Tupilaks had been preserved, at the turn of the twentieth century the locals had started creating things that they thought resembled the creature for the benefit of Europeans. It was uncertain whether the imitation resembled the original version that people feared so much, because the Tupilak was considered so dangerous that it was always destroyed after it had done its job. Or, as legend had it, sometimes it was also buried in the ground or the ice.
Thora went back over to Matthew. ‘I think I have an explanation for the bone figurine we found in the cab of the drilling rig,’ she said. ‘It could be a Tupilak that the original villagers made and then buried. That would fit with the story the girl told us earlier.’
‘Is that good or bad?’ Matthew seemed somewhat distracted as he stabbed at the keyboard.
‘Bad for the bank’s case. It would be silly to refer to force majeure and then hold up a little statue made of bone. No matter how ugly it is.’
Matthew stopped typing. ‘I don’t think I’ll be mentioning it, then.’
‘The only thing I can think of is that it might be necessary for archaeological excavations to be conducted in the area. That way we’d buy ourselves a little time. If it is a Tupilak, then it’s potentially the only specimen to have been preserved in its original form.’
Matthew suddenly looked interested. ‘That would be better than nothing, at least.’
‘Did you get an answer to your query about Arnar?’ Thora looked at the long list of unopened e-mail messages in Matthew’s mailbox. Hers had looked the same the night before, but she had decided not to open them until she got home.
‘Not yet – I was sending this. I also found the e-mail address of the director of Berg Technology and sent him an enquiry. He has to have some information about his employees. I asked him to name others in the group whom he considers might be able to help us, too, but he hasn’t responded yet.’
‘Is there no office that you can call?’ Thora took her phone out of her pocket.
Berg Technology’s phone was answered by a polite but firm woman who did not introduce herself, and Thora spoke briefly to her to explain her business and its connection with the bank. When she had finished she asked for the phone number of Arnar Johannesson.
‘That figures,’ said Thora when she hung up. ‘We have to wait for a response from the director or your friends at the bank. Arnar is undergoing treatment at Vogur and it’s not possible to reach him.’
‘That’s no good.’ Matthew seemed to take this even worse than Thora. ‘It would have been nice to be able to explain the bones in the drawers to the police when they contact us again. I’m not sure we’ll get out of here until that matter is settled.’
‘But what about the man in the freezer? Even if we were to wheedle an answer out of someone about the bones, it doesn’t seem very likely that people would be willing to discuss the discovery of the body with us over the phone.’
‘Hopefully the police will conclude that the body was put there recently. I doubt it’s been stored there for very long. It must have been put in the freezer after the group left the area.’
Thora did not reply to this. What did she know? Whoever stored the human bones in the desk drawers could just as well have put the body in the freezer. Just then, a new message appeared in Matthew’s inbox.
Chapter 28
The e-mail was from the CEO of Berg, who was in the Azores. The man was obviously quite agitated, since the future of his company depended on reaching an agreement about the project with Arctic Mining. The message’s content was quite confusing and didn’t reveal much about how he planned to make up for the delays in Greenland, once his crew could be persuaded to go back to work there. He said that he had convinced two of the company’s other drillers, who were finishing up a job elsewhere, to take over from Bjarki and Dori; it was clear that he believed them to be dead. He expressed certainty that he could persuade the others to return to work if some explanation were found for what had happened at the work site, and hinted that Thora and Matthew should come up with a story about how the men had gone for a hike in the mountains that had ended badly, thus providing a rational explanation for their disappearance. If that failed, they should send all the employees a strictly worded message that their wages would be docked and they would be prosecuted if they didn’t go straight back to work. However, the conclusion of this strange message was a list of the telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of all the employees who now refused to return to Greenland. It was not a large group, and Thora and Matthew divided the task between themselves, with her phoning them one by one and Matthew sending e-mails to those she couldn’t reach or who refused to speak to her.
‘What a charming bunch of people – I don’t think.’ Thora hung up on the fifth person on the list and watched as Matthew started typing him a follow-up e-mail. ‘Anyone would think they’d all conspired to keep their mouths shut.’
‘They might have got themselves a lawyer,’ said Matthew, grinning at Thora. ‘That would be terrible.’ Thora made do with nudging Matthew lightly with her elbow. She felt that he rather deserved the chance to stand up for himself after yesterday evening. While attempting to find a news programme on the TV in their room he had, much to his satisfaction, come across a station in German. However, his happiness was subdued somewhat when he realized that all the programme consisted of was young women walking around stark naked, enthusiastically caressing their own bodies and chewing on pearl necklaces that for some reason they didn’t seem inclined to take off. Thora had teased Matthew about how peculiar the news from his homeland was, and flicked over to the channel at regular intervals to check whether there were any actual news updates.
She tried the two numbers that supposedly belonged to Arnar Johannesson; one was his home phone, which no one answered, and the other his mobile, but either it was switched off or there was no signal where he was. That came as no surprise; if the man was in rehab, he might have lost his phone on a drunken binge or handed it over when he checked in. Thora wondered whether she should call Vogur Hospital and ask to speak to him, but decided to wait in the hope that one of the others could be persuaded to open up. She continued down the list, which now had only two employees left on it. She was fairly optimistic that they would be more easily convinced to talk about things than the others she’d reached. One didn’t answer, and as she tried the last one, Sigmundur Petursson, she said to Matthew: ‘Well, keep your fingers crossed.’ It rang three times, then a husky male voice answered unenthusiastically. After introducing herself, Thora said, ‘I’d like to know whether you could possibly explain to me the provenance of the bones found in the office building. It’s really important, as the police are on site searching for the missing people.’ She added this last bit of information in the hope of keeping the man calm and avoiding hammering one more nail into the project’s proverbial coffin. The employees would never return if they expected to run straight into the police. ‘They need to rule out the possibility that the bones belong to Bjarki or Dori, and it would speed things up if it were possible to explain how they ended up there.’ This was much further than she’d got in her previous calls.
‘The bones, yes.’ Petursson sounded serious. ‘They’re not Bjarki’s or Dori’s. You can tell that to the policemen.’
‘I doubt that will be enough for them,’ said Thora. ‘I’ll have to give them a more detailed explanation if the investigation is not to be delayed by an examination of the remains, which would in turn delay further searches for the missing persons.’ This was a white lie; obviously the team who would conduct the examination of the bones was not the same one who was searching the area. ‘So this could be very important for your co-workers: if they’ve made it to shelter somewhere they could still be alive.’
At first she heard only the man’s heavy breathing, but then he spoke, slowly and determinedly, and Thora did not doubt the validity of what he said.
‘We found a grave. In the area we were supposed to clear to make a track for the drilling rig.’
‘And were these bones inside the grave?’ Thora waved her hand between Matthew’s face and the computer screen to draw his attention to the fact that the phone calls were finally producing results.
‘Yes. They were buried, if you can call it that. They were lying in a kind of animal-skin bag beneath a pile of stones.’
