“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.”
“So it’s a grave.”
“It would appear so,” Skarphedinn said pompously. “Everything points to that. Shall we say that we’ll dig down to it?”
Erlendur nodded.
Skarphedinn strode over to the ladder and climbed up out of the foundation. Erlendur followed close behind. As they stood above the skeleton the archaeologist explained the best way to organise the excavation. Erlendur was impressed by him and everything he said, and soon Skarphedinn was on his mobile phone, calling out his team. He had taken part in several of the main archaeological discoveries in recent decades and knew what he was talking about. Erlendur put his faith in him.
The head of the forensic squad disagreed. He ranted about transferring the excavation to an archaeologist who didn’t have the faintest idea about criminal investigations. The quickest way was to chip the skeleton free from the wall to give them scope to examine both its position and the clues — if there were any — about whether an act of violence had been committed. Erlendur listened to this speech for a while and then declared that Skarphedinn and his team would be allowed to dig their way down to the skeleton even if it took much longer than anticipated.
“The bones have been lying here for half a century, a couple of days either way won’t make any difference,” he said, and the matter was settled.
Erlendur looked around at the new houses under construction. He looked up at the brown geothermal water tanks and to where he knew Lake Reynisvatn lay, then turned and looked east over the grassland that took over where the new quarter ended.
Four bushes caught his attention, standing up out of the brush about 30 metres away. He walked over to them and thought he could tell that they were redcurrant bushes. They were bunched together in a straight line to the east of the foundation and he wondered, stroking his hands over the knobbly, bare branches, who would have planted them there in this no man’s land.
3
The archaeologists arrived in their fleece jackets and thermal suits, armed with spoons and shovels, and roped off a fairly large area around the skeleton, and by dinner time they had started cautiously digging up the grassy ground. It was still broad daylight, the sun would not set until after 9 p.m. The team comprised four men and two women who worked calmly and methodically, carefully examining each trowelful they took. There was no sign of the soil having been disturbed by the gravedigger. Time and the work on the house foundation had seen to that.