The Draining Lake de-6

by Arnaldur Indridason

  “I followed Lothar here,” he said. “I followed him from Aegisida.”

  “You followed Lothar?” Emil said in disbelief. He stood up without taking his eyes off the visitor. “What are you doing?” he repeated. “Why did you follow Lothar?” He looked out through the door as if expecting more uninvited guests. “Are you on your own?” Emil asked him.

  “Yes, I’m alone.”

  “What did you come here for?”

  “You remember Ilona,” he said. “In Leipzig.”

  “Ilona?”

  “We were going out together, me and Ilona.”

  “Of course I remember Ilona. What about her?”

  “Can you tell me what happened to her?” he asked. “Can you tell me now after all these years? Do you know?”

  Not wanting to appear overzealous, he tried to remain calm, but it was futile. He could be read like a book, his years of agonising over the girl he had loved and lost plain to see.

  “What are you talking about?” Emil said.

  “Ilona.”

  “Are you still thinking about Ilona? Even now?”

  “Do you know what happened to her?”

  “I don’t know anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You shouldn’t be here. You ought to leave.”

  He looked around inside the shed.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “What’s this shed for? When did you come home?”

  “You ought to get out,” Emil said again, peering anxiously through the door. “Does anyone else know I’m here?” he added after a moment. “Does anyone else know about me here?”

  “Can you tell me?” he repeated. “What happened to Ilona?”

  Emil looked at him, then suddenly lost his temper.

  “Piss off, I said. Get out! I can’t help you with that shit.”

  Emil pushed him, but he stood firm.

  “What did you get for informing on Ilona?” he asked. “What did they give you, their golden boy? Did they give you money? Did you get good marks? Did you get a good job with them?”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about,” Emil said. He had been half-whispering, but now he raised his voice.

  Emil seemed to have changed a lot since Leipzig. He was as skinny as ever but looked unhealthier, with dark rings beneath his eyes, his fingers stained yellow from smoking, his voice hoarse. His protruding Adam’s apple moved up and down when he spoke, his hair was starting to thin. He had not seen Emil for a long time and remembered him only as a young man. Now he seemed tired and haggard, with several days” beard on his face; he looked like a drinker.

  “It was my fault, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “Will you stop being so stupid,” Emil said, moving closer to push him again. “Get out!” he said. “Forget it.”

  He stepped out of the way.

  “I was the one who told you what Ilona was doing there, wasn’t I? I put you on to her. If I hadn’t told you she might have got away. They wouldn’t have known about the meetings. They wouldn’t have photographed us.”

  “Get out of here!”

  “I talked to Hannes. He told me about you and Lothar and how Lothar and the FDJ got the university to reward you with good marks. You were never much of a student, were you, Emil? I never saw you open a book. What did you get for grassing on your comrades? On your friends? What did they give you for spying on your friends?”

  “She didn’t manage to convert me with her preaching, but you fell flat for it,” Emil snarled. “Ilona was a traitor.”

  “Because she betrayed you?” he said. “Because she wouldn’t have anything to do with you? Was it that painful? Was it so painful when she rejected you?”

  Emil stared at him.

  “I don’t know what she saw in you,” he said, a tiny smile playing across his lips. “I don’t know what she saw in the smart idealist who wanted to make a socialist Iceland but changed his mind the moment she got him into the sack. I don’t know what it was she saw in you!”

  “So you wanted revenge,” he said. “Was that it? Vengeance against her?”

  “You deserved each other,” Emil said.

  He stared at Emil and a strange coldness ran through him. He no longer knew his old friend, did not know who or what Emil had become. He knew that he was looking at the same unflinching evil that he had seen in his student years, and knew that he should be consumed by hatred and anger and attack Emil, but suddenly felt no urge to. Felt no need to take out years of worry, insecurity and fear on him. And not only because he had never had a violent streak or never got into fights. He despised violence in all forms. He knew that he ought to have been seized with such mighty rage that he would want to kill Emil. But instead of swelling up with anger, his mind emptied of everything except coldness.

  “And you’re right,” Emil went on as they stood face to face. “It was you. You have only yourself to blame. It was you who first told me about her meetings, her views and her ideas about helping people to attack socialism. It was you. If that was what you wanted to know, I can confirm it. It was what you said that got Ilona arrested! I didn’t know how she worked. You told me. Do you remember? After that they started watching her. After that they called you in and warned you. But it was too late then. It had moved on. The matter was out of our hands.”

  He remembered the occasion well. Time and again he had wondered whether he had told someone something he should not have. He had always believed that he could trust his fellow Icelanders. Trust them not to spy on each other. That the small band of friends was immune to interactive surveillance. That the thought police had nothing to do with the Icelanders. It was in that faith that he told them about Ilona, her companions and their ideas.

  Looking at Emil, he recognised his inhumanity and how whole societies could be built on brutality alone.

  “There was one thing I started thinking about when it was all over,” he went on as if talking to himself, as if removed from time and space to a place where nothing mattered any more. “When it was all over and nothing could be put right. Long after I came back to Iceland. I was the one who told you about Ilona’s meetings. I don’t know why, but I did. I suppose I was just encouraging you and the others to go to the meetings. There were no secrets between us Icelanders. We could discuss it all without worrying. I didn’t reckon on someone like you.”

  He paused.

  “We stood together,” he went on. “Someone informed on Ilona. The university was a big place and it could have been anyone. It wasn’t until long afterwards that I started to consider the possibility that it was one of us Icelanders, one of my friends, who did it.”

  He looked Emil in the eye.

  “I was an idiot to think we were friends,” he said in a low voice. “We were just kids. Barely twenty.”

  He turned to leave the shed.

  “Ilona was a fucking slut,” Emil snarled behind him.

  At the moment these words were spat out he noticed a spade standing on top of a dusty old cabinet. He grabbed it by its shaft, turned a half-circle and let out a mighty roar as he brought the spade down on Emil with all his might. It struck him on the head. He saw how the light flickered off in Emil’s eyes as he dropped to the floor.

  He stood looking down at Emil’s limp body as if in a world of his own, until a long-forgotten sentence returned to his mind.

  “It’s best to kill them with a spade.”

  A dark pool of blood began to form on the floor and he knew at once that he had dealt Emil a fatal blow. He was completely detached. Calm and collected as he watched Emil motionless on the floor and the pool of blood growing. Looked on as if it were nothing to do with him. He had not gone to the shed to kill him. He had not planned to murder him. It had happened without a moment’s thought.

  He had no idea how long he had been standing there before he registered someone beside him, speaking to him. Someone who tugged at him and slapped his cheek lightly and said something indistinct. He looked at the man but did not recognise him at once.
He saw him bend over Emil. Put a finger to his jugular as if to check for a pulse. He knew that it was hopeless. He knew that Emil was dead. He had killed Emil.

  The man stood up from the body and turned to him. He now saw who it was. He had followed that man through Reykjavik; he had led him to Emil.

  It was Lothar.

  34

  Karl Antonsson was at home when Elinborg knocked on his door. His curiosity was aroused the moment she told him that the discovery of the skeleton in Kleifarvatn had prompted them to make inquiries about Icelandic students in Leipzig. He invited Elinborg into the living room. He and his wife were on their way to the golf course, he told her, but it could wait.

  Earlier that morning Elinborg had telephoned Sigurdur Oli and asked how Bergthora was feeling. He said she was fine. Everything was going well.

  “And that man, has he stopped phoning you at night?”

  “I hear from him now and again.”

  “Wasn’t he suicidal?”

  “Pathologically,” Sigurdur Oli said, and added that Erlendur was waiting for him. They were going to meet Haraldur at the old people’s home as a part of Erlendur’s ridiculous quest for Leopold. The application for a full-scale search of the land in Mosfellsbaer had been turned down, much to Erlendur’s disgust.

  Karl lived on Reynimelur in a pretty house divided into three flats with a neatly kept garden. His wife Ulrika was German and she shook Elinborg’s hand firmly. The couple wore their age well and were both fit. It might be the golf, Elinborg thought to herself. They were very surprised by this unexpected visit and looked blankly at each other when they heard the reason.

  “Is it someone who studied in Leipzig that you found in the lake?” Karl asked. Ulrika went into the kitchen to make coffee.

  “We don’t know,” Elinborg said. “Do either of you remember a man by the name of Lothar in Leipzig?”

  Karl looked at his wife, who was standing in the kitchen doorway.

  “She’s asking about Lothar,” he said.

  “Lothar? What about him?”

  “They think it’s him in the lake,” Karl said.

  “That’s not quite right,” Elinborg said. “We aren’t suggesting that’s the case.”

  “We paid him to clear everything,” Ulrika said. “Once.”

  “Clear everything?”

  “When Ulrika came back to Iceland with me,” Karl said. “He had influence and was able to assist us. But for a price. My parents scraped it together — and Ulrika’s parents in Leipzig too, of course.”

  “And Lothar helped you?”

  “Very much,” Karl said. “He charged for it so it wasn’t just a favour, and I think he helped other people too, not just us.”

  “And all it involved was paying money?”

  Karl and Ulrika exchanged glances and she went into the kitchen.

  “He mentioned that we might be contacted later, you know. But we never were and never would have entertained the idea. Never. I was never in the party after we came back to Iceland, never went to meetings or the like. I gave up all involvement in politics. Ulrika was never political, she had an aversion to that sort of thing.”

  “You mean you would have been given tasks?” Elinborg said.

  “I have no idea,” Karl said. “It never came to that. We never met Lothar again. Thinking back, it’s sometimes hard to believe what we actually experienced in those years. It was a completely different world.”

  “The Icelanders called it “the charade”,” Ulrika said, having rejoined them. “I always thought that was an apt way to describe it.”

  “Are you in contact with your university friends at all?” Elinborg asked.

  “Very little,” Karl said. “Well, we bump into each other in the street sometimes, or at birthday parties.”

  “One of them was called Emil,” Elinborg said. “Do you know anything about him?”

  “I don’t think he ever came back to Iceland,” Karl said. “He always lived in Germany. I haven’t seen him since… is he still alive?”

  “I don’t know,” Elinborg said.

  “I never liked him,” Ulrika said. “He was a bit sleazy.”

  “Emil was always a loner. He didn’t know many people. He was said to do the authorities” bidding. I never saw that side of him.”

  “And you don’t know anything else about this Lothar character?”

  “No, nothing,” Karl said.

  “Do you have any photographs of the students from Leipzig?” Elinborg asked. “Of Lothar or anyone else?”

  “Not Lothar and definitely not Emil, but I do have one of Tomas and his girlfriend. Ilona. She was Hungarian.”

  Karl stood up and walked across the living room to a large cupboard. He took out an old album and flicked through it until he found the photograph, which he handed to Elinborg. It was a black-and-white snap of a young couple holding hands. The sun was shining on them and they were smiling into the camera.

  “It’s taken in front of Thomaskirche,” Karl said. “A few months before Ilona disappeared.”

  “I heard about that,” Elinborg said.

  “I was there when they came to get her,” Karl said. “It was awful. The brutality. No one found out what happened to her and I don’t think Tomas ever recovered.”

  “She was very brave,” Ulrika said.

  “She was a dissident,” Karl said. “That was frowned upon.”

  Erlendur knocked on Haraldur’s door at the old people’s home. Breakfast had just finished and the clatter of plates could still be heard from the canteen. Sigurdur Oli was with him. They heard Haraldur shout something from inside and Erlendur opened the door. Haraldur was sitting up in bed, his head lowered, staring down at the floor. He looked up when they entered the room.

  “Who’s that with you?” he asked when he saw Sigurdur Oli.

  “He works with me,” Erlendur said.

  Instead of greeting Sigurdur Oli, Haraldur shot him a warning look. Erlendur sat on a chair facing Haraldur. Sigurdur Oli remained standing and leaned against the wall.

  The door opened and another grey-haired resident put his head in.

  “Haraldur,” he said, “there’s choir practice in room eleven tonight.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he closed the door again.

  Erlendur gaped at Haraldur.

  “Choir practice?” he said. “Surely you don’t go in for that?”

  “”Choir practice” is code for a booze-up,” Haraldur grunted. “I hope I don’t disappoint you.”

  Sigurdur Oli grinned to himself. He was having trouble concentrating. What he had said to Elinborg that morning was not entirely true. Bergthora had been to the doctor, who had told her that it was fifty-fifty. Bergthora had tried to be positive when she related this, but he knew that she was in torment.

  “Let’s get a move on,” Haraldur said. “Maybe I didn’t tell you the whole truth, but I can’t see why you need to go around sticking your nose into other people’s affairs. But… I wanted…”

  Erlendur sensed an unusual hesitation in Haraldur when the old man lifted his head to be able to look him in the face.

  “Joi didn’t get enough oxygen,” he said, looking back at the floor. “That was why. At birth. They thought it was all right, he grew properly, but he turned out different. He wasn’t like the other kids.”

  Sigurdur Oli indicated to Erlendur that he had no idea what the old man was talking about. Erlendur shrugged. Something about Haraldur had changed. He was not his usual self. He was in some way milder.

  “It turned out that he was a bit funny,” Haraldur continued. “Simple. Backward. Kind inside but couldn’t cope, couldn’t learn, never knew how to read. It took a long time to emerge and we took a long time to accept it and come to terms with it.”

  “That must have been difficult for your parents,” Erlendur said after a long silence, once Haraldur seemed unlikely to say anything else.

  “I ended up looking after Joi when they died,” Haraldur said at l
ast, his eyes trained on the floor. “We lived out there on the farm, barely scraping a living towards the end. Had nothing to sell but the land. It was worth quite a lot because it was so close to Reykjavik and we made a fair bit on the deal. We could buy a flat and still have money left over.”

  “What was it you were going to tell us?” Sigurdur Oli said impatiently. Erlendur glared at him.

  “My brother stole the hubcap from the car,” Haraldur said. “That was the whole crime and now you can leave me alone. That’s the long and the short of it. I don’t know how you can make such a fuss about it. After all these years. He stole a hubcap! What kind of a crime is that?”

  “Are we talking about the black Falcon?” Erlendur asked.

  “Yes, it was the black Falcon.”

  “So Leopold did visit your farm,” Erlendur said. “You’re admitting that now.”

  Haraldur nodded.

  “Do you think you were right to sit on this information for your whole life?” Erlendur asked angrily. “Causing everyone unnecessary trouble?”

  “Don’t you go preaching to me,” Haraldur said. “It won’t get you anywhere.”

  “There are people who have been suffering for decades,” Erlendur said.

  “We didn’t do anything to him. Nothing happened to him.”

  “You ruined the police investigation.”

  “Put me in the nick, then,” Haraldur said. “It won’t make much difference.”

  “What happened?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

  “My brother was a bit simple,” Haraldur said. “But he never harmed that man. There wasn’t a violent bone in him. He thought the bloody hubcaps were pretty so he stole one. He thought it was enough for that bloke to have three.”

  “And what did the man do?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

  “You were looking for a missing man,” Haraldur went on, staring at Erlendur. “I didn’t want to complicate things. You would have complicated it if I’d told you that Joi took the hubcap. Then you would have wanted to know if he killed him, which he didn’t, but you’d never have believed me and you’d have taken Joi away.”