Thóra watched as Matthew and Dr Finnbogi walked up to yet another house, knocked on the door and waited patiently for someone to answer. No house had looked more like a public building than the others, so they had had to resort to simply going door to door. There was no one out on the streets to ask for information. At first Thóra had accompanied Matthew and Finnbogi, but when it seemed clear that their efforts would provide little or no result she decided instead to wait in the car and make an attempt to warm herself up. The humidity in the air as a result of the fog made it considerably colder. She was chilled to the bone and cursed herself for the stupidity of her packing as she sat there in her borrowed gloves and hat in the car’s back seat. She watched Matthew and Finnbogi fidget on the doorstep and make another attempt to get someone to answer. Then they knocked on the door so loudly that the noise carried all the way into the car. They waited a moment before moving on to the next house. A mist had started to form on the windows and Thóra reached out over the seat to wipe it off, so that she could keep better track of the two men’s movements. When she leaned back in her seat again she gripped her chest with both hands and let out a low cry. Someone was standing right next to the car, staring at her.
She was an apparently young woman, although it was difficult to discern her age due to the fog on the window as well as her thick clothing. Her face was expressionless as she stared straight at Thóra, who fought to regulate her heart rate. The woman stood that way for several seconds, and when Thóra got sufficient hold of herself to roll down the window she continued to stand there like a statue. The only thing differentiating her from a shop-window mannequin was the occasional blink of her dark eyes. More than anything else Thóra wanted her to leave, but if she drove the woman away Matthew and Finnbogi would kill her, after they’d trudged through the village from end to end in search of residents to speak to.
‘Good day,’ said Thóra in Danish. ‘Can I help you?’ Her voice sounded shrill and she spoke unnecessarily loudly.
At first the woman just stared back at her, causing Thóra to think that perhaps she did not speak Danish. Before Thóra could give English a try the woman opened her mouth and spoke. What could be seen of her face suggested that she was young, between twenty and thirty. Her face was strong and her high cheekbones were further emphasized by the redness of her cheeks. Her eyes were dark and clear, but the yellowish tinge to their whites ruined her otherwise healthy appearance. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ said the woman. A dull odour of alcohol was carried into the car on her breath, which formed thin white clouds in the cold air.
‘In the village?’ asked Thóra. ‘We just wanted to ask a few questions. There are two men lost, and they might possibly have come here.’
‘You should go home,’ said the woman, still staring at Thóra expressionlessly. ‘Back to your home. Wherever that is.’
‘We’re leaving soon.’ Thóra wished that she understood what was going on. Now her Danish would really be put to the test. She started speaking and although her vocabulary was childish she hoped that the gist of what she wanted to say came across. ‘Are you opposed to the project or did the employees of the Icelandic company do something to you?’
The woman gave Thóra an inquisitive look, not unlike the one Thóra had just given her. ‘You’re staying in a bad place. No one should be there. Go home.’
‘How is it bad?’ Thóra pressed the button to roll the window all the way down. She did this without thinking, as if it were the windowpane separating them that made her unable to understand what the woman was talking about.
‘Bad.’ The woman appeared impatient, showing a reaction at last. ‘You don’t need to understand why. Just believe me. Take your friends and leave and don’t come back.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ Thóra wondered whether this strange conversation would be any easier if she stepped out of the car and they stood side by side.
‘You’ll have to pay me for more information.’ The woman had become stony faced again. Thóra did not know how she should answer. She had no money with her, apart from several hundred nearly worthless Icelandic krónur, which was probably fitting as she didn’t expect the information she was buying to be worth much. ‘I need to know more than that if I’m supposed to pay you.’ Hopefully Matthew or the doctor had some money with them. Matthew must have taken out some Danish currency, just in case. In most things he was the perfect opposite of Thóra, who trusted more often than not in God and luck.
‘You won’t get anyone else to talk to you. The people here don’t want anything to do with you.’ The woman’s eyes narrowed and she appeared lost in thought. ‘It’s not a good time for me – otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to you. How much do I get for talking to you?’
‘That depends on what you can tell me.’ Thóra hoped that Matthew and the doctor wouldn’t come rushing up and scare the woman away. She had something to say and Thóra guessed that now she was trying to put a value on the information. ‘I’m mainly trying to find out about two men who disappeared from here recently.’
The woman exhaled, once again emitting a sour odour of alcohol. ‘I know which men you’re talking about.’
Thóra tried to conceal the excitement that gripped her. Was it conceivable that the men were here in the village? ‘Have you met them recently?’ The woman shook her head energetically. ‘Did they come here after the others went home?’
‘One of them,’ replied the woman. ‘The fat one. He came alone.’
‘When was that and what did he want?’ After blurting this out, Thóra went silent; she had to keep control of her questions even though others were springing to mind. Matthew and Finnbogi had the photo of the drillers, so she couldn’t ask the woman to point out the one she meant. If Thóra remembered correctly, Bjarki was much bigger than Dóri, but that was a moot point if only one of them had come to the village.
The woman shrugged, causing her light blue jacket to lift slightly. It was so thick and stiff that it took a moment for the garment to sink back to its place. Until it did, the woman looked neckless. ‘I don’t know exactly when he arrived. It was more than a week ago. Maybe two. He wanted to make a call.’
‘A call?’ Thóra could not remember having read or heard of a phone call during the period the woman was talking about. The camp’s telephone connection had supposedly been cut off several days after the two drillers were left behind alone, and no one had mentioned that they’d made contact since then. ‘Do you know who he wanted to call?’
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 exposure?’
‘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.