The Draining Lake (6 page)

'Are people out east still talking about that?'

'I don't think so,' Sindri said. 'Not so much. I was just curious and talked to people who remembered it. Remembered you. I talked to the farmer who rents you the horses.'

'Why did you do all this? You've never . . .'

'Eva Lind said she understood you better after you told her about it. She always wants to talk about you. I've never bothered thinking about you at all. I can't figure out what you represent to her. You don't matter to me in the least. That's fine with me. I'm glad I don't need you. Never have. Eva needs you. She always has.'

'I've tried to do what I can for Eva,' Erlendur said.

'I know. She's told me. Sometimes she thinks you're interfering, but I think she understands what you're trying to do for her.'

'Human remains can be found a whole generation later,' Erlendur said. 'Even hundreds of years. By sheer chance. There are lots of stories of that happening.'

'I'm sure,' Sindri said, looking over at the bookshelves. 'Eva said you felt responsible for what happened to him. That you lost hold of him. Is that why you go to the east to look for him?'

'I think . . .'

Erlendur stopped short.

'Your conscience?' Sindri asked.

'I don't know whether it's my conscience,' Erlendur said, with a vague smile.

'But you've never found him,' Sindri said.

'No,' Erlendur said.

'That's why you keep going back.'

'I like going to the east. Change of surroundings. Being by myself a bit.'

'I saw the house you lived in. It was abandoned ages ago.'

'Yes,' Erlendur said. 'Way back. It's half-collapsed. Sometimes I make plans to turn it into a summer house but . . .'

'It's in the middle of nowhere.'

Erlendur looked at Sindri.

'It's nice sleeping there,' Erlendur said. 'With the ghosts.'

When he lay down to go to sleep that night he thought about his son's words. Sindri was right. He had been to the east during several summers to look for his brother. He could not say why, apart from the obvious reason: to find his mortal remains and close the matter, even though he knew deep down that finding anything at this stage was a forlorn hope. On the first and last night he always slept in the old abandoned farmhouse. He slept on the living-room floor, looking out through the broken windows at the sky and thinking about the old times when he had sat in that same room with his family and relatives or the locals. He looked at the carefully painted door and saw his mother coming in with a jug of coffee and filling the guests' cups in the soft glow of the living-room lights. His father standing in the doorway, smiling at something that had been said. His brother came up to him, shy because of the guests, and asked if he could have another cruller. Himself, he stood by the window gazing out at the horses. Some riders had stopped by, cheerful and noisy.

Those were his ghosts.

Marion Briem seemed a little livelier when Erlendur called by the next morning. He had managed to dig up a John Wayne western. It was called
The Searchers
and seemed to cheer up Marion, who asked him to put it in the video player.

'Since when have you watched westerns?' Erlendur asked.

'I've always liked westerns,' Marion said. The oxygen mask lay on the table beside the chair in the living room. 'The best ones tell simple stories about simple people. I'd have thought you'd enjoy that kind of thing. Western stories. A country bumpkin like you.'

'I never liked the cinema,' Erlendur said.

'Making any headway with Kleifarvatn?' Marion asked.

'What does it tell us when a skeleton, probably dating from the 1960s, is found tied to a Russian listening device?' Erlendur asked.

'Isn't there only one possibility?' Marion said.

'Espionage?'

'Yes.'

'Do you think it might be a genuine Icelandic spy in the lake?'

'Who says he's Icelandic?'

'Isn't that a fairly straightforward assumption?'

'There's nothing to say he's Icelandic,' Marion said, suddenly bursting into a fit of coughing and gasping for breath. 'Hand me the oxygen, I feel better when I've got oxygen.'

Erlendur reached for the mask, put it over Marion's face and turned on the oxygen cylinder. He wondered whether to call a nurse or even a doctor. Marion seemed to read his thoughts.

'Relax. I don't need any more help. A nurse will be round later.'

'I shouldn't be tiring you out like this.'

'Don't go yet. You're the only visitor I can be bothered to talk to. And the only one who could conceivably give me a cigarette.'

'I'm not going to give you a cigarette.'

There was silence until Marion removed the mask again.

'Did any Icelanders spy during the Cold War?' Erlendur asked.

'I don't know,' Marion said. 'I know that people tried to get them to. I remember one bloke who came to us and said the Russians never left him alone.' Marion's eyes closed. 'It was an exceptionally cheesy spy story, but very Icelandic, of course.'

The Russians had contacted the man to ask if he would help them. They needed information about the Keflavík base and its buildings. The Russians took the matter seriously and wanted to meet the man in an isolated place outside the city. He found them very pushy and could not get rid of them. Although he refused to do what they asked, they would not listen and in the end he gave in. He contacted the police and a simple sting was set up. When the man drove off to meet the Russians by Lake Hafravatn there were two police officers in the car with him, hiding under a blanket. Other policemen had taken up positions nearby. The Russians suspected nothing until the police officers got out of the man's car and arrested them.

'They were expelled,' Marion said, with a pained smile at the thought of the Russians' amateurish attempts at spying. 'I always remember their names: Kisilev and Dimitriev.'

'I wanted to see if you remembered someone from Reykjavík who went missing in the 1960s,' Erlendur said. 'A man who sold farm machinery and diggers. He failed to turn up for a meeting with a farmer just outside town and he's never been heard of since.'

'I remember that well. Níels handled that case. The lazy bastard.'

'Yes, quite,' said Erlendur, who knew Níels. 'The man owned a Ford Falcon that was found outside the coach station. One hubcap had been removed.'

'Didn't he just want to give his old girl the slip? As far as I recall that was our conclusion. That he killed himself.'

'Could be,' Erlendur said.

Marion's eyes closed again. Erlendur sat on the sofa in silence for a while, watching the film while Marion slept. The video-box blurb described how John Wayne played a Confederate Civil War veteran hunting down the Indians who had killed his brother and sister-in-law and kidnapped their daughter. The soldier spent years searching for the girl and when he found her at last she had forgotten where she came from and become an Indian herself.

After twenty minutes Erlendur stood up and said goodbye to Marion, who was still sleeping under the mask.

When he arrived at the police station, Erlendur sat down with Elínborg, who was writing her speech for the book launch. Sigurdur Óli was in her office too. He said he had traced the sales history of the Falcon right up to the most recent owner.

'He sold the car to a spare-parts dealer in Kópavogur some time before 1980,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'The company's still in business. They just won't answer the phone. Maybe they're on holiday.'

'Anything new from forensics about the listening device?' Erlendur asked, and he noticed that Elínborg was moving her lips while she stared at the computer screen, as if she was trying out how the speech sounded.

'Elínborg!' he barked.

She lifted a finger to tell him to wait.

'. . . And I hope that this book of mine,' she read out loud from the screen, 'will bring you endless pleasure in the kitchen and broaden your horizons. I have tried to keep it plain and simple, tried to emphasise the household spirit, because cookery and the kitchen are the focal point . . .'

'Very good,' Erlendur said.

'Wait,' Elínborg said. '. . . The focal point of every good household where the family gathers every day to relax and enjoy happy times together.'

'Elínborg,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'Is it too sentimental?' Elínborg asked, pulling a face.

'It makes me puke,' Sigurdur Óli said.

Elínborg looked at Erlendur.

'What did forensics say about the equipment?' he asked.

'They're still looking at it,' Elínborg said. 'They're trying to get in touch with experts from Iceland Telecom.'

'I was thinking about all that equipment they found in Kleifarvatn years ago,' Sigurdur Óli said, 'and this one tied to the skeleton. Shouldn't we talk to some old codger from the diplomatic service?'

'Yes, find out who we can speak to,' Erlendur said. 'Someone who remembers the Cold War.'

'Are we talking about spying in Iceland?' Elínborg asked.

'I don't know,' Erlendur said.

'Isn't that pretty absurd?' Elínborg said.

'No more than "where the family gathers every day to relax and enjoy happy times together",' Sigurdur Óli parroted her.

'Oh, shut up,' Elínborg said, and deleted what she had written.

Wrecked cars were kept behind a large fence, stacked six high in some places. Some had been written off, others were just old and worn out. The spare-parts dealer looked the same, a weary man approaching sixty, in a filthy, ripped pair of overalls that had once been light blue. He was tearing the front bumper off a new Japanese car that had been hit from behind and had concertinaed right up to the front seats.

Erlendur stood sizing up the debris until the man looked up.

'A lorry went into the back of it,' he said. 'Lucky there was no one in the back seat.'

'A brand new car too,' Erlendur said.

'What are you looking for?'

'I'm after a black Ford Falcon,' Erlendur said. 'It was sold or given away to this yard around 1980.'

'A Ford Falcon?'

'It's hopeless, of course – I know,' Erlendur said.

'It would have been old when it came here,' the man said, pulling out a rag to wipe his hands. 'They stopped making Falcons around 1970, maybe earlier.'

'You mean you didn't have any use for it?'

'Most Falcons were off the streets long before 1980. Why are you looking for it? Do you need spares? Are you doing it up?'

Erlendur told him that he was from the police and that the car was connected with an old case of a missing person. The man's interest was aroused. He said he had bought the business from a man called Haukur in the mid-1980s but did not recall any Ford Falcon in the stock. The previous owner, who had died years ago, had kept a record of all the wrecks he'd bought, said the dealer, and showed Erlendur into a little room filled to the ceiling with files and boxes of papers.

'These are our books,' the man said with an apologetic smile. 'We, er, never throw anything away. You're welcome to take a look. I couldn't be bothered to keep records of the cars, never saw the point, but he did it conscientiously.'

Erlendur thanked him and began examining the files, which were all marked on the spine with a year. Spotting a stack from the 1970s, he started there. He did not know why he was looking for this car. Even if it did exist, he had no idea how it could help him. Sigurdur Óli had asked why he was interested in this particular missing person over the others he had heard about in the past few days. Erlendur had no proper answer. Sigurdur Óli would never have understood what he meant if he had told him that he was preoccupied by a lonely woman who believed she had found happiness at last, fidgeting outside a dairy shop, looking at her watch and waiting for the man she loved.

Three hours later, when Erlendur was on the verge of giving up and the owner had asked him repeatedly whether he had turned up anything, he found what he was looking for: an invoice for the car. The dealer had sold a black Ford Falcon on 21 October 1979, engine defunct, interior in reasonable condition, good lacquering. No licence plates. Stapled to the sheet of paper describing the sale was a pencilled invoice: Falcon 1967. 35,000 krónur. Buyer: Hermann Albertsson.

The First Secretary at the Russian embassy in Reykjavík was the same age as Erlendur but thinner and considerably healthier-looking. When he received them he seemed to make a special effort to be casual. He was wearing khaki trousers and said, with a smile, that he was on his way to the golf course. He showed Erlendur and Elínborg to their seats in his office, then sat down behind a large desk and smiled broadly. He knew the reason for their visit. The meeting had been arranged well in advance so Erlendur was surprised to hear the golfing excuse. He had the impression that they were supposed to rush through the meeting and then disappear. They spoke English and, although the First Secretary was aware of the reason for the enquiry, Elínborg briefly repeated the need for the meeting. A Russian listening device had been found tied to the skeleton of a man probably murdered and thrown into Lake Kleifarvatn some time after 1961. The discovery of the Russian equipment had still not leaked to the press.

'There have been a number of Soviet and Russian ambassadors in Iceland since 1960,' the Secretary said, smiling self-confidently as if none of what they had related was any of his business. 'Those who were here in the 1960s and early 1970s are long since dead. I doubt that they knew anything about Russian equipment in that lake. Any more than I do.'

He smiled. Erlendur smiled back.

'But you spied here in Iceland during the Cold War? Or at least tried to.'

'That was before my time,' the Secretary said. 'I couldn't say.'

'Do you mean you don't spy any more?'

'Why would we spy? We just go on the Internet like everyone else. Besides, your military base isn't so important any more. If it matters at all. The conflict zones have shifted. America doesn't need an aircraft carrier like Iceland any more. No one can understand what they're doing here with that expensive base. If this were Turkey I could understand.'

'It's not
our
military base,' Elínborg said.

'We know that some embassy staff were expelled from Iceland on suspicion of spying,' Erlendur said. 'When things were very tense in the Cold War.'

'Then you know more than I do,' the Secretary said. 'And of course it is your military base,' he added, looking at Elínborg. 'If we did have spies in this embassy then there were certainly twice as many CIA agents at the US embassy. Have you asked them? The description of the skeleton you found suggests to me – how should one put it – a mafia killing. Had that occurred to you? Concrete boots and deep water. It's almost like an American gangster movie.'

'It was Russian equipment,' Erlendur said. 'Tied to the body. The skeleton . . .'

'That tells us nothing,' the Secretary said. 'There were embassies or offices from other Warsaw Pact countries that used Soviet equipment. It need not be connected with
our
embassy.'

'We have a detailed description of the device with us, and photographs,' Elínborg said, handing them to him. 'Can you tell us anything about how it was used? Who used it?'

'I am not familiar with this equipment,' the Secretary said as he looked at the photographs. 'Sorry. I will enquire, though. But even if we did recognise it, we can't help you very much.'

'Couldn't you give it a try?' Erlendur asked.

The Secretary smiled.

'You'll just have to believe me. The skeleton in the lake has nothing to do with this embassy or its staff. Neither in the present, nor in the past.'

'We believe it's a listening device,' Elínborg said. 'It is tuned to the old wavelength of the American troops in Keflavík.'

'I can't comment on that,' the Secretary said, looking at his watch. His round of golf was waiting.

'If you had spied in the old days, which you didn't,' Erlendur said, 'what would you have been interested in?'

The Secretary hesitated for an instant.

'If we
had
been doing anything then obviously we would have wanted to observe the base, the transportation of military hardware, movements of warships, aircraft, submarines. We would have wanted to know about America's capability at any time. That's obvious. We would have wanted to know about what was going on at the base and other military installations in Iceland. They were all over the place. Not just in Keflavík. There were activities all over Iceland. We would also have monitored the activities of other embassies, domestic politics, political parties and that sort of thing.'

'A lot of equipment was found in Lake Kleifarvatn in 1973,' Erlendur said. 'Transmitters, microwave equipment, tape recorders, even radios. All from Warsaw Pact countries. Mostly from the Soviet Union.'

'I'm not aware of the incident,' the Secretary said.

'No, of course not,' Erlendur said. 'But what reason could there have been for throwing that equipment in the lake? Did you use a particular method for getting rid of old stuff?'

'I'm afraid I cannot assist you with that,' the Secretary said, no longer smiling. 'I've tried to answer you as best I can but there are some things I simply don't know. And that's that.'

Erlendur and Elínborg stood up. There was a smugness about the man that Erlendur disliked. Your base! What did he know about military bases in Iceland?

'Was the equipment obsolete, so there was no point in sending it home in a diplomatic bag?' he asked. 'Couldn't you throw it away like any other rubbish? These devices clearly demonstrate that spying went on in Iceland. When the world was much simpler and the lines were clearly drawn.'

'You can say what you like about it,' the Secretary said, standing up. 'I have to be somewhere else.'

'The man whose body was found in Kleifarvatn, could he have been at the embassy?'

'I think that's out of the question.'

'Or from another Eastern bloc embassy?'

'I don't think there's the slightest chance. And now I must ask you to—'

'Are there any persons missing from this period?'

'No.'

'You just know that? You don't need to look it up?'

'I have looked it up. No one is missing.'

'No one who disappeared and you don't know what became of them?'

'Goodbye,' the Secretary said, with a smile. He had opened the door.

'Definitely no one who disappeared?' Erlendur said as he walked out into the corridor.

'No one,' the Secretary said, and closed the door in their faces.

Sigurdur Óli was refused a meeting with the US ambassador or his staff. Instead he received a message from the embassy marked 'confidential' which stated that no US citizen in Iceland had been reported missing during the period in question. Sigurdur Óli wanted to take the matter further and insist on a meeting, but his request was denied by the top CID officials. The police would need something tangible to link the body in the lake to the US embassy, the base or American citizens in Iceland.

Sigurdur Óli telephoned a friend of his, a head of section at the Defence Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to ask whether he could locate any past employee to tell the police about foreign embassy officials in the 1960s and 1970s. He tried to give away as little as possible about the investigation, just enough to arouse his interest, and his friend promised to get back to him.

Erlendur stood awkwardly, a glass of white wine in his hand, scouring the crowd at Elínborg's book launch. He had found it quite difficult to make up his mind whether to put in an appearance, but in the end he had decided to go. Gatherings annoyed him, the few that came his way. He sipped the wine and grimaced. It was sour. He thought ruefully of his bottle of Chartreuse back home.

He smiled at Elínborg, who was standing in the crowd and waved to him. She was talking to the press. The fact that a woman from the Reykjavík CID had written a cookery book had prompted quite a lot of publicity and Erlendur was pleased to see Elínborg basking in the attention. She had once invited him, Sigurdur Óli and his wife Bergthóra for dinner to test a new Indian chicken dish that she had said would be in the book. It was a particularly spicy and tasty meal and they had praised Elínborg until she blushed.

Erlendur did not recognise many people apart from the police officers and was relieved to see Sigurdur Óli and Bergthóra walk over in his direction.

'Do try to smile for once when you see us,' Bergthóra said, kissing him on the cheek. He drank a toast of white wine, then they toasted Elínborg specially afterwards.

'When do we get to meet this woman you're seeing?' Bergthóra asked, and Erlendur noticed Sigurdur Óli tensing beside her. Erlendur's relationship with a woman was the talk of the CID, but few dared pry into the matter.

'One day, perhaps,' Erlendur said. 'On your eightieth birthday.'

'Can't wait,' Bergthóra said.

Erlendur smiled.

'Who are all these people?' Bergthóra said, looking around the gathering.

'I only know the officers,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'And I think all those fatsos over there are with Elínborg.'

'There's Teddi,' Bergthóra said, with a wave at Elínborg's husband.

Someone tapped a spoon against a glass and the murmuring stopped. In a far corner of the room a man began talking and they could not hear a word, but everyone laughed. They saw Elínborg push her way over to him and take out the speech that she had written. They inched closer to hear her and managed to catch her closing thanks to her family and colleagues in the force for their patience and support. A round of applause followed.

'Are you going to stay long?' Erlendur asked, sounding ready to leave.

'Don't be so uptight,' Bergthóra said. 'Relax. Enjoy yourself a bit. Get drunk.'

She snatched a glass of white wine from the nearest tray.

'Get this inside you!'

Elínborg appeared from the crowd, greeted them all with a kiss and asked if they were bored. She looked at Erlendur, who took a swig of the sour white wine. She and Bergthóra started talking about a female television celebrity who was there and who was having an affair with some businessman. Sigurdur Óli shook the hand of someone whom Erlendur did not recognise and he was about to sneak out when he bumped into an old colleague. He was nearing retirement, something that Erlendur knew he feared.

'You've heard about Marion,' the man said, sipping his white wine. 'Buggered lungs, I'm told. Just sits at home suffering.'

'That's right,' Erlendur said. 'And watches westerns.'

'Were you making enquiries about the Falcon?' the man asked, emptied his glass and grabbed another from a tray as it glided past them.

'The Falcon?'

'They were talking about it at the station. You were looking into missing persons in connection with the Kleifarvatn skeleton.'

'Do you remember anything about the Falcon?' Erlendur asked.

'No, not exactly. We found it outside the coach station. Níels was in charge of the investigation. I saw him here just now. Nifty book that girl's written,' he added. 'I was just looking at it. Good photos.'

'I think the girl's in her forties,' Erlendur said. 'And yes, it's a really good book.'

He scouted around for Níels and found him sitting on a wide windowsill. Erlendur sat down beside him and recalled how he had once envied him. Níels had a long police career behind him and a family that anyone would be proud of. His wife was a well-known painter, they had four promising children, all university graduates and now providing them with a succession of grandchildren. The couple owned a large house in the suburb of Grafarvogur, splendidly designed by the artist, and two cars, and had nothing to cast a shadow on their eternal happiness. Erlendur sometimes wondered whether a happier and more successful life was possible. They were not the best of friends. Erlendur had always found Níels lazy and absolutely unsuited for detective work. Nor did his personal success diminish the antipathy Erlendur felt towards him.

'Marion's really ill, I hear,' Níels said when Erlendur sat down beside him.

'I'm sure there's a while left yet,' Erlendur said against his better judgement. 'How are you doing?'

He asked simply out of politeness. He always knew how Níels was doing.

'I've given up trying to figure it out,' Níels said. 'We arrested the same man for burglary five times in one weekend. Every time he confesses and is released because the case is solved. He breaks in somewhere again, gets arrested, is released, burgles somewhere else. It's brainless. Why don't they set up a system here for sending idiots like that straight to prison? They clock up twenty or so crimes before they're given the minimum custodial sentence, then the minute they're out on probation you're arresting the same buggers again. What's the point of such madness? Why aren't these bastards given a proper sentence?'

'You won't find a more hopeless set-up than the Icelandic judicial system,' Erlendur said.

'Those scum make fools of the judges,' Níels said. 'And then those paedophiles! And the psychos!'

They fell silent. The debate on leniency struck a nerve among police officers, who brought criminals, rapists and paedophiles into custody only to hear later that they had been given light sentences or even suspended ones.

'There's another thing,' Erlendur said. 'Do you remember the man who sold agricultural machinery? He owned a Ford Falcon. Vanished without a trace.'

'You mean the car outside the coach station?'

'Yes.'

'He had a nice girlfriend, that bloke. What do you reckon happened to her?'

'She's still waiting,' Erlendur said. 'One of the hubcaps was missing from the car. Do you remember that?'

'We assumed it must have been stolen from outside the coach station. There was nothing about the case to suggest criminal activity – apart from that hubcap being stolen, perhaps. If it
was
stolen. He could have hit the kerb. Anyway, it was never found. No more than its owner was.'

'Why should he have killed himself?' Erlendur said. 'He had everything going for him. A pretty girlfriend. Bright future. He'd bought a Ford Falcon.'

'You know how none of that counts when people commit suicide,' Níels said.

'Do you think he caught a coach somewhere?'

'We thought that it was likely, if I recall correctly. We talked to the drivers but they didn't remember him. Still, that doesn't mean he didn't take a coach out of town.'