Silence of the Grave

18

Edward Hunter had been an officer with the American wartime forces in Iceland, one of the few members of the military who did not leave when peace was restored. Jim, the secretary at the British embassy, had located him without any great difficulty through the American embassy. He was looking for members of the British and American occupying forces, but according to the Home Office in London, few were still alive. Most of the British troops who went to Iceland lost their lives in combat in North Africa and Italy or on the western front, in the invasion of Normandy in 1944. Only a few Americans stationed in Iceland subsequently went into battle; most stayed for the duration of the war. Several remained behind, married Icelandic women and eventually became Icelandic nationals. One of them was Edward Hunter.

Erlendur received a call from Jim early in the morning.

“I talked to the American embassy and they directed me to this man Hunter. I talked to him myself to save you the bother. I hope that was in order.”

“Thank you,” Erlendur said.

“He lives in Kopavogur.”

“Has he been there since the war?”

“Unfortunately I don’t know that.”

“But he still lives here, in other words, this Hunter,” Erlendur said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

He had not slept well that night, he dozed and had bad dreams. The words of the little thin-haired woman at the hospital the previous evening were preying on his mind. He had no faith in mediums acting as go-betweens for the afterlife, and he did not believe that they could see what was hidden to others. On the contrary, he dismissed them as frauds, every one of them: clever at winkling information out of people and reading body language to establish details about the individual in question, which in half the cases might fit and in the other half might be plain wrong — simple probability. Erlendur scoffed at the subject as bloody nonsense when it had arisen at the office once, to Elinborg’s great chagrin. She believed in mediums and life after death, and for some reason she expected him to be open to such ideas. Possibly because he was from the countryside. That turned out to be a huge misunderstanding. He was certainly not open to the supernatural. Yet there was something about the woman at the hospital and what she said that Erlendur could not stop thinking about, and it had disturbed his sleep.

“Yes, he still lives here now,” Jim said, with profuse apologies for having woken Erlendur; he thought all Icelanders got up early. He did so himself, the endless spring daylight showed him no mercy.

“Hang on, so he’s married to an Icelander?”

“I’ve spoken to him,” Jim said again in his English accent as if he had not heard the question. “He’s expecting your call. Colonel Hunter served for a while with the military police in Reykjavik and he remembers an incident in the depot on the hill that he’s prepared to tell you about.”

“What incident?” Erlendur asked.

“He’ll tell you about it. And I’ll go on trying to dig up something about soldiers who died or went missing here. You ought to ask Colonel Hunter about that too.”

They said goodbye and Erlendur lumbered into the kitchen to make coffee. He was still deep in thought. Could a medium say which side people were on if they were-halfway between life and death? Without accepting it in the slightest, he thought to himself that if it offered consolation to people who had lost loved ones, he was not going to oppose it. It was consolation that mattered, not where it came from.

The seething coffee burned his tongue when he sipped it. He avoided thinking about what was really haunting him that night and morning, and managed to keep it at bay.

More or less.

Ex-US army colonel Edward Hunter cut more an Icelandic than an American figure when, dressed in a buttoned-up woollen sweater and sporting a scraggy white beard, he welcomed Erlendur and Elinborg to his detached house in Kopavogur. His hair was unkempt and a little scruffy, but he was both friendly and polite when he shook them by the hand and told them just to call him Ed. In that respect he reminded Erlendur of Jim. He told them his wife was in the States, visiting his sister. Himself, he went there less and less.

On their way to visit Ed, Elinborg told Erlendur that, according to Bara, Benjamin’s fiancee was wearing a green coat when she went missing. Elinborg thought this interesting, but Erlendur stifled any further discussion by saying rather brashly that he did not believe in ghosts. Elinborg had the feeling the subject was closed.

Ed showed them into a large sitting room and Erlendur saw scant evidence of the military life as he took a look around: in front of him were two gloomy Icelandic landscape paintings, Icelandic ceramic statues and framed family photographs. Nothing that reminded Erlendur of military service or World War II.

Having expected them, Ed had coffee, tea and biscuits ready, and after a polite chat, which rather bored all three of them, the old soldier went into action and asked how he could help. He spoke almost flawless Icelandic, in short, concise phrases as if the discipline of the army had taught him to keep to the bare essentials.

“Jim at the British embassy told us you served here during the war, including a spell with the military police, and were involved in a case concerning the depot at the present site of Grafarholt golf course.”

“Yes, I play golf there regularly now,” Ed said. “I heard the news of the bones on the hill. Jim told me you thought they might belong to one of our men. British or American.”

“Was there some kind of incident at the depot?” Erlendur asked.

“They used to steal,” Ed said. “It happens at most depots. I guess you’d call it ‘wastage’. A group of soldiers stole provisions and sold them to the Icelanders. It started on a very small scale, but gradually they got more confident and in the end it became quite a large operation. The quartermaster was in on it with them. They were all sentenced. Left the country. I remember it well. I kept a diary and browsed through it after Jim phoned. It all came back to me, the theft. I also rang my friend from that time, Phil, who was my superior. We went over it together.”

“How was the theft discovered?” Elinborg asked.

“Greed got the better of them. Theft on the scale they were practising is difficult to conceal, and rumours about irregularities spread.”

“Who was involved?” Erlendur took out a cigarette and Ed nodded to show that he did not mind him smoking. Elinborg gave Erlendur a reproachful look.

“Civilians. Mostly. The quartermaster was the highest ranked. And at least one Icelander. A man who lived on the hill. On the other side from the depot.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“No. He lived with his family in an unpainted shack. We found a lot of merchandise there. From the depot. I wrote in my diary that he had three children, one of them handicapped, a girl. The other two were boys. The mother…”

Ed fell silent.

“What about the mother?” Elinborg said. “You were going to say something about the mother.”

“I think she had a pretty rough time.” Ed fell silent again and grew pensive, as if trying to transport himself back to that distant time when he investigated the theft, walked into an Icelandic house and encountered a woman whom he could tell was the victim of violence. And not only the victim of a single, recent attack; it was obvious that she suffered persistent and systematic abuse, both physical and psychological.

He barely noticed her when he entered the house with four other military policemen. The first thing he saw was the handicapped girl lying on her makeshift bed in the kitchen. He saw the two boys standing side by side next to her, transfixed and terrified as the soldiers burst in. He saw the man leap up from the kitchen table. They had arrived unannounced and clearly he was not expecting them. They could tell at a glance whether people were tough. Whether they posed a threat. This man would not give them any trouble.

Then he saw the woman. It was very early spring and gloomy, and it took him a moment to adjust to the dark inside. As if hiding, the woman stood where he thought he could see a passage leading to other rooms. At first he took her for one of the thieves, trying to make a getaway. He marched up to the passage, drawing his gun from its holster. Shouted down the passage and pointed his gun into the darkness. The crippled girl started screaming at him. The two boys pounced on him as one, shouting something he did not understand. And out of the darkness came the woman, whom he would never forget as long as he lived.

Immediately he realised why she was hiding. Her face was badly bruised, her upper lip puffed up and one eye so swollen that she could not open it. She looked at him in fear with the other eye, then bowed her head as if by instinct. As if she thought he was going to hit her. She was wearing one tattered dress on top of another, her legs bare but for socks and scruffy old shoes. Her dirty hair hung down to her shoulders in thick knots. For all he could tell, she limped. She was the most miserable creature he had ever seen in his life.

He watched her trying to calm her sons and understood that it was not her appearance that she was trying to hide.

She was hiding her shame.

The children fell silent. The older boy huddled up against his mother. Ed looked over at the husband, walked up to him and hit him round the face with a resounding slap.

“And that was that,” Ed concluded his account. “I couldn’t control myself. Don’t know what happened. Don’t know what came over me. It was incomprehensible, really. You were trained, you know, trained to face anything. Trained to keep calm whatever happened. As you can imagine, it was crucial to keep your self-control at all times, with a war going on and all that. But when I saw that woman… when I saw what she’d had to put up with — and clearly not just that once — I could visualise her life at that man’s hands, and something snapped inside me. Something happened that I just couldn’t control.”

Ed paused.

“I was a policeman in Baltimore for two years before war broke out. It wasn’t called domestic violence then, but it was just as ugly all the same. I came across it there too and I’ve always been repelled by it. I could tell right away what was going on, and he’d been stealing from us too… but, well, he was sentenced by your courts,” Ed said, as if trying to shake out of his mind the memory of the woman on the hill. “I don’t think he got much of a sentence. He was sure to be back home beating up his poor wife before a couple of months were up.”

“So you’re talking about serious domestic violence,” Erlendur said.

“The worst imaginable. It was appalling, the sight of that woman,” Ed said. “Plain appalling. As I say, I could see straight away what was going on. Tried to talk to her, but she couldn’t understand a word of English. I told the Icelandic police about her, but they said there wasn’t a lot they could do. That hasn’t changed much, I understand.”

“You don’t remember their names, do you?” Elinborg asked. “They’re not in your diary?”

“No, but you ought to have a report on it. Because of the theft. And he worked in the depot. There are bound to be lists of the employees, of Icelandic workers in the camp on the hill. But maybe it’s too long ago.”

“What about the soldiers?” Erlendur asked. “The ones your courts sentenced.”

“They spent time in military prison. Stealing supplies was a very serious crime. Then they were sent to the front. A death sentence of sorts.”

“And you caught them all.”

“Who knows? But the thieving stopped. The inventories returned to normal. The matter was resolved.”

“So you don’t think any of this is connected with the bones we found?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“You don’t recall anyone who went missing from your ranks, or the British?”

“You mean a deserter?”

“No. An unexplained disappearance. Because of the skeleton. If you know who it might be. Maybe an American soldier from the depot?”

“I simply don’t have a clue. Not a clue.”

They talked to Ed for a good while longer. He gave the impression that he enjoyed talking to them. Seemed to enjoy reminiscing about the old days, armed with his precious diary, and soon they were discussing the war years in Iceland and the impact of the military presence, until Erlendur came to his senses. Mustn’t waste time like that. He stood up, and so did Elinborg, and they both thanked him warmly.

Ed stood up to show them out.

“How did you discover the theft?” Erlendur asked at the door.

“Discover it?” Ed repeated.

“What was your lead?”

“Oh, I see. A phone call. Someone phoned the police headquarters and reported a sizeable theft from the depot.”

“Who blew the whistle?”

“We never found out, I’m afraid. Never knew who it was.”

Simon stood by his mother’s side and watched, dumbfounded, when the soldier spun round with a mixture of astonishment and rage, walked directly across the kitchen and slapped Grimur around the face so hard that he knocked him to the floor.

The three other soldiers stood motionless in the doorway while Grimur’s assailant stood over him and shouted at him something the Icelanders did not understand. Simon could not believe his eyes. He looked at Tomas, transfixed on what was happening, and then at Mikkelina, who stared in horror at Grimur lying on the floor. He looked over at their mother and saw tears in her eyes.

Grimur was off his guard. When they heard two jeeps pull up outside the house the mother had hurried into the passage so that no one would see her. The sight of her with her black eye and burst lip. Grimur had not even stood up from the table, as if he had no worries that what he was doing with the pilferers from the depot would ever be discovered. He was expecting his soldier friends with a batch of merchandise that they planned to store in the house and that evening they were going into town to sell some of the booty. Grimur had plenty of money and had started talking about moving away from the hill, buying a flat, and even talked of buying a car, but only when he was in particularly high spirits.

The soldiers led Grimur out. Put him in one of the jeeps and drove him away. Their leader, the one who knocked Grimur to the floor without the slightest effort — who just walked up to him and hit him as if he did not know how strong Grimur was — said something to their mother and then said goodbye, not with a salute, but with a handshake, and got into the other jeep.

Silence soon returned to the little house. Their mother remained standing in the passage as if the intrusion was beyond her comprehension. She stroked her eye gingerly, fixated on something only she could see. They had never seen Grimur lying on the floor. They had never seen him knocked flat. Never heard anyone shout at him. Never seen him so helpless. They could not fathom what had happened. How it could happen. Why Grimur did not attack the soldiers and beat them to pulp. The children looked at each other. Inside the house, the silence was stifling. They looked at their mother as a strange noise was heard. It came from Mikkelina. She was squatting on her bed and they heard the noise again, and saw that she was beginning to giggle, and the giggling built up into a snigger which she tried to repress at first, but could not, and she erupted into laughter. Simon smiled and started laughing too, and Tomas followed suit, and before long all three were howling with uncontrollable spasms that echoed around the house and carried out onto the hill in the fine spring weather.

Two hours later a military truck pulled up and emptied the house of all the booty that Grimur and his colleagues had stashed indoors. The boys watched the truck drive away, and they ran over the hill and saw it go back to the depot where it was unloaded.

Simon did not know exactly what had happened and he was not sure that his mother did either, but Grimur had received a prison sentence and would not come home for the next few months. At first life continued as normal on the hill. They didn’t seem to take in that Grimur was no longer around. At least, not for the time being. Their mother went about her chores as she always had, and had no qualms about using Grimur’s ill-gotten gains to provide for herself and her children. Later she found herself a job on the Gufunes farm, about half an hour’s walk from the house.

Weather permitting, the boys carried Mikkelina out into the sunshine. Sometimes they took her along when they went fishing in Reynisvatn. If they caught enough trout their mother would fry it in a pan and make a delicious meal. Gradually they were liberated from the grip that Grimur still exerted over them even while he was away. It was easier to wake up in the mornings, the day rushed past care free, and the evenings passed in an unfamiliar calm which was so comfortable that they stayed up well into the night, talking and playing, until they couldn’t keep their eyes open.

Grimur’s absence, however, had the greatest effect on their mother. One day, when she had finally realised that he would not be coming back in the immediate future, she washed every inch of their double bed. She aired the mattresses in the yard and beat the dust and dirt out of them. Then she took out the quilts and beat them too, changed the bed linen, bathed her children in turn with green soap and hot water from a big tub that she put on the kitchen floor, and ended by carefully washing her own hair and her face — which still bore the marks from Grimur’s last assault — and her whole body. Hesitantly she picked up a mirror and looked into it. She stroked her eye and lip. She had grown thinner and her expression was tougher, her teeth protruding a little, her eyes sunk deep and her nose, which had been broken once, had an almost imperceptible curve.

Towards midnight she took all her children into her bed and the four of them slept there together. After that the children slept in the big bed with their mother, Mikkelina by herself on her right and the two boys on her left, happy.

She never visited Grimur in prison. They never mentioned his name all the time he was away.

One morning, shortly after Grimur had been led away, Dave the soldier strolled over the hill with his fishing rod, walked past their house and winked at Simon, who was standing in front of the house, and continued all the way to Hafravatn. Simon set off in pursuit, lying down at a suitable distance to spy on him. Dave spent the day by the lake, relaxed as ever, without apparently minding whether he caught any fish or not. He landed three.

When evening set in he went back up the hill and stopped by their house with his three fish tied together by their tails with a piece of string. Dave was unsure of himself, or so it appeared to Simon, who had run back home to watch him through the kitchen window, where he made sure that Dave could not see him. At last the soldier made up his mind, walked over to the house and knocked on the door.

Simon had told his mother about the soldier, the same one who had given them the trout before, and she went out and glanced around for him, went back in, looked in the mirror and tidied her hair. She seemed to sense that he would drop in on his way back to the barracks. She was ready to greet him when he did.

She opened the door and Dave smiled, said something she didn’t understand and handed her the fish. She took them and invited him inside. He entered the house and stood awkwardly in the kitchen. Nodded to the boys and to Mikkelina, who stretched and strained for a better look at this soldier who had come all that way just to stand in their kitchen in his uniform with a funny hat shaped like an upturned boat, which he suddenly remembered he had forgotten to take off when he came inside and snatched from his head in embarrassment. He was of medium height, certainly older than 30, slim with nicely shaped hands, which fiddled with the upturned boat, twisting it as if they were wringing out the washing.

She gestured to him to sit at the kitchen table, and he sat with the boys beside him while their mother made coffee, real coffee from the depot, coffee that Grimur had stolen and the soldiers had not discovered. Dave knew Simon’s name, and found out that Tomas was called Tomas, which was easy for him to pronounce. Mikkelina’s name amused him and he said it over and again in such a funny way that they all laughed. He said his name was Dave Welch, from a place called Brooklyn in America. He told them he was a private. They had no idea what he was talking about.

“A private,” he repeated, but they just stared at him.

He drank his coffee and seemed very pleased with it. The mother sat facing him at the other end of the table.

“I understand your husband is in jail,” he said. “For stealing.”

He got no response.

With a glance at the children he took a piece of paper out of his breast pocket and twiddled it between his fingers as if uncertain what to do. Then he passed the note across the table to their mother. She picked it up, unfolded it and read what it said. She looked at him in astonishment, then back at the note. Then she folded up the note and put it in the pocket of her apron.

Tomas managed to make Dave understand that he ought to have another try at saying Mikkelina’s name, and when he did they all started laughing again, and Mikkelina crinkled up her face in sheer joy.

Dave Welch visited their house regularly all that summer and made friends with the children and their mother. He fished in the two lakes and gave his catches to them, and he brought them little things from the depot that came in useful. He played with the children, who took a special delight in having him there, and he always carried his notebook in his pocket to make himself understood in Icelandic. They rolled around laughing when he spluttered out a phrase in Icelandic. His serious expression was completely at odds with what he said, and the way he said it sounded like a three-year-old child talking.

But he was a quick learner and it soon became easier for them to understand him and for him to know what they were talking about. The boys showed him the best places to fish and walked proudly with him over the hill and around the lake, and they learned English words from him and American songs that they had heard before from the depot.

He formed a special relationship with Mikkelina. Before long he had won her over entirely, and would carry her outside in good weather and test what she was capable of achieving. His approach was similar to her mother’s: moving her arms and legs for her, supporting her while she walked, helping her with all kinds of exercises. One day he brought over an army doctor to look at Mikkelina. The doctor shone a torch into her eyes and down her throat, moved her head round and felt her neck and down her spine. He had wooden blocks of different shapes with him, and made her fit them into matching holes. That took her no time at all. He was told that she had fallen ill at the age of three and understood what people said to her, but could barely speak a word herself. That she could read and that her mother was teaching her to write. The doctor nodded as if he understood, a meaningful expression on his face. He had a long talk with Dave after the examination and when he left Dave managed to make them understand that Mikkelina’s mind was completely healthy. They already knew that. But then he said that, with time, the proper exercises and a lot of effort, Mikkelina would be able to walk unaided.

“Walk!” Her mother slumped onto her chair.

“And even speak normally,” Dave added. “Perhaps. Has she never been to a doctor before?”

“All this is beyond me,” she said sadly.

“She’s okay,” Dave said. “Just give her time.”

Their mother had ceased to hear what he was saying.

“He’s a terrible man,” she said all of a sudden, and her children pricked up their ears, because they had never heard her talk about Grimur the way she did that day. “A terrible man,” she continued. “A wretched little creature that doesn’t deserve to live. I don’t know why they’re allowed to live. I don’t understand. Why they’re allowed to do what they please. What makes people like that? What is it that turns him into a monster? Why does he behave like an animal year after year, attacking his children and humiliating them, attacking me and beating me until I want to die and think about how to…”

She heaved a deep sigh and went to sit beside Mikkelina.

“It makes you feel ashamed for being the victim of a man like that, you disappear into total loneliness and bar everyone from entering your world, even your own children, because you don’t want anyone to set foot in there, least of all them. And you sit bracing yourself for the next attack that comes out of the blue and is full of hatred for something or other, you don’t know what, and you spend your whole life waiting for the next attack, when is it coming, how bad will it be, what’s the reason, how can I avoid it? The more I do to please him, the more I repulse him. The more submissiveness and fear I show, the more he loathes me. And if I resist, all the more reason for him to beat the living daylights out of me. There’s no way to do the right thing. None.

“Until all you think about is how to get it over with. It doesn’t matter how. Just get it over with.”

A deathly silence fell. Mikkelina lay motionless in her bed and the boys had inched closer to their mother. They listened, dumbstruck, to every word. Never before had she opened a window into the torment that she had grappled with for so long that she had forgotten everything else.

“It’ll be okay,” Dave said.

“I’ll help you,” Simon said in a serious voice.

She looked at him.

“I know, Simon,” she said. “I always have known, my poor Simon.”

The days went by and Dave devoted all his spare time to the family on the hill and spent longer and longer with the children’s mother, either indoors or walking around Reynisvatn and over to Hafravatn. The boys wanted to see more of him, but he had stopped going fishing with them and had less time for Mikkelina. But they did not mind. They noticed the change in their mother, they associated it with Dave and were happy for her.

One beautiful autumn day, almost half a year after Grimur was marched away from the hill in the arms of the military police, Simon saw Dave and his mother in the distance, walking towards the house. They were walking close together and for all he could see they were holding hands. As they drew closer they stopped holding hands and moved apart, and Simon realised they did not want to be seen.

“What are you and Dave going to do?” Simon asked his mother one evening that autumn, after dusk had fallen on the hill. They sat in the kitchen. Tomas and Mikkelina were playing cards. Dave had spent the day with them then gone back to the depot. The question had been in the air all summer. The children had discussed it amongst themselves and imagined all kinds of situations that ended with Dave becoming a father to them and expelling Grimur from their sight for ever.

“What do you mean, do?” his mother said.

“When he comes back,” Simon said, noticing that Mikkelina and Tomas had stopped playing cards and were now watching him.

“There’s plenty of time to think about that,” their mother said. “He won’t be back for a while.”

“But what are you going to do?” Mikkelina and Tomas turned their heads from Simon to their mother.

She looked at Simon, then at the other two.

“He’s going to help us,” she said.

“Who?” Simon said.

“Dave. He’s going to help us.”

“What’s he going to do?” Simon looked at his mother, trying to work out what she meant. She looked him straight in the eye.

“Dave knows about that sort of person. He knows how to get rid of them.”

“What’s he going to do?” Simon repeated.

“Don’t worry about it,” his mother replied.

“Is he going to get rid of him for us?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. The less we know, the better, he says, and I shouldn’t even be telling you this. Maybe he’ll talk to him. Scare him into leaving us alone. He says he has friends in the army who can help him if need be.”

“But what if Dave leaves?”

“Leaves?”

“If he leaves Iceland,” Simon said. “He won’t always be here. He’s a soldier. They’re always sending troops away. Posting new ones to the barracks. What if he leaves? What will we do then?”

She looked at her son.

“We’ll find a way,” she said in a low voice. “We’ll find a way then.”