‘I’ll boil some water for you,’ he said. ‘Would you like some tea?’
She nodded.
Each mouthful of tea sent a tiny current of warmth through her frozen body, but then the shivering would reassert itself.
Suddenly, he stood up and reached for his backpack.
‘I’ve got…’ he started, hesitantly, almost as if he were embarrassed. ‘I’ve got something for you.’
She wasn’t sure how to react. His voice was friendly; there was nothing to be afraid of, she felt. Had he bought a gift for her? Why? She didn’t have anything for him.
He opened the backpack and started scrabbling around in it, searching for something, almost frantically.
‘Sorry … It’s in here somewhere … Sorry.’
She waited, rather anxiously.
Finally, he presented her with a small box, wrapped in what looked – in the gloom – like gold wrapping paper.
‘Here, it’s for you.’ He almost stammered. ‘It’s just a little something I picked up, nothing much.’
‘Why?’ she wanted to ask, but didn’t.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, and accepted the box, unwrapping it clumsily with her cold fingers. Inside was a small black box, obviously something from a jeweller’s.
‘Shall I open it?’ she asked, hoping the answer would be no.
‘Yes, yes, go ahead.’
Inside, she saw a pair of earrings and a small ring.
What on earth was this supposed to mean?
She didn’t say anything, just stared at the gifts. She hoped it wasn’t an engagement ring or anything like that. But no, of course it couldn’t be …
She looked up. He was watching her.
‘Sorry, it was just something I saw at the shopping centre, when I was buying stuff for the trip. I thought you might need something nice, you know. You can take it back to the shop if you like, get something else, a bracelet, shoes, whatever … you know.’
‘Thanks,’ she replied, and an awkward silence ensued.
‘We’ll crack on early tomorrow morning,’ he said, hastily changing the subject. ‘Better get a good night’s sleep.’
VII
‘I hope you learned something useful,’ said Ólíver, giving Hulda a patronizing smile. ‘If there’s nothing else, I’ve got other work I need to be getting on with.’
Ignoring his hint, Hulda asked: ‘Do you know anything about a Russian girl who vanished from the asylum-seekers’ hostel last year?’
‘Vanished? Well … yes, now you come to mention it, I remember we did issue an appeal for information about a missing asylum-seeker. A girl. Though I don’t remember where she was from.’
‘Could you look it up?’
Ólíver rolled his eyes. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Give me your phone number and, when I get a minute, I’ll let you know.’ He bestowed on her the same infuriatingly condescending smile.
‘Could you look it up now?’ Hulda barked, in a tone of such sharp authority that he jumped.
‘Now? Er, all right, I suppose…’
He sat down in front of the computer with a long-suffering air.
After a bit of tapping and clicking, he announced: ‘Yes, she was Russian.’
‘Katja?’ Hulda asked.
He peered at the screen. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘What happened?’
‘Give me a chance to read it,’ he said irritably.
Hulda sighed.
‘Yes, seems we lost her,’ he confirmed at last.
‘You lost her?’ Hulda echoed, scandalized by this choice of word.
‘Yes, she never came back to the hostel. It happens, though not often. Sometimes it’s a misunderstanding, sometimes they try and make a break for it, forgetting we live on an island. They always turn up again.’ After a moment, he qualified this: ‘Almost always.’
‘But not her?’
‘No, actually. Not yet, at any rate. But we’ll find her.’
‘It’s been over a year. Are you still optimistic about that?’
‘Well, I wasn’t handling the case, so I wouldn’t know.’
‘Who is supposed to be handling it, then?’ Hulda asked impatiently.
Ólíver shook his head. ‘It doesn’t look like anyone’s handling it, not directly. The file’s still open. She’s bound to turn up eventually.’
Hulda nodded. ‘I see.’
‘Maybe she’s left the country,’ he suggested, looking hopeful. ‘By sea? Who knows? That would take care of the problem, so to speak.’ He grinned.
‘Did they search for her?’
‘Not in any systematic way, as far as I can see. We did ask around, but there were no real leads.’
‘Don’t tell me: no one was particularly bothered about finding her because there were other, more pressing matters to be getting on with?’
‘You could put it like that,’ Ólíver replied, not even having the grace to look ashamed. Though, to give him his due, he had at least begun to take her more seriously. Maybe she had been a bit hard on Ólíver; she wasn’t usually this rude, but the last couple of days had been extremely trying.
‘You couldn’t possibly give me a lift, could you?’ she asked, more politely than before. She was still tired and aware of a dull throbbing behind her eyes.
‘Where to?’
‘To the cove where Elena’s body was found. What’s it called again? Flekkuvík?’
Ólíver looked as if he were about to refuse, but she backed up her request with a ferocious scowl to show that she wouldn’t take no for an answer. In the end, he agreed with bad grace. ‘OK, let’s get a move on, then.’
VIII
He climbed into the bunk directly above hers. Though the proximity made her deeply uncomfortable, there wasn’t much she could do about it.
She had placed one of the candles on the chair beside the bed to give herself a little light. Their head torches were lying on the table where he had put them after switching them off, insisting that they needed to spare the batteries. She struggled into her sleeping bag, no easy task when bundled up in a thick jumper and woollen underwear, and wriggled down as far as she could. Then she blew out the candle, and the blackness closed in, relieved only, after a moment, by the faint grey outlines of the windows.
God, she was so cold, so terribly cold. The chill seemed to spread through her whole body. She tried to close the neck of her sleeping bag, clutching it tightly around her so the heat wouldn’t escape, and finally resorted to tucking her head inside as well, closing the gap until there was only a tiny opening for her nose and mouth. Yet even then she couldn’t get warm.
Normally, she was quick to drop off, but not here, in these alien surroundings. She lay, waiting for sleep to come, trying in vain to conquer her sense of suffocation.
IX
Ten minutes after leaving Keflavík, they took the turn-off to Vatnsleysuströnd.
‘Just five minutes further along the coast,’ said Ólíver, heaving a sigh. ‘And after that you’ll have a bit of a hike down to the sea, if you’re sure you can be bothered.’
‘We ’ll have a hike, you mean,’ said Hulda, as if nothing could be more natural. ‘You’re coming with me to show me the spot.’
At this, Ólíver gave a resigned nod.
He pulled up beside a track that looked as if it led down to the shore. It had been blocked off with a pile of rocks. ‘This is as far as we can go by car,’ he announced. ‘There’s no way round the barrier.’
The cove was further away than Hulda had expected, and the weather was lousy, too. Was she really going to put herself through this ordeal?
‘How long will it take us to walk there?’ she asked doubtfully.
Ólíver gave her a measuring look, his expression betraying what he was thinking: how fast could an old woman like her be expected to move?
‘Quarter of an hour either way, give or take,’ he guessed, then, with a glance at his watch, added: ‘Look, I really haven’t got time for this and, anyway,
it’s not like there’s anything to see down there.’
It was his reaction that tipped the scales. He was annoying her so much – though, in fairness, that might be partly the fault of her hangover – that she decided she was damn well going to drag him all the way down to the sea.
‘We’ll just have to make the best of it,’ she said briskly, getting out of the car and setting off down the track. A glance over her shoulder revealed that Ólíver was following, albeit reluctantly. It was still drizzling and the wind was gusting hard here by the coast, but she found the effect invigorating. With any luck, it would blow away the cobwebs and, with them, the remnants of her headache. Being close to the sea improved her mood, too: she could feel her tension easing with every step. They trudged along the rough stony track, heads down into the wind, surrounded on either side by the moss-carpeted lava-field, which possessed its own brand of desolate beauty. Apart from the odd bird flying overhead, she and Ólíver were the only moving figures in the landscape. You’d never guess that there were farms not far off, since this area was sufficiently out of the way that you could be quite alone here. As she walked, Hulda wondered what in the world Elena had been doing in such a lonely spot: had she come here of her own accord and died by accident? Had she taken her own life, or had she been lured here and murdered by some person unknown?
‘You didn’t come across a vehicle out here, did you?’ Hulda asked, raising her voice to be heard over the wind.
‘What? No,’ grunted Ólíver, his hunched shoulders and sour expression conveying the message that he had more important things to take care of than trekking down to the shore with some old bag from Reykjavík CID.
They must be more than twenty kilometres from the hostel in Njardvík, Hulda reflected: not what you would call within easy walking distance. In this, as in other respects, Alexander’s report had been deficient, failing to pinpoint exactly where the body had been found. Someone must have given Elena a lift – it stood to reason. And surely it was significant that the final stretch down to the sea was impassable to vehicles, though Alexander had omitted that detail, too.
‘Was this track closed to traffic recently?’ Hulda asked.
‘Oh, no, that happened ages ago. No one lives here now. There’s nothing out this way but a couple of derelict buildings.’
‘So it’s unlikely that someone would have lugged a dead body down to the beach?’
‘Are you crazy? She must have died in the cove. If you ask me, it was an accident or suicide. You’re wasting your time trying to solve a crime that was never committed,’ he added bluntly. ‘There are more than enough urgent cases to be getting on with.’
The scenery was bleak and inhospitable; only the odd hardy plant clinging on here and there, and a lone, skeletal tree.
It didn’t take them long to reach the buildings, which were unmistakeably derelict. One, a two-storey house, was nothing more than a hollow shell: its twin-gabled roof still intact but the grey concrete blocks of its walls stripped bare by the elements, its windows and doors gaping holes so you could see right through it. The other house was a smaller, single-storey affair, with a red roof and peeling white paint on its walls. Once they were beside them, Hulda paused to take stock of their surroundings, noticing that they weren’t overlooked by any human habitation. Even the police car parked up by the road was out of sight. More than ever, she felt convinced that Elena had been murdered in this godforsaken spot, with no witnesses. What on earth were you doing out here, Elena? she asked herself again. And who were you with?
If it was lonely and inhospitable now in May, what would it have been like when Elena came here in the dead of winter? What had been going through her mind? Did she have any inkling of what was going to happen? It was important to remember that she had just learned that she would be allowed to stay in Iceland. She must have been over the moon and perhaps this had made her more careless than usual, so she didn’t perceive the risk from her companion until …
‘It was sheer chance that the body was found so soon,’ Ólíver said, interrupting her train of thought. ‘Not many people come down here, especially not in winter, but a group of walkers stumbled on her. They rang the police, and me and my partner attended the scene.’
No sooner had he spoken than the cove came into view.
Although not large, it was beautiful in an austere sort of way and the sea had an air of tranquillity, in spite of the buffeting gale. Hulda experienced a momentary sense of well-being, the sight and smell of the sea transporting her for an instant back to their old home on Álftanes, to the bosom of her family, in the days before disaster fell. Then the feeling passed and her thoughts returned to Elena, who must have stood in this same spot more than a year ago, seen the same view, perhaps experienced the same sense of peace.
‘They found her lying face down on the beach. She had head injuries, though there’s no way of knowing exactly how she got them. Probably fell, banged her head and knocked herself out. The cause of death was drowning.’
Hulda started to pick her way gingerly over the slippery rocks towards the water’s edge, feeling a need to get as close to Elena as possible, though her body was long gone.
‘For Christ’s sake, be careful!’ Ólíver shouted. ‘I’m not carrying you back to the car if you break a leg.’
Hulda stopped. This was probably far enough. She could picture Elena lying there in the shallow water. The sea was so ruthless: giving life to the Icelanders, but exacting a terrible price. She gazed out over Faxaflói bay towards the great, snow-capped bulk of Mount Esja, her heart bleeding not just for Elena but for herself. She missed her old life, the good old days, and although she had gained a new friend in Pétur, she felt so utterly alone in the world. The feeling had never been stronger than in that moment.
X
‘Well, that was a waste of time,’ Ólíver grumbled as they got back into the squad car.
‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ Hulda said.
‘Where did you leave your car? At the police station?’
‘I … didn’t come by car,’ she admitted, a little sheepishly, trying to pretend this was a perfectly normal way of working.
She thought she detected a sly grin on Ólíver’s face.
‘Should I drive you back to Reykjavík?’ he offered, with no great enthusiasm. ‘It’s not that far now that we’ve already come all this way.’
‘Thanks, but I need to drop by the hostel in Njardvík. It would be great if you could give me a lift there instead.’
‘Right you are,’ he said.
Although the rain had temporarily let up, the clouds were still hanging low over Keflavík, threatening another downpour any minute.
‘Thanks very much for your help,’ said Hulda once they had reached their destination, and hurriedly exited the car. She watched as Ólíver drove off.
Elena’s last dwelling place.
In the short time that had passed since Hulda had decided to delve into Elena’s death, she had developed a strong feeling of connection to the young woman. And now, as she stood outside the hostel in the sudden spring cloudburst, the feeling was stronger than ever. She couldn’t give up now, not when all her instincts told her she was closing in on the truth. But she was afraid that this one day, her last day, wouldn’t be enough.
As it turned out, she was in luck. Dóra was sitting at the reception desk, absorbed in a newspaper.
‘Hello again,’ Hulda said.
Dóra looked up. ‘Oh, hi there. Back again?’
‘Yes. I just need a quick word with you. Any news?’
‘News? No, there’s never any news here.’ Dóra smiled and closed the paper. ‘New people, yes, but always the same old routine. Or were you talking about, you know, something to do with Elena?’
‘I was, actually.’
‘No, no news there. How are you getting on with your investigation thingy?’
‘Getting there, slowly,’ Hulda said. ‘Look, could we sit down for a minute and have a ch
at?’
‘Sure, pull up a seat, there’s a stool by the phone.’ Dóra gestured to a table near the reception desk on which there was an old-fashioned desk phone and next to it a bound copy of the telephone directory, a rare sight in this day and age.
‘Actually, I was thinking of somewhere, well, a little more private,’ said Hulda.
‘Oh, none of the residents understand Icelandic. And I’d rather not leave reception unmanned, if I can help it. We’ve already been over this so thoroughly I’m assuming it won’t take long?’
‘No, it shouldn’t,’ said Hulda, giving in. Bringing over the telephone stool, she sat down, facing Dóra across the reception desk.
‘Tell me about Katja.’
‘Katja? The one who did a runner?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Yes, I remember her. Russian, like Elena. They were good friends, I think. Then one day she simply vanished.’
‘Was her disappearance investigated?’
‘I expect so. A policeman came round asking questions, but I couldn’t tell him anything. I thought maybe she’d been delayed somewhere, but she never turned up again. I don’t know if they ever found her, but she certainly never came back here.’
‘She’s still missing.’
‘Oh, right. I always got on well with her. Hope she’s OK, wherever she is.’
‘Did anyone ever link her disappearance to Elena’s death?’
‘Well, that was some time later.’ Dóra looked thoughtful. ‘But, no, I don’t think so. And I didn’t mention it when your friend came round to interview me about Elena.’
‘Alexander?’
‘Yeah. He wasn’t exactly what you’d call keen. Didn’t seem that interested in the case. You strike me as much more energetic.’ Dóra smiled. ‘If someone killed me, I’d definitely rather you were on the case.’
Hulda didn’t smile at the black humour. ‘Yesterday,’ she said, ‘you told me Elena had got into a four-by-four with a stranger.’
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