Prologue
February 1988
Hulda Hermannsdóttir opened her eyes.
So heavy and unrelenting was the sense of lethargy weighing her down that she felt as if she’d been drugged. She could have gone on sleeping all day, even here in her hard chair. It was just as well that, as a detective, she merited an office to herself. It meant she could shut the door on the outside world and wait for the hours to pass, either by staring into space or letting her eyelids droop. Meanwhile, the documents piled up on the desk in front of her. Since returning from leave two weeks ago she hadn’t got to grips with a single case.
This neglect hadn’t gone entirely unnoticed by her boss, Snorri, although, to his credit, he was treating her with patient understanding. The fact was she’d simply had to come back to work; she couldn’t bear to spend another minute cooped up in the house with Jón. Even the breathtaking natural beauty of their home on Álftanes couldn’t work its magic on her these days. She was deaf to the sighing of the waves and blind to the stars and Northern Lights shimmering across the sky. She and Jón hardly spoke to each other, and she’d given up initiating any conversations with him, although she still answered if he addressed her directly.
The February darkness did nothing to help. It was the coldest, greyest time of the year, and every new day seemed to bring a deterioration in the weather. As if things weren’t bad enough, the snow had been coming down heavily that month, burying the city in a muffling layer and clogging its arteries. Cars kept getting stuck in the streets, and it took all Hulda’s skill to navigate the unploughed back roads of Álftanes in her Skoda, despite its regulation studded tyres, before making it safely on to the main road at Kópavogur.
For a while she had doubted she would ever return to work. In fact, she’d doubted she would ever leave the house again, or find the strength to crawl out from under her duvet. But in the end there were only two options: to stay at home with Jón or sit in her office from dawn to dusk, even if she achieved little in the way of work.
Having opted for the office, she struggled to concentrate and instead spent her days moving files and reports from one pile to another, trying to read them but feeling unable to focus. Things couldn’t go on like this, she reasoned; they had to get better. Of course, she would never get over her guilt – she knew that – but the pain would inevitably be blunted over time. At least she could cling to that hope. But for now her anger towards Jón, far from dissipating, was growing and festering. With every day that passed she could sense the rage and hatred churning ever more corrosively inside her, and she knew that it wasn’t doing her any good, but she just couldn’t control her emotions. She had to find an outlet for them somehow …
When the phone rang on her desk, Hulda didn’t react. Lost in a dark, private world, she didn’t even raise her eyes until it had rung several times. Then, at last, moving sluggishly, as if under water, she picked up the receiver. ‘Hulda.’
‘Hello, Hulda. Snorri here.’
She immediately felt unsettled. Her boss didn’t usually ring her unless it was urgent. Their contact was normally limited to morning meetings, and he didn’t, as a rule, interfere much in the day-to-day handling of her investigations.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said after a slight delay.
‘Could you pop in and see me? Something’s come up.’
‘I’m on my way.’ She put down the receiver, rose to her feet and checked her appearance in the small mirror she kept in her handbag. However awful she felt, she was determined not to show any sign of weakness at work. Of course, none of her colleagues could be in any doubt of the state she was in, but what she dreaded more than anything was being sent on compassionate leave again. The only way to hang on to the shreds of her sanity was to keep herself busy.
Snorri greeted her with a smile as she stepped into his office, which was so much larger than her own. Feeling the waves of sympathy emanating from him, she cursed under her breath, afraid any show of kindness from him would undermine her hard-won self-control.
‘How are you, Hulda?’ he asked, waving her to a seat before she had a chance to reply.
‘Fine, fine, under the circumstances.’
‘How are you finding being back in the office?’
‘I’m just getting into gear again. Tying up the loose ends on some of last year’s cases. It’s all coming along.’
‘Are you absolutely sure you’re up to it?’ Snorri asked. ‘I’m perfectly happy to grant you more time off, should you need it. Of course, we need you here too, as you know, but we want to be sure you’re up to coping with the more challenging cases.’
‘I can understand that.’
‘And are you?’
‘Am I what?’
‘Up to coping?’
‘Yes,’ she lied, looking him straight in the eye.
‘Right, well. In that case, something’s come up and I’d like you to look into it, Hulda.’
‘Oh?’
‘An ugly business.’ He paused before frowning and emphasizing his words with a wave of his arm: ‘Bloody ugly, in fact. Suspected murder out east. We need to send someone over there right now. I’m so sorry to spring this on you so soon after your return, but no one else with your experience is free at the moment.’
Hulda thought he could have done a better job of dressing this up as a compliment, but never mind.
‘Of course I can go. I’m perfectly up to it,’ she replied, aware even as she said it that this was a lie. ‘Whereabouts in the east?’
‘Oh, some farmhouse miles from anywhere. It’s unbelievable anyone’s still making a go of farming out there.’
‘Who’s the victim? Do we know yet?’
‘The victim? Oh, sorry, Hulda, I didn’t give you the full story. We’re not just talking about one body…’ He paused. ‘Apparently, the discovery was pretty horrific. It’s not clear how long the bodies have been lying there, but they’re guessing since Christmas at least…’
PART ONE
Two months earlier – just before Christmas 1987
I
The end.
Erla put down her book and leaned back in the shabby old armchair with a deep sigh.
She had no idea of the time. The grandfather clock in the sitting room had stopped working a while ago – in fact, it must be several years ago now. They had no idea how to mend it themselves and it was so heavy and unwieldy that they had never seriously considered lugging it out to the old jeep and driving it down the long, bumpy road to the village. They couldn’t even be sure it would fit in the car or that anyone in the village would have the necessary skills to repair such an antique mechanism. So it was left where it was, reduced to the status of an ornament. The clock had belonged to her husband Einar’s grandfather. The story was that he had brought it back with him from Denmark, where he had gone to attend agricultural college before returning home to take over the farm. It was what had been expected of him, as Einar used to say. Later, it had been his father’s turn, before finally the baton had passed on to Einar himself. His grandfather was long dead; his father too, somewhat before his time. Farming out here, even just living out here, took its mental and physical toll.
She became aware that it was freezing cold. Of course, that was to be expected at this time of year. The house was feeling its age and when the wind blew from a certain quarter the only way to keep warm in some of the rooms, like here in the sitting room, was to wrap yourself in a thick blanket, as she had done now. The blanket kept her body snug, but her hands, sticking out from under it, were so chilly that it was hard to turn the pages. Still, she put up with it. Reading gave her greater pleasure than anything else she knew. A good book could transport her far, far away, to a different world, another country, another culture, where the climate was warmer and life was easier. That’s not to imply that she was ungrateful or discontented with the farm or its location, not really. It was Einar’s family home, after all, so the only thing for it was to grit one’s teeth and make the best of it. Growing up in post-war Reykjavík, Erla had never dreamt of becoming a farmer’s wife in the wild Icelandic highlands, but when she met Einar he had swept her off her feet. Then, when they were still in their early twenties, Anna had come along.
She thought about Anna, whose house was in a rather better state than theirs. It had been built much more recently, at a little distance from their place, originally as accommodation for tenant farmers. The worst part about the distance was that they couldn’t easily pop round to see each other when the weather closed in like this, or at least only with considerable difficulty. Einar usually parked up the jeep over the harshest winter months, since even with the four-wheel drive, nailed tyres and chains were little use when the snow really started coming down, day after day after day. In those conditions, it was easier to get around on foot or on cross-country skis, so it was fortunate that both she and Einar were quite competent skiers. It would have been fun to have had the chance to go skiing more often – even if only a handful of times – to try out their skills on proper downhill slopes, but there had never been much time for that sort of thing. Money had always been tight too; the farm just about broke even, but they couldn’t justify spending much on leisure pursuits or travelling. They rarely discussed it. The goal now, as ever, was to keep their heads above water, keep the farm going, and in the black, if possible. For Einar, she knew, the honour of the family was at stake; he had shouldered a heavy ancestral burden and his forefathers were like an unseen presence, forever watching him from the wings.
His grandfather, Einar Einarsson the first, kept an eye on them in the oldest part of the house, where Erla was sitting now; the original timber structure that he had built ‘with his own two hands, with blood, sweat and tears’, as her husband had once put it. Einar’s father, Einar Einarsson the second, presided over what Erla referred to as the new wing, the concrete extension that now housed the bedrooms and had been built when her husband, Einar Einarsson the third, was a child.
Erla didn’t feel anything like the same reverence for her own forebears. She seldom spoke of them. Her parents, who were divorced, lived down south, and she hardly ever saw her three sisters. Of course, distance played a part, but the truth was that her family had never been that close. After her parents split up, her sisters had stopped making much effort to stay in touch, and family get-togethers were few and far between. Erla didn’t shed many tears over the fact. It would have been nice to have her own support network to fall back on, but she had become a member of Einar’s family instead and focused on cultivating a relationship with them.
She didn’t stir from her chair. She didn’t have the energy to get up quite yet. After all, there was nowhere to go but to bed, and she wanted to stay awake a little longer, savouring the peace and quiet. Einar had fallen asleep hours ago. To him, rising early was a virtue and, anyway, he had to feed the sheep. But at this time of year, just before Christmas, with the day at its shortest, Erla could see no earthly reason to drag herself out of bed first thing, while it was still pitch dark. It wouldn’t even start to get light until around eleven and, in her opinion, that was quite early enough to wake up in December. Over the years, the couple had learned not to quarrel over such trivial differences as when to get out of bed. It wasn’t as if they received many visitors out here, so they had no choice but to get on with each other. They still loved each other too, perhaps not like in the old days when they had first met, but their love had matured as their relationship deepened.
Erla rather regretted having devoured the book so fast; she should have spun it out a little longer. Last time they drove to the village together she had borrowed fifteen novels from the library, which was over the limit, of course, but she had a special arrangement, as was only natural in the circumstances. She was allowed to keep the books out on loan for longer than usual too, sometimes for as long as two or three months, when the weather was at its worst. Now, though, she had read all fifteen; this had been the last one. She had finished them unusually quickly, although God only knew when she would next make it to the library. It would have been unfair to ask Einar to fetch more books when he skied to the village the other day, as they would only have weighed him down. She was overwhelmed by the familiar feeling of emptiness that assailed her whenever something ran out and she knew she had no chance of replacing it. She was stranded here. To describe the feeling as emptiness didn’t really do it justice; it would be truer to say she felt almost like a prisoner up here in the wilderness.
Copyright © 2017 by Ragnar Jónasson
