“We’ll do whatever we like,” he said.

“What do you want to do?” she asked. “You’ve been so patient and I was wondering if it is really patience, if it isn’t just as much… that somehow you didn’t want to get involved.”

They fell silent. The question hung in the air.

What do you want to do?

He finished his second glass. This was the question he had been asking himself since he first met her. He did not consider himself to have been patient. He had no idea what he had been, apart from trying to be a support to her. Perhaps he had not shown her sufficient attention or warmth. He did not know.

“You didn’t want to rush into anything,” he said. “Nor did I. There hasn’t been a woman in my life for a long time.”

He stopped. He wanted to tell her that he had mostly been by himself, in this place, with his books, and that her sitting on his sofa brought him special joy. She was so completely different from everything he was accustomed to, a sweet scent of summer, and he did not know how to handle it. How to tell her this was all he had wanted and yearned for from the moment he saw her. Being with her.

“I didn’t mean to be stand-offish,” he said. “But this sort of thing takes time, especially for me. And of course you’ve… I mean, it’s tough going through a divorce…”

She could see that he felt uncomfortable discussing this sort of thing. Whenever the conversation took that direction he became awkward and hesitant and clammed up. As a rule he did not say very much, which may have been why she felt comfortable in his presence. There was no pretence about him. He was never acting. He probably would have had no idea how to behave if he wanted to try to be different somehow. He was totally honest in everything he said and did. She sensed this and it offered her a security that she had lacked for so long. In him she found a man she knew she could trust.

“Sorry,” she smiled. “I wasn’t intending to turn this into some kind of negotiation. But it can be nice to know where you stand. You realise that.”

“Completely,” Erlendur said, feeling the tension between them easing slightly.

“It all takes time and we’ll see,” she said.

“I think that’s very sensible,” he said.

“Fine,” she said, standing up from the sofa. Erlendur stood up as well. She said something about having to meet her sons, which he did not catch. His thoughts were elsewhere. She walked over to the door and while he helped her put on her coat she could tell he was dithering about something. She opened the door to the corridor and asked if everything was all right.

Erlendur looked at her.

“Don’t go,” he said.

She stopped in the doorway.

“Stay with me,” he said.

Valgerdur hesitated.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t go.”

She stood motionless and took a long look at him. He walked up to her, led her back inside, closed the door and began taking off her coat without her offering any objection.

They made love slowly, smoothly and tenderly, both of them feeling a little hesitation and uncertainty which they gradually overcame. She told him that he was the second man she had ever slept with.

As they lay in bed he looked up at the ceiling and told her that he sometimes went to the east of Iceland, to his childhood haunts, where he stayed in his old house. There was nothing but bare walls, a half-collapsed roof and little indication that his family had ever lived there. Yet relics of a vanished life remained. Patches of a patterned carpet that he remembered well. Broken cupboards in the kitchen. Windowsills that little hands had once leaned upon. He told her it was nice to go there, to lie down with his memories and rediscover a world that was full of light and tranquillity.

Valgerdur squeezed his hand.

He started to tell her a story about the ordeals of a young girl who left her mother’s house with no exact idea of where she was going. She had suffered setbacks and was weak-willed — understandably perhaps, because she had never been given what she longed for most of all. She felt something lacking in her life. Felt a sense of betrayal. She ploughed on headlong, driven by a strange self-destructive urge, and sank deeper and deeper until she could go no farther, bound up in her self-annihilation. When she was found she was taken back and nursed to health, but as soon as she had recuperated she disappeared again without warning. She roamed around in storms and sometimes sought shelter where her father lived. He tried his best to keep her out of the tempestuous weather, but she never listened and set off again as if fate held nothing in store for her but destruction.

Valgerdur looked at him.

“No one knows where she is now. She’s still alive, because I would have heard if she had died. I’m waiting for that news. I’ve ventured into that storm time and again, found her and dragged her back home and tried to help her, but I doubt whether anyone really can.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Valgerdur said after a long silence.

The telephone on his bedside table rang. Erlendur looked at it and was not going to answer, but Valgerdur told him that it must be important for someone to call so late at night. Muttering that it must be Sigurdur Oli with some stupid brainwave, he reached over.

It took him a while to realise that the man on the other end was Haraldur. He was calling from the old people’s home and said he had sneaked into the office and wanted to talk to Erlendur.

“What do you want?” Erlendur asked.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” Haraldur said.

“Why?” Erlendur asked.

“Do you want to hear it or not?” Haraldur said.

“Calm down,” Erlendur said. “I’ll drop by tomorrow. Is that all right?”

“You do that, then,” Haraldur said, and slammed down the telephone.

33

He put the pages that he had written into a large envelope, addressed it and laid it on his desk. Running his hand over the envelope, he thought about the story it contained. He had wrestled with himself about whether to describe the events at all, then decided it could not be avoided. The body had been found in Kleifarvatn. Sooner or later the trail would lead to him. He knew that there was really barely any link between him and the body in the lake, and the police would have their work cut out to establish the truth without his assistance. But he did not want to lie. If all he left behind was the truth, that would be enough.

He enjoyed both his visits to Hannes. Ever since their first meeting he had liked him, despite their occasional disagreements. Hannes had helped him. He had shed new light on Emil’s relationship with Lothar and revealed that Emil and Ilona had known each other before he arrived in Leipzig, although in very vague terms. Perhaps this helped to explain what happened later. Or perhaps that connection complicated the matter. He did not know what to think about it.

He finally came to the conclusion that he had to talk to Emil. Had to ask him about Ilona and Lothar and the chicanery in Leipzig. He could not be sure that Emil would be able to tell him the answers, but he needed to hear what he did know. Nor could he snoop around Emil’s shed. That was beneath his dignity. He did not want to play hide-and-seek.

Another motive drove him on. A thought that had struck him after visiting Hannes, connected with his own involvement and how naive, gullible and innocent he had been. If there was no other explanation for what had happened, then he would have been the cause of it. He had to know which.

This was why he was back on Bergstadastraeti one afternoon a few days after he had trailed Lothar and peered into the shed. He had gone round to confront Emil straight from work. It was starting to get dark and the weather was cold. He felt winter approaching.