Arnaldur Indriðason - Silence of the Grave

The surgeon who had led the operating team spoke to Erlendur towards the morning. The prognosis wasn't good. They hadn't been able to save the baby and it was uncertain whether Eva Lind herself would pull through.

"She's in a very bad state," said the surgeon, a tall but delicate man aged around 40.

"I understand that," Erlendur said.

"Persistent malnutrition and drug abuse. There's not much chance the baby would have been born healthy so… although it's a nasty thing to say of course…"

"I understand," Erlendur said.

"Did she ever contemplate an abortion? In cases like this it's…"

"She wanted to have the baby," Erlendur said. "She thought it could help her, and I encouraged her too. She wanted to stop. There's some tiny part of Eva that wants to escape from this hell. A tiny part that sometimes comes out and wants to give it all up. But normally it's a completely different Eva who's in charge. More ferocious and merciless. Some Eva who eludes me. Some Eva who seeks this destruction. This hell."

Realising that he was talking to a man he did not know in the slightest, Erlendur fell silent.

"I can imagine it's difficult for parents to have to go through this," the surgeon said.

"What happened?"

"Placenta abruptio. A massive internal haemorrhage that occurred when the placenta was torn, combined with toxic effects that we are still awaiting the results on. She lost a lot of blood and we haven't managed to bring her back to consciousness. That need not mean anything in particular. She's extremely weak."

After a pause the surgeon said, "Have you contacted your people? So they can be with you or…"

"There aren't any 'my people'," Erlendur said. "We're divorced. Her mother and I. I've let her know. And Eva's brother. He's working in the countryside. I don't know whether her mother will come here. It's like she's had enough. It's been very tough for her. All the time."

"I understand."

"I doubt that," Erlendur said. "I don't understand it myself."

He took out a couple of small plastic bags and a box of pills from his coat pocket and showed them to the doctor.

"She might have taken some of this," he said.

The surgeon took the drugs from him and looked at them.

"Ecstasy?"

"Looks like it."

"That's one explanation. We identified a number of substances in her blood."

Erlendur hesitated. He and the surgeon said nothing for a while.

"Do you know who the father is?" the surgeon asked.

"No."

"Do you think she knows?"

Erlendur looked at him and shrugged in resignation. Then they fell silent again.

"Is she going to die?" Erlendur asked after some time.

"I don't know," the surgeon said. "We can only hope for the best."

Erlendur hesitated about asking his question. He'd been grappling with it, horrific as it was, without reaching any conclusion. He was not certain that he wanted to insist. In the end he went ahead.

"Can I see it?"

"It? You mean…?"

"Can I see the foetus? Can I have a look at the baby?"

The surgeon looked at Erlendur without the slightest hint of surprise on his face, only understanding. He nodded and told Erlendur to follow. They walked along the corridor and into an empty room. The surgeon pressed a button and the fluorescent lights on the ceiling flickered before shedding a bluish white light around the room. He went over to a cold steel table and lifted up a little blanket to reveal the dead baby.

Erlendur looked down and stroked his finger across its cheek.

It was a girl.

"Will my daughter come out of this coma, can you tell me that?"

"I don't know," the doctor said. "It's impossible to tell. She'll have to want to herself. It depends a lot on her."

"The poor girl," Erlendur said.

"They say that time heals all wounds," the surgeon said when he felt Erlendur was about to lose his grip. "That's just as true of the body as of the mind."

"Time," Erlendur said, putting the blanket back over the baby. "It doesn't heal any wounds."

He sat by his daughter's bedside until about six in the evening. Halldóra did not turn up. Sindri Snaer kept his word and did not come to the city. There was no one else. Eva Lind's condition was unchanged. Erlendur had neither eaten nor slept since the previous day, and was exhausted. He was in touch with Elínborg by telephone during the day and decided to meet her and Sigurdur Óli at the office. He stroked his daughter's cheek and kissed her on the forehead when he left.

He didn't talk about the night's events when he sat down with Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg at their meeting that evening. The two of them had heard through the station grapevine about what had happened to his daughter, but didn't dare ask about it.

"They're still scratching their way down to the skeleton," Elínborg said. "It's going terribly slowly. I think they're using toothpicks now. The hand you found is sticking up out of the ground, they're down to the wrist. The medical officer examined it, but the only definite thing he can say is that it's a human with fairly small hands. Not much joy there. The archaeologists haven't found anything in the soil to suggest what happened or who is buried there. They think they'll have dug down to the torso late tomorrow afternoon or evening, but that doesn't mean we'll get any neat answers about who it is. Naturally, we'll have to search elsewhere for those."

"I've been looking up statistics on missing persons in the Reykjavik area," Sigurdur Óli said. "There are more than 40 disappearances from the '30s and '40s which remain unsolved to this day, and it's probably one of those. I've sorted the files by sex and age and I'm just waiting for the pathologist's report on the bones."

"Do you mean someone from the hill disappeared?" Erlendur asked.

"Not according to the addresses on the police reports," Sigurdur Óli said, "though I haven't been through them all. Some place names I don't recognise. When we've excavated the skeleton and got an accurate age, size and sex from the pathologist we can surely narrow the group down quite a bit. I expect it's someone from Reykjavik. Isn't that a reasonable assumption?"

"Where's the pathologist?" Erlendur asked. "The one pathologist we have."

"He's on holiday," Elínborg said. "In Spain."

"Did you check whether there was ever a house by those bushes?" Erlendur asked her.

"What house?" Sigurdur Óli asked.

"No, I haven't got round to it," Elínborg said. She looked at Sigurdur Óli. "Erlendur reckons there were houses on the north side of the hill and the British or American military had a base on the south side. He wants us to talk to everyone who owns a chalet in the area down from Reynisvatn and their grandmothers too and then I'm supposed to go to a seance and have a word with Churchill."

"And that's just for starters," Erlendur said. "What are your theories about the skeleton?"

"Isn't it obviously a murder?" Sigurdur Óli said. "Committed half a century ago or more. Hidden in the ground all that time and no one knows a thing."

"He, or rather, this person," Elínborg corrected herself, "was clearly buried to conceal a crime. I think we can take that as read."

"It's not true that no one knows a thing," Erlendur said. "There's always someone who knows something."

"We know the ribs are broken," Elínborg said. "That has to be a sign of a struggle."

"Does it?" Sigurdur Óli said.

"Well, doesn't it?"

"Can't being in the ground cause that?" Sigurdur Óli said. "The weight of the soil. Even temperature change. The freeze-thaw effect. I talked to that geologist you called in and he said something about that."

"There must have been a struggle because someone's been buried. That's obvious, isn't it?" Elínborg looked at Erlendur and saw that his thoughts were miles away. "Erlendur?" she said. "Don't you agree?"