The Draining Lake

14

The Foreign Ministry’s officials were more than willing to assist the police. Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg were having a meeting with the under-secretary, a smooth man Sigurdur Oli’s age. They were acquaintances from their student years in America and reminisced about their time there. The under-secretary said the ministry had been surprised by the police request and he wanted to know why they required information about the former employees of foreign embassies in Reykjavik. They were as silent as the grave. Just a routine investigation, Elinborg said, and smiled.

“And we’re not talking about all the embassies,” Sigurdur Oli said, smiling too. “Just old Warsaw Pact countries.”

The under-secretary looked at them in turn.

“Are you talking about the ex-communist countries?” he asked, his curiosity clearly in no way satisfied. “Why just them? What about them?”

“Just a routine investigation,” Elinborg repeated.

She was in an unusually good mood. The book launch had been a huge success and she was still over the moon about a review that had appeared in the largest-circulation newspaper praising her book, the recipes and photographs, which concluded by saying that hopefully this would not be the last to be heard from Elinborg, the detective-cum-gourmet.

“The communist states,” the under-secretary said thoughtfully. “What was it that you found in the lake?”

“We don’t know yet whether it’s linked to any embassies,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“I suppose you should come with me,” the under-secretary said, standing up. “Let’s talk to the director general if he’s in.”

The director general invited them into his office and listened to their request. He tried to wheedle out the reason for wanting this particular information, but they gave nothing away.

“Do we have a record of these employees?” the director general asked. He was a particularly tall man who wore a worried expression and had large rings under his weary eyes.

“As it happens we do,” the under-secretary said. “It’ll take a while to compile the list, but it’s no problem.”

“Let’s do that, then,” the director general said.

“Was there any espionage to speak of in Iceland during the Cold War?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“Do you think it’s a spy in the lake?” the under-secretary asked.

“We can’t go into details of the investigation but it would appear that the skeleton has been in the lake since before 1970,” Elinborg said.

“It would be naive to assume that no spying took place,” the director general said. “It was going on all around us, and Iceland was strategically vital then, much more so than it is today. There were several embassies here from Eastern European countries, plus of course the Nordic countries, the UK, US and West Germany.”

“When we say spying,” Sigurdur Oli said, “what exactly is it that we’re talking about?”

“I think it mainly involved keeping an eye on what the others were up to,” the director general said. “In some cases there were attempts to establish contact. To get someone from the other side to work for you, that sort of thing. And of course there was the base, the details of operations there and military exercises. I don’t think this had anything much to do with Icelanders themselves. But there are stories of attempts to get them to collaborate.”

The director general became lost in his thoughts.

“Are you looking for an Icelandic spy?” he asked.

“No,” Sigurdur Oli said, although he had no idea. “Were there any? Icelandic spies? Isn’t that a ridiculous notion?”

“Maybe you should talk to Omar,” the chief of department said.

“Who’s Omar?” Elinborg said.

“He was director general here for most of the Cold War,” the chief of department said. “Very old but clear as a bell,” he added, tapping his head with his index finger. “Still comes to our annual dinner and he’s the life and soul of the party. He knew all those chaps in the embassies. Maybe he could help you somehow.”

Sigurdur Oli wrote down the name.

“Actually it’s a misunderstanding to talk about real embassies,” the director general said. “Some of these countries only had delegations back then, trade delegations or trade offices or whatever you want to call them.”

The three detectives met in Erlendur’s office at noon. Erlendur had spent the morning locating the farmer who had been waiting for the driver of the Falcon and had told the police that he failed to turn up for their meeting. His name was in the files. Erlendur discovered that some of the old farmland had been sold to property developers for the town of Mosfellsbaer. The man had stopped farming around 1980. He was now registered as living at an old people’s home in Reykjavik.

Erlendur called in a forensics expert who brought his equipment to the garage, vacuumed up every speck of dust from the floor of the car and searched it for bloodstains.

“You’re just messing about,” Sigurdur Oli said as he took a large bite from a baguette. He chewed fast and had clearly still not finished speaking. “What are you trying to find?” he said. “What are you going to do with the case? Are you planning to reopen the investigation? Do you think we have nothing better to do than fiddle about with old missing-persons cases? There are a million other things we could be doing.”

Erlendur eyed Sigurdur Oli.

“A young woman,” he said, “stands outside the dairy shop where she works, waiting for her boyfriend. He doesn’t come. They’re going to get married. Nicely settled. The future’s bright, as they say. Nothing to suggest that they won’t live happily ever after.”

Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg said nothing.

“Nothing in their lives suggests anything is wrong,” Erlendur went on. “Nothing suggests that he’s depressed. He’s going to fetch her after work. Then he doesn’t arrive. He leaves work to meet someone but doesn’t show up and disappears for ever. There are hints that he may have caught a coach out of the city. There are other signs that he committed suicide. That would be the most obvious explanation for his disappearance. Many Icelanders suffer serious depression, although most keep it well concealed. And there’s always the possibility that someone did him in.”

“Isn’t it just a suicide?” Elinborg asked.

“We have no official record of a man by the name of Leopold who went missing at that time,” Erlendur said. “It seems he was lying to his girlfriend. Niels, who was in charge of the case, thought nothing of his disappearance. He even believed that the man lived somewhere else but had been having an affair in Reykjavik. If it wasn’t just a straightforward suicide.”

“So he had a family out in the countryside and the woman in Reykjavik was his mistress?” Elinborg said. “Isn’t that reading a bit too much into his car being found outside the coach station?”

“You mean he might have got himself back home to the other end of the country and stopped shagging in Reykjavik?” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Shagging in Reykjavik!” Elinborg fumed. “How can poor Bergthora stand you?”

“That theory needn’t be any more daft than any of the others,” Erlendur said.

“Can you get away with bigamy in Iceland?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“No,” Elinborg said firmly. “There are too few of us.”

“In America they make public announcements about guys like that,” Sigurdur Oli said. “They have special programmes about that type of missing person, criminals and bigamists. Some murder their family, disappear, then start a new one.”

“Naturally, it’s easier to hide in America,” Elinborg said.

“That may well be,” Erlendur said. “But isn’t it simple enough to lead a double life even for a while in a small community? He spent a lot of time in rural places, this man, weeks on end sometimes. He met a woman in Reykjavik and maybe he fell in love or maybe she was just a fling. When the relationship became serious he decided to break it off.”

“A sweet little urban love story,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“I wonder if the woman from the dairy shop had considered that possibility,” Erlendur said thoughtfully.

“Didn’t they announce that this Leopold had gone missing?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

Erlendur had already checked and found a brief announcement in the newspapers describing the man’s disappearance, along with a request for anyone who had seen him to contact the police. It gave a description of what he was wearing, his height and the colour of his hair.

“It led nowhere,” Erlendur said. “He’d never been photographed. Niels said to me that they never told the woman they couldn’t find any record of him.”

“They didn’t tell her that?” Elinborg said.

“You know what Niels is like,” Erlendur said. “If he can avoid trouble, he does. He had the feeling that the woman had been duped and I’m sure he felt she’d been through enough. I don’t know. He’s not particularly…”

Erlendur did not finish the sentence.

“Maybe he’d found a new girlfriend,” Elinborg suggested, “and didn’t dare tell her. There’s no greater coward than a cheating male.”

“Here we go,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Didn’t he travel around the country selling, what, agricultural machinery?” Elinborg said. “Wasn’t he always roaming the farms and villages? Perhaps we can’t rule out that he met someone and started a new life. Didn’t dare tell his girlfriend in Reykjavik.”

“And has been in hiding ever since?” Sigurdur Oli interjected.

“Of course things were completely different in 1970,” Erlendur said. “It took a whole day to drive to Akureyri — the main road around Iceland hadn’t been finished. Transportation was much worse and regional communities were much more isolated.”

“You mean there were all kinds of nowhere places that nobody ever visited,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“I once heard a story about a woman,” Elinborg said, “who had this terrific boyfriend and everything was just fine until one day when he phoned her and said he was breaking it off, and after beating about the bush a bit he admitted he was going to marry someone else the next week. His girlfriend never heard any more of him. Like I say: there’s no limit to what creeps men can be.”

“So why was Leopold in Reykjavik under false pretences?” Erlendur asked. “If he didn’t dare tell his girlfriend that he’d met someone outside the city and started a new life? Why this game of hide-and-seek?”

“What does anyone know about these characters?” Elinborg said in a resigned tone.

They all fell silent.

“What about the body in the lake?” Erlendur finally asked.

“I think we’re looking for a foreigner,” Elinborg said. “It’s ridiculous to think it’s an Icelander with Russian spy equipment tied around him. I just can’t imagine it.”

“The Cold War,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Weird times.”

“Yes, weird times,” Erlendur said.

“To me, the Cold War was always the fear of the end of the world,” Elinborg said. “I always remember thinking that. Somehow you could never escape it. Doomsday constantly looming over you. That’s the only Cold War I knew.”

“One little fuse blows and ka-boom!” Sigurdur Oli said.

“That fear has to come out somewhere,” Erlendur said. “In what we do. In what we are.”

“You mean in suicides, like the man who drove the Falcon?” Elinborg said.

“Unless he’s alive and well and happily married in Sheepsville,” Sigurdur Oli said. He rolled up his baguette wrapping and threw it on the floor beside a nearby rubbish bin.

When Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg had left, Erlendur’s phone rang. On the other end was a man he did not recognise.

“Is that Erlendur?” the voice said, deep and angry.

“Yes — who is this?” Erlendur said.

“I want to ask you to leave my wife alone,” the voice said.

“Your wife?”

The words caught Erlendur completely off guard. It did not occur to him that the voice was talking about Valgerdur.

“Understand?” the voice said. “I know what you’re up to and I want you to stop.”

“It’s up to her what she does,” Erlendur said when it finally registered that this was Valgerdur’s husband. He remembered what Valgerdur had said about his affair and how meeting Erlendur had initially been an attempt on her part to get even with him.

“You leave her alone,” the voice said, more menacingly.

“Get lost,” Erlendur said and slammed down the phone.