Dagbjartur arrived early at the National Hospital in Reykjavik and asked for Dr. Thorgerdur Fridriksdottir. After a number of enquiries, it transpired that she was in the operating room.
“I’ll wait,” said Dagbjartur, smiling patiently.
He had been waiting for three hours when a young woman approached him.
“I was told you were looking for me,” she said.
She was wearing a white coat with large splatters of blood on the front.
“I was just removing some tonsils. There can be a lot of bleeding sometimes,” she added when she noticed he was staring at the stains.
Dagbjartur smiled awkwardly. “Sorry to disturb you. This won’t take long.”
“OK. What’s it about?”
“I believe you know Johanna Thorvaldsdottir?”
“Yes, we’re friends.”
“Have you seen her recently?”
“No. Not this year. She’s been busy taking care of her father. I hear he’s finally passed away now.”
“How did you meet?”
“Why are you asking me about Johanna?”
“There was a terrible incident on Flatey and we’re trying to form a picture of the people who live there. It’s a relatively small number of people, so we can get a pretty good idea of each individual.”
“I see. I’ve got nothing but good things to say about Johanna, so I hope none of this will harm her. We met in Copenhagen at the end of the war when we were teenagers and became good friends when she became engaged to my brother.”
“What kind of a teenager was she?”
“She was a strange kid because she had been brought up by her father on the move across northern Europe. It took our family many months to break through the shell. Once we had, though, I realized she was an extremely gifted, tender, and fun girl. At first she sounded too much like an adult when she spoke, and her Icelandic was quite funny. Sometimes it was as if she were talking straight from the Icelandic sagas. She wasn’t used to speaking this language with kids her own age. We actually spoke Danish together to begin with because that’s what I was used to when I spoke to my friends in Copenhagen. We sometimes still do that for fun.”
“Have you stayed in contact with her since then?”
“On and off. After my brother died, she vanished from our family life. She got into a doomed relationship with some guy for a couple of years. She was a year ahead of me in med school, and we caught up a bit once the relationship ended. She was very unhappy during those years but did very well in her studies. I think she saw a shrink for a while.”
A nurse came running down the corridor. “Thorgerdur, come straight back,” she called. “The boy is starting to bleed again!”
Question twenty-nine: What cracked with such a loud noise? First letter. Then the earl said to Finn Eyvindarson, “Shoot that man by the mast.”
Finn answered, “The man cannot be shot if he is not fey. I can break his bow, though.” Finn then shot his arrow, which struck the middle of Einar’s bow just as he was drawing it for a third time, and the bow split in two.
Then King Olaf said, “What cracked with such a loud noise?”
Einar answered, “Norway out of your hands, sire.”
The first letter is n.