Silence of the Grave - Страница 3

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They stand up on the box,
in their little socks,
golden are their locks,
the girls in pretty frocks.

The girl was panting for breath. Her little chest rose and fell and a vague whistle came from her nose. Her face looked ablaze. Mikkelina’s mother tried to wake her, but she did not stir.

She screamed.

The girl was seriously ill.

2

Elinborg took the call about the bones found in the Millennium Quarter. She was alone in the office and on her way out when the telephone rang. After hesitating for a moment she looked at the clock, then back at the telephone. She was planning a dinner party that evening and had spent all day imagining chickens smeared with tandoori. She sighed and picked up the phone.

Elinborg was of an indeterminate age, forty-something, well built without being fat, and she loved food. She was divorced and had four children, including a foster child who had now moved away from home. She had remarried, a car mechanic who loved cooking, and she lived with him and their three children in a small town house in Grafarvogur. She had taken a degree in geology long before, but had never worked in that field. She started working for the Reykjavik police as a summer job and ended up joining the force. She was one of the few female detectives.

Sigurdur Oli was in the throes of wild sex with his partner, Bergthora, when his beeper went off. It was attached to the belt of his trousers, which were lying on the kitchen floor and beeping intolerably. He knew that it would not stop until he got out of bed. He had left work early. Bergthora had already been home and had greeted him with a deep, passionate kiss. Things took their natural course and he left his trousers in the kitchen, unplugged the telephone and switched off his mobile. He forgot his beeper.

With a deep sigh Sigurdur Oli looked up at Bergthora straddling him. He was sweating and red in the face. From her expression he could tell that she was not prepared to let him go just yet. She squeezed her eyes shut, lay down upon him and pumped her hips gently and rhythmically until her orgasm ebbed away and every muscle in her body could relax again.

Himself, he would have to wait for a more suitable occasion. In his life the beeper took priority.

He slipped out from beneath Bergthora, who lay with her head on the pillow as if knocked out cold.

Erlendur was sitting in Skulakaffi eating salted meat. He sometimes ate there because it was the only restaurant in Reykjavik that offered Icelandic home cooking the way he would prepare it himself if he could be bothered to cook. The interior design appealed to him as well: brown and shabby veneer, old kitchen chairs, some with the sponge poking up through the plastic upholstery, and the linoleum on the floor worn thin from the trampling boots of lorry drivers, taxi drivers and crane operators, tradesmen and navvies. Erlendur sat alone at a table in one corner, his head bowed over meat, boiled potatoes, peas and turnips drenched with a sugary flour sauce.

The lunchtime rush was long over but he persuaded the cook to serve him some salted meat. He carved himself a large lump, piled potato and turnip on top of it and plastered creamy sauce over the whole trophy with his knife before it all vanished into his gaping mouth.

Erlendur arranged another such banquet on his fork and had just opened his mouth when his mobile phone started to ring where he had left it on the table beside his plate. He stopped the fork in mid-air, glanced at the phone for an instant, looked at the crammed fork and back at the phone, then finally put the fork down with an air of regret.

“Why don’t I ever get any peace?” he said before Sigurdur Oli could say a word.

“Some bones found in the Millennium Quarter,” Sigurdur Oli said. “I’m heading out there and so is Elinborg.”

“What kind of bones?”

“I don’t know. Elinborg phoned and I’m on my way over there. I’ve alerted forensics.”

“I’m eating,” Erlendur said slowly.

Sigurdur Oli almost blurted out what he had been doing, but managed to stop himself in time.

“See you up there,” he said. “It’s on the way to Lake Reynisvatn, on the north side beneath the hot water tanks. Not far from the road out of town.”

“What’s a Millennium Quarter?” Erlendur asked.

“Eh?” Sigurdur Oli said, still irritated about being interrupted with Bergthora.

“Is it a quarter of a millennium? Two hundred and fifty years? What does it mean?”

“Christ,” Sigurdur Oli groaned and rang off.

Shortly afterwards Erlendur pulled up in his battered old car and stopped in the street in Grafarholt beside the foundation of the house. The police had arrived on the scene and sealed off the area with yellow tape, which Erlendur slipped underneath. Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli were down in the foundation, standing by a wall of earth. The medical student who had reported the bones was with them. The mother who was hosting the birthday party had rounded up the boys and sent them back indoors. The Reykjavik district medical officer, a chubby man aged about 50, clambered down one of the three ladders that had been propped up in the foundation. Erlendur followed him.

The media took quite an interest in the bones. Reporters gathered at the scene and the neighbours lined up around it. Some had already moved into the estate while others, who were working on their roofless houses, stood with hammers and crowbars in their hands, puzzled by all the fuss. This was at the end of April in mild and beautiful spring weather.

The forensic team was at work, carefully scraping samples from the wall of earth. They let the soil drop onto little trowels which they emptied into plastic bags. Part of the upper skeleton could be seen inside the wall. An arm was visible, a section of the ribcage and the lower jawbone.

“Is that the Millennium Man?” Erlendur asked, walking up to the wall of earth.

Elinborg cast a questioning glance at Sigurdur Oli, who stood behind Erlendur, pointing his index finger at his head and twirling it around.

“I phoned the National Museum,” Sigurdur Oli said, and started scratching his head when Erlendur turned suddenly to look at him. “There’s an archaeologist on his way here. Maybe he can tell us what it is.”

“Don’t we need a geologist too then?” Elinborg asked. “To find out about the soil. The position of the bones relative to it. To date the strata.”

“Can’t you help us with that?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “Didn’t you study that?”

“I can’t remember a word of it,” Elinborg said. “I know that the brown stuff is called dirt, though.”

“He’s not six feet under,” Erlendur said. “He’s a metre down, one and a half at the most. Bundled away there in a hurry. As far as I can see this is the remains of a body. He hasn’t been here long. This is no Viking.”

“Why do you think it’s a him?” the district medical officer asked.

“Him?” Erlendur said.

“I mean,” the doctor said, “it could just as easily be a her. Why do you feel sure it’s a man?”

“Or a woman then,” Erlendur said. “I don’t care.” He shrugged. “Can you tell us anything about these bones?”

“I can’t really see anything of them,” the doctor said. “Best to say as little as possible until they pick them out of the ground.”

“Male or female? Age?”

“Impossible to tell.”

A man wearing jeans and a traditional Icelandic woollen sweater, tall, with a scruffy, greying beard and two yellow dogteeth fangs that protruded out of it through his big mouth, came over to them and introduced himself as the archaeologist. He watched the forensic team at work and asked them for pity’s sake to stop that nonsense. The two men with trowels hesitated. They wore white overalls, rubber gloves and protective glasses. To Erlendur they could have been straight out of a nuclear power station. They looked at him, awaiting instructions.

“We need to dig down to him, for God’s sake,” said Fang, waving his arms. “Are you going to pick him out with those trowels? Who’s in charge here anyway?”

Erlendur owned up.

“This isn’t an archaeological find,” Fang said, shaking his hand. “The name’s Skarphedinn, hello, but it’s best to treat it as such. You understand?”

“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” said Erlendur.

“The bones haven’t been in the ground for any great length of time. No more than 60 or 70 years, I’d say. Maybe even less. The clothes are still on them.”

“Clothes?”

“Yes, here,” Skarphedinn said, pointing with a fat finger. “And in more places, I’m certain.”

“I though that was flesh,” Erlendur said sheepishly.

“The most sensible thing to do in this situation, to keep the evidence intact, would be to let my team excavate it using our methods. The forensic squad can help us. We need to rope off the area up here and dig down to the skeleton, and stop chipping away at the soil here. We don’t make a habit of losing evidence. Just the way the bones lie could tell us a hell of a lot. What we find around them could provide clues.”

“What do you think happened?” Erlendur asked.

“I don’t know,” Skarphedinn said. “Far too early to speculate. We need to excavate it, hopefully something useful will emerge then.”

“Is it someone who’s frozen to death and been covered by the earth?”

“No one sinks this deep into the ground.”