She stood by the kitchen table, holding her stomach. Although she had not yet told him, she was certain she was pregnant. It could have been expected. They had discussed having children, but she was not sure how he felt about it, he could be so mysterious. If the baby was a boy, she had already chosen his name. She wanted a boy. He would be called Simon.
She had heard about men who beat their wives. Heard of women who had to put up with violence from their husbands. Heard stories. She could not believe that he was one of them. Did not think him capable of it. It must have been an isolated incident, she told herself. He thought I was flirting with Snorri, she thought. I must be careful not to let that happen again.
She wiped her face and snuffled. What aggression. Although he had walked out he would surely come back home soon and apologise to her. He could not treat her like that. Simply could not. Must not. Perplexed, she went into the bedroom to take a look at her daughter. The girl's name was Mikkelina. She had woken up with a temperature that morning, then slept for most of the day and was still asleep. The mother picked her up and noticed that she was boiling hot. She sat down holding the girl in her arms and started singing a lullaby, still shocked and distracted from the attack.
They stand up on the box,
in their little socks,
golden are their locks,
the girls in pretty frocks.
The girl was panting for breath. Her little chest rose and fell and a vague whistle came from her nose. Her face looked ablaze. Mikkelina's mother tried to wake her, but she did not stir.
She screamed.
The girl was seriously ill.
2
Elinborg took the call about the bones found in the Millennium Quarter. She was alone in the office and on her way out when the telephone rang. After hesitating for a moment she looked at the clock, then back at the telephone. She was planning a dinner party that evening and had spent all day imagining chickens smeared with tandoori. She sighed and picked up the phone.
Elinborg was of an indeterminate age, forty-something, well built without being fat, and she loved food. She was divorced and had four children, including a foster child who had now moved away from home. She had remarried, a car mechanic who loved cooking, and she lived with him and their three children in a small town house in Grafarvogur. She had taken a degree in geology long before, but had never worked in that field. She started working for the Reykjavik police as a summer job and ended up joining the force. She was one of the few female detectives.
Sigurdur Oli was in the throes of wild sex with his partner, Bergthora, when his beeper went off. It was attached to the belt of his trousers, which were lying on the kitchen floor and beeping intolerably. He knew that it would not stop until he got out of bed. He had left work early. Bergthora had already been home and had greeted him with a deep, passionate kiss. Things took their natural course and he left his trousers in the kitchen, unplugged the telephone and switched off his mobile. He forgot his beeper.
With a deep sigh Sigurdur Oli looked up at Bergthora straddling him. He was sweating and red in the face. From her expression he could tell that she was not prepared to let him go just yet. She squeezed her eyes shut, lay down upon him and pumped her hips gently and rhythmically until her orgasm ebbed away and every muscle in her body could relax again.
Himself, he would have to wait for a more suitable occasion. In his life the beeper took priority.
He slipped out from beneath Bergthora, who lay with her head on the pillow as if knocked out cold.
Erlendur was sitting in Skulakaffi eating salted meat. He sometimes ate there because it was the only restaurant in Reykjavik that offered Icelandic home cooking the way he would prepare it himself if he could be bothered to cook. The interior design appealed to him as well: brown and shabby veneer, old kitchen chairs, some with the sponge poking up through the plastic upholstery, and the linoleum on the floor worn thin from the trampling boots of lorry drivers, taxi drivers and crane operators, tradesmen and navvies. Erlendur sat alone at a table in one corner, his head bowed over meat, boiled potatoes, peas and turnips drenched with a sugary flour sauce.
The lunchtime rush was long over but he persuaded the cook to serve him some salted meat. He carved himself a large lump, piled potato and turnip on top of it and plastered creamy sauce over the whole trophy with his knife before it all vanished into his gaping mouth.
Erlendur arranged another such banquet on his fork and had just opened his mouth when his mobile phone started to ring where he had left it on the table beside his plate. He stopped the fork in mid-air, glanced at the phone for an instant, looked at the crammed fork and back at the phone, then finally put the fork down with an air of regret.
"Why don't I ever get any peace?" he said before Sigurdur Oli could say a word.
"Some bones found in the Millennium Quarter," Sigurdur Oli said. "I'm heading out there and so is Elinborg."
"What kind of bones?"
"I don't know. Elinborg phoned and I'm on my way over there. I've alerted forensics."
"I'm eating," Erlendur said slowly.
Sigurdur Oli almost blurted out what he had been doing, but managed to stop himself in time.
"See you up there," he said. "It's on the way to Lake Reynisvatn, on the north side beneath the hot water tanks. Not far from the road out of town."
"What's a Millennium Quarter?" Erlendur asked.
"Eh?" Sigurdur Oli said, still irritated about being interrupted with Bergthora.
"Is it a quarter of a millennium? Two hundred and fifty years? What does it mean?"
"Christ," Sigurdur Oli groaned and rang off.
Shortly afterwards Erlendur pulled up in his battered old car and stopped in the street in Grafarholt beside the foundation of the house. The police had arrived on the scene and sealed off the area with yellow tape, which Erlendur slipped underneath. Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli were down in the foundation, standing by a wall of earth. The medical student who had reported the bones was with them. The mother who was hosting the birthday party had rounded up the boys and sent them back indoors. The Reykjavik district medical officer, a chubby man aged about 50, clambered down one of the three ladders that had been propped up in the foundation. Erlendur followed him.
The media took quite an interest in the bones. Reporters gathered at the scene and the neighbours lined up around it. Some had already moved into the estate while others, who were working on their roofless houses, stood with hammers and crowbars in their hands, puzzled by all the fuss. This was at the end of April in mild and beautiful spring weather.
The forensic team was at work, carefully scraping samples from the wall of earth. They let the soil drop onto little trowels which they emptied into plastic bags. Part of the upper skeleton could be seen inside the wall. An arm was visible, a section of the ribcage and the lower jawbone.
"Is that the Millennium Man?" Erlendur asked, walking up to the wall of earth.
Elinborg cast a questioning glance at Sigurdur Oli, who stood behind Erlendur, pointing his index finger at his head and twirling it around.
"I phoned the National Museum," Sigurdur Oli said, and started scratching his head when Erlendur turned suddenly to look at him. "There's an archaeologist on his way here. Maybe he can tell us what it is."
"Don't we need a geologist too then?" Elinborg asked. "To find out about the soil. The position of the bones relative to it. To date the strata."
"Can't you help us with that?" Sigurdur Oli asked. "Didn't you study that?"
"I can't remember a word of it," Elinborg said. "I know that the brown stuff is called dirt, though."
"He's not six feet under," Erlendur said. "He's a metre down, one and a half at the most. Bundled away there in a hurry. As far as I can see this is the remains of a body. He hasn't been here long. This is no Viking."
"Why do you think it's a him?" the district medical officer asked.
"Him?" Erlendur said.
"I mean," the doctor said, "it could just
as easily be a her. Why do you feel sure it's a man?"
"Or a woman then," Erlendur said. "I don't care." He shrugged. "Can you tell us anything about these bones?"
"I can't really see anything of them," the doctor said. "Best to say as little as possible until they pick them out of the ground."
"Male or female? Age?"
"Impossible to tell."
A man wearing jeans and a traditional Icelandic woollen sweater, tall, with a scruffy, greying beard and two yellow dogteeth fangs that protruded out of it through his big mouth, came over to them and introduced himself as the archaeologist. He watched the forensic team at work and asked them for pity's sake to stop that nonsense. The two men with trowels hesitated. They wore white overalls, rubber gloves and protective glasses. To Erlendur they could have been straight out of a nuclear power station. They looked at him, awaiting instructions.
"We need to dig down to him, for God's sake," said Fang, waving his arms. "Are you going to pick him out with those trowels? Who's in charge here anyway?"
Erlendur owned up.
"This isn't an archaeological find," Fang said, shaking his hand. "The name's Skarphedinn, hello, but it's best to treat it as such. You understand?"
"I don't have a clue what you're talking about," said Erlendur.
"The bones haven't been in the ground for any great length of time. No more than 60 or 70 years, I'd say. Maybe even less. The clothes are still on them."
"Clothes?"
"Yes, here," Skarphedinn said, pointing with a fat finger. "And in more places, I'm certain."
"I though that was flesh," Erlendur said sheepishly.
"The most sensible thing to do in this situation, to keep the evidence intact, would be to let my team excavate it using our methods. The forensic squad can help us. We need to rope off the area up here and dig down to the skeleton, and stop chipping away at the soil here. We don't make a habit of losing evidence. Just the way the bones lie could tell us a hell of a lot. What we find around them could provide clues."
"What do you think happened?" Erlendur asked.
"I don't know," Skarphedinn said. "Far too early to speculate. We need to excavate it, hopefully something useful will emerge then."
"Is it someone who's frozen to death and been covered by the earth?"
"No one sinks this deep into the ground."
"So it's a grave."
"It would appear so," Skarphedinn said pompously. "Everything points to that. Shall we say that we'll dig down to it?"
Erlendur nodded.
Skarphedinn strode over to the ladder and climbed up out of the foundation. Erlendur followed close behind. As they stood above the skeleton the archaeologist explained the best way to organise the excavation. Erlendur was impressed by him and everything he said, and soon Skarphedinn was on his mobile phone, calling out his team. He had taken part in several of the main archaeological discoveries in recent decades and knew what he was talking about. Erlendur put his faith in him.
The head of the forensic squad disagreed. He ranted about transferring the excavation to an archaeologist who didn't have the faintest idea about criminal investigations. The quickest way was to chip the skeleton free from the wall to give them scope to examine both its position and the clues — if there were any — about whether an act of violence had been committed. Erlendur listened to this speech for a while and then declared that Skarphedinn and his team would be allowed to dig their way down to the skeleton even if it took much longer than anticipated.
"The bones have been lying here for half a century, a couple of days either way won't make any difference," he said, and the matter was settled.
Erlendur looked around at the new houses under construction. He looked up at the brown geothermal water tanks and to where he knew Lake Reynisvatn lay, then turned and looked east over the grassland that took over where the new quarter ended.
Four bushes caught his attention, standing up out of the brush about 30 metres away. He walked over to them and thought he could tell that they were redcurrant bushes. They were bunched together in a straight line to the east of the foundation and he wondered, stroking his hands over the knobbly, bare branches, who would have planted them there in this no man's land.
3
The archaeologists arrived in their fleece jackets and thermal suits, armed with spoons and shovels, and roped off a fairly large area around the skeleton, and by dinner time they had started cautiously digging up the grassy ground. It was still broad daylight, the sun would not set until after 9 p.m. The team comprised four men and two women who worked calmly and methodically, carefully examining each trowelful they took. There was no sign of the soil having been disturbed by the gravedigger. Time and the work on the house foundation had seen to that.
Elinborg located a geologist at the university who was more than willing to assist the police, dropped everything and turned up at the foundation just half an hour after they had spoken. He was middle-aged, black-haired and slim with an exceptionally deep voice, and had a doctorate from Paris. Elinborg led him over to the wall of earth. The police had put a tent over the wall to obscure it from passers-by, and she gestured to the geologist to go in under the flap.
The tent was illuminated by a large fluorescent light, which cast gloomy shadows over to where the skeleton lay. The geologist did not rush anything. He examined the soil, took a handful from the wall and clenched his fist to crumble it. He compared the strata beside the skeleton with those above and below it, and examined the density of the soil around the bones. Proudly he told her how he had once been called in to help with an investigation, to analyse a clump of earth found at the scene of a crime, which made a useful contribution. Then he went on to discuss academic works on criminology and the earth sciences, a kind of forensic geology, if Elinborg understood him correctly.
She listened to him rambling away until she lost her patience.
"How long has he been in there?" she asked.
"Difficult to say," the geologist said in his deep voice, assuming an academic pose. "It needn't be long."
"How long is that, geologically speaking?" Elinborg asked. "A thousand years? Ten?"
The geologist looked at her.
"Difficult to say," he repeated.
"How accurate an answer can you give?" Elinborg asked. "Measured in years."
"Difficult to say."
"In other words, it's difficult to say anything?"
The geologist looked at Elinborg and smiled.
"Sorry, I was thinking. What do you want to know?"
"How long?"
"What?"
"He's been lying here," Elinborg groaned.
"I'd guess somewhere between 50 and 70 years. I still have to do some more detailed tests, but that's what I'd imagine. From the density of the soil, it's out of the question that it's a Viking or a heathen burial mound."
"We know that," Elinborg said, "there are shreds of clothing. ."
"This green line here," the geologist said and pointed to a stratum in the lowest part of the wall. "This is ice-age clay. These lines at regular intervals here," he continued, pointing further up, "these are volcanic tuff. The uppermost one is from the end of the fifteenth century. It's the thickest layer of tuff in the Reykjavik area since the country was settled. These are older layers from eruptions in Hekla and Katla. Now we're thousands of years back in time. It's not far down to the bedrock as you can see here," he pointed to a large layer in the foundation. "This is the Reykjavik dolerite that covers the whole area around the city."
He looked at Elinborg.
"Relative to all that history, the grave was only dug a millionth of a second ago."
The archaeologists stopped work around 9.30 and Skarphedinn told Erlendur they would be back early the next morning. They had not found anything of note in the soil and had barely started stripping the vegetation above it. Erlendur asked whether they could not speed up the work a little, but Skarphedinn looked at him disdainfully and asked him if he want
ed to destroy the evidence. They agreed that there was still no rush to dig down to the skeleton.
The fluorescent light in the tent was switched off. All the reporters had left. The discovery of the skeleton was the main story on the evening news. There were pictures of Erlendur and his team down in the foundation and one station showed its reporter trying to interview Erlendur, who waved his hands in his face and walked away.
Calm had descended upon the estate once more. The banging hammers had fallen silent. Everyone who had been working on their half-built houses had left. Those who had already moved in were going to bed. No children could be heard shouting any more. Two policeman in a patrol car were appointed to watch over the area during the night. Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli had gone home. The forensic squad, who had been helping the archaeologist, had gone home as well by now. Erlendur had spoken to Toti and his mother about the bone that the boy found. Toti was elated by all the attention he received. "What a turn up for the books," his mother sighed. Her son finding a human skeleton just lying around. "This is the best birthday I've had," Toti told Erlendur. "Ever."
The medical student had gone back home, taking his little brother with him. Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli had spoken briefly to him. He described how he had been watching the baby without noticing at first the bone it was gnawing. When he examined it more closely it turned out to be a human rib.
"How could you tell at once that it was a human rib?" Erlendur asked. "It could have been from a sheep, for instance."
"Yes, wasn't it more likely to have been from a sheep?" asked Sigurdur Oli, a city boy who knew nothing about Icelandic farm animals.
"There was no mistaking it," the student said. "I've done autopsy work and there was no question."
"Can you tell us how long you'd estimate that the bones have been buried there?" Erlendur asked. He knew he would eventually be given the findings of the geologist Elinborg had called out, the archaeologist and the forensic pathologist, but he did not mind hearing the student's opinion.
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