The Mist

by Ragnar Jónasson

  That, and the questions that plagued her mercilessly: Why didn’t I do anything? Why didn’t I see what was coming? Why didn’t I stop him?

  Anyone would have thought Hulda the policewoman was a completely different person from Hulda the wife and mother: the former a tough nut who fought her corner; the latter a soft touch, gullible, passive. It was her cowardice, her sheer bloody cowardice, that had cost her so dear. She had never had the courage to tackle the situation head on. If she had done so, she might have realized what was going on behind closed doors.

  ‘So, here we are,’ the inspector said, trying to sound upbeat. Ahead of them, a house took shape through the falling snow. It was a traditional whitewashed Icelandic farmhouse, sitting huddled on its mound, the oldest part a low-rise wooden building clad in corrugated iron; the newer annex built of concrete, with dormer windows indicating an attic. The roof, swept bare of snow by the wind, was red and could have done with a fresh coat of paint. It was an exceptionally lonely-looking house. Even the farm buildings were tucked out of sight in a fold of the land. As they drove up the track they passed a rusty green jeep, parked some way below the house, which the inspector explained had belonged to the couple. Nature-lover though she was, Hulda would never have dreamt of living in such a bleak, isolated spot, especially not in the depths of winter. The solitude was almost palpable. The only other house she had seen on the way there had been a newer, slightly more hospitable-looking place, with blue walls and roof, a couple of kilometres back down the road.

  There was a police car parked in the yard and, as the inspector drew up beside it, a young uniformed officer appeared on the doorstep of the farmhouse and gave them a friendly wave.

  Hulda was the first out of the car, obeying an urgent need to get out into the fresh air, in spite of the snow. The car journey had left her feeling queasy and depressed.

  Inspector Jens followed her up to the house, obviously keen not to miss anything.

  ‘I’ll come in with you,’ he said, pushing past his subordinate to show Hulda inside. The air indoors was unpleasantly heavy, with that familiar, cloying odour that told Hulda a body had been lying there for some time. ‘He’s upstairs,’ Jens said. They entered a plain, strikingly clean and tidy hall, which led into a sitting room. Here Hulda paused a moment. A desiccated Christmas tree drooped in one corner, its needles scattered over the floor and the small collection of parcels arranged underneath it. Clearly, the terrible events must have happened in the run-up to Christmas.

  There was a pile of books on a little side table, revealed by the labels on their spines to be library books. Beside them was a cup still half full of dark liquid and, on the larger table, there were two other cups, both empty. Hulda took a quick glance into the small kitchen that adjoined the sitting room. There were saucepans on the cooker but, apart from that, there was no obvious mess. Perhaps someone had tidied up for Christmas.

  She went back into the sitting room and from there into a passage lined with four doors and a staircase to the attic. ‘Up here,’ the inspector informed Hulda solemnly, although he had already told her the body was upstairs. But, of course, she reminded herself, there was more than one body.

  She accompanied the inspector up the stairs, doing her best to ignore the smell, refusing to let herself dwell on the fact that, only two months after finding the body of her daughter, she was about to be confronted by another corpse. She had never been hampered in her job by any squeamishness. But now she had an odd, vertiginous sensation, as if she were standing in the middle of a glacier, almost blinded by the glare of sunlit snow whichever way she looked, while ahead a crack had formed in the ice-sheet, a deep crevasse that was drawing ever closer. And she was falling …

  At the top there was a narrow landing with three doors. One stood open and the inspector ushered Hulda towards it. Inside, the source of the throat-catching stench was revealed: the body of a middle-aged man lay on its back on the floor, a large patch of dried blood beside it. There was no sign of a weapon.

  ‘That’s Einar,’ Jens said redundantly, after a respectful moment of silence. ‘Sorry, it was Einar. The farmer.’

  ‘Right. It doesn’t look good, to be honest,’ Hulda said. ‘Though of course my colleagues will do a more thorough examination.’

  ‘Yes, but you do agree it looks like murder, don’t you?’

  Hulda was struck by a suspicion that the inspector wanted it to be murder, that he was eager for the chance to work on a major crime. But maybe she was doing him an injustice. Was it age that had made her so cynical? Or was it what had happened at Christmas?

  ‘Well, it doesn’t appear to have been an accident, at any rate,’ she said quietly. Something terrible had happened there, that much was plain.

  ‘Shall we go back downstairs?’

  Hulda lingered a moment, surveying the room. It was reasonably spacious, despite the low ceiling. In the corner under the dormer window was an old divan bed with a small table and lamp next to it, and a little bookcase under the sloping roof. Apart from the shocking aberration of the body lying in the middle of the floor, it seemed to have been quite a pleasant room, typical guest accommodation, neutral but homely.

  What had the farmer been doing up here?

  ‘OK, let’s go downstairs,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen all I need to for the moment. By the way, what about these other rooms? Do you know what’s in them?’ She preferred not to check for herself as she didn’t want to risk destroying any evidence before her colleagues had had a chance to carry out their examination.

  ‘Yes, I had a look inside when we arrived, but they’re just storerooms, so I closed the doors again. Downstairs there are three bedrooms and a bathroom. I took a quick peek in all of them, just to make sure there was no one else in the house. And there wasn’t.’

  ‘Thanks, my colleagues will conduct a more thorough investigation.’

  She followed him down the narrow stairs.

  ‘Now we have to go out in the cold, I’m afraid.’

  Hulda still had her thick down jacket and gloves on. As they emerged on to the steps, she pulled a woolly hat from her pocket.

  ‘It’s not very far,’ the inspector said. ‘Just round that corner and down to the cellar.’

  ‘Oh?’ Hulda paused.

  ‘Sorry, the original report we sent to Reykjavík may have been a bit garbled, but the second body is in the cellar.’

  Hulda followed him down a set of steep steps that had been turned into a treacherously slippery slope by impacted ice and snow. The windowless cellar was illuminated by a single, low-watt light bulb, but the dim illumination was enough to reveal the body of a middle-aged woman lying against one wall.

  ‘Erla, Einar’s wife.’

  This time there was no blood, but the scene was somehow even more gruesome than the first. The cold, drab, enclosed space gave Hulda a creeping sense of claustrophobia. She halted just inside the door, unable to make herself go any further.

  ‘Of course, we don’t know what happened here,’ the inspector said, ‘but there are various clues to suggest a violent death. A blow to the head, or strangulation, maybe. We’ll soon find out.’

  ‘Was it just the two of them here, as far as you know?’ Hulda asked, cutting across his speculation.

  ‘Yes, just them.’

  ‘OK, let’s go back outside.’ Hulda was holding her breath. ‘Get some air.’

  ‘The smell, yes,’ said the inspector, putting a hand to his nose.

  ‘You get used to it,’ Hulda said, once they were out in the open. Don’t think about Dimma, she told herself. She tried to imagine that Hulda the detective was not the same woman as the one who had found her daughter dead on Christmas Day. She had to separate out these two sides of her life if she were to maintain her detachment. It was the only way she could carry on working, or indeed carry on at all.

  In an effort to distract herself, she turned her attention to the surrounding countryside. The snow had stopped and the setting, now that she could
see it, had a desolate sort of beauty under its light covering of white. The contrast between this pure, untouched landscape and the sordid scenes inside couldn’t have been greater. The inspector had told her that the sheep had starved to death in the barn and that the scene that met the police there had been no less harrowing than the ones inside the house.

  ‘Weren’t there three of them?’ Hulda asked.

  ‘Three? The couple lived alone.’

  ‘I mean, didn’t they have a visitor?’

  ‘Not at this time of year. That’s completely out of the question. Nobody would come up here. Not –’

  ‘Not even a guest for Christmas?’

  ‘I very much doubt it. The road’s usually blocked in December and the snow ploughs don’t come this far up the valley, so it would mean covering a fair distance on foot.’

  ‘So not completely out of the question, then?’ Hulda asked carefully.

  ‘No, of course not completely – it’s just a manner of speaking – but I could swear they were alone here. They sometimes had visitors in the summer, and maybe in the spring and autumn too – they ran a sort of farm stay, or maybe that’s not quite the right word …’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘They invited young people to stay here in return for working on the farm – as cheap labour, you know. That’s no way to run things, in my opinion, but then I’m old-fashioned.’

  ‘It sounds like a perfectly sensible idea to me,’ Hulda said, not hesitating to contradict the inspector, who was increasingly getting on her nerves. But maybe that was because she was letting everything get to her at the moment; her concentration was shot and her mind refused to stay on the job.

  ‘Anyway, what made you wonder if there were three of them?’ Jens asked.

  ‘The three coffee cups in the sitting room.’

  ‘Maybe they didn’t bother to clear up every time they used a cup.’

  ‘Well, we’ll find out once we’ve lifted fingerprints from them. But, apart from that, the kitchen was very tidy, as if they were the types who put things away,’ she replied dismissively. ‘Besides, it doesn’t work, does it? I mean, who killed who?’

  ‘What? Oh, no, right, I see what you’re getting at, of course,’ Jens said, though Hulda suspected he had only just cottoned on. He frowned, then added: ‘It’s a hell of a situation – a hell of a situation.’

  ‘If Einar attacked his wife, who murdered him?’ Hulda asked rhetorically.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘And if Erla attacked Einar, who killed her?’

  ‘Quite,’ Jens repeated, and stood there, brow furrowed. ‘Unless one of them committed suicide?’

  ‘Shall we take another look inside?’ Hulda suggested, and started back without waiting for an answer.

  The inspector followed a little way behind. Eventually he asked: ‘Where is he, then?’

  She paused and looked round enquiringly.

  ‘Where is he, then – the other man, the third person?’

  ‘We’ll find out, don’t you worry,’ she said, the air of quiet authority in her voice disguising the fact that she wasn’t at all sure her theory was correct or that she would ever identify the mysterious visitor. She mustn’t lose faith in herself, though. She had to keep believing, as she tried to every day at work, that she was better than her male colleagues and that there was nothing she couldn’t achieve.

  It felt eerie going back into the house, where a quite literally deathly silence hung in the air and even the most ordinary, everyday objects took on a sinister appearance in light of what had happened. There were the three coffee cups, which her colleagues would take away for further analysis. And the stairs to the attic – Hulda had no intention of going back up there. She told herself it was because she wanted to let the experts do their job, but, if she were honest, it was because she would resort to any excuse to avoid seeing that grisly scene again, with its echoes of that other, more personal tragedy.

  There were four rooms opening off the passage downstairs. The bathroom was stuck in a seventies time-warp with its yellow suite, green and yellow tiles, slightly damp-smelling carpet and the single bottle of Old Spice on one shelf. There were no signs of a struggle, no blood smears on the taps or sink, or anything else untoward. Then there was the master bedroom. At least, Hulda assumed this had been the couple’s room. The double bed was large and hadn’t been made, and two people usually slept there, as was apparent from the wrinkled sheets and the twin bedside tables, a pair of reading glasses on each.

  The third room appeared to be a spare room, containing a single bed and a wardrobe, but there was no sign that anyone had been in there, and the air that met Hulda when she opened the door was stale and dry, as if no one had used it in a very long time.

  The last room. Another spare room, she guessed, but something felt different about this one; she immediately sensed that someone had been there. There was a dressing table and a chest of drawers with a crowd of photographs on top, but Hulda didn’t have time to pay any attention to these because her gaze was fixed on the bed. Somebody had slept in it: the pillow was dented and the bed hadn’t been properly made.

  Hulda turned round. The inspector was hovering in the passage, trying not to disturb her concentration. ‘This is where their visitor slept,’ she told him, feeling compelled to share the information as evidence of her theory. ‘Someone’s used the bed, see? There was a third person here over Christmas. Otherwise, I can’t believe the bed wouldn’t have been made. It seems out of character when the rest of the place is so tidy.’

  He nodded, then a thought struck him. ‘Unless the couple slept in separate beds … But, assuming you’re right, where is he?’

  ‘That’s the question.’

  Hulda went back outside, the inspector close on her heels. She needed to fill her lungs with cold, clean air to get rid of the sickening odour of decomposing flesh and clear her mind of the images of the dead: the farmer, his wife … and Dimma …

  II

  Erla got the shock of her life when she saw who it was.

  It felt as if her heart had stopped beating, as if she were already dead. Then she came to her senses and felt genuinely afraid that this was the end. There was an unhinged look in his eyes; the mask had fallen.

  It wasn’t Einar.

  It was the intruder, Leó.

  Einar? Oh God, where was he?

  Leó grabbed her roughly, without a word, a violent hatred in his eyes, and, strangely, despair.

  Then it came back to her. She remembered where Einar was – lying in a dark pool of blood in the attic; dead, gone. She had been so sure she’d been hallucinating and that he was still alive; that it was just the two of them here. But now, horrifyingly, she knew she had been wrong.

  Leó had her arm in an agonizing grip. He took a few steps into the darkness, dragging her with him. It came back to her with a sudden clarity that she had fled down to the cellar to hide from him. She’d had some mad idea of using the spades or other tools for self-defence.

  But now she was utterly powerless, unable to move, unable to do anything to prevent what was about to happen.

  III

  Hulda was sitting in the big police vehicle with the inspector, who had turned on the engine to get the heater going full blast. Her colleagues from Forensics were inside the house, conducting their painstaking investigation.

  ‘We have to work on the basis that someone else was there with them,’ Hulda said in a level voice, making an effort to be polite. She needed to cooperate with this man if she were to benefit from his local knowledge.

  ‘Mm, yes, right,’ he said warily.

  ‘How far is it to the nearest neighbours? Is it possible that one of them could have come round for a visit … and that it ended badly?’

  ‘Neighbours?’ The inspector smiled. ‘They didn’t have any neighbours.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The couple’s nearest neighbours were the villagers, including me. All the other farms in t
his valley have been abandoned.’

  ‘Well, supposing someone had come up from the village?’

  ‘Like I said, no one came out here in winter, not a soul. No one had any business here and the couple didn’t mix much with the villagers. They were well suited, Einar and Erla. They looked out for each other, if you know what I mean?’

  Hulda was irritated by his presumptions. ‘We can’t rule anything out,’ she said sharply. ‘There are always exceptions.’

  ‘Yes, of course, of course …’

  ‘And the person in question could have driven – what – at least halfway here, from what you said earlier?’

  ‘Yes, or maybe more, but they’d have had to walk the rest of the way. And the weather’s unpredictable in these parts.’

  Hulda thought about the parcels, the tree … The tragic events must have happened shortly before, or even during, the festivities. ‘What was the weather like at Christmas?’

  The inspector didn’t even need to think. ‘We had a violent storm right through the holiday, a complete white-out. The power went in the village, which means it must have gone up here too. It wasn’t fixed until 26 December.’ He sighed.

  ‘A power cut, you say? Do you remember exactly when it happened?’ Hulda pictured the darkness, wondering if it had fallen after the events, or whether it could have played a part in what had happened here. It was a chilling thought.

  ‘Yes, I certainly do. It was on the twenty-third. The worst possible timing. We had a bloody nightmare trying to cook Christmas dinner the next day and missed the radio greetings, the carol service and everything. Old Ásgrímur at the Co-op had to open up on the evening of the twenty-third so people could buy batteries, candles and matches, and so on. I believe he completely ran out of batteries.’