Silence Of The Grave

by Arnaldur Indridason

  23

  It was approaching 10 p.m., the temperature was dropping on the hill and Erlendur asked Mikkelína whether they ought not to get in his car. Or they could talk some more tomorrow. It was late and . . .

  "Let's get in your car," she said, and set off. She moved slowly and lurched to one side with every step that she took with her club foot. Erlendur walked just ahead of her and showed her to his car, opened the door and helped her in. Then he walked round the front of the car. He couldn't work out how Mikkelína had got to the hill. She didn't seem to have driven.

  "Did you take a taxi here?" he asked as he sat down behind the wheel. He started the engine, which was still hot, and they soon warmed up.

  "Símon gave me a lift," she said. "He'll be back to collect me soon."

  "We've tried to gather information about the people who lived on the hill – I presume it's your family – and some of what we've heard, mostly from old people, sounds strange. One story is about the Gasworks by Hlemmur."

  "He teased her about the Gasworks," Mikkelína said, "but I don't think she was the product of some doomsday orgy there as he said. It could just as easily have been him. I think that insult was levelled at him once, he might even have been teased about it, maybe when he was younger, maybe later, and he transferred it to her."

  "So you think your father was one of the Gasworks kids?"

  "He wasn't my father," Mikkelína said. "My father was lost at sea. He was a fisherman and my mother loved him. That was my only consolation in life when I was a child. That he was not my father. He hated me in particular. The cripple. Because of my condition. I had an illness at the age of three that left me paralysed and I lost my power of speech. He thought I was retarded, but my mind was normal. I never had any therapy, which people take for granted nowadays. And I never told anyone, because I lived forever in fear of that man. It's not unusual for children who experience a trauma to become reticent and even dumb. I presume that happened to me. It wasn't until later that I learned to walk and started talking and got an education. I've got a degree now. In psychology."

  She paused.

  "I've found out who his parents were," she went on. "I've searched. To understand what happened and why. I tried to dig up something about his childhood. He worked as a farmhand here and there, the last place was in Kjós around the time he met Mum. The part of his upbringing that interests me most was in Mýrarsýsla, at a little croft called Melur. It doesn't exist any more. The couple who lived there had three children of their own and the parish council paid them to take others into their home. There were still paupers in the countryside at that time. The couple had a reputation for treating the poor children badly. People on neighbouring farms talked about it. His foster parents were taken to court after a child in their care died from malnutrition and neglect. An autopsy was performed on the farm under very primitive conditions, even by the standards of the time. It was a boy of eight. They took a door off its hinges and conducted the autopsy on that. Rinsed his innards in the brook on the farm. Discovered he was subjected to 'unnecessarily harsh treatment', as they used to call it, but they couldn't prove that he'd died from it. He would have seen it all. Perhaps they were friends. He was in care at Melur around the same time. He's mentioned in the case documents: undernourished with injuries on his back and legs."

  She paused.

  "I'm not trying to justify what he did to us and the way he treated us," she said. "There's no justification for that. But I wanted to know who he was."

  She stopped again.

  "And your mother?" Erlendur asked, though he sensed that Mikkelína intended to tell him everything she considered important and would go about it her own way. He did not want to put pressure on her. She had to tell the story at her own pace.

  "She was unlucky," Mikkelína said forthrightly, as if this was the only sensible conclusion to draw. "She was unlucky to end up with that man. It's as simple as that. She had no family, but by and large she had a decent upbringing in Reykjavík and was a maid in a respectable household when she met him. I haven't managed to find out who her parents were. If it ever was written down, the papers are lost."

  Mikkelína looked at Erlendur.

  "But she found true love before it was too late. He entered her life at the right moment, I think."

  "Who? Who entered her life?"

  "And Simon. My brother. We didn't realise how he felt. The strain he was under for all those years. I felt the treatment that my stepfather dished out to my mother and I suffered for her, but I was tougher than Simon. Poor, poor Simon. And then Tómas. There was too much of his father in him. Too much hatred."

  "Sorry, you've lost me. Who entered your mother's life?"

  "He was from New York. An American. From Brooklyn."

  Erlendur nodded.

  "Mum needed love, some kind of love, admiration, recognition that she existed, that she was a human being. Dave restored her self-respect, made her human again. We always used to wonder why he spent so much time with Mum. What he saw in her when no one else would even look at her apart from my stepfather, and then only to beat her up. Then he told Mum why he wanted to help her. He said he sensed it the moment he saw her the first time he brought over some trout; he used to go fishing in Reynisvatn. He recognised all the signs of domestic violence. He could see it in her eyes, in her face, her movements. In an instant he knew her entire history."

  Mikkelína paused and looked across the hill to the bushes.

  "Dave was familiar with it. He was brought up with it just like Simon, Tómas and me. His father was never charged and never sentenced, and never punished for beating his wife until her dying day. They lived in awful poverty, she contracted TB and died. His father beat her up just before she passed away. Dave was a teenager then, but he was no match for his father. He left home the day of his mother's death and never went back. Joined the army a few years later. Before the war broke out. They sent him to Reykjavik during the war, up here where he walked inside a shack and saw his mother's face again."

  They sat in silence.

  "By then he was big enough to do something about it," Mikkelína said.

  A car drove slowly past them and stopped by the foundations of the house. The driver stepped out and looked around towards the redcurrant bushes.

  "Simon's come to fetch me," Mikkelína said. "It's late. Do you mind if we continue tomorrow? You can call on me at home if you want."

  She opened the car door and called out to the man, who turned round.

  "Do you know who's buried there?" Erlendur asked.

  "Tomorrow," Mikkelína said. "We'll talk tomorrow. There's no rush," she said. "No rush about anything."

  The man had walked over to the car by now to help Mikkelína.

  "Thank you, Simon," she said and got out of the car. Erlendur stretched over the seat to take a better look at him. Then he opened his door and got out.

  "That can't be Simon," he said to Mikkelína, looking at the man who was supporting her. He could not have been older than 35.

  "What?" Mikkelína said.

  "Wasn't Simon your brother?" Erlendur asked, looking at the man.

  "Yes," Mikkelína said, then seemed to understand Erlendur's bewilderment. "Oh, he's not that Simon," she said with a smile. "This is my son, whom I named after him."

  24

  The next morning Erlendur held a meeting with Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli at his office, told them about Mikkelína and what she had said, and that he would meet her again later that day. He was certain she would tell him who was buried on the hill, who had put him there and why. Then the bones would be excavated towards evening.

  "Why didn't you get it out of her yesterday?" asked Sigurdur Óli, who had woken replenished after a quiet evening with Bergthóra. They had discussed the future, including children, and agreed about the best arrangement for everything; likewise the trip to Paris and the sports car they would rent.

  "Then we can stop this fucking around," he added. "I'm fed up w
ith these bones. Fed up with Benjamín's cellar. Fed up with the two of you."

  "I want to go with you to see her," Elínborg said. "Do you think she's the handicapped girl Ed saw in the house when he arrested that man?"

  "It's highly likely. She had two half-brothers, Simon and Tómas. That fits with the two boys he saw. And there was an American soldier by the name of Dave, who helped them in some way. I'll talk to Ed about him. I don't have his surname.

  "I thought a soft approach was the right way to handle her, she'll tell us what we need to know. There's no point in rushing this matter."

  He looked at Sigurdur Óli.

  "Have you finished in Benjamín's cellar?"

  "Yes, finished it yesterday. Didn't find a thing."

  "Can you rule out that it's his fiancée buried up there?"

  "Yes, I think so. She threw herself in the sea."

  "Is there any way to confirm the rape?" Elínborg wondered.

  "I think the confirmation's on the bottom of the sea," Sigurdur Óli said.

  "How did they put it, a summer trip to Fljót?" Erlendur asked.

  "A real countryside romance," Sigurdur Óli said with a smile.

  "Arsehole!" Erlendur said.

  Ed welcomed Erlendur and Elínborg at the front door and showed them into the sitting room. The table was covered with documents relating to the depot. There were faxes and photocopies on the floor and open diaries and books spread all over the room. Erlendur had the feeling he had conducted a major investigation. Ed flicked through a pile of papers on the table.

  "Somewhere here I have a list of the Icelanders who worked at the depot," he said. "The embassy found it."

  "We've located one of the tenants frorn the house you went to," Erlendur said. "I think she's the handicapped girl you were talking about."

  "Good," Ed said, engrossed in his search. "Good. Here it is."

  He gave Erlendur a handwritten list of the names of nine Icelanders who worked at the depot. Erlendur recognised the list. Jim had read it out to him over the phone and was going to send him a copy. Erlendur remembered he had forgotten to ask Mikkelína her stepfather's name.

  "I found out who blew the whistle," Ed said. "Informed on the thieves. My old colleague from the military police in Reykjavik lives in Minneapolis now. We've stayed in touch off and on so I phoned him. He remembered the matter, phoned someone else and found the name of the informant."

  "And who was it?" Erlendur asked.

  "His name was Dave, David Welch, from Brooklyn. Private."

  The same name Mikkelína mentioned, Erlendur thought.

  "Is he alive?" he asked.

  "We don't know. My friend's trying to trace him through the Pentagon. He might have been sent to the front."

  Elínborg enlisted Sigurdur Óli's help in investigating the identity of the depot workers and the whereabouts of them and their descendants. Erlendur asked her to meet him again that afternoon before they went to see Mikkelína. First he was going to the hospital to see Eva Lind.

  He walked down the corridor in intensive care and looked in at his daughter, who lay motionless as ever, her eyes closed. To his enormous relief, Halldóra was nowhere to be seen. He looked down the ward to where he had accidentally wandered when he'd had the bizarre conversation with the little woman about the boy in the blizzard. Inching his way down the corridor to the innermost room, he noticed that it was empty. The woman in the fur coat had gone and there was no one in the bed where the man had been lying between this world and the next. The self-styled medium was gone too, and Erlendur wondered whether it ever actually happened, or whether it was a dream. He stood in the doorway for a second, then turned and went into his daughter's room, softly closing the door behind him. He wanted to lock it, but there was no lock. He sat down beside Eva Lind. Sat silently at her bedside, thinking about the boy in the blizzard.

  A good while passed before Erlendur finally plucked up the courage, and heaved a deep sigh.

  "He was eight years old," he said to Eva Lind. "Two years younger than I was."

  He thought about how the medium had said that he accepted it, that it was no one's fault. Such simple words out of the blue told him nothing. He had been battling against that blizzard all his life, and all the passage of time did was intensify it.

  "I lost my grip," he said to Eva Lind.

  He heard the scream in the storm.

  "We couldn't see each other," he said. "We held hands so there was no distance between us, but still I couldn't see him for the blizzard. And then I lost my grip."

  He paused.

  "That's why you mustn't let go. That's why you have to survive this and come back and get healthy again. I know your life hasn't been easy, but you destroy it as if it were worthless. As if you were worthless. But that's not right. You're not right to think that. And you mustn't think that."

  Erlendur looked at his daughter in the dull glow from the bedside lamp.

  "He was eight. Did I say that? A boy, just like any other boy, fun to be with and always smiling, we were friends. You can't take that for granted. Normally there's some rivalry. Fighting, bragging and arguments. But not between us. Maybe because we were completely different. He impressed people. Unconsciously. Some people are like that. I'm not. There's something in those people that breaks down all the barriers, because they act completely the way they are, have nothing to hide, never shelter behind anything, are just themselves, straightforward. Kids like that . . ."

  Erlendur fell silent.

  "You remind me of him sometimes," he continued. "I didn't see it until later. When you tracked me down after all those years. There's something about you that reminds me of him. Something you're destroying, and that's why I'm hurt by the way you treat your life and yet I don't seem able to do anything about it. I'm as helpless with you as when I stood in that blizzard and felt my grip slipping. We were holding hands and I lost my grip and I could feel it happening and sensed it was the end. We would both die. Our hands were frozen and we couldn't hold on. I couldn't feel his hand, apart from that split second when I lost hold of it."

  Erlendur paused and looked down at the floor.

  "I don't know whether that's the reason for all of this. I was ten and I've blamed myself ever since. I couldn't shake it off. Don't want to shake it off. The pain is like a fortress around a sorrow I don't want to release. Maybe I should have done that long ago, to come to terms with the life that was saved and give it a purpose. But that didn't happen and hardly will at this stage. We all have our burdens. Maybe I don't suffer more than anyone else who has lost a loved one, but I can't deal with it at all.

  "Something switched off in me. I never found him again and I dream about him all the time and I know he's still there somewhere, roaming around in the blizzard, alone and abandoned and cold, until he drops down where he can't be found and never will be, and the storm rages against his back and he's buried by the snow in the twinkling of an eye, and no matter how I search and shout, I can't find him and he can't hear me, and he's lost to me for ever."

  Erlendur looked at Eva Lind.

  "It was like he'd gone straight to God. I was found. I was found and I survived and I lost him. I couldn't tell them a thing. Couldn't say where I'd been when I lost him. Couldn't see out of my eyes for that bloody blizzard. I was ten years old and almost frozen to death and couldn't tell them a thing. They mounted a search party and people combed the moor carrying lamps from dawn to dark for days on end, shouting for him and prodding the snow with sticks, and they split up and took dogs and we could hear the shouts and the barking, but nothing happened. Never.