Silence of the Grave (11 page)

Símon had trouble understanding this change or what it meant, but he became more intensely aware of it than ever around the time that Mikkelína shouted out her first word. Mikkelína's progress pleased her mother immeasurably. For a moment it was as if her gloom had been swept away, she smiled and hugged the girl and the two boys, and for the next weeks and months she helped Mikkelína to learn to talk, delighting in her slightest advances.

But it was not long before their mother was back in her old routine, as if the gloom that had lifted from her returned with greater intensity than ever. Sometimes she sat on the side of the bed, staring into space for hours, after cleaning every speck of dust from the little house. Glared in silent misery with half-closed eyes, her expression so infinitely sad, alone in the world. Once, when Grímur had punched her in the face and stormed out, Símon found her holding the carving knife, with the palm of her hand turned up, stroking the blade slowly across her wrist. When she noticed him she gave a wry smile and put the knife back in the drawer.

"What are you doing with that knife?" Simon asked.

"Checking that it's sharp. He likes the knives to be kept sharp."

"He's completely different in town," Simon said. "He's not nasty then."

"I know."

"He's happy then, and he smiles."

"Yes."

"Why isn't he like that at home? To us?"

"I don't know. He doesn't feel well."

"I wish he was different. I wish he was dead."

His mother looked at him.

"None of that. Don't talk like him. You mustn't think like that. You're not like him and you never will be. Neither you nor Tómas. Never. Do you hear? I forbid you to think like that. You mustn't."

Simon looked at his mother.

"Tell me about Mikkelína's dad," he said. Simon had sometimes heard her talking about him to Mikkelína and tried to imagine what her world would have been like had he not died and left her. Imagined himself as that man's son in a family where his father was not a monster but a friend and companion who loved his children.

"He died," his mother said with a hint of accusation in her voice. "And that's that."

"But he was different," Simon said. "You would be different."

"If he hadn't died? If Mikkelína hadn't fallen ill? If I hadn't met your father? What's the point of thinking like that?"

"Why is he so nasty?"

He asked her this repeatedly and sometimes she answered, sometimes she just said nothing as if she herself had searched for the answer to that question for years without getting any closer to it. She just stared past Simon, alone in the world, and talked to herself sadly and remotely, as if nothing she said or did mattered any more.

"I don't know. I only know that we're not to blame. It's not our fault. It's something inside him. I blamed myself at first. Tried to find something I was doing wrong that made him angry, and I tried to change it. But I never knew what it was and nothing I did made any difference. I stopped blaming myself long ago and I don't want you or Tómas or Mikkelína to think the way he acts is your fault. Even when he curses and abuses you. It's not your fault."

She looked at Símon.

"The little power that he has in this world, he has over us, and he doesn't intend to let go of it. He'll never let go of it."

Simon looked at the drawer where the carving knives were kept.

"Is there nothing we can do?"

"No."

"What were you going to do with the knife?"

"I told you. I was checking how sharp it was. He likes the knives kept sharp."

Simon forgave his mother for lying because he knew she was trying, as always, to protect him, safeguard him, ensure that their terrible life as a family would have the least effect on his.

When Grímur got home that evening, filthy black from shovelling coal, he was in exceptionally good spirits and started talking to their mother about something he had heard in Reykjavik. He sat down on a kitchen stool, told her to bring him some coffee and said her name had cropped up at work. He didn't know why, but the coalmen had been talking about her and claimed she was one of them. One of the doomsday kids who were conceived in the Gasworks.

She kept her back turned to Grímur and didn't say a word. Simon sat at the table. Tómas and Mikkelína were outside.

"At the Gasworks!?"

Then Grímur laughed an ugly, gurgling laugh. Sometimes he coughed black phlegm from the coal dust and was black around the eyes, mouth and ears.

"In the doomsday orgy in the fucking gas tank!" he shouted.

"That's not true," she said softly, and Simon was surprised because he had seldom heard her contest anything Grímur said. He stared at his mother and a shiver ran down his spine.

"They fucked and boozed all night because they thought the end of the world was nigh and that's where you came from, you twat."

"It's a lie," she said, more firmly than before, but still without looking up from what she was doing at the sink. Her back remained turned to Grímur and her head dropped lower onto her chest and her petite shoulders arched up as if she wanted to hide between them.

Grímur had stopped laughing.

"Are you calling me a liar?"

"No," she said, "but it's not true. It's a misunderstanding."

Grímur got to his feet.

"Is it a misunderstanding," he mimicked her voice.

"I know when the gas tank was built. I was born before then."

"That's not what I heard. I heard your mother was a whore and your father was a tramp and they threw you in the dustbin when you were born."

The drawer was open and she stared down into it and Simon saw her glaring at the big carving knife. She looked at Símon then back down at the knife and for the first time he believed that she was capable of using it.

12

Skarphédinn had arranged for a big white tent to be put up over the excavation site and when Erlendur went inside it out of the spring sunshine he saw the incredibly slow progress they had made. By the foundation they had cut an area of ten square metres and the skeleton was embedded in one edge of it. The arm still pointed up, as before, and two men were kneeling with brushes and spoons in their hands, picking away at the dirt and sweeping it into pans.

"Isn't that a bit too painstaking?" Erlendur asked when Skarphédinn walked up to greet him. "You'll never get it finished like that."

"You just can't be too careful in an excavation," Skarphédinn said as pompously as ever, proud that his methods were producing results. "And you, of all people, ought to be aware of that," he added.

"Aren't you just using this for field training?"

"Field training?"

"For archaeologists? Isn't this the class you teach at the university?"

"Listen, Erlendur. We're working methodically. There's no other way to do it. Believe me."

"Yes, maybe there's no rush," Erlendur said.

"We'll get there in the end," Skarphédinn said, running his tongue over his fangs.

"They tell me the pathologist is in Spain," Erlendur said. "He's not expected back for a few days. So we do have plenty of time, I suppose."

"Who could it be, lying there?" Elínborg asked.

"We can't determine whether it's a male or a female, a young body or an old one," Skarphédinn said. "And maybe it's not our job to do so either. But I don't think there's the slightest doubt any more that it was a murder."

"Could it be a young, pregnant woman?" Erlendur asked.

"We'll have that settled soon," Skarphédinn said.

"Soon?" Erlendur said. "Not if we go on at this rate."

"Patience is a virtue," Skarphédinn said. "Remember that."

Erlendur would have told him where to stick his virtue if Elínborg had not interrupted.

"The murder doesn't have to be connected with this place," she said out of the blue. She had agreed with most of what Sigurdur Óli had said the day before, when he started criticising Erlendur for being too preoccupied with his first hunch about the bones: that the person buried there had lived on the hill, even in one of the chalets. In Sigurdur Óli's opinion it was stupid to concentrate on a house that used to be there and people who may or may not have lived in it. Erlendur was at the hospital when Sigurdur Óli delivered this sermon, and Elínborg decided to hear Erlendur's views on it.

"He could have been murdered in, say, the west of town, and brought over here," she said. "We can't be sure that the murder was actually committed on the hill. I was discussing this with Sigurdur Óli yesterday."

Erlendur rummaged deep in his coat pockets until he found his lighter and cigarette packet. Skarphédinn gave him a disdainful look.

"You don't smoke inside the tent," he snarled.

"Let's go outside," Erlendur said to Elínborg, "We don't want to make virtue lose its patience."

They left the tent and Erlendur lit up.

"Of course you're right," he said. "It's by no means certain that the murder, if indeed it was a murder, was committed here. As far as I can see," he continued, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke, "we have three equally plausible theories. First, it's Benjamín Knudsen's fiancée, who got pregnant, disappeared, and who everyone thought had thrown herself into the sea. For some reason, possibly jealousy, as you say, he killed the girl and hid the body here by his chalet; and was never the same man afterwards. Second, someone was murdered in Reykjavik, even in Keflavík or Akranes for that matter; anywhere around the city. Brought here, buried and forgotten. Third, there's a possibility that people lived on this hill, committed a murder and buried the body on their doorstep because they had nowhere else to go. It might have been a traveller, a visitor, maybe one of the British who came here in the war and built the barracks on the other side of the hill, or the Americans who took over from them, or maybe a member of the household."

Erlendur dropped the cigarette butt by his feet and stamped it out.

"Personally, and I can't explain why, I favour the last theory. The one about Benjamín's fiancée would be easiest, if we can link her DNA to the skeleton. The third one could prove toughest for us, because we're talking about someone who went missing, assuming it was ever reported, in a large, populated area, donkey's years ago. That option is wide open."

"If we find the remains of an embryo with the skeleton, haven't we more or less got the answer?" Elínborg said.

"That would be a very neat solution, as I say. Was the pregnancy documented?" Erlendur asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Do we know it for a fact?"

"Are you saying that Benjamín might have been lying? And she wasn't pregnant?"

"I don't know. She could have been pregnant, but not necessarily by him."

"She cheated on him?"

"We can speculate until the cows come home before those archaeologists present us with something."

"What could have happened to that person?" Elínborg sighed, wondering about the bones in the dirt.

"Maybe they deserved it," Erlendur said.

"What?"

"That person. Let's hope so, anyway. Let's hope it wasn't an innocent victim."

His thoughts turned to Eva Lind. Did she deserve to be lying in intensive care, more dead than alive? Was it his fault? Was anyone to blame except her? Wasn't the state she was in of her own doing? Wasn't her drug addiction her private business? Or did he have some part in it? She was convinced he did, and had told him so when she felt he was being unfair to her.

"You never should have left us," she shouted at him once. "Okay, you look down on me. But you're no better yourself. You're just as much a goddam loser!"

"I don't look down on you," he said, but she didn't even listen to him.

"You look down on me like a piece of shit," she shouted. "Like you're more important than me. Like you're smarter and better. Like you're better than me and Mum and Sindri! Walking out on us like some bigshot, then ignoring us. Like you're, like you're God fucking Almighty."

"I tried . . ."

"You didn't try shit! What did you try? Nothing. Fuck all. Ran out like the creep you are."

"I've never looked down on you," he said. "That's wrong. I can't understand why you say that."

"Oh yes you do. That's why you left. Because we're so ordinary. So bloody ordinary that you couldn't stand us. Ask Mum! She knows. She says it's all your fault. The whole lot. Your fault. The state I'm in too. What do you reckon to that, mister God fucking Almighty?"

"Not everything your mother says is true. She's angry and bitter and . . ."

"Angry and bitter! If you only knew how angry and bitter she really is and hates your guts and hates her kids because it wasn't her fault you left because she's the Virgin fucking Mary. It was OUR fault. Sindri and me. Don't you get it, you fucking jerk. Don't you get it, you fucking jerk . . ."

"Erlendur?"

"What?"

"Are you all right?"

"Fine. Perfectly all right."

"I'm going to drop in on Róbert's daughter." Elínborg waved her hand in front of his face as if he had slipped into a trance. "Are you going to the British embassy?"

"Eh?" Erlendur snapped back to his senses. "Yes, let's do it that way," he said remotely. "Let's do it that way. And one thing, Elínborg."

"Yes?"

"Get the district medical officer back here to take a look at the bones when they're exposed. Skarphédinn doesn't know his arse from his elbow. He increasingly reminds me of some monstrosity out of the Brothers Grimm."