Oblivion

10

She was just eighteen when she vanished one dark winter’s day in ’53. Not long before, she had invited some school friends round to celebrate her birthday. The girls played records on the family’s recently acquired gramophone. She had helped her father carry it indoors. It came in an imposing piece of furniture — a large walnut box supported on four legs, with a lid on top and a built-in wireless — and this was given pride of place in the sitting room. They played records that had been released that spring — Alfred Clausen’s ‘Gling gló’, Sigfús Halldórsson’s ‘Dagný’. One of the girls brought round some of the new singles from America that she had managed to procure from the US airbase at Keflavík, including one by Kay Starr, and Doris Day singing ‘Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee’. The girls danced and giggled and, once Dagbjört’s parents were safely out of the way, two of them produced some alcohol they had pinched from home. They shared it round and someone took out a packet of cigarettes and started smoking. The cigarettes were passed round too, a few of the girls puffing and making faces, others inhaling with an air of sophistication. They chatted about the school camping trip to Thórsmörk earlier that autumn and the proposed skiing trip to Hveradalir in the highlands after New Year, and exchanged gossip about who was dating who and the latest exploits of various Hollywood stars. A Dean Martin film was currently showing in the cinemas. They preferred him to Frank Sinatra. As the evening wore on they sang their school song with its lyrics about a bright, happy future, and played Sigfús’s hit single over and over again: ‘... the glorious stars will shine / on our love, our joy and delight, / though the song of the breeze has fallen quiet.’

The girls were close friends and when one morning Dagbjört didn’t turn up to school or for the meeting a group of them had arranged for later that day, they rang her house to ask if she was ill. Dagbjört’s mother said no, she had gone to school as usual, at least as far as she knew. She called out to her daughter, went upstairs to her room, opened the front door and peered down the street, then stepped out into the garden, repeatedly calling her name. After this she phoned her husband at work and asked if he had heard from her or knew where she was. He was nonplussed. As far as he was aware, Dagbjört had gone to school that morning.

When they still hadn’t heard from her by evening, her parents grew seriously alarmed and went out looking for her. They phoned round all their friends and relatives, but no one had any news of their daughter. A number of people came to their house, among them several of Dagbjört’s classmates, neighbours and close relatives, and together they retraced her customary route to school. Perhaps something had happened to her on the way. They looked everywhere, walked the streets, climbed into gardens, conducted a thorough search of Camp Knox, combed the park and area around Lake Tjörnin and the streets at the lower end of Thingholt, near the school. By then the police had got their act together, though opinion at the station was that it was a little premature to call out the search parties. They asked if she had ever done anything like this before but the response was a firm negative: she had never disappeared without trace before. No need to worry too much, the parents were told; their daughter hadn’t even been missing twenty-four hours and there was every likelihood that she would turn up safe and sound before long.

But Dagbjört didn’t turn up. Twenty-four hours passed, then forty-eight, then seventy-two, and still there was no sign of her. Nothing she had said or done in the preceding days had given any clue to her possible movements that morning. She had been her usual self, bright and breezy, bursting with plans as always. She had informed her parents of her wish to continue her education, preferably in medicine, though there were few female doctors in the country at the time. She had told her mother that in the past decade only seven women had completed their medical training in Iceland.

‘So, as I’m sure you can imagine, it was an unspeakably awful time,’ Svava told Erlendur. ‘They said — my brother and his wife Helga — that it was out of the question that she could have taken her own life.’

‘What did they think had happened?’ asked Erlendur.

‘They couldn’t begin to understand it. They thought she must have been injured in some way. Maybe she’d walked along the shore, fallen in the sea and couldn’t save herself. Got swept out by the current. It was so bloody dark, of course — it was the end of November — and for reasons we don’t know she either decided not to go to school and went somewhere else instead or was intercepted on the way. Accepted a lift perhaps. Had some sort of run-in with somebody. We pictured all kinds of situations she could have got into but of course we hadn’t really the faintest idea what happened.’

‘If she had gone somewhere other than school, where might it have been?’

‘I suppose it’s just possible she walked out to Nauthólsvík cove. Went for a swim in the hot water. But that’s clutching at straws. She was young, she loved life and had never shown any hint of depression or anxiety — quite the reverse — she had a very positive outlook, was doing well at school, had a good gang of friends. Her parents said she looked forward to school every day.’

‘There was nothing wrong with the weather that morning, was there?’ asked Erlendur. ‘No chance she’d have had to urgently seek shelter?’

‘No, it was frosty and still,’ said Svava. ‘They combed all the shores here, all the way south to the Reykjanes Peninsula. Never found a thing.’

Svava poured them both more coffee. Erlendur still hadn’t touched his freshly baked doughnut.

‘There was talk of a diary,’ said Erlendur, remembering this detail from the police files. It had not helped the inquiry as it had turned out to contain nothing but the musings and dreams of a growing girl, incidents from school life, books she was reading for her studies and her opinions of the various subjects. The occasional comment about her teachers and fellow pupils, all very innocent. She had also stuck in cuttings from the papers, pictures of actors and so on.

‘Yes, that’s right. I saw it among my brother’s papers. It didn’t help us at all, as you probably know.’

‘You didn’t notice if there were any pages missing, any she’d torn out?’

‘There could well have been. The diary’s a sort of file with loose pages, so it’s impossible to say. You can take them out or add them in as you like. If she removed any, they must have been lost long ago.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Of course, the biggest puzzle was that boy from Camp Knox,’ Svava added after a brief pause.

‘The one her friend mentioned?’

‘Yes. Dagbjört was in the habit of taking a detour, to avoid the old army barracks — she wasn’t the only one. There was often bad feeling between the kids from the camp and the ones living in the houses nearby. As far as her parents were aware, she didn’t know any boys from Camp Knox. So it would’ve had to have been a recent development. Naturally they tried to track the boy down and asked around about him, but he never came forward. So I don’t know if there was any truth to the story. They questioned the residents of the camp and searched some of the huts — there were a lot of lowlifes living there, as you’d expect. But nothing came out of it.’

‘Was she seeing any other boys?’ asked Erlendur.

‘No — if you mean boyfriends, we didn’t know of any and neither did her friends. We thought this girl had probably misunderstood or misheard something Dagbjört said about a boy from Camp Knox. But maybe you should talk to her yourself.’

Erlendur nodded. ‘I was planning to. Was Dagbjört actively scared of walking through the camp then?’

‘Well, she wasn’t keen on it and I know Helga warned her not to go there — she’d heard tales about drunkenness and so on. There were single mothers with three or four kids, some of the poorest people in Reykjavík, and men in all kinds of states trying to crawl into their huts at night. I remember her telling us — one of the mothers we met when we were looking for Dagbjört. She was complaining about it to the policemen with us. Asked why it was that louts and thugs were allowed to run riot in the camp and nothing was done about it. Those poor women and their children had a very raw deal. The kids were bullied at school too. One of the other mothers told us her two daughters had been driven out of school by a gang of boys and said they were never going back. I seem to recall one of them was actually beaten up. That sort of thing was bound to make the camp children stick together.’

Svava looked Erlendur in the eye and spoke firmly.

‘I’m aware I might be prejudiced,’ she said, ‘and it can’t be helped, but I don’t believe Dagbjört had met a boy from the camp. I think it’s quite out of the question. I just can’t picture it. Can’t picture it at all.’

‘Because...?’

‘Because she had her head screwed on,’ said Svava. ‘That’s why. I know I shouldn’t talk like this but it’s a fact. It’s what I feel and I should be allowed to speak my mind. I don’t believe she was seeing a boy from the camp, and anyway it was never proved. No one in the huts was aware of any relationship or recognised Dagbjört.’

‘Couldn’t she have been seeing this boy anyway, in spite of the fact no one saw them together?’

‘We went over it endlessly day in, day out,’ said Svava. ‘Did he exist? If so, who was he? Did he know what happened? Did she meet him that morning?’

‘But you don’t think he existed?’

‘No, I don’t. Though my brother disagreed. All I can say is that if there was a boy, he never gave himself up. He knew we were looking for Dagbjört. He’d have heard about our search and would have told us if he knew anything.’

‘Unless he was involved?’ said Erlendur. ‘Since he didn’t come forward, doesn’t that point to a guilty conscience?’

‘Of course, if you look at it that way,’ said Svava. ‘My brother talked a lot along those lines; Helga too. They were sure this mystery boy must have played some part in her disappearance. Convinced of it.’

‘The police put out an appeal in the camp for him or any witnesses who might know something about Dagbjört’s movements or their relationship to come forward.’

‘Yes.’

‘But nothing came of it.’

‘No. Nothing. Apart from two or three false leads the police followed up that turned out to have nothing to do with her disappearance. That was all.’