Yrsa Sigurdardóttir - The Day Is Dark

The woman shook her head. ‘I don’t want to talk to them for you. You’ll just have to do that yourselves.’ She appeared to be somewhat undecided, however, and it was perhaps in the hope of receiving more cash that she didn’t leave. She looked away from Thóra and began to scan the windows of the nearby houses again.

‘We can’t get anyone else to speak to us and you know that,’ said Thóra. ‘You’re the only person who’s offered to help at all. I promise that we’ll pay you for all the assistance you give us.’

The woman looked around her one last time and finally turned to Thóra and pointed discreetly in the direction of the harbour. ‘See that house standing at the end of the village? It’s blue.’ Thóra saw that it was the house she’d noticed as they drove through the village. From this angle it didn’t appear any more attractive than it had earlier. Bright orange skis stood stuck in the snow against the house’s gable but otherwise there was little there that called to mind sports or a healthy lifestyle. Thóra assumed that the woman had been behind the curtains that moved as they passed by. ‘I live there.’ She peered furtively at the men. ‘You can make calls from there if you want. Not them. Just you.’ She turned away without saying goodbye.

‘What about the information?’ called out Thóra after the woman had turned her back on them. ‘Can you try to find out for me about the history of the area?’

The woman replied without looking back. ‘No. You could try talking to Igimaq. He should know the story.’

‘Who is Igimaq?’ The doctor was the first to ask and Thóra tried as best she could to hide her irritation. The woman clearly would not answer him – only Thóra.

The woman looked back angrily and stared hard at Thóra, acting as if the two men were not standing there. Finnbogi had the good sense to say nothing. ‘He’s an old hunter and he knows this area well. He’s even experienced first hand what it costs to spend time in those parts. He lost his daughter there.’

‘What do you mean?’ Thóra started thinking about the polar bear again. ‘Did she die of exposure?’

‘Ask Igimaq yourself. He lives west of town. If you head towards the black cliff you can see in front of the glacier, you’ll come across his tent.’ She looked from Thóra to the car. ‘You won’t make it there in that. You’ve got to find yourselves dogsleds or snowmobiles.’ She turned away from them once more and walked away. ‘Good luck finding it.’

They watched her as she strode off, proud and upright, and Thóra admired the way the young woman managed to keep her back so straight. It was as if they were watching one of the most illustrious women in the village. Despite her yellowed eyes and the odour of alcohol, they could still sense her proud spirit, which must have been based on her coming from much sturdier stock than them. It was as if she were two different people, a front and a back, where the front had stumbled on the road of life but the back was still proud and victorious.

‘Okay. Igimaq.’ Finnbogi looked to the sky in the hope of seeing where the sun was in its short working day. He had forgotten about the fog, which made it impossible for him to determine the source of the grey light that slipped through. ‘Perhaps we should check whether we can find even one snowmobile.’ He sighed loudly. ‘We forgot to show her the bone and the Tupilak.’ He tapped lightly at his jacket pocket.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Matthew. ‘I suspect this Igimaq knows more about these things than the girl, anyway.’

‘If he wants to talk to us about them at all,’ said Thóra, rolling up the window. There was no need to breathe in more cold air when warmer air was available. It wasn’t always possible to make such a choice. On a snowmobile, for instance.

In the end they were unable to meet Igimaq. There was a snowmobile at the camp, as Thóra had expected, but it wasn’t in working order. Alvar spent the rest of the day trying to repair it, with no luck. They’d found it inside a storage unit behind the camp on a tip-off from Friðrikka and Eyjólfur, the latter of whom went with Matthew and Alvar to the unit, happy to stop working on the satellite dishes for a while. He had made no progress, and the dishes appeared to have suffered some rather unusual damage. The one on the roof of the office building was on its side, but the roof and the cables, which still connected it to strong fastenings, had prevented it from falling off. The banging they had heard during the storm had most likely come from the dish. Eyjólfur had fixed it back in its place but hadn’t got it to work properly, even though he considered it possible that the Internet connection could go on and off as it appeared to have done while the dish was swinging on the roof at the mercy of the wind. It was a different story with the dish on the roof of the cafeteria, to which the phones were connected. It was in a worse state, having presumably been subjected to more damage before it came loose, and in the end Eyjólfur came to the conclusion that its receiving equipment was so badly broken that phone calls were out of the question.

It was difficult to gauge the reasons why the dishes had suffered so much damage outside. Eyjólfur thought it doubtful that the weather was to blame, and tended towards the opinion that someone had hammered at the devices with a crowbar or other heavy object until they came loose. There could be no other explanation for the dents on them, he thought.

Eyjólfur must have still been thinking about the satellite dishes when he arrived at the storage unit, since the first thing that crossed his mind was that it had been broken into. The unit was unlocked and the paint was scraped away in several dented spots around the lock bracket. Inside was the snowmobile, surrounded by tyres of all shapes and sizes, spare car parts and various other supplies. Eyjólfur didn’t notice anything missing, so the team did not set much store by his conclusion that it was a case of breaking and entering. There could have been other reasons for the dents on the rusted bracket, and it was also possible that the hanging lock on the unit had disappeared long ago. Eyjólfur pointed out that he wasn’t particularly interested in cars or their maintenance and had only been in the unit once before, so he couldn’t say for sure what it had contained. However, he was certain that the unit’s door had always been securely locked. Friðrikka had never been in the unit either, but she remembered that she had once walked past it when its door stood open. She recalled nothing about what had been in it. Of course it was possible that someone had broken into it to damage the snowmobile, although on what impulse she had no idea. The only motive they could think of was that someone had intended to hinder the drillers’ movements, although no one could contribute anything when Matthew sought an explanation for the possible reasons for wanting to do this. It was clear that the damage – if there was actually any damage – was not of the kind suffered by the satellite dishes, since there were no marks or dents visible on the snowmobile.

As the discussion about possible vandalism reached its peak, Friðrikka pointed out that the drillers had also had the use of two cars, so damaging the snowmobile to immobilize the men would have been a fairly pointless exercise. The cars had been parked outside when they arrived and it hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind to check their condition. When they went to do so, they discovered that the cars wouldn’t start, and it looked very likely that one of the engines had burned out.

Now, Thóra was sitting at the computer in the office that Friðrikka said had been used by Oddný Hildur. She was planning to upload the photos that Eyjólfur had taken of the damage to the satellite dishes on the roof. Later, she would transfer the images to her laptop, but it was easier to view them on a good screen that wasn’t covered with the fingerprints of small children. Everything now suggested that the drillers’ disappearance, and consequently the cessation of the project, could be attributed to human intervention, and hence the photos could be useful to the bank in its dispute with the mining company. However, it was impossible to say who was behind this or why. Of course it was not out of the question that nature had been asserting itself, that a violent wind had blown over the satellite dishes, but Thóra doubted that a polar bear or other wild animal had been involved; the roof was too high for that. Nor did the damage to the dishes appear to have been caused by claws or teeth. The dents in the thick metal shield were huge, and there were no scratches or scrapes to be seen. The marks could hardly have been made by anything but a tool. After her conversation with the Greenlandic woman she found it not entirely absurd to suppose that one of the villagers might bear the responsibility for it. There was a thin line between denying assistance to those in need and causing them wilful damage through acts of vandalism. Perhaps the villagers had been offended when their warnings hadn’t been heeded and had taken action in this way, which then raised the question of whether they had also played a part in the disappearance and death of Oddný Hildur. Thóra had deliberately chosen to use the computer the missing woman had used, on the off-chance that something was hidden there that might shed light on her disappearance. So after uploading the photographs, Thóra focused on combing through the computer’s files, and quickly became lost in that jungle.