The Flatey Enigma

by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson

  Hogni knocked many times on the doctor’s hall door and, when no one answered, opened it and stepped into a little hallway. The islanders were not in the habit of locking their houses on Flatey, and it was all right to pop one’s head through the door if the matter was urgent.

  “Hello?” he called out, hearing nothing but the echo of his own voice in the small, dark hallway in reply. He could smell odors from the infirmary and pharmacy. All kinds of peculiar scents combined to produce that special mysterious hospital aroma that could feel both menacing and comforting, depending on the circumstances.

  Hogni penetrated deeper inside and saw a patient’s room to his right in which there was a hospital bed containing a corpse veiled under a white sheet. Bjorn Snorri Thorvald was lying there, waiting for his removal and final farewell to the house. A flame glowed on a candlestick by the side of the bed.

  Johanna wouldn’t have left the house like this, Hogni thought to himself. She must be home.

  “Hello?” he called out louder than before.

  This time he heard a door open on the floor above, and Johanna appeared on the stairs.

  “What is it, Hogni? Are you sick?” she asked.

  “No, no, no one is sick. But the inspectors from Reykjavik would like to talk to you. They’re talking to everyone.”

  “Yes, I know. Is it my turn then? I won’t be a minute.”

  “I’ll wait,” said Hogni. “We can go together.”

  Johanna vanished for a moment before reappearing at the bottom of the stairs in her coat. She walked over to her father’s bed, blew out the candle, and locked the room behind her. In the hallway she grabbed an umbrella off a hook.

  “It’s not often that you see one of those in Flatey,” Hogni said as they set off and Johanna opened the umbrella.

  “No, people around here are so used to having their faces pelted by the rain it doesn’t bother them. I’m more delicate,” Johanna answered. Then they walked in silence.

  Hogni wasn’t sure, but he thought he might have spotted Kjartan’s-the magistrate’s assistant’s-coat in the hallway of the doctor’s house.

  Question thirty-one: The cause of the death of King Harald Gormsson. Fifth letter. The Jomsvikings saga tells of a man called Palnatok, who was a Viking, lived in Fjon, and was one of the most powerful men in Denmark, apart from King Harald Gormsson. There were feuds between these leaders, which culminated with Palnatok coming to a place where the king was resting by a fire in the evening after a battle. The king was stooped over the fire with his chest leaning forward and his ass in the air. Palnatok heard the king talking, armed his bow with an arrow, and fired. It is said that the arrow shot up straight up the king’s ass and out his mouth. He dropped dead, as was to be expected. The cause of his death was the “arrow up his ass,” and the fifth letter in the answer is w.

  CHAPTER 48

  Inspector Thorolfur scrutinized the woman who sat facing him, bolt upright, on the other side of the school desk. She seemed calm and reflective and had been waiting in silence since they had shook hands and sat down. District Officer Grimur awaited further instructions by the door.

  “Should we call in more people?” he asked.

  Thorolfur shook his head. “No, let’s wait a bit. This will be a long interview.”

  He turned to Johanna. “Let’s start by talking about Professor Gaston Lund. Do you remember him coming to you last autumn to obtain some seasickness tablets?”

  “Yes, I remember that.”

  “Did he get the tablets?”

  “Yes. They’re kept in the pharmacy.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He went off to catch his boat.”

  “Are you sure he caught that boat?”

  “No, I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t follow him.”

  “Did he stay with you longer than he needed to when he bought the seasickness tablets?”

  “Yes, he stayed on a bit with me and my father.”

  “Why was that?”

  “We knew each other from the days when my father and I lived in Copenhagen.”

  “So it was, in fact, a reunion?”

  “Professor Lund and my father were happy to have the opportunity to meet again.”

  Thorolfur unfolded a sheet of paper on his desk. “As you can appreciate, there are many people working on this investigation. Both in Copenhagen and Reykjavik. They’ve been talking to people to try and understand what kind of lives Gaston Lund and Bryngeir led. Is there anything in particular you would like to say before we continue with this interview?”

  Johanna gave Thorolfur a long stare, and then she shook her head with a numb smile. “Let’s just assume your colleagues are doing their job right and you, yours and just see what happens.”

  “Very well, if that’s the way you want it.” Thorolfur picked up the sheet. “Here’s the first telegram with information on this case. We asked people in Copenhagen if they knew of anyone in Iceland who might bear a particular grudge against the professor. People could only think of one name.”

  “Really, and what name was that?”

  “Bjorn Snorri Thorvald. Isn’t that your father’s name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Professor Lund, therefore, wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms when he visited your home last autumn?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact he was. My father and Lund were actually very good friends and colleagues at the Arnamagn?an Institute for many years. The friendship then became increasingly strained during the German occupation of Denmark and turned to hostility at the end of the war. But when Professor Lund came into our home by sheer coincidence last autumn, they chatted for a while and were fully reconciled again. I think they both felt better after that.”

  “Is there someone who can bear witness to what you’re saying?”

  “No, my father’s dead, as you probably know.”

  “What fueled this hostility in the first place?”

  “My father was fired from his post at the Arnamagn?an Institute and he partly blamed the professor for it.”

  “Why was your father fired?”

  “I’m sure your men in Copenhagen will dig up a plausible explanation for that. It only happened fifteen years ago, and somebody should be able to remember the story.”

  Thorolfur clenched his fists and leaned over the desk. “It would speed up our interview here if you would be willing to collaborate with us,” he said.

  Johanna smiled coldly. “Yes, that’s probably true. Maybe I should explain it to you, since I doubt that your men will either have the ability or the will to get to the bottom of what really happened.”

  Johanna told the inspectors how she had been brought up traveling with her father across the Nordic countries and Germany. How her father continued to travel to Germany after Denmark was occupied, and how he stirred up animosity among his colleagues at the Arnamagn?an Institute and the Royal Library. Finally the war ended and the Germans abandoned Copenhagen.

  “I accompanied my father to the institute as usual that morning, but just as he was about to enter they blocked him. Then some superior came to tell him that his post had been abolished and that he no longer had access to the manuscript collection. He was given no explanation, and he was escorted out of the building when he started to raise his voice. A number of employees witnessed the scene, including Professor Lund. I don’t know how it would have ended if Fridrik Einarsson, his Icelandic friend, hadn’t been there to break it up. Fridrik then took us to his home and offered us some refreshments. He could tell my father that his lecture tours around Germany had probably been the cause of this animosity. He suggested we go to Iceland with him and his family a few weeks later and suggested we stay there until the turmoil had blown over.”

  “Did you move to Iceland then?”

  “Yes.”

  “But did you never go back to Copenhagen?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “My father desperately tried to get
his post back from Iceland, but failed. I’d also grown opposed to the idea of moving away from Iceland because I got to know Einar, Fridrik’s son, when we stayed with them in Copenhagen and when we traveled on the ship together. He was the first friend of my own age I’d ever had, and he then became my boyfriend. He was a great guy and I couldn’t think of leaving him. We were together for the first few years of high school, and then he died in an accident.”

  Thorolfur scribbled down a note and then asked, “You were called upon to examine the bodily remains of Gaston Lund when he was found and transported here last week, were you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t recognize him?”

  Johanna smiled numbly. “It would be easy for me to say I didn’t. No one could doubt me, considering the state of the body. And it would be easier for me if I stuck to that version, but I don’t want to lie. I recognized him as soon as I opened the casket.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I was in such a terrible state of shock. And I thought of my father. The cancer had progressed so far and he only had a few days to live. He wasn’t suffering, though, because I’d managed to treat the pain quite effectively. At that moment I couldn’t bear the thought of him spending his last hours agonizing over the fate of his friend. So I decided to postpone any revelations, while I was still catching my bearings. It wouldn’t really have greatly changed the outcome of the investigation, since the man had been dead for several months anyway. It was just a twenty-four-hour reprieve, and that was all I needed. My father died without ever knowing about this incident.”

  Lukas coughed several times to attract Johanna’s attention. It was his turn now. “That’s quite a story,” he said, moistening his lips. “But I think the reality is slightly different. What if it went something like this, for example: Lund came to you as a doctor and pharmacist. What kind of initial exchange you had I don’t know, but he asked you for some seasick tablets. You gave him some drug and advised him to take one pill straightaway, maybe two. He did as he was told, but soon felt drowsy and then fell asleep. You keep some strong sleeping pills, I take it, don’t you? We can easily check that.”

  Johanna looked at him, aghast. “That’s correct, there’s an ample supply in the pharmacy, but your suggestion is preposterous.”

  “Well, let’s see. Lund is asleep in your living room. Maybe you needed to give him an injection or something to keep him as unconscious as possible? Then you took him out on a boat to the most forsaken island you knew of in Breidafjordur. We know that considerable fuel vanished from one of the boats on the island at that time. You know how to handle a motorboat, don’t you? You know I can easily check on this.”

  “Yes, I can handle a boat all right. But I haven’t a clue of where Ketilsey is in the fjord. And I don’t have the physical strength to carry a sleeping man on my own, let alone onto a boat and then off it again.”

  “Perhaps your late father gave you a hand moving him? Maybe he was in better shape last autumn than he was lately. And happy to avenge himself. The man could also have been transported on a handcart. There are several of those on the island.”

  “This is in very poor taste.”

  “Yes, well you can’t really prettify an atrocity like this. The retribution was clearly meant to be memorable and final. How do you think that man felt when he woke up and realized where he was?”

  Johanna gave Lukas a long stare before answering: “How do I think he felt? I’ll tell you. For the first few hours he was angry. Then very angry. He yelled and yelled and shouted and shouted. Then he was cold, and when night fell he was scared. Then he got very cold and even more terrified, and he cried. When the sun rose in the morning, he was thirsty and hungry and very tired. He gathered some driftwood and built himself some shelter by placing the wood against a crag. He packed some gravel and seaweed around the sticks and then crawled inside and lay down. Maybe he slept for one or two hours, and then woke up again shivering from the cold. Then it started to rain. He found an old plastic flask drifting on the shore and was able to collect some of the water that was running down the rocks. He drank and drank, but he got badly drenched in the rain. He crawled into the shelter and it didn’t rain on him. But he was already wet, and when night fell again, he was colder than ever before. He lay there shivering for many hours until he couldn’t take it anymore, and he crawled out and ran to try and get some warmth into his bones. It helped a bit, but it hadn’t stopped raining, so he got even wetter and colder. The day after the rain stopped and the sun appeared. He managed to sleep a few hours. Then he went down to the shore in search of something edible. He turned over stones, picked some copepods, and dug up some lugworm. He found shellfish. He shoved it into his mouth and washed it down with the water without chewing. He couldn’t bear the thought of biting into those bugs. He arranged the stones in the grass so that they would form a big SOS. Four days later he had a cold, a day after that a bad cough, and then he contracted pneumonia. Then he arranged some little pebbles on a flat rock and tried to write some kind of message. He coughed and coughed until he threw up and developed a high fever. And then he died.”

  Lukas was dumbstruck. Eventually it was Thorolfur who asked, “How do you know all this?”

  “This isn’t something I know,” Johanna answered, “but I can imagine it, and I can tell you that I’ve thought about him every single hour since I saw him in that casket, and felt a great deal for him. I’ve tried to place myself in his footsteps, tried to convince myself that it went swiftly and that the pain wasn’t unbearable. But everything you’ve said here is pure supposition. I’m in no way responsible for this nightmare Gaston Lund got himself into. The events in my house were exactly as I described them to you.”

  Thorolfur peered at her skeptically. “Yeah sure, give it to me all again then, in every detail.”

  “Professor Lund knocked on our door and told me what he’d come for. I welcomed him in and immediately recognized him. He obviously didn’t recognize me because I had only been a child when I had been with my father in Copenhagen. I was just about to give him his seasickness tablets when he saw my father through the door. It took them both a moment to decide how they were going to take this reunion, but then they embraced and it was all just like the good old days. They had so much to talk about, and time was precious. Lund told my father that he’d been to the library to try and solve the Flatey enigma. He had the answers to all the questions but couldn’t test them by getting them to fit with the final key. He couldn’t figure out the methodology. My father had spent endless hours at the library poring over the string of letters that constitute the final key. He discovered that if the letters were placed in a certain order, they formed a sentence. If the letters in the answers were placed in the correct order, following the same pattern, they formed the last two lines of the poem and thereby the solution to the whole riddle, the Aenigma Flateyensis. Lund was very taken by all this and decided to go back to the library to test his answers using this method. My father could lend him the key to the library. We could already see the mail boat heading south on its way from Brjansl?kur, so he didn’t have much time. We never saw him after that, so we presumed he’d caught the boat. I later walked up to the library and it wasn’t locked and the key was on the table.”

  “But he didn’t catch the mail boat?” said Thorolfur.

  “No, it seems not. He must have run to the library, sat down, and started to arrange the letters. The mail boat was steadily approaching, and he finally didn’t dare to wait there any longer. The last thing he did was to write down the key on a piece of paper so that he could continue later. We found that note in his pocket. But that was against the rules of the game.”

  “So he was doomed to some mishap, according to folk belief,” said Thorolfur.

  “So they say, but I don’t believe in that stuff. In fact, I think it’s just a perfectly honorable and innocent game. But when people start connecting it with accidents and deaths, I think that’s
going too far.”

  Question thirty-two: Who made Earl Hakon’s crotch itch? Third letter. Thorleifur visited the earl in Hladir on Christmas Eve, disguised as a beggar. The earl had him brought before him and asked him for his name. “My name is an unusual one,” the man answered. “I’m Nidung, the son of Gjallandi, and I come from Syrgisdalir in cold Sweden. I have traveled widely and visited many chieftains. I’ve heard a lot about your nobility.”

  The earl said, “Is there something you excel at, old man, to enable you to mix with chieftains?”

  Nidung wanted to recite a poem he had composed to the earl. But as the poem was being recited, the earl was puzzled to feel a terrible itch spread all over his body and particularly around his thighs so that he could barely sit still. He had himself scratched with combs wherever they could reach, and three knots were made in a coarse cloth so that two men could pull it between his thighs. The earl started to take a dislike to the poem. The answer is “Thorleifur Asgeirsson,” and the third letter is o.

  Kjartan said, “Here the guest writes ‘Nidung.’ So the answer is either o or d.”

  CHAPTER 49

  The coroner’s preliminary report on Bryngeir’s body, which had been transported by van from Stykkisholmur earlier that day, was expected in the afternoon. Dagbjartur was sent over to collect the results firsthand because it was sometimes difficult to decipher these documents. If there was something in it that was difficult to understand, it was always best to have it explained on the spot. Sometimes it was possible to get the coroner to talk off the record about certain aspects that he would never have put down on paper except until maybe several weeks into the investigation. There seemed to be little doubt about the cause of the reporter’s death, but it needed to be confirmed. Further data might have come to light, such as some indication of the perpetrator’s physical strength, or whether he was left-or right-handed, etc.