“Did you move to Iceland then?”
“Yes.”
“But did you never go back to Copenhagen?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“My father desperately tried to get his post back from Iceland, but failed. I’d also grown opposed to the idea of moving away from Iceland because I got to know Einar, Fridrik’s son, when we stayed with them in Copenhagen and when we traveled on the ship together. He was the first friend of my own age I’d ever had, and he then became my boyfriend. He was a great guy and I couldn’t think of leaving him. We were together for the first few years of high school, and then he died in an accident.”
Thorolfur scribbled down a note and then asked, “You were called upon to examine the bodily remains of Gaston Lund when he was found and transported here last week, were you not?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t recognize him?”
Johanna smiled numbly. “It would be easy for me to say I didn’t. No one could doubt me, considering the state of the body. And it would be easier for me if I stuck to that version, but I don’t want to lie. I recognized him as soon as I opened the casket.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“I was in such a terrible state of shock. And I thought of my father. The cancer had progressed so far and he only had a few days to live. He wasn’t suffering, though, because I’d managed to treat the pain quite effectively. At that moment I couldn’t bear the thought of him spending his last hours agonizing over the fate of his friend. So I decided to postpone any revelations, while I was still catching my bearings. It wouldn’t really have greatly changed the outcome of the investigation, since the man had been dead for several months anyway. It was just a twenty- four-hour reprieve, and that was all I needed. My father died without ever knowing about this incident.”
Lukas coughed several times to attract Johanna’s attention. It was his turn now. “That’s quite a story,” he said, moistening his lips. “But I think the reality is slightly different. What if it went something like this, for example: Lund came to you as a doctor and pharmacist. What kind of initial exchange you had I don’t know, but he asked you for some seasick tablets. You gave him some drug and advised him to take one pill straightaway, maybe two. He did as he was told, but soon felt drowsy and then fell asleep. You keep some strong sleeping pills, I take it, don’t you? We can easily check that.”
Johanna looked at him, aghast. “That’s correct, there’s an ample supply in the pharmacy, but your suggestion is preposterous.”
“Well, let’s see. Lund is asleep in your living room. Maybe you needed to give him an injection or something to keep him as unconscious as possible? Then you took him out on a boat to the most forsaken island you knew of in Breidafjordur. We know that considerable fuel vanished from one of the boats on the island at that time. You know how to handle a motorboat, don’t you? You know I can easily check on this.”
“Yes, I can handle a boat all right. But I haven’t a clue of where Ketilsey is in the fjord. And I don’t have the physical strength to carry a sleeping man on my own, let alone onto a boat and then off it again.”
“Perhaps your late father gave you a hand moving him? Maybe he was in better shape last autumn than he was lately. And happy to avenge himself. The man could also have been transported on a handcart. There are several of those on the island.”
“This is in very poor taste.”
“Yes, well you can’t really prettify an atrocity like this. The retribution was clearly meant to be memorable and final. How do you think that man felt when he woke up and realized where he was?”
Johanna gave Lukas a long stare before answering: “How do I think he felt? I’ll tell you. For the first few hours he was angry. Then very angry. He yelled and yelled and shouted and shouted. Then he was cold, and when night fell he was scared. Then he got very cold and even more terrified, and he cried. When the sun rose in the morning, he was thirsty and hungry and very tired. He gathered some driftwood and built himself some shelter by placing the wood against a crag. He packed some gravel and seaweed around the sticks and then crawled inside and lay down. Maybe he slept for one or two hours, and then woke up again shivering from the cold. Then it started to rain. He found an old plastic flask drifting on the shore and was able to collect some of the water that was running down the rocks. He drank and drank, but he got badly drenched in the rain. He crawled into the shelter and it didn’t rain on him. But he was already wet, and when night fell again, he was colder than ever before. He lay there shivering for many hours until he couldn’t take it anymore, and he crawled out and ran to try and get some warmth into his bones. It helped a bit, but it hadn’t stopped raining, so he got even wetter and colder. The day after the rain stopped and the sun appeared. He managed to sleep a few hours. Then he went down to the shore in search of something edible. He turned over stones, picked some copepods, and dug up some lugworm. He found shellfish. He shoved it into his mouth and washed it down with the water without chewing. He couldn’t bear the thought of biting into those bugs. He arranged the stones in the grass so that they would form a big SOS. Four days later he had a cold, a day after that a bad cough, and then he contracted pneumonia. Then he arranged some little pebbles on a flat rock and tried to write some kind of message. He coughed and coughed until he threw up and developed a high fever. And then he died.”
Lukas was dumbstruck. Eventually it was Thorolfur who asked, “How do you know all this?”
“This isn’t something I know,” Johanna answered, “but I can imagine it, and I can tell you that I’ve thought about him every single hour since I saw him in that casket, and felt a great deal for him. I’ve tried to place myself in his footsteps, tried to convince myself that it went swiftly and that the pain wasn’t unbearable. But everything you’ve said here is pure supposition. I’m in no way responsible for this nightmare Gaston Lund got himself into. The events in my house were exactly as I described them to you.”
Thorolfur peered at her skeptically. “Yeah sure, give it to me all again then, in every detail.”
“Professor Lund knocked on our door and told me what he’d come for. I welcomed him in and immediately recognized him. He obviously didn’t recognize me because I had only been a child when I had been with my father in Copenhagen. I was just about to give him his seasickness tablets when he saw my father through the door. It took them both a moment to decide how they were going to take this reunion, but then they embraced and it was all just like the good old days. They had so much to talk about, and time was precious. Lund told my father that he’d been to the library to try and solve the Flatey enigma. He had the answers to all the questions but couldn’t test them by getting them to fit with the final key. He couldn’t figure out the methodology. My father had spent endless hours at the library poring over the string of letters that constitute the final key. He discovered that if the letters were placed in a certain order, they formed a sentence. If the letters in the answers were placed in the correct order, following the same pattern, they formed the last two lines of the poem and thereby the solution to the whole riddle, the Aenigma Flateyensis. Lund was very taken by all this and decided to go back to the library to test his answers using this method. My father could lend him the key to the library. We could already see the mail boat heading south on its way from Brjansl?kur, so he didn’t have much time. We never saw him after that, so we presumed he’d caught the boat. I later walked up to the library and it wasn’t locked and the key was on the table.”
“But he didn’t catch the mail boat?” said Thorolfur.
“No, it seems not. He must have run to the library, sat down, and started to arrange the letters. The mail boat was steadily approaching, and he finally didn’t dare to wait there any longer. The last thing he did was to write down the key on a piece of paper so that he could continue later. We found that note in his pocket. But that was against the rules of the game.”
“So he was doomed to some mishap, according to folk belief,” said Thorolfur.
“So they say, but I don’t believe in that stuff. In fact, I think it’s just a perfectly honorable and innocent game. But when people start connecting it with accidents and deaths, I think that’s going too far.”
Question thirty-two: Who made Earl Hakon’s crotch itch? Third letter. Thorleifur visited the earl in Hladir on Christmas Eve, disguised as a beggar. The earl had him brought before him and asked him for his name. “My name is an unusual one,” the man answered. “I’m Nidung, the son of Gjallandi, and I come from Syrgisdalir in cold Sweden. I have traveled widely and visited many chieftains. I’ve heard a lot about your nobility.”
The earl said, “Is there something you excel at, old man, to enable you to mix with chieftains?”
Nidung wanted to recite a poem he had composed to the earl. But as the poem was being recited, the earl
