There was a police car parked in the yard and, as the inspector drew up beside it, a young uniformed officer appeared on the doorstep of the farmhouse and gave them a friendly wave.
Hulda was the first out of the car, obeying an urgent need to get out into the fresh air, in spite of the snow. The car journey had left her feeling queasy and depressed.
Inspector Jens followed her up to the house, obviously keen not to miss anything.
‘I’ll come in with you,’ he said, pushing past his subordinate to show Hulda inside. The air indoors was unpleasantly heavy, with that familiar, cloying odour that told Hulda a body had been lying there for some time. ‘He’s upstairs,’ Jens said. They entered a plain, strikingly clean and tidy hall, which led into a sitting room. Here Hulda paused a moment. A desiccated Christmas tree drooped in one corner, its needles scattered over the floor and the small collection of parcels arranged underneath it. Clearly, the terrible events must have happened in the run-up to Christmas.
There was a pile of books on a little side table, revealed by the labels on their spines to be library books. Beside them was a cup still half full of dark liquid and, on the larger table, there were two other cups, both empty. Hulda took a quick glance into the small kitchen that adjoined the sitting room. There were saucepans on the cooker but, apart from that, there was no obvious mess. Perhaps someone had tidied up for Christmas.
She went back into the sitting room and from there into a passage lined with four doors and a staircase to the attic. ‘Up here,’ the inspector informed Hulda solemnly, although he had already told her the body was upstairs. But, of course, she reminded herself, there was more than one body.
She accompanied the inspector up the stairs, doing her best to ignore the smell, refusing to let herself dwell on the fact that, only two months after finding the body of her daughter, she was about to be confronted by another corpse. She had never been hampered in her job by any squeamishness. But now she had an odd, vertiginous sensation, as if she were standing in the middle of a glacier, almost blinded by the glare of sunlit snow whichever way she looked, while ahead a crack had formed in the ice-sheet, a deep crevasse that was drawing ever closer. And she was falling …
At the top there was a narrow landing with three doors. One stood open and the inspector ushered Hulda towards it. Inside, the source of the throat-catching stench was revealed: the body of a middle-aged man lay on its back on the floor, a large patch of dried blood beside it. There was no sign of a weapon.
‘That’s Einar,’ Jens said redundantly, after a respectful moment of silence. ‘Sorry, it was Einar. The farmer.’
‘Right. It doesn’t look good, to be honest,’ Hulda said. ‘Though of course my colleagues will do a more thorough examination.’
‘Yes, but you do agree it looks like murder, don’t you?’
Hulda was struck by a suspicion that the inspector wanted it to be murder, that he was eager for the chance to work on a major crime. But maybe she was doing him an injustice. Was it age that had made her so cynical? Or was it what had happened at Christmas?
‘Well, it doesn’t appear to have been an accident, at any rate,’ she said quietly. Something terrible had happened there, that much was plain.
‘Shall we go back downstairs?’
Hulda lingered a moment, surveying the room. It was reasonably spacious, despite the low ceiling. In the corner under the dormer window was an old divan bed with a small table and lamp next to it, and a little bookcase under the sloping roof. Apart from the shocking aberration of the body lying in the middle of the floor, it seemed to have been quite a pleasant room, typical guest accommodation, neutral but homely.
What had the farmer been doing up here?
‘OK, let’s go downstairs,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen all I need to for the moment. By the way, what about these other rooms? Do you know what’s in them?’ She preferred not to check for herself as she didn’t want to risk destroying any evidence before her colleagues had had a chance to carry out their examination.
‘Yes, I had a look inside when we arrived, but they’re just storerooms, so I closed the doors again. Downstairs there are three bedrooms and a bathroom. I took a quick peek in all of them, just to make sure there was no one else in the house. And there wasn’t.’
‘Thanks, my colleagues will conduct a more thorough investigation.’
She followed him down the narrow stairs.
‘Now we have to go out in the cold, I’m afraid.’
Hulda still had her thick down jacket and gloves on. As they emerged on to the steps, she pulled a woolly hat from her pocket.
‘It’s not very far,’ the inspector said. ‘Just round that corner and down to the cellar.’
‘Oh?’ Hulda paused.
‘Sorry, the original report we sent to Reykjavík may have been a bit garbled, but the second body is in the
