'No. He lived with his family in an unpainted shack. We found a lot of merchandise there. From the depot. I wrote in my diary that he had three children, one of them handicapped, a girl. The other two were boys. The mother…'
Ed fell silent.
'What about the mother?' Elinborg said. 'You were going to say something about the mother.'
'I think she had a pretty rough time.' Ed fell silent again and grew pensive, as if trying to transport himself back to that distant time when he investigated the theft, walked into an Icelandic house and encountered a woman whom he could tell was the victim of violence. And not only the victim of a single, recent attack; it was obvious that she suffered persistent and systematic abuse, both physical and psychological.
He barely noticed her when he entered the house with four other military policemen. The first thing he saw was the handicapped girl lying on her makeshift bed in the kitchen. He saw the two boys standing side by side next to her, transfixed and terrified as the soldiers burst in. He saw the man leap up from the kitchen table. They had arrived unannounced and clearly he was not expecting them. They could tell at a glance whether people were tough. Whether they posed a threat. This man would not give them any trouble.
Then he saw the woman. It was very early spring and gloomy, and it took him a moment to adjust to the dark inside. As if hiding, the woman stood where he thought he could see a passage leading to other rooms. At first he took her for one of the thieves, trying to make a getaway. He marched up to the passage, drawing his gun from its holster. Shouted down the passage and pointed his gun into the darkness. The crippled girl started screaming at him. The two boys pounced on him as one, shouting something he did not understand. And out of the darkness came the woman, whom he would never forget as long as he lived.
Immediately he realised why she was hiding. Her face was badly bruised, her upper lip puffed up and one eye so swollen that she could not open it. She looked at him in fear with the other eye, then bowed her head as if by instinct. As if she thought he was going to hit her. She was wearing one tattered dress on top of another, her legs bare but for socks and scruffy old shoes. Her dirty hair hung down to her shoulders in thick knots. For all he could tell, she limped. She was the most miserable creature he had ever seen in his life.
He watched her trying to calm her sons and understood that it was not her appearance that she was trying to hide.
She was hiding her shame.
The children fell silent. The older boy huddled up against his mother. Ed looked over at the husband, walked up to him and hit him round the face with a resounding slap.
'And that was that,' Ed concluded his account. 'I couldn't control myself. Don't know what happened. Don't know what came over me. It was incomprehensible, really. You were trained, you know, trained to face anything. Trained to keep calm whatever happened. As you can imagine, it was crucial to keep your self-control at all times, with a war going on and all that. But when I saw that woman… when I saw what she'd had to put up with – and clearly not just that once – I could visualise her life at that man's hands, and something snapped inside me. Something happened that I just couldn't control.'
Ed paused.
'I was a policeman in Baltimore for two years before war broke out. It wasn't called domestic violence then, but it was just as ugly all the same. I came across it there too and I've always been repelled by it. I could tell right away what was going on, and he'd been stealing from us too… but, well, he was sentenced by your courts,' Ed said, as if trying to shake out of his mind the memory of the woman on the hill. 'I don't think he got much of a sentence. He was sure to be back home beating up his poor wife before a couple of months were up.'
'So you're talking about serious domestic violence,' Erlendur said.
'The worst imaginable. It was appalling, the sight of that woman,' Ed said. 'Plain appalling. As I say, I could see straight away what was going on. Tried to talk to her, but she couldn't understand a word of English. I told the Icelandic police about her, but they said there wasn't a lot they could do. That hasn't changed much, I understand.'
'You don't remember their names, do you?' Elinborg asked. 'They're not in your diary?'
'No, but you ought to have a report on it. Because of the theft. And he worked in the depot. There are bound to be lists of the employees, of Icelandic workers in the camp on the hill. But maybe it's too long ago.'
'What about the soldiers?' Erlendur asked. 'The ones your courts sentenced.'
'They spent time in military prison. Stealing supplies was a very serious crime. Then they were sent to the front. A death sentence of sorts.'
'And you caught them all.'
'Who knows? But the thieving stopped. The inventories returned to normal. The matter was resolved.'
'So you don't think any of this is connected with the bones we found?'
'I couldn't say.'
'You don't recall anyone who went missing from your ranks, or the British?'
'You mean a deserter?'
'No. An unexplained disappearance. Because of the skeleton. If you know who it might be. Maybe an American soldier from the depot?'
'I simply don't have a clue. Not a clue.'
They talked to Ed for a good while longer. He gave the impression that he enjoyed talking to them. Seemed to enjoy reminiscing about the old days, armed with his precious diary, and soon they were discussing the war years in Iceland and the impact of the military presence, until Erlendur came to his senses. Mustn't waste time like that. He stood up, and so did Elinborg, and they both thanked him warmly.
Ed stood up to show them out.
'How did you discover the theft?' Erlendur asked at the door.
'Discover it?' Ed repeated.
'What was your lead?'
'Oh, I see. A phone call. Someone phoned the police headquarters and reported a sizeable theft from the depot.'
'Who blew the whistle?'
'We never found out, I'm afraid. Never knew who it was.'
Simon stood by his mother's side and watched, dumbfounded, when the soldier spun round with a mixture of astonishment and rage, walked directly across the kitchen and slapped Grimur around the face so hard that he knocked him to the floor.
The three other soldiers stood motionless in the doorway while Grimur's assailant stood over him and shouted at him something the Icelanders did not understand. Simon could not believe his eyes. He looked at Tomas, transfixed on what was happening, and then at Mikkelina, who stared in horror at Grimur lying on the floor. He looked over at their mother and saw tears in her eyes.
Grimur was off his guard. When they heard two jeeps pull up outside the house the mother had hurried into the passage so that no one would see her. The sight of her with her black eye and burst lip. Grimur had not even stood up from the table, as if he had no worries that what he was doing with the pilferers from the depot would ever be discovered. He was expecting his soldier friends with a batch of merchandise that they planned to store in the house and that evening they were going into town to sell some of the booty. Grimur had plenty of money and had started talking about moving away from the hill, buying a flat, and even talked of buying a car, but only when he was in particularly high spirits.
The soldiers led Grimur out. Put him in one of the jeeps and drove him away. Their leader, the one who knocked Grimur to the floor without the slightest effort – who just walked up to him and hit him as if he did not know how strong Grimur was – said something to their mother and then said goodbye, not with a salute, but with a handshake, and got into the other jeep.
Silence soon returned to the little house. Their mother remained standing in the passage as if the intrusion was beyond her comprehension. She stroked her eye gingerly, fixated on something only she could see. They had never seen Grimur lying on the floor. They had never seen him knocked flat. Never heard anyone shout at him. Never seen him so helpless. They could not fathom what had happened. How it could happen. Why Grimur did not attack the
