Silence Of The Grave

by Arnaldur Indridason

  "What do you expect to find there anyway?" Sigurdur Óli said, the grin on his face turning sour.

  "He must have written something down if he rented out his chalet. No question of it. We need the names of the people who lived there. The National Statistics Office doesn't seem likely to find them for us. Once we have the names we can check the missing persons register and whether any of these people are alive. And we need an analysis to determine the sex and age as soon as the skeleton is fully uncovered."

  "Róbert mentioned three children," Elínborg said. "At least one of them must still be alive."

  "Well, this is what we've got to go on," Erlendur said. "And it's not much: a family of five lived in a chalet in Grafarholt, a couple with three children, at some time before, during or after the war. They are the only people we know to have lived in the house, but others could have been there too. It doesn't look as though they were registered as living there. So for now we can assume that one of them is buried there, or someone connected with them. And someone connected with them, the lady Róbert remembered, used to go up there . . ."

  "Often and later and was crooked," Elínborg finished the sentence for him. "Could crooked mean she was lame?"

  "Wouldn't he have written 'lame' then?" Sigurdur Óli asked.

  "What happened to that house?" Elínborg asked. "There's no sign of it on the hill."

  "Maybe you'll find that out for us in Benjamín's cellar or from his niece," Erlendur said to Sigurdur Óli. "I clean forgot to ask."

  "All we need is the names of the residents and then to check them against the list of missing persons from that time, and it's all sewn up. Isn't that obvious?" Sigurdur Óli said.

  "Not necessarily," Erlendur said.

  "Why not?"

  "You're only talking about the people who were reported missing."

  "Who else that went missing should I be talking about?"

  "The disappearances that go unreported. You can't be sure that everyone tells the police when someone disappears from their lives. Someone moves to the countryside and is never seen again. Someone moves abroad and is never seen again. Someone flees the country and is slowly forgotten. And then there are travellers who freeze to death. If we have a list of people who were reported to have got lost and died in the area at that time, we ought to examine that too."

  "I think we can all agree that it's not that sort of case," Sigurdur Óli said in an authoritative tone that was beginning to get on Erlendur's nerves. "It's out of the question that this man, or whoever it is lying there, froze to death. It was a wilful act. Someone buried him."

  "That's precisely what I mean," said Erlendur, who was a walking encyclopaedia about ordeals in the wilderness. "Someone sets off from a farm, say. It's the middle of winter and the weather forecast is bad. Everyone tries to dissuade him. He ignores their advice, convinced he'll make it. The strangest thing about stories of people who freeze to death is that they never listen to advice. It's as if death lures them. They seem to be doomed. As if they want to challenge their fate. Anyway. This man thinks he'll succeed. Except when the storm breaks, it's much worse than he could have imagined. He loses his bearings. Gets lost. In the end he gets covered over in a snowdrift and freezes to death. By then he's miles off the beaten track. That's why the body's never found. He's given up for lost."

  Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli exchanged glances, uncertain of what Erlendur was driving at.

  "That's a typical Icelandic missing person scenario and we can explain it and understand it because we live in this country and know how the weather suddenly turns bad and how the story of that man repeats itself at regular intervals without anyone questioning it. That's Iceland, people think, and shake their heads. Of course, it was a lot more common in the old days when almost everyone travelled on foot. Whole series of books have been written about it; I'm not the only one who's interested in the subject. Modes of travel have only really changed over the past 60 to 70 years. People used to go missing and although you could never reconcile yourself to it, you understood their fate. There were rarely grounds for treating such disappearances as police or criminal matters."

  "What do you mean?" Sigurdur Óli said.

  "What was that lecture all about?" Elínborg said.

  "What if some of these men or women never set off from the farm in the first place?"

  "What are you getting at?" Elínborg asked.

  "What if people said so-and-so had set off for the moors or for another farm or went to lay a fishing net in the lake and was never heard of again? A search is mounted, but he's never found and is given up for lost."

  "So the whole household conspires to kill this person?" Sigurdur Óli said, sceptical about Erlendur's hypothesis.

  "Why not?"

  "Then he is stabbed or beaten or shot and buried in the garden?" Elínborg added.

  "Until one day Reykjavik has grown so big that he can't rest in peace any longer," Erlendur said.

  Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg looked at each other and then back at Erlendur.

  "Benjamín Knudsen had a fiancée who disappeared under mysterious circumstances," Erlendur said. "Around the time that the chalet was being built. It was said that she threw herself into the sea and Benjamín was never the same afterwards. Seems to have had plans to revolutionise the Reykjavik retail trade, but he went to pieces when the girl disappeared and his burgeoning ambition evaporated."

  "Only she didn't disappear at all, according to your new theory?" Sigurdur Óli said.

  "Oh yes, she disappeared."

  "But he murdered her."

  "Actually I find it difficult to imagine that," Erlendur said. "I've read some of the letters he wrote to her and judging from them he wouldn't have touched a hair on her head."

  "It was jealousy then," said Elínborg, an avid reader of romances. "He killed her out of jealousy. His love for her seems to have been genuine. Buried her up there and never went back. Finito."

  "What I'm thinking is this," Erlendur said. "Isn't a young man overreacting a bit if he turns senile when his sweetheart dies on him? Even if she commits suicide. I gather that Benjamín was a broken man after she went missing. Could there be something more to it?"

  "Could he have kept a lock of her hair?" Elínborg pondered, and Erlendur thought she still had her mind on pulp fiction. "Maybe inside a picture frame or a locket," she added. "If he loved her that much."

  "A lock of hair?" Sigurdur Óli repeated.

  "He's so slow on the uptake," said Erlendur, who had grasped Elínborg's train of thought.

  "What do you mean, a lock of hair?" Sigurdur Óli said.

  "That would rule her out if nothing else."

  "Who?" Sigurdur Óli looked at them in turn. "Are you talking about DNA?"

  "Then there's the lady on the hill," Elínborg said. "It would be good to track her down."

  "The green lady," Erlendur said thoughtfully, apparently to himself.

  "Erlendur," Sigurdur Óli said.

  "Yes?"

  "Obviously she can't be green."

  "Sigurdur Óli."

  "Yes?"

  "Do you think I'm a total idiot?"

  The telephone on Erlendur's desk rang. It was Skarphédinn, the archaeologist.

  "We're getting there," Skarphédinn said. "We could uncover the rest of the skeleton in two days or so."

  "Two days!" Erlendur roared.

  "Or thereabouts. We haven't found anything yet that looks like a weapon. You might think we're being a little meticulous about it, but I think it's better to do the job properly. Do you want to come and take a look?"

  "Yes, I was on my way," Erlendur said.

  "Maybe you could buy some pastries on the way," Skarphédinn said, and in his mind's eye Erlendur could see his yellow fangs.

  "Pastries?"

  "Danish pastries," Skarphédinn said.

  Erlendur slammed down the phone, asked Elínborg to join him in Grafarholt and told Sigurdur Óli to go to Benjamín's cellar to try to find some
thing about the chalet that the merchant built but apparently lost all interest in after his life turned to misery.

  On the way to Grafarholt, Erlendur, still thinking about people who went missing and were lost in snowstorms, remembered the story about Jon Austmann. He froze to death, probably in Blöndugil in 1780. His horse was discovered with its throat slit, but all that was found of Jon was one of his hands.

  It was inside a blue knitted mitten.

  *

  Simon's father was the monster in all his nightmares.

  It had been that way for as long as he could remember. He feared the monster more than anything else in his life, and when it attacked his mother all that Simon could think of was coming to her defence. He imagined the inevitable battle like an adventure story in which the knight vanquishes the fire-breathing dragon, but in his dreams Simon never won.

  The monster in Simon's dreams was called Grímur. It was never his father or Dad, just Grímur.

  Simon was awake when Grímur tracked them down in the fish factory dormitory in Siglufjördur, and heard when he whispered to their mother how he was going to take Mikkelína up to the mountain and kill her. He saw his mother's terror, and he saw when she suddenly seemed to lose all control, slammed herself against the bed head and knocked herself out. Grímur slowed down then. He saw when Grímur brought her round by repeatedly slapping her face. The boy could smell Grímur's acrid stench and he buried his face in the mattress, so afraid that he asked Jesus to take him up to heaven, there and then.

  He did not hear any more of what Grímur whispered to her. Just her whimpering. Repressed, like the sound of a wounded animal, and mingling with Grímur's curses. Through a crack in his eyes he saw Mikkelína staring through the darkness in indescribable terror.

  Simon had stopped praying to his God and stopped talking to his "good brother Jesus", even though his mother said never to lose faith in him. Although convinced otherwise, Simon had stopped talking to his mother about it because he could tell from her expression that what he said displeased her. He knew that no one, least of all God, would help his mother to overcome Grímur. For all he had been told, God was the omnipotent and omniscient creator of heaven and earth, God had created Grímur like everyone else, God kept the monster alive and God made it attack his mother, drag her across the kitchen floor by the hair and spit on her. And sometimes Grímur attacked Mikkelína, "that fucking moron", as he called her, beating her and mocking her, and sometimes he attacked Simon and kicked him or punched him, one time with such force that the boy lost one of his upper teeth and spat blood.

  "My good brother Jesus, the friend of every child . . ."

  Grímur was wrong about Mikkelína being retarded. Simon had a feeling that she was more intelligent than the rest of them put together. But she never said a word. He was certain she could talk but did not want to. Certain she had chosen silence, from the way she was just as scared of Grímur as the others were, perhaps more so because Grímur sometimes talked about how they ought to throw her on the rubbish dump with that pushchair contraption of hers, she was useless anyway and he was fed up with watching her eat his food without doing anything around the house except be a burden. He said she made them a laughing stock, the whole family and him too, because she was a moron.

  Grímur made sure that Mikkelína could hear when he talked like this, and he laughed at her mother's feeble attempts to curtail the abuse. Mikkelína didn't mind him ranting at her and calling her names, but she didn't want her mother to suffer for her sake. Simon could tell that when he looked at her. Mikkelína's relationship with him had always been close, much closer than with little Tómas, who was more of a puzzle, more of a loner.

  Their mother knew that Mikkelína was not retarded. She did regular exercises with her, but only when Grímur was not there to see it. Helped her to limber up her legs. Lifted her withered arm, which was twisted inwards and stiff, and rubbed her paralysed side with an ointment that she made from wild herbs from the hill. She even thought that Mikkelína would be able to walk one day. She put her arm around her and tottered with her back and forth across the floor, urging her on and encouraging her.

  She always spoke to Mikkelína like any other normal, healthy child, and told Simon and Tómas to do the same. She included her in everything they did together when Grímur was not at home. The mother and daughter understood each other. And her brothers understood her too. Every movement, every expression on her face. Words were superfluous, even if Mikkelína knew the words but never used them. Her mother had taught her to read and the one thing she enjoyed more than being carried out to lie in the sun was reading, or being read to.

  And then one day the words started to come out, the summer after the world went to war and the British army set up camp on the hill. When Simon was carrying Mikkelína back indoors out of the sun. She had been exceptionally lively during the day, wiggling her ears and opening her mouth and poking out her tongue. Simon was about to put her back on the divan in the kitchen, because evening was falling and the weather was cooling, when Mikkelína suddenly made a noise that startled her mother into dropping a plate into the washing-up bowl, where it broke. Forgetting for an instant the terror that would usually fill her after such clumsiness, she spun round and stared at Mikkelína.

  "EMAAEMAAA," Mikkelína repeated.

  "Mikkelína!" their mother gasped.

  "EMAAEMAAA," Mikkelína shouted, rolling her head around in wild rejoicing at her achievement.

  Their mother walked slowly towards her as if unable to believe her own ears, then looked, open mouthed, at her daughter, and Simon thought he could see tears filling her eyes.

  "Maammmmaa," Mikkelína said, and her mother took her out of Símon's arms and laid her slowly and gently onto her bed, stroking her head. Símon had never seen their mother cry before. No matter what Grímur did to her, she never cried. She shrieked in pain, called for help, pleaded with him to stop or otherwise suffered his blows in silence, but Símon had never seen her cry. Thinking that she must be upset, he put his arm around her, but she told him not to worry. This was the best thing that could ever have happened in her life. He could tell that she was crying not only about Mikkelína's condition, but about her achievement as well, which had made her happier than she had ever before allowed herself to feel.

  That was two years ago, and Mikkelína had steadily added to her vocabulary since then and could now say whole sentences, her face like a beetroot from the strain, poking out her tongue and dangling her head back and forth in such furious spasms from the effort that they thought it would drop off her withered body. Grímur did not know that she could talk. Mikkelína refused to say anything within his hearing and their mother concealed it from him, because she never tried to draw his attention to the girl, not even such triumphs. They pretended that nothing had happened or changed. A few times Simon heard his mother very guardedly mention to Grímur whether they ought to try to find help for Mikkelína. That she could become more mobile and stronger with age, and seemed to be able to learn. She could read and was learning to write with her good hand.

  "She's a moron," Grímur said. "Don't ever think she's anything more than a moron. And stop talking to me about her."

  So she stopped, because she obeyed Grímur's every word; the only help that Mikkelína ever received was from their mother, and what Simon and Tómas did for her by carrying her out into the sunshine and playing with her.

  Símon avoided his father as far as possible, but from time to time he was forced to go out with him. When Simon grew up he proved more useful to Grímur, who took him to Reykjavik and made him carry provisions back to the hill. The trip to town took two hours, down to Grafarvogur, crossing the bridge over Ellidaár and skirting the Sund and Laugarnes districts. Sometimes they took the route up the slope to Háaleiti and across Sogamýri. Símon kept four or five of his little steps behind Grímur, who never spoke to him or paid him any attention until he loaded him with supplies and ordered him to carry them home. The retur
n journey could take three or four hours, depending upon how much Simon had to carry. Sometimes Grímur would stay in town and not return to the hill for days.