The Day is Dark Page 14

  The woman looked with pursed lips at Thóra. ‘You’re definitely going to pay me?’ Thóra nodded and the woman continued, although the words seemed to come out reluctantly. ‘I don’t know. Probably the police or a doctor. He was looking for someone like that.’

  ‘And was he able to make a call?’ asked Thóra, hoping that the answer would be yes. Maybe the men had been arrested and because of some red tape had been stuck in a Greenlandic prison without the knowledge of the Icelandic authorities. The arrest could even have been connected with the body they found in the ice.

  ‘No,’ replied the woman. ‘No one would let him in. He was very strange and I know it never crossed my mind to open my door. He would have been better off going home, as I tried to tell him through the door. He didn’t listen.’

  ‘How do you know that he didn’t go home?’

  ‘Well, he left when it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to use a phone, and he couldn’t have gone anywhere else other than back to the camp. The only clear way from here to other towns is by helicopter, and no one else came here between the time that the big group left and you arrived. There are no roads leading here, and the man didn’t have access to a boat, not that he would have been able to sail it through the ice anyway.’

  ‘What about a dogsled or a snowmobile?’ Thóra hadn’t seen a snowmobile at the work site, though it was unthinkable that Berg Technology wouldn’t have provided such a thing. Perhaps the men had tried to make it to a more southerly settlement by snowmobile, and died of exposure on the way.

  ‘He didn’t go by dogsled, that’s for sure,’ replied the woman emphatically. ‘There’s no one here who would have taken him, and he didn’t steal dogs or a sled. I would have heard about it. And I didn’t notice any snowmobiles. They’re loud and the dogs always bark at them.’ She stuck her hands in her pockets and shrugged her shoulders, her jacket rising again and making her neck disappear once more. ‘They know that they’re a threat to them. They can sometimes replace the dogs. But not always.’ She realized that she’d got off the subject and went back to it. ‘No one would have taken the man on a dogsled or a snowmobile.’

  ‘Why would no one have wanted to take him if he needed help?’ Thóra suspected that the woman wasn’t quite as all-knowing about what happened in the village as she pretended to be. ‘Do you dislike outsiders so much?’ Thóra’s sentences had become practically all English since her Danish vocabulary could no longer handle the conversation. But it didn’t seem to do any harm.

  The woman frowned. ‘We’re not bad to outsiders. We don’t like the place you choose to live in. No one should be there; you are disturbing the evil that dwells there and by doing so you’re putting us all in danger. We just want you to go somewhere else.’

  In a way, Thóra was slightly relieved, as it was conceivable that the natives’ prejudices against the work site could be used to justify the delays on the project. There was nothing in the contract to protect Berg against this, even though it could be argued that it should have been included. The villagers had possibly done more than just nag the staff to go home. ‘What’s wrong with that area?’

  The woman looked panicked. ‘Nothing that you would understand,’ she said. ‘I want my money.’

  ‘You’ve got to tell me,’ replied Thóra. ‘Is the area considered bad because of a particular occurrence, or is something else wrong with it? Something palpable such as polar bears or other dangers?’

  The woman had grown irritated. Her eyes narrowed as she stood there shuffling her feet and looking around as if to see how many people were witness to the conversation. Although there was no one else to be seen, there were doubtless people watching from behind the curtains of the nearby houses. ‘I don’t know. It’s just something that everyone knows. The area is bad and it’s dangerous to be there. We never go there and if you had listened to us then you wouldn’t be looking for this man.’ She stopped her hopeless search for invisible observers and looked at Thóra head-on. Her pitch-black pupils gleamed in the yellow whites of her eyes. ‘You’ll never find him.’

  Before Thóra could reply to this assertion, Matthew and Finnbogi started heading back over to the car. The woman appeared startled. ‘Those are my friends,’ said Thóra, to try to calm her down. She had a certain sympathy for the woman’s sense of self-preservation, to agree to speak to a stranger in the hope of payment – there were hardly many opportunities to make money in the village. The boats in the harbour were of the sort used for small, personal catches; larger fishing vessels could not enter the harbour, which was surrounded by sea ice. The villagers should actually have celebrated the project as a source of increased opportunities for work that it surely brought. Instead, their complete lack of interest in attempting to profit from the project clearly revealed their deep-rooted fear of the afflicted place. Thóra pointed at Matthew as he approached with Finnbogi. ‘He’s got the money.’ The woman nodded worriedly. While Thóra explained things to the two men, the Greenlander stood there looking as if she expected the three of them to do her in.

  None of them had any idea how much they should pay the woman. Finnbogi was convinced that if they paid her too much, they would soon be beset by people who would invent stories simply for the money. In the end they gave her five hundred Danish crowns and she took them without any indication as to whether it was more or less than she’d expected. She thanked them in a soft voice as she stuffed the bills into her pocket. ‘Where do you live?’ asked Thóra.

  ‘Why?’ The woman’s voice was suspicious and she frowned instinctively.

  ‘I might need to speak to you again,’ Thóra replied. ‘If the phones at the camp can’t be reconnected we might need to make a call from your phone. Of course we’ll pay if it should come to that. I’d also like to know more about what you were saying about the work site. You could maybe try to find out from some of the older people here what the explanation is for the area’s bad reputation.’

  The woman shook her head. ‘I don’t want to talk to them for you. You’ll just have to do that yourselves.’ She appeared to be somewhat undecided, however, and it was perhaps in the hope of receiving more cash that she didn’t leave. She looked away from Thóra and began to scan the windows of the nearby houses again.

  ‘We can’t get anyone else to speak to us and you know that,’ said Thóra. ‘You’re the only person who’s offered to help at all. I promise that we’ll pay you for all the assistance you give us.’

  The woman looked around her one last time and finally turned to Thóra and pointed discreetly in the direction of the harbour. ‘See that house standing at the end of the village? It’s blue.’ Thóra saw that it was the house she’d noticed as they drove through the village. From this angle it didn’t appear any more attractive than it had earlier. Bright orange skis stood stuck in the snow against the house’s gable but otherwise there was little there that called to mind sports or a healthy lifestyle. Thóra assumed that the woman had been behind the curtains that moved as they passed by. ‘I live there.’ She peered furtively at the men. ‘You can make calls from there if you want. Not them. Just you.’ She turned away without saying goodbye.

  ‘What about the information?’ called out Thóra after the woman had turned her back on them. ‘Can you try to find out for me about the history of the area?’

  The woman replied without looking back. ‘No. You could try talking to Igimaq. He should know the story.’

  ‘Who is Igimaq?’ The doctor was the first to ask and Thóra tried as best she could to hide her irritation. The woman clearly would not answer him – only Thóra.

  The woman looked back angrily and stared hard at Thóra, acting as if the two men were not standing there. Finnbogi had the good sense to say nothing. ‘He’s an old hunter and he knows this area well. He’s even experienced first hand what it costs to spend time in those parts. He lost his daughter there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Thóra started thinking about the polar bear again. ‘Did she die of exposu
re?’

  ‘Ask Igimaq yourself. He lives west of town. If you head towards the black cliff you can see in front of the glacier, you’ll come across his tent.’ She looked from Thóra to the car. ‘You won’t make it there in that. You’ve got to find yourselves dogsleds or snowmobiles.’ She turned away from them once more and walked away. ‘Good luck finding it.’

  They watched her as she strode off, proud and upright, and Thóra admired the way the young woman managed to keep her back so straight. It was as if they were watching one of the most illustrious women in the village. Despite her yellowed eyes and the odour of alcohol, they could still sense her proud spirit, which must have been based on her coming from much sturdier stock than them. It was as if she were two different people, a front and a back, where the front had stumbled on the road of life but the back was still proud and victorious.

  ‘Okay. Igimaq.’ Finnbogi looked to the sky in the hope of seeing where the sun was in its short working day. He had forgotten about the fog, which made it impossible for him to determine the source of the grey light that slipped through. ‘Perhaps we should check whether we can find even one snowmobile.’ He sighed loudly. ‘We forgot to show her the bone and the Tupilak.’ He tapped lightly at his jacket pocket.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Matthew. ‘I suspect this Igimaq knows more about these things than the girl, anyway.’

  ‘If he wants to talk to us about them at all,’ said Thóra, rolling up the window. There was no need to breathe in more cold air when warmer air was available. It wasn’t always possible to make such a choice. On a snowmobile, for instance.

  Chapter 14

  21 March 2008

  In the end they were unable to meet Igimaq. There was a snowmobile at the camp, as Thóra had expected, but it wasn’t in working order. Alvar spent the rest of the day trying to repair it, with no luck. They’d found it inside a storage unit behind the camp on a tip-off from Friðrikka and Eyjólfur, the latter of whom went with Matthew and Alvar to the unit, happy to stop working on the satellite dishes for a while. He had made no progress, and the dishes appeared to have suffered some rather unusual damage. The one on the roof of the office building was on its side, but the roof and the cables, which still connected it to strong fastenings, had prevented it from falling off. The banging they had heard during the storm had most likely come from the dish. Eyjólfur had fixed it back in its place but hadn’t got it to work properly, even though he considered it possible that the Internet connection could go on and off as it appeared to have done while the dish was swinging on the roof at the mercy of the wind. It was a different story with the dish on the roof of the cafeteria, to which the phones were connected. It was in a worse state, having presumably been subjected to more damage before it came loose, and in the end Eyjólfur came to the conclusion that its receiving equipment was so badly broken that phone calls were out of the question.

  It was difficult to gauge the reasons why the dishes had suffered so much damage outside. Eyjólfur thought it doubtful that the weather was to blame, and tended towards the opinion that someone had hammered at the devices with a crowbar or other heavy object until they came loose. There could be no other explanation for the dents on them, he thought.

  Eyjólfur must have still been thinking about the satellite dishes when he arrived at the storage unit, since the first thing that crossed his mind was that it had been broken into. The unit was unlocked and the paint was scraped away in several dented spots around the lock bracket. Inside was the snowmobile, surrounded by tyres of all shapes and sizes, spare car parts and various other supplies. Eyjólfur didn’t notice anything missing, so the team did not set much store by his conclusion that it was a case of breaking and entering. There could have been other reasons for the dents on the rusted bracket, and it was also possible that the hanging lock on the unit had disappeared long ago. Eyjólfur pointed out that he wasn’t particularly interested in cars or their maintenance and had only been in the unit once before, so he couldn’t say for sure what it had contained. However, he was certain that the unit’s door had always been securely locked. Friðrikka had never been in the unit either, but she remembered that she had once walked past it when its door stood open. She recalled nothing about what had been in it. Of course it was possible that someone had broken into it to damage the snowmobile, although on what impulse she had no idea. The only motive they could think of was that someone had intended to hinder the drillers’ movements, although no one could contribute anything when Matthew sought an explanation for the possible reasons for wanting to do this. It was clear that the damage – if there was actually any damage – was not of the kind suffered by the satellite dishes, since there were no marks or dents visible on the snowmobile.

  As the discussion about possible vandalism reached its peak, Friðrikka pointed out that the drillers had also had the use of two cars, so damaging the snowmobile to immobilize the men would have been a fairly pointless exercise. The cars had been parked outside when they arrived and it hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind to check their condition. When they went to do so, they discovered that the cars wouldn’t start, and it looked very likely that one of the engines had burned out.

  Now, Thóra was sitting at the computer in the office that Friðrikka said had been used by Oddný Hildur. She was planning to upload the photos that Eyjólfur had taken of the damage to the satellite dishes on the roof. Later, she would transfer the images to her laptop, but it was easier to view them on a good screen that wasn’t covered with the fingerprints of small children. Everything now suggested that the drillers’ disappearance, and consequently the cessation of the project, could be attributed to human intervention, and hence the photos could be useful to the bank in its dispute with the mining company. However, it was impossible to say who was behind this or why. Of course it was not out of the question that nature had been asserting itself, that a violent wind had blown over the satellite dishes, but Thóra doubted that a polar bear or other wild animal had been involved; the roof was too high for that. Nor did the damage to the dishes appear to have been caused by claws or teeth. The dents in the thick metal shield were huge, and there were no scratches or scrapes to be seen. The marks could hardly have been made by anything but a tool. After her conversation with the Greenlandic woman she found it not entirely absurd to suppose that one of the villagers might bear the responsibility for it. There was a thin line between denying assistance to those in need and causing them wilful damage through acts of vandalism. Perhaps the villagers had been offended when their warnings hadn’t been heeded and had taken action in this way, which then raised the question of whether they had also played a part in the disappearance and death of Oddný Hildur. Thóra had deliberately chosen to use the computer the missing woman had used, on the off-chance that something was hidden there that might shed light on her disappearance. So after uploading the photographs, Thóra focused on combing through the computer’s files, and quickly became lost in that jungle.

  By the time she had more or less finished viewing everything that she considered to be of any worth, the rumbling in her belly was driving her crazy. She looked at the clock on the screen and saw that time had flown. She didn’t feel any better informed. Oddný Hildur appeared to have been rather reticent and did not leave any clues about herself on her computer. Her e-mails were incredibly unexciting and centred mostly on work; there were numerous short messages with attached reports about the progress of the project and strata that Thóra did not understand at all. Still, several messages to the owner of the company roused Thóra’s interest. In them Oddný Hildur appeared to be complaining about the atmosphere at the workplace and the harassment she said the engineer Arnar was suffering. Thóra searched for and found the man’s reply, in which he seemed to disregard all of Oddný Hildur’s concerns and make little of her request for him to intervene. His message contained rather feeble advice such as, ‘It sounds like it’s just good-natured teasing that shouldn’t be taken seriously,’ and ‘I’m su
re it doesn’t matter to him, he has a thick skin,’ and Thóra could not help but admire the geologist’s determination not to give up. She had sent her final message on this subject two days before she disappeared. The message hadn’t been answered. In it she had said that it was now no longer possible to turn a blind eye to the matter; the man was having a bad time of it and the cruelty of his co-workers clearly ‘did matter to him’; the harassment was becoming more serious and was heading towards something that could not be taken back. Thóra recalled the tiff between Friðrikka and Eyjólfur over the homosexual engineer. Although she was unable to be completely certain, it all looked as if the poor man had been made an outsider by the prejudices of his co-workers. At least that’s what she had understood from the conversation, even though she also vaguely recalled Eyjólfur’s argument that it was the man’s alcoholism that had made him unpopular – or rather the fact that he had managed to gain control over the disease, which had made him boringly holier-than-thou. It wasn’t possible to determine, either from Oddný Hildur’s messages or from her boss’s reply, whether it was the man’s sexual preference or his sobriety that had provoked the harassment.

  Besides this, Thóra found an exchange of emails between Oddný Hildur and Arnar himself. It wasn’t clear from these either what had caused the harassment or how Arnar felt about it. Thóra’s interpretation was that he had tried to tough it out, and didn’t feel comfortable complaining even though his co-workers’ behaviour hurt him. Of course it must have. If Oddný Hildur’s insinuations were anything to go by, it would have been bad enough to have had to endure it eight to ten hours a day, five days a week, but in this case workplace and home were merged into one for a huge portion of the year, with no refuge to be had anywhere. Thus, statements such as, ‘It doesn’t matter, I’m not going to let them affect me,’ and ‘Luckily I don’t care what others think of me,’ could not have been made with complete sincerity. Arnar had written them more to convince himself than Oddný Hildur; he had tried to build an invisible shield that protected him from all of it. However, one sentence clearly showed that if there were such a shield, it was not solid. Arnar had invited Oddný Hildur to coffee at his apartment one evening to discuss this and that; he had been thinking about quitting since ‘this isn’t working any more’. This message was the last that Thóra found from him to Oddný Hildur, and it had been sent two days before the geologist disappeared. If she had answered him, her message had been deleted. It was certainly possible that Oddný Hildur had accepted the invitation verbally; they worked in the same building and ate all their meals at the same table. It was actually strange that they should have e-mailed each other at all, although Thóra knew that she herself sent her colleagues e-mails when she didn’t feel like getting up and speaking to them face to face. It was often just quicker that way. In any case, she would have to speak to this Arnar when they returned to Iceland.