Thora felt terribly sunburned on the tiny bit of her face that was exposed. The snow magnified the weak winter sun, which had risen slowly as they drove to the site. She felt relieved when they put down their shovels and went back into the shed. Still, their efforts had been successful; beneath the heavy snow they had found an irregular hole in the apparently bottomless ice layer, but Fri?rikka said that it did not fit with any procedure the drillers were supposed to carry out. It was the correct location for their drilling, but according to her the drill had been applied in an extremely unusual manner, and there were peculiar marks left by ice axes and shovels. If the proper procedures had been followed, facing them now should have been a single black borehole the same diameter as the drill shaft, but instead there were many holes scattered about, none of which penetrated deep enough into the ice to be useful for gathering core samples. All of these peculiar holes had been made in one larger pit that appeared to have been dug with a shovel, but when they cleared it of snow it turned out to be empty. The pit was up against a cliff wall at the foot of a mountain rising high above them a bit further north. Directly behind the pit appeared an arched line of stone in the cliff, which rose up through the ice and formed a sort of halo. At the edge of the pit Matthew had caught a glimpse of something in the ice, and they decided to try to get whatever it was out in the hope of gaining some idea of what the ice might have contained before the drillers started working. With great difficulty they managed to scrape out an extremely unusual object, the likes of which neither Thora nor Matthew had ever seen before. After removing most of the ice from it, it turned out to be a bone that had been polished, with holes drilled in two places in the middle. A leather strap had been tied to it at both ends, meaning that above all, it resembled a giant’s armband.
‘Does anyone know what this is?’ Matthew passed around the object.
‘No idea,’ said Fri?rikka. ‘It’s something Greenlandic, but what it’s for I don’t know.’ Alvar took the bone and looked it over, but he was equally unable to provide an explanation for it and gave up trying to guess what it was. He handed the object back to Matthew with a shrug.
‘Maybe the villagers can provide us with an answer,’ said Matthew, grabbing a dirty tea towel from the back of one of the chairs in the shed. He wrapped it around the bone and stuck it in his pocket. They were hungry and ready to head back to the camp. Thora hoped that someone had had the sense to put together lunch for the group, but she doubted it. Neither the doctor nor Eyjolfur appeared likely to be very domestically minded, and she knew Bella well enough to recognize that she would be the last person to have prepared them a meal.
On the way to the car Fri?rikka opened the door to the drilling rig’s cab. They could see through the window that no one was inside it, either alive or dead. Nevertheless, she wanted to have a look inside in case the drillers had left behind a notebook or any other clues that could explain what they were doing. She said that they’d all been careful to record things as they went along, because it was difficult to rely on memory alone when it came to writing it all up in their journals in the evenings. Matthew followed Fri?rikka and Thora saw him climb into the cab after they seemed to have spotted something.
‘Did you find anything?’ called out Thora to Fri?rikka, who was still standing outside the cab.
‘Yes,’ replied the geologist. ‘Now I’m completely at a loss.’
Chapter 11
The therapist was too experienced to have much sympathy for Arnar’s story, which perhaps was not strange, considering how short this binge had been. He simply had little to say. The man appeared almost disappointed, as though he had expected something more exciting. It occurred to Arnar to indulge his need for ingratiating himself with others and come up with something to ignite a spark in the therapist’s eyes. He had enough to draw on from the past few years and it would be no problem to recount something juicy. But that’s not what he did. In the self- examination that he’d undergone during his last treatment he had discovered that life was much simpler when you realized that you couldn’t please everyone – and that there was no reason to do so. His own well-being was just as important as anyone else’s. He needed to keep that firmly in mind until the day dawned when his first thought was not how good it would feel to have a drink.
‘I know you’re aware that every time you lapse, you pick up where you left off last time. The past few weeks have shown you that in black and white.’ The therapist held Arnar’s gaze as if to emphasize the importance of what he was saying. The effect was lessened somewhat by the way his eyes kept flickering up to the clock. It was never good to hold a session just before lunch.
The therapist’s eyes were slightly protruding and Arnar had the discomfiting thought that all the tales of sorrow and misfortune he’d had to listen to had filled his entire skull and now pressed against the backs of his eyes. After a few years his tongue and ears might also pop out. Arnar wondered whether he was experiencing delirium tremens, so vivid was this mental image. He shook himself slightly to get rid of it. ‘I know,’ he said, unsure what else to say. ‘This is pathetic.’ He could not concentrate and it was the best he could come up with.
‘Yes, it’s pathetic,’ echoed the therapist, equally uninspired. ‘You’ll have to start from scratch, and now it’s clear that you’ll have to be more diligent about attending meetings than you have been in the past few years.’ He rubbed his forehead, trying to appear serious and intelligent and concerned about Arnar’s recovery. But he just looked like a hungry man with bulging eyes.
‘It was hard to find a meeting in the middle of a glacier.’ Arnar had investigated whether there were any AA meetings anywhere near the work site but the nearest had been in Angmagssalik, and it was far too much trouble to go there. So he had used CD recordings of American meetings, which had helped considerably, even though it wasn’t the same as attending a meeting with other addicts. Defeated people had more powers of dissuasion than mere words – as did the joy in the eyes of those who had overcome their problems, at least for the time being.
‘A glacier?’ The therapist had apparently forgotten Arnar’s story, or had not heard a single word of it. Perhaps the overcrowding in his skull made it impossible for him to absorb new information.
‘I was working in Greenland.’ Arnar couldn’t care less about the therapist’s lack of interest, which made this even more awkward. ‘But I didn’t fall off the wagon there.’
‘No, that’s right.’ The therapist’s expression was completely blank. ‘Are you aware of what it was that led you back to the bottle?’
‘Yes.’ Arnar did not want to share that story with the man. He had had enough and was starting to look forward to lunch himself. He didn’t know if it was his imagination, but it seemed as though the smell of food was being carried all the way to them from the cafeteria. ‘But I don’t care to discuss it.’ No doubt the therapist would quickly lose his appetite if Arnar started to describe the events leading to his fall. Terrible, mindless vengeance and violence – and not from someone who kills for survival but from him, a supposedly civilized human being. And towards his colleagues, too… He felt sick when he recalled the reasons behind his actions. But though the others’ behaviour towards him had been disgraceful, he alone was responsible for what had happened. And for that, he couldn’t blame alcohol. Drunkenness did not get the ball rolling; that happened when in his ignorance he let himself be overwhelmed by hatred and ignore everything but his own lust for revenge.
Bella was the only one who was not impressed by Thora’s expedition with the others. She curled her lip so that no one could doubt how boring she found their story. But Thora could sense something else behind Bella’s contempt: she envied their little field trip. She had been left behind with Eyjolfur to make a list of all the computers and other technical equipment at the camp, which was the first step in trying to determine the monetary value of it all. The two of them had gone from room to room; he had announced what was there and she had written it down, no doubt with a face like thunder. The doctor had continued to make his sample collection, which he alone controlled and understood fully.
‘So you think that the corpse of the geologist who disappeared had been where they were planning to drill?’ asked the doctor in a rather sceptical tone. ‘That would mean this photo could be of a work glove.’ He put down the poor-quality printout of the photo: the colours were odd and the image itself grainy.
Eyjolfur snorted. ‘Yes, precisely. I think that you should look at the image on the screen; this printout is shitty. Onscreen you can see the nails in better resolution – albeit vaguely, but still.’
‘Yes, no doubt,’ said the doctor, although his tone didn’t suggest that he believed it. ‘This is all just too incredible. What are the chances of boring one little hole in that place and hitting exactly upon the spot where the
