Arnaldur Indridason: The Draining Lake

“It’s for you,” she said, smiling.

“Were you asleep?” a voice said at the other end of the line.

“Yes,” Sigurdur Oli lied. “I’ve asked you not to call me at home. I don’t want you to.”

“Sorry,” the voice said. “I can’t sleep. I’m taking medication and tranquillisers and sleeping tablets but none of them work.”

“You can’t just call whenever you please,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Sorry,” the man said. “I don’t feel too good.”

“Okay,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“It was a year ago,” the man said. “To the day.”

“Yes,” Sigurdur Oli said. “I know.”

“A whole year of hell,” the man said.

“Try to stop thinking about it,” Sigurdur Oli said. “It’s time you stopped tormenting yourself like this. It doesn’t help.”

“That’s easy enough to say,” the man on the telephone said.

“I know,” Sigurdur Oli said. “But just try.”

“What was I thinking of with those bloody strawberries?”

“We’ve been through this a thousand times,” Sigurdur Oli said, shaking his head as he glanced at Bergthora. “It wasn’t your fault. Stop torturing yourself.”

“Of course it was,” the man said. “Of course it was my fault. It was all my fault.”

Then he rang off.

The woman looked at them in turn, gave a weak smile and invited them in. Elinborg went first and Erlendur closed the door behind them. They had telephoned in advance and the woman had placed crullers and soda cake on the table. The aroma of coffee wafted in from the kitchen. This was a town house in Breidholt suburb. Elinborg had spoken to the woman on the telephone. She had remarried. Her son from the previous marriage was doing a doctorate in medicine in the States. She had had two children with her second husband. Surprised by Elinborg’s call, she had taken the afternoon off work to meet her and Erlendur at home.

“Is it him?” the woman asked as she offered them a seat. Her name was Kristin, she was past sixty and had put on weight with age. She had heard on the news about the skeleton that had been found in Lake Kleifarvatn.

“We don’t know,” Erlendur said. “We know it’s a male but we’re waiting for a more precise age on it.”

A few days had passed since the skeleton had been found. Some bones had been sent for carbon analysis but the pathologist had also used a different method, which she thought could speed up the results.

“Speed up the results how?” Erlendur had asked Elinborg.

“She uses the aluminium smelter in Straumsvik.”

“The smelter?”

“She’s studying the history of pollution from it. It involves sulphur dioxide and fluoride and that sort of gunge. Have you heard about it?”

“No.”

“A certain amount of sulphur dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere and falls onto the land and the sea; it’s found in lakes near the smelter, such as Kleifarvatn. They’ve reduced the quantity now with improved pollution control. She said she found a trace in the bones and at a very provisional estimate says the body was put in the lake before 1970.”

“Give or take?”

“Five years either way.”

At this stage the investigation into the skeleton from Kleifarvatn focused on males who had gone missing between 1960 and 1975. There were eight cases in the whole of Iceland. Five had lived in or around Reykjavik.

Kristin’s first husband had been one of them. The detectives had read the files. She had reported his disappearance herself. One day he had not come home from work. She’d had his dinner ready for him. Their son was playing on the floor. She bathed the boy, put him to bed and tidied up in the kitchen. Then sat down and waited. She would have watched television, but in those days there were no broadcasts on Thursdays.

This was the autumn of 1969. They lived in a small flat they had recently bought. He was an estate agent and had been given a good deal on it. She had just finished Commercial College when they met. A year later they were married with due ceremony and a year after that their son was born. Her husband worshipped him.

“That’s why I couldn’t understand it,” Kristin said, her gaze flicking between them.

Erlendur had a feeling that she was still waiting for the husband who had so suddenly and inexplicably vanished from her life. He visualised her waiting alone in the autumn gloom. Calling people who knew him and their friends, telephoning the family, who would quietly gather in the flat over the following days to give her strength and support her in her grief.

“We were happy,” she said. “Our little boy Benni was the apple of our eye, I’d got a job with the Merchants” Association and as far as I knew my husband was doing well at work. It was a big estate agency and he was a great salesman. He wasn’t so good at school, dropped out after two years, but he worked hard and I thought he was happy with life. He never suggested otherwise to me.”

She poured coffee into their cups.

“I didn’t notice anything unusual on the last day,” Kristin went on, passing them the dish of crullers. “He said goodbye to me in the morning, phoned at lunchtime just to say hello and again to say he would be a little late. That was the last I heard from him.”

“But wasn’t he having trouble at work, even if he didn’t tell you?” Elinborg asked. “We read the reports and…”

“Redundancies were on the way. He’d spoken about it a few days earlier but didn’t know who. Then he was called in that day and told that they no longer needed him. The owner told me that later. He said my husband had showed no response to being made redundant, didn’t protest or ask for an explanation, just went back out and sat down at his desk. Didn’t react.”

“He didn’t phone you to tell you?” Elinborg asked.

“No,” the woman said, and Erlendur could sense the sorrow still enveloping her. “Like I told you, he phoned but didn’t say a word about losing his job.”

“Why was he made redundant?” Erlendur asked.

“I never had a satisfactory answer to that. I think the owner wanted to show me compassion or consideration when we spoke. He said they needed to cut back because sales were down, but later I heard that Ragnar had apparently lost interest in the job. Lost interest in what he was doing. After a school reunion he had talked about enrolling again and finishing. He was invited to the reunion even though he had quit school and all his old friends had become doctors and lawyers and engineers. That was the way he talked. As if it brought him down, dropping out of school.”

“Did you link this to his disappearance in any way?” Erlendur asked.

“No, not particularly,” Kristin said. “I can just as easily put it down to a little tiff we had the day before. Or that our son was difficult at night. Or that he couldn’t afford a new car. Really I don’t know what to think.”

“Was he depressive?” Elinborg said, noticing Kristin slip into the present tense, as if it had all just happened.

“No more than most Icelanders. He went missing in the autumn, if that means anything.”

“At the time you ruled out the possibility that there was anything criminal about his disappearance,” Erlendur said.

“Yes,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine that. He wasn’t involved in anything of that sort. If he met someone who murdered him, it would have been pure bad luck. The thought that anything like that happened never crossed my mind, nor yours at the police. You never treated his disappearance as a criminal matter either. He stayed behind at work until everyone had left and that was the last time he was seen.”

“Wasn’t his disappearance ever investigated as a criminal matter?” Elinborg said.