The announcement of another death in Flatey did not go down well with Dagbjartur. Now he knew that the peace was over. He’d be required to give an account of his investigation over the past few days and submit a report. The worst part was that he hadn’t written anything down yet. This would become a priority case now, some higher-ranking officer would be put in charge, and the department’s best men would be dispatched to Flatey. The only positive thing to come out of that morning was the fact he would no longer be required to travel to the island.
Using three fingers, Dagbjartur hammered out the conclusions of his interviews with Fridrik Einarsson and Arni Sakarias on his typewriter. He didn’t need to write much to cover the essentials, but it still took him a long time. His chubby fingers were stiff on the keyboard and didn’t always hit the right letters.
It didn’t take the head of the division long to race over his subordinate’s text.
“The Flatey enigma?” he erupted in a rage. “What childish nonsense is that?”
“The magistrate’s assistant in the west seemed to feel it was important,” Dagbjartur answered defensively.
“Oh yeah? And what’s this? A child out of wedlock. That might be worth looking into. Who’s this woman?”
“We don’t know.”
“Don’t know! What have you been up to over these past few days?”
“This.” Dagbjartur pointed stubbornly at his papers. “But no one knows who this woman is.”
“Aren’t there any birth records from those years that we can go through?”
“Everywhere’s closed on the Whitsunday weekend.”
“Right, well, keep going and keep me posted.”
For the remainder of the day Dagbjartur tracked down the friends, relatives, and colleagues of the reporter, Bryngeir, to dig up some information about his life and habits. His colleagues at the paper seemed to be mostly relieved to be free of him, although no one had the effrontery to say so straight out.
The list of relatives was a short one. His maternal grandfather was in an old folk’s home in Stokkseyri, and he had an uncle on his mother’s side who was a farmer in the east in Or?fi. Dagbjartur tried phoning the grandfather but was informed that the old man was deaf and unable to talk on the phone. When he finally reached the uncle in Or?fi, it took the man some time to remember he had a nephew by the name of Bryngeir. He hadn’t heard of his death, but betrayed little emotion. He did, however, ask if the man had left any assets behind.
Most of Bryngeir’s friends considered themselves to be more acquaintances than close friends and showed no sign of grief. He wouldn’t be dearly missed, it seemed.
Collecting a few snippets of information from here and there, Dagbjartur managed to build a reasonable personal profile of Bryngeir and submitted it to his boss that same evening.
Question twenty-two: Who were the soldiers of King John of England? Seventh letter. Earlier that summer, the English king had sent King Sverrir two hundred warriors when he was in Bergen; they were called the Ribbalds. They were as swift on their feet as beasts and were great archers, audacious, and had no qualms about committing bad deeds. The answer is “Ribbalds,” and the seventh letter is d.