‘What are you on about?’ said Eyjólfur angrily. ‘I was here too. We did everything we could. You’d do better to take a good look at yourself. Fat lot of use you were, with all your hysterics. You were little better than that ponce Arnar. Oddný Hildur would never have survived in the kind of blizzard we experienced that week, with or without a broken leg. Things could have gone badly wrong if we had kept looking. You and Arnar were the ones who messed up in the search, if memory serves.’ At this, Friðrikka’s face turned so red that Alvar looked pale in comparison.
‘Who is this Arnar?’ asked Matthew. ‘Did he work here?’ Thóra recognized the name from the organizational chart but didn’t recall what the man’s job was.
‘He’s an engineer. I think he’s still working for the company.’ It was Friðrikka who answered. ‘It’s not fair to compare me to him as far as the search for Oddný Hildur is concerned. I put just as much effort into it as the others, even though I was chosen to investigate the area closest to camp so I wasn’t out all over the place. I highly doubt that Arnar took it as seriously as I did, though he might have tried to help a bit. When Oddný Hildur disappeared I was the one who suffered the most.’
‘You?’ shot back Eyjólfur. ‘In the end she and Arnar were pretty close, in this whole mess.’ He took a drink of the apple juice that had been served with the sandwiches.
Thóra looked at him curiously. ‘What do you mean by “close”? Were they having an affair?’ Oddný Hildur had been married, and probably this Arnar was as well.
Eyjólfur choked slightly on his drink. ‘Far from it. He bats for the other side. That’s why I called him a ponce. Couldn’t stand him.’ He stopped, clearly realizing from the looks on the others’ faces that he’d now revealed his homophobia as well as his racism. ‘That’s not what I meant. He wasn’t intolerable because he’s gay; that has nothing to do with it. He’d stopped drinking and was obsessed with his sobriety.’ Thóra recalled having seen a card listing the Twelve Steps hanging in one of the offices. ‘Nobody was bothered that he was gay. It wasn’t like that.’
‘Rubbish,’ bristled Friðrikka. ‘You had a massive problem with him being at the camp, just because he’s gay. All his AA crap was nothing to do with it.’ She turned to the others. ‘Most of the guys here are real “men’s men”. They talk non-stop about football and other equally fascinating topics. When Arnar came out of the closet after he stopped drinking they all turned their backs on him, and Eyjólfur was no exception. It was as if they thought it was infectious.’
‘Bullshit,’ muttered Eyjólfur. ‘I don’t know what he was like when he was drinking, but sober he was a boring, narrow-minded bastard.’
‘Did you resign because of what happened to your friend Oddný Hildur?’ asked Thóra, regarding Friðrikka steadily. Again she had found it necessary to intervene to ease the tension. What would things at the work camp have been like, she wondered, if it had always been this volatile in the cafeteria?
‘Yes.’ Friðrikka let this answer suffice. She pursed her lips, picked up her fork and started drawing it through the ketchup on her plate. Thóra thought it best not to irritate her, since she was hoping the other woman would help them locate the place the photo had been taken. She seemed a stubborn sort, and was probably more than capable of refusing to help them. Matthew was clearly thinking along the same lines, because he also said nothing.
‘Still, it was definitely the Greenlanders,’ muttered Eyjólfur, breaking the silence. He was obviously the type who had to have the last word. ‘They’ve been a problem since the project started.’ Rather than keeping silent when no one protested, the young man went on. This did not bode well for whatever woman married him in the future. ‘They stole stuff no one in their right mind would want, and everyone knew that they didn’t give a shit about this project.’
‘What did they steal?’ asked Matthew. Thóra’s ears pricked up.
‘Just some minor stuff. I don’t remember in detail but it was some stuff lying around that had been left behind. Pieces of wood, jackets, petrol cans. Things like that.’ Eyjólfur thought for a moment. ‘Boots, too. And probably other things I don’t remember or never heard about.’
So much for Thóra’s hope that theft or vandalism might be the key to saving the bank’s insurance money.
It had been a long day, and for Thóra the happiest part of it was the moment she finally crawled into bed. There was no sign that the storm was slackening, so the team had decided to work late to avoid having to return to the office building after supper. They said little over the meal and quickly disappeared one by one into their own rooms. Warm showers would have lightened their moods but all the pipes in this part of the camp had frozen, making that a distant dream. It was imperative that they finish the job here and get home, or somewhere else where the plumbing was in order. But the weather would dictate when that would happen. They hoped the storm would subside in the night so they could go to the work site the next day, or even down to Kaanneq to check whether anyone there knew about the men.
As Thóra drifted off, with Matthew snoring next to her, she ran over what she had learned that day. She felt particularly bad about not having a good enough understanding of the work done on site. In the contractual documents Matthew had given her she was able to read up on the main purpose of the project; namely, to prepare the area for the proposed mining of molybdenum, a metal that Thóra had never heard of but that was apparently used to temper steel. The exact details of how these preparations were accomplished were much fuzzier in her mind, meaning there was no way to work out what mattered and what didn’t while going over the data. Of course only a tiny proportion of the material stored in the computer system was of any actual use, and the trick was to fish up what mattered out of the digital soup. Her mind’s eye was filled with the hundreds of photographs she’d glanced over; endless pictures of the machinery, the core samples and other things that all had the common factor of being surrounded by every conceivable form of snow and ice. By the time she stopped to go to bed, she’d been struck snowblind simply from staring at the computer screen. Some of the photos had been taken in Kaanneq and showed the same empty streets and colourful houses as they had seen on their way from the helicopter pad. However, she still hadn’t found the twenty photos that had been deleted from the file made the day that the drillers recorded finding something unusual – photos presumably showing, from various angles, a hand covered in ice.
She had spent quite some time examining the drillers’ private files in the hope of getting to know them and gaining a better idea of what they could have got themselves into; perhaps even discovering what might have led to their disappearance. It didn’t take her long to come to the conclusion that they were a pair of jokers who were always sending round gags and funny stories on e-mail. Thóra knew they were both unmarried, and after reading the e-mails it looked to her as if they didn’t have girlfriends either. Nowhere did she find a message to a girl expressing how much they missed her or arranging a date. They were much better at inviting friends and acquaintances to parties and getting themselves invited to dinner by others.
In any case, Thóra found it made for depressing reading; Halldór Grétarsson and Bjarki Elíasson had undoubtedly met a sad end and there was something tragic about thinking that no spouse would be weeping over her husband’s disappearance – no matter how twisted it might be for Thóra to imagine it. Halldór, known as Dóri, had been interested in Greenland; among other things, his computer had links to websites about the country and its history. Thóra could not look at these sites since the Internet connection was still down, but the names of the links suggested the nature of their content. Dóri had even saved screengrabs from some of them, and those Thóra could see. In one of them she had discovered photos from when all the original inhabitants of the settlement had been found dead. Women and children lay as if asleep, except for the way their eyes stared vacuously into the lens. The images were black and white, but Thóra thought she could see
bloodstains on the beds of the dead, although she wasn’t sure. The book in the cafeteria had said nothing about them dying violently, so that could hardly be right. The stains even appeared to form the same pattern on most of the beds, Almost like a kind of roughly drawn face, so there must have been another explanation for them.
The other driller, Bjarki, seemed to have been something of a hypochondriac, since most of the web pages he had bookmarked were related to diseases. Thóra had asked Eyjólfur whether Bjarki had been ill at all, but Eyjólfur had shaken his head and said it had never come up in conversation. Bjarki had always appeared to be in good shape. Maybe he was obsessed with his health, thought Thóra, but maybe he also just had dandruff or something and wanted to get rid of it. She could not get onto any of his bookmarked pages to find out what had been troubling him.
The data thus came from all directions and there was no one particular thing that appeared potentially useful for extricating the bank from its predicament. On the contrary, Thóra was making no progress: there was no evidence that any kind of criminal activity had stopped work here, and it looked unlikely that they would be able to explain the disappearance of either the drillers or the geologist. Gísli’s journal entries had been non-committal regarding whether he personally suspected vandalism, though at one point he expressed doubt that the residents of Kaanneq would have had anything to do with any potential sabotage, and elsewhere he wondered whether it might have been the work of protestors. Thóra realized that that would certainly strengthen the bank’s position. But in any case, what was lacking was a definite conclusion; speculation was of little use.
All she had to show for the day’s labours were the bones in the desk drawers and the photograph of the frozen hand. Thóra drifted off to sleep wondering how long a corpse could stay suspended in ice.
Around midnight she woke to the creaking of the floor slats out in the corridor. Someone seemed to be trying to walk down it as carefully as possible. Thóra shuddered. Instead of checking who it was, she turned on her side and in a short time fell back asleep. In the morning she was unsure of whether it had actually happened or whether it had been part of the dream she’d been having: a dream about the people who settled this country a long time ago in the hope of a better life, but who had reaped only hunger, hardship and a sad death.
Chapter 10
21 March 2008
Thóra did not get out of bed until Matthew was gone. She wanted to lie in a little longer, and didn’t want to give him the chance to peek into her suitcase when she looked in it for clean clothes. She had been shocked the night before when she finally saw what was in it. On top were high-heeled shoes and other equally inspired choices: capri pants that she’d probably thrown in because they looked good on her, skirts, dresses and a glittery pashmina shawl her parents had given her after one of their numerous trips to the Canary Islands. She had never worn the pashmina and never would, least of all here. After a long search she finally managed to find her jeans and a thick jumper that she could wear without embarrassment. Under the jumper she wore a silk blouse. The weather appeared to have calmed down, so luckily they weren’t in too much danger. Even if a wild storm hit they would still be inside, and then Thóra could saunter over to the cafeteria in her high heels and glittery shawl.
She brushed her teeth with the water they’d boiled in one of the sinks in the shared bathroom. She stared at the showerhead hanging there provocatively, the steel bone-dry and shiny. She was met in the mirror by an ugly sight: her hair was greasy at the roots and she had black mascara circles under her eyes. She covertly used a few splashes of the boiled water to wash her face and, after smearing on cream that supposedly guaranteed eternal youth and applying mascara, she finally looked presentable. As she stepped into the corridor she met Eyjólfur, who had a toothbrush in his hand. He looked almost as bad as she had just now. Nevertheless he smiled and stopped her as they crossed paths. ‘I forgot to mention one thing yesterday,’ he said. ‘I actually noticed that Bjarki’s jacket and boots are in the vestibule of the office building. That seems ominous, unless he’s wearing someone else’s jacket.’
Thóra tried to recall which garments had been hanging in the vestibule. She remembered two identical down jackets hanging on a hook and several dirty work coveralls. The floor was covered with shoes, mainly insulated work boots with steel toes. ‘Are the clothes labelled?’ she asked. ‘I mean, how do you know his clothes from the others’?’
‘Yes, they’re labelled,’ said Eyjólfur, smoothing down his hair in a fruitless attempt to make it look better. ‘Berg provided us all with outerwear and protective clothing. Of course I didn’t need a coverall, but the jacket and cold-weather boots have come in handy. Since we all had exactly the same kind of outerwear we had to label every garment, and one of the jackets hanging on the coat rack is marked “Bjarki”. His boots are there too.’
Thóra nodded thoughtfully. ‘And it’s not possible that he took someone else’s jacket by mistake?’
‘No, definitely not. The ones who went on leave took their jackets with them so they wouldn’t freeze to death on the way back, and the only extra jacket in camp is still hanging on the coat rack. It was left behind when an employee resigned shortly after the work started.’ He saw from Thóra’s expression that she wanted to know more about this person and hurriedly added: ‘He was an old man who’d simply had enough of the weather. No great mystery there. In fact, it’s incredible how low the staff turnover has been here. It’s my understanding that people rarely last long in this kind of workplace.’ He smiled at Thóra again. ‘Despite what Friðrikka said, Berg Technology is an exceptionally fair employer and that’s why its employees are so loyal. It would have been impossible for the owner to rush out here to take part in the search for a lost person, so it’s no reflection on him or how he treats his staff.’
‘Still, they all quit.’ Thóra was watching him carefully. ‘Except for you, no?’
Eyjólfur’s smile evaporated. ‘I’m sure they regret it,’ he said. ‘Of course, I don’t work directly for the company; I was just hired through an employment agency. My employer is the company responsible for Berg’s computers.’
‘Did you notice the jacket or boots of the other driller, Halldór?’ asked Thóra, keen to get off to breakfast.
‘No. They weren’t in the office, and I didn’t find them in the vestibule.’ Eyjólfur bit his lip. ‘Hopefully it means Dóri made it out of here alive, but I didn’t check his apartment, so we’ll probably find them there.’
‘Hopefully he’s wearing them.’ It didn’t take a genius to conclude that without protective clothing the man had little hope. Eyjólfur didn’t respond, but his expression brightened abruptly. ‘Had you heard about the tracks?’
‘Tracks?’ Thóra was speechless.
‘Yes, I met Alvar here earlier and this morning he found tracks leading from here out to Oddný Hildur’s building. Someone dug the snow from around the walls of her building and it looks like they removed something from beneath the house.’
‘Like what?’
‘No idea. It happened in the night or early this morning, since Alvar was apparently the first one up and the first to go out and see them.’
Thóra recalled the noise in the corridor the night before. ‘Could he tell from the tracks what shoes were worn? We’re all wearing different types of footwear, so it might be possible to compare the tracks with the soles of our shoes.’
‘It’s my understanding that the wind has blown so much snow into them that that would be impossible. All you can see is that someone went over there and did something around the crawlspace under the hut. Who it was, or why, nobody knows.’
‘Isn’t it possible to see whether something was there beneath the building, and what it was?’
‘No, as far as I understand from Alvar, it looked as if there was nothing there. A thin layer of snow had blown under the building and it appeared untouched, so this is all really strange. All I know for sure is that it w
asn’t me out there.’
The tyres on the jeeps were so big and over-inflated that they reminded Thóra of Donald Duck’s car. She hadn’t noticed this when they arrived, since she hadn’t been in any condition to do so. It had taken everything she’d had just to squirm into the back seat. Now her attention was more focused and she took careful notice of everything she saw along the way. The scenery was indescribably beautiful, but at the same time it awakened dread in her heart. Alvar was at the wheel, and he, Thóra and Matthew had been joined by Friðrikka. She had recognized the description of the place immediately, south slope, L-3, and said that she could certainly take them there to look for signs of anything unusual. ‘It’s not much further,’ she said, pointing Alvar to a crag that could be seen vaguely, rising from the snow. ‘Turn left here. The trail runs in the direction of that mountain ahead.’
‘I located the spot too, on the GPS, so I know exactly where I’m going,’ muttered Alvar. ‘Someone took the trouble to input a lot of information into it, which is wise.’ He looked from the road to the device. ‘We’re just about there.’ Suddenly they saw something flash orange in the sheer white surroundings. The closer they drew the better their view of the drilling rig, which was unlike any piece of machinery Thóra had seen before. It was a large oblong house on tracks. Lying across the rig was an arm and on this a vertical steel mast that Friðrikka said was the drill. Next to it stood a little ramshackle hut. It must have been stronger than it looked since it had withstood yesterday’s storm, and doubtless others much worse. Friðrikka told them it was a moveable work shed for the drillers. Thóra saw no evidence of construction, but when she asked her the geologist replied that that wasn’t surprising; the snow covered all disturbances of the earth immediately, so signs of construction could very well lie directly beneath them. They would have to dig down if they were interested in seeing that. At that Alvar cheered up; he had just loaded the platform with all sorts of hand tools and ropes.
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