Saturday, June 4, 1960
The eastern winds subsided during the night, and when dawn broke, the sun shone and a stillness hung over Breidafjordur. The water in the strait was dark blue and as smooth as a mirror, except for those spots where the tide swirled between the islets and shallows.
Kjartan gazed out of his bedroom window and recalled the old proverb that said that sunshine was of little use to the man with no sun in his heart. He took a few deep breaths and then started to pick up his clothes.
Grimur and Hogni had long left to go out and check on the seal nets by the time Kjartan finally stepped outside. Ingibjorg was in the kitchen stirring baking dough and listening to music on the radio. There was yellow dough in a large bowl, which she held firmly under her left arm as she stirred it vigorously with a big baking paddle in her right hand. In the shuffle some flour had been sprinkled over the table. Kjartan saw that the eggs she was using for the baking were big and had black spots on them.
“Those are great black-backed gull eggs from the spring,” she said as he picked one up to examine it. “There’s no need to spare any of those eggs in these recipes. There’s plenty of them at this time of the year, and they’re fine for baking, even if they’re a bit old and have started to gestate,” she added.
Kjartan drank his morning coffee and ate a slice of bread with lamb pate. He was gradually starting to feel better and more comfortable about his stay with the district officer and his wife, although he was still plagued by worries about the investigation. For a moment he managed to forget himself, though, by staring out the kitchen window at two white wagtails that were hopping between stones on the embankment; he whistled a few notes to the radio.
To his relief, Ingibjorg continued with her kitchen work and did not initiate any conversation with him. It was good to sit like that and just think a little. He also feared that if they started talking together, the conversation would soon veer toward his personal affairs, and that was something he was eager to avoid. He didn’t want to tell any lies, so it was best just to keep his mouth shut.
But he certainly had plenty of work to do. He intended to meet the islanders who had a motorboat at their disposal that would have been sturdy enough to make a journey to Ketilsey in the month of September, and he now asked Ingibjorg who they might be. She answered that there were only five, three once you excluded Valdi from Ystakot and Grimur, the district officer himself.
Ingibjorg listed the others as she broke another egg and added it to the baking dough: “There’s Asmundur, the storekeeper of the island store. He owns Alda, a beautiful white rowboat with a motor mounted on board. Then there’s Gudjon, my brother in Radagerdi, who has Ellidi, a six-ton open motorboat with a little wheelhouse on it, and Sigurbjorn, the farmer in Svalbardi, who owns Lucky, an old-fashioned motorboat; it’s green. They’re all decent, sensible, honest, and honorable people.”
Kjartan gave a start. Lucky could be the name of a boat. It had never occurred to him. There didn’t have to be any connection with the message the man in Ketilsey tried to leave behind, but it needed to be borne in mind in the investigation.
Kjartan knew the way to Radagerdi, and Benny was alone at home and still painting the window. He seemed to be glad of the interruption; he put down his brush and lit a cigarette.
“Mom and my sister Rosa are up in the shed milking the cows, and Dad’s with Sigurbjorn in Svalbardi, cutting his hair for the mass tomorrow,” he said when Kjartan inquired about the other members of the household.
“Cutting hair?” Kjartan wasn’t sure he had heard right.
“Yeah, Dad can cut hair a bit. He cuts it quite short, though, and it can be quite sore because his clippers aren’t as sharp as they used to be. That’s why I don’t want him to cut my hair. Sometimes a barber comes over from Stykkisholmur on the mail boat and cuts people’s hair while the boat goes off to Brjansl?kur. I prefer him. He knows how to cut hair with style. You can buy brilliantine from Asmundur at the island store.”
Benny stuck his smoldering cigarette into his mouth, took a comb out of his back pocket, and combed his blond hair back over his forehead.
“This is how Elvis combs his hair,” he explained, losing his cigarette as he did.
Kjartan said good-bye and walked away toward Svalbardi while Benny was searching for his cigarette stub in the rhubarb patch that grew along the walls of the house.
As luck would have it, Kjartan bumped into the farmers Sigurbjorn and Gudjon together. Sigurbjorn was sitting on a stool in front of the entrance to the Svalbardi farmhouse with an old sheet over his shoulders that was tied around his neck. Gudjon stood over Sigurbjorn cutting his hair. In addition to them, there were two women in the yard, probably a mother and daughter, washing bedclothes in a large basin. The youngest, a pretty girl of about fifteen or sixteen, looked at Kjartan with curiosity but coyly averted her gaze when he returned the stare.
Gudjon in Radagerdi was a well-groomed man in his forties, freshly shaven with dark hair, which was meticulously combed back with hair wax. He was wearing pressed beige pants and a checked cotton shirt with a red scarf around his neck. Sigurbjorn, on the other hand, was somewhat older with a choppy mop of gray hair on one side of his head that had not been cut yet. The other side was crew-cut, revealing bluish white skin underneath. His feet were clad in woolen socks and rubber shoes that protruded from under the sheet.
This method of cutting hair struck Kjartan as being closer to sheepshearing than hairdressing. The cutting was also proceeding slowly because the clippers were stiff and painful on Sigurbjorn’s head.
Kjartan introduced himself, and the others greeted him.
“Mild weather,” Kjartan then said, for the sake of saying something.
“Yes,” Sigurbjorn answered, “it’s been like this all spring. Better weather than any of the oldest women can remember, I think. The arctic terns have never come this early to nest; I think it can only end in disaster. Ouch, ouch, take it easy with those bloody clippers, Gutti pal.”
“You mean you think the weather’ll get worse?” Kjartan asked, scanning the air, unable to spot a single cloud. But then he got down to business: “But anyway, you know why I’m here on the island, don’t you? Can I ask you a few questions?”
Gudjon stopped cutting and straightened a moment. “Yeah, sure, of course,” he said, intrigued.
“It’s been established that the body that was found on Ketilsey was that of a Danish man who stayed here with the priest last year, Professor Gaston Lund,” said Kjartan.
“Yes. We heard that straightaway yesterday,” Gudjon answered.
“Do either of you remember the man?”
Gudjon shook his head, but Sigurbjorn nodded and answered, “Yeah, yeah, I sure do. I remember the man very well. I had an argument with him.”
“Oh?” Kjartan was all ears.
“Yeah, or as much as I could. He was trying to speak Icelandic, the poor lad, and it wasn’t altogether easy to understand what he was saying.”
“Could he make himself understood, though?”
“He could speak some old Icelandic and that kind of thing. He learned it from the manuscripts, he said. Then he’d practiced speaking modern Icelandic with Icelandic students in pubs in Copenhagen. They obviously taught him some swear words and curses.”
“Did he curse a lot?” Kjartan asked.
Sigurbjorn smiled and shook his head. “No, no.”
“What did you argue about?”
“I asked him when he was going to give us the Flatey Book back, and he said it was going to stay in Copenhagen. The best scholars were there, he said. Then I asked him some questions about Sverrir’s saga to test his knowledge, but he couldn’t answer much. We then tried to reason about it a little more, but I think it’s fair to say that we were just unable to understand each other.”
Sigurbjorn grinned at the memory of it, but then he turned serious and said, “Of course, it was terrible for him to perish out on Ketilsey like that.”
Gudjon seconded this with a nod.
“Where did you meet?” Kjartan asked.
“In the library. Hallbjorg in Innstibaer let him in to look at our Munksgaard edition of the book. He was very impressed by how it was kept in a glass case. I don’t think they treat the original manuscript any better. He took several photographs. Then he was going to have a crack at the old riddle. That was when I asked whether he was going to return the manuscript to us, but he wouldn’t hear a word of it.”
Kjartan said, “We know that the deceased left the priest on September fourth and intended to take the mail boat to Stykkisholmur. We don’t know if he ever boarded the boat. If not, is it possible that he may have left the island on some other boat? Could he have gone on one of your boats?”
Gudjon and Sigurbjorn looked at each other and both shook their heads.
“We go out very little that early in September,” Sigurbjorn said, “except maybe to collect the hay on the outer islands when it’s been cut. Later we take a few trips to the mainland to collect the sheep from their summer grazing. We never sail south to Stykkisholmur or anywhere in that direction at that time of the year. Anyone who needs to travel south takes the mail boat.”
Kjartan persisted: “Is it possible that someone would have taken him on one of your boats without you knowing?” he asked.
“Taken the boat in secret, you mean?” Gudjon asked.
“Yes.”
“That would be a first on these islands.”
“Could it have happened? There’s a first time for everything.”
Gudjon and Sigurbjorn looked at each other and both shook their heads again.
“No,” they said in unison, and Sigurbjorn added: “I think I would notice it straightaway if someone else had landed my boat.”
Gudjon seconded him with a nod.
“Have you any idea, then, of how he could have reached Ketilsey?”
“I’m sure he didn’t fall off the mail boat on the way to Stykkisholmur,” said Gudjon. “The crew would definitely have noticed it if a passenger they had picked up in Flatey failed to disembark in Stykkisholmur. Especially in September when there are normally very few passengers on the boat. They’re very observant and conscientious.”
Kjartan wondered whether he should also mention that the Danish man had probably written the word Lucky with pebbles on Ketilsey, but he decided against it. He had no way of knowing if it was connected to Sigurbjorn’s boat and could not think of how to formulate his question. Feeling the farmers could be of no more use to him for the moment, Kjartan said good-bye and headed back toward the village. Glancing back, he could see that the men were deep in conversation and seemed to have forgotten about the haircut altogether.
She read, “Question one: It will come near when it is God’s wish. First letter. King Sverrir was going to his ship on a small rowboat when an arrow struck the bow over his head and another one came close to his knee. The king sat there and did not flinch, and his companion said, ‘Dangerous shot, sire.’ The king answered, ‘It will come near when it is God’s wish.’ The answer is ‘dangerous shot,’ and the first letter is d.”