"Talk to her?"
"He thinks she can hear voices through her coma, and that's good for her."
"So what do you talk to her about?"
"Nothing much," Erlendur said. "I have no idea what to say."
The sister of Benjamín's fiancée had heard the rumours, but flatly denied that there was any truth in them. Her name was Bára and she was considerably younger than the one who had gone missing. She lived in a large detached house in Grafarvogur, still married to a wealthy wholesaler and living in luxury, which was manifested in flamboyant furniture, the expensive jewellery she wore and her condescending attitude towards the detective who was now in her sitting room. Elínborg, who had outlined over the phone what she wanted to talk about, thought that this woman had never had to worry about money, always granted herself whatever she pleased and never had to associate with anyone but her own type. Probably gave up caring for anything else long ago. She had the feeling that this was the life that had awaited Bára's sister, around the time she disappeared.
"My sister was extremely fond of Benjamín, which I never really understood. He struck me as a crushing bore. No lack of breeding, of course. The Knudsens are the oldest family in Reykjavik. But he wasn't the exciting type."
Elínborg smiled. She didn't know what she meant. Bára noticed.
"A dreamer. Hardly ever came down to earth, what with his big ideas for the retailing business, which actually all came to pass years ago, although he didn't live to benefit from them. And he was kind to ordinary people. His maids didn't need to call him Sir. People have stopped that now. No courtesy any more. And no maids."
Bára wiped imaginary dust from the coffee table. Elínborg noticed some large paintings at one end of the room, separate portraits of Bára and her husband. The husband looked quite glum and worn out, his thoughts miles away. Bára seemed to have an insinuating grin on her strict face and Elínborg could not help thinking that she had emerged from this marriage the victor. She pitied the man in the painting.
"But if you think he killed my sister, you're barking up the wrong tree," Bára said. "Those bones you said were found by the chalet are not hers."
"How can you be sure of that?"
"I just know. Benjamín would never have hurt a fly. An awful wimp. A dreamer, as I said. That was obvious when she disappeared. The man fell apart. Stopped caring about his business. Gave up socialising. Gave up everything. Never got over it. My mother gave him back the love letters he sent to my sister. She read some of them, said they were beautiful."
"Were you and your sister close?"
"No, I can't say that. I was so much younger. She already seemed grown-up in my earliest memories of her. Our mother always said she was like our father. Whimsical and tetchy. Depressive. He went the same way."
Bára gave the impression she had let out the last sentence by mistake.
"The same way?" Elínborg said.
"Yes," Bára said peevishly. "The same way. Committed suicide." She spoke the words with complete detachment. "But he didn't go missing like her. Oh no. He hanged himself in the dining room. From the hook for the chandelier. In full view of everyone. That was how much he cared about the family."
"That must have been difficult for you," Elínborg said for the sake of saying something. Bára glared accusingly at Elínborg from where she sat facing her, as if blaming her for having to recall it all.
"It was hardest for my sister. They were very close. It leaves its mark on people, that sort of thing. The dear girl."
For a moment there was a trace of sympathy in her voice.
"Was it . . . ?"
"This was a few years before she herself went missing," Bára said, and Elínborg could tell that she was concealing something. That her story was rehearsed. Purged of all emotion. But perhaps the woman was simply like that. Bossy, cold-hearted and dull.
"To his credit, Benjamín treated her well," Bára continued. "Wrote her love letters, that sort of thing. In those days, people in Reykjavik would go for long walks when they were engaged. A very ordinary courtship really. They met at Hótel Borg, which was the place in those days, they called on each other and went for walks and travelled, and it developed from there just as with young people everywhere. He proposed to her and the wedding was only a fortnight away, I would guess, when she disappeared."
"I'm told that people said she threw herself into the sea," Elínborg said.
"Yes, people made quite a meal of that story. They looked for her all over Reykjavik. Dozens of people took part in the search, but they didn't find so much as a hair. My mother broke the news to me. My sister left us that morning. She was going shopping and went to a few places, there weren't as many shops in those days, but she didn't buy anything. She met Benjamín in his shop, left him and was never seen again. He told the police, and us, that they quarrelled. That's why he blamed himself for what happened and took it so badly."
"Why the talk of the sea?"
"Some people thought they'd seen a woman heading towards the beach where Tryggvagata ends today. She was wearing a coat like my sister's. Similar height. That was all."
"What did they argue about?"
"Some petty matter. To do with the wedding. The preparations. Or at least that's what Benjamín said."
"You don't think it was something else?"
"I have no idea."
"And you don't think it possible that it's her skeleton we found on the hill?"
"Out of the question, yes. I have nothing to base that claim on, of course, and I can't prove it, but I find it just so far-fetched. I simply can't conceive of it."
"Do you know anything about the tenants in Benjamín's chalet in Grafarholt? Maybe people who were there during the war? Possibly a family of five, a couple with three children. Does that ring a bell?"
"No. But I know people lived in his chalet all throughout the war. Because of the housing shortage."
"Do you have a keepsake from your sister, such as a lock of hair? In a locket maybe?"
"No, but Benjamín had a lock of her hair. I saw her cut it off for him. He asked her for a memento one summer when my sister went up north to Fljót for a couple of weeks to visit some relatives."
When Elínborg got into her car she phoned Sigurdur Óli. He was on his way out of Benjamín's cellar after a long, boring day, and she told him to keep his eyes open for a lock of hair from Benjamín's fiancée. It might be inside a pretty locket, she said. She heard Sigurdur Óli groan.
"Come on," Elínborg said. "We can prove whether it's her if we find the lock of hair. It's as simple as that."
She rang off and was about to drive away when she had a sudden thought and switched off the engine. After pondering for a moment, nervously biting her lower lip, she decided to act.
When Bára answered the door she was surprised to see Elínborg again.
"Did you forget something? she asked.
"No, just one question," Elínborg said awkwardly. "Then I'll leave."
"Well, what is it?" Bára said impatiently.
"You said your sister was wearing a coat the day she went missing."
"So?"
"What sort of coat was it?"
"What sort? Just an ordinary coat that my mother gave her."
"I mean, what colour? Do you know?"
"Why do you ask?"
"I'm curious," Elínborg said, not wanting to go into explanations.
"I don't remember."
"No, of course not," Elínborg said. "I understand. Thank you and sorry for bothering you."
"But my mother said it was green."
*
So many things changed during those strange years.
Tómas had stopped wetting the bed. Stopped enraging his father and in some way which eluded Simon, Grímur had started showing the younger boy more attention. He thought Grímur might have changed after the troops arrived. Or maybe Tómas was changing.
Simon's mother never talked about the Gasworks which Grímur had teased her about so mu
ch, so eventually he got bored with it. You little bastard, he used to say, and called her Gashead and talked about the big gas tank and the orgy in it the night that the Earth was supposed to perish, smashed to smithereens in a collision with a comet. Although he understood little of what his father was saying, Simon noticed that it upset his mother. Simon knew that his words hurt her as much as when he beat her up.
Once when he went to town with his father they walked past the Gasworks and Grímur pointed to the big tank, laughing, saying that was where his mother came from. Then he laughed even more. The Gasworks was one of the largest buildings in Reykjavik and Simon found it disturbing. He decided to ask his mother about the building and the big gas tank that aroused his curiosity.
"Don't listen to the nonsense he talks," she said. "You ought to know by now the way he rants and raves. You shouldn't believe a word he says. Not a word."
"What happened at the Gasworks?"
"As far as I know, nothing. He's making it all up. I don't know where he got that story from."
"But where are your mum and dad?"
She looked at her son in silence. She had wrestled with this question all her life and now her son had innocently put it to her and she was at a loss as to what to tell him. She had never known her parents. When she was younger she had asked about them, but never made any headway. Her first memory was of being in a household full of children in Reykjavík, and as she grew up she was told that she was no one's sister and no one's daughter; the council paid for her to be there. She mulled over those words, but did not find out what they meant until much later. One day she was taken from the home and went to live with an elderly couple as a kind of domestic servant, and when she reached adulthood she went to work for the merchant. That was her entire life before she met Grímur. She missed not having parents or a place to call home, a family with cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents and siblings, and in between girlhood and womanhood she went through a phase of incessantly puzzling over who she was and who her parents were. She did not know where to look for the answers.
She imagined they had been killed in an accident. This was her consolation, because she could not bear the thought that they had left her, their child. She fantasised they had saved her life and died in the process. Even sacrificed their lives for her. She always saw them in that light. As heroes battling for their lives and hers. She could not conceive of her parents being alive. For her, that was unthinkable.
When she met the fisherman, Mikkelína's father, she enlisted him to help find the answer, and they called at a succession of offices without learning anything about her, except that she was an orphan; her parents' names were missing from her entry in the national register. She was described as an orphan. Her birth certificate could not be located. She and the fisherman called on the family where she lived with all the other children, and they talked to the woman who had been her foster mother as far back as she could remember, but she had no answers either. "They paid for you," she said. "We needed the money." She had never enquired into the girl's background.
She had long given up wondering about her parents by the time Grímur came home claiming to have discovered who they were and how she came into the world, and she saw the morbid pleasure on his face when he talked about the orgy in the gas tank.
All these thoughts passed through her mind as she looked at Símon, and for a moment she seemed to be on the brink of telling him something important before suddenly she told him to stop asking those endless questions.
War was raging in much of the world and it had reached all the way up to the other side of the hill where British occupying forces had begun erecting buildings shaped like loaves of bread, which they called barracks. Simon did not understand the word. Inside the barracks there was supposed to be something with another incomprehensible name. A depot.
Sometimes he ran over the hill with Tómas to watch the soldiers. They had transported timber up the hill, roofing beams, corrugated iron and fencing, rolls of barbed wire, bags of cement, a cement mixer and a bulldozer to clear the ground for the barracks. And they built the bunker overlooking Grafarvogur, and one day the brothers saw the British bringing a huge cannon up the hill. The cannon was installed in the bunker with its gigantic barrel sticking several metres out through a slit, ready to blow the enemy to pieces. They were defending Iceland from the Germans, who had started the war and killed everyone they got their hands on, even little boys like Simon and Tómas.
The soldiers erected the fencing around what turned out to be eight barracks in total, which went up in no time at all, and they put up a gate and signs in Icelandic saying that unauthorised access was strictly prohibited. A soldier with a rifle was always on guard in a sentry post at the gate. The soldiers ignored the boys, who made sure to keep a safe distance. When the weather was fine Simon and Tómas carried their sister over the hill, put her down on the moss and let her see what the soldiers were building and showed her the barrel projecting from the bunker. Mikkelína lay looking at everything around her, but was silent and contemplative, and Simon had the feeling that she was scared of what she saw. The soldiers and the big cannon.
All the troops wore khaki uniforms with belts, and heavy-duty black boots laced up to their calves, and some had helmets and carried rifles or guns in holsters. In warm weather they took off their jackets and shirts and lay bare-chested in the sunshine. Every so often there were military exercises on the hill, when the soldiers would lie concealed, run from their hiding places, throw themselves to the ground and fire their weapons. Noise and music came from the camp at night. Sometimes they had a machine that made scratchy music with tinny singing. At other times the soldiers sang into the night, songs from their own country which Simon knew was called Britain and Grímur said was an empire.
They told their mother all that was happening on the other side of the hill, but she showed little interest. Once, though, they took her with them to the top of the hill and she had a long look over the British camp, then back home she talked about all the bother and danger there and banned the boys from snooping around the soldiers, because they could never tell what might happen when men had guns and she did not want them to come to any harm.
Time passed and one day the camp filled up with Americans; almost all the British left. Grímur said they were all being sent away to be killed but the Americans would have an easy time in Iceland, without a care in the world.
Grímur gave up shovelling coal and started working for the Americans on the hill because there was plenty of money and work to be had at the camp. One day he had strolled over the hill and asked for work at the depot, and without further ado he was given a job in the quartermaster's stores and the mess. Afterwards, the diet at their home changed for the better. Grímur produced a red can with a key on the side. He opened the lid with the key and turned the can upside-down, and a lump of pink meat plopped onto the plate covered in clear jelly. It wobbled and tasted deliciously salty.
"Ham," Grímur said. "From America, no less."
Simon had never tasted anything so good in his life.
At first he did not wonder how the new food found its way onto their table, but he did notice the anxious look on his mother's face once when Grímur brought home a boxful of cans and hid them in the house. Sometimes Grímur set off for Reykjavik with a sack full of those cans and other goods that Simon did not recognise. When he came back he counted out money onto the table, and Simon saw him happy in a way he had never witnessed before. Grímur ceased being so spiteful to their mother. Stopped talking about the Gasworks. Stroked Tómas on the head.
As time passed, the house was swamped with merchandise. American cigarettes, delicious canned food, fruit and even nylon stockings that their mother said all the women in Reykjavik yearned to have.
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