Silence Of The Grave

by Arnaldur Indridason

  "Yes, here," Skarphédinn 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," Skarphédinn 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," Skarphédinn said pompously. "Everything points to that. Shall we say that we'll dig down to it?"

  Erlendur nodded.

  Skarphédinn 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 Skarphédinn 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 Skarphédinn 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.

  Elínborg 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. Elínborg 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 Elínborg 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?" Elínborg asked. "A thousand years? Ten?"

  The geologist looked at her.

  "Difficult to say," he repeated.

  "How accurate an answer can you give?" Elínborg asked. "Measured in years."

  "Difficult to say."

  "In other words, it's difficult to say anything?"

  The geologist looked at Elínborg and smiled.

  "Sorry, I was thinking. What do you want to know?"

  "How long?"

  "What?"

  "He's been lying here," Elínborg 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," Elínborg 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 Reykjavík dolerite that covers the whole area around the city."

  He looked at Elínborg.

  "Relative to all that history, the grave was only dug a millionth of a second ago."

  The archaeologists stopped work around 9.30 and Skarphédinn 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 Skarphédinn looked at him disdainfully and asked him if he wanted 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. Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli had gone home. The forensic squad, who had been helping the archaeologist, had gone home as well by now. Erlendur had spoken to Tóti and his mother about the bone that the boy found. Tóti 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," Tóti told Erlendur. "Ever."

  The medical student had gone back home, taking his little brother with him. Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli 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 a
sked. "It could have been from a sheep, for instance."

  "Yes, wasn't it more likely to have been from a sheep?" asked Sigurdur Óli, 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 Elínborg had called out, the archaeologist and the forensic pathologist, but he did not mind hearing the student's opinion.

  "I took a look at the soil and, based on the rate of decay, we're maybe talking about 70 years. Not much more than that. But I'm no expert."

  "No, quite," Erlendur said. "The archaeologist thought the same and he's no expert either."

  He turned to Sigurdur Óli.

  "We need to check out the records of people who went missing from that time, around 1930 or 1940. Maybe even earlier. See what we can find."

  Erlendur stood beside the foundation, in the evening sun, and looked north towards the town of Mosfellsbaer, to Kollafjördur and Mount Esja, and he could see the houses across the bay on Kjalarnes. He could see the cars on the West Road skirt the foot of Úlfarsfell on their way to Reykjavík. He heard a car drive up to the foundation and a man stepped out of it, about the same age as Erlendur, fat, wearing a blue windcheater and a peaked cap. He slammed the door and looked at Erlendur and the police car, the disturbed ground by the foundation and the tent covering the skeleton.

  "Are you from the taxman?" he asked brashly, walking over to Erlendur.

  "Taxman?" Erlendur said.

  "Never a bloody moment's peace from you," the man said. "Have you got a writ or . . . ?"

  "Is this your land?" Erlendur asked.

  "Who are you? What's this tent? What's going on here?"

  Erlendur explained to the man, who said his name was Jon, what had happened. It turned out that he was a building contractor and owned the building plot; he was on the verge of bankruptcy and plagued by debt collectors. No work had been done on the foundation for some time, but he said he came regularly to check whether the formwork had been vandalised; those bloody kids in these new suburbs who play silly buggers in the houses. He had not heard about the discovery of the skeleton and looked down into the foundation in disbelief while Erlendur explained to him what the police and archaeologists were doing.

  "I didn't know about it, and the carpenters certainly wouldn't have seen those bones. Is it an ancient grave then?" Jon asked.

  "We don't know yet," Erlendur said, unwilling to give any further information. "Do you know anything about that land over there to the east?" he asked, pointing towards the redcurrant bushes.

  "All I know is that it's good building land," Jon said. "I didn't think I'd live to see the day that Reykjavik would spread all the way out here."

  "Maybe the city's grown out of all proportion," Erlendur said. "Do redcurrants grow wild in Iceland, would you happen to know?"

  "Redcurrants? No idea. Never heard of it."

  They talked briefly before Jon drove away again. Erlendur gained the impression that his creditors were about to expropriate the land, but that there was a glimpse of hope if he could manage to squeeze out yet another loan.

  Erlendur intended to go home himself. The evening sun shed a beautiful red glow on the western sky, spreading in from the sea and across the land. It was beginning to cool down.

  He scrutinised the dark swathe. He kicked at the soil and strolled around, unsure why he was dithering. There was nothing waiting for him at home, he thought, swinging his foot at the dirt. No family to welcome him, no wife to tell him what her day had been like. No children to tell him how they were doing at school. Only his clapped out television, an armchair, a worn carpet, wrappers from takeaway meals in the kitchen and whole walls of books that he read in his solitude. Many of them were about missing persons in Iceland, the tribulations of travellers in the wilds in days of old, and deaths on mountain roads.

  Suddenly he felt something hard against his foot. It was like a little pebble standing up out of the dirt. He nudged at it a few times with his toe, but it stood firm. He bent down and began carefully to claw the soil away from it. Skarphédinn had told him not to move anything while the archaeologists were away. Erlendur pulled at the pebble half-heartedly but could not manage to free it.

  He dug deeper, and his hands were filthy by the time he finally reached a similar pebble, then a third and fourth and fifth. Erlendur got down on his knees, scooping up dirt around him in all directions. The object came gradually into view and soon Erlendur stared at what, as far as he could make out, was a hand. Five bony fingers and the bone of a palm, standing up out of the earth. He rose slowly to his feet.

  The five fingers were spread apart as if the person down there had stretched out a hand to clutch at something or defend himself, or perhaps to beg for mercy. Erlendur stood there, thunderstruck. The bones stretched up towards him out of the ground like a plea for clemency, and a shiver passed through him in the evening breeze.

  Alive, Erlendur thought. He looked in the direction of the redcurrant bushes.

  "Were you alive?" he said to himself.

  At that very moment his mobile rang. Standing in the calm of evening, engrossed in his thoughts, he took a while to realise the phone was ringing. He took it out of his coat pocket and answered it. At first all he could hear was rumbling.

  "Help me," said a voice that he recognised immediately. "Please."

  Then the call was cut off.

  4

  He could not tell where the call came from. His mobile's screen display said "Unknown". It was the voice of his daughter, Eva Lind. He winced as he stared at the phone, like a splinter that had pierced his hand, but it did not ring again. He could not call back. Eva Lind had his number and he remembered that the last time they spoke was when she called him to say she never wanted to see him again. He stood transfixed, dumbfounded, waiting for a second call that never came.

  Then he leaped into his car.

  He had not been in touch with Eva Lind for two months. In itself there was nothing unusual about that. His daughter had been living her life without giving him much chance to interfere in it. She was in her twenties. A drug addict. Their last meeting had ended with yet another furious argument. It was in the block of flats where he lived and she stormed out, saying that he was repulsive.

  Erlendur also had a son, Sindri Snaer, who had little contact with his father. He and Eva Lind were infants when Erlendur walked out and left them with their mother. Erlendur's wife never forgave him after their divorce and did not allow him to see the children. He increasingly regretted having let her decide. They sought him out themselves when they were old enough.

  The calm spring dusk was descending over Reykjavik when Erlendur sped out of the Millennium Quarter, onto the main road and into the city. He checked that his mobile was switched on and put it on the front seat. Erlendur did not know much about his daughter's personal life and had no idea where to start looking for her until he remembered a basement flat in the Vogar district where Eva Lind had been living about a year before.

  First he checked whether she had gone to his flat, but Eva Lind was nowhere to be seen. He ran around the block where he lived and up the other staircases. Eva had a key to his flat. He called out to her inside the flat, but she wasn't there. He wondered about telephoning her mother, but couldn't bring himself to do so. They had hardly spoken for 20 years. He picked up the phone and called his son. He knew that his children kept in contact with each other, albeit intermittently. He found out Sindri's mobile number from directory enquiries. It turned out that Sindri was working out of town and had no idea of his sister's whereabouts.