information from members of the search party. People have no business printing gossip and rumour and dressing it up as the truth. He hurt my mother in a way that was quite uncalled-for.’
‘And you as well.’
Erlendur shrugged.
‘It was a long time ago. I haven’t been keen to advertise the existence of this account, probably out of respect for my mother. She wasn’t happy with it.’
‘Was it true? Didn’t she want you to go with your father?’
‘She was against it. But later on she didn’t blame him for what happened. Of course she was grief-stricken and angry but she knew it wasn’t a question of guilt or innocence. It was a question of survival, survival in the battle against nature. The journey had to be made. There was no way of knowing beforehand that it would turn out to be so dangerous.’
‘What happened to your father? Why didn’t he do anything?’
‘I never really understood that. He came down from the moor in a state of shock, convinced that Bergur and I were both dead. It was as if he’d lost the will to live. He himself only survived by the skin of his teeth after we were separated, and when it grew dark and night fell and the storm intensified your grandmother said it was as if he simply gave up. He sat on the edge of his bed in his room and took no further interest in what was going on. Admittedly he was exhausted and suffering from frostbite. When he heard I’d been rescued he revived a little. I crept into his room and he took me in his arms.’
‘He must have been glad.’
‘He was, of course, but I… I felt oddly guilty. I couldn’t understand why I was spared while Bergur died. I still don’t really understand. I felt as if I must have caused it in some way, as if it was my fault. Little by little I shut myself in with those thoughts. Gloomy and withdrawn. Maybe he was right after all.’
They sat in silence until finally Erlendur laid the book aside.
‘Your grandmother left everything in good order when we moved. I’ve been to derelict farms where it seems as if people have walked out in a hurry and never looked back. Plates on the table, crockery in the cupboards, furniture in the living room, beds in the bedrooms. Your grandmother emptied our house and left nothing behind, took our furniture to Reykjavik and gave the rest of the stuff away. No one cared to live there after we left. Our home fell derelict. That’s a peculiar feeling. On the last day we walked from room to room and I felt a strange emptiness that has stayed with me ever since. As if we were leaving our life behind in that place, behind those old doors and blank windows. As if we no longer had a life. Some power had taken it away from us.’
‘Like it took Bergur?’
‘Sometimes I wish he’d leave me in peace. That a whole day would pass without him entering my thoughts.’
‘But it doesn’t?’
‘No. It doesn’t.’
21
Erlendur sat in his car outside the church, smoking and brooding on coincidences. He had long pondered the way simple coincidence could decide a person’s fate, decide their life and death. He knew examples of such coincidence from his work. More than once he had surveyed the scene of a murder that was committed for no motive whatsoever, without any warning or any connection between murderer and victim.
One of the cruellest examples of such a coincidence was that of a woman who was murdered on her way home from the supermarket in one of the city suburbs. The shop was one of a handful in those days that opened in the evenings. She encountered two men who were well known to the police. They meant to rob her but she clung on to her bag with a peculiar obstinacy. One of the repeat offenders had a small crowbar with him and struck her two heavy blows on the head. She was already dead by the time she was brought in to Accident and Emergency.
Why her? Erlendur had asked himself as he stood over the woman’s body one summer’s evening twenty years ago.
He knew that the two men who had attacked her were walking time bombs; in his view it had been inevitable that they would commit a serious crime one day, but it was by complete coincidence that their paths had crossed that of the woman. It could have been someone else that evening, or a week, a month, a year later. Why her, in that place, at that time? And why did she react as she did when she encountered them? When did the sequence of events begin that was to end with this murder? he asked himself. He was not for a moment trying to absolve the criminals of blame, only to examine the life that had ended in a pool of blood on a Reykjavik pavement.
He discovered that the woman was from the countryside and had lived in the city for more than seven years. Because of redundancies in the fisheries she had moved there with her two daughters and her husband from the fishing village where she’d been born. The trawler that their community relied on had been sold to another district, the prawn catch failed. Perhaps her final journey really began there. The family settled in the suburbs. She had wanted to move closer to the town centre but the same kind of flat would have been considerably more expensive there. That was another nail in her coffin.
Her husband found work in the construction business and she became a service rep for a phone company. The company moved their headquarters, making it harder for her to travel to work by public transport, so she handed in her notice. She was taken on as a caretaker at the local elementary school and liked the job; she got on well with the children. She went to work on foot every day and became a keen walker, dragging her husband out every evening, walking around the neighbourhood and only missing her breather if the weather was really bad. Their daughters were growing up. The eldest was nearing her twentieth birthday.
Her time was running out. That fateful evening the family were all at home and the elder daughter asked her mother for home-made ice cream. With that she set the chain of events in motion. They were out of cream and one or two other minor ingredients. The mother went out to the shop.
The younger daughter offered to run over for her but her mother said no, thanks. She fancied an evening stroll and caught her husband’s eye. He said he didn’t feel like it. There was a repeat on television of an Icelandic documentary featuring interviews with people from the countryside, some of them real oddballs, and he didn’t want to miss it. Perhaps that was one of the coincidences. If the programme hadn’t been on, he would have gone with her.
The mother went out and never came back.
The man who inflicted her death blow said that she wouldn’t let go of her handbag, no matter what they did. It turned out that the woman had withdrawn a large amount of cash earlier that day for the birthday present she planned to buy her daughter, and was carrying it in her bag. That was why she held on to it so tightly. She never normally carried so much money around.
That too was a coincidence.
She lost her life that summer’s evening with her daughter’s birthday present on her mind; all she had done wrong was to live her ordinary life and take loving care of her family.
Erlendur stubbed out his cigarette and stepped out of the car. He looked up at the church, a cold, grey lump of concrete, and thought to himself that the architect must have been an atheist. At any rate, he couldn’t see how the building could have been raised to the glory of God; if anything, it would have been to the glory of the company that supplied the concrete.
The vicar Eyvor was sitting in her office, talking on the phone. She gestured at a chair. He waited for her to finish her conversation. There was a cupboard containing a cassock, ruff and other vestments standing half-open in the office.
‘Back again?’ Eyvor said, having finished her conversation. ‘Is it still about Maria?’
‘I read somewhere that cremations are becoming increasingly popular,’ he said, hoping to avoid giving her a direct answer.
‘There are always people who choose that course and leave strict instructions to that effect. People who don’t want their body to rot in the ground.’
‘It has nothing to do with the Christian faith, then?’
