as guilty as the pranksters. On the screen the image moved down the familiar corridor of the Berg office building in Greenland. The man holding the camera giggled and whispered to someone who was apparently following him. Thora struggled to distinguish the words but thought that he whispered:
The singing stopped and the man was handed a white shoebox tied with a large ribbon. The ribbon was made of yellow plastic and printed with a warning about underground cables. ‘What is this?’
‘A birthday present, or course! Isn’t it your birthday today?’ The two men outside the frame giggled again, now even more nastily than before. ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’
‘No, thank you.’ The man handed back the shoebox. ‘I remember what I got from you last year.’
‘Oh man, come on. We just didn’t remember that you’d stopped drinking. Most people would be very happy to get a bottle of schnapps.’
‘Yes, yes. Probably.’ The man shook the box at the camera in an attempt to return it. ‘Take this and get out of here with that camera. I need to work.’
‘Come on. Open it. We went to a lot of trouble to get it for you.’ He wasn’t laughing any more. ‘Open your present, man.’
The man looked into the camera, and the brutally honest lens captured the moment of his surrender. ‘What is this?’ The anxiety in his voice was clear, but he received no answer. He stared into the camera for a moment longer before violently tearing off the plastic ribbon. He was clearly upset about giving in to them, but was unable to toss the box at them and throw them out. It was as if this were inevitable; if he didn’t open the box now it would turn up again at the supper table, in the lounge or somewhere else. Thora frowned; it must have been horrible to be in this man’s shoes in this kind of workplace. Before he took the lid off Arnar looked up nervously. Then he threw it on the floor with a quick flip of his hand and looked into the box. Thora would have preferred to fast forward through the rest of it, but she forced herself to watch it again. The man cried out and looked at the others in bewilderment. ‘What is wrong with you two?’ His voice cracked.
‘What?’ The cameraman’s simulated surprise fooled no one and Thora supposed that the expression on his face was just as false. ‘Aren’t you happy? We went to a lot of trouble to get it.’
‘Get out of here.’ The man didn’t throw down the shoebox, as he’d done with the lid, but let it lie in his arms and simply stared down at it as he spoke. ‘This is even lower than I would have believed you two could go.’
‘What?’ His voice was falsely incredulous. ‘Haven’t you been trying to get this for a long, long time? You can stop now. We’ve done it for you.’
The other man crowed: ‘Happy Birthday!’ The giggling began again.
‘Get out.’ The man was still staring into the box. ‘You’re disgusting.’ The camera zoomed in to reveal the box’s contents. It had been filled with paper from the paper shredder and in the centre of the pile was a tiny sparrow.
‘Now you can stop trying to lure it to you with breadcrumbs. Be happy.’
‘I wasn’t trying to lure it. I was feeding it. To keep it alive.’ The man looked up and now anger radiated from his face. ‘It’s obviously too much to ask, expecting imbeciles like you to notice that there aren’t any birds here. It ended up here and simply needed to be fed until the spring. Then it would have survived.’
‘My dear man, don’t be so sentimental.’ The men snickered and now the camera was turned towards them. They were similar despite not looking at all the same, and to Thora’s eye they were the incarnation of boorishness – schoolyard bullies, all grown up. One of them was starting to lose his hair but tried to make up for it with his beard, which was ragged and discoloured. The other was dirty blond and could have seriously used a haircut. He was chubbier than his balding partner, but they were both wearing dark blue fleece jackets marked
Thora turned to Matthew. ‘What utter, utter bastards.’
‘Yes, they don’t seem to be particularly nice people, judging by this video.’ Matthew was always cautious, so Thora didn’t push him for a stronger reaction. ‘I assume that these are Bjarki and Dori, the drillers, the ones we’re searching for, along with other things.’
‘Yes, and I’m on the verge of believing that the world is better off without them. I want to show you something else on this page.’ She scrolled down. ‘Total nonsense, and most of it seriously nasty. I’d bet my right arm that if the bones in the drawers are Oddny Hildur’s, then these men were involved in cleaning the flesh from them. I’m certain they wouldn’t have thought anything of it.’
‘Have you watched all these clips?’ said Matthew as she scrolled from one media player window to the next.
‘Yes.’ Thora let go of the mouse. On the screen was yet another clip waiting for her to click on ‘play’. ‘This is typical of the rest: the two of them thinking they’re funny. I don’t know who shot the video, or whether they set up the camera to record automatically. Usually only one of them is in the frame at a time.’ On the screen the men sat and smoked cigars with great enthusiasm. The joke was based on the decision to allow all the workers to decide for themselves whether smoking would be allowed in their individual offices. The corridor would be a smoke-free zone, and the smokers’ room as well, since its function was now obsolete. Speculation on what it could now be used for took over and the lameness of the humour increased exponentially.
‘I don’t understand half of what they’re saying but it seems fairly innocent.’ Matthew yawned. ‘Shouldn’t we just go to bed? We might very well have to wake up early tomorrow morning if the police have got anywhere in their investigation.’ Thora stopped the video. ‘I doubt they’ve found anything. We were there for days and we didn’t make much progress.’
‘They have better equipment than us. They can detect blood and handle everything that we didn’t want to touch. And you never know, they might have sent additional personnel from the crime lab, and even sniffer dogs. I know that’s what I would do if I were conducting the investigation on behalf of the police.’
Thora sighed. ‘Let me cling on to the hope that I’ll get to sleep in tomorrow. Please.’
Matthew bent closer to the computer. ‘What is this?’ He pointed at the clip that had been stopped on the screen. ‘Is this a part of the joke?’
Thora also moved closer to see what he meant. The two men were frozen in strange positions, one with his eyes closed and his cigar raised, the other reaching for the ashtray, revealing dark sweat stains in his armpits. However, it wasn’t either of the men that had drawn Matthew’s attention, but something in the dark window behind them. ‘Is it possible to enlarge this?’ Matthew had got as close as he could without blocking the screen in front of Thora. ‘That looks like some kind of weird figure outside the window.’
Thora peered at the image. ‘Oh? I don’t see anything.’ She squinted to try to get a better look. ‘Oh yes. Is that a mask or a helmet?’
‘Maybe a snowmobile helmet.’ Matthew pointed at the area directly above the vague figure. ‘There’s something else. He seems to be dragging something along the window.’ He looked at Thora and hurriedly added: ‘Or she. There’s no way to tell.’
Thora tilted her head back a little and looked at the date of the clip. ‘This was made on the same day that Oddny Hildur disappeared.’ She set the clip in motion again and they watched the strange being move quickly past the window and out of sight. Whatever it had been dragging behind it left an irregular dark streak on the windowpane. ‘Could this be related to her disappearance? If it’s not an employee, then it’s possible that it might have been someone who wished to do them harm.’
‘Isn’t that rather far-fetched?’ Matthew straightened up as the clip finished. ‘It’s probably something related to the joke, or an employee of Berg.’
‘We can find out.’ Thora stood up. ‘It would be best to have Fri?rikka and Eyjolfur look at it. Since it was uploaded on the same day that Oddny Hildur disappeared, they would both have been on site, and I’m guessing that everyone followed this blog.’
‘Everyone but Arnar,’ said Matthew. ‘He would hardly have been waiting with bated breath for the next entry.’
