Silence of the Grave

that, but I would have liked children. They'd be 30 today, perhaps. In their thirties. I sometimes think about that. Grown-up. With their own children. I don't really know what happened. Suddenly you're middle-aged. I'm a doctor. Not many women studied medicine when I enrolled. I was like you, I didn't have the time. Didn't have time for a life of my own. What you're doing now isn't your own life. It's just work.'

'Yes, well, I suppose I should…'

'Benjamin didn't have a family either,' Elsa went on. 'That was all he wanted, a family. With that girl.'

Elsa stood up and so did Sigurdur Oli. He expected her to say goodbye, but instead she went over to a large oak cabinet with beautiful glass doors and carved drawers, opened one of them, took out a little Chinese trinket box, lifted the lid and pulled out a silver locket on a slender chain.

'He did keep a lock of her hair,' she said. 'There's a photograph of her in the locket too. Her name was Solveig.' Elsa gave a hint of a smile. 'The apple of Benjamin's eye. I don't think that's her buried on the hill. The thought is unbearable. That would mean Benjamin harmed her. He didn't. Couldn't. I'm convinced of that. This lock of hair will prove it.'

She handed Sigurdur Oli the locket. He sat down again, opened it carefully and saw a tiny lock of black hair on top of a photograph of its owner. Without touching the hair he manoeuvred it onto the lid of the necklace to be able to see the photograph. It showed the petite face of a girl of 20, dark-haired with beautifully curved eyebrows above big eyes staring enigmatically into the lens. Lips that suggested determination, a small chin, her face slender and pretty. Benjamin's fiancee. Solveig.

'Please excuse me for holding back,' Elsa said. 'I've thought the matter over and weighed it up and I couldn't bring myself to destroy that lock of hair. Whatever emerges from the investigation.'

'Why did you conceal it?'

'I needed to think things over.'

'Yes, but even…'

'It gave me quite a shock when your colleague – Erlendur, isn't it? – started insinuating that it might be her up there, but once I'd thought more about it…' Elsa shrugged as if in resignation.

'Even if the DNA test proves positive,' Sigurdur Oli said, 'that doesn't necessarily mean that Benjamin murderered her. The analysis won't give any answers to that. If that is his fiancee up on the hill, there could be another reason besides Benjamin…'

Elsa interrupted him.

'She… what's it called these days… she dumped him. 'Broke off their engagement' is probably the old phrase. Back when people used to get engaged. She did it the day that she disappeared. Benjamin didn't reveal that until much later. To my mother, on his deathbed. She told me. I've never told anyone before. And I would have taken it to my grave if you hadn't found those bones. Do you know yet whether it's a male or a female?'

'Not yet, no,' Sigurdur Oli said. 'Did he say anything about why she broke off their engagement? Why she left him?'

He sensed Elsa hesitating. They looked each other in the eye and he knew she had already given too much away to back down now. He felt that she wanted to tell him what she knew. As if she were bearing a heavy cross and the time had come to put it down. At last, after all these years.

'It wasn't his child,' she said.

'Not Benjamin's child?'

'No.'

'She wasn't pregnant by him?'

'No.'

'So whose was it?'

'You have to understand that times were different then,' Elsa said. 'Today women have abortions like going to the dentist. Marriage has no special meaning even if people want to have children. They live together. They separate. Start living with someone else. Have more children. Split up again. It wasn't like that. Not in those days. Having a child out of wedlock used to be unthinkable for women. It brought shame, they would be outcasts. People were merciless, they called them tarts.'

'So I gather,' Sigurdur Oli said. His mind turned to Bergthora and it gradually dawned on him why Elsa had been asking about his private life.

'Benjamin was prepared to marry her,' Elsa continued. 'Or at least that's what he later told my mother. Solveig didn't want that. She wanted to break off their engagement and told him so straight out. Just like that. Without any warning.'

'Who was the father then?'

'When she left Benjamin she asked him to forgive her. For leaving him. But he didn't. He needed more time.'

'And she disappeared?'

'She was never seen again after she said goodbye to him. When she didn't return home that evening they started looking for her and Benjamin wholeheartedly took part in the search. But she was never found.'

'What about the father of her child?' Sigurdur Oli asked again. 'Who was he?'

'She didn't tell Benjamin. She left without ever letting him know. That's what he told my mother, at least. If he did know, he certainly never told her.'

'Who could it have been?'

'Could have been?' Elsa repeated. 'It doesn't matter who it could have been. The only important thing is who it was.'

'Do you mean the father was involved in her disappearance?'

'What do you think?' Elsa asked.

'You and your mother never suspected anyone?'

'No, no one. Nor did Benjamin, as far as I know.'

'Could he have fabricated the whole story?'

'I can't say for sure, but I don't think Benjamin told a lie in his life.'

'I mean, to detract attention from himself.'

'I'm not aware that he ever came under any suspicion, and it was quite a long time later that he told my mother all this. It was just before he died.'

'He never stopped thinking about her.'

'That's what my mother said.'

Sigurdur Oli thought for a moment.

'Could the shame have led her to suicide?'

'Definitely. She not only betrayed Benjamin, she was pregnant and refused to say whose child it was.'

'Elinborg, the woman I work with, talked to her sister. She said their father committed suicide. Hanged himself. That it was tough for Solveig because they were particularly close.'

'Tough for Solveig?'

'Yes.'

'That's odd!'

'How so?'

'He did hang himself, but it could hardly have upset Solveig.'

'What do you mean?'

'They said he was driven to it by grief.'

'Grief?'

'Yes, that's the impression I got.'

'Grief over what?'

'His daughter's disappearance,' Elsa said. 'He hanged himself after she went missing.'

17

At long last, Erlendur found something to talk to his daughter about. He had done a lot of research at the