Tomas was silent as ever, but Mikkelina sensed a change in him as the winter wore on. Grimur allowed Tomas to spend the night in his room after he forbade the children’s mother to sleep in the double bed and forced her to sleep in Tomas’ bed, which was too small for her and uncomfortable. Mikkelina did not know what Grimur said to Tomas, but soon Tomas adopted a very different attitude towards her. He would not have anything to do with her and distanced himself from Simon as well, despite how close they had always been. Their mother tried to talk to Tomas, but he always backed away from her, angry, silent and helpless.

“Simon’s turning a bit funny,” Mikkelina heard Grimur say to Tomas once. “He’s going funny like your mother. Keep a watch out for him. Make sure you don’t get like him. Because then you’ll turn funny too.”

Once Mikkelina heard her mother talking to Grimur about the baby, the only time he allowed her to speak her mind, as far as she knew. Her mother’s stomach was bulging by then and he prohibited her to work at the dairy any longer.

“You give up your job and say you have to look after your family,” Mikkelina heard him order her.

“But you can say it’s yours,” her mother said.

Grimur laughed at her.

“You can.”

“Shut up.”

Mikkelina noticed that Simon was eavesdropping as well.

“You could easily say it’s your child,” their mother said in a soothing voice.

“Don’t try that,” Grimur said.

“No one needs to know anything. No one need find out.”

“It’s too late to try to put things right now. You should have thought of that when you were out on the moor with that fucking Yank.”

“Or I could have it adopted,” she said cautiously. “I’m not the first one this has happened to.”

“Sure you’re not,” Grimur said. “Half the bloody city’s been screwing them. But don’t think that makes you any better for it.”

“You’ll never need to see it. I’ll give it away as soon as it’s born and you won’t ever need to see it.”

“Everyone knows my wife shags Yanks,” Grimur says. “They all know you’ve been playing the field.”

“No one knows,” she said. “No one. There was no one who knew about me and Dave.”

“How do you think I knew about it, you twat? Because you told me? Don’t you think that kind of story gets around?”

“Yes, but no one knows he’s the father. No one knows.”

“Shut up,” Grimur said. “Shut up or…”

They all waited to see what that long winter would bring and what was in some terrible way inevitable. It began when Grimur slowly began to fall ill.

Mikkelina stared at Erlendur.

“She started to poison him that winter.”

“Poison?” Erlendur said.

“She didn’t know what she was doing.”

“How did she poison him?”

“Do you remember the Dukskot case in Reykjavik?”

“When a young woman killed her brother with rat poison? Yes, it was some time around the beginning of the last century.”

“Mum didn’t intend to kill him with it. She only wanted to make him ill. So she could have the baby and get it out of his way before he found out the baby was gone. The woman from Dukskot fed her brother rat poison. Put big doses in his curds, he even saw her do it but didn’t know what it was, and he managed to tell someone because he didn’t die until several days later. She gave him schnapps with his curds to take the taste away. At the inquest they found phosphorus in his body, which has a slow toxic effect. Our mother knew that story, it was a famous Reykjavik murder. She got hold of rat poison at the Gufunes dairy. Stole small doses which she put in his food. She used very little at a time so that he wouldn’t taste it or suspect anything. Instead of keeping the poison at home she brought back what she needed each time, but when she gave up her job at the dairy she took a large dose home and hid it. She had no idea what effect it would have on him or whether such small doses would even work at all, but after a while the effects seemed to come on. He got weaker, was often ill or tired, vomited. Couldn’t make it to work. Lay in bed suffering.”

“Did he never suspect anything?” Erlendur asked.

“Not until it was too late,” Mikkelina said. “He had no faith in doctors. And of course she didn’t encourage him to go for a check-up.”

“What about when he said they would take care of Dave? Did he ever mention that again?”

“No, never,” Mikkelina said. “He was just bluffing really. Saying things to scare her. He knew that she loved Dave.”

Erlendur and Elinborg were in Mikkelina’s sitting room, listening to her story. They had told her that it was a male skeleton underneath the baby in the grave in Grafarholt. Mikkelina shook her head; she could have told them that before had they not hurried away without saying why.

She wanted to know about the baby skeleton and when Erlendur asked whether she wanted to see it, she said no.

“But I’d like to know when you don’t need it any more,” she said. “It’s about time she was laid to rest in hallowed ground.”

“She?” Elinborg said.

“Yes. She,” Mikkelina said.

Sigurdur Oli told Elsa what the medical officer had discovered: the body in the grave could not be her uncle Benjamin’s fiancee. Elinborg phoned Solveig’s sister, Bara, to tell her the same news.

While Erlendur was setting off with Elinborg to see Mikkelina, Ed called on his mobile to let him know that he still had not managed to find out what became of Dave Welch; he did not know whether he was posted away from Iceland, or even when that might have been. He said he would go on searching.

Earlier that morning Erlendur had gone to intensive care to visit his daughter. Her condition was unchanged and Erlendur sat beside her for a good while, and resumed his tale about his brother who had frozen to death on the moors above Eskifjordur when Erlendur was ten. They were rounding up sheep with their father when the storm broke. The brothers lost sight of their father and soon afterwards of each other. Their father made it back to the farm, exhausted. Search parties were mounted.

“They found me by sheer chance,” Erlendur said. “I don’t know why. I had the presence of mind to dig a shelter for myself in a snowdrift. I was more dead than alive when they poked at the snow and the stick happened to touch my shoulder. We moved away. Couldn’t live there any more, knowing about him up on the moor. Tried to start a new life, in Reykjavik… In vain.”

At that moment a doctor looked in. He and Erlendur greeted each other and briefly discussed Eva Lind’s condition. Unchanged, the doctor said. No hint of a recovery or that she was regaining consciousness. They fell silent. Said goodbye. The doctor turned at the door.

“Don’t expect any miracles,’’ he said, and noticed a cold smile on Erlendur’s face.

Now Erlendur was sitting opposite Mikkelina, thinking about his daughter in her hospital bed and his brother lying in the snow. Mikkelina’s words trickled into his mind.

“My mother wasn’t a murderer,” she said.

Erlendur looked at her.

“She wasn’t a murderer,” Mikkelina repeated. “She thought she could save the baby. She feared for her child.”

She darted a glance at Elinborg.

“After all, he didn’t die,” she said. “He didn’t die from the poison.”

“But you said he didn’t suspect anything until it was too late,” Elinborg said.

“Yes,” Mikkelina said. “It was too late by then.”

The night that it happened, Grimur seemed more subdued after lying in bed all day racked with pain.

Their mother felt pains in her stomach and towards evening she had gone into labour with very rapid contractions. She knew it was too soon. The baby would be premature. She had the boys bring the mattresses from the beds in their room and from Mikkelina’s divan in the kitchen, spread them out on the kitchen floor, and around dinner time she lay down on them.