Skarphedinn had arranged for a big white tent to be put up over the excavation site and when Erlendur went inside it out of the spring sunshine he saw the incredibly slow progress they had made. By the foundation they had cut an area of ten square metres and the skeleton was embedded in one edge of it. The arm still pointed up, as before, and two men were kneeling with brushes and spoons in their hands, picking away at the dirt and sweeping it into pans.
“Isn’t that a bit too painstaking?” Erlendur asked when Skarphedinn walked up to greet him. “You’ll never get it finished like that.”
“You just can’t be too careful in an excavation,” Skarphedinn said as pompously as ever, proud that his methods were producing results. “And you, of all people, ought to be aware of that,” he added.
“Aren’t you just using this for field training?”
“Field training?”
“For archaeologists? Isn’t this the class you teach at the university?”
“Listen, Erlendur. We’re working methodically. There’s no other way to do it. Believe me.”
“Yes, maybe there’s no rush,” Erlendur said.
“We’ll get there in the end,” Skarphedinn said, running his tongue over his fangs.
“They tell me the pathologist is in Spain,” Erlendur said. “He’s not expected back for a few days. So we do have plenty of time, I suppose.”
“Who could it be, lying there?” Elinborg asked.
“We can’t determine whether it’s a male or a female, a young body or an old one,” Skarphedinn said. “And maybe it’s not our job to do so either. But I don’t think there’s the slightest doubt any more that it was a murder.”
“Could it be a young, pregnant woman?” Erlendur asked.
“We’ll have that settled soon,” Skarphedinn said.
“Soon?” Erlendur said. “Not if we go on at this rate.”
“Patience is a virtue,” Skarphedinn said. “Remember that.”
Erlendur would have told him where to stick his virtue if Elinborg had not interrupted.
“The murder doesn’t have to be connected with this place,” she said out of the blue. She had agreed with most of what Sigurdur Oli had said the day before, when he started criticising Erlendur for being too preoccupied with his first hunch about the bones: that the person buried there had lived on the hill, even in one of the chalets. In Sigurdur Oli’s opinion it was stupid to concentrate on a house that used to be there and people who may or may not have lived in it. Erlendur was at the hospital when Sigurdur Oli delivered this sermon, and Elinborg decided to hear Erlendur’s views on it.
“He could have been murdered in, say, the west of town, and brought over here,” she said. “We can’t be sure that the murder was actually committed on the hill. I was discussing this with Sigurdur Oli yesterday.”
Erlendur rummaged deep in his coat pockets until he found his lighter and cigarette packet. Skarphedinn gave him a disdainful look.
“You don’t smoke inside the tent,” he snarled.
“Let’s go outside,” Erlendur said to Elinborg, “We don’t want to make virtue lose its patience.”
They left the tent and Erlendur lit up.
“Of course you’re right,” he said. “It’s by no means certain that the murder, if indeed it was a murder, was committed here. As far as I can see,” he continued, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke, “we have three equally plausible theories. First, it’s Benjamin Knudsen’s fiancee, who got pregnant, disappeared, and who everyone thought had thrown herself into the sea. For some reason, possibly jealousy, as you say, he killed the girl and hid the body here by his chalet; and was never the same man afterwards. Second, someone was murdered in Reykjavik, even in Keflavik or Akranes for that matter; anywhere around the city. Brought here, buried and forgotten. Third, there’s a possibility that people lived on this hill, committed a murder and buried the body on their doorstep because they had nowhere else to go. It might have been a traveller, a visitor, maybe one of the British who came here in the war and built the barracks on the other side of the hill, or the Americans who took over from them, or maybe a member of the household.”
Erlendur dropped the cigarette butt by his feet and stamped it out.
“Personally, and I can’t explain why, I favour the last theory. The one about Benjamin’s fiancee would be easiest, if we can link her DNA to the skeleton. The third one could prove toughest for us, because we’re talking about someone who went missing, assuming it was ever reported, in a large, populated area, donkey’s years ago. That option is wide open.”
“If we find the remains of an embryo with the skeleton, haven’t we more or less got the answer?” Elinborg said.
“That would be a very neat solution, as I say. Was the pregnancy documented?” Erlendur asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Do we know it for a fact?”
“Are you saying that Benjamin might have been lying? And she wasn’t pregnant?”
“I don’t know. She could have been pregnant, but not necessarily by him.”
“She cheated on him?”
“We can speculate until the cows come home before those archaeologists present us with something.”
“What could have happened to that person?” Elinborg sighed, wondering about the bones in the dirt.
“Maybe they deserved it,” Erlendur said.
“What?”
“That person. Let’s hope so, anyway. Let’s hope it wasn’t an innocent victim.”
His thoughts turned to Eva Lind. Did she deserve to be lying in intensive care, more dead than alive? Was it his fault? Was anyone to blame except her? Wasn’t the state she was in of her own doing? Wasn’t her drug addiction her private business? Or did he have some part in it? She was convinced he did, and had told him so when she felt he was being unfair to her.
“You never should have left us,” she shouted at him once. “Okay, you look down on me. But you’re no better yourself. You’re just as much a goddam loser!”
“I don’t look down on you,” he said, but she didn’t even listen to him.
“You look down on me like a piece of shit,” she shouted. “Like you’re more important than me. Like you’re smarter and better. Like you’re better than me and Mum and Sindri! Walking out on us like some bigshot, then ignoring us. Like you’re, like you’re God fucking Almighty.”
“I tried…”
“You didn’t try shit! What did you try? Nothing. Fuck all. Ran out like the creep you are.”
“I’ve never looked down on you,” he said. “That’s wrong. I can’t understand why you say that.”
“Oh yes you do. That’s why you left. Because we’re so ordinary. So bloody ordinary that you couldn’t stand us. Ask Mum! She knows. She says it’s all your fault. The whole lot. Your fault. The state I’m in too. What do you reckon to that, mister God fucking Almighty?”
“Not everything your mother says is true. She’s angry and bitter and…”
“Angry and bitter! If you only knew how angry and bitter she really is and hates your guts and hates her kids because it wasn’t her fault you left because she’s the Virgin fucking Mary. It was OUR fault. Sindri and me. Don’t you get it, you fucking jerk. Don’t you get it, you fucking jerk…”
“Erlendur?”
“What?”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine. Perfectly all right.”
“I’m going to drop in on Robert’s daughter.” Elinborg waved her hand in front of his face as if he had slipped into a trance. “Are you going to the British embassy?”
“Eh?” Erlendur snapped back to his senses. “Yes, let’s do it that way,” he said remotely. “Let’s do it that way. And one thing, Elinborg.”
“Yes?”
“Get the district medical officer back here to take a look at the bones when they’re exposed. Skarphedinn doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. He increasingly reminds me of some monstrosity out of the Brothers Grimm.”