Suddenly Thora missed her family terribly. Never before had she been out of touch with her children for so long. She longed to know what they were doing, how Orri’s potty training was going and whether Soley was practising her violin, which she had recently started learning at her father’s request. Thora suspected that Hannes would be much less enthusiastic about the idea when the shrill notes started sounding through his house than he had been when he asked Thora to encourage their daughter to practise. She hoped that everything was going well, and was especially concerned about Gylfi’s relationship with his father. They had probably ended up arguing a bit while Thora was away. Her little family was fragile and without her it lacked the padding that generally absorbed the worst knocks of daily life. She had to hold on to her chair to prevent herself from running out to the car and rushing over to the house of the woman in the village to phone home. Her hunger must be starting to affect her brain function; it was high time she had something to eat.
Matthew walked in. ‘How’s it going? I’m absolutely famished, and Bella’s probably finished putting dinner together.’
‘Bella? Is she cooking?’ At that news Thora’s hunger disappeared like dew under the sun. ‘What’s on the menu? Barbecued seal fins and cigarette pudding?’ She turned off the monitor in front of her.
‘She didn’t have anything to do so I thought it was the perfect assignment.’ Matthew smiled at her. ‘I would ask you out to eat but it’s probably not that easy to get a table at such short notice at the restaurants round here.’ He wrapped his arms around her shoulders. ‘We’re almost done here. The helicopter’s coming not tomorrow, not the day after, but the day after that, so we actually only have two days left.’
Thora smiled back at him. ‘I’ll never talk to you again if the weather prevents it.’ She stood up and stretched. Her vertebrae cracked. ‘The worst thing is that I feel we’re making so little progress. I’m no closer to understanding what happened here, and every new piece of information we discover just complicates things.’
‘At least we know how things look now, and Fri?rikka says that she’s advanced quite a long way with her assessment of the project. She can’t see anything that would prevent her from finishing before we leave.’ He pointed at a multicoloured organizational chart that had been taped to the wall. ‘You never know, we might just get to the bottom of this when we talk to the employees in Iceland.’
‘If they want to talk to us,’ said Thora. ‘It’s entirely up to them.’ She pulled herself together and pushed aside her pessimism. ‘That would be interesting, actually. I found various things in Oddny Hildur’s e-mail to confirm the harassment that Fri?rikka mentioned. Maybe it played some part in this.’
‘How?’ asked Matthew. ‘Did Oddny Hildur suffer because of it? Or the drillers?’ His expression was one giant question mark. ‘Do you think that all these people committed suicide?’ Before Thora could reply he interrupted himself: ‘I wonder if that would be sufficient grounds to absolve Berg of responsibility for what’s happened with the project?’
‘No, probably not. It’s up to the contractor to ensure that the atmosphere at the workplace is not harmful to the workers, either mentally or physically. No, I didn’t mean that. These three don’t appear to have been affected by the bullying. Oddny Hildur was concerned about one of the engineers and didn’t mention the drillers in this context, though I think they were more perpetrators than victims.’
‘What do you base that on?’
‘Nothing special. I scrutinized their computers and got the feeling that they were funny guys, the class clowns. I’m not saying they were the main perpetrators, but I can well imagine that they didn’t hold back, although they might not have realized it was harassment.’ Thora rubbed her face. ‘Actually, I don’t know what I’m talking about. This probably had nothing to do with harassment. I’m just trying to fit what I came across with what we’re investigating. This was probably an incredibly normal workplace, at least given the circumstances. It makes more sense to focus on the natives’ stories about this place. At least they might shed some light on the question of the insurance, although they hardly explain everything.’
‘We’ll try to find the hunter,’ said Matthew. ‘Hopefully the snowmobile can be repaired. If not, then maybe that woman can find someone to take us by dogsled.’
‘Or maybe we’ll just wake up with wings and fly there.’ Thora went to the window and drew the curtain. She didn’t know why she chose to do so – there was nothing but darkness outside. ‘How’s it been going otherwise?’
Matthew and the doctor had gone through the apartments of all the full-time employees one by one, in the hope of spotting something that hadn’t come to light before. They had originally investigated with torches, before the electricity was restored. ‘We found two strange things,’ replied Matthew. ‘I’ll show them to you on the way over to the cafeteria if you can bear to wait a few minutes before tasting Bella’s delicacies.’
They put on their jackets and boots and went out into the darkness outside. The cold was refreshing and the air so still that their frozen breath did not rise into the air, but rather hung there before their faces for a moment before evaporating. The sky was bright with stars, so much more numerous and so much brighter than those Thora was used to that it seemed like Greenland was closer to outer space than to any other earthly country. The Milky Way itself could be seen clearly as it lay in a dense, broad streak across the heavens. Thora held on to Matthew and let him lead her so that she could stare into the sky. She hoped that if there were life on other planets, it was gentler than what Mother Nature had created on Earth. And not as cold.
‘Careful, there’s a platform ahead.’ Matthew slowed his pace and Thora looked down. They had arrived at one of the green units containing the workers’ apartments. They were built in a straight line, in two sets of four. In front of each was a platform, and they stepped onto the one before them and stood there as Matthew took out a key and stuck it in the lock. He jiggled it for a moment, then opened the door. ‘This is the apartment of one of the drillers, Halldor Gretarsson,’ Matthew said. ‘Be careful not to touch anything.’
They walked into the tiny vestibule, where they found a small coat rack upon which hung a yellow work coverall with wide reflective stripes and a fleece jacket, side by side. There wasn’t a single down jacket to be seen. On the frame above it lay a helmet that was both scratched and dirty. Next to the vestibule was a small bathroom with a shower. A shelf above the sink held a little electric razor, inexpensive-looking aftershave lotion, a toothbrush, hairbrush, deodorant and several cotton buds. Dental floss trailed from a white plastic box onto the shelf and halfway down to the sink. The apartment had a small kitchen that opened onto a rather austere sitting room with a two-seater sofa that looked extremely uncomfortable, a modern chair, a coffee table with a half-full ashtray and a shelving unit with a television and DVD player.
There were several books on the shelf above the DVD player and they appeared to Thora to be all foreign crime novels. On one kitchen chair hung a down jacket, so the chances that the man had somehow made it out of the area looked rather slim. Off the sitting room was the bedroom, which was what Matthew had wanted to show her. Everything in there was a mess. There were towels and dirty clothes on the floor, along with a bucket that had been placed at the side of the bed. ‘Well, now,’ said Thora. ‘Not exactly the tidiest person.’ In the poor man’s defence, he probably hadn’t expected anyone else to come into his apartment.
‘But look here,’ said Matthew, pointing at the bed. ‘It looks to me like this might be blood.’
Thora drew nearer. Matthew was right: on the pillow she could see what were clearly bloodstains. They weren’t terribly large, but they were obviously more than dots from the man’s last shave. There were four in total they seemed to form a kind of face: two eyes, a nose and a wide smirking mouth. ‘Do you think the man was hit on the head as he slept?’ Thora bent down to take a better look at the marks. There was something about them that bothered her. ‘Was there something similar in the other man’s room?’
‘No,’ said Matthew. ‘There were several small stains on the floor, but nothing like this. Maybe we can get the police to come now.’ He shook his head. ‘It may well be that the other driller killed the man who lived here, got rid of the body and ran off. The blood in the other apartment might have dripped off him after he did the dirty deed.’
‘You know what?’ said Thora, standing up straight. ‘I need to show you something that’s just as frightening as this is.’ She pointed at the bloody pillow. ‘Either I’ve finally gone completely crazy or these stains are exactly the same as those on one of the beds of the first residents of the area that I saw in those old photographs. One of the original inhabitants who was supposed to have died of hunger.’
Chapter 15
