Yrsa Sigurdardóttir - The Day Is Dark

‘And by car?’ asked Matthew. ‘Could she have driven or got a lift?’

Both Eyjólfur and Friðrikka were silent. The former was the first to speak up. ‘She didn’t go by car because they were all in their places the next day, and as far as getting a lift goes, that doesn’t add up. Who would she have gone with? No one saw her after dinner that night, and no one would lie about that.’ He looked at Matthew, bewildered. ‘I don’t know why any one of us would have kept it quiet. We were searching high and low for a whole week.’

‘Five days,’ interjected Friðrikka. ‘You only searched for five days.’ She said nothing for a moment and looked down, staring as if entranced at the pattern on the linoleum. ‘Maybe whoever gave her a lift wanted to hurt her. And left her there intentionally.’

Eyjólfur glared at Friðrikka, then exhaled deeply. It looked to Thóra as if he were counting to ten. He appeared to regain his composure. ‘If anyone drove her, then it was one of those weirdo villagers. None of us did, since the weather made it impossible to be driving around out there. If she didn’t walk, she must have gone by dogsled.’

Another argument was brewing, and Bella perked up. ‘Maybe it doesn’t matter at this moment how the woman got there,’ said Matthew drily. ‘I think it’s more important to try to find out what happened to the body – if it was in fact a body in the ice.’ He looked at the objects they had found in the hole. They lay on the table, menacing in their strangeness and irritating in the light of how poorly they fitted into the theory that Oddný Hildur had been found frozen in the ice. As if it weren’t enough to think about where the drillers had taken her body and what had then become of them.

‘Were they into drugs?’ asked Bella, pointing at a large and rather battered-looking glass syringe. It had no needle. ‘These drillers or the missing woman?’

‘Fat chance,’ said Eyjólfur flatly; characteristically, hardly leaping to his colleagues’ defence. ‘No junkie could work here. Where would you buy dope if you were running out?’ His argument was fairly sound; drug addicts kept mainly to the cities and avoided the wilderness. And they wouldn’t be likely to carry around any of what was lying beside the syringe. All of it was in rather poor condition: snowshoes and a leather jacket that was scratched and tattered, and so black with grease and filth that it was impossible to determine what animal the leather had come from; a newish-looking ice axe and a little bone statue that Matthew had wrapped in a scarf for protection. The other objects hadn’t been handled as carefully, since they weren’t as delicate. Next to these things lay the bone with the holes in it, on top of the tea towel that Matthew had taken from the shed.

‘I have a feeling this is probably some kind of Tupilak,’ said Friðrikka, pointing at the figurine. At first Thóra had found the figurine resembled a banana upon which something had been scratched, but when she looked more closely she saw that it was an intricately carved bone to which had been tied some strange-looking odds and ends: hair, some kind of leather and a bird’s claw. The craftsman appeared to have tried to make the bone itself resemble an ogre, and indeed the figurine looked quite monstrous. It had a large face with open jaws and numerous sharp teeth. Little hands with claws were carved onto its belly but otherwise the monster was covered with a pattern that they couldn’t understand, but that possibly symbolized something. On the figurine’s back a tail could be distinguished.

‘What is a Tupilak, if I might ask?’ Thóra was dying to hold the object, but considering how carefully Matthew had held it before he wrapped it in the scarf, it was unlikely that she would be granted the opportunity to do so. ‘I read in a book here in the cafeteria that the natives blame it, whatever it is, for what happened to the original inhabitants of the area. Maybe it’s related to those people somehow.’

‘I must confess that I don’t know exactly what its role is,’ said Friðrikka. ‘It’s connected somehow to Greenlandic folk beliefs, and these kinds of bones are sold in all the tourist spots.’ She stared at the one in Matthew’s hand. ‘I don’t think that any two are alike, and they don’t follow any specific form. However, they do all have scary faces like that. Still, I don’t recall seeing a version like this one. For example, there isn’t usually anything tied to the figure.’

‘So this could be some sort of tourist knick-knack?’ Matthew peered doubtfully at its snarling face. ‘Who would want to own a souvenir like that?’

‘I have no idea where it came from. At least, I’ve never seen it before.’ Friðrikka looked across the table. ‘Nor the other things.’

‘I don’t know where that syringe comes from, but it’s very different to the ones I’m used to.’ Finnbogi bent down to examine it more closely. ‘It might be used for veterinary medicine. It’s big enough.’ He straightened up. ‘It’s not a drug addict’s, that’s for certain.’

‘The jacket is definitely Greenlandic,’ said Alvar, who had kept to himself until now. ‘The other junk I know nothing about.’

Eyjólfur looked triumphant. ‘So my theory that Oddný Hildur got a ride on a dogsled is maybe not so far-fetched after all. Maybe this jacket and these snowshoes are from whoever drove the sled.’

‘And why should he have left them behind? Was there a sudden heatwave?’ Friðrikka spoke like a primary school kid, with the same sing-song contempt that can be heard in every school playground at break-time.

Matthew let go of the back of the chair that he’d been holding on to and it hit the edge of the table hard, shifting the objects slightly. ‘This is all just conjecture. We don’t know what was out there in the ice and we don’t know anything about these things, which – according to Friðrikka – shouldn’t have been in the drilling rig.’ He nudged the ice axe. ‘The only logical explanation is that this was used to free whatever was in the ice. Anything else is so far from being feasible that it’s pointless to wonder about it.’

‘One other thing is certain. If this was Oddný Hildur, then she didn’t die of exposure,’ said Friðrikka, now speaking in her normal, slightly husky voice. ‘It’s been about six months since she disappeared and it’s impossible that she was buried beneath two metres of ice and snow during that time. Maybe snow, but not ice. It was a deep hole and it would have been necessary to use a shovel for her to have been buried that deep.’

‘Would she have been able to dig herself down to take shelter from the weather?’ asked Thóra, directing her question at Alvar. As a rescuer, he must know this.

‘Dig herself into the ice?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I can’t imagine it. People generally find themselves a snowdrift or thick sheets of snow. I’ve never heard of someone digging himself or herself several metres down into ice.’ He looked at his toes, embarrassed at his own stream of words. Thóra had never met a man so shy. ‘Of course I don’t know how conditions have changed these past six months.’

They all stared at the table, each struggling to come up with a sensible explanation. Surprisingly, it was Bella who broke the silence with a theory that seemed fairly reasonable. ‘Couldn’t someone have murdered this geologist lady and buried her, and then when the drillers found the body by accident, the same person murdered them too?’

They nodded thoughtfully, all except the doctor who stood with his arms crossed and an unhappy look on his sunburned face. ‘I don’t see why this mysterious murderer should have wanted to kill this woman in the first place, let alone any men who might have found the body. What would be the point?’ Bella had managed to offend the doctor that morning, when he had tried again to point out to her the hazards of smoking. She had told him to mind his own business, and added that she wasn’t constantly pointing out to him that he was losing his hair, which was just as obvious as the fact that smoking was dangerous. ‘That I don’t know,’ she now replied airily. ‘Maybe they found something on the body that pointed to the killer? Maybe one of these things is a clue to the identity of the murderer.’