The medical equipment bleeped at regular intervals in one of the wards but it was quiet in the room where Marion Briem lay on the brink of death. Erlendur stood at the foot of the bed, looking at the patient. Marion seemed to be asleep. Face nothing but bones, eyes sunken, skin pale and withered. On top of the duvet lay hands with long, slender fingers and long nails, untrimmed. The fingers were yellow from smoking and the nails black. No one had come to visit Marion, who had been lying in the terminal ward for several days. Erlendur had particularly asked about that. Probably no one will come to the funeral either, he thought. Marion lived alone, always had, and never wanted it otherwise. Sometimes when Erlendur saw Marion his thoughts turned to his own future of loneliness and solitude.

For a long time Marion seemed to adopt the role of Erlendur’s conscience, never tiring of asking about his private life, especially the divorce and his relationship with the two children he had left behind and took no care of. Erlendur, who bore a certain respect for Marion, was annoyed by this prying and their dealings had often ended with big words and raised voices. Marion laid claim to a part of Erlendur, claimed to have shaped him after he joined the Reykjavik CID. Marion was Erlendur’s boss and had given him a tough schooling during his first years.

“Aren’t you going to do anything about your children?” Marion had asked once in a moralising tone.

They were standing in a dark basement flat. Three fishermen on a week-long bender had got into a fight. One had pulled out a knife and stabbed his companion three times after the latter had made disparaging remarks about his girlfriend. The man was rushed to hospital but died of his wounds. His two companions were taken into custody. The scene of the crime was awash with blood. The man had virtually bled to death while the other two carried on drinking. A woman delivering newspapers had seen a man lying in his own blood through the basement window and called the police. The two other men had both passed out drunk by then and had no idea what had happened when they were woken up.

“I’m working on it,” Erlendur had said, looking at the pool of blood on the floor. “Don’t you worry yourself about it.”

“Someone has to,” Marion said. “You can’t feel too good, the way things are at the moment.”

“It’s none of your business how I feel,” Erlendur said.

“It is my business if it’s affecting your work.”

“It’s not affecting my work. I’ll solve it. Don’t fret about it.”

“Do you think they’ll ever amount to anything?”

“Who?”

“Your children.”

“Please just let it go,” Erlendur said, staring at the blood on the floor.

“You ought to stop and think about that: what it’s like to grow up without a father.”

The bloodstained knife lay on the table.

“This isn’t much of a murder mystery,” Marion said.

“It rarely is in this city,” Erlendur said.

Now Erlendur stood and looked at the shrunken body in the bed and knew what he had not known then: that Marion was trying to help him. Erlendur himself lacked a satisfactory explanation for why he had walked out on his two children when he was divorced and had done almost nothing to demand access to them afterwards. His ex-wife developed a hatred for him and swore that he would never have the children, not for a single day, and he did not put up much of a fight for that right. There was nothing in his life that he regretted as much, when later he discovered the state his two children were in once they reached adulthood.

Marion’s eyes slowly opened and saw Erlendur standing at the foot of the bed.

Erlendur suddenly recalled his mother’s words about an old relative of theirs from the East Fjords on his deathbed. She had been to visit him and sat by his bedside, and when she returned she said he had looked so shrivelled up and odd’.

“Would you … read to me … Erlendur?”

“Of course.”

“Your story,” Marion said. “And … your brother’s.”

Erlendur said nothing.

“You told me … once that it was in … one of those books of ordeals you’re always reading.”

“It is,” Erlendur said.

“Will you… read it… to me?”

At that moment Erlendur’s mobile rang. Marion watched him. The ringtone had been set by Elinborg one rainy day when they were sitting in a police car behind the District Court, escorting prisoners in custody. She had changed the ringtone to Beethoven’s Ninth.

“The Ode to Joy” filled the little room at the hospital.

“What’s that music?” Marion asked, in a stupor from the strong painkillers.

Erlendur finally managed to fish his mobile out of his jacket pocket and answer. “The Ode” fell silent.

“Hello,” Erlendur said.

He could hear that there was someone at the other end, but no one answered.

“Hello,” he said again in a louder voice.

No answer.

“Who is that?”

He was about to ring off when the caller hung up.

“I’ll do that,” Erlendur said, putting his mobile back in his jacket pocket. “I’ll read that story to you.”

“I hope . … that this . … will be over soon,” Marion said. The patient’s voice was hoarse and trembled slightly, as if it took a particular effort to produce it. “It’s … no fun … going through this.”

Erlendur smiled. His mobile began ringing again. “The Ode to Joy’.

“Yes,” he said.

No one answered.

“Bloody messing about,” Erlendur snarled. “Who is that?” he said roughly.

Still the line was silent.

“Who is that?” Erlendur repeated.

“I…”

“Yes? Hello!”

“Oh, God, I can’t do it,” a weak female voice whispered in his ear.

Erlendur was startled by the despair in the voice. At first he thought it was his daughter calling. She had called him before in terrible straits, crying out for help. But this was not Eva.

“Who is that?” Erlendur said, his tone much gentler when he heard the woman on the other end weeping.

“Oh, God …” she said, as if incapable of stringing a sentence together.

A moment passed in silence.

“It can’t go on like this,” she said, and rang off.

“What? Hello?”

Erlendur shouted down the mobile but heard only the dialling tone in his ear. He checked the caller ID but it was blank. He noticed that Marion had fallen asleep again. He looked back at his mobile and suddenly in his mind’s eye he saw a woman’s bluish-white face rippling in the waves and looking up at him with dead eyes.

11

Erlendur sat in the interview room, his thoughts focused on the telephone call he had received at the hospital. Oh God, I can’t do it, the weak voice groaned over and over in his mind, and he could not avoid the thought that the woman who had disappeared before Christmas might have just got in touch for the first time. She could have obtained his mobile number from the police switchboard without difficulty. It was his work number. His name had sometimes appeared in the papers in connection with police investigations. It had appeared in connection with the missing woman and now because of Elias’s death. Not knowing the woman’s voice, Erlendur could not tell whether it actually was her, but he intended to talk to her husband as soon as the opportunity arose.

He recalled having once read that only five per cent of marriages or relationships that began with infidelity lasted for life. That did not strike him as a high proportion and he wondered whether it was, in fact, difficult to build up a trusting relationship after betraying others. Or maybe it was too harsh to talk of betrayal. Perhaps the prior relationships had been changing and evolving and new love was kindled at a sensitive moment. That happened and was always happening. The woman who vanished felt that she had found true love, judging by her friends” remarks. She loved her new husband with all her heart.