Arnaldur Indridason - Arctic Chill

Elias said that he did not have any money. He tried to tear himself free but Agust held on to him. Hallur took out the knife to frighten him. They didn’t mean to hurt him, they were just messing about. Hallur threatened him with the knife. Brandished it in his face.

Elias struggled even more frantically when he saw the knife. He began to call for help and Agust put a hand over his mouth. Elias fought for all he was worth. Agust shouted to warn Hallur that he was going to let him go when Elias bit his hand, hurting him so badly that he yelled out.

Hallur had hold of Elias’s anorak and before he knew what he was doing he had stabbed him with the knife. Elias stopped struggling. He fell silent, clutched his stomach and crumpled onto the path.

Hallur and Agust looked at one another, then set off at a run down the path, back the way they had come.

They took the bus to Agust’s house. They were in shock. Agust’s father was home and without a moment’s hesitation they poured out the whole story. Hallur’s hand was covered in blood. He had thrown away the knife on the way home. They said that they had stabbed a boy on the path by the school. They didn’t mean to. It was an accident. They never meant to hurt the boy. It just happened. Agust’s father stared at them, stunned.

Agust’s mother came home at that point and immediately saw that something serious had happened. When she heard what the boys had done she wanted to call the police straight away. Her husband prevaricated.

“Did anyone see you?” he asked the boys.

They shook their heads.

“No, no one,” Hallur said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s the knife?”

Hallur described the place.

“Wait here,” Agust’s father said. “Don’t do anything till I get back.”

“What are you doing?” his wife moaned.

He took her aside, out of earshot of the boys.

“Think about it,” he said. “Think about the boys” future while I’m away. Call my sister. Tell her to come round and bring Dori with her.”

He went out and returned three-quarters of an hour later with the knife. He announced that the boy was not on the path and they breathed easier. Maybe he was all right.

At that moment Hallur’s parents arrived and were told what had happened. They couldn’t believe their ears at first until they saw the boys” expressions and sensed Agust’s parents” helplessness in the face of the unthinkable. They looked at their son, and all of a sudden they knew that it was true. Something horrific and incomprehensible had happened and nothing would ever be the same again.

“We didn’t mean to do it,” Hallur said.

“It just happened,” Agust added.

They had nothing else to say.

“So it wasn’t Agust who stabbed him?” his mother asked.

“They were both involved,” Hallur’s father said firmly. “Your son was holding him.”

“Your son stabbed him.”

A row broke out and the boys looked on. The brother and sister, Hallur’s mother and Agust’s father, eventually managed to calm down their spouses. Agust’s father proposed that they should not go to the police yet.

They quarrelled again. In the end, the fathers went out looking for Elias. If he had disappeared from the path it might mean that he was all right. As they drove through the neighbourhood they noticed police cars parked by a block of flats. Cruising slowly past they saw uniformed officers in the garden of the block and a number of squad cars, their blue lights reflecting off the surrounding buildings in the winter dusk.

They drove away.

They waited at Agust’s house for the news, caught between hope and fear. The radio reported that Elias had been found dead. The police were refusing to release any details but the attack seemed to have been entirely unprovoked and might conceivably have had a racist motive. It was not known who was behind the deed and no witness to the incident had yet come forward.

In the end they agreed to wait. Hallur’s father would dispose of the knife. The cousins were not to meet for a while. They would behave as if nothing had happened. The damage had been done, their boys had killed another boy, but surely it was an accident rather than premeditated murder. It had started out as a harmless prank. They hadn’t meant to hurt the boy. Of course they would never be able to forget what had happened but they had to think about their sons” future, at least for the time being. Wait and see.

Erlendur took part in cross-examining Agust’s mother. She had been seeing a psychiatrist since the arrest and was on tranquillisers.

“Of course we should never have done it,” she said. “But we weren’t thinking of ourselves, we were thinking of the boys.”

“Of course you were thinking of yourselves,” Erlendur said.

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Did you really think you’d be able to live with that on your conscience?” Erlendur asked.

“No,” she said. “Not me. I…”

“You called me,” Erlendur said. “You were the weakest link.”

“I can’t describe it,” she said, rocking in her seat. “I was suicidal. It was a mistake. Not a minute has passed since it happened when I haven’t thought about that poor little boy and his family. Of course it was an error of judgement on our parts, a moral lapse but-‘ She broke off.

“I know we shouldn’t have done it. I know it was wrong and I tried to tell you. But you . . . you reacted so strangely.”

“I know,” Erlendur said. “I thought you were somebody else.”

“We believed them when they said it was an accident. Things like that can happen. We wouldn’t have done it otherwise. We would never have tried to cover up a murder. My husband said that every parent would understand what we did. Understand our reaction.”

“I don’t believe that,” Erlendur said. “You wanted it to go away, to disappear as if it had nothing to do with you. You added outrage to an already terrible crime.”

When it was all over, the police had obtained their confessions and the case was officially deemed to be closed, Erlendur sat down with Hallur in an interview room at the place where he was being held by the Child Welfare Agency. They talked over the incident at length and Erlendur asked why they had decided to attack Elias. What had given them the idea.

“Just, you know,” Hallur said.

“You know what?”

“He was there.”

“That was the only reason?”

“We were bored.”

Erlendur held the urn in his hand, a plain, green ceramic pot with a decorated lid, containing the ashes of Marion Briem. It had been delivered to him in a brown paper bag. He looked down into the small grave, then stooped and lowered the urn into it. The minister looked on, making the sign of the cross. They were the only two people in the cemetery on that raw January afternoon.

The snow that had fallen in the blizzard the night Niran attacked Kjartan had mostly thawed during the two days of rain that followed. After that the mercury had plummeted again, the ground was frozen hard and a bitter north wind chilled them to the bone.

Erlendur stood over the grave in the freezing cold, searching for a purpose to the whole business of life and death. As usual he could find no answers. There were no final answers to explain the life-long solitude of the person in the urn, or the death of his brother all those years ago, or why Erlendur was the way he was, and why Elias was stabbed to death. Life was a random mass of unforeseeable coincidences that governed men’s fates like a storm that strikes without warning, causing injury and death.

Erlendur thought about Marion Briem and their shared story, which was now at an end. He felt a sense of loss and regret. He had not realised until he was standing there alone with the urn in his hands that it was over. He thought about their relationship, the experiences they had shared, the story that was part of him, that he could not and would not have done without. It was him.