“It’s none of your business how I feel,” Erlendur said.
“It is my business if it’s affecting your work.”
“It’s not affecting my work. I’ll solve it. Don’t fret about it.”
“Do you think they’ll ever amount to anything?”
“Who?”
“Your children.”
“Please just let it go,” Erlendur said, staring at the blood on the floor.
“You ought to stop and think about that: what it’s like to grow up without a father.”
The bloodstained knife lay on the table.
“This isn’t much of a murder mystery,” Marion said.
“It rarely is in this city,” Erlendur said.
Now Erlendur stood and looked at the shrunken body in the bed and knew what he had not known then: that Marion was trying to help him. Erlendur himself lacked a satisfactory explanation for why he had walked out on his two children when he was divorced and had done almost nothing to demand access to them afterwards. His ex-wife developed a hatred for him and swore that he would never have the children, not for a single day, and he did not put up much of a fight for that right. There was nothing in his life that he regretted as much, when later he discovered the state his two children were in once they reached adulthood.
Marion’s eyes slowly opened and saw Erlendur standing at the foot of the bed.
Erlendur suddenly recalled his mother’s words about an old relative of theirs from the East Fjords on his deathbed. She had been to visit him and sat by his bedside, and when she returned she said he had looked so shrivelled up and odd’.
“Would you … read to me … Erlendur?”
“Of course.”
“Your story,” Marion said. “And … your brother’s.”
Erlendur said nothing.
“You told me … once that it was in … one of those books of ordeals you’re always reading.”
“It is,” Erlendur said.
“Will you… read it… to me?”
At that moment Erlendur’s mobile rang. Marion watched him. The ringtone had been set by Elinborg one rainy day when they were sitting in a police car behind the District Court, escorting prisoners in custody. She had changed the ringtone to Beethoven’s Ninth.
“The Ode to Joy” filled the little room at the hospital.
“What’s that music?” Marion asked, in a stupor from the strong painkillers.
Erlendur finally managed to fish his mobile out of his jacket pocket and answer. “The Ode” fell silent.
“Hello,” Erlendur said.
He could hear that there was someone at the other end, but no one answered.
“Hello,” he said again in a louder voice.
No answer.
“Who is that?”
He was about to ring off when the caller hung up.
“I’ll do that,” Erlendur said, putting his mobile back in his jacket pocket. “I’ll read that story to you.”
“I hope . … that this . … will be over soon,” Marion said. The patient’s voice was hoarse and trembled slightly, as if it took a particular effort to produce it. “It’s … no fun … going through this.”
Erlendur smiled. His mobile began ringing again. “The Ode to Joy’.
“Yes,” he said.
No one answered.
“Bloody messing about,” Erlendur snarled. “Who is that?” he said roughly.
Still the line was silent.
“Who is that?” Erlendur repeated.
“I…”
“Yes? Hello!”
“Oh, God, I can’t do it,” a weak female voice whispered in his ear.
Erlendur was startled by the despair in the voice. At first he thought it was his daughter calling. She had called him before in terrible straits, crying out for help. But this was not Eva.
“Who is that?” Erlendur said, his tone much gentler when he heard the woman on the other end weeping.
“Oh, God …” she said, as if incapable of stringing a sentence together.
A moment passed in silence.
“It can’t go on like this,” she said, and rang off.
“What? Hello?”
Erlendur shouted down the mobile but heard only the dialling tone in his ear. He checked the caller ID but it was blank. He noticed that Marion had fallen asleep again. He looked back at his mobile and suddenly in his mind’s eye he saw a woman’s bluish-white face rippling in the waves and looking up at him with dead eyes.
11
Erlendur sat in the interview room, his thoughts focused on the telephone call he had received at the hospital. Oh God, I can’t do it, the weak voice groaned over and over in his mind, and he could not avoid the thought that the woman who had disappeared before Christmas might have just got in touch for the first time. She could have obtained his mobile number from the police switchboard without difficulty. It was his work number. His name had sometimes appeared in the papers in connection with police investigations. It had appeared in connection with the missing woman and now because of Elias’s death. Not knowing the woman’s voice, Erlendur could not tell whether it actually was her, but he intended to talk to her husband as soon as the opportunity arose.
He recalled having once read that only five per cent of marriages or relationships that began with infidelity lasted for life. That did not strike him as a high proportion and he wondered whether it was, in fact, difficult to build up a trusting relationship after betraying others. Or maybe it was too harsh to talk of betrayal. Perhaps the prior relationships had been changing and evolving and new love was kindled at a sensitive moment. That happened and was always happening. The woman who vanished felt that she had found true love, judging by her friends” remarks. She loved her new husband with all her heart.
The friends with whom she stayed in contact after the divorce stressed that point when Erlendur was seeking explanations for her disappearance. She had left her first husband and married for the second time with due ceremony. She was said to be very down-to-earth and realistic, then suddenly it was as if she had been transformed. Her friends did not doubt that her love for her new husband was genuine, and she always implied that her former marriage had run its course and she herself was “completely different’, as one of her friends put it. When Erlendur asked her to elaborate, it transpired that the woman had been elated after her divorce, talking about a new life and that she had never felt better. A grand wedding was held. They were married by a popular vicar. A huge crowd of guests celebrated with the couple on a lovely summer’s day. They took a three-week honeymoon in Tuscany. When they returned they were relaxed, tanned and radiant.
All that was missing from the beautiful wedding was her children. Her ex refused to let them take part in “that circus’.
It was not long before the expectation and excitement faded and turned into their opposite. Her friends described how, over time, the woman had been overwhelmed by sadness and regret, and ultimately by guilt at how she had treated her family. It did not help that her new husband’s ex accused her constantly of destroying their family. His children moved in with them while she was fighting for custody of her own kids, a constant reminder of her culpability. All this was accompanied by crippling depression.
It was not the first time her new husband had been divorced following an affair. Erlendur found out that he had been married three times. He traced his first wife, who lived in Hafnarfjordur and had long since remarried and had a child. Exactly the same process had taken place in that case. The husband excused his absences from home on the grounds of long meetings, travelling around the country for work, golf trips. Then one day, quite unexpectedly, he announced that it was all over, they had grown apart and he was planning to move out. All this struck his wife like a bolt from the blue. She had not been aware of any fatigue in their relationship, only of his absence.