Yrsa Sigurdardóttir - The Day Is Dark

By the time she had more or less finished viewing everything that she considered to be of any worth, the rumbling in her belly was driving her crazy. She looked at the clock on the screen and saw that time had flown. She didn’t feel any better informed. Oddný Hildur appeared to have been rather reticent and did not leave any clues about herself on her computer. Her e-mails were incredibly unexciting and centred mostly on work; there were numerous short messages with attached reports about the progress of the project and strata that Thóra did not understand at all. Still, several messages to the owner of the company roused Thóra’s interest. In them Oddný Hildur appeared to be complaining about the atmosphere at the workplace and the harassment she said the engineer Arnar was suffering. Thóra searched for and found the man’s reply, in which he seemed to disregard all of Oddný Hildur’s concerns and make little of her request for him to intervene. His message contained rather feeble advice such as, ‘ It sounds like it’s just good-natured teasing that shouldn’t be taken seriously ,’ and ‘ I’m sure it doesn’t matter to him, he has a thick skin ,’ and Thóra could not help but admire the geologist’s determination not to give up. She had sent her final message on this subject two days before she disappeared. The message hadn’t been answered. In it she had said that it was now no longer possible to turn a blind eye to the matter; the man was having a bad time of it and the cruelty of his co-workers clearly ‘did matter to him’; the harassment was becoming more serious and was heading towards something that could not be taken back. Thóra recalled the tiff between Friðrikka and Eyjólfur over the homosexual engineer. Although she was unable to be completely certain, it all looked as if the poor man had been made an outsider by the prejudices of his co-workers. At least that’s what she had understood from the conversation, even though she also vaguely recalled Eyjólfur’s argument that it was the man’s alcoholism that had made him unpopular – or rather the fact that he had managed to gain control over the disease, which had made him boringly holier-than-thou. It wasn’t possible to determine, either from Oddný Hildur’s messages or from her boss’s reply, whether it was the man’s sexual preference or his sobriety that had provoked the harassment.

Besides this, Thóra found an exchange of emails between Oddný Hildur and Arnar himself. It wasn’t clear from these either what had caused the harassment or how Arnar felt about it. Thóra’s interpretation was that he had tried to tough it out, and didn’t feel comfortable complaining even though his co-workers’ behaviour hurt him. Of course it must have. If Oddný Hildur’s insinuations were anything to go by, it would have been bad enough to have had to endure it eight to ten hours a day, five days a week, but in this case workplace and home were merged into one for a huge portion of the year, with no refuge to be had anywhere. Thus, statements such as, ‘ It doesn’t matter, I’m not going to let them affect me ,’ and ‘ Luckily I don’t care what others think of me ,’ could not have been made with complete sincerity. Arnar had written them more to convince himself than Oddný Hildur; he had tried to build an invisible shield that protected him from all of it. However, one sentence clearly showed that if there were such a shield, it was not solid. Arnar had invited Oddný Hildur to coffee at his apartment one evening to discuss this and that; he had been thinking about quitting since ‘ this isn’t working any more ’. This message was the last that Thóra found from him to Oddný Hildur, and it had been sent two days before the geologist disappeared. If she had answered him, her message had been deleted. It was certainly possible that Oddný Hildur had accepted the invitation verbally; they worked in the same building and ate all their meals at the same table. It was actually strange that they should have e-mailed each other at all, although Thóra knew that she herself sent her colleagues e-mails when she didn’t feel like getting up and speaking to them face to face. It was often just quicker that way. In any case, she would have to speak to this Arnar when they returned to Iceland.

The woman appeared to have had few friends to whom she sent e-mails, but that might not be the whole story. Thóra personally chose to keep her work e-mail separate from her personal e-mail, other than in exceptional circumstances. She used a different address for the personal mail and it was generally full to the brim with silly pictures, jokes and stories that one was supposed to forward to at least ten others, who doubtless cared as little for such rubbish as Thóra herself did. It could well be that Oddný Hildur had been drowning in e-mails from her friends and acquaintances but that that mailbox was located elsewhere in cyberspace. With things as they were, it would be of little use for Thóra to try to investigate the main e-mail applications in the hope that the geologist had let the computer save her password. It was fairly clear that Oddný Hildur’s friends and relatives were not connected with her disappearance, but it was conceivable that the woman had sent them more comprehensive descriptions of the situation in the camp.

Suddenly Thóra missed her family terribly. Never before had she been out of touch with her children for so long. She longed to know what they were doing, how Orri’s potty training was going and whether Sóley was practising her violin, which she had recently started learning at her father’s request. Thóra suspected that Hannes would be much less enthusiastic about the idea when the shrill notes started sounding through his house than he had been when he asked Thóra to encourage their daughter to practise. She hoped that everything was going well, and was especially concerned about Gylfi’s relationship with his father. They had probably ended up arguing a bit while Thóra was away. Her little family was fragile and without her it lacked the padding that generally absorbed the worst knocks of daily life. She had to hold on to her chair to prevent herself from running out to the car and rushing over to the house of the woman in the village to phone home. Her hunger must be starting to affect her brain function; it was high time she had something to eat.

Matthew walked in. ‘How’s it going? I’m absolutely famished, and Bella’s probably finished putting dinner together.’

‘Bella? Is she cooking?’ At that news Thóra’s hunger disappeared like dew under the sun. ‘What’s on the menu? Barbecued seal fins and cigarette pudding?’ She turned off the monitor in front of her.

‘She didn’t have anything to do so I thought it was the perfect assignment.’ Matthew smiled at her. ‘I would ask you out to eat but it’s probably not that easy to get a table at such short notice at the restaurants round here.’ He wrapped his arms around her shoulders. ‘We’re almost done here. The helicopter’s coming not tomorrow, not the day after, but the day after that, so we actually only have two days left.’

Thóra smiled back at him. ‘I’ll never talk to you again if the weather prevents it.’ She stood up and stretched. Her vertebrae cracked. ‘The worst thing is that I feel we’re making so little progress. I’m no closer to understanding what happened here, and every new piece of information we discover just complicates things.’

‘At least we know how things look now, and Friðrikka says that she’s advanced quite a long way with her assessment of the project. She can’t see anything that would prevent her from finishing before we leave.’ He pointed at a multicoloured organizational chart that had been taped to the wall. ‘You never know, we might just get to the bottom of this when we talk to the employees in Iceland.’