'Wait.'
'Excuse me, but this is none of my busi…'
'There's a boy out there,' the little woman said.
Erlendur did not hear properly what she said.
'There's a little boy in the blizzard,' she went on.
Erlendur looked at her in astonishment and jerked his arm away from her as if he had been stabbed.
'What are you talking about?' he said.
'Do you know who it is?' the woman asked, looking up at Erlendur.
'I don't have the faintest idea what you're going on about,' Erlendur snapped, turned round and strode down the corridor towards the exit sign.
'You have nothing to fear,' she called after him. 'He accepts it. He's reconciled to what happened. It was nobody's fault.'
Erlendur stopped in his tracks, turned slowly round and stared at the little woman at the other end of the corridor. Her persistence was beyond his comprehension.
'Who is that boy?' she asked. 'Why is he with you?'
'There is no boy,' Erlendur snorted. 'I don't know what you mean. I don't know you from Adam and I have no idea what boy you're talking about. Leave me alone!' he shouted.
Then he spun round and stormed out of the ward.
'Leave me alone,' he hissed through clenched teeth.
18
Edward Hunter had been an officer with the American wartime forces in Iceland, one of the few members of the military who did not leave when peace was restored. Jim, the secretary at the British embassy, had located him without any great difficulty through the American embassy. He was looking for members of the British and American occupying forces, but according to the Home Office in London, few were still alive. Most of the British troops who went to Iceland lost their lives in combat in North Africa and Italy or on the western front, in the invasion of Normandy in 1944. Only a few Americans stationed in Iceland subsequently went into battle; most stayed for the duration of the war. Several remained behind, married Icelandic women and eventually became Icelandic nationals. One of them was Edward Hunter.
Erlendur received a call from Jim early in the morning.
'I talked to the American embassy and they directed me to this man Hunter. I talked to him myself to save you the bother. I hope that was in order.'
'Thank you,' Erlendur said.
'He lives in Kopavogur.'
'Has he been there since the war?'
'Unfortunately I don't know that.'
'But he still lives here, in other words, this Hunter,' Erlendur said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
He had not slept well that night, he dozed and had bad dreams. The words of the little thin-haired woman at the hospital the previous evening were preying on his mind. He had no faith in mediums acting as go-betweens for the afterlife, and he did not believe that they could see what was hidden to others. On the contrary, he dismissed them as frauds, every one of them: clever at winkling information out of people and reading body language to establish details about the individual in question, which in half the cases might fit and in the other half might be plain wrong – simple probability. Erlendur scoffed at the subject as bloody nonsense when it had arisen at the office once, to Elinborg's great chagrin. She believed in mediums and life after death, and for some reason she expected him to be open to such ideas. Possibly because he was from the countryside. That turned out to be a huge misunderstanding. He was certainly not open to the supernatural. Yet there was something about the woman at the hospital and what she said that Erlendur could not stop thinking about, and it had disturbed his sleep.
'Yes, he still lives here now,' Jim said, with profuse apologies for having woken Erlendur; he thought all Icelanders got up early. He did so himself, the endless spring daylight showed him no mercy.
'Hang on, so he's married to an Icelander?'
'I've spoken to him,' Jim said again in his English accent as if he had not heard the question. 'He's expecting your call. Colonel Hunter served for a while with the military police in Reykjavik and he remembers an incident in the depot on the hill that he's prepared to tell you about.'
'What incident?' Erlendur asked.
'He'll tell you about it. And I'll go on trying to dig up something about soldiers who died or went missing here. You ought to ask Colonel Hunter about that too.'
They said goodbye and Erlendur lumbered into the kitchen to make coffee. He was still deep in thought. Could a medium say which side people were on if they were-halfway between life and death? Without accepting it in the slightest, he thought to himself that if it offered consolation to people who had lost loved ones, he was not going to oppose it. It was consolation that mattered, not where it came from.
The seething coffee burned his tongue when he sipped it. He avoided thinking about what was really haunting him that night and morning, and managed to keep it at bay.
More or less.
Ex-US army colonel Edward Hunter cut more an Icelandic than an American figure when, dressed in a buttoned-up woollen sweater and sporting a scraggy white beard, he welcomed Erlendur and Elinborg to his detached house in Kopavogur. His hair was unkempt and a little scruffy, but he was both friendly and polite when he shook them by the hand and told them just to call him Ed. In that respect he reminded Erlendur of Jim. He told them his wife was in the States, visiting his sister. Himself, he went there less and less.
On their way to visit Ed, Elinborg told Erlendur that, according to Bara, Benjamin's fiancee was wearing a green coat when she went missing. Elinborg thought this interesting, but Erlendur stifled any further discussion by saying rather brashly that he did not believe in ghosts. Elinborg had the feeling the subject was closed.
Ed showed them into a large sitting room and Erlendur saw scant evidence of the military life as he took a look around: in front of him were two gloomy Icelandic landscape paintings, Icelandic ceramic statues and framed family photographs. Nothing that reminded Erlendur of military service or World War II.
Having expected them, Ed had coffee, tea and biscuits ready, and after a polite chat, which rather bored all three of them, the old soldier went into action and asked how he could help. He spoke almost flawless Icelandic, in short, concise phrases as if the discipline of the army had taught him to keep to the bare essentials.
'Jim at the British embassy told us you served here during the war, including a spell with the military police, and were involved in a case concerning the depot at the present site of Grafarholt golf course.'
'Yes, I play golf there regularly now,' Ed said. 'I heard the news of the bones on the hill. Jim told me you thought they might belong to one of our men. British or American.'
'Was there some kind of incident at the depot?' Erlendur asked.
'They used to steal,' Ed said. 'It happens at most depots. I guess you'd call it 'wastage'. A group of soldiers stole provisions and sold them to the Icelanders. It started on a very small scale, but gradually they got more confident and in the end it became quite a large operation. The quartermaster was in on it with them. They were all sentenced. Left the country. I remember it well. I kept a diary and browsed through it after Jim phoned. It all came back to me, the theft. I also rang my friend from that time, Phil, who was my superior. We went over it together.'
'How was the theft discovered?' Elinborg asked.
'Greed got the better of them. Theft on the scale they were practising is difficult to conceal, and rumours about irregularities spread.'
'Who was involved?' Erlendur took out a cigarette and Ed nodded to show that he did not mind him smoking. Elinborg gave Erlendur a reproachful look.
'Civilians. Mostly. The quartermaster was the highest ranked. And at least one Icelander. A man who lived on the hill. On the other side from the depot.'
'Do you remember his name?'
