‘A cairn,’ said Thora. ‘They’d been interred beneath a cairn. How come they weren’t all broken into pieces, if they were lying underneath a pile of rocks?’
‘They were small rocks, so I’d say that’s not so weird. Maybe the bag protected them as well. I don’t know.’
‘Where was this exactly?’ Maybe there would still be traces, which would help convince the police of the story’s validity. ‘Is it possible to find the place?’
Petursson gave a joyless laugh. ‘Yes, it’s possible. But it’s disappeared beneath the track. It was at the very end of it, right at the place where the drilling rig is now.’
Thora wiped the image of the bag from her mind and focused on the conversation. ‘What did you do with the bag? Do you know where it is?’
‘It got thrown away. It was pretty disgusting, you know, since a corpse had decomposed in it. There were holes in it where foxes had probably got in, since the stones were piled a bit haphazardly and there was enough space for a creature that size to squeeze through. Anyway, we threw the bag away.’
‘Where?’ Thora couldn’t imagine rubbish trucks driving around the work site, so it was likely that the bag was still where it had been thrown.
‘We put all the rubbish into a large container next to the cafeteria, but it was taken from there and buried on a regular basis in a place set aside for the purpose. If I remember correctly the container was emptied after we threw away the bag.’
Perhaps there was still some hope regarding the fate of the bag, if it turned out to be important. Fri?rikka and Eyjolfur should be able to point them to the spot where rubbish was buried, so she needn’t waste any of this conversation getting a better description of its location. ‘So it was just bones and nothing else – no clothing, nothing that might suggest the person’s identity?’
‘There was a hair that could have been from either a man or a woman. It was pitch-black and medium-length, not necessarily a woman’s hair, but on the long side for a man. The colour seemed to indicate that it was a Greenlander’s. There were also remains of clothing in the bag but they were in tatters, so it was difficult to say what gender they’d belonged to.’
‘Did you check on whether this had anything to do with the villagers? Did you give them the opportunity to move the cairn?’
‘Of course.’ The man sounded surprised and even irritated at the question. ‘We went down to the village and tried to find out more about it, but no one there would speak to us, as usual. We would never have removed the bones without making sure that we weren’t offending someone by doing so. We never got any answers out of them, but at least we tried.’
Thora could imagine that the Berg employees might have got annoyed that the locals would not listen to them, and taken their annoyance out on this derelict cairn. ‘Couldn’t you divert the track around it?’
‘No, that was impossible. There are large flat rocks all around and there was no other way through them. The drilling rig could only go up and down very gentle slopes, so we were forced to sacrifice the cairn. It wasn’t up to us to decide where to drill. It was the orders from the mining company that paid the bills. We saw no reason to get them involved in the matter. It would have got ridiculous.’
‘Did everyone at the camp know about the discovery of the bones?’ Thora was taking something of a risk by asking this, since it implied that there was something unnatural about the whole situation.
‘At first, only the people who found them. I was one of them. We thought initially that it was just a strange natural rock formation that a retreating glacier had left behind, but when we looked closer we caught a glimpse of something among the rocks and removed them to get a better look. If we hadn’t seen it the bulldozer would have crushed it all in a second.’
‘So you removed the bones and stored them in the desk drawers?’ Thora had trouble concealing her astonishment at these working methods. But of course she had never been in the situation of having a grave stand in the way of her performing her job.
‘We removed them. That’s right. It seemed better than just throwing them out of the way of the track.’ Petursson said nothing more about the bones’ new resting place in the office building.
‘But why were they in different desks all over the place? You couldn’t have put them together in one location?’
‘The desk drawers don’t lock, and we thought it would be weird to leave them lying around. Now I don’t want to discuss it any further. Others will have to answer for how the situation was handled. If you’ve been there then presumably you know that there were no bones in my desk drawer.’
He was right, and Thora decided not to press him any further for fear that he would slam the phone down on her. ‘And you didn’t find out anything about who they might have belonged to?’
‘No. Although there was one other thing in the bag when we cut it open…’ The man stopped. ‘I’m sure the police will gain enough information if they ask around the village. The people there probably know exactly who it was. I’m sure the locals don’t give the cops the cold shoulder the way they did with us.’
‘What did you find?’ Thora didn’t believe for a second that the locals were at all respectful or afraid of the authorities, or that they’d suddenly open up and start talking to them. If Petursson knew something more it would have to be him who told her. ‘Who knows, maybe this grave is nothing to do with the villagers? They avoid the area like the plague, so it’s doubtful that they would take a dead friend there. So what you found could be important.’ Thora shut her eyes and said a silent prayer that the man would trust this reasoning.
‘It was a necklace.’
‘Can you describe it or tell me what happened to it?’ It was possible it had lain under the bones that they’d left untouched in the desk drawers, if it wasn’t that bulky.
‘It was a kind of typical Inuit thing. Carved bone, except that it didn’t hang from a leather strip, but a metal chain. It was silver-coloured but I don’t know whether it was steel or something fancier. The metal hadn’t corroded, anyway.’ He hesitated, then went on. ‘The strange thing was that when we opened the bag the chain wasn’t around the person’s neck as if they’d worn it like a necklace, but lying inside its pelvis. We were careful to cut the bag open gently, so the necklace couldn’t have rolled there. I thought it might have been in the pocket of the garment that the deceased was wearing and had fallen down there when the clothing had rotted away, but my partner thought it had been in the corpse’s stomach. But I mean, who swallows a necklace?’
‘Where is it now?’ asked Thora.
‘I don’t know. It was hanging on the bulletin board by the coffee machine last time I saw it. Maybe it’s still there? It was a seagull. Something unintelligible was scratched on the back of the pendant. Maybe the name of the person who inscribed it.’
‘What did it say?’ Thora grabbed Matthew’s pen and notebook from the table. Perhaps the police could figure it out.
‘I don’t remember exactly. It was written from wing to wing, “s”s and “n”s, some vowels.
‘Did the necklace say “Usinna”?’
‘Yes, I guess so.’ Petursson paused. ‘Do you think they’re dead? Bjarki and Dori?’
Thora had to answer honestly. Anything else would be unfair. ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure they are, unfortunately. We still haven’t found anything to contradict the theory that they died of exposure. Lost in a snowstorm, probably.’ She added this last bit so as not to kill any hope that the employees might be persuaded to return to work, without any litigation or wage docking.
‘In the middle of the night? Not likely.’
‘What do you mean? We don’t know for certain when they disappeared, but it could hardly have been at night.’
The man was silent for a moment. ‘You might not have heard this before, but several of us had missed phone calls from the work site one night when only Bjarki and Dori were left there. The calls came in the middle of the night, which is why no one answered, and the phone number couldn’t be reached the next day. Nothing was heard from them after that, so you can maybe understand why we weren’t particularly excited about returning. Bjarki and Dori were probably calling for help, not to inform us that they were going for a walk. I can’t help wondering if things might have turned out differently if one of us had answered.’
Thora sat at the small bar at one end of the dining room and tried again to call Gylfi. Her son had answered a
