Yrsa Sigurdardóttir - The Day Is Dark

‘What are you on about?’ said Eyjólfur angrily. ‘I was here too. We did everything we could. You’d do better to take a good look at yourself. Fat lot of use you were, with all your hysterics. You were little better than that ponce Arnar. Oddný Hildur would never have survived in the kind of blizzard we experienced that week, with or without a broken leg. Things could have gone badly wrong if we had kept looking. You and Arnar were the ones who messed up in the search, if memory serves.’ At this, Friðrikka’s face turned so red that Alvar looked pale in comparison.

‘Who is this Arnar?’ asked Matthew. ‘Did he work here?’ Thóra recognized the name from the organizational chart but didn’t recall what the man’s job was.

‘He’s an engineer. I think he’s still working for the company.’ It was Friðrikka who answered. ‘It’s not fair to compare me to him as far as the search for Oddný Hildur is concerned. I put just as much effort into it as the others, even though I was chosen to investigate the area closest to camp so I wasn’t out all over the place. I highly doubt that Arnar took it as seriously as I did, though he might have tried to help a bit. When Oddný Hildur disappeared I was the one who suffered the most.’

‘You?’ shot back Eyjólfur. ‘In the end she and Arnar were pretty close, in this whole mess.’ He took a drink of the apple juice that had been served with the sandwiches.

Thóra looked at him curiously. ‘What do you mean by “close”? Were they having an affair?’ Oddný Hildur had been married, and probably this Arnar was as well.

Eyjólfur choked slightly on his drink. ‘Far from it. He bats for the other side. That’s why I called him a ponce. Couldn’t stand him.’ He stopped, clearly realizing from the looks on the others’ faces that he’d now revealed his homophobia as well as his racism. ‘That’s not what I meant. He wasn’t intolerable because he’s gay; that has nothing to do with it. He’d stopped drinking and was obsessed with his sobriety.’ Thóra recalled having seen a card listing the Twelve Steps hanging in one of the offices. ‘Nobody was bothered that he was gay. It wasn’t like that.’

‘Rubbish,’ bristled Friðrikka. ‘You had a massive problem with him being at the camp, just because he’s gay. All his AA crap was nothing to do with it.’ She turned to the others. ‘Most of the guys here are real “men’s men”. They talk non-stop about football and other equally fascinating topics. When Arnar came out of the closet after he stopped drinking they all turned their backs on him, and Eyjólfur was no exception. It was as if they thought it was infectious.’

‘Bullshit,’ muttered Eyjólfur. ‘I don’t know what he was like when he was drinking, but sober he was a boring, narrow-minded bastard.’

‘Did you resign because of what happened to your friend Oddný Hildur?’ asked Thóra, regarding Friðrikka steadily. Again she had found it necessary to intervene to ease the tension. What would things at the work camp have been like, she wondered, if it had always been this volatile in the cafeteria?

‘Yes.’ Friðrikka let this answer suffice. She pursed her lips, picked up her fork and started drawing it through the ketchup on her plate. Thóra thought it best not to irritate her, since she was hoping the other woman would help them locate the place the photo had been taken. She seemed a stubborn sort, and was probably more than capable of refusing to help them. Matthew was clearly thinking along the same lines, because he also said nothing.

‘Still, it was definitely the Greenlanders,’ muttered Eyjólfur, breaking the silence. He was obviously the type who had to have the last word. ‘They’ve been a problem since the project started.’ Rather than keeping silent when no one protested, the young man went on. This did not bode well for whatever woman married him in the future. ‘They stole stuff no one in their right mind would want, and everyone knew that they didn’t give a shit about this project.’

‘What did they steal?’ asked Matthew. Thóra’s ears pricked up.

‘Just some minor stuff. I don’t remember in detail but it was some stuff lying around that had been left behind. Pieces of wood, jackets, petrol cans. Things like that.’ Eyjólfur thought for a moment. ‘Boots, too. And probably other things I don’t remember or never heard about.’

So much for Thóra’s hope that theft or vandalism might be the key to saving the bank’s insurance money.

It had been a long day, and for Thóra the happiest part of it was the moment she finally crawled into bed. There was no sign that the storm was slackening, so the team had decided to work late to avoid having to return to the office building after supper. They said little over the meal and quickly disappeared one by one into their own rooms. Warm showers would have lightened their moods but all the pipes in this part of the camp had frozen, making that a distant dream. It was imperative that they finish the job here and get home, or somewhere else where the plumbing was in order. But the weather would dictate when that would happen. They hoped the storm would subside in the night so they could go to the work site the next day, or even down to Kaanneq to check whether anyone there knew about the men.

As Thóra drifted off, with Matthew snoring next to her, she ran over what she had learned that day. She felt particularly bad about not having a good enough understanding of the work done on site. In the contractual documents Matthew had given her she was able to read up on the main purpose of the project; namely, to prepare the area for the proposed mining of molybdenum, a metal that Thóra had never heard of but that was apparently used to temper steel. The exact details of how these preparations were accomplished were much fuzzier in her mind, meaning there was no way to work out what mattered and what didn’t while going over the data. Of course only a tiny proportion of the material stored in the computer system was of any actual use, and the trick was to fish up what mattered out of the digital soup. Her mind’s eye was filled with the hundreds of photographs she’d glanced over; endless pictures of the machinery, the core samples and other things that all had the common factor of being surrounded by every conceivable form of snow and ice. By the time she stopped to go to bed, she’d been struck snowblind simply from staring at the computer screen. Some of the photos had been taken in Kaanneq and showed the same empty streets and colourful houses as they had seen on their way from the helicopter pad. However, she still hadn’t found the twenty photos that had been deleted from the file made the day that the drillers recorded finding something unusual – photos presumably showing, from various angles, a hand covered in ice.

She had spent quite some time examining the drillers’ private files in the hope of getting to know them and gaining a better idea of what they could have got themselves into; perhaps even discovering what might have led to their disappearance. It didn’t take her long to come to the conclusion that they were a pair of jokers who were always sending round gags and funny stories on e-mail. Thóra knew they were both unmarried, and after reading the e-mails it looked to her as if they didn’t have girlfriends either. Nowhere did she find a message to a girl expressing how much they missed her or arranging a date. They were much better at inviting friends and acquaintances to parties and getting themselves invited to dinner by others.

In any case, Thóra found it made for depressing reading; Halldór Grétarsson and Bjarki Elíasson had undoubtedly met a sad end and there was something tragic about thinking that no spouse would be weeping over her husband’s disappearance – no matter how twisted it might be for Thóra to imagine it. Halldór, known as Dóri, had been interested in Greenland; among other things, his computer had links to websites about the country and its history. Thóra could not look at these sites since the Internet connection was still down, but the names of the links suggested the nature of their content. Dóri had even saved screengrabs from some of them, and those Thóra could see. In one of them she had discovered photos from when all the original inhabitants of the settlement had been found dead. Women and children lay as if asleep, except for the way their eyes stared vacuously into the lens. The images were black and white, but Thóra thought she could see bloodstains on the beds of the dead, although she wasn’t sure. The book in the cafeteria had said nothing about them dying violently, so that could hardly be right. The stains even appeared to form the same pattern on most of the beds, Almost like a kind of roughly drawn face, so there must have been another explanation for them.