“Why did she do that?”
“Her relationship with Mum was tough a lot of the time,” Sindri said. “Mum never treated me the way she did Eva. Perhaps because she was older and reminded her too much of you. Maybe because Eva was always up to something. She was definitely hyperactive. Ginger-haired and hyperactive. She got on the wrong side of her teachers. Mum sent her to another school but that really just made things worse. She was teased for being the new kid, so she pulled all sorts of pranks to get attention. And she bullied others because she thought that would help her fit in. Mum went to millions of meetings at school about her.”
Sindri lit a cigarette.
“She never believed what Mum said about you. Or she said she didn’t believe it. They fought like cat and dog and Eva was brilliant at using you to wind Mum up. Said it was no surprise you left her. That no one could live with her. She defended you.”
Sindri scouted around with the cigarette in his hand. Erlendur pointed to an ashtray on the coffee table. After taking a drag, Sindri sat at the table. He had calmed down and the tension between them eased. He told Erlendur how Eva had invented stories about him when she was old enough to ask sensible questions about her father.
Erlendur’s children could sense their mother’s animosity towards him, but Eva did not believe what she said and pictured her father as she felt fit, images completely different to the ones her mother presented. Eva had run away from home twice, at the ages of nine and eleven, to look for him. She lied to her friends, saying that her real Dad — not the ones who used to hang around her mother — was always abroad. Whenever he came back he brought her wonderful presents. She could never show them any of the presents because her father did not want her boasting about them. Others were told that her father lived in a huge mansion where she sometimes went to stay and could have whatever she fancied because he was so rich.
When she began to grow up her tales about her father became more mundane. Once their mother said that as far as she knew he was still in the police force. Through all her troubles at school and at home, when she started smoking tobacco and hash, drinking at the age of thirteen or fourteen, Eva Lind always knew that her father was somewhere in the city. As time wore on she grew unsure about whether she wanted to find him any longer.
Maybe, she said to Sindri once, it’s better to keep him in your head. She was convinced he would turn out to be a disappointment, like everything else in her life.
“No doubt I did,” Erlendur said.
He had sat down in his armchair. Sindri took out his cigarette packet again.
“And she didn’t make a good impression with all those studs in her face,” Erlendur said. “She always falls into the same old rut. Never has any money, latches on to some dealer and hangs around with him, and no matter how badly they treat her, she always stays.”
“I’ll try to talk to her,” Sindri said. “But what I really think is that she’s waiting for you to come and rescue her. I think she’s on her last legs. She’s often been bad, but I’ve never seen her like that before.”
“Why did she cut her hair?” Erlendur asked. “When she was twelve.”
“Someone touched her and stroked her hair and talked dirty to her,” Sindri said.
He said this straightforwardly, as if he could search his memory for such incidents and find a whole hoard of them.
Sindri looked along the bookshelves in the living room. There was almost nothing but books in the flat.
Erlendur’s expression remained unchanged, his eyes cold as marble.
“Eva said you were always looking into missing persons,” Sindri said.
“Yes,” Erlendur said.
“Is it because of your brother?”
“Perhaps. Probably.”
“Eva said you told her you were her missing person.”
“Yes,” Erlendur said. “Just because people disappear doesn’t mean they’re necessarily dead,” he added, and into his mind came the image of a black Ford Falcon outside Reykjavik coach station, one hubcap missing.
Sindri did not want to stay. Erlendur invited him to sleep on the sofa but Sindri declined and they said goodbye. For a long while after his son had left, Erlendur sat in his chair wondering about his brother and Eva Lind — the little he remembered of her from when she was small. She was two when they separated. Sindri’s description of her childhood had struck a nerve and he saw his strained relationship with Eva in a different, sadder light.
When he fell asleep, shortly after midnight, he was still thinking about his brother and Eva and himself and Sindri, and he dreamed a bizarre dream. The three of them, him and his children, had gone out for a drive. The kids were in the rear and he was behind the wheel, and he could not tell where they were because there was bright light all around them and he couldn’t make out the landscape. Yet he still felt the car was moving and that he needed to steer it more carefully than usual because he could not see. Looking in the rear-view mirror at the children sitting behind him, he could not distinguish their faces. They looked as if they might be Sindri and Eva, but their faces were somehow blurred or wreathed in fog. He thought to himself that the children could not be anyone else. Eva did not look more than four years old. He saw that they were holding hands.
The radio was on and a seductive female voice was singing:
I
Suddenly he saw a gigantic lorry heading for him. He tried to sound the horn and slam on the brakes but nothing happened. In the rear-view mirror he noticed that the children had gone and felt an indescribable sense of relief. He looked out at the road ahead. He was approaching the lorry at full speed. A crash was inevitable.
When it was all too late, he felt a strange presence beside him. He glanced across at the passenger seat and saw Eva Lind sitting there, staring at him and smiling. She was no longer a little girl but grown up and looking terrible in a filthy blue anorak with clumps of dirt in her hair, rings under her eyes, sunken cheeks and black lips. He noticed that, in her broad smile, some of her teeth were missing.
He wanted to say something to her but could not get the words out. Wanted to shout at her to throw herself from the car, but something held him back. Some kind of calmness about Eva Lind. Total indifference and peace. She looked away from him to the lorry and began to laugh.
An instant before they struck the lorry he started from sleep and called his daughter’s name. It took him a while to get his bearings, then he laid his head back on the pillow and a strangely melancholic song crept up on him and ushered him back to a dreamless sleep.
I
25
Niels did not remember Haraldur’s brother Johann very clearly or really understand why Erlendur was making a fuss that he went unmentioned in the reports about the missing person. Niels was on the telephone when Erlendur interrupted him in his office. He was talking to his daughter who was studying medicine in America — a postgraduate course in paediatric medicine, as a matter of fact, Niels said proudly when he got off the telephone, as if he had never told anyone this before. In fact he hardly spoke about anything else. Erlendur could not have cared less. Niels was approaching retirement and dealt mainly with petty crimes now, car theft and minor burglaries, invariably telling people to try to forget it, not press charges, that it was just a waste of time. If they found the culprits they would make a report, but to no real purpose. The offenders would be released immediately after interrogation and the case would never go to court. In the unlikely event that it did, when enough petty crimes had been accumulated, the sentence would be ridiculous and an insult to their victims.
“What do you remember about this Johann?” Erlendur asked. “Did you meet him? Did you ever go to their farm near Mosfellsbaer?”
“Shouldn’t you be investigating that Russian spying equipment?” Niels retorted, took a pair of nail clippers from his waistcoat pocket and began manicuring himself. He looked at his watch. It would soon be time for a long and leisurely lunch.
“Oh yes,” Erlendur said. “There’s plenty to do.”
