The Draining Lake

34

Karl Antonsson was at home when Elinborg knocked on his door. His curiosity was aroused the moment she told him that the discovery of the skeleton in Kleifarvatn had prompted them to make inquiries about Icelandic students in Leipzig. He invited Elinborg into the living room. He and his wife were on their way to the golf course, he told her, but it could wait.

Earlier that morning Elinborg had telephoned Sigurdur Oli and asked how Bergthora was feeling. He said she was fine. Everything was going well.

“And that man, has he stopped phoning you at night?”

“I hear from him now and again.”

“Wasn’t he suicidal?”

“Pathologically,” Sigurdur Oli said, and added that Erlendur was waiting for him. They were going to meet Haraldur at the old people’s home as a part of Erlendur’s ridiculous quest for Leopold. The application for a full-scale search of the land in Mosfellsbaer had been turned down, much to Erlendur’s disgust.

Karl lived on Reynimelur in a pretty house divided into three flats with a neatly kept garden. His wife Ulrika was German and she shook Elinborg’s hand firmly. The couple wore their age well and were both fit. It might be the golf, Elinborg thought to herself. They were very surprised by this unexpected visit and looked blankly at each other when they heard the reason.

“Is it someone who studied in Leipzig that you found in the lake?” Karl asked. Ulrika went into the kitchen to make coffee.

“We don’t know,” Elinborg said. “Do either of you remember a man by the name of Lothar in Leipzig?”

Karl looked at his wife, who was standing in the kitchen doorway.

“She’s asking about Lothar,” he said.

“Lothar? What about him?”

“They think it’s him in the lake,” Karl said.

“That’s not quite right,” Elinborg said. “We aren’t suggesting that’s the case.”

“We paid him to clear everything,” Ulrika said. “Once.”

“Clear everything?”

“When Ulrika came back to Iceland with me,” Karl said. “He had influence and was able to assist us. But for a price. My parents scraped it together — and Ulrika’s parents in Leipzig too, of course.”

“And Lothar helped you?”

“Very much,” Karl said. “He charged for it so it wasn’t just a favour, and I think he helped other people too, not just us.”

“And all it involved was paying money?”

Karl and Ulrika exchanged glances and she went into the kitchen.

“He mentioned that we might be contacted later, you know. But we never were and never would have entertained the idea. Never. I was never in the party after we came back to Iceland, never went to meetings or the like. I gave up all involvement in politics. Ulrika was never political, she had an aversion to that sort of thing.”

“You mean you would have been given tasks?” Elinborg said.

“I have no idea,” Karl said. “It never came to that. We never met Lothar again. Thinking back, it’s sometimes hard to believe what we actually experienced in those years. It was a completely different world.”

“The Icelanders called it “the charade”,” Ulrika said, having rejoined them. “I always thought that was an apt way to describe it.”

“Are you in contact with your university friends at all?” Elinborg asked.

“Very little,” Karl said. “Well, we bump into each other in the street sometimes, or at birthday parties.”

“One of them was called Emil,” Elinborg said. “Do you know anything about him?”

“I don’t think he ever came back to Iceland,” Karl said. “He always lived in Germany. I haven’t seen him since… is he still alive?”

“I don’t know,” Elinborg said.

“I never liked him,” Ulrika said. “He was a bit sleazy.”

“Emil was always a loner. He didn’t know many people. He was said to do the authorities” bidding. I never saw that side of him.”

“And you don’t know anything else about this Lothar character?”

“No, nothing,” Karl said.

“Do you have any photographs of the students from Leipzig?” Elinborg asked. “Of Lothar or anyone else?”

“Not Lothar and definitely not Emil, but I do have one of Tomas and his girlfriend. Ilona. She was Hungarian.”

Karl stood up and walked across the living room to a large cupboard. He took out an old album and flicked through it until he found the photograph, which he handed to Elinborg. It was a black-and-white snap of a young couple holding hands. The sun was shining on them and they were smiling into the camera.

“It’s taken in front of Thomaskirche,” Karl said. “A few months before Ilona disappeared.”

“I heard about that,” Elinborg said.

“I was there when they came to get her,” Karl said. “It was awful. The brutality. No one found out what happened to her and I don’t think Tomas ever recovered.”

“She was very brave,” Ulrika said.

“She was a dissident,” Karl said. “That was frowned upon.”

Erlendur knocked on Haraldur’s door at the old people’s home. Breakfast had just finished and the clatter of plates could still be heard from the canteen. Sigurdur Oli was with him. They heard Haraldur shout something from inside and Erlendur opened the door. Haraldur was sitting up in bed, his head lowered, staring down at the floor. He looked up when they entered the room.

“Who’s that with you?” he asked when he saw Sigurdur Oli.

“He works with me,” Erlendur said.

Instead of greeting Sigurdur Oli, Haraldur shot him a warning look. Erlendur sat on a chair facing Haraldur. Sigurdur Oli remained standing and leaned against the wall.

The door opened and another grey-haired resident put his head in.

“Haraldur,” he said, “there’s choir practice in room eleven tonight.”

Without waiting for an answer, he closed the door again.

Erlendur gaped at Haraldur.

“Choir practice?” he said. “Surely you don’t go in for that?”

“”Choir practice” is code for a booze-up,” Haraldur grunted. “I hope I don’t disappoint you.”

Sigurdur Oli grinned to himself. He was having trouble concentrating. What he had said to Elinborg that morning was not entirely true. Bergthora had been to the doctor, who had told her that it was fifty-fifty. Bergthora had tried to be positive when she related this, but he knew that she was in torment.

“Let’s get a move on,” Haraldur said. “Maybe I didn’t tell you the whole truth, but I can’t see why you need to go around sticking your nose into other people’s affairs. But… I wanted…”

Erlendur sensed an unusual hesitation in Haraldur when the old man lifted his head to be able to look him in the face.

“Joi didn’t get enough oxygen,” he said, looking back at the floor. “That was why. At birth. They thought it was all right, he grew properly, but he turned out different. He wasn’t like the other kids.”

Sigurdur Oli indicated to Erlendur that he had no idea what the old man was talking about. Erlendur shrugged. Something about Haraldur had changed. He was not his usual self. He was in some way milder.

“It turned out that he was a bit funny,” Haraldur continued. “Simple. Backward. Kind inside but couldn’t cope, couldn’t learn, never knew how to read. It took a long time to emerge and we took a long time to accept it and come to terms with it.”

“That must have been difficult for your parents,” Erlendur said after a long silence, once Haraldur seemed unlikely to say anything else.

“I ended up looking after Joi when they died,” Haraldur said at last, his eyes trained on the floor. “We lived out there on the farm, barely scraping a living towards the end. Had nothing to sell but the land. It was worth quite a lot because it was so close to Reykjavik and we made a fair bit on the deal. We could buy a flat and still have money left over.”

“What was it you were going to tell us?” Sigurdur Oli said impatiently. Erlendur glared at him.

“My brother stole the hubcap from the car,” Haraldur said. “That was the whole crime and now you can leave me alone. That’s the long and the short of it. I don’t know how you can make such a fuss about it. After all these years. He stole a hubcap! What kind of a crime is that?”

“Are we talking about the black Falcon?” Erlendur asked.

“Yes, it was the black Falcon.”

“So Leopold did visit your farm,” Erlendur said. “You’re admitting that now.”

Haraldur nodded.

“Do you think you were right to sit on this information for your whole life?” Erlendur asked angrily. “Causing everyone unnecessary trouble?”

“Don’t you go preaching to me,” Haraldur said. “It won’t get you anywhere.”

“There are people who have been suffering for decades,” Erlendur said.

“We didn’t do anything to him. Nothing happened to him.”

“You ruined the police investigation.”

“Put me in the nick, then,” Haraldur said. “It won’t make much difference.”

“What happened?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“My brother was a bit simple,” Haraldur said. “But he never harmed that man. There wasn’t a violent bone in him. He thought the bloody hubcaps were pretty so he stole one. He thought it was enough for that bloke to have three.”

“And what did the man do?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“You were looking for a missing man,” Haraldur went on, staring at Erlendur. “I didn’t want to complicate things. You would have complicated it if I’d told you that Joi took the hubcap. Then you would have wanted to know if he killed him, which he didn’t, but you’d never have believed me and you’d have taken Joi away.”

“What did this man do when Joi took the hubcap?” Sigurdur Oli repeated.

“He seemed very tense.”

“So what happened?”

“He attacked my brother,” Haraldur said. “He shouldn’t have done that, because even though Joi was stupid, he was strong. Threw him off like a sack of feathers.”

“And killed him,” Erlendur said.

Haraldur raised his head.

“What did I just tell you?”

“Why should we believe you now, after you’ve been lying all these years?”

“I decided to pretend that he never came. That we’d never met him. That was the obvious thing to do. We never touched him, apart from Joi defending himself. He left and he was fine then.”

“Why should we believe you now?” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Joi didn’t kill anyone. He never could have. He never hurt a fly, Joi. But you wouldn’t have believed that. I tried to get him to give the hubcap back, but he wouldn’t say where he’d hidden it. Joi was like a raven. He liked pretty things and they were nice, shiny hubcaps. He wanted to own one. As simple as that. The bloke got really worked up and threatened us both, and then he went for Joi. We had a fight and then he left and we never saw him again.”

“Why should I believe this?” Erlendur asked again.

Haraldur snorted.

“I don’t give a monkey’s what you believe,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police this touching tale about you and your brother when they were searching for the man?”

“The police didn’t seem interested in anything much,” Haraldur said. “They didn’t ask for any explanations. They took a statement from me and that was it.”

“And the man left you after the fight?” Erlendur said, thinking of lazy Niels.

“Yes.”

“With one hubcap missing?”

“Yes. He stormed off without bothering about the hubcap.”

“What did you do with it? Or did you ever find it?”

“I buried it. After you started asking about that bloke. Joi told me where he’d put it and I dug a little hole behind the house and buried it in the ground. You’ll find it there.”

“All right,” Erlendur said. “We’ll poke around behind the house and see if we can’t find it. But I still think you’re lying to us.”

“I don’t care,” Haraldur said. “You can think what you like.”

“Anything else?” Erlendur said.

Haraldur sat without saying a word. Perhaps he felt he had said enough. There wasn’t a sound in his little room. Noises were heard from the canteen and the corridor: old people wandering around, waiting for their next meal. Erlendur stood up.

“Thank you,” he said. “This will be useful. We should have been told this more than thirty years ago, but…”

“He dropped his wallet,” Haraldur said.

“His wallet?”

“In the fight. The salesman. He dropped his wallet. We didn’t find it until after he’d gone. It was where his car had been parked. Joi saw it and hid it. He wasn’t that stupid.”

“What did you do with it?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“I buried it with the hubcap,” Haraldur said, a sudden vague smile on his face. “You’ll find that there, too.”

“You didn’t want to return it?”

“I tried, but I couldn’t find the name in the phone book. Then you lot started asking about that bloke, so I hid it with the hubcap.”

“You mean Leopold wasn’t in the directory?”

“No, and nor was the other name.”

“The other name?” Sigurdur Oli said. “Did he have another name?”

“I couldn’t figure out why, but some documents in the wallet had the name he introduced himself by, Leopold, and on others there was a different name.”

“What name?” Erlendur asked.

“Joi was funny,” Haraldur said. “He was always hanging around the spot I buried the hubcap. Sometimes he’d lie on the ground or sit down where he knew it was. But he never dared dig it up. Never dared touch it again. He knew he’d done something wrong. He cried in my arms after that fight. The poor boy.”

“What name was it?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“I can’t remember,” Haraldur said. “I’ve told you all you need to know, so bugger off. Leave me alone.”

Erlendur drove to the abandoned farm just outside Mosfellsbaer. A cold northerly wind was getting up and autumn was descending over the land. He felt chilly when he walked behind the house. He pulled his coat tighter around him. At one time there had been a fence around the yard, but it had broken up long before and the yard was now mostly overgrown with grass. Before they left, Haraldur had given Erlendur a fairly detailed description of where he had buried the hubcap.

He took a shovel from the farmhouse, paced out the distance from the wall and began to dig. The hubcap would not be buried very deep. The digging made him hot, so he took a rest and lit a cigarette. Then he carried on. He dug down about one metre but found no sign of the hubcap. He began widening the hole. He took another break. It was a long time since he had done manual work. He smoked another cigarette.

About ten minutes later there was a chink when he thrust the shovel’s blade down, and he knew he had found the hubcap from the black Falcon.

He dug carefully around it, then got down on his knees and scraped the dirt away with his hands. Soon the entire hubcap was visible and he lifted it carefully from the earth. Although rusty, the hubcap was clearly from a Ford Falcon. Erlendur stood up and knocked it against the wall, and the dirt fell away. The hubcap made a ringing sound when it struck the wall.

Erlendur put it down and peered into the hole. He still had to find the wallet that Haraldur had described. It was not yet visible, so he knelt down again, leaned over the hole and dug away at the earth with his hands.

Everything that Haraldur had told him was true. Erlendur found the wallet in the ground nearby. After carefully extracting it he stood up. It was a regular, long, black leather wallet. The moisture in the ground meant that the wallet had begun to rot and he had to handle it carefully because it was in tatters. When he opened it he saw a cheque book, a few Icelandic banknotes long since withdrawn from circulation, a few scraps of paper and a driving licence in Leopold’s name. The damp had seeped through and the photograph was ruined. In another compartment he found another card. It looked like a foreign driving licence and the photograph on it was not so badly damaged. He peered at it, but did not recognise the man.

As far as Erlendur could tell the licence had been issued in Germany, but it was in such a bad condition that only the odd word was legible. He could see the owner’s name clearly, but not his surname. Erlendur stood holding the wallet and looked up.

He recognised the name on the driving licence.

He recognised the name Emil.