The Flatey Enigma

by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson

  “Ahem, excuse me, but what name are you looking for?” the manager asked, as Dagbjartur was about to close the book.

  “Professor Gaston Lund, a Danish national.”

  The reception manager nodded. “Yes. Mr. Lund stayed with us last year,” he said.

  “Really? Is his name in the book?”

  “No, the man chose to register under a pseudonym.”

  “And you remember that after all these months?” Dagbjartur asked, surprised.

  The manager gave him a faint smile. “Yes, it was certainly an unusual check-in. I remember things like that.”

  He turned the guestbook around and skimmed through it with his skilled fingers.

  “There, that’s how the professor checked in,” he said, pointing at a line on August 24.

  It started off with what looked like a G and an a, but had then been crossed out with two strokes and followed by “Egill Sturluson” in block letters.

  “My name also happens to be Egill, so it drew my attention, especially to see it written that way,” said the manager.

  “Yes, I can see how this name would have attracted your attention,” said Dagbjartur, nodding. He took out his notebook and scribbled down this information. “Didn’t you have any remarks to make to him about this?” he then asked.

  “No, he was a very respectable-looking man and immediately agreed to settle his bill in advance, as well as the deposit. I saw no reason to raise any objections about it. It was obvious that the man was Danish and also a bit of an eccentric. If he didn’t want to use his real name, he must have had his reasons for it.”

  “How do you know his right name was Gaston Lund?”

  “That’s the name he used when he signed his bill in the restaurant. He obviously forgot himself. I was the one who processed the hotel bill, so I remember it. There was also a man who came here to ask if Professor Lund could possibly be staying here.”

  “What did you answer?”

  “I told him there was no guest here under that name.”

  “Why?”

  “Because our guest obviously wanted to keep a low profile and the hotel didn’t want to complicate things for him; it was the least we could do. Besides, he’d already checked out of the hotel by the time the question was asked, so I wasn’t lying.”

  “When did he move out?”

  Egill examined the guestbook. “He stayed here for two nights and left here on August twenty-sixth. He left a case behind, which I kept in storage for him.”

  “Did he then claim the case?”

  “I expect so, but not on my watch.”

  “Where was the case kept?”

  “We have a storage room in the basement.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Yes. I’ll take you down in a moment.”

  Egill vanished behind a door but swiftly returned, followed by a young man who took his place at the reception desk.

  “Follow me please,” he said to Dagbjartur.

  They walked down some stairs into a dark corridor. There Egill opened the door to a small cell and turned on the light. A number of cases were stored there on racks.

  “You keep a lot of cases in here,” said Dagbjartur.

  “This is mostly the lost property that has accumulated. Sometimes guests forget a whole case. Some of these belong to guests who’ve run away without settling their bills. I don’t expect they’ll ever be recovered.”

  “Can you see the Danish guest’s case here anywhere?”

  “I can’t remember what it looks like. It was probably a quality case, though. He was a pretty refined kind of guest.” Egill perused the cases, took several out, and opened them. One of them was considerably heavier than the others and turned out to contain folders of files when it was opened. Also some clothes.

  Dagbjartur took one of the folders and browsed through the contents. It was full of pages crammed with text written in Danish, and there were a few Norwegian postcards at the back. Finally he found a tab that was stapled to the very last page: G. Lund was written on it.

  “That’s probably it,” said Dagbjartur.

  The manager seemed very taken aback. “That surprises me,” he said. “I’d always assumed the guest had picked up his case as he said he would.”

  “I’ll take it with me now,” said Dagbjartur. “Who was it who asked you if he was staying here?”

  “I don’t know the man’s name, but I’m sure I’ve seen pictures of him in the papers. He’s obviously well known in his field.”

  Dagbjartur smiled amiably. “I hope you’re not too busy these days because we obviously need to go through some old newspapers.”

  “…The Flatey Book was based on many sources or older manuscripts, no less than forty. The Thingeyar monastery library was probably the main source since there was an ample selection of books there.

  “Scholars have noted that the priests who wrote out the Flatey Book were not great poetry lovers. They copied verse word for word from older manuscripts mainly out of a sense of duty but with many mistakes and showing a poor understanding of poetry…”

  CHAPTER 14

  The road to the Ystakot croft was a narrow, winding dirt track, and they walked in single file, Grimur first, followed by Hogni and Kjartan behind. Little Nonni was sitting on a mound and spotted them as they approached. Springing to his feet, he dashed down to the farmhouse and vanished inside. The croft was divided into three little gables with turf rooftops and wooden panels in front. The back of the house was mostly built into the side of the slope. A chimney protruded from the gable, heaving black smoke. There was potato patch to the north of the building and beyond that a small hut, presumably a storeroom. In the yard there were a number of wooden frames, seed potatoes, an overturned wheelbarrow, and a large barrel of water with a lid on top.

  Valdi appeared in the low doorway and had to stoop to come out to them.

  “Hello there,” Grimur greeted him.

  Valdi nodded in silence, stuffed tobacco into his pipe, and stared at Kjartan with one inquisitory eye. Grimur got straight to the point. Could he have by any chance written down who was on the mail boat on Saturday September 4 last year?

  Valdi pondered this a moment.

  “Why do you want to know?” he asked.

  “Reverend Hannes thinks he knows the man you found in Ketilsey but said that he was supposed to be traveling on the mail boat to Stykkisholmur that day.”

  Valdi went back into the croft and soon reappeared with a blue copybook in his hands. He skimmed through it, reading it in silence.

  “No, Officer. I didn’t write anything about who traveled south that day.”

  “Why not, Valdi?” Grimur asked, surprised.

  “I can’t remember offhand.”

  “Was it maybe because no one traveled on the boat?” Kjartan asked.

  Valdi looked at him. “Could be.”

  “Could we maybe see that page?” Grimur asked.

  Valdi looked at them alternately and then handed them the copybook and showed them the page. It was crammed with words written in pencil, and the entry beside the date September 4 read: “Drizzle, moderate breeze, temperature 4 degrees. Passengers from Stykkisholmur, Hakon, and Filippia. Was in Akranes getting new teeth. Gudrun’s son in Innstibaer on visit.” Then there was a small blank space.

  They heard a screech from inside the house. Jon Ferdinand came limping outside clutching his mouth. “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” he wailed. “I burned my mouth.”

  “What the hell happened?” Valdi gruffly snapped.

  “I was just sipping the broth of the black-backed gull,” said the crestfallen old man.

  “Have you gone mad, tasting the broth when it’s still boiling in the pot?” said Valdi, taking the lid off the barrel of water. He stuck a ladle inside and handed it to the old man.

  “Here, drink something cold.”

  Jon Ferdinand sipped the water, and Valdi looked at the guests.

  “I have to watch over this man like a little child,�
�� he said.

  Grimur examined old Jon’s lips. “He’ll get some burn blisters,” said Grimur. “Maybe you should take him to the doctor.”

  “I’d be doing little else if I had to take that old man to the doctor every time he burned his gob,” Valdi grumbled.

  “Mind if I take a little look at your book?” Kjartan asked.

  Valdi looked at Kjartan. “Why?”

  “The priest said the guest came over from Reykholar on the second of September. Do you keep a record of the boats that come from over there in your book?”

  “No, no. There’s no way you can keep track of everyone who comes and goes from the village. Boats anchor all over the place, and there are so many things to do. I only follow the mail boat when it comes on Saturdays. I grab the ropes for them because it’s such a short distance for me to go out to the pier. Then I write down who was on the boat, just for the information and fun of it. No one’s ever asked to look at this before.”

  Grimur heaved a sigh. “Right then, Valdi. We’ll take this no further then. Maybe you could try to remember why you didn’t write about it in your book on that day and just let me know.”

  The three men said good-bye.

  “…Vellum manuscripts in the Middle Ages were not all preserved with the same care. In the thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth century, many manuscripts were probably exported to Norway as merchandise. Their value diminished, however, when the language rapidly changed at the end of the fourteenth century. People no longer cared about these vellum manuscripts that no one could read. In Iceland, on the other hand, it was probably overuse that damaged the books the most. Books were lent from person to person and read from cover to cover. Then new transcripts were made and the old shreds were lost. The Reformation also cast a bad light on anything written by the monks. It is not known who held the Flatey Book after Jon Hakonarson in Vididalstunga, but in the latter half of the fifteenth century it was in the hands of Thorleifur Bjornsson, a seneschal in Reykholar. It was then owned by Thorleifur’s grandson, Jon Bjornsson, in Flatey, and he gave the book to his grandson, Jon Finnsson, who also lived in Flatey; and it is after their home island that the book is named.

  “In the sixteenth century, national awareness was awakening in Europe. An emphasis was placed on the power of the nation and the strength of the kingdom. Interest in the history of nations grew, and in the Nordic countries, learned men knew that sources were to be found in Iceland. The Danish king sent manuscript collectors to Iceland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Arni Magnusson was the most prominent of these. But there were other collectors, too. The bishop sagas refer to Jon the farmer in Flatey, saying that he had a big and thick vellum manuscript of monk writings containing the histories of the Norwegian kings and a lot more, and here it was generally referred to as the Flatey Book…”

  CHAPTER 15

  Kjartan and Grimur headed to the telephone exchange after their visit to Ystakot and made calls all over. They contacted the mail boat over the Gufunes radio, since it was positioned out in the bay of Faxafloi, on its way to Stykkisholmur with a cargo of cement from Akranes. The crew of the boat could offer them no information on the foreign passenger. He could well have been on board, but they had no specific recollection of him. It would mainly have been the cook who interacted with the passengers the most, but he had been on vacation for those weeks last year. A young girl, who had just graduated from the domestic college, had replaced him during his absence. She was now married to someone in the Westman Islands, as far as they knew.

  Reverend Veigar in Reykholar remembered Gaston Lund very well but had not heard from him, nor expected to hear from him. He had only stayed one night in Reykholar. The hotel owner in Stykkisholmur 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 Stykkisholmur bus was at his home in Reykjavik. “I can’t even remember who was on my bus yesterday,” he answered when Grimur 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 Grimur sat at the telephone exchange until dinnertime, continuing with their enquiries. Stina, the head of the telephone exchange, and her colleague in Stykkisholmur 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 Patreksfjordur was quoted as saying that there was an investigation underway.

  “…In 1647 Bishop Brynjolfur visited the West Fjords and celebrated mass in the church of Flatey on the twelfth Sunday after trinity, which was the fifteenth of September. Brynjolfur then offered to buy the Flatey Book, first for money and then for land, but his offer was rejected. But when Jon 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 Skalholt because the bishop of Holar 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 Brynjolfur, 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

  Hogni continued working on the seal pups when Grimur 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?” Hogni 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.”

  Hogni 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…