The Day is Dark (15 page)

The therapist’s eyes were slightly protruding and Arnar had the discomfiting thought that all the tales of sorrow and misfortune he’d had to listen to had filled his entire skull and now pressed against the backs of his eyes. After a few years his tongue and ears might also pop out. Arnar wondered whether he was experiencing delirium tremens, so vivid was this mental image. He shook himself slightly to get rid of it. ‘I know,’ he said, unsure what else to say. ‘This is pathetic.’ He could not concentrate and it was the best he could come up with.

‘Yes, it’s pathetic,’ echoed the therapist, equally uninspired. ‘You’ll have to start from scratch, and now it’s clear that you’ll have to be more diligent about attending meetings than you have been in the past few years.’ He rubbed his forehead, trying to appear serious and intelligent and concerned about Arnar’s recovery. But he just looked like a hungry man with bulging eyes.

‘It was hard to find a meeting in the middle of a glacier.’ Arnar had investigated whether there were any AA meetings anywhere near the work site but the nearest had been in Angmagssalik, and it was far too much trouble to go there. So he had used CD recordings of American meetings, which had helped considerably, even though it wasn’t the same as attending a meeting with other addicts. Defeated people had more powers of dissuasion than mere words – as did the joy in the eyes of those who had overcome their problems, at least for the time being.

‘A glacier?’ The therapist had apparently forgotten Arnar’s story, or had not heard a single word of it. Perhaps the overcrowding in his skull made it impossible for him to absorb new information.

‘I was working in Greenland.’ Arnar couldn’t care less about the therapist’s lack of interest, which made this even more awkward. ‘But I didn’t fall off the wagon there.’

‘No, that’s right.’ The therapist’s expression was completely blank. ‘Are you aware of what it was that led you back to the bottle?’

‘Yes.’ Arnar did not want to share that story with the man. He had had enough and was starting to look forward to lunch himself. He didn’t know if it was his imagination, but it seemed as though the smell of food was being carried all the way to them from the cafeteria. ‘But I don’t care to discuss it.’ No doubt the therapist would quickly lose his appetite if Arnar started to describe the events leading to his fall. Terrible, mindless vengeance and violence – and not from someone who kills for survival but from him, a supposedly civilized human being. And towards his colleagues, too . . . He felt sick when he recalled the reasons behind his actions. But though the others’ behaviour towards him had been disgraceful, he alone was responsible for what had happened. And for that, he couldn’t blame alcohol. Drunkenness did not get the ball rolling; that happened when in his ignorance he let himself be overwhelmed by hatred and ignore everything but his own lust for revenge.

Bella was the only one who was not impressed by Thóra’s expedition with the others. She curled her lip so that no one could doubt how boring she found their story. But Thóra could sense something else behind Bella’s contempt: she envied their little field trip. She had been left behind with Eyjólfur to make a list of all the computers and other technical equipment at the camp, which was the first step in trying to determine the monetary value of it all. The two of them had gone from room to room; he had announced what was there and she had written it down, no doubt with a face like thunder. The doctor had continued to make his sample collection, which he alone controlled and understood fully.

‘So you think that the corpse of the geologist who disappeared had been where they were planning to drill?’ asked the doctor in a rather sceptical tone. ‘That would mean this photo could be of a work glove.’ He put down the poor-quality printout of the photo: the colours were odd and the image itself grainy.

Eyjólfur snorted. ‘Yes, precisely. I think that you should look at the image on the screen; this printout is shitty. Onscreen you can see the nails in better resolution – albeit vaguely, but still.’

‘Yes, no doubt,’ said the doctor, although his tone didn’t suggest that he believed it. ‘This is all just too incredible. What are the chances of boring one little hole in that place and hitting exactly upon the spot where the woman died of exposure?’

‘Little to none.’ Friðrikka still looked worn out from the trip. ‘Actually, they drilled more than one hole, and in more than one place. But it would certainly be a huge coincidence.’

‘Could your friend, Oddný Hildur, have got lost in the storm but then realized she was in the vicinity of the shed? Could she have been searching for it to use as shelter?’ Thóra knew as soon as she said this that such a scenario was beyond absurd. The distance was far too great for one person to make it safe and sound through a storm.

Friðrikka shook her head. Her red hair was dirty – as was all their hair, in fact. ‘No. When Oddný Hildur disappeared the shed was located elsewhere. It gets moved after every drilling. I’m not sure when it was put where it is now but it was after I quit. When I left the drilling rig the shed had been a bit further north for several months, in a place where drilling was coming to an end.’

‘Then couldn’t she have been heading there?’ asked Matthew. ‘And simply given up at the point where the shed is now?’

‘If so, then she strayed a long way from the camp,’ exclaimed Eyjólfur. ‘That’s too far to go on foot. I can’t imagine how she could have made it that far; the weather was absolutely abominable.’

‘And by car?’ asked Matthew. ‘Could she have driven or got a lift?’

Both Eyjólfur and Friðrikka were silent. The former was the first to speak up. ‘She didn’t go by car because they were all in their places the next day, and as far as getting a lift goes, that doesn’t add up. Who would she have gone with? No one saw her after dinner that night, and no one would lie about that.’ He looked at Matthew, bewildered. ‘I don’t know why any one of us would have kept it quiet. We were searching high and low for a whole week.’

‘Five days,’ interjected Friðrikka. ‘You only searched for five days.’ She said nothing for a moment and looked down, staring as if entranced at the pattern on the linoleum. ‘Maybe whoever gave her a lift wanted to hurt her. And left her there intentionally.’

Eyjólfur glared at Friðrikka, then exhaled deeply. It looked to Thóra as if he were counting to ten. He appeared to regain his composure. ‘If anyone drove her, then it was one of those weirdo villagers. None of
us
did, since the weather made it impossible to be driving around out there. If she didn’t walk, she must have gone by dogsled.’

Another argument was brewing, and Bella perked up. ‘Maybe it doesn’t matter at this moment how the woman got there,’ said Matthew drily. ‘I think it’s more important to try to find out what happened to the body – if it was in fact a body in the ice.’ He looked at the objects they had found in the hole. They lay on the table, menacing in their strangeness and irritating in the light of how poorly they fitted into the theory that Oddný Hildur had been found frozen in the ice. As if it weren’t enough to think about where the drillers had taken her body and what had then become of them.

‘Were they into drugs?’ asked Bella, pointing at a large and rather battered-looking glass syringe. It had no needle. ‘These drillers or the missing woman?’

‘Fat chance,’ said Eyjólfur flatly; characteristically, hardly leaping to his colleagues’ defence. ‘No junkie could work here. Where would you buy dope if you were running out?’ His argument was fairly sound; drug addicts kept mainly to the cities and avoided the wilderness. And they wouldn’t be likely to carry around any of what was lying beside the syringe. All of it was in rather poor condition: snowshoes and a leather jacket that was scratched and tattered, and so black with grease and filth that it was impossible to determine what animal the leather had come from; a newish-looking ice axe and a little bone statue that Matthew had wrapped in a scarf for protection. The other objects hadn’t been handled as carefully, since they weren’t as delicate. Next to these things lay the bone with the holes in it, on top of the tea towel that Matthew had taken from the shed.

‘I have a feeling this is probably some kind of Tupilak,’ said Friðrikka, pointing at the figurine. At first Thóra had found the figurine resembled a banana upon which something had been scratched, but when she looked more closely she saw that it was an intricately carved bone to which had been tied some strange-looking odds and ends: hair, some kind of leather and a bird’s claw. The craftsman appeared to have tried to make the bone itself resemble an ogre, and indeed the figurine looked quite monstrous. It had a large face with open jaws and numerous sharp teeth. Little hands with claws were carved onto its belly but otherwise the monster was covered with a pattern that they couldn’t understand, but that possibly symbolized something. On the figurine’s back a tail could be distinguished.

‘What is a Tupilak, if I might ask?’ Thóra was dying to hold the object, but considering how carefully Matthew had held it before he wrapped it in the scarf, it was unlikely that she would be granted the opportunity to do so. ‘I read in a book here in the cafeteria that the natives blame it, whatever it is, for what happened to the original inhabitants of the area. Maybe it’s related to those people somehow.’

‘I must confess that I don’t know exactly what its role is,’ said Friðrikka. ‘It’s connected somehow to Greenlandic folk beliefs, and these kinds of bones are sold in all the tourist spots.’ She stared at the one in Matthew’s hand. ‘I don’t think that any two are alike, and they don’t follow any specific form. However, they do all have scary faces like that. Still, I don’t recall seeing a version like this one. For example, there isn’t usually anything tied to the figure.’

‘So this could be some sort of tourist knick-knack?’ Matthew peered doubtfully at its snarling face. ‘Who would want to own a souvenir like that?’

‘I have no idea where it came from. At least, I’ve never seen it before.’ Friðrikka looked across the table. ‘Nor the other things.’

‘I don’t know where that syringe comes from, but it’s very different to the ones I’m used to.’ Finnbogi bent down to examine it more closely. ‘It might be used for veterinary medicine. It’s big enough.’ He straightened up. ‘It’s not a drug addict’s, that’s for certain.’

‘The jacket is definitely Greenlandic,’ said Alvar, who had kept to himself until now. ‘The other junk I know nothing about.’

Eyjólfur looked triumphant. ‘So my theory that Oddný Hildur got a ride on a dogsled is maybe not so far-fetched after all. Maybe this jacket and these snowshoes are from whoever drove the sled.’

‘And why should he have left them behind? Was there a sudden heatwave?’ Friðrikka spoke like a primary school kid, with the same sing-song contempt that can be heard in every school playground at break-time.

Matthew let go of the back of the chair that he’d been holding on to and it hit the edge of the table hard, shifting the objects slightly. ‘This is all just conjecture. We don’t know what was out there in the ice and we don’t know anything about these things, which – according to Friðrikka – shouldn’t have been in the drilling rig.’ He nudged the ice axe. ‘The only logical explanation is that this was used to free whatever was in the ice. Anything else is so far from being feasible that it’s pointless to wonder about it.’

‘One other thing is certain. If this was Oddný Hildur, then she didn’t die of exposure,’ said Friðrikka, now speaking in her normal, slightly husky voice. ‘It’s been about six months since she disappeared and it’s impossible that she was buried beneath two metres of ice and snow during that time. Maybe snow, but not ice. It was a deep hole and it would have been necessary to use a shovel for her to have been buried that deep.’

‘Would she have been able to dig herself down to take shelter from the weather?’ asked Thóra, directing her question at Alvar. As a rescuer, he must know this.

‘Dig herself into the ice?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I can’t imagine it. People generally find themselves a snowdrift or thick sheets of snow. I’ve never heard of someone digging himself or herself several metres down into ice.’ He looked at his toes, embarrassed at his own stream of words. Thóra had never met a man so shy. ‘Of course I don’t know how conditions have changed these past six months.’

They all stared at the table, each struggling to come up with a sensible explanation. Surprisingly, it was Bella who broke the silence with a theory that seemed fairly reasonable. ‘Couldn’t someone have murdered this geologist lady and buried her, and then when the drillers found the body by accident, the same person murdered them too?’

They nodded thoughtfully, all except the doctor who stood with his arms crossed and an unhappy look on his sunburned face. ‘I don’t see why this mysterious murderer should have wanted to kill this woman in the first place, let alone any men who might have found the body. What would be the point?’ Bella had managed to offend the doctor that morning, when he had tried again to point out to her the hazards of smoking. She had told him to mind his own business, and added that she wasn’t constantly pointing out to him that he was losing his hair, which was just as obvious as the fact that smoking was dangerous. ‘That I don’t know,’ she now replied airily. ‘Maybe they found something on the body that pointed to the killer? Maybe one of these things is a clue to the identity of the murderer.’

‘Bloody nonsense.’ The doctor turned to Matthew. ‘This is ludicrous, completely fantastical. We don’t even know for certain that a body was there, still less the body of this particular woman.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Bella sarcastically. ‘That would make the case
much
simpler, if it involved yet another dead body.’

Thóra cleared her throat. As if it weren’t bad enough having to continually try to make peace between Friðrikka and Eyjólfur. ‘This case certainly isn’t simple. Don’t forget the bones in the desk drawers. They’re yet another unexplained phenomenon in this peculiar place.’ She forced out a smile that was supposed to be encouraging. ‘But hopefully we’ll find an explanation for all of it. As things stand, I can’t say that we’re on the right track but you never know, things might become clear later.’