Viktor Ingolfsson - The Flatey Enigma

“…When ancient tales were written down on sheets of vellum, they were just one of many versions. Prior to that they had been passed down orally or written into older manuscripts. Each generation told the tales in their own way. My father told me stories from this book like fairy tales when I was a child. Since then I’ve trained myself to recount my favorite stories in my own way…”

Ketilsey wasn’t a big island, but finding the body wasn’t easy. They had walked the full perimeter of its shore and then moved slightly higher. The district officer and the teacher were tired of searching.

“We should have taken Valdi with us and let him show us the spot,” said Hogni.

Grimur had his doubts. “Then the old man would’ve had to come along and probably the boy, too. They’re practically inseparable.”

He took off his cap and wiped the sweat from his brow with a red snuff handkerchief.

“Didn’t the man say anything about where we should look?” Kjartan asked.

“No, damn it. I thought the corpse would just be lying there on the shore by the slip and that we would have been able to just follow the smell,” Grimur answered.

“Could he have floated back into the sea?” Kjartan asked.

Grimur shook his head. “No, the tide is neap and the waves have barely moved since those men were here.”

Hogni glared at some of the black-backed gulls spiraling above them. “Do you think those bloody seagulls finished him off?” he asked.

Kjartan had almost given up on finding the body when he walked between some rocks. The green of the parka blended with the color of the patches of grass, and its hood was drawn over the skull so that only a portion of some bare facial bones were visible. Pants and shoes concealed the lower part of the body. A rotting stench lingered in the air, and a cluster of flies hovered above.

“He’s here,” Kjartan called out in a voice that he did not recognize as his own.

The men swiftly rushed to the scene, the district officer first.

“Not that I was expecting the smell to be pleasant,” Grimur said, coughing.

“So this is where he was all along,” Hogni said in surprise, once he had examined the scene. “The sea must have been bloody wild this winter if it managed to chuck him all the way up here.”

“No way,” said Grimur. “There’s no wreckage up here. The nearest pieces of driftwood and seaweed are thirty fathoms below.”

Hogni was taken aback. “Could it be that…” His voice trailed off.

Grimur looked around. “Yeah, he must have had some life left in him when he reached this island.”

He scrutinized the man’s body for a brief moment and then started to walk and look around.

“Look,” he called out. Hogni and Kjartan looked in the direction he was pointing.

It was a slanted crag against which several pieces of driftwood had been diagonally arranged. Stones and seaweed had then been piled onto the wood to create a small shelter. One man could have crawled into it and lain there lengthwise and been reasonably shielded.

“The man must have built this when he landed here. The Ystakot lads would never have done a botched job like this.”

“Couldn’t he have attracted someone’s attention?” Kjartan asked. It was uncomfortable to think that the man could have been stranded there for some time, maybe in the heart of winter.

“No,” Grimur answered, “that would have been difficult if he had nothing to make a fire with. The sailing routes are far west, and the next inhabited area is miles away. There are no fishing grounds around here, so no one comes until the Ystakot clan comes here to collect the eiderdown from the nests and hunt seal. There’s nothing else that would draw anyone here.”

“So did he starve to death?” Kjartan asked.

“Yeah, and froze. He wouldn’t have been able to keep any heat in here without any fire. Especially if he crawled up here after being drenched in the sea.”

“How the hell did he get all the way out here?” Hogni asked. “There’s no boat he could have come on. There’s no regular sailing route that passes through here, so he could hardly have fallen off some ship.”

“He must have come out here on a boat and lost it,” Grimur answered. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“It would have been noticed if a man and his boat had gone missing from the fjord,” said Hogni.

“Unless he’s from further afield,” said Grimur.

“Doesn’t matter. He still would’ve been missed,” said Hogni categorically.

“There was a shipwreck this winter in the distant west coast. Some men were presumed dead. Maybe one of them reached here on a lifeboat that drifted into the fjord and landed here.”

“And the boat?”

“He could have lost it again.”

“No,” Hogni disagreed. He stooped over the body and examined the clothes. “This is no sailor. Look at his shoes. These are the type of hiking shoes that tourists wear, leather.”

“Right then,” said Grimur, “this needs to be better investigated. Let’s get him into the casket and head straight back to Flatey.”

They fetched the casket and laid it by the side of the body. Next Grimur and Hogni hoisted the body up with their shovels while Kjartan held the casket. Then they turned the casket so that the body rolled into it facedown. The patch of grass that appeared under the body was yellow and withered, apart from the swarm of maggots squirming in the roots of the grass.

“Shouldn’t we turn him the right way around in the casket?” Kjartan asked.

“No,” Grimur answered. “He won’t be too bothered about which way he lies on such a short trip.”

He took a glass receptacle out of his pocket, unscrewed the lid, and sprinkled it inside the casket. “I got this from the doctor,” he said. “It’ll reduce the smell and kill the flies and maggots.”

The lid of the casket was lined with a rubber seal strip, designed to block out any air once it had been tightly screwed to the box.

They systematically combed the island for signs of the man’s stay there. On a patch of grass at the tip of the isle, some flat stones had been arranged to clearly read as SOS, and each letter was about ten feet long. By the shelter they found an open plastic flask with a thin layer of water and some broken shells. There was nothing inside the shelter itself, however. Every possible crag was examined for any trace of information that the man might have scratched onto flat surfaces, but they found no marks that could have been left by a human. On one flat rock there were many small pebbles that seemed to form letters, although some of them had now been scattered by the forces of nature. Nevertheless, Kjartan drew a picture of them on a piece of paper, as precisely as he could, and readjusted two stones that seemed to have been thrown out of alignment and tried to form a word:

Grimur and Hogni watched with interest. “Lucky? Does that have any special meaning around here?” Kjartan asked.

“No,” Hogni answered. “Although there’s a stud bull in Hvallatrar called Lucky. The bull was given the name when he was young and got stranded on a skerry flooded at high water and had to swim to survive. It was a long way to land, and he probably wouldn’t have survived if some people from Skaleyjar hadn’t been passing there on their way to a dance in Flatey. At first they thought it was a seal that was swimming there, but then his ears popped up. They had never seen a seal with big ears in Breidafjordur before, so they swiftly hauled the calf on board. He got to travel with them to Flatey, and he was kept in a barn until he recovered from his ordeal.”

Grimur and Hogni fetched the casket and placed it on board the boat. Then they set off toward Flatey.