Арнальдур Индридасон - Reykjavik Nights

They were thoroughly fed up with him by the time they dropped him off at Litla-Hraun. Later, as they were trundling back into town, there was an alert about a young girl who had gone missing. She had left her home in Reykjavík three days earlier and not been heard of since. She was nineteen years old and when last seen had been wearing jeans, a pink peasant blouse, a camouflage jacket, and trainers.

‘Remember the lad who woke up the other side of the country in Akureyri — last year, wasn’t it?’ said Marteinn. ‘He went for a night out in Reykjavík without telling anyone. When they hadn’t heard from him for four days, his parents called the police. They were a respectable family. He was in a newsagent’s when he saw a picture of himself in the papers.’

‘What about the woman who went for a few drinks at Thórskaffi?’ said Gardar. ‘She was never found. That wasn’t so long ago.’

‘Out with friends, wasn’t she?’ said Marteinn. ‘And never came home.’

‘That’s right. She was going to walk back.’

‘Wonder what happened to her.’

‘Threw herself in the sea, surely?’

‘Hey, Erlendur,’ said Marteinn, ‘wasn’t that around the same time as your tramp drowned?’

‘ My tramp?’ Erlendur had not heard that one before, though he had told them of his encounters with Hannibal and the indifference of the investigating officers. ‘Yes, it was around then.’

Their shift was ending. All they had to do was return the van and go home, when a notification came through about a burglary in Vogar.

‘Shit!’ exclaimed Gardar. ‘Do we have to take it?’

They were the closest vehicle, so Erlendur swung off the main road into the residential streets. As they approached the house in question they caught sight of a figure sprinting away. The man paused for a split second when he saw the police van, then dodged into the next-door garden. Erlendur braked violently. Gardar hurtled out with Marteinn on his heels. Within minutes they had run the man down, wrestled him to the ground, then bundled him into the van.

They discovered a watch and some jewellery on him. He had also been observed discarding a large object when he first spotted them. While Gardar and Marteinn were chasing the thief, Erlendur had gone to investigate the loot left lying in the road and discovered that the burglar had made off with the family fondue set.

As it happened, Erlendur was well acquainted with the facts of the woman’s disappearance from Thórskaffi, since stories of people going missing held a particular fascination for him. He devoured news reports on everything from poorly equipped ptarmigan hunters failing to return home from the mountains at the appointed time, to travellers in the interior who had not been heard of for days, or youngsters, like the girl in the pink blouse, running away from home. Most turned up eventually, alive or dead, but some were never seen again, despite large search parties and rescue units combing the countryside for days. The missing left a series of unanswered questions behind them.

Soon after Erlendur joined the police, he had begun to trawl through the archives for cases, old and more recent, in Reykjavík and the surrounding area. For years he had been reading up on tales of travellers going astray or surviving ordeals on the country’s high moors and mountain roads. His digging in the police records was merely an extension of this interest.

Only rarely were these missing-persons cases attributed to criminal action, but then Erlendur’s interest was personal rather than professional. He spent hours leafing through reports of cold cases and familiarising himself with the circumstances of a variety of disappearances and unsolved crimes, though the latter did not have the same appeal. There were exceptions, however, such as Hannibal’s demise, though whether there had been anything suspicious about that was disputable. In this instance it was his acquaintance with the victim that had aroused his curiosity.

One case in particular exerted such a powerful hold on Erlendur’s imagination that he had immersed himself in the details to the extent of visiting the sites in question. One day in 1953 an eighteen-year-old girl, a pupil at the Reykjavík Women’s College, had been due to meet her friends at a cafe much frequented by students on Lækjargata in the centre of town. Although they had originally come from different schools, the four girls had all started in the same class at the college and become good friends that first winter. They hung out together and signed up for all kinds of extracurricular activities. They had been meeting to plan an evening’s entertainment for their class. When only three of them turned up the girls were not unduly annoyed; they simply assumed their friend was ill since she had been absent from class that morning. They phoned her house from the cafe to find out how she was. The girl’s mother answered and it took her a minute or two to grasp what they were talking about. ‘We just wanted to know how she’s feeling,’ explained the friend. The girl’s mother was puzzled by the question: her daughter wasn’t ill; she’d gone to school.

The girl almost invariably took the same route to the college. It was a fifteen-minute walk from where she lived in the west of town, via Camp Knox, the area of Nissen huts built by the American occupying force during the war, which later became a source of cheap housing for Reykjavík’s poorer families. From there she headed east along Hringbraut to Fríkirkjuvegur where the college was located. On other days she used to catch the bus, but the driver had failed to notice her among the passengers that morning. As it tended to be the same small group of people every morning, he claimed to know the girl by sight. So either she had walked in or hitched a lift with someone she knew. It would not have been the first time. And although she had never been known to accept a ride from a stranger, this could not be ruled out either. But nor could it be established with any certainty, since no one had come forward to say they had given her a lift.

It was always possible that she had never intended to go in that day, that she had met up with some unknown person, with disastrous consequences, or had, alternatively, been bent on taking her own life in such a manner that her body was never found. She had not, as far as anyone was aware, had a boyfriend or gone out on dates or kept some relationship secret from her parents. And she had always been conscientious about her attendance. Could she have killed herself? There was no hint of any personal problems that could have pushed her to the brink of despair; on the contrary, she was popular and outgoing. But, then again, she had vanished during the blackest months of winter, and the darkness could take its toll on people’s mental health, so suicide could not be entirely ruled out. Indeed, the fact that her body never turned up suggested that it may have been swallowed without trace by the sea.

Erlendur had traced the girl’s route to school on foot, though much had changed in the intervening years; the Nissen huts were long gone and new buildings had risen in their place. On another occasion he had caught the bus to Fríkirkjuvegur. He had also stood in front of her old home in the west of town. She had been an only child. He saw the garden where she had played, the door she had walked through. He lingered only briefly, no more than a minute or two, but it had been long enough for his eyes to drink in the sadness.

The fate of the Thórskaffi woman was shrouded in the same mystery. Admittedly her friends had voiced suspicions of depression, though the woman had never confided in anyone, and unhappiness in her marriage. Her husband had flatly denied this, however, while conceding that he had been aware of mood swings and maybe low spirits. He had reported his wife missing early on Monday morning, by which point he had not heard from her since Saturday evening when she had gone out with friends from the estate agency where she worked. When she did not return home the following day, he had rung round her colleagues, but it was no use: some had only the haziest recollection of how the evening had ended.