'Have you finished in Benjamin's cellar?'
'Yes, finished it yesterday. Didn't find a thing.'
'Can you rule out that it's his fiancee buried up there?'
'Yes, I think so. She threw herself in the sea.'
'Is there any way to confirm the rape?' Elinborg wondered.
'I think the confirmation's on the bottom of the sea,' Sigurdur Oli said.
'How did they put it, a summer trip to Fljot?' Erlendur asked.
'A real countryside romance,' Sigurdur Oli said with a smile.
'Arsehole!' Erlendur said.
Ed welcomed Erlendur and Elinborg at the front door and showed them into the sitting room. The table was covered with documents relating to the depot. There were faxes and photocopies on the floor and open diaries and books spread all over the room. Erlendur had the feeling he had conducted a major investigation. Ed flicked through a pile of papers on the table.
'Somewhere here I have a list of the Icelanders who worked at the depot,' he said. 'The embassy found it.'
'We've located one of the tenants frorn the house you went to,' Erlendur said. 'I think she's the handicapped girl you were talking about.'
'Good,' Ed said, engrossed in his search. 'Good. Here it is.'
He gave Erlendur a handwritten list of the names of nine Icelanders who worked at the depot. Erlendur recognised the list. Jim had read it out to him over the phone and was going to send him a copy. Erlendur remembered he had forgotten to ask Mikkelina her stepfather's name.
'I found out who blew the whistle,' Ed said. 'Informed on the thieves. My old colleague from the military police in Reykjavik lives in Minneapolis now. We've stayed in touch off and on so I phoned him. He remembered the matter, phoned someone else and found the name of the informant.'
'And who was it?' Erlendur asked.
'His name was Dave, David Welch, from Brooklyn. Private.'
The same name Mikkelina mentioned, Erlendur thought.
'Is he alive?' he asked.
'We don't know. My friend's trying to trace him through the Pentagon. He might have been sent to the front.'
Elinborg enlisted Sigurdur Oli's help in investigating the identity of the depot workers and the whereabouts of them and their descendants. Erlendur asked her to meet him again that afternoon before they went to see Mikkelina. First he was going to the hospital to see Eva Lind.
He walked down the corridor in intensive care and looked in at his daughter, who lay motionless as ever, her eyes closed. To his enormous relief, Halldora was nowhere to be seen. He looked down the ward to where he had accidentally wandered when he'd had the bizarre conversation with the little woman about the boy in the blizzard. Inching his way down the corridor to the innermost room, he noticed that it was empty. The woman in the fur coat had gone and there was no one in the bed where the man had been lying between this world and the next. The self-styled medium was gone too, and Erlendur wondered whether it ever actually happened, or whether it was a dream. He stood in the doorway for a second, then turned and went into his daughter's room, softly closing the door behind him. He wanted to lock it, but there was no lock. He sat down beside Eva Lind. Sat silently at her bedside, thinking about the boy in the blizzard.
A good while passed before Erlendur finally plucked up the courage, and heaved a deep sigh.
'He was eight years old,' he said to Eva Lind. 'Two years younger than I was.'
He thought about how the medium had said that he accepted it, that it was no one's fault. Such simple words out of the blue told him nothing. He had been battling against that blizzard all his life, and all the passage of time did was intensify it.
'I lost my grip,' he said to Eva Lind.
He heard the scream in the storm.
'We couldn't see each other,' he said. 'We held hands so there was no distance between us, but still I couldn't see him for the blizzard. And then I lost my grip.'
He paused.
'That's why you mustn't let go. That's why you have to survive this and come back and get healthy again. I know your life hasn't been easy, but you destroy it as if it were worthless. As if you were worthless. But that's not right. You're not right to think that. And you mustn't think that.'
Erlendur looked at his daughter in the dull glow from the bedside lamp.
'He was eight. Did I say that? A boy, just like any other boy, fun to be with and always smiling, we were friends. You can't take that for granted. Normally there's some rivalry. Fighting, bragging and arguments. But not between us. Maybe because we were completely different. He impressed people. Unconsciously. Some people are like that. I'm not. There's something in those people that breaks down all the barriers, because they act completely the way they are, have nothing to hide, never shelter behind anything, are just themselves, straightforward. Kids like that…'
Erlendur fell silent.
'You remind me of him sometimes,' he continued. 'I didn't see it until later. When you tracked me down after all those years. There's something about you that reminds me of him. Something you're destroying, and that's why I'm hurt by the way you treat your life and yet I don't seem able to do anything about it. I'm as helpless with you as when I stood in that blizzard and felt my grip slipping. We were holding hands and I lost my grip and I could feel it happening and sensed it was the end. We would both die. Our hands were frozen and we couldn't hold on. I couldn't feel his hand, apart from that split second when I lost hold of it.'
Erlendur paused and looked down at the floor.
'I don't know whether that's the reason for all of this. I was ten and I've blamed myself ever since. I couldn't shake it off. Don't want to shake it off. The pain is like a fortress around a sorrow I don't want to release. Maybe I should have done that long ago, to come to terms with the life that was saved and give it a purpose. But that didn't happen and hardly will at this stage. We all have our burdens. Maybe I don't suffer more than anyone else who has lost a loved one, but I can't deal with it at all.
'Something switched off in me. I never found him again and I dream about him all the time and I know he's still there somewhere, roaming around in the blizzard, alone and abandoned and cold, until he drops down where he can't be found and never will be, and the storm rages against his back and he's buried by the snow in the twinkling of an eye, and no matter how I search and shout, I can't find him and he can't hear me, and he's lost to me for ever.'
Erlendur looked at Eva Lind.
'It was like he'd gone straight to God. I was found. I was found and I survived and I lost him. I couldn't tell them a thing. Couldn't say where I'd been when I lost him. Couldn't see out of my eyes for that bloody blizzard. I was ten years old and almost frozen to death and couldn't tell them a thing. They mounted a search party and people combed the moor carrying lamps from dawn to dark for days on end, shouting for him and prodding the snow with sticks, and they split up and took dogs and we could hear the shouts and the barking, but nothing happened. Never.
'He was never found.
'Then in the ward here I met a woman who said she had a message for me from the boy in the blizzard. And she said it wasn't my fault and I had nothing to fear. What does it mean? I don't believe in that sort of thing, but what am I supposed to think? All my life it's been my fault, although I'm well aware, and have been for a long time, that I was too young to shoulder any blame. But the guilt torments you like a cancer that eventually kills you.
'Because that was no ordinary boy I lost my grip on.
'Because the boy in the blizzard… was my brother.'
Their mother slammed the door on the cold autumn wind and in the dim light of the kitchen she could see Grimur sitting opposite Simon at the table. She could not see Grimur's face clearly. This was the first time she had
