‘Yes, she was,’ the other man said. ‘She went to church. Much more religious than me. More so with age.’
‘You’re not religious?’
‘I can’t say I am.’
Baldvin sighed heavily.
‘It’s… it’s so unreal, you must excuse me, I…’
‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ Erlendur said. ‘I’m done.’
‘I’ll go down to Baronsstigur then.’
‘Good,’ Erlendur said. ‘The police pathologist will need to examine her. It has to be done in circumstances like these.’
‘I understand,’ Baldvin said.
Soon the house was empty. Erlendur followed a little way behind the vicar and Baldvin. As he was turning out of the drive he glanced in the rear-view mirror and thought he saw the sitting-room curtains move. He braked and stared in the mirror. He could see no movement at the window and by the time he took his foot off the brake and continued on his way he was sure that he must have been mistaken.
Maria was prostrate with grief for the first weeks and months after Leonora’s death. She refused all visits and stopped answering the phone. Baldvin took a fortnight’s leave from work but the more he wanted to do for her, the more she insisted on being left alone. He procured her drugs to combat the lethargy and depression, but she wouldn’t take them. He knew a psychiatrist who was willing to see her but she refused. She said she needed to work through her grief on her own. It would take time and he would have to be patient. She’d done it before and would do it again now.
Maria was familiar with the anxiety and depression, the lack of appetite and weight loss, and the feeling of mental paralysis that drained her of energy and made her indifferent to anything but the private world of her grief. She allowed no one in. She had been in a similar state after her father died. But then her mother had been there as a pillar of strength. Maria had dreamed of her father incessantly during the first years after his death and many of her dreams had turned into nightmares that she could not shake off. She suffered from delusions. He appeared to her so vividly that she sometimes thought he was still alive, that he hadn’t died after all. She sensed his presence when she was awake, even smelled his cigars. Sometimes she felt as if he were standing beside her, watching her every move. Because she was only a child, she believed he was visiting her from heaven.
Her mother Leonora, who was a rationalist, said that the visions, the sounds and the smells were a natural reaction to grief, part of her mental response to her father’s death. They had been very close and his death had been so traumatic that her senses were conjuring up his presence; sometimes his image, sometimes a smell associated with him. Leonora called it the inner eye that was capable of bringing her mental pictures to life; she was susceptible after the shock and her senses were hypersensitive and fragile and conjured up abnormal sensations that would disappear with time.
‘What if it wasn’t the inner eye, as you always said? What if what I saw when Dad died was on the boundary between two worlds? What if he wanted to visit me? Wanted to tell me something?’
Maria was sitting on the edge of her mother’s bed, They had discussed death openly after it became obvious that Leonora would not be able to escape her fate.
‘I’ve read all those books you brought me about the light and the tunnel,’ Leonora said, ‘Maybe there is something in what people say, About the tunnel to eternity, Eternal life, I’ll soon find out.’
‘There are so many vivid accounts,’ Maria said. ‘Of people who have died and come back to life. Of near-death experiences. Of life after death.’
‘We’ve discussed this so often… ’
‘Why shouldn’t they be true? At least some of them?’
Leonora looked through half-closed eyes at her daughter who was sitting beside her, utterly shattered, The effect of her illness on Maria had been almost worse than it had been on herself, The thought of her mother’s approaching death was unbearable to Maria, When Leonora had gone she would be alone in the world.
‘I don’t believe them because I’m a rationalist.’
They sat for a long time in silence, Maria hung her head and Leonora kept drifting into a doze, worn out by her three-year battle with the cancer that had now finally defeated her.
‘I’ll give you a sign,’ she whispered, half-opening her eyes.
‘A sign?’
Leonora smiled faintly through the haze of drugs.
‘Let’s keep it… simple.’
‘What?’ Maria asked.
‘It’ll have to be… it’ll have to be something tangible, It can’t be a dream and it can’t just be some vague feeling.’
‘Are you talking about giving me a sign from beyond the grave?’
Leonora nodded.
‘Why not? If it’s anything other than a figment of the imagination. The afterlife.’
‘How?’
Leonora seemed to be sleeping.
‘You know… my favourite… author.’
‘Proust.’
‘It… it’ll be… keep an eye out…’
Leonora took her daughter’s hand.
‘Proust,’ she said, exhausted, and fell asleep at last, By evening Leonora was in a coma, She died two days later without ever regaining consciousness.
Three months after Leonora’s funeral, Maria woke with a jolt in mid-morning and got out of bed, Baldvin left early for work in the mornings and she was alone in the house, feeling weak and worn out from bad dreams and serious long-term stress and debility, She was about to go into the kitchen when she felt instinctively that she was not alone in the house.
At first she looked around her in a panic, believing that a burglar had broken in, She called out to ask if anyone was there.
She was standing there, frozen into immobility, when suddenly she smelled a faint hint of her mother’s perfume.
Maria stared straight ahead and saw Leonora standing by the bookshelves in the semi-darkness of the sitting room, speaking to her, But she could not make out the words.
She stared at her mother for a long time, not daring to move, until Leonora vanished as suddenly as she had appeared.
4
Erlendur turned on the light in the kitchen when he got home to his apartment-block flat. A heavy bass beat was pounding from the floor above. A young couple had recently moved in and they blasted out loud music every evening, sometimes deafeningly loud, and threw parties every weekend. Their visitors tramped up and down the stairs well into the early hours, often making an appalling noise. The couple had received complaints from the residents on their staircase and had promised to mend their ways but so far had not kept their word. To Erlendur’s mind, what the couple played was not really music so much as the relentless repetition of the same heavy bass beat, interspersed with raucous wailing.
He heard a knock on the door.
‘I saw your light on,’ his son Sindri Snaer said, when Erlendur opened the door.
‘Come in,’ Erlendur said. ‘I’ve just got back from Grafarvogur.’
‘Anything interesting?’ Sindri asked, closing the door behind him.
‘It’s always interesting,’ Erlendur said. ‘Coffee? Something else?’
‘Just water,’ Sindri said, taking out a packet of cigarettes. ‘I’m on holiday. I’m taking two weeks off.’ He looked
