The e-mail was from the CEO of Berg, who was in the Azores. The man was obviously quite agitated, since the future of his company depended on reaching an agreement about the project with Arctic Mining. The message’s content was quite confusing and didn’t reveal much about how he planned to make up for the delays in Greenland, once his crew could be persuaded to go back to work there. He said that he had convinced two of the company’s other drillers, who were finishing up a job elsewhere, to take over from Bjarki and Dóri; it was clear that he believed them to be dead. He expressed certainty that he could persuade the others to return to work if some explanation were found for what had happened at the work site, and hinted that Thóra and Matthew should come up with a story about how the men had gone for a hike in the mountains that had ended badly, thus providing a rational explanation for their disappearance. If that failed, they should send all the employees a strictly worded message that their wages would be docked and they would be prosecuted if they didn’t go straight back to work. However, the conclusion of this strange message was a list of the telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of all the employees who now refused to return to Greenland. It was not a large group, and Thóra and Matthew divided the task between themselves, with her phoning them one by one and Matthew sending e-mails to those she couldn’t reach or who refused to speak to her.
‘What a charming bunch of people – I don’t think.’ Thóra hung up on the fifth person on the list and watched as Matthew started typing him a follow-up e-mail. ‘Anyone would think they’d all conspired to keep their mouths shut.’
‘They might have got themselves a lawyer,’ said Matthew, grinning at Thóra. ‘That would be terrible.’ Thóra made do with nudging Matthew lightly with her elbow. She felt that he rather deserved the chance to stand up for himself after yesterday evening. While attempting to find a news programme on the TV in their room he had, much to his satisfaction, come across a station in German. However, his happiness was subdued somewhat when he realized that all the programme consisted of was young women walking around stark naked, enthusiastically caressing their own bodies and chewing on pearl necklaces that for some reason they didn’t seem inclined to take off. Thóra had teased Matthew about how peculiar the news from his homeland was, and flicked over to the channel at regular intervals to check whether there were any actual news updates.
She tried the two numbers that supposedly belonged to Arnar Jóhannesson; one was his home phone, which no one answered, and the other his mobile, but either it was switched off or there was no signal where he was. That came as no surprise; if the man was in rehab, he might have lost his phone on a drunken binge or handed it over when he checked in. Thóra wondered whether she should call Vogur Hospital and ask to speak to him, but decided to wait in the hope that one of the others could be persuaded to open up. She continued down the list, which now had only two employees left on it. She was fairly optimistic that they would be more easily convinced to talk about things than the others she’d reached. One didn’t answer, and as she tried the last one, Sigmundur Pétursson, she said to Matthew: ‘Well, keep your fingers crossed.’ It rang three times, then a husky male voice answered unenthusiastically. After introducing herself, Thóra said, ‘I’d like to know whether you could possibly explain to me the provenance of the bones found in the office building. It’s really important, as the police are on site searching for the missing people.’ She added this last bit of information in the hope of keeping the man calm and avoiding hammering one more nail into the project’s proverbial coffin. The employees would never return if they expected to run straight into the police. ‘They need to rule out the possibility that the bones belong to Bjarki or Dóri, and it would speed things up if it were possible to explain how they ended up there.’ This was much further than she’d got in her previous calls.
‘The bones, yes.’ Pétursson sounded serious. ‘They’re not Bjarki’s or Dóri’s. You can tell that to the policemen.’
‘I doubt that will be enough for them,’ said Thóra. ‘I’ll have to give them a more detailed explanation if the investigation is not to be delayed by an examination of the remains, which would in turn delay further searches for the missing persons.’ This was a white lie; obviously the team who would conduct the examination of the bones was not the same one who was searching the area. ‘So this could be very important for your co-workers: if they’ve made it to shelter somewhere they could still be alive.’
At first she heard only the man’s heavy breathing, but then he spoke, slowly and determinedly, and Thóra did not doubt the validity of what he said.
‘We found a grave. In the area we were supposed to clear to make a track for the drilling rig.’
‘And were these bones inside the grave?’ Thóra waved her hand between Matthew’s face and the computer screen to draw his attention to the fact that the phone calls were finally producing results.
‘Yes. They were buried, if you can call it that. They were lying in a kind of animal-skin bag beneath a pile of stones.’
‘A cairn,’ said Thóra. ‘They’d been interred beneath a cairn. How come they weren’t all broken into pieces, if they were lying underneath a pile of rocks?’
‘They were small rocks, so I’d say that’s not so weird. Maybe the bag protected them as well. I don’t know.’
‘Where was this exactly?’ Maybe there would still be traces, which would help convince the police of the story’s validity. ‘Is it possible to find the place?’
Pétursson gave a joyless laugh. ‘Yes, it’s possible. But it’s disappeared beneath the track. It was at the very end of it, right at the place where the drilling rig is now.’
Thóra wiped the image of the bag from her mind and focused on the conversation. ‘What did you do with the bag? Do you know where it is?’
‘It got thrown away. It was pretty disgusting, you know, since a corpse had decomposed in it. There were holes in it where foxes had probably got in, since the stones were piled a bit haphazardly and there was enough space for a creature that size to squeeze through. Anyway, we threw the bag away.’
‘Where?’ Thóra couldn’t imagine rubbish trucks driving around the work site, so it was likely that the bag was still where it had been thrown.
‘We put all the rubbish into a large container next to the cafeteria, but it was taken from there and buried on a regular basis in a place set aside for the purpose. If I remember correctly the container was emptied after we threw away the bag.’
Perhaps there was still some hope regarding the fate of the bag, if it turned out to be important. Friðrikka and Eyjólfur should be able to point them to the spot where rubbish was buried, so she needn’t waste any of this conversation getting a better description of its location. ‘So it was just bones and nothing else – no clothing, nothing that might suggest the person’s identity?’
‘There was a hair that could have been from either a man or a woman. It was pitch-black and medium-length, not necessarily a woman’s hair, but on the long side for a man. The colour seemed to indicate that it was a Greenlander’s. There were also remains of clothing in the bag but they were in tatters, so it was difficult to say what gender they’d belonged to.’
‘Did you check on whether this had anything to do with the villagers? Did you give them the opportunity to move the cairn?’
‘Of course.’ The man sounded surprised and even irritated at the question. ‘We went down to the village and tried to find out more about it, but no one there would speak to us, as usual. We would never have removed the bones without making sure that we weren’t offending someone by doing so. We never got any answers out of them, but at least we tried.’
Thóra could imagine that the Berg employees might have got annoyed that the locals would not listen to them, and taken their annoyance out on this derelict cairn. ‘Couldn’t you divert the track around it?’
‘No, that was impossible. There are large flat rocks all around and there was no other way through them. The drilling rig could only go up and down very gentle slopes, so we were forced to sacrifice the cairn. It wasn’t up to us to decide where to drill. It was the orders from the mining company that paid the bills. We saw no reason to get them involved in the matter. It would have got ridiculous.’
‘Did everyone at the camp know about the discovery of the bones?’ Thóra was taking something of a risk by asking this, since it implied that there was something unnatural about the whole situation.
‘At first, only the people who found them. I was one of them. We thought initially that it was just a strange natural rock formation that a retreating glacier had left behind, but when we looked closer we caught a glimpse of something among the rocks and removed them to get a better look. If we hadn’t seen it the bulldozer would have crushed it all in a second.’
‘So you removed the bones and stored them in the desk drawers?’ Thóra had trouble concealing her astonishment at these working methods. But of course she had never been in the situation of having a grave stand in the way of her performing her job.
‘We removed them. That’s right. It seemed better than just throwing them out of the way of the track.’ Pétursson said nothing more about the bones’ new resting place in the office building.
‘But why were they in different desks all over the place? You couldn’t have put them together in one location?’
‘The desk drawers don’t lock, and we thought it would be weird to leave them lying around. Now I don’t want to discuss it any further. Others will have to answer for how the situation was handled. If you’ve been there then presumably you know that there were no bones in my desk drawer.’
He was right, and Thóra decided not to press him any further for fear that he would slam the phone down on her. ‘And you didn’t find out anything about who they might have belonged to?’
‘No. Although there was one other thing in the bag when we cut it open…’ The man stopped. ‘I’m sure the police will gain enough information if they ask around the village. The people there probably know exactly who it was. I’m sure the locals don’t give the cops the cold shoulder the way they did with us.’
‘What did you find?’ Thóra didn’t believe for a second that the locals were at all respectful or afraid of the authorities, or that they’d suddenly open up and start talking to them. If Pétursson knew something more it would have to be him who told her. ‘Who knows, maybe this grave is nothing to do with the villagers? They avoid the area like the plague, so it’s doubtful that they would take a dead friend there. So what you found could be important.’ Thóra shut her eyes and said a silent prayer that the man would trust this reasoning.
‘It was a necklace.’
‘Can you describe it or tell me what happened to it?’ It was possible it had lain under the bones that they’d left untouched in the desk drawers, if it wasn’t that bulky.
‘It was a kind of typical Inuit thing. Carved bone, except that it didn’t hang from a leather strip, but a metal chain. It was silver-coloured but I don’t know whether it was steel or something fancier. The metal hadn’t corroded, anyway.’ He hesitated, then went on. ‘The strange thing was that when we opened the bag the chain wasn’t around the person’s neck as if they’d worn it like a necklace, but lying inside its pelvis. We were careful to cut the bag open gently, so the necklace couldn’t have rolled there. I thought it might have been in the pocket of the garment that the deceased was wearing and had fallen down there when the clothing had rotted away, but my partner thought it had been in the corpse’s stomach. But I mean, who swallows a necklace?’
‘Where is it now?’ asked Thóra.
‘I don’t know. It was hanging on the bulletin board by the coffee machine last time I saw it. Maybe it’s still there? It was a seagull. Something unintelligible was scratched on the back of the pendant. Maybe the name of the person who inscribed it.’
‘What did it say?’ Thóra grabbed Matthew’s pen and notebook from the table. Perhaps the police could figure it out.
‘I don’t remember exactly. It was written from wing to wing, “s”s and “n”s, some vowels. Business, sinner, something like that, but Greenlandic.’ Thóra put the notebook and pen down again. She didn’t need to write this down.
‘Did the necklace say “Usinna”?’
‘Yes, I guess so.’ Pétursson paused. ‘Do you think they’re dead? Bjarki and Dóri?’
Thóra had to answer honestly. Anything else would be unfair. ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure they are, unfortunately. We still haven’t found anything to contradict the theory that they died of exposure. Lost in a snowstorm, probably.’ She added this last bit so as not to kill any hope that the employees might be persuaded to return to work, without any litigation or wage docking.
‘In the middle of the night? Not likely.’
‘What do you mean? We don’t know for certain when they disappeared, but it could hardly have been at night.’
The man was silent for a moment. ‘You might not have heard this before, but several of us had missed phone calls from the work site one night when only Bjarki and Dóri were left there. The calls came in the middle of the night, which is why no one answered, and the phone number couldn’t be reached the next day. Nothing was heard from them after that, so you can maybe understand why we weren’t particularly excited about returning. Bjarki and Dóri were probably calling for help, not to inform us that they were going for a walk. I can’t help wondering if things might have turned out differently if one of us had answered.’
Thóra sat at the small bar at one end of the dining room and tried again to call Gylfi. Her son had answered a short time ago but had asked her to call back later, since he was driving. For some reason the sound of his voice made her feel rather sad; perhaps it was homesickness, perhaps it was seeing the lives of her children continue as if nothing had happened even though she was nowhere near them. But probably the main reason was that she felt death all around her in this place, pressing upon her as if it meant to trap her in a corner and then consume her. Now finally it had made its presence known when she discovered that the bones in the office building must be those of Usinna, the daughter of the strange hunter. It was too preposterous an idea that another woman had been buried with her necklace in precisely the same location where this young and apparently talented girl had her final resting place. However, this didn’t fit with the information that they had gathered in the village. She was supposed to have wandered to the notorious area and disappeared, not been buried. This didn’t necessarily mean she’d been murdered, but it was clear that someone had at least found her dead – if not worse. It was hard to tell who that might have been, or why that same person kept it secret – or whether the missing Icelanders rested in similar graves in the same area.
‘Gylfi! Hi, it’s Mum.’ Her words echoed down the phone. ‘Are you at home now?’ Her heart glowed as she pictured her offspring, Gylfi – with little Orri in his arms – and Sóley.
‘Yes. Listen, I was thinking…’ Not a word about when she was coming home or how the trip had gone. ‘Sigga and I are thinking about going to Spain this summer and a brochure from a travel agency came with Fréttablaðið this morning. Would you maybe want to lend us the money for the trip because we don’t have any and then we would pay you after we started working in the summer?’ He spoke so rapidly that Thóra had to try her hardest to figure out what he was saying.
‘Lend you money for a trip to Spain?’ Thóra was slightly bewildered. She connected Spain with sun cream, bikinis and beer, and nothing was further from her right now.
‘Yes, it’s not expensive at all or anything. If you pay right away you get a discount too.’ Gylfi paused expectantly.
‘But what about work? How do you plan on finding a job if you’re just going to leave straight away? Usually, temps have to be found to cover employees who go off on holiday, to Spain or anywhere else. Have you not thought about that at all?’
‘Maybe it was like that when you were young. No one expects people just to stay in Iceland in the summer any more.’ Thóra tried to look on the bright side. He hadn’t said all those years ago when you were young.
‘Can we talk about this when I get home?’ Thóra stared at herself in the large mirror embedded in the surface of the bar. In the second that passed between seeing this person and realizing who it was, she discovered how other people saw her. A blonde, attractive but worried-looking woman who should frown less and try to dress more appropriately. Her bright, low-cut silk blouse didn’t belong here.
‘Yeah, but this offer is only valid for a few days. And the best trips will probably sell out immediately.’ Gylfi didn’t explain which trips those were and what distinguished a good trip to Spain from a bad one.
‘Let me think about it, then we’ll take a look when I come home.’ Thóra heard the front door of the hotel open on the floor below. She could easily have craned her neck over the edge of the landing to see who had come in, but she didn’t feel like it. If they had to stay here much longer, she would definitely start taking a keen interest in people’s comings and goings, but things hadn’t got that bad yet. ‘You need to think about Orri, too. I doubt he’d enjoy that kind of trip, sweetheart. He’s far too little.’ She added silently to herself: And you’re too young to take care of a small child abroad.
‘Ah, but we’re not going to take him with us,’ said Gylfi proudly, convinced that he’d trumped her. ‘He’ll be staying with you. Just the two of us will go.’
Thóra opened her mouth to speak but closed it again immediately. Up the stairs towards her was walking the Greenlandic police officer who’d questioned her at the work site. ‘Gylfi, I’ll have to call you a bit later, when I know when I’ll be home.’ She hung up and stood up from her high bar stool. The man looked anything but pleased as he came towards her and greeted her with a terse nod.
‘Will you please gather your group and ask them to pack their things?’ Thóra was filled with an unreal hope that they were about to be sent home. ‘You need to come back with us to Kaanneq.’
It had been good to have something to think about other than suffocating darkness, isolation and the lack of a shower, but now those thoughts reappeared in a flash. Thóra looked at her loose three-quarter-length sleeves. If this blouse was inappropriate here at the hotel, it would be completely ridiculous at the camp. ‘Can I get changed first?’