Reykjavik Nights

7

As it happened, Erlendur was well acquainted with the facts of the woman’s disappearance from Thórskaffi, since stories of people going missing held a particular fascination for him. He devoured news reports on everything from poorly equipped ptarmigan hunters failing to return home from the mountains at the appointed time, to travellers in the interior who had not been heard of for days, or youngsters, like the girl in the pink blouse, running away from home. Most turned up eventually, alive or dead, but some were never seen again, despite large search parties and rescue units combing the countryside for days. The missing left a series of unanswered questions behind them.

Soon after Erlendur joined the police, he had begun to trawl through the archives for cases, old and more recent, in Reykjavík and the surrounding area. For years he had been reading up on tales of travellers going astray or surviving ordeals on the country’s high moors and mountain roads. His digging in the police records was merely an extension of this interest.

Only rarely were these missing-persons cases attributed to criminal action, but then Erlendur’s interest was personal rather than professional. He spent hours leafing through reports of cold cases and familiarising himself with the circumstances of a variety of disappearances and unsolved crimes, though the latter did not have the same appeal. There were exceptions, however, such as Hannibal’s demise, though whether there had been anything suspicious about that was disputable. In this instance it was his acquaintance with the victim that had aroused his curiosity.

One case in particular exerted such a powerful hold on Erlendur’s imagination that he had immersed himself in the details to the extent of visiting the sites in question. One day in 1953 an eighteen-year-old girl, a pupil at the Reykjavík Women’s College, had been due to meet her friends at a cafe much frequented by students on Lækjargata in the centre of town. Although they had originally come from different schools, the four girls had all started in the same class at the college and become good friends that first winter. They hung out together and signed up for all kinds of extracurricular activities. They had been meeting to plan an evening’s entertainment for their class. When only three of them turned up the girls were not unduly annoyed; they simply assumed their friend was ill since she had been absent from class that morning. They phoned her house from the cafe to find out how she was. The girl’s mother answered and it took her a minute or two to grasp what they were talking about. ‘We just wanted to know how she’s feeling,’ explained the friend. The girl’s mother was puzzled by the question: her daughter wasn’t ill; she’d gone to school.

The girl almost invariably took the same route to the college. It was a fifteen-minute walk from where she lived in the west of town, via Camp Knox, the area of Nissen huts built by the American occupying force during the war, which later became a source of cheap housing for Reykjavík’s poorer families. From there she headed east along Hringbraut to Fríkirkjuvegur where the college was located. On other days she used to catch the bus, but the driver had failed to notice her among the passengers that morning. As it tended to be the same small group of people every morning, he claimed to know the girl by sight. So either she had walked in or hitched a lift with someone she knew. It would not have been the first time. And although she had never been known to accept a ride from a stranger, this could not be ruled out either. But nor could it be established with any certainty, since no one had come forward to say they had given her a lift.

It was always possible that she had never intended to go in that day, that she had met up with some unknown person, with disastrous consequences, or had, alternatively, been bent on taking her own life in such a manner that her body was never found. She had not, as far as anyone was aware, had a boyfriend or gone out on dates or kept some relationship secret from her parents. And she had always been conscientious about her attendance. Could she have killed herself? There was no hint of any personal problems that could have pushed her to the brink of despair; on the contrary, she was popular and outgoing. But, then again, she had vanished during the blackest months of winter, and the darkness could take its toll on people’s mental health, so suicide could not be entirely ruled out. Indeed, the fact that her body never turned up suggested that it may have been swallowed without trace by the sea.

Erlendur had traced the girl’s route to school on foot, though much had changed in the intervening years; the Nissen huts were long gone and new buildings had risen in their place. On another occasion he had caught the bus to Fríkirkjuvegur. He had also stood in front of her old home in the west of town. She had been an only child. He saw the garden where she had played, the door she had walked through. He lingered only briefly, no more than a minute or two, but it had been long enough for his eyes to drink in the sadness.

The fate of the Thórskaffi woman was shrouded in the same mystery. Admittedly her friends had voiced suspicions of depression, though the woman had never confided in anyone, and unhappiness in her marriage. Her husband had flatly denied this, however, while conceding that he had been aware of mood swings and maybe low spirits. He had reported his wife missing early on Monday morning, by which point he had not heard from her since Saturday evening when she had gone out with friends from the estate agency where she worked. When she did not return home the following day, he had rung round her colleagues, but it was no use: some had only the haziest recollection of how the evening had ended.

They had gone out for dinner at Naustid to celebrate the firm’s fifth anniversary. Spouses were not invited and in their absence everyone had let their hair down and consumed copious amounts of alcohol. They had stayed at the restaurant until late, then someone had suggested moving on to Thórskaffi, a busy nightclub where a popular band was playing. Once there, the group had gradually dispersed, either calling it a night or running into other friends. No one had noticed when or with whom the woman had left. The last person she was known to have talked to was the oldest employee of the firm, a receptionist in her fifties. The receptionist had offered to share a taxi but she had said no thanks; she was going to stay on a bit longer and would probably walk home as it would do her good to clear her head. She lived in the new neighbourhood at the western end of the Fossvogur valley but said she didn’t mind the distance.

Later, when interviewed by the police, none of the other customers at Thórskaffi could recall much about the missing woman. Her colleagues had seen her chatting to a handful of other people, and two of these had come forward when the search was at its height. One was an old college friend who had been there with his wife. To them she had not appeared drunk, merely in high spirits, as they reminisced about their school days. The other witness was a woman she had known since her teens. A little later this friend had observed her talking to a man she did not recognise and could only describe in the vaguest terms since it had been dark in the club.

The search had yielded no results. The woman had simply vanished into thin air and the subsequent investigation had uncovered little that might explain her fate, apart from the detail that three years previously she had cheated on her husband. The circumstances had been so similar that when she failed to return home her husband had initially assumed that she had been up to her old tricks again. After the first occasion she had insisted it was the only time she had been unfaithful; it had been a moment of madness during a rough patch in their marriage. He had no reason to doubt her words.

One theory was that she had either bumped into her old lover or gone home with a new man, and that something had happened and she vanished without trace. When questioned, the former lover swore blind he had not met her that evening. The man her friend had seen her talking to had never come forward.

Yet in spite of this they saw no reason to treat the woman’s disappearance as a crime. Suicide was deemed more likely.

A single detail had struck Erlendur as he read the file one evening when he did not feel like going straight home after his shift. Two of the people interviewed had mentioned that the woman had been mad about jewellery.

Erlendur started awake, worried that he had overslept. He had been having a nap as he sometimes did before going on duty. Relieved to discover that it was still early, he got up and prepared for yet another night shift. He had lain there for a long time that evening, brooding over the fates of the girl from the women’s college and the woman from Thórskaffi, and wondering if his decision to join the police had been precipitated by his fascination with stories like theirs.