The Day is Dark (7 page)

Bella lit a fresh cigarette. ‘Like what?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know, murder, maybe,’ replied the geologist drily. ‘You shouldn’t imagine that things here are like what you’re used to. Far from it. If you get lost, no one will search for you. If you fall into the sea, no one will fish you out. Here you’re not much better off than an animal.’ Friðrikka pursed her lips and said nothing more.

The others in the group smiled uncomfortably and tried in vain to think of something clever to say in response. Matthew – who wasn’t yet fluent enough in Icelandic to fully understand his fellow traveller’s statement – had continued trying to open the door, but ice around the catch was making his task difficult. He broke the embarrassed silence. ‘Well,’ he said contentedly, pulling forcefully at the door. The hinges creaked loudly and the door swung out towards the group.

Inside were two white raised pickup trucks and only Thóra knew Matthew well enough to read on his face how happy he was. In addition, there was one well-equipped Ford Econoline, which Eyjólfur told them belonged to the Greenland authorities so that the police or others on public business would have a vehicle available whenever it was needed. ‘Who wants to drive?’

Thóra stared out of the window as they drove through the village, in the hope of seeing anyone out and about. She was troubled and could not avoid the thought that perhaps a dangerous epidemic or food poisoning had swept over the area and killed the villagers and employees of Berg Technology. Suddenly two little girls appeared, walking between the houses. They stopped abruptly when they saw the cars and fixed their dark eyes on them. They looked to Thóra to be a bit younger than Sóley, perhaps five and six years old. Yet it was difficult to be sure, since they were dressed warmly in thick hooded coats and windproof trousers that were tucked into snow boots. Their blue-black hair splayed out from beneath their hats and blew in the wind. Thóra waved to them and smiled her warmest smile but the girls stood stock-still and watched her dispassionately. The taller one grabbed her companion’s mittened hand. If there had been an epidemic, it appeared that at least some of them had escaped. A third girl was sitting on a landing at the top of the stairs in front of a house at the end of the village, and down at the harbour were two adults. Thóra turned in her seat to get a better view of the girls, but they had disappeared. ‘Should we try talking to the people here?’ she asked. ‘I saw a couple of them down at the harbour.’

‘No, let’s keep going,’ said Matthew. ‘We can come back down here tomorrow if we want. Hopefully all this will be explained when we get to the work camp, and then talking to the villagers will be unnecessary. They want to be left in peace, so it wouldn’t pay to trouble them unnecessarily.’

Thóra looked around again. Just as she’d suspected, she would find no souvenir shop here. ‘How far is it?’ she asked. As if her hangover weren’t enough, now the muscles in her bottom were killing her after a day in transit, due mainly to the helicopter seat. The helicopter’s manufacturer had saved its pennies on more than just the number of propeller blades.

‘It’s not too far,’ replied the unlovely Alvar, who was driving. ‘According to the GPS, we’ve got only ten kilometres to go.’ Twenty minutes later the work camp appeared. The low, dark green buildings were difficult to see in the encroaching darkness. The car plodded at a snail’s pace over one more snowdrift, and while they waited they regarded the buildings.

‘Shouldn’t there be lights on if anyone is here?’ asked Eyjólfur. ‘That’s how it was every time I came here. I don’t recall ever seeing the camp so dark.’

No one said anything, but clearly they had all been thinking the same thing. Not a single light was lit in the camp.

Chapter 5

19 March 2008

There is something about abandoned places; something unpleasant but difficult to put your finger on. In an abstract way, it was clear to everyone that those who had vanished from there would not be coming back. Several times Thóra had visited the home of a deceased person to take care of the division of their estate, and had experienced this same discomfort. Perhaps it was the ornaments that would never again be admired, or the open newspaper on the table that no one would finish reading. Although the camps held neither ornaments nor newspapers, Thóra was gripped by the same feeling; they were empty of people but full of signs of human activity. Above all, it reminded Thóra of a documentary on Chernobyl that she had seen several years ago, which gave a good view of how it looked when an entire town’s population has to abandon its homes and workplaces without warning. The difference was in the people. In Chernobyl, the residents had fled from something. Here it looked as though the earth had swallowed the two employees.

In the camp’s main office building computers whirred; desks bore signs that the workers had had no suspicion that they would never return. Half-empty coffee mugs were left here and there and fleece jackets hung on the backs of chairs. Everything was silent, except for the faint buzzing of the computers and the occasional beeping of the fire alarm system. When they looked at it, it seemed to be flagging up a fire in the smokers’ room, which they found near the main entrance with Friðrikka’s assistance. There was no fire there, but the window had been left ajar, which had let in enough snow to cover the floor. The men’s disappearance couldn’t be attributed to a fire. The geologist informed them that the security system was sensitive and could have been set off by the unexpected ingression of snow into the building. Likewise, the smoke detectors were very sensitive to cigar and pipe smoke. On the other hand, Friðrikka thought it strange that no one had shut off that intolerable beeping – resetting the system could not be that difficult. Most likely, the alarm had gone off after the two men disappeared from the camp. According to Friðrikka they both smoked, and thus could have left the window open after their final cigarettes in there. Bella was furious at the snow-filled room since it was now impossible to smoke inside the office building, but her anger was largely appeased when Friðrikka told her that there was another little lounge for smokers in the cafeteria and residential wing. However, Bella was prohibited from going there alone until everything had been checked out, which made her grumpy again. ‘Then I’ll just have to smoke outside on this fucking tundra,’ she muttered, putting on her coat to go out and do just that.

‘I don’t know how advisable it is for you to go out alone,’ said the doctor gravely. ‘We have no idea what occurred here, and there could well have been a polar bear outside that attacked the men.’ This warning seemed to give Bella no pause, and she continued wrapping herself up for her trip outside. ‘Not to mention how unhealthy smoking is,’ added the doctor, in the hope of a better reception.

Bella stiffened as she zipped up her coat. Her expression was not one of panic, but anger. She looked straight at the doctor, resentfully. ‘I can’t smoke in here?’ she asked. When she received no answer she bent down once more and pulled on her other boot. ‘I didn’t think so. Either I smoke in here or I go out.’ She finished getting ready as Thóra, Matthew, Friðrikka and the doctor watched in silence, and then stormed out after flinging them one last grumpy look.

‘I’m more worried about the polar bear, if they do cross paths,’ said Thóra as the door closed.

They continued inspecting the office building, and after looking into all the rooms Friðrikka declared that everything but the smokers’ room appeared normal. One thing struck Thóra as they rambled through the building – as far as she could see, the speckled linoleum was exactly like that visible in the video clip. She exchanged glances with Matthew and he nodded his head to indicate that he had also noticed this. On the other hand, there appeared to be no traces of blood in the rooms; although the group had only done a cursory inspection, it didn’t pay to arouse the suspicion of the geologist by inspecting the walls for signs of blood spatter. It could wait.

Although everything appeared normal in the office building, it was a different story in the employees’ quarters and the cafeteria. These were, respectively, little green buildings that most resembled container units and a larger building that had been put together from similar units. The larger building contained the staff’s communal facilities: kitchen, cafeteria, lounge, gym and laundry room. Attached to the large building was a long wing of rooms with simple sleeping accommodation. Friðrikka told them that the buildings with separate entrances were effectively apartments. Those who stayed here for longer periods lived in them; they had a bedroom, a bathroom with a shower, a little sitting room and a kitchenette. The rooms on the wing were more modest: a bed and a locker, with a shared shower and toilet at the end of the wing.

These rooms were occupied by those who stayed for shorter periods, and occasionally regular staff when storms raged and it was inadvisable to go outside, even to get from the cafeteria to the apartments. Thóra said nothing when she heard this, but was quite surprised, since the small apartments were only a few dozen metres away. If people couldn’t make it safely such a short distance in bad weather, she hoped that the impending storm would pass over quickly. She frowned when Friðrikka added that sometimes these storms could last for days. They decided to stay in the rooms on the wing, so as not to tamper with the apartments of the people who might conceivably return to work there. If they weren’t able to restore power to the sleeping wing they would set themselves up in the office building, since without power it was twenty degrees below inside as well as outside. The most probable explanation for the lack of heat in the employees’ quarters was that the generator supplying power was either broken or out of fuel, and Matthew, Dr Finnbogi and Alvar went to try to get it working again. Thóra, Friðrikka and Eyjólfur remained behind in the office, along with Bella, who had returned safely from her fag break.

The four of them stood in the little coffee room that had been set up in a nook in a corridor of the office building. The large coffeemaker was turned on and there was nothing preventing them from pressing a button and making coffee except that the doctor had explicitly prohibited them from doing so. He considered it unwise to consume anything in the camp while the fate of the two employees was still unclear. Thóra thought this unnecessarily dramatic; all of the rooms and living quarters had been inspected and had revealed no signs of the missing men. People did not simply evaporate from food poisoning or sickness, she thought privately; but she didn’t dare make herself a coffee, even though she was parched and knew that her hangover, which was finally decreasing in intensity, would disappear almost entirely if she had a coffee or something stronger.

‘The system was actually divided into two to ensure that the entire area would not lose power all at once,’ said Friðrikka, breaking the silence. ‘There is a separate generator for the office and another for the apartments and cafeteria. Everything here is heated with electric radiators, and even though the houses are well insulated, it gets cold quickly when the electricity goes off. But electrical failures don’t matter; we have a huge oil tank that is supposed to be enough to supply both generators through the winter, but if spring arrives late we have to shut one of them down until a ship can bring more supplies.’

‘Did that happen often while you were here?’ asked Thóra. ‘The electricity going off?’

‘No, no,’ replied Friðrikka. ‘At first there was some trouble with the exhaust pipe of one of the generators and the electricity went out when wind blew into the pipe, but that was repaired quickly. The system worked fine after that but I don’t know how things went after I quit. Maybe something was already going wrong then.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ interjected Eyjólfur. ‘I was here two weeks ago and no one mentioned anything like that.’

‘Could the generator have run out of oil?’ asked Thóra, directing her question at Friðrikka. ‘And that’s why it shut down?’ She wanted to look outside, satisfy herself that the storm hadn’t hit yet.

‘No, that’s impossible,’ the other woman replied. ‘Spring’s still a long way off and there should be plenty of oil, unless someone badly miscalculated.’

It must have been odd not to be able to count on regular shipments except over the summer. The residents had to make arrangements for the winter at the end of that season. Thóra would have liked to see her own shopping list if she’d lived under these conditions. The hut that housed the generator was in view, but she did not see any of the men that had gone there armed with torches and a toolkit. The wind was starting to stir up the snow and Thóra shivered at the thought of having to go outside. She turned around.

‘How did it all work here, then?’ she asked. ‘It’s an unusual set-up, to say the least.’

‘I actually just made short trips here,’ replied Eyjólfur off-handedly. ‘I wouldn’t have stuck it out if I’d had to be here longer than a week.’ The answer hardly came as a surprise, since the computer expert was young and doubtless had a decent social life outside of work. Everything here must have centred on daily work tasks.

Friðrikka shrugged and looked down at her toes. ‘It was all right. You had to get used to it, but on the whole it was fine.’ She drew a breath through her nose. ‘Naturally it’s not easy living where you work and associating only with your co-workers, but once you’ve got used to it it’s no problem. The salary was good and made up for the isolation. I’m single and childless, so it was okay really.’

‘But still, you gave it up.’ said Thóra. ‘May I ask why?’ Eyjólfur suddenly became very interested in a little refrigerator and bent down to inspect it.

‘The atmosphere changed, you might say,’ replied the woman, pushing a red lock of hair that had fallen onto her cheek back behind her ear. ‘When we came here about a year ago everything was done professionally and all of our interactions were normal, but the group’s spirits deteriorated quickly. In the end I couldn’t bear the idea of being here any longer.’ She flushed, but then stuck out her chin and continued, focused: ‘I wasn’t even surprised when I was contacted and told that something had come up here. It was inevitable.’ She looked away from Thóra. ‘There was – and probably still is – a curse on this place.’ She added quickly, ‘And I’m not alone in that view, if that’s what you think.’