Arnaldur Indridason - The Draining Lake

Early that evening he went for another walk, as he sometimes did. As a man of routine he generally followed the same streets in the western quarter and alongside the seashore on Aegisida. He walked slowly and stared in through the windows of the house, expecting to catch a glimpse of Lothar, but saw nothing. Only two windows were lit and he could not discern anyone inside. He was about to go back home when a black Volga suddenly backed out of the drive beside the house and drove down Aegisida away from him.

He did not know what he was doing. He did not know what he expected to see or what would happen next. Even if he saw Lothar leave the house he would not have known whether to call out or simply follow him. What was he supposed to say to him?

For the next few evenings he would walk along Aegisida and past the house, and one evening he saw three people leaving it. Two got into a black Volga and drove away while the third, who was Lothar, said goodbye to them and walked up Hofsvallagata towards the city centre. It was about eight o’clock and he followed him. Lothar walked slowly up to Tungata, along Gardastraeti all the way to Vesturgata, where he entered the Naustid restaurant.

He spent two hours waiting outside the restaurant while Lothar dined. It was autumn and the evenings were beginning to turn noticeably colder, but he was dressed warmly in a winter coat with a scarf and a cap with ear flaps. Playing this childish game of spies made him feel rather silly. He mainly stayed on Fischersund, trying not to let the restaurant door out of his sight. When Lothar finally reemerged, he went down Vesturgata and along Austurstraeti towards the Thingholt district. On Bergstadastraeti, he stopped outside a small shed in the back garden of a house not far from Hotel Holt. The door opened and someone let Lothar in. He did not see who it was.

He could not imagine what was going on and, driven by curiosity, he hesitantly approached the shed. The street lighting did not reach that far and he inched his way carefully forward in the near-dark. There was a padlock on the door. He crept up to a small window on the side of the shed and peered inside. A lamp was switched on over a workbench and in its light he could see the two men.

One of them reached out for something under the light. Suddenly he saw who it was and darted back from the window. It was as if he had been hit in the face.

It was his old student friend from Leipzig, whom he had not seen for all those years.

Emil.

He crept away from the shed and back onto the street, where he waited for a long time until Lothar emerged. Emil was with him. Emil vanished into the darkness beside the shed, but Lothar set off again for the west of town. He had no idea what kind of contact Emil and Lothar maintained. As far as he knew, Emil lived abroad.

He turned all this over in his mind without reaching a conclusion. In the end he decided to visit Hannes. He had done that once before, as soon as he returned from East Germany, to tell him about Ilona. Hannes might know something about Emil and Lothar.

Lothar went into the house on Aegisida. Tomas waited for a while a reasonable distance away before setting off home, and suddenly the German’s strange and incomprehensible sentence at their last encounter entered his mind:

Take a closer look.

Driving back from Selfoss, Erlendur and Elinborg discussed Hannes’s story. It was evening and there was not much traffic on Hellisheidi moor. Erlendur thought about the black Falcon. There would hardly have been many on the streets in those days. Yet the Falcon was popular, according to Elinborg’s husband Teddi. He thought about Tomas, whose girlfriend had gone missing in East Germany. They would visit him at the first opportunity. He still could not work out the link between the body in the lake and the Leipzig students in the 1960s. And he thought about Eva Lind, who was destroying herself in spite of his attempts to save her, and about his son Sindri, whom he did not know in the slightest. He puzzled over all this without managing to organise his thoughts. Giving him a sideways glance, Elinborg asked what was on his mind.

“Nothing,” he said.

“There must be something,” Elinborg said.

“No,” Erlendur said. “It’s nothing.”

Elinborg shrugged. Erlendur thought about Valgerdur, from whom he had not heard for several days. He knew that she needed time and he was in no hurry either. What she saw in him was a riddle to Erlendur. He could not understand what attracted Valgerdur to a lonely, depressive man who lived in a gloomy block of flats. He asked himself sometimes whether he deserved her friendship at all.

However, he knew precisely what it was that he liked about Valgerdur. He had known from the first moment. She was everything he was not but would love to be. To all intents and purposes she was his opposite. Attractive, smiling and happy. In spite of the marital problems she had to deal with, which Erlendur knew had had a profound effect on her, she tried not to let them ruin her life. She always saw the upside to any problem and was incapable of feeling hatred or irritation about anything. She allowed nothing to darken her outlook on life, which was gentle and generous. Not even her husband, whom Erlendur regarded as a moron for being unfaithful to such a woman.

Erlendur knew perfectly what he saw in her. Being with her reinvigorated him.

“Tell me what you’re thinking about,” Elinborg pleaded. She was bored.

“Nothing,” Erlendur said. “I’m not thinking about anything.”

She shook her head. Erlendur had been rather gloomy that summer, even though he had spent an unusual amount of time after work with the other detectives. She and Sigurdur Oli had discussed this and thought he was probably depressed by having virtually no contact with Eva Lind any longer. They knew that he was in anguish about her and had tried to help her, but the girl seemed to have no control over herself. She’s a loser, was Sigurdur Oli’s stock response. Two or three times Elinborg had approached Erlendur to talk about Eva and ask how she was, but he had brushed her off.

They sat in deep silence until Erlendur drew up in front of Elinborg’s townhouse. Instead of getting straight out of the car, she turned to him.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Erlendur did not reply.

“What should we do about this case? Do we talk to this Tomas character?”

“We have to,” Erlendur said.

“Are you thinking about Eva Lind?” Elinborg asked. “Is that why you’re so quiet and serious?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Erlendur said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He watched her walk up the steps to her house. When she went inside he drove away.

Two hours later, Erlendur was sitting in his chair at home reading when the doorbell rang. He stood up and asked who it was, then pressed the button to open the front door downstairs. After switching on the light in his flat he went to the hallway, opened the door and waited. Valgerdur soon appeared.

“Perhaps you want to be left alone?” she said.

“No, do come in,” he said.

She slipped past him and he took her coat. Noticing an open book by the chair, she asked what he was reading and he told her it was a book about avalanches.

“And everyone meets a ghastly death, I suppose,” she said.

They had often talked about his interest in Icelandic lore, historical accounts, biography and books about fatal ordeals at the mercy of the elements.

“Not everyone. Some survive. Fortunately.”

“Is that why you read these books about death in the mountains and avalanches?”

“What do you mean?” Erlendur said.

“Because some people survive?”

Erlendur smiled.

“Maybe,” he said. “Are you still living with your sister?”