Oblivion

5

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.

‘A serviceman, you mean?’

Erlendur shrugged. ‘Don’t forget the international airport’s located in the military zone. Our man could have flown in from anywhere in the world. We can’t take it for granted he’s an Icelander. And we can’t be certain he wasn’t thrown out of a plane over the lagoon. A plane from a domestic airport like Reykjavík. Though it could equally have come from the base.’

‘Where are you going with this?’ asked Marion.

‘Maybe we should start by checking all flights over the area in the last few days. We’re probably talking light aircraft. The question is, should we submit a request to the base as well and find out if the Defense Force are missing one of their men?’

‘On the basis of the cowboy boots?’

‘All his clothes — nearly all of them — had American labels. Though of course most of them could have been bought in Reykjavík, so that doesn’t tell us much per se.’

‘No. What else do we have?’

‘The proximity to the base.’

‘So you want to link the American clothing to the naval base and conclude from this that we’re dealing with a soldier? Isn’t it a bit of a long shot?’

‘Maybe,’ said Erlendur. ‘But when you take into account the clothing and the proximity, it hardly seems unreasonable to send an inquiry to the military authorities. If the man had been found on the other side of the country in Raufarhöfn, I wouldn’t be considering this angle. But it might just turn out that the army are missing one of their men.’

‘They’re under no obligation to inform us if so.’

‘But at least we’d have checked the possibility.’

‘Won’t they have heard about the discovery of the body by now?’

‘Presumably.’

‘Surely they’d have got in touch if they suspected he was one of theirs?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Erlendur. ‘I don’t know how their minds work. Seems to me that lot go their own sweet way without taking too much notice of us.’

‘That lot? Are you opposed to the army?’

‘Is that relevant?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Marion. ‘Are you?’

‘I’ve always been opposed to the army,’ said Erlendur.

He was standing in a stiff northerly breeze near the place where Camp Knox used to be during the Second World War, when the country was occupied, first by the British, then by the Americans. The site was now buried beneath the Vesturbær swimming pool and other buildings, mostly residential. Nothing remained of the old army barracks. Named after Frank Knox, the then US Secretary of the Navy, and originally serving as the American naval operating base in Iceland, Camp Knox had been one of the largest of the eighty such camps constructed in and around Reykjavík during the Allied occupation. The camps had all gone now, though they had enjoyed a remarkable afterlife as a solution to the post-war housing shortage. Once the soldiers had departed, Icelanders from the countryside had moved in their droves into the prefab Quonset and Nissen huts with their curving roofs and walls; in their heyday as many as three thousand people had lived in the former camps.

Erlendur remembered the last gasp of these barracks slums. They had been slowly but surely coming to the end of their existence when he first moved to the city. He remembered Múli Camp and another big one on Skólavörduholt near the modern town centre. There he had encountered the worst poverty he had ever seen. The huts, which were constructed from corrugated iron, flimsy fibreboard and even cardboard, had never been intended as civilian housing and offered hopelessly inadequate protection against the Icelandic climate. Drainage and sewage disposal were primitive at best, rat infestations were endemic, and although plenty of decent, respectable people lived there, the camps were notorious for their grim conditions and colourful occupants. The residents were sneeringly referred to as ‘Campies’ and said to stink of the camp.

If the police report was to be believed, the girl’s route to school in the mornings would have passed the old barracks. During the search for her, particular stress had been laid on finding out if she had entered the camp. A number of the huts were searched, along with the ramshackle sheds and lean-tos they had spawned, and the residents were questioned about whether they had seen the girl. Many of them assisted in the search. But this proved no more successful than any of the other efforts to find her.

The reason Camp Knox had been subjected to particular scrutiny was that, shortly before she went missing, the girl had confided in a friend that she had met a boy from the camp, and the friend had interpreted her words as meaning that she had fallen for him.

The boy’s identity never came to light.