Reykjavik Nights

40

Erlendur was off duty for the next four nights. It was always difficult to adjust. More experienced officers had told him it was best to tackle the problem head on and revert to a normal routine when off duty rather than remaining active at night and sleeping during the day. This was easier said than done. The trick was to stay awake all day after the last night shift, then go to bed at the usual time. When you woke up the next morning, so the theory went, your body clock would have reset itself.

Erlendur’s attempts to follow this advice had not been particularly successful. He had dutifully stayed awake for twenty-four hours but the following night he tossed and turned, falling into a fitful doze only to wake again restless, sweating and confused. At two in the morning, sleep still eluding him, he went into the kitchen and sat at the table, alone in the silence, not knowing what to do. He stared into space, conscious that whatever ploys he used to try to switch off his churning thoughts, the problem of Oddný and Hannibal would prevent him from sleeping. And if not that, then Halldóra’s announcement. And if not that, something else...

‘What do you want to do, Erlendur?’ she had asked, and he had suggested she move in with him for now; later they would find somewhere more suitable. She was not convinced. She wanted to be persuaded that he genuinely meant it and asked if he was serious about their relationship. He tried to reassure her, and even believed it himself. It was time to settle down, time to stop living a life that revolved entirely around himself, time to make changes and do something new, something different.

By now Halldóra was looking rather more cheerful and before long she was agreeing with him about finding more suitable accommodation. She had already been scanning the property ads in the papers and concluded that it would be better to buy a place than rent. Of course, they would need a second bedroom. One, for now. Her face broke into a smile and he realised she was happy again.

From there his thoughts roved on to Gústaf’s reaction: had it been right to visit him and, if so, could he have handled the situation better? He felt a pang of regret now at how aggressive he had been, at the harsh accusations implicit in his questions. For all he knew, Gústaf might regard this as grounds for a formal complaint.

It seemed a reasonable assumption that Oddný was dead. Erlendur pondered the possibility he had put to Gústaf: that the same person had murdered Hannibal as well. Jealousy and revenge were the motives that sprang to mind, but he told himself he must not be too quick to point the finger. It was hard to work out the sequence of events at the pipeline and later at the diggings, but he thought perhaps Oddný had been assaulted and, in trying to come to her aid, Hannibal had been overpowered and killed. The perpetrator had then hidden Oddný’s body but left Hannibal in the pool to make it look as if he’d drowned, gambling on the fact that no one would bother much about the death of a tramp.

He had assured Gústaf that Hannibal wouldn’t have laid a finger on Oddný, and it was true: he simply couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t picture him killing her, hiding her body, then drowning himself. That didn’t add up. There must have been a third person, who was responsible for both their deaths. That was the conclusion staring Erlendur in the face.

His mind wandered back over the events of recent days and weeks, pausing at his meeting with Thurí at the bus station. At what she had said about the accident; how Helena had waved Hannibal away so that he would save his sister. Hannibal had confided in Thurí when his guard was down. When he was ‘gentle’, she had said. Hannibal had never been able to escape the memories of what had happened when they crashed into the harbour.

He pictured Thurí in the bus shelter, waiting for her next round trip, dreaming of travel. Remembered his first meeting with her when she had been perfectly sober, so different from the three alcoholics playing Ludo, who had been so coarse, cackling at them like three witches in a fairy tale. He tried to erase the image of Thurí and Bergmundur in her grotty little room in the west of town.

The west of town... where he sometimes took a detour past a certain house, when haunted by the story of the girl from the women’s college who had vanished without trace. This fixation of his with disappearances — with the phenomenon itself, the fates of those who were never heard of again and the sufferings of those left behind to mourn. He knew his obsession had its roots in the tragedy he himself had endured on the moors out east, and that it had been intensified by all the books he had read on disappearances or terrible ordeals in this harsh land.

Perhaps that was the true origin of his insomnia. The compulsion that repeatedly interrupted his sleep, that kept him lying awake. An inexplicable tension in his body. A sense of anticipation he had not experienced before. A spark of life ignited by the investigation he had begun, on his own initiative, into a disappearance in the city.

Sooner or later he really would have to present his discoveries to CID. He would tell them all he knew, detail his conversations with everyone — from the brothers whom Hannibal had accused of trying to set fire to him, to Thurí who had found the earring.

The object in question was lying on the table in front of him. Erlendur picked it up and twiddled it between his fingers. According to Thurí it had been lying right under the pipe near the opening. If her account was correct, Oddný could not have lost the earring where it was found. Nobody could fit in such a narrow space. There was no telling how it had ended up there but presumably somebody had kicked it aside without realising. On the other hand, it might have been hidden under the pipes, and there was no getting away from the fact that Hannibal himself could have done that.

One further possibility occurred to him, but Erlendur could hardly bear to think it through. Oddný herself might have secreted the earring there in the faint hope that it would one day come to light and the world would learn that she had met her death in that dark tunnel.