The Mist

by Ragnar Jónasson

  It was quiet in the café. Unnur had treated herself to a coffee and a cold sandwich, both of which were pretty uninspiring. The coffee was at least hot, though, and the sandwich was edible, so it would have to do.

  On the table next to her was a pile of advertising leaflets and a day-old newspaper. She began by leafing through the paper but soon gave up as there was something rather depressing about getting dragged back into the same old political bickering. She had deliberately avoided the news recently, paying no particular attention to what was going on in the world.

  Laying aside the paper, she glanced absent-mindedly at the advertising brochures, some in colour, others in black and white, which were mostly aimed at Icelandic tourists exploring their own country. At the bottom of the pile was a photocopied sheet that Unnur paused to read, perhaps because it was so appealingly old-fashioned and amateurish. It turned out to be an advertisement for volunteers to work on a farm in return for board and lodging.

  Like many Icelanders, she had spent a couple of summers on a farm as a little girl, helping out with the chores and experiencing traditional life in the countryside, but it had never occurred to her to do it again once she had grown up. Still, this was too exciting an opportunity to pass up; it was exactly the sort of experience she pictured as being both interesting and different – a glimpse into a vanishing way of life. And the free board and lodging would help to eke out her savings.

  The photocopied sheet provided the basic facts, including directions for how to find the place, which involved taking a bus to a village in the east. The farm itself was quite a distance beyond the village; a bit of a trek on foot, it said, but a lift could be arranged. She immediately made up her mind to walk; what a dream that would be.

  There was a phone number at the bottom of the sheet. It would be silly to travel all the way out east without ringing ahead, only to discover that the place was no longer available. Grabbing the advertisement, she went over to the counter, leaving her coffee and sandwich behind on the table, confident that no one would bother to steal them.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said to the teenage boy who was on duty that evening on the till.

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Excuse me, could I use your phone?’

  The boy rolled his eyes. ‘There’s a payphone round the back – there, look …’ He pointed to the left. ‘Behind that wall.’

  Unnur pulled out a hundred-krónur note. ‘Could you change this for me?’

  The boy hesitated, as if thinking of refusing, then took the note with a long-suffering air, opened the till and gave her a shower of ten-krónur pieces.

  Unnur quickly found the phone and dialled the number.

  VII

  They were sitting in the inspector’s office at the village police station.

  The office was on the small side, like the station itself, but Jens had made it homely. There were family photos on a shelf and the room was notably tidy; the desk wasn’t buried in an avalanche of papers like Hulda’s. Perhaps this was the result of less pressure and fewer cases, or perhaps Jens was just naturally more organized.

  Now that he was on home ground, comfortably enthroned behind his desk, while Hulda perched on the hard visitor’s chair, it seemed their roles had been reversed.

  The media had got wind of the deaths, upping the pressure a little. A reporter from the State Broadcaster had rung the police station and Jens had chosen to field the call himself rather than passing it on to Hulda. She’d caught snippets of what the caller was saying but had been too slow to intervene. Her immediate reaction would have been to say ‘No comment’, but Jens was clearly enjoying the limelight. In fact, he was so busy basking in his five minutes of fame that he blurted out far too much information. Mercifully, it was too late to make the main evening news on TV, but the report would doubtless make it on to the ten o’clock radio bulletin. Hulda could only hope the papers wouldn’t get hold of it in time to make a splash tomorrow morning. She could do with a little more breathing space. To be fair to Jens, though, he hadn’t given away the fact that the police suspected murder, merely confirmed the discovery of two bodies. That alone was enough to generate a huge amount of interest but, in Hulda’s experience, when it came to cases like this, Icelandic journalists could usually be trusted to respect the interests of the investigation. Fortunately, Jens hadn’t revealed the possible link between the current incident and the mysterious disappearances of Haukur Leó and his daughter, Unnur, either.

  They were waiting in his office for the head of the local search-and-rescue team, who was on his way to meet them.

  Hulda heard a noise outside in the corridor and, glancing round, saw a lean, bespectacled figure appear in the doorway. ‘Hello there.’ She judged him to be around thirty, ten years younger than her. He entered the room briskly, held out his hand and introduced himself: ‘I’m Hjörleifur. I take care of search-and-rescue operations in the area.’

  ‘Hello. I’m Hulda, from Reykjavík CID,’ she said. ‘Thanks for coming. We need to organize a search for a man.’

  ‘Yes, so I gathered.’ Hjörleifur remained standing, as there weren’t any free chairs in the little office. ‘Jens mentioned that when he rang me. We’re talking about the man who went missing at Christmas, right?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Jens said, with self-conscious solemnity.

  ‘Sure, of course we can do it,’ Hjörleifur replied.

  He looked from Jens to Hulda.

  ‘When can you start?’ she asked. ‘How long will it take to call out your members?’

  ‘Call out our members? That won’t take long, but it’s coming down heavily out there now and it’s dark too, so we won’t be going anywhere in a hurry. If the man’s out there, his body must have been lying there since Christmas, so surely a day or two more isn’t going to make any difference?’

  Hulda rose from her chair, fixing Hjörleifur with a stern gaze and saying emphatically: ‘On the contrary, it’s extremely urgent. We’re looking for a girl who’s been missing since last autumn. We don’t know what happened to her, but we’ve finally picked up her trail. If there’s the slightest chance she might still be alive …’

  Hjörleifur was momentarily too disconcerted by her vehemence to answer. Then he nodded. ‘OK, fine, I’ll assemble the team. But I hope you’re not expecting to find the man alive.’

  ‘I’d be surprised,’ Hulda said in a more composed voice, sitting down again. ‘Can you start straight away?’

  ‘Not in the dark, but as soon as it’s light tomorrow,’ Hjörleifur muttered, sounding rather sheepish now. ‘But, just to be clear, if conditions get significantly worse, we’ll have to abort the search. We’re not taking any risks.’

  ‘We understand that,’ Jens said.

  From his tone, Hulda wasn’t sure if he was on her or Hjörleifur’s side. Perhaps it was foolhardy to insist on sending out a search party to comb the countryside for a body in this weather, but the girl’s disappearance had touched a nerve with her and she wanted to pull out all the stops to solve the case. Not that she was kidding herself that there would be any happy ending.

  ‘Then I’d better get going, since there’s obviously no time to lose,’ Hjörleifur said, not even trying to disguise the sarcasm in his voice. He took his leave of them.

  ‘Hadn’t we better go back up to the farm?’ Hulda asked, turning to Jens. She was feeling far too restless to wait around with nothing to do.

  ‘Are you sure? It’ll mean having to drive all the way out there and back again tonight. My lads could give your colleagues a lift once they’ve finished.’ His lack of enthusiasm was obvious.

  Hulda nodded. ‘Quite sure. I’d like to be there personally to hear how they’re getting on with the crime-scene investigation.’

  This time the drive was more arduous, as snow had drifted over the road since that morning. Hulda spared a guilty thought for the rescue-team members who were going to have to scour the valley and moors in these conditions.

  When they fin
ally reached the farmhouse, Hulda’s colleagues were just finishing up. They had taken samples and photographs and reckoned they had enough evidence to be going on with.

  They had made one unexpected discovery: it was plain that someone had deliberately sabotaged the telephone connection by pulling out some of the wires, then hiding the evidence. ‘It wouldn’t have required any expert knowledge and would probably only have taken a minute,’ Hulda was told when she asked for details. In addition, a preliminary analysis of the fingerprints on the coffee cups had confirmed her theory that there had been three people in the house.

  Both bodies had already been removed by ambulance and the rescue team weren’t due to begin their search from the farm until the following morning. It was agreed, therefore, that the two police vehicles should travel back to the village in convoy, but there was something Hulda wanted to do first.

  ‘Is it all right for me to go in now and take a closer look around?’ she asked one of her colleagues from Forensics. He nodded.

  She had a disorientating sensation of walking into a painting: a cosy sitting room in a house where no one lived any more, where the clock seemed to have stopped at Christmas, although it was now well into February. It was as if the house were caught in some strange limbo: there were signs of life everywhere you looked, yet the air was tainted by the smell of death, a reminder that the Grim Reaper had recently wielded his scythe there. She tried to visualize the scene. Had all three of them – the farming couple and Haukur Leó – sat here together in the days before Christmas? Had he been a complete stranger to them? If so, what was he doing here in the middle of winter? Or could the couple have been relatives?

  It had occurred to Hulda while she was at the police station that she should seize the chance to ring his wife, Unnur’s mother, and let her know that the Mitsubishi had been found. This would have given her an excuse to ask the woman about any possible link to the couple out east. Yet she had hesitated, preferring to wait until she had made a bit more progress with the investigation. Until she could put the poor woman out of her misery by telling her straight that her husband was dead – and perhaps give her news of her daughter at the same time.

  That conversation would have to wait until tomorrow at the earliest, unless there were any unexpected developments tonight.

  Hulda walked past the stairs to the attic since she simply didn’t have the mental strength to go up there again just yet. Subconsciously, she knew that this was because, apart from the blood, the scene had been too grim a reminder of her own private trauma.

  Instead, she revisited the couple’s bedroom. Jens had suggested they might have slept in separate rooms as a possible explanation for the fact that both the double bed and the bed in the guestroom had been used. Now, though, there was compelling evidence that his theory was wrong: a third person had been there – Haukur Leó must have been staying with them. As further proof that the couple had slept together, there were, as Hulda had noticed earlier, two pairs of reading glasses. There was also a half-empty water glass on one bedside table, along with a novel, Halldór Laxness’s Salka Valka, the bookmark revealing that the reader hadn’t got very far with it.

  Apart from that, it was rather a cheerless room, Hulda felt. Impersonal, somehow. She couldn’t immediately work out what it was that gave that impression, then recalled the photographs on the chest of drawers in the spare room. That was it: there were no family pictures in here. Of course, that wasn’t necessarily significant, but it seemed odd, all the same.

  Hulda left the couple’s room and went back into the spare room, where Haukur Leó had presumably slept. There were the family photos, all in one place. Hulda had given them a cursory glance when she examined the room the first time round but now she stopped to consider them more closely. Her attention was arrested by one particular snapshot in the middle. It showed the couple, Erla and Einar, probably in their thirties, looking young and carefree, and between them a pretty, red-haired girl in her teens … And … there was something about the girl that struck Hulda; yes, she reminded her a little of Unnur, the missing girl from Gardabær. Maybe it was just that Hulda was preoccupied by both cases, and yet there was a resemblance. They were both redheads, of course, but it was more than that; they were actually quite alike.

  She wondered who the girl in the picture was and guessed she must be the couple’s daughter; the atmosphere in the photo certainly gave that impression, since they both had their arms around her, and Hulda’s immediate assumption had been that this was a family portrait.

  But if so, where was the girl now?

  And why had nobody mentioned her?

  Inspector Jens was standing outside in the driving snow, buffeted by the wind, which seemed unrelenting in this exposed spot.

  ‘Could I have a word?’ Hulda asked, but he continued to stare into space. Walking over, she tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped.

  ‘I wanted to ask you something.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t hear you. Should we go inside?’

  She nodded and they returned to the welcome shelter of the hall.

  ‘I was looking at the photographs – the family photos, you know – and there was one of the couple with a young girl. Did they have a daughter?’

  ‘Yes,’ the inspector answered promptly: ‘Anna.’ His expression grew sombre.

  ‘Where is she?’

  This time it took him longer to reply: ‘She lived on the neighbouring farm, in the blue house we visited earlier.’

  ‘She lived there? Then where is she now?’ Hulda pictured the rooms in the empty house, the home that someone seemed to have left in a hurry, never to return.

  ‘She’s dead,’ Jens said heavily.

  ‘Dead? But … she must have died very young.’ Hulda tried hard to focus, to keep her thoughts from straying to Dimma, but she could hear her voice breaking.

  ‘Very. She was no more than twenty, if I remember right. She’d just moved home again after finishing sixth-form college. Well, not exactly home: she moved into the old tenant farm, as I said. It caused quite a stir in the village. Most people had taken it for granted she’d move south to Reykjavík and do something different with her life. But the countryside exerts a strong pull. It was in her blood. I remember bumping into her not long after she moved home, and she was radiant with happiness. She lived for this place.’

  Hulda was feeling too choked up to continue with the conversation. All she could see was Dimma, and she knew that any minute now she would break down in tears. The only way she could hide them was outside in the falling snow. Yet, clearing her throat, she forced herself to ask, trying to keep the quiver out of her voice: ‘What … what happened to Anna?’ She had to know.

  VIII

  Unnur experienced an intoxicating feeling of pure, unadulterated freedom. She was as free as a bird, dependent on no one, all her belongings in her backpack – everything that mattered, at least; most importantly, her notebooks. Her writing was going well. And nobody knew where she was. She hadn’t got round to telling her parents where she was heading next, as there was no urgency. She was taking a year’s break from them as well. Of course, she loved them dearly, but this was her time and she was determined to manage on her own.

  It had taken her a couple of days to get here. From Kirkjubæjarklaustur she had travelled by bus along the south coast to Höfn í Hornafirdi. It was one of the most spectacular roads in Iceland: to the south, there was nothing but the immense, flat ocean; on the landward side to the north, the vast Vatnajökull icecap with its jagged fringe of peaks and succession of glacial tongues, tumbling one after another down towards the plain. With the handful of other passengers – a few locals and a scattering of foreigners – she had got out to marvel at the intensely blue glacial lagoon at Jökulsárlón, with its jostling crowd of icebergs. Yet, stunning though the scenery was, the experience had made her feel like a tourist rather than an adventurer. She was impatient to get off the beaten track, leave behind the Ring Road with its famous sights a
nd head up into the lonely valleys of the interior, where a few last farms were still clinging on.

  After a night in the youth hostel at Höfn, Unnur had continued her journey by bus up the east coast, leaving the icecap behind and entering a new, green landscape of fjords and layer-cake mountains, finally arriving at the village the woman had mentioned on the phone. From there, she had kept to her plan of walking rather than trying to organize a lift. It was a fine day, with that extraordinary clarity that you only get in an Icelandic autumn, every ridge and gully standing out so clear in the pure air that it looked as if you could reach out and touch them. The hike took hours, but the exercise and the sensation of being completely alone, following a narrow ribbon of road up the uninhabited, treeless valley, left her feeling mentally and physically invigorated. She had brought along a packed lunch and perched on a rock beside the road to eat it. Close at hand, rugged fells rose above the green, U-shaped valley, and the only sounds to break the silence were the mournful calls of whimbrel and the gurgling of a stream.

  Her backpack was beginning to weigh heavily on her shoulders by the time she finally spotted a house ahead. Her spirits lifted but were almost immediately dashed when she realized from the description she’d been given that it couldn’t be the right place. So she kept going, further than she had thought possible, her pack heavier with each step, blisters forming on her feet, until the farmhouse appeared unexpectedly round a bend at the head of the valley. White with a red roof, as the woman had said, standing utterly alone on its mound, the only building to be seen in the wide, empty landscape. Unnur had the giddying sensation of having literally reached the edge of the inhabited world. This was exactly what she had been looking for.

  Here, she would find the peace and quiet she craved. She could work during the day and write in the evenings, undisturbed by external distractions. She wondered if they even had TV reception out here, and hoped not. A quick scan of the roof established that there was no aerial.