Hulda rose from her chair, fixing Hjörleifur with a stern gaze and saying emphatically: ‘On the contrary, it’s extremely urgent. We’re looking for a girl who’s been missing since last autumn. We don’t know what happened to her, but we’ve finally picked up her trail. If there’s the slightest chance she might still be alive…’
Hjörleifur was momentarily too disconcerted by her vehemence to answer. Then he nodded. ‘OK, fine, I’ll assemble the team. But I hope you’re not expecting to find the man alive.’
‘I’d be surprised,’ Hulda said in a more composed voice, sitting down again. ‘Can you start straight away?’
‘Not in the dark, but as soon as it’s light tomorrow,’ Hjörleifur muttered, sounding rather sheepish now. ‘But, just to be clear, if conditions get significantly worse, we’ll have to abort the search. We’re not taking any risks.’
‘We understand that,’ Jens said.
From his tone, Hulda wasn’t sure if he was on her or Hjörleifur’s side. Perhaps it was foolhardy to insist on sending out a search party to comb the countryside for a body in this weather, but the girl’s disappearance had touched a nerve with her and she wanted to pull out all the stops to solve the case. Not that she was kidding herself that there would be any happy ending.
‘Then I’d better get going, since there’s obviously no time to lose,’ Hjörleifur said, not even trying to disguise the sarcasm in his voice. He took his leave of them.
‘Hadn’t we better go back up to the farm?’ Hulda asked, turning to Jens. She was feeling far too restless to wait around with nothing to do.
‘Are you sure? It’ll mean having to drive all the way out there and back again tonight. My lads could give your colleagues a lift once they’ve finished.’ His lack of enthusiasm was obvious.
Hulda nodded. ‘Quite sure. I’d like to be there personally to hear how they’re getting on with the crime-scene investigation.’
This time the drive was more arduous, as snow had drifted over the road since that morning. Hulda spared a guilty thought for the rescue-team members who were going to have to scour the valley and moors in these conditions.
When they finally reached the farmhouse, Hulda’s colleagues were just finishing up. They had taken samples and photographs and reckoned they had enough evidence to be going on with.
They had made one unexpected discovery: it was plain that someone had deliberately sabotaged the telephone connection by pulling out some of the wires, then hiding the evidence. ‘It wouldn’t have required any expert knowledge and would probably only have taken a minute,’ Hulda was told when she asked for details. In addition, a preliminary analysis of the fingerprints on the coffee cups had confirmed her theory that there had been three people in the house.
Both bodies had already been removed by ambulance and the rescue team weren’t due to begin their search from the farm until the following morning. It was agreed, therefore, that the two police vehicles should travel back to the village in convoy, but there was something Hulda wanted to do first.
‘Is it all right for me to go in now and take a closer look around?’ she asked one of her colleagues from Forensics. He nodded.
She had a disorientating sensation of walking into a painting: a cosy sitting room in a house where no one lived any more, where the clock seemed to have stopped at Christmas, although it was now well into February. It was as if the house were caught in some strange limbo: there were signs of life everywhere you looked, yet the air was tainted by the smell of death, a reminder that the Grim Reaper had recently wielded his scythe there. She tried to visualize the scene. Had all three of them – the farming couple and Haukur Leó – sat here together in the days before Christmas? Had he been a complete stranger to them? If so, what was he doing here in the middle of winter? Or could the couple have been relatives?
It had occurred to Hulda while she was at the police station that she should seize the chance to ring his wife, Unnur’s mother, and let her know that the Mitsubishi had been found. This would have given her an excuse to ask the woman about any possible link to the couple out east. Yet she had hesitated, preferring to wait until she had made a bit more progress with the investigation. Until she could put the poor woman out of her misery by telling her straight that her husband was dead – and perhaps give her news of her daughter at the same time.
That conversation would have to wait until tomorrow at the earliest, unless there were any unexpected developments tonight.
Hulda walked past the stairs to the attic since she simply didn’t have the mental strength to go up there again just yet. Subconsciously, she knew that this was because, apart from the blood, the scene had been too grim a reminder of her own private trauma.
Instead, she revisited the couple’s bedroom. Jens had suggested they might have slept in separate rooms as a possible explanation for the fact that both the double bed and the bed in the guestroom had been used. Now, though, there was compelling evidence that his theory was wrong: a third person had been there – Haukur Leó must have been staying with them. As further proof that the couple had slept together, there were, as Hulda had noticed earlier, two pairs of reading glasses. There was also a half-empty water glass on one bedside table, along with a novel, Halldór Laxness’s Salka Valka, the bookmark revealing that the reader hadn’t got very far with it.
Apart from that, it was rather a cheerless room, Hulda felt. Impersonal, somehow. She couldn’t immediately work out what it was
