“Why?” Miroslav said.

“We’re led to believe that being stuck out here in Iceland wasn’t very popular with embassy officials,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“It was fine for us Czechoslovakians,” Miroslav said. “But I’m not aware that Lothar ever did anything to merit being sent to Iceland as a punishment, if that’s what you mean. I know that he was expelled from Norway once. The Norwegians found out he was trying to get a high-ranking official in the foreign ministry to work for him.”

“What do you know about Lothar’s disappearance?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“The last time I saw him was at a reception in the Soviet embassy. That was just before we started hearing reports that he was missing. It was 1968. Those were bad times of course, because of what was happening in Prague. At the reception, Lothar was recalling the Hungarian uprising of 1956. I only heard snatches of it, but I remember it because what he said was so typical of him.”

“What was that?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“He was talking about Hungarians he knew in Leipzig,” Miroslav said. “Especially a girl who hung around with the Icelandic students there.”

“Can you remember what he said?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“He said he knew how to deal with dissidents, the rebels in Czechoslovakia. They ought to arrest the lot of them and send them off to the gulag. He was drunk when he said it and I don’t know what exactly he was talking about, but that was the gist of it.”

“And soon afterwards you heard that he’d gone missing?” Sigurdur Oli said.

“He must have done something wrong,” Miroslav said. “At least that’s what everyone thought. There were rumours that they took him out themselves. The East Germans. Sent him home in a diplomatic bag. They could easily do that. Embassy mail was never examined and we could take whatever we wanted in and out of the country. The most incredible things.”

“Or they threw him in the lake,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“All I know is that he disappeared and nothing more was ever heard of him.”

“Do you know what his crime was supposed to have been?”

“We thought he’d gone over.”

“Gone over?”

“Sold himself to the other side. That often happened. Just look at me. But the Germans weren’t as merciful as us Czechs.”

“You mean he sold information…?”

“Are you sure there’s no money in this?” Miroslav interrupted Sigurdur Oli. The woman’s voice in the background had returned, louder than before.

“Unfortunately not,” Sigurdur Oli said.

They heard Miroslav say something, probably in Czech. Then in English: “I’ve said enough. Don’t call me again.”

Then he hung up. Erlendur reached over to the tape recorder and switched it off.

“What a twat you are,” he said to Sigurdur Oli. “Couldn’t you lie to him? Promise ten thousand kronur. Something. Couldn’t you try to keep him on the phone longer?”

“Cool it,” Sigurdur Oli said. “He didn’t want to say any more. He didn’t want to talk to us any more. You heard that.”

“Are we any closer to knowing who was at the bottom of the lake?” Elinborg asked.

“I don’t know,” Erlendur said. “An East German trade attache and a Russian spy device. It could fit the bill.”

“I think it’s obvious,” Elinborg said. “Lothar and Leopold were the same man and they sank him in Kleifarvatn. He fouled up and they had to get rid of him.”

“And the woman in the dairy shop?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“She doesn’t have a clue,” Elinborg said. “She doesn’t know a thing about that man except that he treated her well.”

“Perhaps she was part of his cover in Iceland,” Erlendur said.

“Maybe,” Elinborg said.

“I think it must be significant that the device wasn’t functional when it was used to sink the body,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Like it was obsolete or had been destroyed.”

“I was wondering whether the device necessarily came from one of the embassies,” Elinborg said. “Whether it couldn’t have entered the country by another channel.”

“Who would want to smuggle Russian spying equipment into Iceland?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

They fell silent, all thinking in their separate ways that the case was beyond their understanding. They were more accustomed to dealing with simple, Icelandic crimes without mysterious devices or trade attaches who weren’t trade attaches, without foreign embassies or the Cold War, just Icelandic reality: local, uneventful, mundane and infinitely far removed from the battle zones of the world.

“Can’t we find an Icelandic angle on this?” Erlendur asked in the end, for the sake of saying something.

“What about the students?” Elinborg said. “Shouldn’t we try to locate them? Find out if any of them remembers this Lothar? We still have that to check.”

By the following day Sigurdur Oli had obtained a list of Icelandic students attending East German universities between the end of the war and 1970. The information was supplied by the ministry of education and the German embassy. They began slowly, starting with students in Leipzig in the 1960s and working back. Since there was no hurry, they handled the case alongside other investigations that came their way, mostly burglaries and thefts. They knew when Lothar had been enrolled at the University of Leipzig in the 1950s, but also that he could have been attached to it for much longer than that, and they were determined to do a proper job. They decided to work backwards from when he disappeared from the embassy.

Instead of calling people and speaking to them over the telephone, they thought it would be more productive to make surprise visits to their homes. Erlendur believed that the first reaction to a police visit often provided vital clues. As in war, a surprise attack could prove crucial. A simple change of expression when they mentioned their business. The first words spoken.

So, one day in September, when their investigation of Icelandic students had reached the mid-1950s, Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg knocked on the door of a woman by the name of Rut Bernhards. According to their information, she had abandoned her studies in Leipzig after a year and a half.

She answered the door and was terrified to hear that it was the police.

27

Rut Bernhards stood blinking at Sigurdur Oli and then at Elinborg, unable to understand how they could be from the police. Sigurdur Oli had to tell her three times before it sank in and she asked what they wanted. Elinborg explained. This was around ten o’clock in the morning. They were standing on the landing of a block of flats, not unlike Erlendur’s but dirtier, the carpet more worn and a stench of rising damp on every floor.

Rut was even more surprised once Elinborg had said her piece.

“Students in Leipzig?” she said. “What do you want to know about them? Why?”

“Maybe we could come in for a minute,” Elinborg said. “We won’t be long.”

Still very doubtful, Rut thought for a moment before opening the door to them. They entered a small hallway which led to the living room. There were bedrooms on the right-hand side and beside the living room was the kitchen. Rut offered them a seat and asked whether they wanted tea or the like, apologising because she had never spoken to the police before. They saw that she was very confused as she stood in the kitchen doorway. Elinborg thought she would come to her senses if she made some tea, so she accepted the offer, to Sigurdur Oli’s chagrin. He wasn’t interested in attending a tea party and gave Elinborg an expression to signal that. She just smiled back at him.

The day before, Sigurdur Oli had received yet another telephone call from the man who had lost his wife and daughter in a car crash. He and Bergthora had just come back from a visit to the doctor who told them that the pregnancy was progressing well, the foetus was flourishing and they had nothing to worry about. But the doctor’s words were not so reassuring. They had heard him talk that way before. They were sitting at home in the kitchen, cautiously discussing the future, when the telephone rang.