The archaeologists continued excavating in the morning after the bones were found. The policemen who had patrolled the area that night showed them where Erlendur had exposed the hand and Skarphedinn was furious when he saw how Erlendur had picked away at the soil. Bloody amateurs, he was heard muttering into his beard well past noon. To him, an excavation was a sacred ritual in which the soil was peeled back, one stratum after another, until the history of all that lay beneath came to light and the secrets were revealed. Every detail mattered, every handful of dirt might contain vital evidence and charlatans could destroy important data.
He preached all this to Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli, who had done nothing wrong, in between giving orders to his team. Work progressed very slowly by these painstaking archaeological methods. Ropes were stretched across the length and breadth of the area, marking out zones according to a specific system. The crucial consideration was to leave the position of the skeleton unmoved during the excavation; they made sure that the hand did not budge even when they brushed the dirt away from it, and scrutinised every grain of soil.
“Why is the hand sticking up out of the ground?” Elinborg asked Skarphedinn, stopping him as he hurried busily past.
“Impossible to say,” Skarphedinn said. “In a worstcase scenario the person lying there could have been alive when he was covered with the earth and tried to put up some resistance. Tried to dig his way out.”
“Alive!” Elinborg groaned. “Digging his way out?”
“That’s not necessarily the case. We can’t rule out that the hand ended up in that position when the body was put in the ground. It’s too soon to say anything about that.”
Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg were surprised that Erlendur had not turned up for the excavation. Eccentric and unpredictable as he was, they also knew of his great fascination with missing persons, past and present, and the buried skeleton could well be the key to an old disappearance that Erlendur would delight in unearthing from parched documents. When it was past midday Elinborg tried to phone him at home and on his mobile, but to no avail.
Around two o’clock, Elinborg’s mobile rang.
“Are you up there?” a deep voice said over the phone, and she recognised it at once.
“Where are you?”
“I got delayed. Are you at the excavation?”
“Yes.”
“Can you see the bushes? I think they’re redcurrant. About 30 metres east of the foundations, standing almost in a straight line, going south.”
“Redcurrant bushes?” Elinborg squinted and scoured around for some bushes. “Yes,” she said, “I can see them.”
“They were planted a long time ago.”
“Yes.”
“Check why. Whether anyone lived there. Whether there was a house there in the old days. Go down to the City Planning Office and get some maps of the area, even aerial photos if they have any. You might need to look up documents from the beginning of the century until 1960 at least. Maybe even later.”
“Do you think there was a house on the hill here?” Elinborg said, looking all around. She made no attempt to conceal her disbelief.
“I think we ought to check it out. What’s Sigurdur Oli doing?”
“He’s browsing through the files of missing persons since World War II, to start with. He was waiting for you. Said you enjoyed that sort of thing.”
“I spoke to Skarphedinn just now and he said he remembered a camp there, on the other side, the south slope of Grafarholt, in wartime. Where the golf course is now.”
“A camp?”
“A British or American camp. Military. Barracks. He couldn’t remember the name. You ought to check that too. Check whether the British reported anyone missing from the camp. Or the Americans who took it over from them.”
“British? Americans? In the war? Wait a minute, where do I find that out?” Elinborg asked in surprise. “When did the Americans take over from them?”
“1941. Could have been a supply depot. Anyway that’s what Skarphedinn thought. Then there’s the question of the chalets on the hill and around it. Whether there could be a missing person connected with them. Even just stories or suspicions. We need to talk to the local chalet owners.”
“That’s a lot of work for some old bones,” Elinborg said peevishly, kicking at the gravel around the foundation where she stood. “What are you doing?” she then asked, almost accusingly.
“Never you mind,” Erlendur said and rang off.
He walked back into intensive care wearing a thin green paper smock with a gauze over his mouth. Eva Lind lay in a big bed in a single room on the ward. She was connected to all kinds of equipment and devices that Erlendur had never even seen before and an oxygen mask covered her mouth and nose. He stood by the bed head, looking down at his daughter. She was in a coma. Had not yet regained consciousness. Over what he could see of her face, an air of peace reigned which Erlendur had not seen before. A calmness unfamiliar to him. When she lay like that her features became stronger, her brows sharper, her cheeks stretching the skin and her eyes sunk into their sockets.
He had called emergency services when he could not manage to bring Eva Lind back to consciousness where she lay in front of the old maternity home. He felt a weak pulse and laid his coat over her, trying to tend to her as best he could, but not daring to move her. The next thing he knew, the same ambulance turned up that had come to Tryggvagata, with the same doctor in it. Eva Lind was gently lifted onto a stretcher and slid inside the ambulance, which sped off the short distance remaining to Accident and Emergency.
She was sent straight into surgery that lasted almost the rest of the night. Erlendur paced the little waiting room by the operating theatre, wondering whether he ought to let Halldora know. He baulked at phoning her. In the end he found some kind of solution. He woke up Sindri Snaer, told him about his sister and asked him to contact Halldora so that she could visit the hospital. They exchanged a few words. Sindri was not planning to come to the city anytime soon. Saw no reason to make a journey just for Eva Lind’s sake. Their conversation faded out.
Erlendur chain smoked beneath a sign that said smoking was strictly prohibited — until a surgeon wearing a gauze mask walked past and gave him a dressing-down for infringing the ban. Erlendur’s mobile rang when the doctor had gone. It was Sindri with a message from Halldora: “It would do Erlendur good to take on some of the responsibility for once.”
The surgeon who had led the operating team spoke to Erlendur towards the morning. The prognosis wasn’t good. They hadn’t been able to save the baby and it was uncertain whether Eva Lind herself would pull through.
“She’s in a very bad state,” said the surgeon, a tall but delicate man aged around 40.
“I understand that,” Erlendur said.
“Persistent malnutrition and drug abuse. There’s not much chance the baby would have been born healthy so… although it’s a nasty thing to say of course…”
“I understand,” Erlendur said.
“Did she ever contemplate an abortion? In cases like this it’s…”
“She wanted to have the baby,” Erlendur said. “She thought it could help her, and I encouraged her too. She wanted to stop. There’s some tiny part of Eva that wants to escape from this hell. A tiny part that sometimes comes out and wants to give it all up. But normally it’s a completely different Eva who’s in charge. More ferocious and merciless. Some Eva who eludes me. Some Eva who seeks this destruction. This hell.”
Realising that he was talking to a man he did not know in the slightest, Erlendur fell silent.
“I can imagine it’s difficult for parents to have to go through this,” the surgeon said.
“What happened?”
“Placenta abruptio.A massive internal haemorrhage that occurred when the placenta was torn, combined with toxic effects that we are still awaiting the results on. She lost a lot of blood and we haven’t managed to bring her back to consciousness. That need not mean anything in particular. She’s extremely weak.”
After a pause the surgeon said, “Have you contacted your people? So they can be with you or…”
“There aren’t any ‘my people’,” Erlendur said. “We’re divorced. Her mother and I. I’ve let her know. And Eva’s brother. He’s working in the countryside. I don’t know whether her mother will come here. It’s like she’s had enough. It’s been very tough for her. All the time.”
“I understand.”
“I doubt that,” Erlendur said. “I don’t understand it myself.”
He took out a couple of small plastic bags and a box of pills from his coat pocket and showed them to the doctor.
“She might have taken some of this,” he said.
The surgeon took the drugs from him and looked at them.
“Ecstasy?”
“Looks like it.”
“That’s one explanation. We identified a number of substances in her blood.”
Erlendur hesitated. He and the surgeon said nothing for a while.
“Do you know who the father is?” the surgeon asked.
“No.”
“Do you think she knows?”
Erlendur looked at him and shrugged in resignation. Then they fell silent again.
“Is she going to die?” Erlendur asked after some time.
“I don’t know,” the surgeon said. “We can only hope for the best.”
Erlendur hesitated about asking his question. He’d been grappling with it, horrific as it was, without reaching any conclusion. He was not certain that he wanted to insist. In the end he went ahead.
“Can I see it?”
“It? You mean…?”
“Can I see the foetus? Can I have a look at the baby?”
The surgeon looked at Erlendur without the slightest hint of surprise on his face, only understanding. He nodded and told Erlendur to follow. They walked along the corridor and into an empty room. The surgeon pressed a button and the fluorescent lights on the ceiling flickered before shedding a bluish white light around the room. He went over to a cold steel table and lifted up a little blanket to reveal the dead baby.
Erlendur looked down and stroked his finger across its cheek.
It was a girl.
“Will my daughter come out of this coma, can you tell me that?”
“I don’t know,” the doctor said. “It’s impossible to tell. She’ll have to want to herself. It depends a lot on her.”
“The poor girl,” Erlendur said.
“They say that time heals all wounds,” the surgeon said when he felt Erlendur was about to lose his grip. “That’s just as true of the body as of the mind.”
“Time,” Erlendur said, putting the blanket back over the baby. “It doesn’t heal any wounds.”