doubt that Arnar took it as seriously as I did, though he might have tried to help a bit. When Oddny Hildur disappeared I was the one who suffered the most.’
‘You?’ shot back Eyjolfur. ‘In the end she and Arnar were pretty close, in this whole mess.’ He took a drink of the apple juice that had been served with the sandwiches.
Thora looked at him curiously. ‘What do you mean by “close”? Were they having an affair?’ Oddny Hildur had been married, and probably this Arnar was as well.
Eyjolfur choked slightly on his drink. ‘Far from it. He bats for the other side. That’s why I called him a ponce. Couldn’t stand him.’ He stopped, clearly realizing from the looks on the others’ faces that he’d now revealed his homophobia as well as his racism. ‘That’s not what I meant. He wasn’t intolerable because he’s gay; that has nothing to do with it. He’d stopped drinking and was obsessed with his sobriety.’ Thora recalled having seen a card listing the Twelve Steps hanging in one of the offices. ‘Nobody was bothered that he was gay. It wasn’t like that.’
‘Rubbish,’ bristled Fri?rikka. ‘You had a massive problem with him being at the camp, just because he’s gay. All his AA crap was nothing to do with it.’ She turned to the others. ‘Most of the guys here are real “men’s men”. They talk non-stop about football and other equally fascinating topics. When Arnar came out of the closet after he stopped drinking they all turned their backs on him, and Eyjolfur was no exception. It was as if they thought it was infectious.’
‘Bullshit,’ muttered Eyjolfur. ‘I don’t know what he was like when he was drinking, but sober he was a boring, narrow-minded bastard.’
‘Did you resign because of what happened to your friend Oddny Hildur?’ asked Thora, regarding Fri?rikka steadily. Again she had found it necessary to intervene to ease the tension. What would things at the work camp have been like, she wondered, if it had always been this volatile in the cafeteria?
‘Yes.’ Fri?rikka let this answer suffice. She pursed her lips, picked up her fork and started drawing it through the ketchup on her plate. Thora thought it best not to irritate her, since she was hoping the other woman would help them locate the place the photo had been taken. She seemed a stubborn sort, and was probably more than capable of refusing to help them. Matthew was clearly thinking along the same lines, because he also said nothing.
‘Still, it was definitely the Greenlanders,’ muttered Eyjolfur, breaking the silence. He was obviously the type who had to have the last word. ‘They’ve been a problem since the project started.’ Rather than keeping silent when no one protested, the young man went on. This did not bode well for whatever woman married him in the future. ‘They stole stuff no one in their right mind would want, and everyone knew that they didn’t give a shit about this project.’
‘What did they steal?’ asked Matthew. Thora’s ears pricked up.
‘Just some minor stuff. I don’t remember in detail but it was some stuff lying around that had been left behind. Pieces of wood, jackets, petrol cans. Things like that.’ Eyjolfur thought for a moment. ‘Boots, too. And probably other things I don’t remember or never heard about.’
So much for Thora’s hope that theft or vandalism might be the key to saving the bank’s insurance money.
It had been a long day, and for Thora the happiest part of it was the moment she finally crawled into bed. There was no sign that the storm was slackening, so the team had decided to work late to avoid having to return to the office building after supper. They said little over the meal and quickly disappeared one by one into their own rooms. Warm showers would have lightened their moods but all the pipes in this part of the camp had frozen, making that a distant dream. It was imperative that they finish the job here and get home, or somewhere else where the plumbing was in order. But the weather would dictate when that would happen. They hoped the storm would subside in the night so they could go to the work site the next day, or even down to Kaanneq to check whether anyone there knew about the men.
As Thora drifted off, with Matthew snoring next to her, she ran over what she had learned that day. She felt particularly bad about not having a good enough understanding of the work done on site. In the contractual documents Matthew had given her she was able to read up on the main purpose of the project; namely, to prepare the area for the proposed mining of molybdenum, a metal that Thora had never heard of but that was apparently used to temper steel. The exact details of how these preparations were accomplished were much fuzzier in her mind, meaning there was no way to work out what mattered and what didn’t while going over the data. Of course only a tiny proportion of the material stored in the computer system was of any actual use, and the trick was to fish up what mattered out of the digital soup. Her mind’s eye was filled with the hundreds of photographs she’d glanced over; endless pictures of the machinery, the core samples and other things that all had the common factor of being surrounded by every conceivable form of snow and ice. By the time she stopped to go to bed, she’d been struck snowblind simply from staring at the computer screen. Some of the photos had been taken in Kaanneq and showed the same empty streets and colourful houses as they had seen on their way from the helicopter pad. However, she still hadn’t found the twenty photos that had been deleted from the file made the day that the drillers recorded finding something unusual – photos presumably showing, from various angles, a hand covered in ice.
She had spent quite some time examining the drillers’ private files in the hope of getting to know them and gaining a better idea of what they could have got themselves into; perhaps even discovering what might have led to their disappearance. It didn’t take her long to come to the conclusion that they were a pair of jokers who were always sending round gags and funny stories on e-mail. Thora knew they were both unmarried, and after reading the e-mails it looked to her as if they didn’t have girlfriends either. Nowhere did she find a message to a girl expressing how much they missed her or arranging a date. They were much better at inviting friends and acquaintances to parties and getting themselves invited to dinner by others.
In any case, Thora found it made for depressing reading; Halldor Gretarsson and Bjarki Eliasson had undoubtedly met a sad end and there was something tragic about thinking that no spouse would be weeping over her husband’s disappearance – no matter how twisted it might be for Thora to imagine it. Halldor, known as Dori, had been interested in Greenland; among other things, his computer had links to websites about the country and its history. Thora could not look at these sites since the Internet connection was still down, but the names of the links suggested the nature of their content. Dori had even saved screengrabs from some of them, and those Thora could see. In one of them she had discovered photos from when all the original inhabitants of the settlement had been found dead. Women and children lay as if asleep, except for the way their eyes stared vacuously into the lens. The images were black and white, but Thora thought she could see bloodstains on the beds of the dead, although she wasn’t sure. The book in the cafeteria had said nothing about them dying violently, so that could hardly be right. The stains even appeared to form the same pattern on most of the beds, Almost like a kind of roughly drawn face, so there must have been another explanation for them.
The other driller, Bjarki, seemed to have been something of a hypochondriac, since most of the web pages he had bookmarked were related to diseases. Thora had asked Eyjolfur whether Bjarki had been ill at all, but Eyjolfur had shaken his head and said it had never come up in conversation. Bjarki had always appeared to be in good shape. Maybe he was obsessed with his health, thought Thora, but maybe he also just had dandruff or something and wanted to get rid of it. She could not get onto any of his bookmarked pages to find out what had been troubling him.
The data thus came from all directions and there was no one particular thing that appeared potentially useful for extricating the bank from its predicament. On the contrary, Thora was making no progress: there was no evidence that any kind of criminal activity had stopped work here, and it looked unlikely that they would be able to explain the disappearance of either the drillers or the geologist. Gisli’s journal entries had been non-committal regarding whether he personally suspected vandalism, though at one point he expressed doubt that the residents of Kaanneq would have had anything to do with any potential sabotage, and elsewhere he wondered whether it might have been the work of protestors. Thora realized that that would certainly strengthen the bank’s position. But in any case, what was lacking was a definite conclusion; speculation was of little use.
All she had to show for the day’s labours were the bones in the desk drawers and the photograph of the frozen hand. Thora drifted off to sleep wondering how long a corpse could stay suspended in ice.
Around midnight she woke to the creaking of the floor slats out in the corridor. Someone seemed to be trying to walk down it as carefully as possible. Thora shuddered. Instead of checking who it was, she turned on her side and in a short time fell back asleep. In the morning she was unsure of whether it had actually happened or whether it had been part of the dream she’d been having: a dream about the people who settled this country a
