Arnaldur Indridason - Oblivion

Erlendur was greeted by the head of the forensics team, a man in his early sixties, who was poring over the clothing that had been removed from the corpse: underwear, jeans, checked shirt, socks, leather jacket and the cowboy boots. The forensics lab was located on the top floor of CID headquarters. Following the recent creation of the State Criminal Investigation Department, they had been moved from Borgartún in Reykjavík and found themselves plonked in the middle of a semi-industrial zone in the neighbouring town of Kópavogur.

Erlendur, who had risen from the ranks of the regular police and only been with CID for two years, was still learning the ropes and getting acquainted with the other staff. He worked for the most part with Marion Briem, one of the longest-serving detectives, who had originally been responsible for encouraging him to apply for promotion to CID. Erlendur had dragged his feet for several years but eventually, tiring of interminably circling town in a patrol car, he had decided to go for it and got in touch with Marion.

‘About time,’ Marion had said. ‘You knew you’d end up here one day.’

Erlendur couldn’t deny that the role of detective appealed to him. He had already had a brief insight into what it involved when he had taken it upon himself, while still a uniformed officer, to conduct a private investigation into the drowning of a Reykjavík tramp in the old peat diggings on Kringlumýri. The police had dismissed the man’s death as an accident, but Erlendur, who had encountered the victim on his beat, eventually established that he had been murdered. Impressed by the way he had solved the case entirely on his own, with no assistance from CID, Marion had invited him to get in touch if he ever felt like doing more of this kind of work. It took Erlendur a while to make the transition, but Marion’s reaction when he finally did was quite right: Erlendur had known all along that he would end up a detective.

The sediment from the lagoon had been painstakingly washed off the dead man’s clothes and everything adhering to the fabric, such as hairs and dirt, had been subjected to close analysis.

‘It’s mostly just residue,’ said the head technician. ‘I’m guessing he was probably dumped in that mud hole to hide something.’

‘Something on the body?’

‘Yes. We won’t find much now. But the clothes can tell us a thing or two. For example, it looks to us as though they all come from the States. The jeans are a famous brand. So’s the leather jacket. The shirt doesn’t have a label, though, and could just as well have been bought at Men’s Clothing on Hverfisgata. The underwear’s an American make. We don’t know about the socks. Black. Hardly worn. The leather jacket’s seen the most wear and tear, as you can tell by the elbows.’ The technician held up the garment for Erlendur to inspect.

‘Then there are these,’ he added, handing Erlendur one of the cowboy boots. ‘They might get us somewhere. Genuine leather. Newish. Not widely available here, as far as I know. The staff of the shoe shops in town might recognise them. Might even know who bought them. You don’t see many people walking around here in cowboy boots. Not Icelanders, anyway. We’re analysing the dirt on the soles to see if that can provide any clue to where he’s been, but the mud from the lagoon has more or less obliterated the evidence.’

Erlendur contemplated the boot. It was made of brown leather, the sole showed only light wear, and the decoration on the calf depicted a coiling lasso. He surveyed the rest of the clothing, the jeans, the checked shirt.

‘Can you tell where the boots come from? Where they were made?’

‘Louisiana. There’s a label inside.’

‘I’m sensing an American theme here.’

‘Maybe he’d visited the States recently,’ suggested the technician. ‘It’s a possibility.’

‘Or he was a Yank himself,’ said Erlendur.

‘Yes, or that.’

‘From the base?’

The head of forensics shrugged. ‘Not necessarily, but we can’t rule it out either.’

‘There are five or six thousand Americans out there on Midnesheidi, aren’t there? Servicemen and their families?’

‘Round about that. The lagoon’s not exactly on their doorstep, but it’s near enough that you’ll need to take the base into account.’

Erlendur hadn’t been down this street in a long while. But Dagbjört, the girl who once lived here, was seldom far from his thoughts. One winter’s morning, more than a quarter of a century ago, she had vanished without trace. The question of what happened to her had never been resolved. Erlendur had come across her files when he first joined the police. She had been on her way to the Women’s College from her home in the west of town when she disappeared as if the ground had swallowed her up. Erlendur had followed her route to the school many times, past the former site of Camp Knox, the old barracks slum, onto Hringbraut and down towards the lake, passing Melavellir and the old graveyard on Sudurgata. People did go missing like this in Iceland from time to time, but for some reason this incident in particular had touched a nerve with Erlendur. He had read and reread the police reports and press coverage, and had walked all possible routes between her home and the school. He had sometimes toyed with the idea of talking to people — relatives or friends — who had known her, but he had never actually gone ahead or embarked on any kind of systematic investigation. It had all happened a long time ago and there was every reason to believe that the girl had taken her own life, yet she would not leave Erlendur alone, no matter how hard he tried to push her away and forget the case. She haunted him like a ghost risen from the grave, ensuring that he was subject to constant reminders of her.

This time it was the obituaries. Only this morning he had been reading her father’s. Her mother had died some years back. There were two notices, both of which touched on the incident obliquely. One had been written by a former colleague of her father who described him as a loyal and reliable workmate, who had been good company in happy times but had never really recovered from the loss of his daughter. The other was written by the dead man’s sister and traced his early years, saying that they came from a large, close-knit family, and that later he and his wife had lost the apple of their eye in a way that defied all comprehension. Erlendur, detecting an old bitterness in her words, guessed that time had not succeeded in softening the pain. But then it rarely did.

It was nearly midnight when Erlendur finally left the street and headed home. He had noticed that Dagbjört’s old house was vacant and there was an estate agent’s notice in the kitchen window. The wind was still blowing from the north and was forecast to continue for the next few days. Loose snow swirled alongside the pavement and Erlendur hugged his coat tighter around him as he strode away.

He and Marion had stayed late in the office that evening, reviewing the case of the man in the lagoon. More than twenty-four hours had passed since the body had been found but so far no one had come forward to report him missing or say they recognised him by the detailed description that had been released to the press. The man seemed to have neither family nor friends. When Erlendur returned from his meeting with the head of forensics, he had found Marion resting on the battered sofa in the office. Marion had brought the sofa along from CID’s old headquarters on Borgartún where they used to be based when they came under the state prosecutor’s office.

‘An American?’ Marion had exclaimed irritably when Erlendur reported his conversation with forensics.

‘It’s one possibility,’ said Erlendur.