The Flatey Enigma

by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson

  Dagbjartur met coroner Magnus Hansen in the examination room. Two humanoid shapes covered with sheets lay on separate slabs in the center of the room. Dagbjartur was relieved to see that the examination seemed to be over. He had witnessed plenty of autopsies over the years and never found them enticing. If at all possible, he preferred to avoid being present.

  “You’re certainly keeping us busy these days,” said Magnus. He was a tall man in his sixties, big boned with a big aquiline nose. He made quite an imposing figure as he towered over Dagbjartur in his long white coat, rubber apron, and white hat. A white surgical mask dangled loosely from his throat over his apron. Poised on the tip of his nose were glasses that he never seemed to look through, and he was holding copious sheets of notes in his hands.

  Dagbjartur nodded and backed off a step. He was fearfully respectful of Magnus, who was famous for the pleasure he took in winding up investigators he considered to be too cocky.

  “Do you have anything for us?” he humbly asked.

  Magnus peered at him over his glasses and came to the conclusion that this little soul wasn’t worth teasing. “There’s not much to say about the first one,” he said. “He’s too far gone to be able to draw any conclusions about the cause of his death. There’s actually little more than a skeleton and shreds of skin around the legs that are held together by the clothing. Some wasted muscle and soft tissue around the bones. Except for the spots the birds got at, of course. There’s only bone left there. There’s almost nothing left of his internal organs, except for some remains of his heart and his enlarged prostate gland, which tells me little about the cause of his death but the fact that he probably had difficulties urinating. All the bones are intact, so they weren’t damaged by any attack. I examined the skull particularly well and saw no sign of any damage to it. There is, therefore, nothing to add to the local doctor’s report, which suggests the man died of exposure. The cause of death is therefore most likely to be hypothermia, unless he had some other underlying condition that kicked in once his resistance was weakened.”

  Magnus stopped talking and peered over his glasses at Dagbjartur again.

  “What about the other guy?” Dagbjartur asked, feeling the onus was now on him to say something.

  “The other guy is another kettle of fish altogether,” said Magnus, perking up. He lifted his papers up to his nose and this time looked through his glasses.

  “This is a very interesting case,” he said. “I first examined the many wounds on the subject’s back.”

  He read from the sheets: “Paravertebral, contiguous to the spine on both sides, bilateral stab wounds piercing subcutaneous tissues and ribs, from the third to the eleventh rib on the right-hand side and the third to the tenth rib on the left-hand side at the intersection with the columna vertebralis.”

  “The columna what?” Dagbjartur asked.

  “Spinal column.”

  “Right.”

  “This was done with two powerful thrusts of a knife on the left side and three on the right side. I’d call these blows more than stabbings, because it takes a lot of power to tear the ribs apart like that. The perpetrator is probably right-handed and used both hands to hold the weapon, which was a very big sharp knife, sword, or even an axe. The lungs were then pulled out through the wounds. There are some scattered shallow fissures on them, probably caused by the friction with the broken ribs. Also fissures on the veins to the lungs for the same reasons.”

  Magnus stopped talking and continued to read in silence.

  “Do you think he died instantly?” Dagbjartur asked.

  Magnus peered at him over his glasses. “What do you think?”

  “Probably, I would imagine.”

  “Yes, he probably would have died quickly if he hadn’t already been dead for a long time.”

  “Huh?”

  “Anyone with an ounce of brains would have been able to see that on the scene, but I guess brains are in short supply in your department.”

  Dagbjartur remained silent. He realized Magnus was launching into one of his rants and that it was best to just let it wash over.

  “There’s no inflammation around the rims of the wounds. Any fool should be able to see that.”

  “That’s true,” said Dagbjartur in a total bluff. He couldn’t think of any colleague of his who would have been capable of recognizing a clue of that kind.

  “The edges of the wounds are a yellowish brown and dry. No bleeding in the adjacent tissue. This is a clear sign that the man was not alive when the wounds were inflicted.”

  “So how did he die then?” Dagbjartur asked.

  “I found a bruise on the back of his head that indicated bleeding in the scalp. This suggested he was subjected to a blow to the head of some kind, which wasn’t fatal, however. But he probably passed out. The cause of death was therefore probably drowning.”

  “Drowning?”

  “Yes. Drowning is difficult to diagnose, especially when the lungs have been messed with like they have in this case. But all the symptoms of drowning are there when you look for them.” Magnus read: “Foam in the larynx, trachea, and bronchi.”

  He stopped reading and gazed at Dagbjartur over his glasses. “Those could also be symptoms of heart failure or carbon poisoning, so I had to exclude that using other methods. But then I looked for other symptoms of drowning.”

  Dagbjartur nodded to show interest.

  Magnus continued to read: “Hyper-inflated lungs, hyper-inflatio pulmonum, with indentations on the surface, under the ribs, pulmonary edema. Liquid in both pleural cavities, bilateral hydrothoraces. Liquid in the cranial cavities and ethmoidal and sphenoidal sinuses. Blood congestion in the bones around the auditory canal. These aren’t all equally reliable indicators, of course, but when you add them all up I’m pretty certain.”

  Dagbjartur was baffled and, after some thought, asked, “So was the man knocked out first, then drowned, and then carved up?”

  “That I don’t know. I just got the results of tests that show that the man was very drunk. The ethanol level in his blood was 3.02 per mil and 2.56 in the urine. He could also have fallen and gotten that head wound before he drowned.”

  Dagbjartur was still ruminating on these results. “Did the man drown at sea?” he asked.

  Magnus pondered. “Is that possible?” he asked.

  “Yes, probably,” Dagbjartur answered. “This happened on a small island surrounded by water.”

  Magnus turned and took two steps toward one of the slabs. He carefully lifted the sheet off the body’s face and beckoned Dagbjartur to approach. The policeman was now seeing Bryngeir for the first time. His white eyebrow was very conspicuous. Magnus stooped over the corpse and examined its eyes. “No, he’s unlikely to have drowned at sea,” he said. “Salty water is a strong irritant of the mucous membrane of the eyes, so if he had, they’d be redder than that. The man probably drowned in clean freshwater.”

  Magnus pulled the sheet back over the body and said, “It should be added that the man had a damaged liver and that he would have died within a few years if he hadn’t stopped drinking.”

  “There’s just one thing I don’t get,” said Dagbjartur. “The report that my colleagues who went to the island sent said that the body was covered in blood on the scene. But if he’d been dead when he was carved up, there shouldn’t have been any bleeding, isn’t that right?”

  “Exactly,” said Magnus with a tinge of recognition in his voice. “Everything therefore indicates that he died lying on his back and even with his legs in the air. The blood accumulated in the back and the cuts then released it. The arteries were also severed, so one could expect to see a lot of blood on the outside of the body.”

  “Can you imagine how he might have drowned in such a position?” Dagbjartur asked.

  “I don’t have any explanation that I could put down on paper with a clear conscience.”

  “But could you hazard an off-the-record guess?”

  Magnus glanced at the det
ective over his glasses and reflected a moment. Finally, he said, “I once read about a case in a specialized magazine about a man who murdered his three wives at various intervals of a period of some years. He approached them all when they were lying in the bathtub, grabbed them by the calves, and hoisted their legs in the air. That way their heads hit the bottom and they drowned without being able to save themselves. There were no wounds on the body, so it was always considered to be an accident. This happened in three different cities, so no one knew of the previous wife when the next one died. Finally someone recognized a pattern between them and the case was investigated. The police tested the method, so a woman who was a good swimmer was asked to lie in the bathtub and then her legs were hoisted in the same way. The woman almost died in the experiment. Don’t quote me on this, but that’s what could have happened, and the man could have been lying with his legs in the air like that for quite some time. The bruise on the head could have been caused by the brim of the bathtub.”

  Question thirty-three: Bui’s response to losing his chin. Fifth letter. In the battle between the Jomsvikings and Earl Hakon, Thorkel jumped from his ship on board Bui’s with a sword in his hand and cut off Bui’s chin and lip, causing a row of his teeth to drop onto the deck. After Bui received the wound, he said, “That Danish woman in Borgundarholm won’t be as keen to kiss me now, if I ever get home.” Bui then struck Thorkel, striking him in the middle and slicing him in two.

  “My father thinks the answer is in the words ‘that Danish woman.’ The fifth letter is d.”

  Kjartan looked at the note containing the list of answers and said, “The guest’s answer was ‘sliced Thorkel in two.’”

  “That means there are two possible answers to this question, the letters d and e.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Thorolfur took a short break from the questioning when a member of the crew from the coast guard ship appeared with a big envelope, which he handed to him. Johanna stood up and stepped outside to breathe in some fresh air. Both inspectors were smoking, and the classroom was getting very stuffy. Grimur stood up from his seat in the school corridor and walked outside with her. Hogni had gone over to Gudjon in Radagerdi to help him build the casket for Bjorn Snorri.

  “Still raining,” she said.

  Grimur looked at the weather. “Someone once said don’t wish for rainfall if you don’t like getting your feet wet. The fields were getting pretty dry and the wells were low.”

  “I still need to learn that all weather serves its purpose,” said Johanna.

  They stood there in silence until Thorolfur came out and told Johanna that the interview could resume. She took a deep breath and walked back in.

  Thorolfur asked Grimur to look for Kjartan, the magistrate’s assistant, and to summon him for the final interview. Then he went back into the classroom and sat opposite Johanna.

  “We just got a message from Reykjavik,” he said. “We sent them a list of all the people who were on the island and compared it with a list of all the names that cropped up in their investigation into Bryngeir down south, and it turns out that your name pops up.”

  “That’s not unlikely.”

  “When did you first meet Bryngeir?”

  “In my second year at high school.”

  “How did you meet?”

  Johanna thought a moment and finally said, “I wrote an essay about the Tale of Sarcastic Halli in the Flatey Book. I sometimes used the Flatey Book as assignment material in high school when I was lazy. I knew the material so well, having listened to my father’s countless lectures about it in five different languages over the years, so I could write pretty good essays on the subject quite fast. I got good grades for this assignment, and it appeared in the school magazine. Bryngeir was taking his finals that year and was really into Icelandic philology. He was reading the printed edition of the Flatey Book every night at the time and felt the urge to meet me after reading my essay. I wasn’t enthusiastic about it because I was engaged to Einar Fridriksson, whom I mentioned earlier. I’d met Einar in Copenhagen when I was fifteen years old and he was seventeen. We were good friends back then and later developed a crush on each other when we got a bit older. His parents were studying and working in Denmark. As I told you, they moved back to Iceland at the same time as my dad and I did. At that time Einar was in his last year at the high school, in the same class as Bryngeir.”

  “You mentioned he died?”

  “Yes, he died in a horrible accident.”

  “What happened?”

  “Einar was invited to join a weird students’ cultural club called the Jomsviking Society. It was a semi-secret club for snobby, vain young men. New members were initiated into the society through some ridiculous ritual, and there was a terrible accident at it and Einar died.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “The initiation involved a reenactment of the execution of the Jomsvikings after their defeat in battle against Earl Hakon. The members acted out the scene from the saga, reciting the dialogue between the Jomsvikings and the earl’s men like in a play. The initiate had to kneel under a sword, which was then dropped. Naturally, he was supposed to move his head out of the way at the last second, just like Sveinn Buason did in the story. It was a perfectly harmless game, even though the sword was sharp and heavy. On this occasion, however, they were unusually drunk. Something went wrong, and the sword landed on Einar’s head.”

  “Who was it that swung the sword?” Thorolfur asked.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Yes, but I want to hear it from you.”

  Johanna stared at the policeman for a long moment without betraying any emotion and then finally said, “It was Kjartan, the magistrate’s assistant in Patreksfjordur.”

  Thorolfur broke into a numb smile. “Yes, it was Kjartan, and he was convicted of manslaughter and spent a few years in prison. It must have been a tough experience for him to meet you here again. The man who killed your boyfriend?”

  Johanna sank into a long silence.

  “Yes, it was difficult, but not in the way you imagine,” she finally said.

  “In what way then?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I love long stories.”

  “Very well then, you’ll get a long story. I was devastated when Einar died. He was a particularly bright and good young man. I’m not just saying that because of our teenage romance. Now that I’m an adult I can still recall our time together and our nightlong conversations. I’ve missed him every day since I lost him.”

  Johanna fell into a long silence and didn’t continue with her story again until Thorolfur signaled her to do so with a faint nod.

  “Anyway, there was a funeral and a police investigation and finally a court case, and Kjartan was convicted. It gave me some outlet to be able to hate him, and I was pleased when he got his prison sentence. Of course, my studies went down the drain during that period, but I still managed to drag myself to school most days. It was then that Bryngeir took it upon himself to console me. I found him to be more considerate than I’d initially expected, and I was vulnerable to someone who seemed to really care for me. I got little support from my father at that time. The only job he could get was teaching in a secondary school, which of course was a total waste of his education and talents, so he got depressed and drank a lot. Bryngeir passed his school exams and started studying literature at university in the fall. I continued in the high school and we became an item that winter. Then we rented a small basement apartment in the west of Reykjavik and started living together. It lasted for four years and almost finished me off before it ended.”

  “How’s that?” Thorolfur asked.

  “After I moved in with Bryngeir, he soon started to control my life every minute of the day. I had to be at school during school hours and focus on nothing else but my homework and domestic chores when he didn’t need me for sex or whatever else popped into his mind. I wasn’t allowed to meet anyone else unless he was present. I wasn�
��t allowed to hold any opinions unless he approved them. I couldn’t make any decision regarding my life without him having the last word on it. When I got my high school exams, he decided I should study medicine because I was good at studying and it would be a good source of income for the home once I’d become a brain surgeon. He never laid a finger on me, but he could play me like a musical instrument with his words. With just a few sentences he could make me feel like I was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and then with a few extra words he sent me crashing into hell again. The latter tended to be the norm, because he drank a lot, made a mess of our finances, and blamed me for every misfortune. All of a sudden the strings of the instrument snapped, and I had a nervous breakdown in the middle of a class in my second year at med school. I was taken to hospital and put into the psychiatric ward. An unusually perceptive psychologist realized what the situation was in our very first session and made me realize the relationship was life-threatening. I went straight home to Dad from the hospital. He shook himself out of his self-pity and started to take care of me. Bryngeir tried everything to win me back again, but I had regained my senses after four years of unconsciousness. Finally, after many weeks, he seemed to accept that our relationship was over and allowed me into the house to collect my clothes and textbooks. Naturally, I was slightly wary of him because he had threatened me with all kinds of awful things, but I was sure he wouldn’t lay a finger on me and thought that I was by now immune to him hurting me with his words, after my therapy with the psychologist. I therefore went to the meeting on my own. That was a big mistake.”

  Johanna picked up a glass of water, lifted it to her lips, and held it there for a long moment without drinking. Finally, she took a small sip and carefully put the glass down again.