The Draining Lake

21

The cow dung provided no help. The car had had other owners before being sold for scrap and any one of them could have trodden in dung and carried it inside. Reykjavik had been so provincial thirty years ago that the owner would not even have needed to leave the city to come across cows.

Haraldur’s temper had not improved since the last time Erlendur sat in his room. He was eating his lunch, some kind of thin porridge with a slice of soft liver sausage, his dentures sitting on the bedside table. Erlendur tried to avoid stealing a glance at the teeth. Hearing the slurping of porridge and seeing it running out of one side of his mouth was quite enough. Haraldur sucked up his porridge and relished the liver sausage that went with it.

“We know that the owner of the Falcon visited you and your brother at the farm,” Erlendur said when the liquid noises stopped and Haraldur had wiped his mouth. As before he had snorted when he saw Erlendur and told him to bugger off, but Erlendur had just smiled and sat down.

“Can’t you leave me alone?” Haraldur had said with a greedy eye on his porridge. He had not wanted to start eating with Erlendur watching over him.

“Eat your porridge,” Erlendur had said. “I can wait.”

Haraldur shot him a filthy look but soon gave up.

“Where’s your proof?” Haraldur said. “You’ve got no proof because he never came to us. Isn’t there a law against this kind of harassment? Are you allowed to badger people day in and day out?”

“We now know that he visited you,” Erlendur said.

“Huh. Bloody nonsense. How do you think you know that?”

“We’ve examined his car more closely,” Erlendur said. In fact he had nothing concrete but thought it was worth putting pressure on the old man. “We didn’t take a comprehensive forensic profile of the car at the time. But microscopic technology has been revolutionised since then.”

He tried to use long words. Haraldur hung his head as before and stared at the floor.

“So we obtained some new evidence,” Erlendur went on. “At the time, the case wasn’t investigated as a criminal matter. Missing persons generally aren’t, because it isn’t considered significant in this country if people disappear. It could be the climate. Or Icelandic apathy. Perhaps we don’t mind having a high suicide rate.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Haraldur said.

“His name was Leopold. You remember? He was a salesman and you’d led him on about buying a tractor and all he had left to do was to pop over to see you that day. I think he did.”

“I must have some rights,” Haraldur said. “You can’t just burst in here whenever you like.”

“I think Leopold came to visit you,” Erlendur repeated without answering Haraldur.

“Bollocks.”

“He came to see you and your brother and something happened. I don’t know what. He saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. You started arguing with him about something he said. Maybe he was too pushy. He wanted to agree the sale that day.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Haraldur repeated. “He never came. He said he was going to, but he didn’t.”

“How long do you think you have left to live?” Erlendur asked.

“Fuck knows. And if you had any evidence you’d have told me about it. But you don’t have a thing. Because he never came.”

“Won’t you just tell me what happened?” Erlendur said. “You can’t have long to go. You’d feel better. Even if he did come to your farm, it doesn’t mean that you killed him. I’m not saying that. He might just as easily have left you and then vanished.”

Haraldur raised his head and stared at him from beneath his bushy eyebrows.

“Get out,” he said. “I never want to see you here again.”

“You had cows at the farm, you and your brother, didn’t you?”

“Get out!”

“I went out there and saw the cattle shed and the dung heap behind it. You told me you had ten cows.”

“What are you getting at?” Haraldur said. “We were farmers. Are you going to bang me up for that?”

Erlendur stood up. Haraldur was irritating him, although he knew he shouldn’t have allowed him to. He ought to have walked out and continued with the investigation instead of allowing him to wind him up. Haraldur was nothing but a bad-tempered and annoying old fogey.

“We found cow dung in the car,” he said. “That’s why I’ve been thinking about your cows. Daisy and Buttercup or whatever you called them. I don’t think the dung was brought into the car on his shoes. Of course there’s a chance that he trod in it and drove away. But I think someone else brought the dung into the car. Someone who lived on the farm he visited. Someone who quarrelled with him. Someone who attacked him, then jumped into the car in his wellies straight from the cow shed and drove down to the coach station.”

“Leave me alone. I don’t know anything about any cow dung.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, now go away. Leave me in peace.”

Erlendur looked down at Haraldur.

“There’s just one flaw in this theory of mine,” Erlendur continued.

“Huh,” Haraldur grunted.

“That coach station business.”

“What about it?”

“There are two things that don’t fit.”

“I’m not interested. Get your arse out of here.”

“It’s too clever.”

“Huh.”

“And you’re too stupid.”

The company for which Leopold was working when he went missing was still operating but now as one of three departments in a large car-import business. The original owner had left a good few years earlier. His son told Erlendur that he had struggled to keep the company afloat but it was a hopeless venture and in the end he had sold it, on the brink of bankruptcy. The son was part of the deal and became manager of the new company’s agricultural and earth-moving machinery department. All this had happened more than a decade before. A few employees had gone with him, but none of them was working for the company any longer. The son gave Erlendur his father’s details and those of the longest-serving salesman with the old company, who had been there at the same time as Leopold.

When Erlendur got back to his office he looked up the salesman in the telephone directory and called him. There was no answer. He telephoned the former owner. The same story.

Erlendur picked up the telephone again. He looked out of the window and watched the summer on the streets of Reykjavik. He didn’t know why he was so engrossed in the case of the owner of the Falcon. Surely the man had committed suicide. Even though there was almost nothing to suggest otherwise, he sat there, telephone receiver in hand, poised to apply for permission to search the brothers” farmland for the body, with a team of fifty police officers, rescue workers and all the media rumpus that would entail.

Perhaps, after all, the salesman was Lothar who had been lying on the bottom of Lake Kleifarvatn. Maybe they were one and the same man.

Slowly he replaced the telephone. Was he so eager to solve cases of missing persons that it blurred his judgement? He knew in his bones that the most sensible thing to do would be to shut Leopold’s case away in a drawer and allow it to fade away, like other disappearances for which no simple explanation could be found.

While he was absorbed in his thoughts the telephone rang. It was Patrick Quinn from the US embassy. They exchanged a few pleasantries, then the diplomat got to the point.

“Your people were given the information that we felt safe revealing at the time,” Quinn said. “We’ve now been authorised to go a step further.”

“They’re not really my people,” Erlendur said, thinking about Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg.

“Yes, whatever,” Quinn said. “I understand you’re in charge of the investigation into the skeleton in the lake. They weren’t entirely convinced by what we told them about Lothar Weiser’s disappearance. We had information that he came to Iceland but never left the country, but the way we presented it, it sounded a little, how should I say, insubstantial. I contacted Washington and got permission to go a bit further. We have the name of a man, a Czech, who may be able to confirm Weiser’s disappearance. He’s called Miroslav. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Tell me another thing,” Erlendur said. “Do you have a photograph of Lothar Weiser that you could lend us?”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said. “I’ll look into it. It might take a while.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t expect too much, though,” Quinn said and they rang off.

Erlendur tried to contact the old salesman again and was about to put down the telephone when he answered. Hard of hearing by now, the man mistook Erlendur for a social worker and started complaining about the lunches that were delivered to his home. “The food is always cold,” he said. “And that’s not all,” he went on.

Erlendur had the impression he was about to launch into a long speech about the treatment of the elderly in Reykjavik.

“I’m from the police,” Erlendur said in a loud, clear voice. “I wanted to ask about a salesman who used to work with you at Machine and Plant in the old days. He went missing one day and hasn’t been heard of since.”

“You mean Leopold?” the man said. “What are you asking about him for? Have you found him?”

“No,” Erlendur said. “He hasn’t been found. Do you remember him?”

“A little,” the man said. “Probably better than most of the others, just because of what happened. Because he disappeared. Didn’t he leave a brand-new car somewhere?”

“Outside the coach station,” Erlendur said. “What kind of a man was he?”

“Eh?”

Erlendur was on his feet now. He repeated the question, half-shouting into the telephone.

“That’s difficult to say. He was a mysterious sort of bloke. Never talked about himself much. He’d worked on ships, might even have been born abroad. At least, he spoke with a bit of an accent. And he had a dark complexion, not lily white like us Icelanders. A really friendly bloke. Sad how it turned out.”

“He did sales trips around the country,” Erlendur said.

“Oh yes, you bet, we all did. Called at the farms with our brochures and tried to sell stuff to the farmers. He probably put the most effort into that. Took along booze, you see, to break the ice. Everyone did. It helped the deals along.”

“Did you have any particular sales patches, I mean, did you share out the regions?”

“No, not really. The richest farmers are in the south and north, of course, and we tried to divvy them up. But the bloody Co-op had them all by the balls anyway.”

“Did Leopold go to any particular places? That he visited more than others?”

There was a silence and Erlendur imagined the old salesman trying to dig up details about Leopold that he had forgotten long ago.

“Come to mention it,” he said eventually. “Leopold spent quite a lot of time in the east fjords, the southern part. You could call that his favourite patch. The west too, the whole of west Iceland. And the West Fjords. And the south-west too. He went everywhere, really.”

“Did he sell a lot?”

“No, I wouldn’t say so. Sometimes he was away for weeks on end, months even, without producing very much. But you ought to talk to old Benedikt. The owner. He might know more. Leopold wasn’t with us for long and if I remember correctly there was some bother about fitting him in.”

“Bother about fitting him in?”

“I think they had to sack someone to make way for him. Benedikt insisted that he joined the firm but wasn’t happy with his work. I never understood that. Talk to him instead. Talk to Benedikt.”

At home, Sigurdur Oli turned off the television. He had been watching the Icelandic football late-evening highlights. Bergthora was at her sewing group. He thought it was her calling when he answered the telephone. It wasn’t.

“Sorry I’m always phoning you,” the voice said.

Sigurdur Oli hesitated briefly before putting the telephone back down. It began ringing again immediately. He stared at it.

“Shit,” he said.

“Don’t hang up,” the man said. “I just want to talk to you. I feel I can talk to you. Ever since you came round with the news.”

“I’m… seriously, I’m not your therapist. You’re going too far. I want you to stop. I can’t help you. It was an awful coincidence and nothing more. You’ll have to accept it. Try to understand that. Goodbye.”

“I know it was a coincidence,” the man said. “But I made it happen.”

“No one makes coincidences happen,” Sigurdur Oli said. “That’s why they’re coincidences. They begin the moment you’re born.”

“If I hadn’t delayed her, they would have made it home safely.”

“That’s absurd. And you know it. You can’t blame yourself. You simply can’t. No one can blame themselves for that kind of thing.”

“Why not? Coincidences don’t come from nowhere. They’re consequences of the conditions we create. Like me that day.”

“This is so absurd I can’t even be bothered discussing it.”

“Why?”

“Because if we let that sort of thinking control our actions, how would we ever make decisions? Your wife went to the shop at a particular time, you didn’t come anywhere near that decision. So was it suicide? No! It was some drunken idiot in a Range Rover. Nothing more.”

“I made the coincidence happen when I phoned her.”

“We can go on like this until the end of time,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Should we go for a drive out of town? Should we go to the cinema? Should we meet at a cafe? Who’d dare to suggest anything, for fear of something happening? You’re ridiculous.”

“That’s the point,” the man said.

“What?”

“How are we supposed to do anything?”

Sigurdur Oli heard Bergthora come in through the door.

“I’ve got to stop this,” he said. “It’s just nonsense.”

“Yes, me too,” the man said. “I’ve got to stop this.”

Then he put the telephone down.