Perhaps the wisest plan would be to sit down and dig himself into a drift. Rest a little. Hope for a stroke of luck; an improvement in the weather, for example, though he knew this was unlikely.
Yes, that would be best. To bunker down in the snow.
He halted again and sank to the ground. It was a good feeling to be able to catch his breath and give his aching muscles a break.
He took off his backpack and laid it down in the snow, then rested his head on it like a pillow. He wasn’t going to let himself fall asleep, just relax for a few minutes.
He put his right hand over his jacket pocket where he kept Unnur’s letter – he had to protect that.
Then he closed his eyes and his thoughts went homing to his daughter.
XXI
Hulda had found herself a seat at the back of the plane and was sitting alone, well away from the other passengers.
She was on her way home.
The noise was deafening but she tried not to let it get to her; she had to endure this flight in spite of the turbulence, the uncomfortable seat and the lukewarm coffee she was sipping carefully so she wouldn’t spill it all over herself every time the plane lurched.
The coffee was disgusting, but then what could you expect on a plane? She had bought a newspaper at the airport to read on the way, but it had been a waste of money. She had hardly read a word because the moment she tried to focus on the print she started to feel sick, and the smell of the paper and ink, combined with the reek of fuel and the bitter coffee, made for a bad cocktail.
Yes, she was on her way home.
The trip had been an ordeal. The last thing she had needed was to find herself stuck with a bunch of strangers in unfamiliar surroundings in the depths of winter, trapped in the middle of a tragedy. As if she didn’t have enough trouble at the moment, coping with her own grief.
She had been too quick to agree to take on the case, too quick to return to work. She hadn’t got over it yet. No sooner had she formulated this thought than she regretted it, since of course she would never get over it.
She just had to learn to disguise her real feelings behind a façade, admitting no one, while at the same time behaving towards others as if nothing had happened, so she could carry on living her life – if you could call it a life.
She supposed the case had, insofar as it was possible, been solved. They would probably never establish exactly how Unnur had died, poor girl, though it wasn’t hard to fill in the gaps now that they knew the background and had read the letter she had written her parents. The exact sequence of events that had resulted in the deaths of the couple from the farm was impossible to piece together too, though it seemed fairly clear that Haukur Leó had been responsible.
Four people had lost their lives and three of them had almost certainly been murdered, yet no one would be punished.
But then that’s what her job was like at times, a game played out in the grey borderlands between day and night. No victory was ever sweet enough; her work was never really done. She could expect no praise or reward. The riddle had been solved to general indifference. Perhaps, though, that applied more to her, a woman in a man’s world, than to her colleagues. She felt it so keenly, so repeatedly, the sense that some of her colleagues longed for her to make a mistake, to perform worse than them. It was the explanation for her deep need to prove herself, to constantly do better, but even that wasn’t enough.
Yet small victories did bring her a degree of satisfaction. At least she herself could be proud of a job well done, even if no one else mentioned it.
This time, she felt nothing but emptiness, though she had performed her role well, in spite of her inability to concentrate. In fact, she doubted anyone else could have done better. But there was a void inside her that nothing could fill, like a hole in her soul.
She sat there on the bucking plane, gripping the cooling coffee, aware of the chill in her bones.
She was on her way home, but what awaited her there? Could she even call the house on Álftanes a home?
Not any more.
It might as well have collapsed into rubble on Christmas Day, when the family had splintered for good. Nevertheless, that’s where she was heading, that’s where she had to live, for the present at least. She had nowhere else to turn.
Of course, she could always knock on her mother’s door, but she had no intention of doing that. Their relationship wasn’t close enough, not on Hulda’s side, anyway.
Hulda knew she would persevere with her job after this trip, although she wasn’t in any fit state to do so. Jón was working from home a lot these days, even more than he used to, and she had to get away from him. At least when she was at work she could think, now and then, about something other than Dimma.
She could try to focus her mind on something she didn’t care about so much. Perhaps her investigations would suffer as a result of her distracted state, regardless of the assurances she gave her bosses, but that was just tough. From now on, she was going to learn to put herself first. She had to get through this on her own. There was no other way. Jón provided no support, and she would never have accepted any from him. It was as if he knew that she knew, though neither of them said a word.
The silence between them was almost complete.
She assumed he would move out after an appropriate interval
