Viktor Ingolfsson - The Flatey Enigma

Valdi went back into the croft and soon reappeared with a blue copybook in his hands. He skimmed through it, reading it in silence.

“No, Officer. I didn’t write anything about who traveled south that day.”

“Why not, Valdi?” Grimur asked, surprised.

“I can’t remember offhand.”

“Was it maybe because no one traveled on the boat?” Kjartan asked.

Valdi looked at him. “Could be.”

“Could we maybe see that page?” Grimur asked.

Valdi looked at them alternately and then handed them the copybook and showed them the page. It was crammed with words written in pencil, and the entry beside the date September 4 read: “Drizzle, moderate breeze, temperature 4 degrees. Passengers from Stykkisholmur, Hakon, and Filippia. Was in Akranes getting new teeth. Gudrun’s son in Innstibaer on visit.” Then there was a small blank space.

They heard a screech from inside the house. Jon Ferdinand came limping outside clutching his mouth. “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” he wailed. “I burned my mouth.”

“What the hell happened?” Valdi gruffly snapped.

“I was just sipping the broth of the black-backed gull,” said the crestfallen old man.

“Have you gone mad, tasting the broth when it’s still boiling in the pot?” said Valdi, taking the lid off the barrel of water. He stuck a ladle inside and handed it to the old man.

“Here, drink something cold.”

Jon Ferdinand sipped the water, and Valdi looked at the guests.

“I have to watch over this man like a little child,” he said.

Grimur examined old Jon’s lips. “He’ll get some burn blisters,” said Grimur. “Maybe you should take him to the doctor.”

“I’d be doing little else if I had to take that old man to the doctor every time he burned his gob,” Valdi grumbled.

“Mind if I take a little look at your book?” Kjartan asked.

Valdi looked at Kjartan. “Why?”

“The priest said the guest came over from Reykholar on the second of September. Do you keep a record of the boats that come from over there in your book?”

“No, no. There’s no way you can keep track of everyone who comes and goes from the village. Boats anchor all over the place, and there are so many things to do. I only follow the mail boat when it comes on Saturdays. I grab the ropes for them because it’s such a short distance for me to go out to the pier. Then I write down who was on the boat, just for the information and fun of it. No one’s ever asked to look at this before.”

Grimur heaved a sigh. “Right then, Valdi. We’ll take this no further then. Maybe you could try to remember why you didn’t write about it in your book on that day and just let me know.”

The three men said good-bye.

“…Vellum manuscripts in the Middle Ages were not all preserved with the same care. In the thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth century, many manuscripts were probably exported to Norway as merchandise. Their value diminished, however, when the language rapidly changed at the end of the fourteenth century. People no longer cared about these vellum manuscripts that no one could read. In Iceland, on the other hand, it was probably overuse that damaged the books the most. Books were lent from person to person and read from cover to cover. Then new transcripts were made and the old shreds were lost. The Reformation also cast a bad light on anything written by the monks. It is not known who held the Flatey Book after Jon Hakonarson in Vididalstunga, but in the latter half of the fifteenth century it was in the hands of Thorleifur Bjornsson, a seneschal in Reykholar. It was then owned by Thorleifur’s grandson, Jon Bjornsson, in Flatey, and he gave the book to his grandson, Jon Finnsson, who also lived in Flatey; and it is after their home island that the book is named.

“In the sixteenth century, national awareness was awakening in Europe. An emphasis was placed on the power of the nation and the strength of the kingdom. Interest in the history of nations grew, and in the Nordic countries, learned men knew that sources were to be found in Iceland. The Danish king sent manuscript collectors to Iceland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Arni Magnusson was the most prominent of these. But there were other collectors, too. The bishop sagas refer to Jon the farmer in Flatey, saying that he had a big and thick vellum manuscript of monk writings containing the histories of the Norwegian kings and a lot more, and here it was generally referred to as the Flatey Book…”

Kjartan and Grimur headed to the telephone exchange after their visit to Ystakot and made calls all over. They contacted the mail boat over the Gufunes radio, since it was positioned out in the bay of Faxafloi, on its way to Stykkisholmur with a cargo of cement from Akranes. The crew of the boat could offer them no information on the foreign passenger. He could well have been on board, but they had no specific recollection of him. It would mainly have been the cook who interacted with the passengers the most, but he had been on vacation for those weeks last year. A young girl, who had just graduated from the domestic college, had replaced him during his absence. She was now married to someone in the Westman Islands, as far as they knew.

Reverend Veigar in Reykholar remembered Gaston Lund very well but had not heard from him, nor expected to hear from him. He had only stayed one night in Reykholar. The hotel owner in Stykkisholmur confirmed that Lund had not stayed at the hotel overnight, after the boat arrived from Flatey. The bus for Reykjavik was leaving the following morning, so he assumed he must have stayed somewhere else in the village, if he had arrived on the boat.

The driver of the Stykkisholmur bus was at his home in Reykjavik. “I can’t even remember who was on my bus yesterday,” he answered when Grimur asked him whether he remembered a Danish passenger on September 4 last year.

Finally, there was a message from the detective division in Reykjavik. Gaston Lund had stayed in Hotel Borg for two nights when he came to Iceland and left his case in storage while he was traveling around the country. The case had been kept in a storage room in the hotel’s basement and had been forgotten. This was why no one had wondered why it hadn’t been collected.

Kjartan and Grimur sat at the telephone exchange until dinnertime, continuing with their enquiries. Stina, the head of the telephone exchange, and her colleague in Stykkisholmur stayed open long past their normal working hours, eavesdropping on the conversations with excitement.

More information arrived from the Danish embassy. Gaston Lund had traveled from Copenhagen to Norway in mid-July. He was single, somewhat eccentric in his habits, and apparently liked to keep to himself. His colleagues at the University of Copenhagen knew he intended to go to Bergen, Trondheim, and Stiklestad in Norway, but he had never mentioned any visit to Iceland. Questions soon began to be asked when he failed to turn up to deliver his lecture at the manuscript symposium and to teach at the university. An extensive search was then launched in Norway. There had been a ferry accident near Bergen at the beginning of September, and people were starting to wonder whether he might have been among the victims. The fact that the professor had been found dead on a deserted in Iceland made headlines in Copenhagen.

On the state radio news there had been a long report on the case, and the district magistrate from Patreksfjordur was quoted as saying that there was an investigation underway.

“…In 1647 Bishop Brynjolfur visited the West Fjords and celebrated mass in the church of Flatey on the twelfth Sunday after trinity, which was the fifteenth of September. Brynjolfur then offered to buy the Flatey Book, first for money and then for land, but his offer was rejected. But when Jon Finnsson then followed the bishop to the ship, he handed him the good manuscript. One can assume that the bishop intended to print the book in Latin translation for learned men, but he did not have the king’s authorization to run a printing press in Skalholt because the bishop of Holar had exclusive printing rights in Iceland.