would be proud of. His wife was a well-known painter, they had four promising children, all university graduates and now providing them with a succession of grandchildren. The couple owned a large house in the suburb of Grafarvogur, splendidly designed by the artist, and two cars, and had nothing to cast a shadow on their eternal happiness. Erlendur sometimes wondered whether a happier and more successful life was possible. They were not the best of friends. Erlendur had always found Níels lazy and absolutely unsuited for detective work. Nor did his personal success diminish the antipathy Erlendur felt towards him.

  'Marion's really ill, I hear,' Níels said when Erlendur sat down beside him.

  'I'm sure there's a while left yet,' Erlendur said against his better judgement. 'How are you doing?'

  He asked simply out of politeness. He always knew how Níels was doing.

  'I've given up trying to figure it out,' Níels said. 'We arrested the same man for burglary five times in one weekend. Every time he confesses and is released because the case is solved. He breaks in somewhere again, gets arrested, is released, burgles somewhere else. It's brainless. Why don't they set up a system here for sending idiots like that straight to prison? They clock up twenty or so crimes before they're given the minimum custodial sentence, then the minute they're out on probation you're arresting the same buggers again. What's the point of such madness? Why aren't these bastards given a proper sentence?'

  'You won't find a more hopeless set-up than the Icelandic judicial system,' Erlendur said.

  'Those scum make fools of the judges,' Níels said. 'And then those paedophiles! And the psychos!'

  They fell silent. The debate o
n leniency struck a nerve among police officers, who brought criminals, rapists and paedophiles into custody only to hear later that they had been given light sentences or even suspended ones.

  'There's another thing,' Erlendur said. 'Do you remember the man who sold agricultural machinery? He owned a Ford Falcon. Vanished without a trace.'

  'You mean the car outside the coach station?'

  'Yes.'

  'He had a nice girlfriend, that bloke. What do you reckon happened to her?'

  'She's still waiting,' Erlendur said. 'One of the hubcaps was missing from the car. Do you remember that?'

  'We assumed it must have been stolen from outside the coach station. There was nothing about the case to suggest criminal activity – apart from that hubcap being stolen, perhaps. If it was stolen. He could have hit the kerb. Anyway, it was never found. No more than its owner was.'

  'Why should he have killed himself?' Erlendur said. 'He had everything going for him. A pretty girlfriend. Bright future. He'd bought a Ford Falcon.'

  'You know how none of that counts when people commit suicide,' Níels said.

  'Do you think he caught a coach somewhere?'

  'We thought that it was likely, if I recall correctly. We talked to the drivers but they didn't remember him. Still, that doesn't mean he didn't take a coach out of town.'

  'You think he killed himself.'

  'Yes,' said Níels. 'But . . .'

  Níels hesitated.

  'What?' Erlendur said.

  'He was playing some kind of a game, that bloke,' Níels said.

  'How so?'

  'She said his name was Leopold but we couldn't find anyone by that name of the age she said he was; there was no one on our files or in the national register. No birth certificate. No driving licence. There was no Leopold who could have been that man.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Either all the records about him had gone missing or . . .'

  'Or he was deceiving her?'

  'He couldn't have been called Leopold, at least,' Níels said.

  'What did she say to that? What did his girlfriend say when you asked her about it?'

  'We had the feeling he'd been pulling a fast one on her,' Níels said eventually. 'We felt sorry for her. She didn't even have a photograph of him. What does that tell you? She didn't know a thing about that man.'

  'So?'

  'We didn't tell her.'

  'You didn't tell her what?'

  'That we had no files about this Leopold of hers,' Níels said. 'It looked cut and dried to us. He lied to her, then walked out on her.'

  Erlendur sat in silence while he tried to work out the implications of what Níels had told him.

  'Out of consideration for her,' Níels said.

  'And she still doesn't know?'

  'I don't think so.'

  'Why did you keep it a secret?'

  'Probably for the sake of kindness.'

  'She's still sitting waiting for him,' Erlendur said. 'They were going to get married.'

  'That was what he convinced her of before he left.'

  'What if he was murdered?'

  'We considered it very unlikely. It's a rare scenario, but admittedly not unknown: men lie their way into women's lives, get . . . how should I put it, comfortable, then disappear. I think she knew deep down. We didn't need to tell her.'

  'What about the car?'

  'It was in her name. The loan for it was in her name. She owned the car.'

  'You should have told her.'

  'Perhaps. But would she have been any better off? She would have learned that the man she loved was a confidence trickster. He told her nothing about his family. She knew nothing about him. He had no friends. Forever on sales trips all over the countryside. What does that tell you?'

  'She knew that she loved him,' Erlendur said.

  'And that's how he paid her back.'

  'What did the farmer say, the one he was going to meet?'

  'That's all in the files,' Níels said, with a nod and a smile at Elínborg, who was deep in conversation with her publisher. Elínborg had once mentioned that his name was Anton.

  'Come on, not everything goes into the files.'

  'He never met the farmer,' Níels said, and Erlendur could see how he was trying to recall the details of the case. They all remembered the big cases, the murders or disappearances, every single major arrest, every single assault and rape.

  'Couldn't you tell from the Falcon whether or not he met the farmer?'

  'We didn't find anything in the car to indicate that he'd been to the farm.'

  'Did you take samples from the floor by the front seats? Under the pedals?'

  'It's in the files.'

  'I didn't see it. You could have established whether he visited the farmer. He would have picked stuff up on his shoes.'

  'It wasn't a complicated case, Erlendur. Nobody wanted to turn it into one. The man made himself vanish. Maybe he bumped himself off. We don't always find the bodies. You know that. Even if we had found something under the pedals, it could have been from anywhere. He travelled around the country a lot. Selling agricultural machinery.'

  'What did they say at his work?'

  Níels thought about the question.

  'It was such a long time ago, Erlendur.'

  'Try to remember.'

  'He wasn't on the payroll, I remember that much, which was rare in those days. He was on commission and worked on a freelance basis.'

  'Which means he would have had to pay his taxes himself.'

  'As I said, there was no mention of him in the records under the name Leopold. Not a thing.'

  'So you reckon he kept that woman when he was in Reykjavík but, what, lived somewhere else?'

  'Or even had a family,' Níels said. 'There are blokes like that.'

  Erlendur sipped his wine and looked at the perfect tie knot under Níels's shirt collar. He was not a good detective. To him, no case was ever complicated.

  'You should have told her the truth.'

  'That may well be, but she had happy memories of him. We concluded that it wasn't a criminal matter. The disappearance was never investigated as a murder because no clues were found to warrant it.'

  They stopped talking. The guests' murmuring had become a solid wall of noise.

  'You're still into these missing persons,' Níels said. 'Why this interest? What are you looking for?'

  'I don't know,' Erlendur said.

  'It was a routine disappearance,' Níels said. 'Something else was needed to turn it into a murder investigation. No clues ever emerged to give grounds for that.'

  'No, probably not.'

  'Don't you ever get tired of all this?' Níels asked.