The Day Is Dark

Chapter 9

Eyjólfur agreed with Thóra’s theory about the photos that appeared to be missing from the folder. However, he couldn’t tell whether the images had been deleted from the camera or the computer system. That actually didn’t matter, since the images were gone and there was no way of knowing what was in them, although it was safe to assume they showed the same ice-bound hand and perhaps other body parts belonging to this unfortunate person. He turned to Thóra and Matthew. ‘Of course I could go over the backup files to check whether the images are in there. If they were deleted the day after they were uploaded it’s possible that they are.’ He smiled resignedly. ‘If in fact the photos made it onto the system.’

Matthew agreed to Eyjólfur’s plan and Eyjólfur went off to find the tapes. As he left he said that this work would be time-consuming, although there was little else for him to do for the time being; at least he wouldn’t be climbing up on the roof to fix the satellite dishes in this weather. ‘We could go and visit this place,’ said Thóra after he’d gone. ‘The journal described it quite oddly, and I’m sure Friðrikka will know what it means.’ Before they could go anywhere, however, the weather would have to improve.

Matthew pointed at the image on the screen. ‘Do you think that’s the owner of the bones lying here in all the drawers?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Thóra. ‘It looks like there’s flesh on this hand and the photos are only just over a week old. Besides, there aren’t any bones in the desk drawers of the drillers, who are probably the ones who took the photos.’

Bella stuck her head through the doorway. ‘It’s twelve thirty now and I’m ravenous. Is there anything to eat here, or did the trip include both starving and freezing to death?’ Thóra did not reply, but her own stomach was starting to rumble.

‘Yes, I guess it’s best to round everyone up and go over to the cafeteria,’ said Matthew. ‘Since the weather is so bad we ought to stick together.’ They went and found the others: Eyjólfur was working on the Internet servers, Friðrikka sat absorbed at a computer in one of the geologists’ offices, and the doctor was busily marking little plastic cups half full of water in the coffee room. They found Alvar in the security guard’s office, bent over a pile of ropes. Alvar saw the surprise on Eyjólfur’s face and his cheeks grew even redder as he muttered something about making a line between the houses that they could follow during blizzards. They put on their outerwear and walked in single file over to the cafeteria, without the safety line. Naturally, the wind had turned and it blew in their faces.

‘It looks to me as if everything fell apart after I quit,’ said Friðrikka, putting down her fork. They were sitting in the cafeteria, having just munched their way through grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. It was certainly no feast, but the sandwiches were quick and easy to prepare and left little to wash up afterwards. ‘I went over a chart they used to keep track of the progress of the project and that they sent weekly to Arctic Mining, but little seems to have happened. The work schedule is completely messed up and I totally understand why the mining company got worried. They were very insistent that we follow it.’

‘Do you know what caused the disruption?’ asked Thóra, considering whether she should have a third sandwich. There was only one left, and Bella was quicker to grab it.

‘I went over some of the journals and it looked to me as if there were a lot of possibilities.’ Friðrikka became a bit bashful when all eyes focused on her and she appeared to regret having said anything. ‘It seems as though they experienced significant mechanical failures, besides the havoc wreaked by the weather. This winter was much more severe than last year’s, when I was here.’

‘Didn’t those bastard Greenlanders just sabotage the equipment?’ asked Eyjólfur immediately. ‘They’d certainly be capable of it.’

‘What the hell are you talking about, boy?’ snapped the doctor. ‘Why would they want to sabotage anything here? I’m certain I know more about the natives in this country than you do, and I can tell you for sure that they’re the kindest of people and wish no one ill.’

‘Except for their women,’ interrupted Friðrikka. ‘They’re not particularly kind to them.’ Again she seemed to regret having spoken, and pressed her lips shut.

The doctor harrumphed, then said. ‘The way that a particular people or race handles alcohol says nothing about its disposition. Alcohol doesn’t really bring out the best in Icelanders either. What if we were deprived of our sustenance, like these people have been because of bleeding-heart liberal Westerners banning the hunting they depend upon?’ He paused for a moment. ‘These people are innately good but they have suffered badly. I also think that conditions here on the east coast are the worst of anywhere in Greenland. The society on the west coast is more like what we’re used to.’

Finally Thóra joined in. ‘Why do you think that the natives had something to do with the machinery?’ she asked Eyjólfur. ‘Were you here when any of this happened? That kind of thing could matter as far as the insurance is concerned.’

Eyjólfur seemed to have calmed down a bit. ‘Yeah, I’m not making it up; I know a bit about what happened,’ he answered, happy to have the opportunity to defend himself. ‘I’m not prejudiced or anything.’ No one bothered to contest this feeble excuse. ‘But I was here once when the drilling rig failed, and the drillers said someone had contaminated its fuel, poured sugar into it or something. It took them a long time to fix it and I can promise you that none of our people would have done such a thing. We all knew what was at stake.’

‘Is it possible that this Oddný Hildur, the one who disappeared, might have been involved?’ asked Matthew. ‘Maybe she was mentally unbalanced, and upset with the workplace or with Berg Technology.’

Friðrikka cleared her throat, her face red with anger. ‘The equipment failed after she disappeared. And besides, the very idea is ridiculous. Oddný Hildur was my friend; she was quiet and reserved by nature and I can guarantee you that she didn’t sabotage the equipment or anything else. And I won’t listen to this nonsense about her mental condition; she simply died of exposure, it was an accident and any talk about anything else is fucking bullshit. I was here when she vanished and there was nothing wrong with her. I found the insinuations that she committed suicide tasteless, and they were only made to cover the fact that those who were supposed to be taking care of us did not deal with the matter appropriately.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Thóra. ‘I read through the journals and it looked to me as if your security guard, Gísli, was completely on the case. Are they not to be trusted?’ She had already decided to go back over his data, making note of the time period when the vandalism to the drilling rig had taken place, in order to get a clearer view of the bigger picture. If the man had been making things up in his journals, she might not need to spend much time on them.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Friðrikka. ‘Gísli tried a bit but he called off the search too early, and he could have done more in my opinion. And there were others who could also have done better as far as the search is concerned. The owner of the company seemed not to take her disappearance particularly badly and didn’t even make the trip out here. The same goes for the police in Greenland; they never came. Oddný Hildur might even have still been alive somewhere, maybe with a broken leg, and unable to make it back to camp. If we had searched better, we might have been able to save her.’ She looked close to tears.

‘What are you on about?’ said Eyjólfur angrily. ‘I was here too. We did everything we could. You’d do better to take a good look at yourself. Fat lot of use you were, with all your hysterics. You were little better than that ponce Arnar. Oddný Hildur would never have survived in the kind of blizzard we experienced that week, with or without a broken leg. Things could have gone badly wrong if we had kept looking. You and Arnar were the ones who messed up in the search, if memory serves.’ At this, Friðrikka’s face turned so red that Alvar looked pale in comparison.

‘Who is this Arnar?’ asked Matthew. ‘Did he work here?’ Thóra recognized the name from the organizational chart but didn’t recall what the man’s job was.

‘He’s an engineer. I think he’s still working for the company.’ It was Friðrikka who answered. ‘It’s not fair to compare me to him as far as the search for Oddný Hildur is concerned. I put just as much effort into it as the others, even though I was chosen to investigate the area closest to camp so I wasn’t out all over the place. I highly doubt that Arnar took it as seriously as I did, though he might have tried to help a bit. When Oddný Hildur disappeared I was the one who suffered the most.’

‘You?’ shot back Eyjólfur. ‘In the end she and Arnar were pretty close, in this whole mess.’ He took a drink of the apple juice that had been served with the sandwiches.

Thóra looked at him curiously. ‘What do you mean by “close”? Were they having an affair?’ Oddný Hildur had been married, and probably this Arnar was as well.

Eyjólfur choked slightly on his drink. ‘Far from it. He bats for the other side. That’s why I called him a ponce. Couldn’t stand him.’ He stopped, clearly realizing from the looks on the others’ faces that he’d now revealed his homophobia as well as his racism. ‘That’s not what I meant. He wasn’t intolerable because he’s gay; that has nothing to do with it. He’d stopped drinking and was obsessed with his sobriety.’ Thóra recalled having seen a card listing the Twelve Steps hanging in one of the offices. ‘Nobody was bothered that he was gay. It wasn’t like that.’

‘Rubbish,’ bristled Friðrikka. ‘You had a massive problem with him being at the camp, just because he’s gay. All his AA crap was nothing to do with it.’ She turned to the others. ‘Most of the guys here are real “men’s men”. They talk non-stop about football and other equally fascinating topics. When Arnar came out of the closet after he stopped drinking they all turned their backs on him, and Eyjólfur was no exception. It was as if they thought it was infectious.’

‘Bullshit,’ muttered Eyjólfur. ‘I don’t know what he was like when he was drinking, but sober he was a boring, narrow-minded bastard.’

‘Did you resign because of what happened to your friend Oddný Hildur?’ asked Thóra, regarding Friðrikka steadily. Again she had found it necessary to intervene to ease the tension. What would things at the work camp have been like, she wondered, if it had always been this volatile in the cafeteria?

‘Yes.’ Friðrikka let this answer suffice. She pursed her lips, picked up her fork and started drawing it through the ketchup on her plate. Thóra thought it best not to irritate her, since she was hoping the other woman would help them locate the place the photo had been taken. She seemed a stubborn sort, and was probably more than capable of refusing to help them. Matthew was clearly thinking along the same lines, because he also said nothing.

‘Still, it was definitely the Greenlanders,’ muttered Eyjólfur, breaking the silence. He was obviously the type who had to have the last word. ‘They’ve been a problem since the project started.’ Rather than keeping silent when no one protested, the young man went on. This did not bode well for whatever woman married him in the future. ‘They stole stuff no one in their right mind would want, and everyone knew that they didn’t give a shit about this project.’

‘What did they steal?’ asked Matthew. Thóra’s ears pricked up.

‘Just some minor stuff. I don’t remember in detail but it was some stuff lying around that had been left behind. Pieces of wood, jackets, petrol cans. Things like that.’ Eyjólfur thought for a moment. ‘Boots, too. And probably other things I don’t remember or never heard about.’

So much for Thóra’s hope that theft or vandalism might be the key to saving the bank’s insurance money.

It had been a long day, and for Thóra the happiest part of it was the moment she finally crawled into bed. There was no sign that the storm was slackening, so the team had decided to work late to avoid having to return to the office building after supper. They said little over the meal and quickly disappeared one by one into their own rooms. Warm showers would have lightened their moods but all the pipes in this part of the camp had frozen, making that a distant dream. It was imperative that they finish the job here and get home, or somewhere else where the plumbing was in order. But the weather would dictate when that would happen. They hoped the storm would subside in the night so they could go to the work site the next day, or even down to Kaanneq to check whether anyone there knew about the men.

As Thóra drifted off, with Matthew snoring next to her, she ran over what she had learned that day. She felt particularly bad about not having a good enough understanding of the work done on site. In the contractual documents Matthew had given her she was able to read up on the main purpose of the project; namely, to prepare the area for the proposed mining of molybdenum, a metal that Thóra had never heard of but that was apparently used to temper steel. The exact details of how these preparations were accomplished were much fuzzier in her mind, meaning there was no way to work out what mattered and what didn’t while going over the data. Of course only a tiny proportion of the material stored in the computer system was of any actual use, and the trick was to fish up what mattered out of the digital soup. Her mind’s eye was filled with the hundreds of photographs she’d glanced over; endless pictures of the machinery, the core samples and other things that all had the common factor of being surrounded by every conceivable form of snow and ice. By the time she stopped to go to bed, she’d been struck snowblind simply from staring at the computer screen. Some of the photos had been taken in Kaanneq and showed the same empty streets and colourful houses as they had seen on their way from the helicopter pad. However, she still hadn’t found the twenty photos that had been deleted from the file made the day that the drillers recorded finding something unusual – photos presumably showing, from various angles, a hand covered in ice.

She had spent quite some time examining the drillers’ private files in the hope of getting to know them and gaining a better idea of what they could have got themselves into; perhaps even discovering what might have led to their disappearance. It didn’t take her long to come to the conclusion that they were a pair of jokers who were always sending round gags and funny stories on e-mail. Thóra knew they were both unmarried, and after reading the e-mails it looked to her as if they didn’t have girlfriends either. Nowhere did she find a message to a girl expressing how much they missed her or arranging a date. They were much better at inviting friends and acquaintances to parties and getting themselves invited to dinner by others.

In any case, Thóra found it made for depressing reading; Halldór Grétarsson and Bjarki Elíasson had undoubtedly met a sad end and there was something tragic about thinking that no spouse would be weeping over her husband’s disappearance – no matter how twisted it might be for Thóra to imagine it. Halldór, known as Dóri, had been interested in Greenland; among other things, his computer had links to websites about the country and its history. Thóra could not look at these sites since the Internet connection was still down, but the names of the links suggested the nature of their content. Dóri had even saved screengrabs from some of them, and those Thóra could see. In one of them she had discovered photos from when all the original inhabitants of the settlement had been found dead. Women and children lay as if asleep, except for the way their eyes stared vacuously into the lens. The images were black and white, but Thóra thought she could see bloodstains on the beds of the dead, although she wasn’t sure. The book in the cafeteria had said nothing about them dying violently, so that could hardly be right. The stains even appeared to form the same pattern on most of the beds, Almost like a kind of roughly drawn face, so there must have been another explanation for them.

The other driller, Bjarki, seemed to have been something of a hypochondriac, since most of the web pages he had bookmarked were related to diseases. Thóra had asked Eyjólfur whether Bjarki had been ill at all, but Eyjólfur had shaken his head and said it had never come up in conversation. Bjarki had always appeared to be in good shape. Maybe he was obsessed with his health, thought Thóra, but maybe he also just had dandruff or something and wanted to get rid of it. She could not get onto any of his bookmarked pages to find out what had been troubling him.

The data thus came from all directions and there was no one particular thing that appeared potentially useful for extricating the bank from its predicament. On the contrary, Thóra was making no progress: there was no evidence that any kind of criminal activity had stopped work here, and it looked unlikely that they would be able to explain the disappearance of either the drillers or the geologist. Gísli’s journal entries had been non-committal regarding whether he personally suspected vandalism, though at one point he expressed doubt that the residents of Kaanneq would have had anything to do with any potential sabotage, and elsewhere he wondered whether it might have been the work of protestors. Thóra realized that that would certainly strengthen the bank’s position. But in any case, what was lacking was a definite conclusion; speculation was of little use.

All she had to show for the day’s labours were the bones in the desk drawers and the photograph of the frozen hand. Thóra drifted off to sleep wondering how long a corpse could stay suspended in ice.

Around midnight she woke to the creaking of the floor slats out in the corridor. Someone seemed to be trying to walk down it as carefully as possible. Thóra shuddered. Instead of checking who it was, she turned on her side and in a short time fell back asleep. In the morning she was unsure of whether it had actually happened or whether it had been part of the dream she’d been having: a dream about the people who settled this country a long time ago in the hope of a better life, but who had reaped only hunger, hardship and a sad death.