That was six years after it had happened. They had moved to Reykjavik by then.

Erlendur seldom recalled the world of his dreams unless he became too emotionally involved in a case he happened to be investigating. Then he might have bad dreams, although he would not necessarily remember their substance. It took him a long time to digest the fact that Eva had come to see him after all this time to tell him about a dream she had had, involving him and his brother.

“What did you dream, Eva?” he asked falteringly. “What happened in your dream?”

“First tell me how he died.”

“You know that,” Erlendur said. “He froze to death on the moors. A storm blew up and we were buried in a snowdrift.”

“Why was he never found?”

“Where are you heading with all this, Eva?”

“You haven’t told me the whole story, have you?”

“What story?”

“Sindri told me what could have happened.”

“What are they blathering on about out there in the east?” Erlendur said. “What do they reckon they know?”

“In my dream he didn’t die of exposure, you see. And that fits in with what Sindri said.”

“Please drop the subject,” Erlendur said. “Let’s stop. I don’t want to talk about it. Not now. Later, Eva. I promise.”

“But—”

“Surely you can tell,” he interrupted her. “I don’t want to. Maybe you ought to leave. I… I’m very busy. It’s been a rough day. Let’s discuss it better another time.”

He stood up. Eva watched him without saying a word. She could not comprehend his reaction. It was as if the event had just as much effect on Erlendur now as it did at the time; as if he had proved completely incapable of dealing with it for all those years.

“Don’t you want to hear my dream?”

“Not now.”

“Okay,” she said as she stood up.

“Say hello to Sindri from me if you see him,” Erlendur said, running his fingers through his hair.

“I will,” Eva said.

“It was nice seeing you,” he said awkwardly.

“Same here.”

When she had left he stood facing the bookshelves for a long time, as if in another world. Eva had a knack of riling him. No one else could do it in quite the same way. He was not ready to embark on accounts of his brother’s disappearance. Once he had promised to tell Eva the whole story, but nothing had come of it. She could not burst into his life now, insisting on answers whenever she had the urge.

The book he had read aloud from for Marion Briem was lying on the table in the living room and he picked it up. Like so many of his books, it dealt with fatal accidents, but what distinguished it from all the others was that it contained a short narrative of events that had taken place many years before, when a father and his two sons were caught in a violent storm on the moors above Eskifjordur.

Erlendur looked up the story as he had done so often before. The accounts varied in length but most were structured in the same way. First came a heading and a subheading or source reference. The story generally opened with a topographical description, followed by the narrative proper and a short postscript. He had read this account more often than anything else in his life and knew it off by heart, word for word. It was impartial and impersonal, despite telling of the lonely death of an eight-year-old boy. It made no mention of the devastation that the incident had left behind in the hearts of those who experienced it. That story would never be written.

16

The police attached the highest priority to locating Niran, who had not been heard of since the previous day. With the help of the school staff, they gathered information about his friends, boys he knew and spent most of his time with at school. A lower-profile and more personal search was also in progress, known only to Erlendur and based on Marion Briem’s memory of Andres’s stepfather. He wanted to keep that line of inquiry quiet because he had the feeling Andres was lying to them. He had done as much in the past.

When word spread that Sunee, the victim’s mother, had spirited her older son away to a safe haven, it became headline news and a talking point all over Iceland. The police were heavily criticised for their ineptitude. Either they had let a key witness slip through their hands or, even worse, they had driven him to flight through their own sheer incompetence. After suspicions were raised that the police had tried to conceal this information, like so much else connected with the investigation, a furore broke out about the information act and lack of cooperation with the media.

Erlendur despised nothing more than having to inform journalists and reporters about “the progress of the investigation’, as it was called. He had long maintained that police investigations had nothing to do with the media and that it could be downright damaging to give constant updates about the latest developments. Sigurdur Oli disagreed. He considered it a matter of course to give information, provided it did not jeopardise the interests of the investigation.

“Interests of the investigation?” Erlendur fumed. “Who invents phrases like that? That lot can stick it where the sun don’t shine. We shouldn’t be releasing any bloody information until we ourselves know what’s happened. It serves no purpose whatsoever.”

They were sitting in Erlendur’s office, with Elinborg. A press conference was to be held later that day in response to demands by the media, but Erlendur had refused to attend. This created quite a rumpus between him and his immediate superiors. The outcome was that Sigurdur Oli would be police spokesman and media liaison, along with the deputy head of Reykjavik CID. Erlendur considered it stupid to waste manpower on such pointless exercises.

He had met Odinn, Elias’s father, the previous day when it transpired that Niran had gone missing again and Sunee refused to disclose his whereabouts. Erlendur went to visit him in the flat on Snorrabraut. Odinn had taken several days off work. He did not look as if he had slept well that night, he was unkempt and in bad shape.

Sigridur, Sunee’s mother-in-law, had also taken leave from work and Sigurdur Oli visited her at her home. She said she had been on her way to see Sunee when she heard the news, and really could not understand what was going on. She had offered to sleep at their flat that night, but Sunee had declined. Sigridur had no idea of her movements and could not imagine what had become of Niran. She wondered why Sunee should take such drastic action. Sigurdur Oli hinted that she might have something to hide from the police, but Sigridur dismissed that as absurd. Rather Sunee was trying to protect the boy, she thought.

The most likely scenario was that Sunee had approached someone within the Thai community in the city. Elinborg spent a long time with her brother Virote. She could not tell whether he was lying when he claimed to know nothing. He was deeply anxious about his sister and Niran and reproached the police for allowing such a thing to happen. Elinborg visited the brother on her own, although he could not speak much more Icelandic than Sunee. She repeatedly asked him about Niran, but Virote stood firm.

“I can well understand if you don’t want to tell me where Niran is,” Elinborg said, “but you have to believe that it’s in his best interests to come out of hiding.”

“I not know about Niran,” Virote said. “Sunee not tell me nothing.”

“You must help us,” Elinborg said.

“I not know nothing.”

“Why did Sunee do this?” Elinborg asked.

“I not know what she do. She afraid. Afraid for Niran.”

“Why?”

“I not know nothing.”

The brother stuck to his guns until Elinborg gave up and left.

“We have to find Niran and tell him he can trust us,” Erlendur said. “Sunee has to understand that.”