The Draining Lake

24

When Erlendur got home from the office that evening, Sindri Snaer was waiting for him in his flat. He was sleeping on the sofa but when Erlendur came in he woke up.

“Where have you been hiding?” Erlendur asked.

“Around,” Sindri Snaer said, sitting up.

“Have you had anything to eat?”

“No, it’s okay.”

Erlendur took out some rye bread, lamb pate and butter, and made coffee. Sindri said he was not hungry but Erlendur noticed how he wolfed down the pate and bread. He put some cheese on the table and that vanished too.

“Do you know anything about Eva Lind?” Erlendur asked over a cup of coffee when Sindri Snaer’s hunger seemed to have been satisfied.

“Yes,” he said, “I spoke to her.”

“Is she all right?”

“Sort of,” Sindri said and produced a packet of cigarettes. Erlendur did likewise. Sindri lit his father’s cigarette with a cheap lighter. “I think it’s been a long time since Eva was all right,” he said.

They sat smoking and not speaking over their black coffee.

“Why is it so dark in here?” Sindri asked, looking into the living room where the thick curtains kept the evening sun at bay.

“It’s too bright outside,” Erlendur said. “In the evenings and at night,” he added, after a short pause. He did not go into the matter any further. He did not tell Sindri that he much preferred short days and pitch darkness to perpetual sunshine and the endless light it radiated. He did not know himself the reason for it. Did not know why he felt better in dark winters than during bright summers.

“Where did you dredge her up?” he asked. “Where did you find Eva?”

“She texted me. I phoned her. We’ve always kept in touch, even when I was away from the city. We’ve always got on well.”

He stopped talking and looked at his father.

“Eva’s a good soul,” he said.

“Yes,” Erlendur said.

“Seriously,” Sindri said. “If you’d known her when she was…”

“You don’t have to tell me anything about it,” Erlendur said, not realising how curt he sounded. “I know all about that.”

Sindri sat in silence, watching his father. Then he stubbed out his cigarette. Erlendur did the same. Sindri stood up.

“Thanks for the coffee,” he said.

“Are you leaving?” Erlendur said, standing up too and following Sindri out of the kitchen. “Where are you going?”

Sindri did not answer. He took his scruffy denim jacket from the chair and put it on. Erlendur watched him. He did not want Sindri to leave in a temper.

“I didn’t mean to…” he began. “It’s just that… Eva’s so… I know you’re good friends.”

“What do you think you know about Eva?” Sindri asked. “Why do you reckon you know anything about Eva?”

“Don’t make a martyr out of her,” Erlendur said. “She doesn’t deserve it. And she wouldn’t want you to either.”

“I’m not,” Sindri said, “but don’t kid yourself that you know Eva. Don’t think that. And what do you know about what she deserves?”

“I know she’s a bloody junkie,” Erlendur snarled. “Is there anything else I need to know? She does nothing about sorting herself out. You know she had a miscarriage. The doctors said it was a mercy after all the dope she took during her pregnancy. Don’t get on a high horse about your sister. That idiot’s lost the plot yet again and I can’t be bothered to go through all that crap any more.”

Sindri had opened the door and was halfway out onto the landing. He paused and looked back at Erlendur. Then he turned round, went back into the flat and closed the door. He walked over to him.

“Put myself on a high horse about my sister?” he said.

“You have to be realistic,” Erlendur said. “That’s all I’m saying. For as long as she doesn’t want to do anything to help herself, there’s bugger all we can do.”

“I remember Eva well when she wasn’t on drugs,” Sindri said. “Do you remember her?”

He had gone right up close to his father and Erlendur could see the anger in his movements, his face, his eyes.

“Do you remember Eva when she wasn’t doing drugs?” he repeated.

“No,” Erlendur said. “I don’t. You know that perfectly well.”

“Yes, I know that perfectly well,” Sindri said.

“Don’t start preaching any bollocks to me,” Erlendur said. “She’s done plenty of that.”

“Bollocks?” Sindri said. “Are we just bollocks?”

“Jesus Christ,” Erlendur groaned. “Stop it. I don’t want to argue with you. I don’t want to argue with her and I certainly don’t want to argue about her.”

“You don’t know anything, do you?” Sindri said. “I saw Eva. The day before yesterday. She’s with a bloke called Eddi who’s ten, fifteen years older than her. He was out of his head. He was going to stab me because he thought I was a thug. Thought I’d come to collect a debt. They both deal but they do a lot of stuff too, then they need more and the heavies come round for the money. People are after them now. Maybe you know this Eddi, since you’re a cop. Eva didn’t want to tell me where she’s crashing — she’s scared shitless. They’re in some den near the city centre. Eddi supplies her with dope and she loves him. I’ve never seen such true love. Get it? He’s her dealer. She was dirty — no, she was filthy. And you know what she wanted to know?”

Erlendur shook his head.

“She wanted to know if I’d seen you,” Sindri said. “Don’t you think that’s weird? The only thing she wanted to know was if I’d seen you. Why do you think that is? Why do you think she’s worried about that? Amongst all that squalor and misery? Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know,” Erlendur said. “I stopped trying to work Eva out long ago.”

He could have mentioned that he and Eva had been through thick and thin together. That although their relationship was difficult and fragile and by no means free from friction, it was a relationship nevertheless. Sometimes it was even a very good one. He thought back to Christmas when she was so depressed about the baby she had lost that he thought she might attempt something stupid. She spent the Christmas and New Year with him and they discussed the baby and the guilt about it that tormented her. Then, one morning in the New Year, she was gone.

Sindri stared at him.

“She was worried about how you were getting on. How you were getting on!”

Erlendur said nothing.

“If only you’d known her the way she used to be,” Sindri said. “Before she got into dope, if you’d known her like I did, you’d have been shocked. I hadn’t met her for a long time and when I saw her, the way she looked… I… wanted to…”

“I think I did all I could to help her,” Erlendur said. “There are limits to what can be done. And when you feel there’s no real desire to do anything in return…”

His words faded away.

“She had ginger hair,” Sindri said. “When we were kids. Thick ginger hair that Mum said she must have got from your side of the family.”

“I remember the ginger,” Erlendur said.

“When she was twelve she had it cropped and dyed black,” Sindri said.

“Why did she do that?”

“Her relationship with Mum was tough a lot of the time,” Sindri said. “Mum never treated me the way she did Eva. Perhaps because she was older and reminded her too much of you. Maybe because Eva was always up to something. She was definitely hyperactive. Ginger-haired and hyperactive. She got on the wrong side of her teachers. Mum sent her to another school but that really just made things worse. She was teased for being the new kid, so she pulled all sorts of pranks to get attention. And she bullied others because she thought that would help her fit in. Mum went to millions of meetings at school about her.”

Sindri lit a cigarette.

“She never believed what Mum said about you. Or she said she didn’t believe it. They fought like cat and dog and Eva was brilliant at using you to wind Mum up. Said it was no surprise you left her. That no one could live with her. She defended you.”

Sindri scouted around with the cigarette in his hand. Erlendur pointed to an ashtray on the coffee table. After taking a drag, Sindri sat at the table. He had calmed down and the tension between them eased. He told Erlendur how Eva had invented stories about him when she was old enough to ask sensible questions about her father.

Erlendur’s children could sense their mother’s animosity towards him, but Eva did not believe what she said and pictured her father as she felt fit, images completely different to the ones her mother presented. Eva had run away from home twice, at the ages of nine and eleven, to look for him. She lied to her friends, saying that her real Dad — not the ones who used to hang around her mother — was always abroad. Whenever he came back he brought her wonderful presents. She could never show them any of the presents because her father did not want her boasting about them. Others were told that her father lived in a huge mansion where she sometimes went to stay and could have whatever she fancied because he was so rich.

When she began to grow up her tales about her father became more mundane. Once their mother said that as far as she knew he was still in the police force. Through all her troubles at school and at home, when she started smoking tobacco and hash, drinking at the age of thirteen or fourteen, Eva Lind always knew that her father was somewhere in the city. As time wore on she grew unsure about whether she wanted to find him any longer.

Maybe, she said to Sindri once, it’s better to keep him in your head. She was convinced he would turn out to be a disappointment, like everything else in her life.

“No doubt I did,” Erlendur said.

He had sat down in his armchair. Sindri took out his cigarette packet again.

“And she didn’t make a good impression with all those studs in her face,” Erlendur said. “She always falls into the same old rut. Never has any money, latches on to some dealer and hangs around with him, and no matter how badly they treat her, she always stays.”

“I’ll try to talk to her,” Sindri said. “But what I really think is that she’s waiting for you to come and rescue her. I think she’s on her last legs. She’s often been bad, but I’ve never seen her like that before.”

“Why did she cut her hair?” Erlendur asked. “When she was twelve.”

“Someone touched her and stroked her hair and talked dirty to her,” Sindri said.

He said this straightforwardly, as if he could search his memory for such incidents and find a whole hoard of them.

Sindri looked along the bookshelves in the living room. There was almost nothing but books in the flat.

Erlendur’s expression remained unchanged, his eyes cold as marble.

“Eva said you were always looking into missing persons,” Sindri said.

“Yes,” Erlendur said.

“Is it because of your brother?”

“Perhaps. Probably.”

“Eva said you told her you were her missing person.”

“Yes,” Erlendur said. “Just because people disappear doesn’t mean they’re necessarily dead,” he added, and into his mind came the image of a black Ford Falcon outside Reykjavik coach station, one hubcap missing.

Sindri did not want to stay. Erlendur invited him to sleep on the sofa but Sindri declined and they said goodbye. For a long while after his son had left, Erlendur sat in his chair wondering about his brother and Eva Lind — the little he remembered of her from when she was small. She was two when they separated. Sindri’s description of her childhood had struck a nerve and he saw his strained relationship with Eva in a different, sadder light.

When he fell asleep, shortly after midnight, he was still thinking about his brother and Eva and himself and Sindri, and he dreamed a bizarre dream. The three of them, him and his children, had gone out for a drive. The kids were in the rear and he was behind the wheel, and he could not tell where they were because there was bright light all around them and he couldn’t make out the landscape. Yet he still felt the car was moving and that he needed to steer it more carefully than usual because he could not see. Looking in the rear-view mirror at the children sitting behind him, he could not distinguish their faces. They looked as if they might be Sindri and Eva, but their faces were somehow blurred or wreathed in fog. He thought to himself that the children could not be anyone else. Eva did not look more than four years old. He saw that they were holding hands.

The radio was on and a seductive female voice was singing:

I know tonight you’ll come to me …

Suddenly he saw a gigantic lorry heading for him. He tried to sound the horn and slam on the brakes but nothing happened. In the rear-view mirror he noticed that the children had gone and felt an indescribable sense of relief. He looked out at the road ahead. He was approaching the lorry at full speed. A crash was inevitable.

When it was all too late, he felt a strange presence beside him. He glanced across at the passenger seat and saw Eva Lind sitting there, staring at him and smiling. She was no longer a little girl but grown up and looking terrible in a filthy blue anorak with clumps of dirt in her hair, rings under her eyes, sunken cheeks and black lips. He noticed that, in her broad smile, some of her teeth were missing.

He wanted to say something to her but could not get the words out. Wanted to shout at her to throw herself from the car, but something held him back. Some kind of calmness about Eva Lind. Total indifference and peace. She looked away from him to the lorry and began to laugh.

An instant before they struck the lorry he started from sleep and called his daughter’s name. It took him a while to get his bearings, then he laid his head back on the pillow and a strangely melancholic song crept up on him and ushered him back to a dreamless sleep.

I know tonight you’ll come to me …