Silence Of The Grave

by Arnaldur Indridason

  None of it stayed in their house for long. Once Grímur brought back a little packet with the most wonderful scent Simon had ever smelt. Grímur opened it and let them all have a taste, telling them that the Americans chewed it all the time, like cows with cud. You weren't allowed to swallow it, but after a while you should spit it out and take a fresh strip. Simon, Tómas – and even Mikkelína, who was given a pink, scented piece to chew – chomped away for all they were worth, then spat it out and took some more.

  "It's called gum," Grímur said.

  Grímur soon learned to get by in English and befriended the troops. If they were off duty he occasionally invited them to his house, and then Mikkelína had to lock herself in the little store room, the boys combed their hair and their mother put on a dress and made herself presentable. The soldiers would arrive and act politely, greet the family with handshakes, introduce themselves and give the children sweets. Then they sat around drinking. They left in their jeep for Reykjavik and everything fell quiet again in the chalet which, otherwise, no one ever visited.

  Normally, however, the soldiers went straight to Reykjavik and came back at night singing. The hill resounded with their shouts and calls, and once or twice there was a sound like guns being fired, but not the cannon because, as Grímur put it, that would mean "the fucking Nazis are in Reykjavik and they'll kill us all in seconds". He often went for a night on the town with the soldiers and when he came back he was singing American songs. Simon had never heard Grímur sing before that summer.

  And once Simon witnessed something strange.

  One day one of the American solders walked over the hill with a fishing rod, stopped on the shore of Lake Reynisvatn and cast for trout. Then he walked down the hill with his rod and whistled all the way over to Lake Hafravatn, where he spent most of the day. It was a beautiful summer's day and he strolled around the lake, casting whenever he felt the urge. Instead of fishing with much motivation, he just seemed to enjoy being on the lakeside in the good weather. Sat down, smoked and sunbathed.

  Around three o'clock he seemed to have had enough, gathered up his rod and a bag containing the three trout he had caught that day and strolled as casually as ever from the lake and up the hill. But instead of walking past the house he stopped and said something incomprehensible to Simon, who had been keeping a close watch on his movements and was now standing at the front door.

  "Are your parents in?" the smiling soldier asked Simon in English and looked inside the house. The door was always kept open in good weather. Tómas had helped Mikkelína over to the sunny spot behind the house, and was lying there with her. Their mother was indoors, doing the housework.

  Simon did not understand the soldier.

  "You don't understand me?" The soldier said. "My name is Dave. I'm American."

  Gathering that his name was Dave, Simon nodded. Dave held out the bag in front of the boy, put it down on the ground, opened it, took out the three trout and laid them beside it.

  "I want you to have this. You understand? Keep them. They should be great."

  Símon stared at Dave, uncomprehending. Dave smiled, his white teeth gleaming. He was short and thin, bony-faced, his thick, dark hair slicked over to one side.

  "Your mother, is she in?" he asked. "Or your father?" Simon looked blank. Dave unbuttoned his shirt pocket, took out a black notebook and flicked through it to the place he wanted. He walked up to Simon and pointed to a sentence in the book.

  "Can you read?" he asked.

  Simon read the sentence that Dave was pointing to. He could understand it because it was in Icelandic, but was followed by something foreign that he could not fathom. Dave read the Icelandic sentence out loud, as carefully as he could.

  "Ég heiti Dave," he said. "My name is Dave," he said again in English. Pointed once more, then handed the book to Simon, who read out loud.

  "My name is . . . Simon," he said with a smile. Dave smiled even wider. Found another sentence and showed it to the boy.

  "How are you, miss?" Simon read.

  "Yes, but not miss, just you," Dave laughed, but Simon did not understand. Dave found another word and showed it to Simon. "Mother," Simon read out loud, and Dave pointed to him with a nod.

  "Where is?" he asked in Icelandic, and Simon understood he was asking about his mother. Simon beckoned to Dave to follow him and he took him into the kitchen where his mother was sitting at the table darning socks. She smiled when she saw Simon enter, but when she saw Dave behind him her smile froze, she dropped the sock and leapt to her feet, knocking over the chair. Dave, equally taken aback, stepped forward waving his arms.

  "Sorry," he said. "Please, I'm so sorry. I didn't want to scare you. Please."

  Simon's mother rushed over to the kitchen sink and stared down at it as if not daring to look up.

  "Please take him out, Simon," she said.

  "Please, I will go," Dave said. "It's okay. I'm sorry. I'm going. Please, I . . ."

  "Take him out, Simon," his mother repeated.

  Puzzled by her reaction, Simon looked at them in turn, and saw Dave backing out of the kitchen and into the yard.

  "Why did you do that to me?" she said and turned to Simon. "Bringing a man in here. Why would you do that?"

  "Sorry," Simon said. "I thought it was all right. His name is Dave."

  "What did he want?"

  "He wanted to give us his fish," Simon said. "That he caught in the lake. I thought that was all right. He only wanted to give us some fish."

  "God, what a shock! Good Lord, what a shock! You must never do that again. Never! Where are Mikkelína and Tómas?"

  "Out the back."

  "Are they all right?"

  "All right? Yes, Mikkelína wanted to be in the sunshine."

  "You must never do that again," she repeated as she walked out to check on Mikkelína. "Do you hear! Never."

  She walked round the corner of the house and saw the soldier standing over Tómas and Mikkelína, staring down at the girl in bewilderment. Mikkelína pulled faces and craned her neck to see who was standing over them. She could not see the soldier's face because the sun was behind his head. The soldier looked at her mother, then back at Mikkelína writhing in the grass.

  "I . . ." Dave said falteringly. "I didn't know," he said. "I'm sorry. Really I am. This is none of my business. I'm sorry."

  Then he turned round and hurried away, and they watched him disappear slowly over the hill.

  "Are you all right?" their mother asked, kneeling down beside Mikkelína and Tómas. She was calmer now that the soldier had left without apparently wanting to cause them any harm. She picked up Mikkelína, carried her into the house and put her down on the divan in the kitchen. Simon and Tómas ran in behind her.

  "Dave isn't bad," Simon said. "He's different."

  "Is his name Dave?" their mother said vacantly. "Dave," she repeated. "Isn't that the same as David in Icelandic?" she asked, directing the question more at herself than anyone else. And then it happened, something that struck Simon as very strange.

  His mother smiled.

  Tómas had always been mysterious, reticent, a loner, a little nervous and shy, the silent type. The previous winter Grímur seemed to notice something in him that aroused his interest more than in Simon. He would pay attention to Tómas and take him into another room. When Simon asked his brother what they had talked about Tómas said nothing, but Simon insisted and wheedled out of him that they had been talking about Mikkelína.

  "What was he saying to you about Mikkelína?" Simon asked.

  "Nothing," Tómas said.

  "Yes he was, what?" Simon said.

  "Nothing," Tómas said with an embarrassed look, as if he was trying to conceal something from his brother.

  "Tell me."

  "I don't want to. I don't want him to talk to me. I don't want him to."

  "You don't want him to talk to you? So you mean you don't want him to say the things he says? Is that what you mean?"

  "I don't want an
ything, that's all," Tómas said. "And you stop talking to me too."

  The weeks and months passed by and Grímur displayed his favour for his younger son in various ways. Although Simon was never party to their conversations, he found out what they were doing one evening towards the end of the summer. Grímur was getting ready to take some goods from the depot into Reykjavik. He was waiting for a soldier named Mike who was going to help him. Mike had a jeep at his disposal and they planned to fill it with goods to sell in town. The children's mother was cooking the food, which was from the depot as well. Mikkelína was lying in her bed.

  Simon noticed Grímur pushing Tómas towards Mikkelína, whispering in his ear and smiling the way he did when he made snide remarks at the boys. Their mother noticed nothing and Simon had no real idea what was going on until Tómas went up to Mikkelína, urged on by Grímur, and said:

  "Bitch."

  Then he went back to Grímur, who laughed and patted him on the head.

  Simon looked over to the sink where his mother was standing. Although she could not have helped overhearing, she did not move and showed no reaction at first, as if trying to ignore it. Except that he saw she was holding a knife in one hand, peeling potatoes, and her knuckles whitened as she gripped the handle. Then she turned slowly with the knife in her hand and stared at Grímur.

  "That's one thing you shall never do," she said in a quavering voice.

  Grímur looked at her and the grin froze on his face.

  "Me?" Grímur said. "What do you mean, never do? I didn't do anything. It was the lad. It was my boy Tómas."

  Their mother moved a step closer to Grímur, still wielding the knife.

  "Leave Tómas alone."

  Grímur stood up.

  "Are you going to do anything with that knife?"

  "Don't do that to him," she said, and Simon sensed she was beginning to back down. He heard a jeep outside the house.

  "He's here," Simon shouted. "Mike's here."

  Grímur looked out of the kitchen window then back at their mother, and the tension eased for a moment. She put down the knife. Mike appeared in the doorway. Grímur smiled.

  When he got back that night he beat their mother senseless. The next morning she had a black eye and a limp. They heard the grunts when Grímur was pummelling her. Tómas crawled into Simon's bed and looked at his brother through the darkness of night, in shock, continually muttering to himself as if that could erase what had happened.

  ". . . sorry, I didn't mean to, sorry, sorry, sorry . . ."

  16

  Elsa opened the door for Sigurdur Óli and asked him to join her for a cup of tea. As he watched Elsa in the kitchen, he thought about Bergthóra. They had argued that morning before leaving for work. After rejecting her amorous advances he had begun clumsily to describe his concerns, until Bergthóra became seriously agitated.

  "Oh, just a minute," she said. "So we're never supposed to get married? Is that your plan? Is the idea that we just live in limbo with nothing on paper and our children bastards? For ever."

  "Bastards?"

  "Yes."

  "Are you thinking about the big wedding again?"

  "Sorry if it bothers you."

  "You really want to walk down the aisle? In your wedding dress with a posy in your hand and . . ."

  "You have such contempt for the idea, don't you?"

  "And what's this about children anyway?" Sigurdur Óli said, and immediately regretted it when he saw Bergthóra's face turn ever darker.

  "Do you never want to have children?"

  "Yes, no, yes, I mean, we haven't discussed it," Sigurdur Óli said. "I think we need to discuss that. You can't decide on your own whether we have children or not. That's not fair and it's not what I want. Not now. Not straight away."

  "The time will come," Bergthóra said. "Hopefully. We're both 35. It won't be long until it's too late. Whenever I try to talk about it you change the subject. You don't want to discuss it. Don't want children or a marriage or anything. Don't want anything. You're getting as bad as that old fart Erlendur."

  "Eh?" Sigurdur Óli was thunderstruck. "What was that?"

  But Bergthóra had already set off for work, leaving him with an horrific vision of the future.

  Elsa noticed Sigurdur Óli's thoughts were elsewhere as he sat in her kitchen staring down at his cup.

  "Would you like some more tea?" she asked quietly.

  "No, thank you," Sigurdur Óli said. "Elínborg, who's working on this case with me, wanted me to ask if you know whether your uncle Benjamín kept a lock of his fiancée's hair, maybe in a locket or a jar or the like."

  Elsa thought about it.

  "No," she said, "I don't remember a lock of hair, but I'm not a hundred per cent sure what's down there."

  "Elínborg says there should be one. According to the fiancée's sister, who told her yesterday that she gave Benjamín a lock of hair when she went on a trip somewhere, I believe."

  "I've never heard about a lock of her hair, or anyone else's for that matter. My family aren't particularly romantic and never have been."

  "Are any possessions of hers in the basement? The fiancée's?"

  "Why do you want a lock of her hair?" Elsa asked instead of answering his question. She had a prying look on her face which made Sigurdur Óli hesitate. He didn't know how much Erlendur had told her. She saved him the bother of asking.

  "You can prove that it's her buried up on the hill," she said. "If you have something from her. You can do a DNA test to find out whether it's her, and if it is, you'll claim my uncle murdered her and left her there. Is that the idea?"

  "We're just investigating all the possibilities," Sigurdur Óli said, wanting at all costs to avoid provoking Elsa into a rage on the scale of that he had sparked with Bergthóra just half an hour before. This day was not getting off to a very good start. Definitely not.

  "That other detective came here, the sad one, and implied that Benjamín was responsible for his fiancée's death. And now you can all confirm that if you find a lock of her hair. I just don't understand it. That you could think Benjamín capable of killing that girl. Why should he do it? What motive could he have had? None. Absolutely none."

  "No, of course not," Sigurdur Óli said to calm her down. "But we need to know who the bones belong to and so far we don't have much to go on apart from the fact that Benjamín owned the house and his fiancée disappeared. Surely you're curious about it yourself. You must want to know whose bones they are."

  "I'm not certain I do," Elsa said, somewhat calmer now.

  "But I can go on looking in the cellar, can't I?" he said.

  "Yes, of course. I can hardly stop you doing that."

  He finished his tea and went down to the cellar, still thinking about Bergthóra. He did not keep a lock of her hair in a locket, and did not feel he needed anything to remind him of her. Not even her photograph in his wallet, like the pictures of wife and children that some men he knew carried around. He felt bad. He needed to talk things over with Bergthóra. Sort it all out.

  He didn't want to be like Erlendur at all.

  *

  Sigurdur Óli looked through Benjamín Knudsen's belongings until midday, then popped out to a fast-food joint, bought a hamburger that he barely nibbled at, and read the papers over coffee. Around two he headed back to the cellar, cursing Erlendur for his obstinacy. He had not found the slightest clue as to why Benjamín's fiancée had disappeared, nor any evidence of wartime tenants apart from Höskuldur. He had not found the lock of hair that Elínborg was so convinced about after reading all those romances. It was Sigurdur Óli's second day in the cellar and he was at the end of his tether.