The Mist

by Ragnar Jónasson

  ‘Erla, why don’t you show Leó to the spare room?’ Einar asked.

  She stood up reluctantly. She would rather Leó left right now. Realizing that she was nervous about sleeping under the same roof as him, she told herself off for being silly. What possible reason could he have for wanting to harm them? And, anyway, they were two against one.

  ‘Thanks.’ He smiled warmly, looking her straight in the eye, and for a moment she felt ashamed of her suspicions. He was a good-looking man, tall, with thick black hair shot through with grey. ‘Thank you so much again. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t found you.’

  Again, she remembered that there had been nothing about a missing man on the news. It was worrying, but of course there could be a perfectly natural explanation.

  ‘I’ve just got to go and check on the animals,’ Einar said. ‘Make yourself at home, Leó, and feel free to stay with us as long as you like.’

  Erla led the way to the spare room, which was next door to Anna’s old bedroom. It wasn’t very big and they rarely used it, so it smelled a bit stale. She opened the window, admitting an icy draught that sent the curtains flapping wildly. The furniture consisted of a shabby old divan, a chest of drawers and a bedside table. The chest was used for bedlinen and old clothes of theirs and Anna’s that they no longer wore. On top were a number of framed photographs, some of Einar’s parents and various relations, others from their own collection, including a black-and-white snapshot from back when Erla and Einar had first met, when they were young and foolish and used to spend their free time bumping over the country’s rough gravel roads in an old wreck of a car. Even then it had been on the cards that Einar would have to take over the farm, but at the time she hadn’t fully grasped what that would mean. Subconsciously, she had hoped they’d eventually be able to make a life for themselves in the capital instead, even go on the odd foreign holiday, but none of these dreams had come true.

  Then there was the family portrait of them with Anna as a beautiful, red-haired teenager.

  ‘There are sheets in there,’ she said, pointing to the chest and trying not to sound too offhand.

  ‘Thanks, thank you.’ He was staring at her so intently that she began to feel uncomfortable again. It was as if he were trying to figure her out. But perhaps, as so often, she was simply letting her imagination run away with her.

  He took a step or two towards her and she recoiled, believing for an instant that he was going to attack her. But to her relief, he stopped and said politely: ‘I think I’ll have a bit of a lie-down. I’m feeling pretty shattered.’

  Erla nodded and slipped past him, out of the room.

  ‘I’m going to join Einar in the barn. Come and find us if you need anything,’ she said. ‘With any luck, you’ll be home tomorrow,’ she added as a parting shot, and closed the door firmly behind her.

  She wasn’t in the habit of helping Einar with the feeding, since he was perfectly capable of managing on his own, but she didn’t want to be alone in the house with that stranger. She pulled on a thick woollen lopapeysa, a padded down jacket and boots, then went out into the cold. In fact, the cold wasn’t the worst part. She enjoyed filling her lungs with the clean air blown in with the winter winds and her warm clothes kept out the worst of the frost. The scene that met her eyes was bleak and featureless, all landmarks obliterated by a smothering whiteness. It was a grey day, the clouds swollen with unshed snow, scudding overhead with the fierce wind, and in another couple of hours it would be dark. It was the darkness that got to her. In winter, when the nights closed in, she avoided going outside at all if she could help it, so she didn’t have to witness the unrelieved gloom stretching out as far as the eye could see, without the faintest pinprick of light anywhere to give one hope. Anna’s house was too far off, hidden by higher ground, for the glow from her windows to be visible. Only when the moon was shining could Erla bear to go out in the evenings. The moon was her friend; they got on well together. But even in the moonlight there was no getting away from the isolation, the cursed isolation. The crushing knowledge that she couldn’t go anywhere; that if anything went wrong, it might not be possible to get help … She hastily pushed these thoughts away.

  Although there was a temporary let-up in the snow, judging by the threatening sky it wouldn’t be long before it started coming down heavily again. The drifts mounted up at this time of year and froze hard in the bitter temperatures, lasting until February if they were lucky; into March if they were not.

  It was then that she spotted Leó’s footprints. Without really knowing why, she started to follow them down the slope, noting that he had indeed followed the road, as he had said. The only road. The road that led here from the village, first to Anna’s, then to their farm.

  The guest had clearly indicated that he hadn’t seen another house. How was that possible, unless he had been lying? In spite of the cold, she broke out in a sweat under her thick woollen jumper and coat. Slowly, deliberately, she turned, hearing only the moaning of the wind, blinkered by her hood. She was suddenly convinced that their visitor, Leó – if that was really his name – had followed her outside and was standing right behind her.

  There was nobody there. She was standing alone in the snow, allowing herself to be frightened by imaginary phantoms, as so often before.

  She began wading back towards the farmhouse as fast as she could go, her boots sinking in the powdery drifts, slowing her down until she felt as if she were caught in a bad dream, struggling, unable to make any headway.

  Reaching the front door at last, she opened it and stamped on the mat to remove the worst of the snow, then glanced up quickly, because now she really had seen a ghost. Her heart lurched as she found herself looking straight into Leó’s white face. He was standing in the passage, but she could have sworn that he had just emerged, hastily, from her and Einar’s bedroom.

  VI

  ‘All we can think of is that she must have accepted a lift with the wrong man,’ said the police inspector over the phone from Selfoss. ‘Nothing else has turned up at our end that can shed any light on the case.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hulda. It bothered her that the incident remained unsolved, although there was every chance the girl’s disappearance had been deliberate. Sadly, suicide wasn’t that uncommon. But another theory the police had considered at the time was that she might have hitched a lift with a driver who had attacked her.

  The girl, a twenty-year-old from the upmarket Reykjavík suburb of Gardabær, had been taking a year off between school and university. She came from a good family: her father was a lawyer, her mother a nurse. Hulda had spoken to the parents repeatedly in the course of the investigation but hadn’t detected any hint of problems at home. All the indications were that she was a perfectly normal girl who had simply vanished into thin air.

  ‘What about at your end?’ asked the inspector from Selfoss.

  ‘Our end?’

  ‘How’s the inquiry going? You’re in charge of it, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I am,’ said Hulda. ‘We’re making zero progress, I’m afraid. The trail’s gone completely cold. That’s why I’m calling. I was hoping something new might have turned up.’

  When last heard of, the girl had been staying in an old summer house outside the small town of Selfoss, in the southern lowlands some fifty kilometres east of Reykjavík. Her parents had heard from her while she was there, and the locals had been aware of her presence, but after that nothing more was known of her movements. The police had examined every inch of the summer house but could find no evidence of a struggle or any signs that anyone else had been there. The girl’s belongings had vanished too, which suggested that she had left of her own volition.

  The police had combed the banks of the Ölfúsá, the milky glacial river that flowed through the town, as well as a wide swathe of the countryside around the summer house. They had searched the neighbouring buildings and put out an appeal for information, but no one had come forward. A
t this point, the worrying suspicion had occurred to the police that she might, as the inspector put it, have got into a car with the wrong man. She was young, vulnerable and stunningly pretty, judging from the photos of the tall, willowy redhead. And quite an experienced traveller too, in spite of her youth. Everyone agreed that she had been a lovely girl, and a budding artist as well – she had taken time off to concentrate on her writing and painting. ‘She was very artistic,’ her mother had said during one of Hulda’s visits to the parents’ affluent, middle-class home: ‘Her poems had such a pure, heartfelt simplicity. And she was finally pursuing her dream of writing a novel too.’

  The case had been all over the news, as such disappearances were unusual in Iceland’s small, peaceful island community and very rarely the result of murder. But, as time passed, Hulda got the impression that most people had come to the conclusion that the girl must have taken her own life, although the police had no particular reason to believe this.

  ‘I’ll let you know if there are any developments, Hulda,’ the inspector went on, ‘but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. It must have been some pervert, you know; some sick bastard who conned her into accepting a lift with him and … and, well, assaulted her. We’ve seen that sort of thing before. And it always ends badly. I’m convinced she’s dead, convinced of it. The evidence will turn up sooner or later, but I don’t think there’s anything we can do in the meantime.’

  Although Hulda agreed with this, she felt a sense of duty towards the girl. It was her case and she had failed to solve it. And, quite apart from that, she needed something to take her mind off her own problems. Dimma’s constant moodiness was making life increasingly difficult at home.

  ‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’ she asked. ‘Any leads I could follow up, however minor?’

  There was silence at the other end, then her colleague said: ‘Just go home to your family, Hulda. It’s almost Christmas, after all.’

  Hulda said a curt goodbye and put down the receiver, seething slightly.

  Things were quiet at work; everyone was looking forward to Christmas and there were no major investigations underway, nothing urgent that couldn’t wait until after the holidays. Since Hulda had to take the shift on 25 December, she could have left a bit early today, popped into town and bought some jewellery for her daughter on the way home, as she had planned. But she knew she wouldn’t do it. She had a constant battle to prove herself in the patriarchal world of the police and couldn’t afford to show any sign of weakness. She didn’t want to be ‘the mother’ who left work early on St Thorlákur’s Mass, prioritizing her family over her job. She had to be seen to be more dedicated than her male counterparts. It was just a fact of life.

  She went back to leafing through the files, but her thoughts were all of Dimma.

  VII

  Unnur went back into the summer house one last time to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. Her stay there had been exceptionally pleasant and peaceful. That summer she had mostly let herself be guided by chance, temporarily free from the fetters of education; freer than ever before. The decision to take a year off had surprised her more than anyone, but it had turned out to be easier than she had anticipated. She had always been among the top in her class at school, and her parents, that conventional Gardabær couple, had naturally assumed she would go straight to university. To be honest, she had always pictured herself following that path as well, but then a friend of hers had said she was going abroad for a year to ‘find herself’. Unnur had no need to find herself, as she wasn’t lost, but the idea struck her as a good one. To spend a year doing whatever she liked, meeting new people, and maybe writing a bit too. Perhaps that was the real reason, when she thought about it: she wanted to write a book. She’d been constantly scribbling ever since she was a child, and for the last few years she’d been walking around with the germ of an idea for a novel. She had considered going abroad, like her friend, but in the end she had decided to travel around Iceland instead. Leave the whole thing up to fate. She didn’t know where she was going and didn’t have a lot of money, so she would have to be resourceful. Of course, she could have asked her parents for a loan, but she didn’t want to; for the first time in her life she wanted to stand on her own two feet.

  She had spent the last few weeks staying in this old summer house, just outside Selfoss. True to her plan, it had been by pure coincidence that she had ended up here, as she had heard via her friend of a house that was lent out to artists. Unnur had got in touch with the owner on the off chance, well aware that she didn’t really qualify as an artist yet, despite her ambition to write a book. The woman who owned it had turned out to be a pensioner. They had drunk coffee together and hit it off immediately. The upshot was that the woman had agreed to lend Unnur the house, ‘for as long as you need it, dear. Just leave the key under the mat when you go.’ And now Unnur felt it was time to move on. The novel was going fairly well; she’d filled one exercise book and was part of the way through a second. She had met nice people too. Although the nearest neighbours lived some way off, Unnur had gone out of her way to be sociable by making frequent trips into Selfoss. It was essential to mix with all types if she was going to be a writer. Unlike her friend, she hadn’t undertaken this journey as a voyage of self-discovery but to learn about other people’s lives, to gain experience and improve her understanding of the world. Then, hopefully, she would be able to get all the thoughts that were whirling around in her head down on paper and turn them into a book.

  Having reassured herself that she hadn’t left anything behind in the summer house, she locked the door and put the key conscientiously under the mat. All her possessions, the most precious of which were her exercise books, fitted into one large backpack. What she needed now was to move on to somewhere new and meet new people in a different environment. It didn’t really matter where, and she hadn’t made any specific plans. To be free as a bird – the thought made her heart sing.

  Unnur walked unhurriedly along the road towards Selfoss. There was little traffic at this early hour. She was used to having to get up at the crack of dawn for school and that hadn’t changed just because she was her own mistress these days, with no obligations. The way she saw it, self-discipline was essential if you wanted to become a successful novelist. And she found the lifestyle suited her so well that she had even begun to wonder if she should forget her plans to go to university. Of course, she knew this idea was bound to meet with opposition from her parents, and perhaps it was an illusion, a vision of the future that appealed to her now but that wouldn’t survive the cold light of day once she returned to her old life. Still, whatever happened, she was determined to finish her book.

  She knew from experience that it could take a while to get a lift. Very few drivers were prepared to stop and pick up a stranger. When they did stop, they almost without exception addressed her in English, although they were clearly Icelanders, since they couldn’t believe that anyone except a foreign tourist would stand on the side of the road, hitching a lift. It pleased her to think that she didn’t fit any of the usual stereotypes. Her mother would never have dreamt of letting her hitchhike round the country, so she had lied to her and said she was planning to rely on buses. Apart from that, she had told her parents as little as possible, merely that she meant to spend a whole year travelling in Iceland, meeting new people and taking jobs here and there to support herself. From time to time she sent them letters, and in return they left her completely to her own devices. They trusted her. All she had promised was that, once the year was up, she would come home to Gardabær and enrol at the university.

  Several cars had passed while she had been walking, but no one had paid her any attention. That was all right; she was in no hurry. The next stage of her adventure was just beginning. She was hoping to be able to work in exchange for a roof over her head but could afford to pay for accommodation if necessary. She had brought along her savings and, while she wasn’t exactly loaded, she knew how to make her money last.
There was the knowledge, too, that her parents would send her anything she asked for, which was a useful safety net, though she had no intention of using it. Not unless she was desperate … It irritated Unnur a little that she had grown up in such a privileged home. She wanted to be independent, to prove that she could look after herself, and only now, finally, did she feel the umbilical cord had been truly cut.

  Hearing the sound of an approaching engine, she paused at the side of the road and turned round. It was an old white BMW. Her parents used to have a car like that. Unnur stuck out her thumb and the driver slowed down. At last. Now she could take the next step, though her destination remained tantalizingly unknown.

  VIII

  Erla stood on the mat as if turned to stone, unable to utter a word. Her heart began to pound and she was, for the first time in ages, genuinely frightened.

  ‘I was just looking for, you know, the toilet,’ said Leó. He was lying, she was sure of it. The bedroom door had stood open, as always, and there was no way he could have confused it with the toilet. The bathroom door had been open too, right next to the spare room, so he could hardly have failed to notice it.

  ‘It’s …’ she stammered, ‘… it’s down there, next to your room.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course, of course, I remember now.’ He smiled. It was a charming smile in its way, but Erla found it oddly menacing. She rapidly changed her mind about asking Leó any difficult questions without Einar there as back-up. Her anger had been quickly replaced by fear. Ignoring the impulse to go into their bedroom and check that he hadn’t touched anything, she decided to go straight back outside, however strange it might look, and find Einar.

  She watched her husband feeding the sheep, her heart still beating unnaturally fast. The air in the barn was full of the familiar sounds of bleating and munching, the sweet scent of hay mingling with the odours of dung and wool, and the warmth rising from the milling backs of the ewes. She used to take pleasure in the company of the animals, but over the years she had grown to resent them as yet another link in the chain that held her prisoner here.