Silence Of The Grave

by Arnaldur Indridason

  Elsa was at the door when he returned, and she invited him in. He tried to find an excuse to turn down the invitation, but was not quick enough to manage it without sounding rude, so he followed Elsa into the sitting room.

  "Did you find anything down there?" she asked, and Sigurdur Óli knew that behind this helpful-sounding remark she was in fact actually trying to wheedle information out of him. It didn't occur to him that she might be lonely, which was the impression Erlendur had just minutes after entering her gloomy house.

  "I haven't found that lock of hair, anyway," Sigurdur Óli said, nursing his tea. She had been waiting for him. He looked at her, wondering what was in the offing.

  "No," she said. "Are you married? Sorry, of course that's none of my business."

  "No, that's . . . yes, no, not married but living with my partner," Sigurdur Óli said, awkwardly.

  "Any children?"

  "No, no children," Sigurdur Óli said. "Not yet."

  "Why not?"

  "Pardon?"

  "Why haven't you had any children?"

  What's going on here? Sigurdur Óli thought, sipping his tea to win time.

  "Stress, I suppose. So busy at work all the time. We're both in demanding jobs and, well, there's no time."

  "No time for children? Have you really got anything better to do with your time? What does your girlfriend do?"

  "She's a partner in a computer firm," Sigurdur Óli said, poised to thank her for the tea and say he needed to get going. He did not plan to be interrogated about his private life by some posh old maid who had clearly gone strange from living alone, the way women like her eventually do – until they end up snooping around everyone's private business.

  "Is she a good woman?" Elsa asked.

  "Her name's Bergthóra," said Sigurdur Óli, on the verge of becoming impolite. "She's a terribly good woman." He smiled. "Why are you . . . ?"

  "I've never had a family," Elsa said. "Never had any children. Nor a husband for that matter. I don't care about that, but I would have liked children. They'd be 30 today, perhaps. In their thirties. I sometimes think about that. Grown-up. With their own children. I don't really know what happened. Suddenly you're middle-aged. I'm a doctor. Not many women studied medicine when I enrolled. I was like you, I didn't have the time. Didn't have time for a life of my own. What you're doing now isn't your own life. It's just work."

  "Yes, well, I suppose I should . . ."

  "Benjamín didn't have a family either," Elsa went on. "That was all he wanted, a family. With that girl."

  Elsa stood up and so did Sigurdur Óli. He expected her to say goodbye, but instead she went over to a large oak cabinet with beautiful glass doors and carved drawers, opened one of them, took out a little Chinese trinket box, lifted the lid and pulled out a silver locket on a slender chain.

  "He did keep a lock of her hair," she said. "There's a photograph of her in the locket too. Her name was Sólveig." Elsa gave a hint of a smile. "The apple of Benjamín's eye. I don't think that's her buried on the hill. The thought is unbearable. That would mean Benjamín harmed her. He didn't. Couldn't. I'm convinced of that. This lock of hair will prove it."

  She handed Sigurdur Óli the locket. He sat down again, opened it carefully and saw a tiny lock of black hair on top of a photograph of its owner. Without touching the hair he manoeuvred it onto the lid of the necklace to be able to see the photograph. It showed the petite face of a girl of 20, dark-haired with beautifully curved eyebrows above big eyes staring enigmatically into the lens. Lips that suggested determination, a small chin, her face slender and pretty. Benjamín's fiancée. Sólveig.

  "Please excuse me for holding back," Elsa said. "I've thought the matter over and weighed it up and I couldn't bring myself to destroy that lock of hair. Whatever emerges from the investigation."

  "Why did you conceal it?"

  "I needed to think things over."

  "Yes, but even . . ."

  "It gave me quite a shock when your colleague – Erlendur, isn't it? – started insinuating that it might be her up there, but once I'd thought more about it . . ." Elsa shrugged as if in resignation.

  "Even if the DNA test proves positive," Sigurdur Óli said, "that doesn't necessarily mean that Benjamín murderered her. The analysis won't give any answers to that. If that is his fiancée up on the hill, there could be another reason besides Benjamín . . ."

  Elsa interrupted him.

  "She . . . what's it called these days . . . she dumped him. 'Broke off their engagement' is probably the old phrase. Back when people used to get engaged. She did it the day that she disappeared. Benjamín didn't reveal that until much later. To my mother, on his deathbed. She told me. I've never told anyone before. And I would have taken it to my grave if you hadn't found those bones. Do you know yet whether it's a male or a female?"

  "Not yet, no," Sigurdur Óli said. "Did he say anything about why she broke off their engagement? Why she left him?"

  He sensed Elsa hesitating. They looked each other in the eye and he knew she had already given too much away to back down now. He felt that she wanted to tell him what she knew. As if she were bearing a heavy cross and the time had come to put it down. At last, after all these years.

  "It wasn't his child," she said.

  "Not Benjamín's child?"

  "No."

  "She wasn't pregnant by him?"

  "No."

  "So whose was it?"

  "You have to understand that times were different then," Elsa said. "Today women have abortions like going to the dentist. Marriage has no special meaning even if people want to have children. They live together. They separate. Start living with someone else. Have more children. Split up again. It wasn't like that. Not in those days. Having a child out of wedlock used to be unthinkable for women. It brought shame, they would be outcasts. People were merciless, they called them tarts."

  "So I gather," Sigurdur Óli said. His mind turned to Bergthóra and it gradually dawned on him why Elsa had been asking about his private life.

  "Benjamín was prepared to marry her," Elsa continued. "Or at least that's what he later told my mother. Sólveig didn't want that. She wanted to break off their engagement and told him so straight out. Just like that. Without any warning."

  "Who was the father then?"

  "When she left Benjamín she asked him to forgive her. For leaving him. But he didn't. He needed more time."

  "And she disappeared?"

  "She was never seen again after she said goodbye to him. When she didn't return home that evening they started looking for her and Benjamín wholeheartedly took part in the search. But she was never found."

  "What about the father of her child?" Sigurdur Óli asked again. "Who was he?"

  "She didn't tell Benjamín. She left without ever letting him know. That's what he told my mother, at least. If he did know, he certainly never told her."

  "Who could it have been?"

  "Could have been?" Elsa repeated. "It doesn't matter who it could have been. The only important thing is who it was."

  "Do you mean the father was involved in her disappearance?"

  "What do you think?" Elsa asked.

  "You and your mother never suspected anyone?"

  "No, no one. Nor did Benjamín, as far as I know."

  "Could he have fabricated the whole story?"

  "I can't say for sure, but I don't think Benjamín told a lie in his life."

  "I mean, to detract attention from himself."

  "I'm not aware that he ever came under any suspicion, and it was quite a long time later that he told my mother all this. It was just before he died."

  "He never stopped thinking about her."

  "That's what my mother said."

  Sigurdur Óli thought for a moment.

  "Could the shame have led her to suicide?"

  "Definitely. She not only betrayed Benjamín, she was pregnant and refused to say whose child it was."

  "Elínborg, the woman I work with, ta
lked to her sister. She said their father committed suicide. Hanged himself. That it was tough for Sólveig because they were particularly close."

  "Tough for Sólveig?"

  "Yes."

  "That's odd!"

  "How so?"

  "He did hang himself, but it could hardly have upset Sólveig."

  "What do you mean?"

  "They said he was driven to it by grief."

  "Grief?"

  "Yes, that's the impression I got."

  "Grief over what?"

  "His daughter's disappearance," Elsa said. "He hanged himself after she went missing."

  17

  At long last, Erlendur found something to talk to his daughter about. He had done a lot of research at the National Library, gathering information from newspapers and journals that were published in Reykjavik in 1910, the year that Halley's comet passed the Earth with its tail supposedly full of cyanide. He obtained special permission to browse through the papers instead of running them through the microfilm reader. He loved poring over old newspapers and journals, hearing them rustle and inhaling the scent of yellowed paper, experiencing the atmosphere of the time they preserved on their crisp pages, then, now and for ever.

  Evening had set in when he sat down at Eva Lind's bedside and began telling her about the discovery of the skeleton in Grafarholt. He told her about how the archaeologists demarcated small areas above the site of the bones, and about Skarphédinn with his fangs which prevented him from closing his mouth completely. He told her about the redcurrant bushes and Róbert's strange description of the crooked, green lady. He told her about Benjamín Knudsen and his fiancée, who vanished one day, and the effect her disappearance had on her lover as a young man, and he told her about Höskuldur, who had rented the chalet during the war, and of Benjamín's mention of the woman who lived on the hill and who had been conceived in the gas tank the night that everyone thought the world would be destroyed.

  "It was the year Mark Twain died," Erlendur said.

  Halley's comet was heading towards Earth at an unimaginable speed with its tail full of poisonous gases. Even if the Earth escaped being smashed to smithereens in a collision, people believed, it would pass through the comet's tail and all life would perish; those who feared the worst imagined themselves consumed by fire and acid. Panic broke out, not only in Iceland but all over the world. In Austria, in Trieste and Dalmatia, people sold all they owned for next to nothing, to go on a spree for the short time they assumed they had left to live. In Switzerland, the young ladies' finishing schools stood empty because families thought they should be together when the comet destroyed Earth. Clergymen were instructed to talk about astronomy in laymen's terms to allay people's fears.

  In Reykjavik, it was claimed that women took to their beds from fear of doomsday and many seriously believed that, as one of the papers phrased it, "the cold spring that year was caused by the comet". Old people talked of how terrible the weather had been the last time the comet approached Earth.

  Around that time, in Reykjavik, gas was hailed as the key to the future. Gas lamps were widely used in the city, although not so extensively as to provide proper street lighting, but people lit their homes with gas as well. The next step planned was to erect a modern gasworks on the outskirts of town to meet the population's entire gas requirement for decades to come. The Mayor of Reykjavik negotiated with a German firm, and Carl Franke, an engineer, duly arrived in Iceland from Bremen and with a team of experts began building the Reykjavik Gasworks. It was opened in the autumn of 1910.

  The tank itself was a huge contraption, with a volume of 1500 cubic metres, and was known as the "bell jar" because it floated in water, rising or sinking according to how much gas it contained. Never having beheld such a spectacle, people flocked to watch its construction.

  When the tank was nearing completion, a group of people assembled inside it on the night of May 18. They believed that the tank was the only place in Iceland to offer any hope of protection from the comet's poisonous gases. Word spread that there was a party in the tank and people swarmed to take part in a night of wild abandon before doomsday.

  Accounts of what went on in the tank that night spread like wildfire for the next few days. It was claimed that drunken revellers held an orgy till dawn, until it was obvious that the Earth would not perish, neither in a collision with Halley's comet nor in the hellfire of its tail.

  It was also rumoured that a number of babies were conceived in the tank that night, and Erlendur wondered whether one of them might have met her fate in Grafarholt many years later and been buried there.

  "The Gasworks manager's office still stands," he told Eva Lind, unaware whether she could hear him or not. "But apart from that, all sign of the Gasworks has gone. In the end, the power source of the future turned out to be electricity, not gas. The Gasworks was on Raudarárstígur, where Hlemmur bus station is now, and it still performed a useful function despite being a thing of the past; in biting frost and bad weather, homeless people would go inside to warm themselves by the burners, especially at night, and it was often crowded in the tank house in the darkest part of winter."

  Eva Lind made no movement while Erlendur told his story. Nor did he expect her to; he did not expect miracles.

  "The Gasworks was built on a plot of land called Elsumýrarblettur," he continued, smiling at the irony of Providence. "Elsumýrarblettur stood undeveloped for years after the Gasworks was demolished and the tank was removed. Then a block of offices was built on the site, opposite the bus station. That block now houses the Reykjavik police force. My office is there. Precisely where the tank once stood."

  Erlendur paused.

  "We're all waiting for the end of the world," he said. "Whether it's a comet or something else. We all have our private doomsday. Some bring it upon themselves. Others avoid it. Most of us fear it, show it respect. Not you. You could never show respect for anything. And you don't fear your own little doomsday."

  Erlendur sat quietly watching his daughter and wondered whether it meant anything, talking to her when she did not seem to hear a word he uttered. He thought back to what the doctor said and even felt a hint of relief, talking to his daughter this way. He had seldom been able to talk to her calmly and at ease. The tension between them had coloured their entire relationship and they had not often had the chance to sit down for a quiet conversation.

  But they were hardly talking together. Erlendur smiled wryly. He was talking and she was not listening.

  In that respect, nothing had changed between them.

  Maybe this was not what she wanted to hear. The discovery of the skeleton, the Gasworks, the comet and the orgy. Maybe she wanted him to talk about something completely different. Himself. Them.

  He stood up, bent down and kissed her on the forehead and left the room. Engrossed in his thoughts, instead of turning right down the corridor and out of the ward, without noticing it he went in the opposite direction, into intensive care, past dimly lit rooms where other patients lay, their lives in the balance, connected to all the latest equipment. He only snapped out of his trance at the end of the corridor. He was about to turn round when a small woman came out of the innermost room and bumped straight into him.