Silence Of The Grave

by Arnaldur Indridason

  When that happened, a certain joy reigned in the household.

  On his trips to Reykjavik, Simon discovered an aspect of Grímur that he took a while to assimilate and never wholly understood. At home, Grímur was surly and violent. Hated being spoken to. Foul-mouthed if he did speak, and coarse in the way he belittled his children and their mother; he made them serve his every need and woe betide any shirker. But in dealing with everyone else, the monster seemed to shed its skin and become almost human. On Simon's first trips to town he expected Grímur to act the way he always behaved at home, snarling abuse or swinging punches. He feared this, but it never happened. On the contrary. All of a sudden Grímur wanted to please everyone. He chattered away merrily to the merchant and bowed and scraped to people who entered the shop. He addressed them formally, even smiled. Shook their hands. Sometimes when Grímur bumped into people he knew he would break into guffaws – not the strange, dry and raucous laugh that he occasionally let out when he was vilifying his wife. When people pointed to Símon, Grímur put his hand on the boy's head and said yes, he was his son, grown so big. Simon ducked at first as if expecting a blow, and Grímur joked about it.

  It took Simon a long time to grasp this incomprehensible duplicity on Grímur's part. His father's new countenance was unrecognisable. He could not understand how Grímur could be one person at home and a completely different man the moment he left the house. Simon could not fathom how he could be sycophantic and subservient and bow politely, when at home he ruled as the ultimate dispenser of life and death. When Simon discussed this with his mother she shook her head wearily and told him, as always, to be wary of Grímur. Be wary of provoking him. No matter whether it was Simon, Tómas or Mikkelína who sparked him off, or whether it was something that had happened when Grímur was away and which threw him into a rage, he almost invariably attacked their mother.

  Months would sometimes pass between assaults, even a whole year, but they never stopped altogether and were sometimes quite frequent. A matter of weeks. The intensity of his fury varied. Sometimes a single punch out of the blue, sometimes he would fly into an uncontrollable rage, knock their mother to the ground and kick her mercilessly.

  And it was not only physical violence that weighed down upon the family and home. The language he used was like a lash across the face. Denigrating remarks about Mikkelína, that crippled moron. The sarcastic tirade that Tómas suffered for not being able to stop wetting the bed at night. When Simon acted like a lazy bastard. And all that their mother was forced to hear and they tried to close their ears to.

  Grímur didn't care if his children saw him beating up their mother or humiliating her with words that stabbed like stilettos.

  The rest of the time, he paid them virtually no attention. Normally acted as though they did not exist. Very occasionally he played cards with the boys and even allowed Tómas to win. Sometimes, on Sundays, they all walked to Reykjavik and he would buy sweets for the boys. Very seldom Mikkelína was allowed to go with them and Grímur arranged a ride in the coal lorry so they did not need to carry her down from the hill. On these trips – which were few and far between – Simon felt his father was almost human. Almost like a father.

  On the rare occasions when Simon saw his father as something other than a tyrant, he was mysterious and unfathomable. He sat at the kitchen table once, drinking coffee and watching Tómas playing on the floor, and he stroked the surface of the table with the flat of his hand and asked Simon, who was about to sneak out through the kitchen, to bring him another cup. And while Simon poured the coffee for him, he said:

  "It makes me furious thinking about it."

  Simon stopped, holding the coffee jug in both hands, and stood still beside him.

  "Makes me furious," he said, still stroking the surface of the table.

  Simon backed slowly away and put the jug down on the stove plate.

  Looking at Tómas playing on the floor, Grímur said: "It makes me furious to think I couldn't have been much older than him."

  Simon had never imagined his father as ever being any younger than he was then, or that he had ever been different. Now, suddenly, he became a child like Tómas, and a completely new side to his father's character was revealed.

  "You and Tómas are friends, aren't you?"

  Simon nodded.

  "Aren't you?" he repeated, and Simon said yes.

  His father went on stroking the table.

  "We were friends too."

  Then he fell silent.

  "That woman," Grímur said eventually. "I was sent there. The same age as Tómas. Spent years there."

  He fell silent again.

  "And her husband."

  He stopped rubbing the table with his hand and clenched his fist.

  "That fucking bastard. That bloody fucking bastard."

  Simon slowly retreated. Then his father seemed to regain his calm.

  "I don't understand it myself," he said. "And I can't control it."

  He finished his coffee, stood up, went into the bedroom and closed the door behind him. On his way, he picked up Tómas from the floor and took him with him.

  Simon sensed a change in his mother as the years went by and as he grew up, matured and acquired a sense of responsibility. It was not as fast a change as when Grímur was suddenly transformed and became almost human; on the contrary, his mother changed gradually and subtly, over a long period, many years, and he realised the meaning behind it, with a sensitivity denied to most. He had a growing sense that this change in her was dangerous, no less dangerous than Grímur, and that inexplicably it would be his responsibility to intervene before it was too late. Mikkelína was too weak and Tómas was too small. He alone could help her.

  Símon had trouble understanding this change or what it meant, but he became more intensely aware of it than ever around the time that Mikkelína shouted out her first word. Mikkelína's progress pleased her mother immeasurably. For a moment it was as if her gloom had been swept away, she smiled and hugged the girl and the two boys, and for the next weeks and months she helped Mikkelína to learn to talk, delighting in her slightest advances.

  But it was not long before their mother was back in her old routine, as if the gloom that had lifted from her returned with greater intensity than ever. Sometimes she sat on the side of the bed, staring into space for hours, after cleaning every speck of dust from the little house. Glared in silent misery with half-closed eyes, her expression so infinitely sad, alone in the world. Once, when Grímur had punched her in the face and stormed out, Símon found her holding the carving knife, with the palm of her hand turned up, stroking the blade slowly across her wrist. When she noticed him she gave a wry smile and put the knife back in the drawer.

  "What are you doing with that knife?" Simon asked.

  "Checking that it's sharp. He likes the knives to be kept sharp."

  "He's completely different in town," Simon said. "He's not nasty then."

  "I know."

  "He's happy then, and he smiles."

  "Yes."

  "Why isn't he like that at home? To us?"

  "I don't know. He doesn't feel well."

  "I wish he was different. I wish he was dead."

  His mother looked at him.

  "None of that. Don't talk like him. You mustn't think like that. You're not like him and you never will be. Neither you nor Tómas. Never. Do you hear? I forbid you to think like that. You mustn't."

  Simon looked at his mother.

  "Tell me about Mikkelína's dad," he said. Simon had sometimes heard her talking about him to Mikkelína and tried to imagine what her world would have been like had he not died and left her. Imagined himself as that man's son in a family where his father was not a monster but a friend and companion who loved his children.

  "He died," his mother said with a hint of accusation in her voice. "And that's that."

  "But he was different," Simon said. "You would be different."

  "If he hadn't died? If Mikkelína hadn'
t fallen ill? If I hadn't met your father? What's the point of thinking like that?"

  "Why is he so nasty?"

  He asked her this repeatedly and sometimes she answered, sometimes she just said nothing as if she herself had searched for the answer to that question for years without getting any closer to it. She just stared past Simon, alone in the world, and talked to herself sadly and remotely, as if nothing she said or did mattered any more.

  "I don't know. I only know that we're not to blame. It's not our fault. It's something inside him. I blamed myself at first. Tried to find something I was doing wrong that made him angry, and I tried to change it. But I never knew what it was and nothing I did made any difference. I stopped blaming myself long ago and I don't want you or Tómas or Mikkelína to think the way he acts is your fault. Even when he curses and abuses you. It's not your fault."

  She looked at Símon.

  "The little power that he has in this world, he has over us, and he doesn't intend to let go of it. He'll never let go of it."

  Simon looked at the drawer where the carving knives were kept.

  "Is there nothing we can do?"

  "No."

  "What were you going to do with the knife?"

  "I told you. I was checking how sharp it was. He likes the knives kept sharp."

  Simon forgave his mother for lying because he knew she was trying, as always, to protect him, safeguard him, ensure that their terrible life as a family would have the least effect on his.

  When Grímur got home that evening, filthy black from shovelling coal, he was in exceptionally good spirits and started talking to their mother about something he had heard in Reykjavik. He sat down on a kitchen stool, told her to bring him some coffee and said her name had cropped up at work. He didn't know why, but the coalmen had been talking about her and claimed she was one of them. One of the doomsday kids who were conceived in the Gasworks.

  She kept her back turned to Grímur and didn't say a word. Simon sat at the table. Tómas and Mikkelína were outside.

  "At the Gasworks!?"

  Then Grímur laughed an ugly, gurgling laugh. Sometimes he coughed black phlegm from the coal dust and was black around the eyes, mouth and ears.

  "In the doomsday orgy in the fucking gas tank!" he shouted.

  "That's not true," she said softly, and Simon was surprised because he had seldom heard her contest anything Grímur said. He stared at his mother and a shiver ran down his spine.

  "They fucked and boozed all night because they thought the end of the world was nigh and that's where you came from, you twat."

  "It's a lie," she said, more firmly than before, but still without looking up from what she was doing at the sink. Her back remained turned to Grímur and her head dropped lower onto her chest and her petite shoulders arched up as if she wanted to hide between them.

  Grímur had stopped laughing.

  "Are you calling me a liar?"

  "No," she said, "but it's not true. It's a misunderstanding."

  Grímur got to his feet.

  "Is it a misunderstanding," he mimicked her voice.

  "I know when the gas tank was built. I was born before then."

  "That's not what I heard. I heard your mother was a whore and your father was a tramp and they threw you in the dustbin when you were born."

  The drawer was open and she stared down into it and Simon saw her glaring at the big carving knife. She looked at Símon then back down at the knife and for the first time he believed that she was capable of using it.

  12

  Skarphédinn had arranged for a big white tent to be put up over the excavation site and when Erlendur went inside it out of the spring sunshine he saw the incredibly slow progress they had made. By the foundation they had cut an area of ten square metres and the skeleton was embedded in one edge of it. The arm still pointed up, as before, and two men were kneeling with brushes and spoons in their hands, picking away at the dirt and sweeping it into pans.

  "Isn't that a bit too painstaking?" Erlendur asked when Skarphédinn walked up to greet him. "You'll never get it finished like that."

  "You just can't be too careful in an excavation," Skarphédinn said as pompously as ever, proud that his methods were producing results. "And you, of all people, ought to be aware of that," he added.

  "Aren't you just using this for field training?"

  "Field training?"

  "For archaeologists? Isn't this the class you teach at the university?"

  "Listen, Erlendur. We're working methodically. There's no other way to do it. Believe me."

  "Yes, maybe there's no rush," Erlendur said.

  "We'll get there in the end," Skarphédinn said, running his tongue over his fangs.

  "They tell me the pathologist is in Spain," Erlendur said. "He's not expected back for a few days. So we do have plenty of time, I suppose."

  "Who could it be, lying there?" Elínborg asked.

  "We can't determine whether it's a male or a female, a young body or an old one," Skarphédinn said. "And maybe it's not our job to do so either. But I don't think there's the slightest doubt any more that it was a murder."

  "Could it be a young, pregnant woman?" Erlendur asked.

  "We'll have that settled soon," Skarphédinn said.

  "Soon?" Erlendur said. "Not if we go on at this rate."

  "Patience is a virtue," Skarphédinn said. "Remember that."

  Erlendur would have told him where to stick his virtue if Elínborg had not interrupted.

  "The murder doesn't have to be connected with this place," she said out of the blue. She had agreed with most of what Sigurdur Óli had said the day before, when he started criticising Erlendur for being too preoccupied with his first hunch about the bones: that the person buried there had lived on the hill, even in one of the chalets. In Sigurdur Óli's opinion it was stupid to concentrate on a house that used to be there and people who may or may not have lived in it. Erlendur was at the hospital when Sigurdur Óli delivered this sermon, and Elínborg decided to hear Erlendur's views on it.

  "He could have been murdered in, say, the west of town, and brought over here," she said. "We can't be sure that the murder was actually committed on the hill. I was discussing this with Sigurdur Óli yesterday."

  Erlendur rummaged deep in his coat pockets until he found his lighter and cigarette packet. Skarphédinn gave him a disdainful look.

  "You don't smoke inside the tent," he snarled.

  "Let's go outside," Erlendur said to Elínborg, "We don't want to make virtue lose its patience."

  They left the tent and Erlendur lit up.

  "Of course you're right," he said. "It's by no means certain that the murder, if indeed it was a murder, was committed here. As far as I can see," he continued, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke, "we have three equally plausible theories. First, it's Benjamín Knudsen's fiancée, who got pregnant, disappeared, and who everyone thought had thrown herself into the sea. For some reason, possibly jealousy, as you say, he killed the girl and hid the body here by his chalet; and was never the same man afterwards. Second, someone was murdered in Reykjavik, even in Keflavík or Akranes for that matter; anywhere around the city. Brought here, buried and forgotten. Third, there's a possibility that people lived on this hill, committed a murder and buried the body on their doorstep because they had nowhere else to go. It might have been a traveller, a visitor, maybe one of the British who came here in the war and built the barracks on the other side of the hill, or the Americans who took over from them, or maybe a member of the household."