room. The flat reminded him uncomfortably of his own.
“Do you want me to call someone?”
“No, don’t call anyone,” Marion said, taking the mask off. “You can help me make us coffee afterwards. I just need to gather my strength. But surely you remember it? When we found those devices.”
“What devices?”
“In Lake Kleifarvatn. Does nobody remember anything any more?”
Marion looked at him and in a weak voice began recounting the story of the devices from the lake; it suddenly dawned on Erlendur what his old boss was talking about. He only vaguely recalled the matter and had not linked it at all to the skeleton in the lake, although he should have realised at once.
On 10 September 1973 the telephone had rung at Hafnarfjordur police station. Two frogmen from Reykjavik — “they’re not called frogmen any more’, Marion chuckled painfully — had chanced upon a heap of equipment in the lake. It was at a depth of ten metres. It soon became clear that most of it was Russian and the Cyrillic lettering had been filed off. Telephone engineers were called in to examine it and established that it was an assortment of telecommunications and bugging devices.
“There was loads of the stuff,” Marion Briem said. “Tape recorders, radio sets, transmitters.”
“Were you on the case?”
“I was at the lake when they fished it all out but I wasn’t in charge of the investigation. The case got a lot of publicity. It was at the height of the Cold War and it was well known that Russian espionage in Iceland took place. Of course, the Americans spied too, but they were a friendly nation. Russia was the enemy.”
“Transmitters?”
“Yes. And receivers. It turned out that some were tuned to the wavelength of the American base at Keflavik.”
“So you want to link the skeleton in the lake with that equipment?”
“What do you think?” Marion Briem said, eyes closed again.
“Perhaps that’s not implausible.”
“You bear it in mind,” Marion said, pulling a weary face.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” Erlendur said. “Anything I can get you?”
“I sometimes watch westerns,” Marion said after a long pause, still sitting with eyes closed.
Erlendur was unsure whether he had heard correctly.
“Westerns?” he said. “Are you talking about cowboy films?”
“Could you bring me a good western?”
“What’s a good western?”
“John Wayne,” Marion said in a fading voice.
Erlendur sat by Marion’s side for some time, in case his old boss woke up again. Noon was approaching. He went into the kitchen, made coffee and poured two cups. He remembered that Marion drank coffee black with no sugar, as he did, and placed one beside the armchair. He did not know what else he should do.
That afternoon Sigurdur Oli sat down in Erlendur’s office. The man had rung again in the middle of the night, announcing that he was going to commit suicide. Sigurdur Oli had sent a police car to his house, but no one was at home. The man lived alone in a small detached house. On Sigurdur Oli’s orders the police broke in but found no one.
“He called me again this morning,” Sigurdur Oli said after describing the episode. “He was back home by then. Nothing happened but I’m getting a little tired of him.”
“Is he the one who lost his wife and child?”
“Yes. Inexplicably, he blames himself and refuses to listen to anything different.”
“It was sheer coincidence, wasn’t it?”
“Not in his mind.”
Sigurdur Oli had been temporarily assigned to investigating road accidents. A Range Rover had driven into a car at a junction on the Breidholt Road, killing a mother along with her five-year-old daughter who was in the back, wearing a safety belt. The driver of the Range Rover had gone through a red light while drunk. The victims” car was the last in a long queue going over the junction at the very moment the Range Rover raced through the red light. If the mother had waited for the next green light, the Range Rover would have gone through without causing any damage and proceeded on its way. The drunken driver would probably have caused an accident somewhere, but it would not have been at that junction.
“But that’s just how most accidents happen,” Sigurdur Oli said to Erlendur. “Incredible coincidences. That’s what the man doesn’t understand.”
“His conscience is killing him,” Erlendur said. “You ought to show some understanding.”
“Understanding?! He calls me at home in the middle of the night. How can I show him any more understanding?”
The woman had been shopping with their daughter at the supermarket in Smaralind. She was at the checkout when her husband called her mobile to ask her to get him a punnet of strawberries. She did, but it delayed her by a few minutes. The man was convinced that if he hadn’t telephoned her she would not have been at the junction at the time when the Range Rover hit her. So he blamed himself. The crash had happened because he’d called her.
The scene of the accident was awful. The woman’s car was torn apart, a write-off. The Range Rover had rolled off the road. The driver suffered a serious head injury and multiple fractures, and was unconscious when the ambulance took him away. The mother and daughter died instantly. They had to be cut from the wreckage. Blood ran down the road.
Sigurdur Oli went to visit the husband with a clergyman. The car was registered in the husband’s name. He was beginning to worry about his wife and daughter and went into shock when he saw Sigurdur Oli and the vicar on his doorstep. When he was told what had happened he broke down and they called a doctor. Every so often since then he had telephoned Sigurdur Oli, who had become a kind of confidant, entirely against his will.
“I don’t want to be his damned confessor,” Sigurdur Oli groaned. “But he won’t leave me alone. Rings at night and talks about killing himself! Why can’t he go on at the vicar? He was there too.”
“Tell him to consult a psychiatrist.”
“He sees one regularly.”
“Of course, it’s impossible to put yourself in his shoes,” Erlendur said. “He must feel terrible.”
“Yes,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“And he’s contemplating suicide?”
“So he says. And he could easily do something stupid. I just can’t be bothered with it all.”
“What does Bergthora reckon?”
“She thinks I can help him.”
“Strawberries?”
“I know. I’m always telling him. It’s ridiculous.”
9
Erlendur sat listening to an account of someone who had gone missing in the 1960s. Sigurdur Oli was with him. This time it was a man in his late thirties.
A preliminary examination of the skeleton suggested that the body in Kleifarvatn was that of a man aged between 35 and 40. Based on the age of the accompanying Russian device, it had been left in the lake some time after 1961. A detailed study had been made of the black box discovered under the skeleton. It was a listening device — known in those days as a microwave receiver — which could intercept the frequency used by NATO in the 1960s. It was marked with the year of manufacture, 1961, badly filed off, and such inscriptions as remained to be deciphered were clearly Russian.
Erlendur examined newspaper reports from 1973 about the Russian equipment being found in Lake Kleifarvatn and most of what Marion Briem had told him fitted the journalists” accounts. The devices had been
