Arnaldur Indridason - The Draining Lake

“Where’s your head at?” Sigurdur Oli asked as he got into the passenger seat.

“Where’s my head at?”

“What are you planning to do with this car?”

“Drive it,” Erlendur said.

“Are you allowed to? Isn’t it evidence?”

“We’ll find out.”

They were going to see one of the students from Leipzig, Tomas, whom Hannes had told them about. Erlendur had visited Marion that morning. The patient was back on form, asking about the Kleifarvatn case and Eva Lind.

“Have you found your daughter yet?” his old boss asked him.

“No,” Erlendur said. “I don’t know anything about her.”

Sigurdur Oli told Erlendur that he had been looking into the Stasi’s activities on the Internet. East Germany had come the closest of any country to almost total surveillance of its citizens. The security police had headquarters in 41 buildings, the use of 1,181 houses for its agents, 305 summer holiday houses, 98 sports halls, 18,000 flats for spy meetings and 97,000 employees, of whom 2,171 worked on reading mail, 1,486 on bugging telephones and 8,426 on listening to telephone calls and radio broadcasts. The Stasi had more than 100,000 active but unofficial collaborators; 1,000,000 people provided the police with occasional information; reports had been compiled on 6,000,000 persons and one department of the Stasi had the sole function of watching over other security police members.

Sigurdur Oli finished spouting his figures just as he and Erlendur reached the door of Tomas’s house. It was a small bungalow with a basement, in need of repair. There were blotches in the paint on the corrugatediron roof, which was rusted down to the gutters. There were cracks in the walls, which had not been painted for a long time, and the garden was overgrown. The house was well located, overlooking the shore in the westernmost part of Reykjavik, and Erlendur admired the view out to sea. Sigurdur Oli rang the doorbell for the third time. No one appeared to be at home.

Erlendur saw a ship on the horizon. A man and a woman walked quickly along the pavement outside the house. The man took wide strides and was slightly ahead of the woman, who did her best to keep up with him. They were talking, the man over his shoulder and the woman in a raised voice so that he could hear her. Neither noticed the two police officers at the house.

“So does this mean that Emil and Leopold were the same person?” Sigurdur Oli said as he rang the bell again. Erlendur had told him about his discovery at the brothers” farm near Mosfellsbaer.

“It looks that way,” Erlendur said.

“Is he the man in the lake?”

“Conceivably.”

Tomas was in the basement when he heard the bell. He knew it was the police. Through the basement window he had seen two men get out of an old black car. It was purely by chance that they happened to call at precisely that moment. He had been waiting for them since the spring, all summer long, and by now autumn had arrived. He knew they would come in the end. He knew that if they had any talent at all they would eventually be standing at his front door, waiting for him to answer.

He looked out of the basement window and thought about Ilona. They had once stood beneath Bach’s statue next to Thomaskirche. It was a beautiful summer’s day and they had their arms around each other. All around them were pedestrians, trams and cars, yet they were alone in the world.

He held the pistol. It was British, from the Second World War. His father had owned it, a gift from a British soldier, and he had given it to his son, along with some ammunition. He had lubricated, polished and cleaned it, and a few days earlier he had gone to Heidmork nature reserve to test whether it still worked. There was one bullet left in it. He raised his arm and put the muzzle to his temple.

Ilona looked up the facade of the church to the steeple.

“You’re my Tomas,” she said, and kissed him.

Bach was above them, silent as the grave, and he felt that a smile played across the statue’s lips.

“For ever,” he said. “I’ll always be your Tomas.”

“Who is this man?” Sigurdur Oli asked, standing with Erlendur on the doorstep. “Does he matter?”

“I only know what Hannes told us,” Erlendur replied. “He was in Leipzig and had a girlfriend there.”

He rang the bell again. They stood and waited.

It was hardly the sound of a shot that reached their ears. More like a slight thud from inside the house. Like a hammer tapping on a wall. Erlendur looked at Sigurdur Oli.

“Did you hear that?”

“There’s someone inside,” Sigurdur Oli said.

Erlendur knocked on the door and turned the handle. It was not locked. They stepped inside and called out but received no reply. They noticed the door and the steps down to the basement. Erlendur walked cautiously down the steps and saw a man lying on the floor with an antiquated pistol by his side.

“There’s an envelope here addressed to us,” Sigurdur Oli said as he came down the steps. He was holding a thick yellow envelope marked “Police’.

“Oh,” he said when he saw the man on the floor.

“Why did you do this?” Erlendur said, as if to himself.

He walked over to the body and stared down at Tomas.

“Why?” he whispered.

Erlendur visited the girlfriend of the man who called himself Leopold but whose name was Emil. He told her that the skeleton from Kleifarvatn was indeed the earthly remains of the person she had once loved and who then vanished without a trace from her life. He spent a long time sitting in the living room telling her about the account that Tomas had written and left behind before he went down to the basement, and he answered her questions as best he could. She took the news calmly. Her expression remained unchanged when Erlendur told her that Emil had conceivably been working undercover for the East Germans.

Although his story surprised her, Erlendur knew that it was not the question of what Emil did, or who he was, that she would mull over when towards evening he finally took his leave. He could not answer the question that he knew gnawed at her more than any other. Did he love her? Or had he simply used her as an alibi?

She tried to put the question into words before he left. He could tell how difficult she found it and halfway through he put his arm around her. She was fighting back the tears.

“You know that,” he said. “You know that yourself, don’t you?”

One day shortly afterwards, Sigurdur Oli returned home from work to find Bergthora standing confused and helpless in the living room, looking at him through broken eyes. He realised at once what had happened. He ran over to her and tried to console her, but she burst into an uncontrollable fit of tears that made her whole body shake and tremble. The signature tune for the evening news was playing on the radio. The police had reported a middle-aged man missing. The announcement was followed by a brief description of him. In his mind’s eye Sigurdur Oli suddenly saw a woman in a shop, holding a punnet of fresh strawberries.

When winter had descended, bringing piercing northerly winds and swirling snow, Erlendur drove out to the lake where Emil’s skeleton had been found that spring. It was morning and there was little traffic around the lake. Erlendur parked the Ford Falcon by the side of the road and walked down to the water’s edge. He had read in the newspapers that the lake had stopped draining and was beginning to fill again. Experts from the Energy Authority predicted that it would eventually reach its former size. Erlendur looked over to the nearby pool of Lambhagatjorn, which had dried up to reveal a red muddy bed. He looked at Sydri-Stapi, a bluff protruding into the lake, and at the encircling range of mountains, and felt astonished that this peaceful lake could have been the setting for espionage in Iceland.