Hypothermia

3

Erlendur drove up to an unassuming detached house in the suburb of Grafarvogur. It stood on its own at the end of a cul-de-sac in a street of handsome villas. Most of them were identical, painted white, blue or red, with a garage and two cars per house. The street was well lit and clean, the gardens were neatly tended, the lawns mown, and the trees and bushes tidily pruned. There were box-trimmed hedges wherever you looked. The house in question appeared older than the other buildings in the street; it was built in a different style, with no bay windows or conservatory and with no pretentious columns flanking the front door. It was a white building with a flat roof and a large picture window in the sitting room that faced on to Kollafjördur fjord and Mount Esja. Around the house there was an extensive, beautifully lit garden that was clearly well tended. The shrubby potentilla and alpine cinquefoil, as well as the Hansa roses and pansies had all died back with the autumn.

It had been unusually cold recently, with a northerly wind and bitter temperatures. A dry gust blew the leaves along the road to the end of the cul-de-sac. Erlendur parked his car and looked up at the house. He took a deep breath before going inside. This was the second suicide in a week. Perhaps it was due to the onset of autumn and the thought of the long dark winter ahead.

It had fallen to him to contact the man on behalf of the Reykjavík police, as was the custom. The Selfoss force had already decided to transfer the case to Reykjavík for ‘appropriate handling’, as they called it. A priest had been sent to see the man. They were sitting in the kitchen when Erlendur arrived. The priest opened the door to him and showed him into the kitchen, explaining that he was the vicar of Grafarvogur. María had attended a different church but they had been unable to contact her vicar.

The husband, a lean, strongly built man wearing a white shirt and jeans, was sitting very still at the kitchen table. Erlendur introduced himself and they shook hands. The man’s name was Baldvin. The vicar stood by the kitchen door.

‘I must go to the cottage,’ Baldvin said.

‘Yes, the body has been-’ Erlendur started, but got no further.

‘I was told that…’ Baldvin began.

‘We’ll go with you if you like. Though the body has in fact been transferred to Reykjavík. To the morgue on Barónsstígur. We thought you would prefer that to the hospital in Selfoss.’

‘Thank you.’

‘We’ll need you to identify her.’

‘Naturally. Of course.’

‘Was she alone at Thingvellir?’

‘Yes, she went there two days ago to do some work and was due back in town this evening. She said she’d be late. She’d lent the cottage to a friend for the weekend. Or that’s what she told me. Said she might hang around and wait for her.’

‘It was her friend Karen who found her. Do you know her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you here at home?’

‘Yes.’

‘When did you last speak to your wife?’

‘Yesterday evening. Before she went to bed. She had her mobile phone at the cottage.’

‘So you hadn’t heard from her at all today?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘She wasn’t expecting you at Thingvellir?’

‘No. We were going to spend the weekend in town.’

‘But she was expecting her friend this evening?’

‘Yes, so I gathered. The vicar told me that María probably… did it… yesterday evening?’

‘The pathologist hasn’t given us a more accurate time of death yet.’

Baldvin was silent.

‘Had she tried to do this before?’ Erlendur asked.

‘This? Suicide? No, never.’

‘Did you know she was in a bad way?’

‘She’s been a bit depressed and down,’ Baldvin said. ‘But not so… this is…’

He broke down in tears.

The vicar met Erlendur’s eye and signalled that that was enough for the moment.

‘I’m sorry,’ Erlendur said and rose from the kitchen table. ‘We’ll talk more another time. Do you want to call someone to come and be with you? Or a grief counsellor? We can…’

‘No, it’s… Thank you.’

On his way out Erlendur walked through the sitting room, which was lined with large bookcases. He had noticed a smart SUV in front of the garage when he parked in the drive.

Why die and leave a home like this? he wondered. Is there really nothing here to live for?

He knew that such thoughts were futile. Experience showed that motives for suicide could be unpredictable and unrelated to a person’s financial situation. The act itself frequently came as a total shock and could be committed by people of all ages: adolescents, the middle-aged and elderly, people who decided one day to end it all. Sometimes there was a long history of depression and failed attempts. In other cases the act took friends and family completely by surprise. ‘We hadn’t a clue he was feeling like that.’ ‘She never said anything.’ ‘How were we to know?’ The family were left devastated, their eyes full of questions, their voices full of disbelief and horror: ‘Why? Should I have seen it coming? Is there something I could have done better?’

The husband accompanied Erlendur to the hall.

‘I gather she lost her mother not long ago.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Was María badly affected by her death?’

‘It hit her very hard,’ the man said. ‘But this is incomprehensible. Even though she’s been depressed lately it’s still utterly incomprehensible.’

‘Of course,’ Erlendur said.

‘I expect the police deal with a lot of cases?’ Baldvin said. ‘Of suicide, I mean?’

‘Sadly, it’s always happening,’ Erlendur said.

‘Was she… Did she suffer?’

‘No,’ Erlendur said firmly. ‘She didn’t.’

‘I’m a doctor,’ Baldvin said. ‘You don’t have to lie to me.’

‘I’m not,’ Erlendur said.

‘She’d been depressed for quite some time,’ Baldvin said, ‘but she didn’t try to get any help. Maybe she should have done. Maybe I should have been more aware of what she was going through. She and her mother were very close. María had difficulty reconciling herself to her loss. Leonóra was only sixty-five; she died far too young. Of cancer. María nursed her and I’m not sure she had got over her death. She was Leonóra’s only child.’

‘I imagine that would be hard to bear.’

‘It’s probably difficult to put oneself in her shoes,’ Baldvin said.

‘Yes, of course,’ Erlendur replied. ‘And her father?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Was María religious?’ Erlendur asked, seeing a statue of Jesus on the chest of drawers in the hall. There was a Bible beside it.

‘Yes, she was,’ the other man said. ‘She went to church. Much more religious than me. More so with age.’

‘You’re not religious?’

‘I can’t say I am.’

Baldvin sighed heavily.

‘It’s… it’s so unreal, you must excuse me, I…’

‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ Erlendur said. ‘I’m done.’

‘I’ll go down to Barónsstígur then.’

‘Good,’ Erlendur said. ‘The police pathologist will need to examine her. It has to be done in circumstances like these.’

‘I understand,’ Baldvin said.

Soon the house was empty. Erlendur followed a little way behind the vicar and Baldvin. As he was turning out of the drive he glanced in the rear-view mirror and thought he saw the sitting-room curtains move. He braked and stared in the mirror. He could see no movement at the window and by the time he took his foot off the brake and continued on his way he was sure that he must have been mistaken.

María was prostrate with grief for the first weeks and months after Leonóra’s death. She refused all visits and stopped answering the phone. Baldvin took a fortnight’s leave from work but the more he wanted to do for her, the more she insisted on being left alone. He procured her drugs to combat the lethargy and depression, but she wouldn’t take them. He knew a psychiatrist who was willing to see her but she refused. She said she needed to work through her grief on her own. It would take time and he would have to be patient. She’d done it before and would do it again now.

María was familiar with the anxiety and depression, the lack of appetite and weight loss, and the feeling of mental paralysis that drained her of energy and made her indifferent to anything but the private world of her grief. She allowed no one in. She had been in a similar state after her father died. But then her mother had been there as a pillar of strength. María had dreamed of her father incessantly during the first years after his death and many of her dreams had turned into nightmares that she could not shake off. She suffered from delusions. He appeared to her so vividly that she sometimes thought he was still alive, that he hadn’t died after all. She sensed his presence when she was awake, even smelled his cigars. Sometimes she felt as if he were standing beside her, watching her every move. Because she was only a child, she believed he was visiting her from heaven.

Her mother Leonóra, who was a rationalist, said that the visions, the sounds and the smells were a natural reaction to grief, part of her mental response to her father’s death. They had been very close and his death had been so traumatic that her senses were conjuring up his presence; sometimes his image, sometimes a smell associated with him. Leonóra called it the inner eye that was capable of bringing her mental pictures to life; she was susceptible after the shock and her senses were hypersensitive and fragile and conjured up abnormal sensations that would disappear with time.

‘What if it wasn’t the inner eye, as you always said? What if what I saw when Dad died was on the boundary between two worlds? What if he wanted to visit me? Wanted to tell me something?’

María was sitting on the edge of her mother’s bed, They had discussed death openly after it became obvious that Leonóra would not be able to escape her fate.

‘I’ve read all those books you brought me about the light and the tunnel,’ Leonóra said, ‘Maybe there is something in what people say, About the tunnel to eternity, Eternal life, I’ll soon find out.’

‘There are so many vivid accounts,’ María said. ‘Of people who have died and come back to life. Of near-death experiences. Of life after death.’

‘We’ve discussed this so often… ’

‘Why shouldn’t they be true? At least some of them?’

Leonóra looked through half-closed eyes at her daughter who was sitting beside her, utterly shattered, The effect of her illness on María had been almost worse than it had been on herself, The thought of her mother’s approaching death was unbearable to María, When Leonóra had gone she would be alone in the world.

‘I don’t believe them because I’m a rationalist.’

They sat for a long time in silence, María hung her head and Leonóra kept drifting into a doze, worn out by her three-year battle with the cancer that had now finally defeated her.

‘I’ll give you a sign,’ she whispered, half-opening her eyes.

‘A sign?’

Leonóra smiled faintly through the haze of drugs.

‘Let’s keep it… simple.’

‘What?’ María asked.

‘It’ll have to be… it’ll have to be something tangible, It can’t be a dream and it can’t just be some vague feeling.’

‘Are you talking about giving me a sign from beyond the grave?’

Leonóra nodded.

‘Why not? If it’s anything other than a figment of the imagination. The afterlife.’

‘How?’

Leonóra seemed to be sleeping.

‘You know… my favourite… author.’

‘Proust.’

‘It… it’ll be… keep an eye out…’

Leonóra took her daughter’s hand.

‘Proust,’ she said, exhausted, and fell asleep at last, By evening Leonóra was in a coma, She died two days later without ever regaining consciousness.

Three months after Leonóra’s funeral, María woke with a jolt in mid-morning and got out of bed, Baldvin left early for work in the mornings and she was alone in the house, feeling weak and worn out from bad dreams and serious long-term stress and debility, She was about to go into the kitchen when she felt instinctively that she was not alone in the house.

At first she looked around her in a panic, believing that a burglar had broken in, She called out to ask if anyone was there.

She was standing there, frozen into immobility, when suddenly she smelled a faint hint of her mother’s perfume.

María stared straight ahead and saw Leonóra standing by the bookshelves in the semi-darkness of the sitting room, speaking to her, But she could not make out the words.

She stared at her mother for a long time, not daring to move, until Leonóra vanished as suddenly as she had appeared.