He pressed the scarf tight over his nose. The man was lying on his back, tied to a chair, as if he had fallen over backwards. His dead eyes, half open, stared up at him. In the middle of his forehead was an object that looked like a coin. A dirty piece of leather with straps hanging from it lay on the floor beside the body.
Sigurdur Óli remembered Andrés muttering about a krona piece and, curiosity overcoming all his professional instincts, he reached down to the coin, intending to pick it up, only to discover that it was fixed.
Moving closer, he realised that it was not a coin: the surface was smooth. Slowly it dawned on him that the metallic disc on the man’s forehead was the end of a spike that had been driven deep into his head.
The body was badly decomposed.
He reckoned the man had been dead for at least three months.
55
On Monday morning a groundsman for the Reykjavík cemeteries turned up to work in the old graveyard on Hólavallagata and unlocked one of the tool sheds. It was cold. There had been a heavy frost overnight and a northerly wind was blowing in off the highlands, but the man was well wrapped up in a woolly hat and thick mittens. He had a job to finish that he had been putting off, and now gathered the tools he thought he would need. He went about his business without hurrying, anticipating that the task would take him most of the morning. Once he had everything, he set off across the cemetery towards Sudurgata and the tomb of the independence hero, Jón Sigurdsson. Someone had used a spray can to write Jonny rules on the stone monument. He did not really object, taking it as a sign of the younger generation’s increased independence of mind. At least some idiot knew who Jón Sigurdsson was. Happening to glance to his left, the groundsman stopped short and peered across the graveyard: it looked as if a man was sitting against one of the tombstones. After watching him for some time without detecting any movement, he started walking slowly towards him and as he drew near he saw that the man was dead.
He was dressed in rags, covered with a shabby anorak, his knees clasped tight to his chest as if to ward off the cold. His deathly white face was turned, eyes half open, to the heavens, as if at the moment he died he had been looking up at the clouds, waiting for them to part for an instant to reveal a patch of clear blue sky.