“When do we get to meet this woman you’re seeing?” Bergthora asked, and Erlendur noticed Sigurdur Oli tensing beside her. Erlendur’s relationship with a woman was the talk of the CID, but few dared pry into the matter.
“One day, perhaps,” Erlendur said. “On your eightieth birthday.”
“Can’t wait,” Bergthora said.
Erlendur smiled.
“Who are all these people?” Bergthora said, looking around the gathering.
“I only know the officers,” Sigurdur Oli said. “And I think all those fatsos over there are with Elinborg.”
“There’s Teddi,” Bergthora said, with a wave at Elinborg’s husband.
Someone tapped a spoon against a glass and the murmuring stopped. In a far corner of the room a man began talking and they could not hear a word, but everyone laughed. They saw Elinborg push her way over to him and take out the speech that she had written. They inched closer to hear her and managed to catch her closing thanks to her family and colleagues in the force for their patience and support. A round of applause followed.
“Are you going to stay long?” Erlendur asked, sounding ready to leave.
“Don’t be so uptight,” Bergthora said. “Relax. Enjoy yourself a bit. Get drunk.”
She snatched a glass of white wine from the nearest tray.
“Get this inside you!”
Elinborg appeared from the crowd, greeted them all with a kiss and asked if they were bored. She looked at Erlendur, who took a swig of the sour white wine. She and Bergthora started talking about a female television celebrity who was there and who was having an affair with some businessman. Sigurdur Oli shook the hand of someone whom Erlendur did not recognise and he was about to sneak out when he bumped into an old colleague. He was nearing retirement, something that Erlendur knew he feared.
“You’ve heard about Marion,” the man said, sipping his white wine. “Buggered lungs, I’m told. Just sits at home suffering.”
“That’s right,” Erlendur said. “And watches westerns.”
“Were you making enquiries about the Falcon?” the man asked, emptied his glass and grabbed another from a tray as it glided past them.
“The Falcon?”
“They were talking about it at the station. You were looking into missing persons in connection with the Kleifarvatn skeleton.”
“Do you remember anything about the Falcon?” Erlendur asked.
“No, not exactly. We found it outside the coach station. Niels was in charge of the investigation. I saw him here just now. Nifty book that girl’s written,” he added. “I was just looking at it. Good photos.”
“I think the girl’s in her forties,” Erlendur said. “And yes, it’s a really good book.”
He scouted around for Niels and found him sitting on a wide windowsill. Erlendur sat down beside him and recalled how he had once envied him. Niels had a long police career behind him and a family that anyone would be proud of. His wife was a well-known painter, they had four promising children, all university graduates and now providing them with a succession of grandchildren. The couple owned a large house in the suburb of Grafarvogur, splendidly designed by the artist, and two cars, and had nothing to cast a shadow on their eternal happiness. Erlendur sometimes wondered whether a happier and more successful life was possible. They were not the best of friends. Erlendur had always found Niels lazy and absolutely unsuited for detective work. Nor did his personal success diminish the antipathy Erlendur felt towards him.
“Marion’s really ill, I hear,” Niels said when Erlendur sat down beside him.
“I’m sure there’s a while left yet,” Erlendur said against his better judgement. “How are you doing?”
He asked simply out of politeness. He always knew how Niels was doing.
“I’ve given up trying to figure it out,” Niels said. “We arrested the same man for burglary five times in one weekend. Every time he confesses and is released because the case is solved. He breaks in somewhere again, gets arrested, is released, burgles somewhere else. It’s brainless. Why don’t they set up a system here for sending idiots like that straight to prison? They clock up twenty or so crimes before they’re given the minimum custodial sentence, then the minute they’re out on probation you’re arresting the same buggers again. What’s the point of such madness? Why aren’t these bastards given a proper sentence?”
“You won’t find a more hopeless set-up than the Icelandic judicial system,” Erlendur said.
“Those scum make fools of the judges,” Niels said. “And then those paedophiles! And the psychos!”
They fell silent. The debate on leniency struck a nerve among police officers, who brought criminals, rapists and paedophiles into custody only to hear later that they had been given light sentences or even suspended ones.
“There’s another thing,” Erlendur said. “Do you remember the man who sold agricultural machinery? He owned a Ford Falcon. Vanished without a trace.”
“You mean the car outside the coach station?”
“Yes.”
“He had a nice girlfriend, that bloke. What do you reckon happened to her?”
“She’s still waiting,” Erlendur said. “One of the hubcaps was missing from the car. Do you remember that?”
“We assumed it must have been stolen from outside the coach station. There was nothing about the case to suggest criminal activity — apart from that hubcap being stolen, perhaps. If it was stolen. He could have hit the kerb. Anyway, it was never found. No more than its owner was.”
“Why should he have killed himself?” Erlendur said. “He had everything going for him. A pretty girlfriend. Bright future. He’d bought a Ford Falcon.”
“You know how none of that counts when people commit suicide,” Niels said.
“Do you think he caught a coach somewhere?”
“We thought that it was likely, if I recall correctly. We talked to the drivers but they didn’t remember him. Still, that doesn’t mean he didn’t take a coach out of town.”
“You think he killed himself.”
“Yes,” said Niels. “But…”
Niels hesitated.
“What?” Erlendur said.
“He was playing some kind of a game, that bloke,” Niels said.
“How so?”
“She said his name was Leopold but we couldn’t find anyone by that name of the age she said he was; there was no one on our files or in the national register. No birth certificate. No driving licence. There was no Leopold who could have been that man.”
“What do you mean?”
“Either all the records about him had gone missing or…”
“Or he was deceiving her?”
“He couldn’t have been called Leopold, at least,” Niels said.
“What did she say to that? What did his girlfriend say when you asked her about it?”
“We had the feeling he’d been pulling a fast one on her,” Niels said eventually. “We felt sorry for her. She didn’t even have a photograph of him. What does that tell you? She didn’t know a thing about that man.”
“So?”
“We didn’t tell her.”
“You didn’t tell her what?”
“That we had no files about this Leopold of hers,” Niels said. “It looked cut and dried to us. He lied to her, then walked out on her.”
Erlendur sat in silence while he tried to work out the implications of what Niels had told him.
“Out of consideration for her,” Niels said.
“And she still doesn’t know?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why did you keep it a secret?”
“Probably for the sake of kindness.”
“She’s still sitting waiting for him,” Erlendur said. “They were going to get married.”
“That was what he convinced her of before he left.”
“What if he was murdered?”
“We considered it very unlikely. It’s a rare scenario, but admittedly not u
nknown: men lie their way into women’s lives, get… how should I put it, comfortable, then disappear. I think she knew deep down. We didn’t need to tell her.”
“What about the car?”
“It was in her name. The loan for it was in her name. She owned the car.”
“You should have told her.”
“Perhaps. But would she have been any better off? She would have learned that the man she loved was a confidence trickster. He told her nothing about his family. She knew nothing about him. He had no friends. Forever on sales trips all over the countryside. What does that tell you?”
“She knew that she loved him,” Erlendur said.
“And that’s how he paid her back.”
“What did the farmer say, the one he was going to meet?”
“That’s all in the files,” Niels said, with a nod and a smile at Elinborg, who was deep in conversation with her publisher. Elinborg had once mentioned that his name was Anton.
“Come on, not everything goes into the files.”
“He never met the farmer,” Niels said, and Erlendur could see how he was trying to recall the details of the case. They all remembered the big cases, the murders or disappearances, every single major arrest, every single assault and rape.
“Couldn’t you tell from the Falcon whether or not he met the farmer?”
“We didn’t find anything in the car to indicate that he’d been to the farm.”
“Did you take samples from the floor by the front seats? Under the pedals?”
“It’s in the files.”
“I didn’t see it. You could have established whether he visited the farmer. He would have picked stuff up on his shoes.”
“It wasn’t a complicated case, Erlendur. Nobody wanted to turn it into one. The man made himself vanish. Maybe he bumped himself off. We don’t always find the bodies. You know that. Even if we had found something under the pedals, it could have been from anywhere. He travelled around the country a lot. Selling agricultural machinery.”
“What did they say at his work?”
Niels thought about the question.
“It was such a long time ago, Erlendur.”
“Try to remember.”
“He wasn’t on the payroll, I remember that much, which was rare in those days. He was on commission and worked on a freelance basis.”
“Which means he would have had to pay his taxes himself.”
“As I said, there was no mention of him in the records under the name Leopold. Not a thing.”
“So you reckon he kept that woman when he was in Reykjavik but, what, lived somewhere else?”
“Or even had a family,” Niels said. “There are blokes like that.”
Erlendur sipped his wine and looked at the perfect tie knot under Niels’s shirt collar. He was not a good detective. To him, no case was ever complicated.
“You should have told her the truth.”
“That may well be, but she had happy memories of him. We concluded that it wasn’t a criminal matter. The disappearance was never investigated as a murder because no clues were found to warrant it.”
They stopped talking. The guests” murmuring had become a solid wall of noise.
“You’re still into these missing persons,” Niels said. “Why this interest? What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Erlendur said.
“It was a routine disappearance,” Niels said. “Something else was needed to turn it into a murder investigation. No clues ever emerged to give grounds for that.”
“No, probably not.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of all this?” Niels asked.
“Sometimes.”
“And your daughter, she’s always involved in the same old shit,” said Niels, with his four educated children who had all started beautiful families and lived perfect, impeccable lives, just like him.
Erlendur knew that the whole force was aware of Eva Lind’s arrest and how she had attacked Sigurdur Oli. She sometimes ended up in police custody and received no special treatment for being his daughter. Niels had clearly heard about Eva. Erlendur looked at him, his tasteful clothing and his manicured nails, and wondered whether a happy life made people even more boring than they were to start with.
“Yes,” Erlendur said. “She’s as screwed up as ever.”
12
When Erlendur got home that evening there was no Sindri to welcome him. He had still not turned up when Erlendur went to bed just before midnight. There was no message, nor a telephone number where he could be reached. Erlendur missed his company. He dialled directory enquiries, but Sindri’s mobile number was not listed.
He was falling asleep when the telephone rang. It was Eva Lind.
“You know they dope you up in here,” she said in a slurred voice.
“I was asleep,” Erlendur lied.
“They give you tablets to bring you down,” Eva said. “I’ve never been so stoned in my life. What are you doing?”
“Trying to sleep,” Erlendur said. “Were you causing trouble?”
“Sindri stopped by today,” Eva said without answering him. “He said you’d had a talk.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Isn’t he with you?”
“I think he’s left,” Erlendur said. “Maybe he’s at your mother’s. Are you allowed to make phone calls from that place whenever you like?”
“Nice to hear from you too,” Eva snarled. “And I’m not causing any fucking trouble.” She slammed the telephone down on him.
Erlendur lay staring up into the darkness. He thought about his two children, Eva Lind and Sindri Snaer, and their mother, who hated him. He thought about his brother, for whom he had been searching in vain all these years. His bones were lying somewhere. Perhaps deep in a fissure, or higher up in the mountains than he could ever imagine. Even though he had gone far up the mountainsides, trying to work out how high a boy of eight could stray in bad conditions and a blinding blizzard.
“Don’t you ever get tired of all this?”
Tired of this endless search.
Hermann Albertsson opened the door to him just before noon the following day. He was a thin man aged around sixty, nimble, wearing scruffy jeans and a red check cotton shirt, and with a broad smile that never seemed to leave his face. From the kitchen came the smell of boiled haddock. He lived alone and always had done, he told Erlendur without being asked. He smelled of brake fluid.
“Do have some haddock,” he said when Erlendur followed him into the kitchen.
Erlendur declined firmly but Hermann ignored him and set a place at the table, and before he knew it he was sitting down with a complete stranger, eating softboiled haddock and buttered potatoes. They both ate the skin of the haddock and the skin of the potatoes, and for an instant Erlendur’s thoughts turned to Elinborg and her cookery book. When she’d been working on it she had used him as a guinea pig for fresh monkfish with lime sauce, yellow from the quarter-kilo of butter she had put in it. It took Elinborg all day and night to boil down the fish stock until only four tablespoons remained on the bottom, essence of monkfish; she had stayed up all night to skim off the froth from the water. The sauce is everything, was Elinborg’s motto. Erlendur smiled to himself. Hermann’s haddock was delicious.
“I did that Falcon up,” Hermann said, putting a large piece of potato in his mouth. He was a car mechanic and for a hobby he restored old cars and then tried to sell them. It was becoming increasingly difficult, he told Erlendur. No one was interested in old cars any more, only new Range Rovers that never faced tougher conditions than a traffic jam on the way to the city centre.
“Do you still own it?” Erlendur asked.
“I sold it in 1987,” Hermann said. “I’ve got a 1979 Chrysler now, quite a limo really. I’ve been under its bonnet for, what, six years.”
“Will you get anything for it?”
“Nothing,” said Hermann, offering him some coffee. “And I don’t want to sell it either.”
“You didn’t register the Falcon when you owned it.”
“No,” Hermann said. “It never had plates when it was here. I fiddled about with it for a few years and that was fun. I drove it around the neighbourhood and if I wanted to take it to Thingvellir or somewhere I borrowed the plates from my own car. I didn’t think it was worth paying the insurance.”
“We couldn’t find it registered anywhere,” Erlendur said, “so the new owner hasn’t bought licence plates for it either.”
Hermann filled two cups.
“That needn’t be the case,” Hermann said. “Maybe he gave up and got rid of it.”
“Tell me something else. The hubcaps on the Falcon, were they special somehow, in demand?”
Erlendur had asked Elinborg to check the Internet for him and on ford.com they had found photographs of old Ford Falcons. One was black and when Elinborg printed out the image for him, the hubcaps stood out very clearly.
“They were quite fancy,” Hermann said thoughtfully. “Those hubcaps on American cars.”
“One hubcap was missing,” Erlendur said. “At the time.”
“Really?”
“Did you buy a new hubcap when you got it?”
“No, one of the previous owners had bought a new set a long time before. The originals weren’t on when I bought it.”
“Was it a remarkable car, the Falcon?”
“The remarkable thing about it was that it wasn’t big,” Hermann said. “It wasn’t a monster like most American cars. Like my Chrysler. The Falcon was small and compact and good to drive. Not a luxury car at all. Far from it.”
The current owner turned out to be a widow a few years older than Erlendur. She lived in Kopavogur. Her husband, a furniture maker with a fad for cars, had died of a heart attack a few years before.
“It was in good condition,” she said, opening the garage for Erlendur, who was unsure whether she was talking about the car or her husband’s heart. The car was covered with a thick canvas sheet which Erlendur asked if he could remove. The woman nodded.
“My husband took a great deal of care over that car,” she said in a weak voice. “He spent all his time out here. Bought really expensive parts for it. Travelled all over the place to find them.”
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