The Day Is Dark

spoken Icelandic, since the man stared at her, clearly understanding nothing. She repeated her greeting in Danish, just to be sure.

‘You must leave this place.’ The man spoke Danish, which even Thora could hear was not his mother- tongue.

‘Why?’ asked Thora. Although she didn’t really expect a reply, the man could hardly expect her simply to say yes, go inside and start packing.

‘Your friends are not coming back. Go home.’ The man’s voice gave no hint of whether he was threatening or advising her.

‘How do you know that?’ Thora suddenly felt the cold that she hadn’t noticed during her initial adrenaline rush. ‘What happened to them?’

‘They’re gone.’ The man stared at her without blinking. ‘This is an evil place.’ Maybe this was the old hunter the woman in the village had mentioned. He was dressed strangely enough to be living rough in the wilderness. Thora remembered his name and decided to ask him straight out. ‘Are you Igimaq?’ The man appeared surprised by the question, but he nodded. ‘I was told you could tell me about this area.’

‘I have told you. This is an evil place. Leave immediately.’ He didn’t ask who had told Thora about him. ‘You don’t understand and you don’t belong here. Go and tell the others to leave. This place is evil.’

Here was Thora’s opportunity to squeeze some information out of him about what was wrong with the place. It would be nigh on impossible to find this peculiar man again if he didn’t want to be found, and if he had had anything to do with the disappearance of the drillers or Oddny Hildur he would be just as likely to go into hiding when the police arrived. ‘You’ve got to explain this to me better. Maybe we’ll leave when we understand why this is necessary.’

The man stared at her. He appeared to be growing angry. ‘People died here.’

‘The people who first moved here?’ Thora remembered the chapter about the settlement in which everyone had died of hunger. ‘Is that what you mean?’ The book hadn’t mentioned a direct link, but it seemed likely to her that the legend of a curse on the area had arisen in consequence of those long-ago deaths. She wasn’t sure whether this would help the bank’s case, but one never knew.

‘The people who died have no descendants, because they also died. Therefore their souls could not be reborn in their children and grandchildren and they are still here, even though this occurred many years ago. They will be here forever. This is not a good place and those who come here might never leave again.’

Thora had grown colder than could be explained by the frost alone. Although she wasn’t religious and didn’t believe in ghosts, she felt very moved by the idea of the poor original inhabitants, who would never be free from cold and poverty even after their deaths. ‘So the souls of those who starved to death here are to blame for the disappearances?’

‘The ice preserves many things, and destroys nothing. In the end it returns what it has swallowed.’ The man took off one of his leather gloves. His hand was missing its index finger. He showed Thora his palm, in which nestled a little square made of tiny coloured beads. ‘My wife was making this thirty years ago. She never finished it, because she lost it. Yesterday I found it in a place where I often go at this time of year. The ice is melting and revealing what it’s been keeping. It’s bad to be here, now more than ever.’

It seemed a simple yes or no was too much to ask of him. ‘I understand that you know this area better than anyone. Are you willing to tell me what’s wrong with this place? Are there often polar bears here?’

‘I was telling you. You do not listen.’ The man had become angry again.

‘Yes, I was listening but I have trouble understanding what you’re saying. We speak and think in a different way where I live. For example, our souls don’t move around after we die.’ Thora knew she had a limited time to ask the man what she wanted to know. His eyes were starting to dart around as if to determine which way he should leave. To Thora it was all one endless ice sheet that led either to the mountains or out to sea, but for him the landscape must look much more diverse. ‘We are missing two men and one woman from our camp. You said that our friends would not return. Do you mean these people, and are you implying that they are dead?’ The man did not reply, gazing into the distance. ‘Are they dead?’ For the first time since stopping in her tracks Thora moved, stepping directly into the man’s line of sight. ‘I’ve got to know.’

‘Leave this place and tell the others to keep away.’ He stared into her eyes. ‘You will regret it if you do not.’

The man clearly didn’t intend to explain any further, so Thora tried a different tactic. ‘What happened to your daughter? I was told that she died here in this place.’

Igimaq squinted at her. The corners of his mouth turned down. ‘My daughter is none of your business. She is no longer here.’

Precisely. ‘Did the same thing happen to her as to the people we’re looking for?’

‘You will certainly find that out if you do not leave. Then it will all be too late.’

He put the piece of beadwork in his pocket and put his glove back on. ‘When you see the marks you will understand what I am talking about.’ He moved past her. ‘But then it will be too late.’

‘What?’ Now it was Thora’s turn to be angry. ‘Marks? Can’t you just explain properly? What marks do you mean?’ The man walked away without looking back. ‘Why did you come here?’ she called out after him, hoping to delay him.

‘I have done what I came to do. I came to ask you to leave.’ The man turned around, and now his face was framed by the fur hood he had thrown over his head as he left. ‘But you do not listen, any more than those who came here before you.’

‘Did you damage the satellite dishes and snowmobile?’ Thora’s limited language skills prevented her from knowing what these things were called in Danish, but she hoped that the Danes had taken the English names unchanged, as they usually did with technical terms. The man looked back one last time at this, but his expression showed that he understood none of it.

Thora watched him walk into the night, annoyed at herself. He had a long stride but walked in complete silence. It was as if he had made a deal with the snow not to crunch beneath his feet. When he walked between the floodlight towers they went on again, but he appeared not to be startled by the intense light. It wasn’t until he disappeared entirely from her sight that Thora got moving herself. I doubt Bella is even watching, she thought as she tore open the cafeteria door. The man could have killed and eaten her during the time she had been gone, and there was no sign of her chain-smoking guardian angel. But this was probably just as well, since the man would have disappeared if someone else had turned up. Still, she decided to pause for a moment before she went back to the office building, just to torture Bella a bit, make her pace the floor and worry over Thora’s fate. She was going to find Matthew and finish her glass of wine in the lounge before going back to bed. She did not need to search long; he and the doctor came running to the vestibule while she was still pulling off her coverall.

‘What’s wrong?’ Matthew hurried over and took hold of her shoulder to steady her when she stumbled trying to get out of the second trouser leg. ‘Did something happen?’ He looked in astonishment at her dress but said nothing. The last time he had seen her in it, they were at the theatre.

‘Well, not exactly. I met Igimaq, the hunter the woman told us about. He came here to tell us to leave.’

‘What?’ Matthew seemed furious. ‘What were you doing out there?’

‘I was coming over to warn you. The floodlights went on and we saw a man outside. He was walking in this direction and I thought maybe you were asleep.’ Suddenly she realized what a bad idea this had been. Maybe Oddny Hildur had made precisely the same mistake when she disappeared. The floodlight system hadn’t been operational at the time, but she could very well have seen the man despite that and followed him out into the cold. ‘Anyway, nothing happened. He was very cryptic and it was impossible to get anything useful out of him. We need one of the locals to speak to him for us.’

‘Are you out of your mind, just rushing out there like that? Especially when you’d just seen a stranger outside?’ He was nearly shouting.

‘I’m very sorry, and I know it was ridiculous,’ she said as apologetically as possible, ‘but I still managed to talk to him. That was worth something, since we’re not going to get to visit him by snowmobile.’ Thora hung up her coverall. ‘He pretty much confirmed that Bjarki and Dori are dead, as well as Oddny Hildur.’

‘What do you mean by “pretty much confirmed”?’ asked Finnbogi.

‘He said that our friends would not return. I can’t interpret that in any other way.’