them, said they were beautiful.'
'Were you and your sister close?'
'No, I can't say that. I was so much younger. She already seemed grown-up in my earliest memories of her. Our mother always said she was like our father. Whimsical and tetchy. Depressive. He went the same way.'
Bara gave the impression she had let out the last sentence by mistake.
'The same way?' Elinborg said.
'Yes,' Bara said peevishly. 'The same way. Committed suicide.' She spoke the words with complete detachment. 'But he didn't go missing like her. Oh no. He hanged himself in the dining room. From the hook for the chandelier. In full view of everyone. That was how much he cared about the family.'
'That must have been difficult for you,' Elinborg said for the sake of saying something. Bara glared accusingly at Elinborg from where she sat facing her, as if blaming her for having to recall it all.
'It was hardest for my sister. They were very close. It leaves its mark on people, that sort of thing. The dear girl.'
For a moment there was a trace of sympathy in her voice.
'Was it…?'
'This was a few years before she herself went missing,' Bara said, and Elinborg could tell that she was concealing something. That her story was rehearsed. Purged of all emotion. But perhaps the woman was simply like that. Bossy, cold-hearted and dull.
'To his credit, Benjamin treated her well,' Bara continued. 'Wrote her love letters, that sort of thing. In those days, people in Reykjavik would go for long walks when they were engaged. A very ordinary courtship really. They met at Hotel Borg, which was
'I'm told that people said she threw herself into the sea,' Elinborg said.
'Yes, people made quite a meal of that story. They looked for her all over Reykjavik. Dozens of people took part in the search, but they didn't find so much as a hair. My mother broke the news to me. My sister left us that morning. She was going shopping and went to a few places, there weren't as many shops in those days, but she didn't buy anything. She met Benjamin in his shop, left him and was never seen again. He told the police, and us, that they quarrelled. That's why he blamed himself for what happened and took it so badly.'
'Why the talk of the sea?'
'Some people thought they'd seen a woman heading towards the beach where Tryggvagata ends today. She was wearing a coat like my sister's. Similar height. That was all.'
'What did they argue about?'
'Some petty matter. To do with the wedding. The preparations. Or at least that's what Benjamin said.'
'You don't think it was something else?'
'I have no idea.'
'And you don't think it possible that it's her skeleton we found on the hill?'
'Out of the question, yes. I have nothing to base that claim on, of course, and I can't prove it, but I find it just so far-fetched. I simply can't conceive of it.'
'Do you know anything about the tenants in Benjamin's chalet in Grafarholt? Maybe people who were there during the war? Possibly a family of five, a couple with three children. Does that ring a bell?'
'No. But I know people lived in his chalet all throughout the war. Because of the housing shortage.'
'Do you have a keepsake from your sister, such as a lock of hair? In a locket maybe?'
'No, but Benjamin had a lock of her hair. I saw her cut it off for him. He asked her for a memento one summer when my sister went up north to Fljot for a couple of weeks to visit some relatives.'
When Elinborg got into her car she phoned Sigurdur Oli. He was on his way out of Benjamin's cellar after a long, boring day, and she told him to keep his eyes open for a lock of hair from Benjamin's fiancee. It might be inside a pretty locket, she said. She heard Sigurdur Oli groan.
'Come on,' Elinborg said. 'We can prove whether it's her if we find the lock of hair. It's as simple as that.'
She rang off and was about to drive away when she had a sudden thought and switched off the engine. After pondering for a moment, nervously biting her lower lip, she decided to act.
When Bara answered the door she was surprised to see Elinborg again.
'Did you forget something? she asked.
'No, just one question,' Elinborg said awkwardly. 'Then I'll leave.'
'Well, what is it?' Bara said impatiently.
'You said your sister was wearing a coat the day she went missing.'
'So?'
'What sort of coat was it?'
'What sort? Just an ordinary coat that my mother gave her.'
'I mean, what colour? Do you know?'
'Why do you ask?'
'I'm curious,' Elinborg said, not wanting to go into explanations.
'I don't remember.'
'No, of course not,' Elinborg said. 'I understand. Thank you and sorry for bothering you.'
'But my mother said it was green.'
So many things changed during those strange years.
Tomas had stopped wetting the bed. Stopped enraging his father and in some way which eluded Simon, Grimur had started showing the younger boy more attention. He thought Grimur might have changed after the troops arrived. Or maybe Tomas was changing.
Simon's mother never talked about the Gasworks which Grimur had teased her about so much, so eventually he got bored with it. You little bastard, he used to say, and called her Gashead and talked about the big gas tank and the orgy in it the night that the Earth was supposed to perish, smashed to smithereens in a collision with a comet. Although he understood little of what his father was saying, Simon noticed that it upset his mother. Simon knew that his words hurt her as much as when he beat her up.
Once when he went to town with his father they walked past the Gasworks and Grimur pointed to the big tank, laughing, saying that was where his mother came from. Then he laughed even more. The Gasworks was one of the largest buildings in Reykjavik and Simon found it disturbing. He decided to ask his mother about the building and the big gas tank that aroused his curiosity.
'Don't listen to the nonsense he talks,' she said. 'You ought to know by now the way he rants and raves. You shouldn't believe a word he says. Not a word.'
'What happened at the Gasworks?'
'As far as I know, nothing. He's making it all up. I don't know where he got that story from.'
'But where are your mum and dad?'
She looked at her son in silence. She had wrestled with this question all her life and now her son had innocently put it to her and she was at a loss as to what to tell him. She had never known her parents. When she was younger she had asked about them, but never made any headway. Her first memory was of being in a household full of children in Reykjavik, and as she grew up she was told that she was no one's sister and no one's daughter; the council paid for her to be there. She mulled over those words, but did not find out what they meant until much later. One day she was taken from the home and went to live with an elderly couple as a kind of domestic servant, and when she reached adulthood she went to work for the merchant. That was her entire life before she met Grimur. She missed not having parents or a place to call home, a family with cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents and siblings, and in between girlhood and womanhood she went through a phase of incessantly puzzling over who she was and who her parents were. She did not know where to look for the answers.
She imagined they had been killed in an accident. This was her consolation, because she could not bear the thought that they had left her, their child. She fantasised they had saved her life and died in the process. Even
