After lunch, Hogni was sent down to the doctor’s house to summon Johanna to an interview. It was still raining and cold. Hogni walked swiftly against the wind, tightly clutching the collar of his jacket under his chin. In less than twenty-four hours, everything seemed to have taken a turn for the worse in Flatey, including the weather. And instead of attending to their seal nets and picking eiderdown, farmers sat at home and waited for the inspectors to track down the monster who had started to kill people.
Hogni knocked many times on the doctor’s hall door and, when no one answered, opened it and stepped into a little hallway. The islanders were not in the habit of locking their houses on Flatey, and it was all right to pop one’s head through the door if the matter was urgent.
“Hello?” he called out, hearing nothing but the echo of his own voice in the small, dark hallway in reply. He could smell odors from the infirmary and pharmacy. All kinds of peculiar scents combined to produce that special mysterious hospital aroma that could feel both menacing and comforting, depending on the circumstances.
Hogni penetrated deeper inside and saw a patient’s room to his right in which there was a hospital bed containing a corpse veiled under a white sheet. Bjorn Snorri Thorvald was lying there, waiting for his removal and final farewell to the house. A flame glowed on a candlestick by the side of the bed.
Johanna wouldn’t have left the house like this, Hogni thought to himself. She must be home.
“Hello?” he called out louder than before.
This time he heard a door open on the floor above, and Johanna appeared on the stairs.
“What is it, Hogni? Are you sick?” she asked.
“No, no, no one is sick. But the inspectors from Reykjavik would like to talk to you. They’re talking to everyone.”
“Yes, I know. Is it my turn then? I won’t be a minute.”
“I’ll wait,” said Hogni. “We can go together.”
Johanna vanished for a moment before reappearing at the bottom of the stairs in her coat. She walked over to her father’s bed, blew out the candle, and locked the room behind her. In the hallway she grabbed an umbrella off a hook.
“It’s not often that you see one of those in Flatey,” Hogni said as they set off and Johanna opened the umbrella.
“No, people around here are so used to having their faces pelted by the rain it doesn’t bother them. I’m more delicate,” Johanna answered. Then they walked in silence.
Hogni wasn’t sure, but he thought he might have spotted Kjartan’s-the magistrate’s assistant’s-coat in the hallway of the doctor’s house.
Question thirty-one: The cause of the death of King Harald Gormsson. Fifth letter. The Jomsvikings saga tells of a man called Palnatok, who was a Viking, lived in Fjon, and was one of the most powerful men in Denmark, apart from King Harald Gormsson. There were feuds between these leaders, which culminated with Palnatok coming to a place where the king was resting by a fire in the evening after a battle. The king was stooped over the fire with his chest leaning forward and his ass in the air. Palnatok heard the king talking, armed his bow with an arrow, and fired. It is said that the arrow shot up straight up the king’s ass and out his mouth. He dropped dead, as was to be expected. The cause of his death was the “arrow up his ass,” and the fifth letter in the answer is w.