Yrsa Sigurdardóttir - The Day Is Dark

‘That depends on what you can tell me.’ Thóra hoped that Matthew and the doctor wouldn’t come rushing up and scare the woman away. She had something to say and Thóra guessed that now she was trying to put a value on the information. ‘I’m mainly trying to find out about two men who disappeared from here recently.’

The woman exhaled, once again emitting a sour odour of alcohol. ‘I know which men you’re talking about.’

Thóra tried to conceal the excitement that gripped her. Was it conceivable that the men were here in the village? ‘Have you met them recently?’ The woman shook her head energetically. ‘Did they come here after the others went home?’

‘One of them,’ replied the woman. ‘The fat one. He came alone.’

‘When was that and what did he want?’ After blurting this out, Thóra went silent; she had to keep control of her questions even though others were springing to mind. Matthew and Finnbogi had the photo of the drillers, so she couldn’t ask the woman to point out the one she meant. If Thóra remembered correctly, Bjarki was much bigger than Dóri, but that was a moot point if only one of them had come to the village.

The woman shrugged, causing her light blue jacket to lift slightly. It was so thick and stiff that it took a moment for the garment to sink back to its place. Until it did, the woman looked neckless. ‘I don’t know exactly when he arrived. It was more than a week ago. Maybe two. He wanted to make a call.’

‘A call?’ Thóra could not remember having read or heard of a phone call during the period the woman was talking about. The camp’s telephone connection had supposedly been cut off several days after the two drillers were left behind alone, and no one had mentioned that they’d made contact since then. ‘Do you know who he wanted to call?’

The woman looked with pursed lips at Thóra. ‘You’re definitely going to pay me?’ Thóra nodded and the woman continued, although the words seemed to come out reluctantly. ‘I don’t know. Probably the police or a doctor. He was looking for someone like that.’

‘And was he able to make a call?’ asked Thóra, hoping that the answer would be yes. Maybe the men had been arrested and because of some red tape had been stuck in a Greenlandic prison without the knowledge of the Icelandic authorities. The arrest could even have been connected with the body they found in the ice.

‘No,’ replied the woman. ‘No one would let him in. He was very strange and I know it never crossed my mind to open my door. He would have been better off going home, as I tried to tell him through the door. He didn’t listen.’

‘How do you know that he didn’t go home?’

‘Well, he left when it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to use a phone, and he couldn’t have gone anywhere else other than back to the camp. The only clear way from here to other towns is by helicopter, and no one else came here between the time that the big group left and you arrived. There are no roads leading here, and the man didn’t have access to a boat, not that he would have been able to sail it through the ice anyway.’

‘What about a dogsled or a snowmobile?’ Thóra hadn’t seen a snowmobile at the work site, though it was unthinkable that Berg Technology wouldn’t have provided such a thing. Perhaps the men had tried to make it to a more southerly settlement by snowmobile, and died of exposure on the way.

‘He didn’t go by dogsled, that’s for sure,’ replied the woman emphatically. ‘There’s no one here who would have taken him, and he didn’t steal dogs or a sled. I would have heard about it. And I didn’t notice any snowmobiles. They’re loud and the dogs always bark at them.’ She stuck her hands in her pockets and shrugged her shoulders, her jacket rising again and making her neck disappear once more. ‘They know that they’re a threat to them. They can sometimes replace the dogs. But not always.’ She realized that she’d got off the subject and went back to it. ‘No one would have taken the man on a dogsled or a snowmobile.’

‘Why would no one have wanted to take him if he needed help?’ Thóra suspected that the woman wasn’t quite as all-knowing about what happened in the village as she pretended to be. ‘Do you dislike outsiders so much?’ Thóra’s sentences had become practically all English since her Danish vocabulary could no longer handle the conversation. But it didn’t seem to do any harm.

The woman frowned. ‘We’re not bad to outsiders. We don’t like the place you choose to live in. No one should be there; you are disturbing the evil that dwells there and by doing so you’re putting us all in danger. We just want you to go somewhere else.’

In a way, Thóra was slightly relieved, as it was conceivable that the natives’ prejudices against the work site could be used to justify the delays on the project. There was nothing in the contract to protect Berg against this, even though it could be argued that it should have been included. The villagers had possibly done more than just nag the staff to go home. ‘What’s wrong with that area?’

The woman looked panicked. ‘Nothing that you would understand,’ she said. ‘I want my money.’

‘You’ve got to tell me,’ replied Thóra. ‘Is the area considered bad because of a particular occurrence, or is something else wrong with it? Something palpable such as polar bears or other dangers?’

The woman had grown irritated. Her eyes narrowed as she stood there shuffling her feet and looking around as if to see how many people were witness to the conversation. Although there was no one else to be seen, there were doubtless people watching from behind the curtains of the nearby houses. ‘I don’t know. It’s just something that everyone knows. The area is bad and it’s dangerous to be there. We never go there and if you had listened to us then you wouldn’t be looking for this man.’ She stopped her hopeless search for invisible observers and looked at Thóra head-on. Her pitch-black pupils gleamed in the yellow whites of her eyes. ‘You’ll never find him.’

Before Thóra could reply to this assertion, Matthew and Finnbogi started heading back over to the car. The woman appeared startled. ‘Those are my friends,’ said Thóra, to try to calm her down. She had a certain sympathy for the woman’s sense of self-preservation, to agree to speak to a stranger in the hope of payment – there were hardly many opportunities to make money in the village. The boats in the harbour were of the sort used for small, personal catches; larger fishing vessels could not enter the harbour, which was surrounded by sea ice. The villagers should actually have celebrated the project as a source of increased opportunities for work that it surely brought. Instead, their complete lack of interest in attempting to profit from the project clearly revealed their deep-rooted fear of the afflicted place. Thóra pointed at Matthew as he approached with Finnbogi. ‘He’s got the money.’ The woman nodded worriedly. While Thóra explained things to the two men, the Greenlander stood there looking as if she expected the three of them to do her in.

None of them had any idea how much they should pay the woman. Finnbogi was convinced that if they paid her too much, they would soon be beset by people who would invent stories simply for the money. In the end they gave her five hundred Danish crowns and she took them without any indication as to whether it was more or less than she’d expected. She thanked them in a soft voice as she stuffed the bills into her pocket. ‘Where do you live?’ asked Thóra.

‘Why?’ The woman’s voice was suspicious and she frowned instinctively.

‘I might need to speak to you again,’ Thóra replied. ‘If the phones at the camp can’t be reconnected we might need to make a call from your phone. Of course we’ll pay if it should come to that. I’d also like to know more about what you were saying about the work site. You could maybe try to find out from some of the older people here what the explanation is for the area’s bad reputation.’