The Draining Lake

by Arnaldur Indridason

  'Sometimes.'

  'And your daughter, she's always involved in the same old shit,' said Níels, with his four educated children who had all started beautiful families and lived perfect, impeccable lives, just like him.

  Erlendur knew that the whole force was aware of Eva Lind's arrest and how she had attacked Sigurdur Óli. She sometimes ended up in police custody and received no special treatment for being his daughter. Níels had clearly heard about Eva. Erlendur looked at him, his tasteful clothing and his manicured nails, and wondered whether a happy life made people even more boring than they were to start with.

  'Yes,' Erlendur said. 'She's as screwed up as ever.'

  12

  When Erlendur got home that evening there was no Sindri to welcome him. He had still not turned up when Erlendur went to bed just before midnight. There was no message, nor a telephone number where he could be reached. Erlendur missed his company. He dialled directory enquiries, but Sindri's mobile number was not listed.

  He was falling asleep when the telephone rang. It was Eva Lind.

  'You know they dope you up in here,' she said in a slurred voice.

  'I was asleep,' Erlendur lied.

  'They give you tablets to bring you down,' Eva said. 'I've never been so stoned in my life. What are you doing?'

  'Trying to sleep,' Erlendur said. 'Were you causing trouble?'

  'Sindri stopped by today,' Eva said without answering him. 'He said you'd had a talk.'

  'Do you know where he is?'

  'Isn't he with you?'

  'I think he's left,' Erlendur said. 'Maybe he's at your mother's. Are you allowed to make phone calls from that place whenever you like?'

  'Nice to hear from you too,' Eva snarled. 'And I'm not causing any fucking trouble.' She slammed the telephone down on him.

  Erlendur lay staring up into the darkness. He thought about his two children, Eva Lind and Sindri Snaer, and their mother, who hated him. He thought about his brother, for whom he had been searching in vain all these years. His bones were lying somewhere. Perhaps deep in a fissure, or higher up in the mountains than he could ever imagine. Even though he had gone far up the mountainsides, trying to work out how high a boy of eight could stray in bad conditions and a blinding blizzard.

  'Don't you ever get tired of all this?'

  Tired of this endless search.

  Hermann Albertsson opened the door to him just before noon the following day. He was a thin man aged around sixty, nimble, wearing scruffy jeans and a red check cotton shirt, and with a broad smile that never seemed to leave his face. From the kitchen came the smell of boiled haddock. He lived alone and always had done, he told Erlendur without being asked. He smelled of brake fluid.

  'Do have some haddock,' he said when Erlendur followed him into the kitchen.

  Erlendur declined firmly but Hermann ignored him and set a place at the table, and before he knew it he was sitting down with a complete stranger, eating softboiled haddock and buttered potatoes. They both ate the skin of the haddock and the skin of the potatoes, and for an instant Erlendur's thoughts turned to Elínborg and her cookery book. When she'd been working on it she had used him as a guinea pig for fresh monkfish with lime sauce, yellow from the quarter-kilo of butter she had put in it. It took Elínborg all day and night to boil down the fish stock until only four tablespoons remained on the bottom, essence of monkfish; she had stayed up all night to skim off the froth from the water. The sauce is everything, was Elínborg's motto. Erlendur smiled to himself. Hermann's haddock was delicious.

  'I did that Falcon up,' Hermann said, putting a large piece of potato in his mouth. He was a car mechanic and for a hobby he restored old cars and then tried to sell them. It was becoming increasingly difficult, he told Erlendur. No one was interested in old cars any more, only new Range Rovers that never faced tougher conditions than a traffic jam on the way to the city centre.

  'Do you still own it?' Erlendur asked.

  'I sold it in 1987,' Hermann said. 'I've got a 1979 Chrysler now, quite a limo really. I've been under its bonnet for, what, six years.'

  'Will you get anything for it?'

  'Nothing,' said Hermann, offering him some coffee. 'And I don't want to sell it either.'

  'You didn't register the Falcon when you owned it.'

  'No,' Hermann said. 'It never had plates when it was here. I fiddled about with it for a few years and that was fun. I drove it around the neighbourhood and if I wanted to take it to Thingvellir or somewhere I borrowed the plates from my own car. I didn't think it was worth paying the insurance.'

  'We couldn't find it registered anywhere,' Erlendur said, 'so the new owner hasn't bought licence plates for it either.'

  Hermann filled two cups.

  'That needn't be the case,' Hermann said. 'Maybe he gave up and got rid of it.'

  'Tell me something else. The hubcaps on the Falcon, were they special somehow, in demand?'

  Erlendur had asked Elínborg to check the Internet for him and on ford.com they had found photographs of old Ford Falcons. One was black and when Elínborg printed out the image for him, the hubcaps stood out very clearly.

  'They were quite fancy,' Hermann said thoughtfully. 'Those hubcaps on American cars.'

  'One hubcap was missing,' Erlendur said. 'At the time.'

  'Really?'

  'Did you buy a new hubcap when you got it?'

  'No, one of the previous owners had bought a new set a long time before. The originals weren't on when I bought it.'

  'Was it a remarkable car, the Falcon?'

  'The remarkable thing about it was that it wasn't big,' Hermann said. 'It wasn't a monster like most American cars. Like my Chrysler. The Falcon was small and compact and good to drive. Not a luxury car at all. Far from it.'

  The current owner turned out to be a widow a few years older than Erlendur. She lived in Kópavogur. Her husband, a furniture maker with a fad for cars, had died of a heart attack a few years before.

  'It was in good condition,' she said, opening the garage for Erlendur, who was unsure whether she was talking about the car or her husband's heart. The car was covered with a thick canvas sheet which Erlendur asked if he could remove. The woman nodded.

  'My husband took a great deal of care over that car,' she said in a weak voice. 'He spent all his time out here. Bought really expensive parts for it. Travelled all over the place to find them.'

  'Did he ever drive it?' Erlendur asked as he struggled to untie a knot.

  'Only around the block,' the woman said. 'It looks nice but my boys aren't interested in it and they haven't managed to sell it. There aren't many veteran-car enthusiasts these days. My husband was going to put plates on it when he died. He died in his workshop. He used to work alone and when he didn't come home for dinner and wouldn't answer the phone I sent my son round; he found him lying on the floor.'

  'That must have been difficult,' Erlendur said.

  'There's heart trouble in his family,' the woman said. 'His mother went that way and so did his cousin.'

  She watched Erlendur fiddling with the canvas. She did not give the impression of missing her husband much. Perhaps she had overcome her grief and was trying to make a new start.

  'What is it with this car, anyway?' she asked.

  She had asked the same question when Erlendur telephoned and he could still not find a way to tell her why he was interested in the car without saying what the case involved. He wanted to avoid going into details. Not say too much for the time being. He hardly knew why he was chasing after the car, or whether it would prove useful.

  'It was once connected with a police matter,' Erlendur said reluctantly. 'I just wanted to know if it was still around, in one piece.'

  'Was it a famous case?' she asked.

  'No, not at all. Not famous in the least,' Erlendur said.

  'Do you want to buy it or . . . ?' the woman asked.

  'No,' Erlendur said. 'I don't want to buy it. Old cars don't interest me as such.'

&nb
sp; 'As I say, it's in good condition. Valdi, my husband, said the main trouble was the underseal. It had gone rusty and he had to fix it. Otherwise it was all right. Valdi stripped the engine down, scrubbed every bit of it and bought new parts if he needed them.'

  She paused.

  'He didn't mind spending money on the car,' she said eventually. 'Never bought me anything. But men are like that.'

  Erlendur tugged at the sheet, which slipped off the car and onto the floor. For a moment he stood looking along the beautiful sleek lines of the Ford Falcon that had been owned by the man who had disappeared outside the coach station. He knelt down beside one of the front wheels. Assuming that the hubcap was missing when the car was discovered, he wondered where it could possibly have ended up.

  His mobile rang in his pocket. It was forensics with information about the Russian equipment in Kleifarvatn. Skipping all the formalities, the head of forensics told him that the device did not appear to have been functional when it was put in the lake.

  'Oh?' Erlendur said.

  'Yes,' the head of forensics said. 'It was certainly useless before it went into the water. The lake bed is porous sand and the contents of the container are too damaged to be explained by it having lain in water. It wasn't working when it got there.'

  'What does that tell us?' Erlendur asked.

  'Don't have the foggiest,' the head of forensics said.

  13

  The couple walked along the pavement, the man slightly ahead of the woman. It was a glorious spring evening. Rays of sunshine fell on the surface of the sea and in the distance showers of rain tumbled down. It was as if the couple were impervious to the evening's beauty. They strode forward, the man seemingly agitated. He talked incessantly. His wife followed silently, trying not to be left behind.

  He watched them pass his window, looked at the evening sun and thought back to when he was young and the world was beginning to become so infinitely complex and unmanageable.

  When the tragedy began.

  He completed his first year at the university with flying colours and went back to Iceland in the summer. During the vacation he worked for the party newspaper, writing articles about the reconstruction of Leipzig. At meetings he described being a student there and discussed Iceland's historical and cultural links with the city. He met leading party members. They had big plans for him. He looked forward to going back. He felt he had a role to play, perhaps a greater one than others. It was said that he was highly promising.

  That autumn he returned to East Germany; his second Christmas at the residence was approaching. The Icelanders looked forward to it because some would be sent food parcels from home: traditional Icelandic Christmas delicacies such as smoked lamb, salted fish, dried fish, confectionery, even books too. Karl had already received his parcel and when he began boiling a huge leg of lamb from Húnavatnssýsla where his uncle was a farmer the aroma filled the old villa. In the box there was also a bottle of Icelandic schnapps, which Emil requisitioned.

  Only Rut could afford to go home to Iceland for Christmas. She was also the only one who felt seriously homesick after she returned from summer vacation, and when she left for the Christmas break some said she might not be back. The old villa was emptier than usual because most of the German students had gone home, as had some of the Eastern Europeans who were permitted to travel and were entitled to cheap rail transport.

  So it was only a small group that gathered in the kitchen around the leg of smoked lamb and the bottle of schnapps that Emil had placed in the middle of the table. Two Swedish students had supplied potatoes, others brought red cabbage and Karl had somehow managed to produce a decent white sauce for the meat. Lothar Weiser, the liaison who had especially befriended the Icelanders, dropped by and was invited to join the feast. They all liked Lothar. He was talkative and entertaining. He seemed profoundly interested in politics and sometimes probed them for their views on the university, Leipzig, the German Democratic Republic, First Secretary Walter Ulbricht and his planned economy. He wondered whether they thought Ulbricht was too closely aligned to the Soviet government, and asked repeatedly about the events in Hungary and the American capitalists' attempts to drive a wedge into its friendship with the Soviet Union through their radio broadcasts and endless anticommunist propaganda. In particular he felt that young people were too gullible towards the propaganda and blind to the real intentions of the Western capitalist governments.

  'Can't we just have a bit of fun?' Karl said when Lothar began talking about Ulbricht, and downed a shot of spirit. Grimacing terribly, he said that he had never liked Icelandic schnapps.

  'Ja, ja, natürlich,' Lothar laughed. 'Enough of politics.'

  He spoke Icelandic, which he said he had learned in Germany, and they thought he must be a linguistic genius because he spoke the language almost as well as they did, without ever having visited the country. When they asked how he had gained such a command of it he said he had listened to recordings and radio broadcasts. Nothing amused them more than when he sang old lullabies.

  'Approaching rain,' was another phrase that he repeated endlessly, from the Icelandic weather forecasts.

  In the box there were two letters to Karl which delivered the main news from Iceland since the autumn, along with some newspaper cuttings. They talked about the news from home and someone remarked that Hannes was absent as usual.

  'Ja, Hannes,' Lothar said, with a smirk.

  'I told him about this,' Emil said, downing a glass.

  'Why is he so mysterious?' Hrafnhildur asked.

  'Ah yes, mysterious,' Lothar said.

  'It's so strange,' Emil said. 'He never turns up to the FDJ meetings or their lectures. I've never seen him doing volunteer work. Is he too good to work in the ruins? Aren't we good enough for him? Does he think he's better than us? Tómas, you've talked to him.'

  'I think Hannes just wants to finish his course,' he said, with a shrug. 'He's just got this year left.'

  'Everyone always spoke of him as a future star of the party,' Karl said. 'He was always described as leadership material. He doesn't look very promising here. I think I've only seen him twice this winter and he hardly said a word to me.'

  'You barely see him,' Lothar said. 'He's rather glum,' he added, shaking his head, then sipped the schnapps and pulled the same sort of face that Karl had.

  Down on the ground floor they heard the front door open, followed by quick footsteps up the stairs. Two males and a female appeared at the gloomy far end of the corridor. They were students, passing acquaintances of Karl's.

  'We heard you were having an Icelandic Christmas party,' the girl said when they entered the kitchen and saw the spread. There was plenty of lamb left and the others made room for them at the table. One of the men produced two bottles of vodka, to riotous applause. They introduced themselves: the men were from Czechoslovakia and the girl was Hungarian.

  She sat beside him and he felt himself go weak. He tried not to stare at her after she emerged from the darkness of the corridor, but when he saw her there for the first time a wave of feelings rushed through him that he would never have thought himself capable of and found difficult to understand. Something strange happened and he was suddenly overwhelmed by a peculiar joy and euphoria, mixed with shyness. No girl had ever had such an effect on him.

  'Are you from Iceland too?' She turned to him and asked her question in good German.

  'Yes, I'm from Iceland,' he stammered, also in German, which he could speak well by now. He dragged his gaze away from her when it dawned on him that he had been staring at her ever since she'd sat down beside him.