1
You couldn’t have asked for better weather. She was sitting with her tour group, admiring the view of the glacier and rummaging in her daypack for a sandwich, when her gaze happened to fall on a bump in the snow crust. It looked like a human face.
It took her a moment to register what she was seeing. Then she was on her feet, screaming her head off, shattering the silence of the ice cap.
The German tourists sitting in a huddle around her almost jumped out of their skins. They couldn’t understand what had triggered such a violent reaction in their Icelandic guide, an older woman who up to now had seemed so calm and unflappable.
They were coming to the end of their glacier tour. Yesterday they had gone for a hike on the famously unpronounceable Eyjafjallajökull. It had become a popular tourist destination following the notorious 2010 eruption, when European air traffic had been brought to a standstill by the ash cloud produced by the volcano under the ice. For a long time afterwards the surrounding landscape had been buried under a thick layer of ash, but now it had mostly blown away or been washed into the soil, and the mountainsides had reverted to a vivid moss-green.
The tour was scheduled to last ten days and take in four ice caps. They had left Reykjavík just over a week ago in specially modified vehicles. Their nights were spent at the best hotels in the south-west so that the Germans, a group of wealthy friends from the car manufacturing town of Wolfsburg, wouldn’t have to go without any of their creature comforts. Gourmet lunches on the ice caps were followed by good dinners back at their hotels in the evenings. During the day, they undertook hikes of a moderate length, with rest stops for refreshments. They had been unusually lucky with the weather: every day that September the sun had shone from a cloudless sky, and the Germans kept asking about global warming and the impact of the greenhouse effect on Iceland. The guide was fluent in German – she had studied literature at the University of Heidelberg – and the tour was conducted entirely in that language, apart from those two words in English: global warming.
She told them how the Icelandic climate had changed in recent years. The summers had become warmer with more hours of sunlight and – obligatory joke – no one was complaining. Gone were the old, unsettled summers; now you could almost rely on the good weather to last for days, even weeks at a time. The winters had become milder too, with lighter snowfall – though, on the minus side, this did nothing to diminish the gloom of the long dark nights. But the most striking change was to be seen in the glaciers, which were receding at an alarming rate. Snæfellsjökull was a good example: the ice-capped volcano, famous as the starting point for Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, was a shadow of its former self.
Now they were on the last glacier of their tour, Langjökull, which had also seen better days. In 1997 to ’98, she told them, it had lost a whole three metres in height, and recently its area had shrunk by 3.5 per cent. At guide school they’d taught her to trot out figures like these, including the usual spiel about ice caps making up 11 per cent of Iceland’s surface area and containing a volume of water equivalent to twenty-five years’ precipitation.
They had spent the previous night at Húsafell and set off for the glacier at eleven this morning. It was a very easy group; they were almost all fit and equipped with top-of-the-range walking boots and protective gear. There had been no awkward incidents, no one had fallen ill or complained or made a scene, and everyone seemed set on getting the most out of their trip. Earlier they had hiked along the edge of the glacier before picking their way onto the ice itself. The compacted snow crunched at every step and the surface was covered in trickling streams. She led the way, feeling the cold air rising against her face. There was quite a bit of traffic up here. Seeing all the jeeps and snowmobiles roaring over the ice, the Germans had asked her if glacier driving was a popular sport among Icelanders and she had answered non-committally. Although she was well prepared, they often caught her out with unexpected questions, like the one at breakfast: how many cheeses do you make in Iceland?
She had enrolled at guide school after tourism really began to take off. By then she had been unemployed for eight months. On top of that she had lost her flat, as she hadn’t been able to pay off her mortgage in the wake of the financial crash, and the man she was seeing had moved to Norway. He was a builder by trade and, finding more than enough work there, had declared that he was never coming back to this shitty little island now that a bunch of idiots had managed to bankrupt it. Then someone had mentioned that tourism was the next big thing. With the bottom falling out of the króna, Iceland had suddenly become an affordable destination. At guide school, they taught her that foreign visitors loved Iceland for the landscape, the pure air and the peace and quiet.
They’d said nothing about frozen corpses on glaciers.
The Germans gathered round, following her gaze to what appeared to be a human head, emerging from the ice.
‘What is it?’ a woman asked, moving closer.
‘Is it a man?’ asked another.
Though the face was almost covered by a thin layer of snow, they could see the nose, the eye sockets and most of the forehead. The rest of the head and body were buried in the ice.
‘What can have happened to him?’ a third member of the group wondered aloud. The guide recalled that he was a retired doctor.
‘Has he been there long?’ someone else asked.
‘It looks like it,’ said the doctor, kneeling beside the face. ‘He didn’t freeze to death yesterday.’
Carefully, using his bare hands, he brushed the snow away until the whole face was revealed.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ his wife warned.
‘It’s all right, I’m not doing any more than that.’
When the doctor straightened up and stepped back, they could all see the man’s face, looking as if it had been moulded from porcelain, so paper-thin that it would break at the slightest touch. There was no way of telling how long he had been there, as the ice had treated him kindly, preventing decomposition. He appeared to have been around thirty when he died. His face was broad across the cheeks, with a large mouth, strong teeth, and deep-set eyes above a handsome nose. His hair was thick and blond.
‘Shouldn’t you notify the police, dear?’ asked the doctor’s wife, turning to the guide.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said distractedly, unable to tear her eyes away from the face. ‘Of course. I’ll do that right now.’
She took out her phone, confident that there would be a signal. She was always careful to stick to areas with phone or radio reception, in case of accidents.
‘We’re not far from Geitlandsjökull,’ she explained to the emergency services, after describing what they had found. As she was speaking, her gaze fell on the flat-topped volcano from which the south-western flank of the glacier took its name. She had read when preparing for this trip that if the ice cap continued to shrink at the same rate, by the end of the century it would have almost entirely disappeared.
2
By the time he finally emerged from the sports bar into the driving snow, he was seriously drunk. He hadn’t seen his friend for at least an hour, so he must have gone home. As usual, they’d met up early to watch the football. It had been a good match and afterwards he’d got talking to some lads he didn’t know, while Ingi had lapsed into a gloomy silence. Ingi often got like that when he drank: just sat there, not saying a word.
He lowered his head, clutching his jacket tightly around his skinny frame, and set off into the blizzard. The snow immediately started settling on his clothes, and in no time at all he was freezing and cursing the fact he hadn’t put on his work overalls, which were thickly lined enough to protect him from anything the elements could throw at him. On winter mornings it could be hard to leave the warm hut for the exposed construction site, but two mugs of coffee, a cigarette and the blue overalls all helped. It wasn’t complicated. Simple pleasures – you just had to know how to appreciate them. Football and a cold beer. Coffee and a ciggie. And thick overalls in winter.
He moved quickly but unsteadily along the pavement, his thoughts as erratic as his footprints in the snow.
He’d thought the guy looked vaguely familiar as they sat chatting at the bar, but it had taken a while for the penny to drop. The lights were low and the guy had been wearing a baseball cap and kept his head down. They’d exchanged a few remarks about the game and discovered that they both supported the same team. In the end, unable to restrain himself, he’d started talking about Öskjuhlíd and asked the man straight out if it had been him he ran into there. Asked if he remembered that evening too.
‘No,’ the man said. But the glance he shot him from under his cap removed all doubt that it was him.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ he exclaimed, pleased and incredulous. ‘It was you! Don’t you remember me? I can’t believe it! Did the cops ever talk to you?’
Instead of answering, the man ducked his head even lower.
But he wouldn’t let go of the subject. He told the man how he’d gone to the police about it several years ago but they hadn’t taken any notice of him. The cops had received a million tip-offs and he’d only been a boy when it happened, so maybe it was –
‘Leave me alone,’ the man muttered.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ the man said angrily. ‘Just leave me alone!’ Then he got up and stamped out of the bar.
He’d been left sitting there, hardly able to get over the coincidence that it was the same guy. He was still marvelling at the fact when he staggered outside himself a few minutes later and headed for home. By the time he reached Lindargata, the snow was so impenetrable that he could barely make out the next street light as he hurried across the road, thinking that he would have to inform the police as soon as possible. Just as he was about to reach the other side, his befuddled senses registered that he was in danger. His surroundings were lit up by a sudden dazzling glare, and over the noise of the wind he heard the roar of an engine approaching at speed. The next moment he was flying through the air, an agonising pain in his side, then he crashed down head first onto the pavement that had been swept clear of snow by the storm.
The booming of the engine receded and everything grew quiet again, apart from the screaming of the wind. But the blizzard went on raging all around him, the stinging flakes pelting his exposed flesh and penetrating his jacket. He couldn’t move, his whole body was a mass of pain, his head worst of all.
He parted his lips to call for help but couldn’t emit a sound.
Time passed but he was no longer aware of it. He couldn’t feel the pain any more, or the cold. The alcohol had dulled his senses. His thoughts drifted back to the man in the sports bar, then even further back in time to the hot-water tanks on Öskjuhlíd hill, where he’d loved to play, and the incident he’d witnessed there as a boy.
He was absolutely sure. They’d met once before.
It had been the same man.
There was no doubt in his mind.
3
Konrád opened his eyes at the sound of his mobile phone ringing. He hadn’t been able to get to sleep, but that was nothing new. Pills, red wine, rather aimless meditation – nothing made any impression on his insomnia.
He couldn’t remember where he’d put his phone. Sometimes it was on the bedside table, sometimes in a trouser pocket. Once he’d lost it for several days, only to find it at last in the boot of his car.
He got out of bed, went into the sitting room, then followed the sound to the kitchen, where the phone was lying vibrating on the table. Outside, the autumn night was pitch-black.
‘Sorry, Konrád, I know I’ve woken you,’ whispered a female voice at the other end.
‘No, you haven’t.’
‘I think you should come over to the mortuary.’
‘Why are you whispering?’
‘Am I?’ The woman cleared her throat. Her name was Svanhildur and she was a pathologist at the National Hospital. ‘Haven’t you heard the news?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Konrád said, wide awake now. He had been going through some of his father’s old papers and this time his insomnia could partly be blamed on that.
‘They brought him in at around eight o’clock,’ Svanhildur said. ‘They’ve found him.’
‘Found him? Who? Sorry, who are you talking about?’
‘Some German tourists. On Langjökull. He was in the ice.’
‘On Langjökull?’
‘It’s Sigurvin, Konrád! Sigurvin’s turned up. They’ve found his body.’
‘Sigurvin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sigurvin! No, it … what are you talking about?’
‘After all these years, Konrád. It’s quite incredible. I thought you might want to see him.’
‘Is this some kind of joke?’
‘I know it’s hard to believe but it’s him. Beyond a doubt.’
Konrád was floored. Svanhildur’s words seemed to be coming from a long way off, as though from deep in some bizarre dream that had faded from his consciousness. They were words he’d never expected to hear. Not now. Not after so much time had passed. But, on another level, it felt as if he had always been expecting this phone call. Waiting for this news out of the distant past that continued to haunt him like a shadow. Yet now that the news had finally come, he was utterly thrown.
‘Konrád?’
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Sigurvin? They’ve found Sigurvin?’ He sank into a chair at the kitchen table.
‘Yes. It’s definitely him.’
‘German tourists, you say?’
‘On Langjökull. There were some experts on earlier, saying the glacier’s shrunk substantially since Sigurvin vanished. Don’t you ever listen to the news? It’s the greenhouse effect. I thought you might want to see him before everything kicks off tomorrow morning. The ice has preserved him uncannily well.’
Konrád was dazed.
‘Konrád?’
‘I’m still here.’
‘You won’t believe how good he looks.’
Konrád pulled on his clothes in a stupor. He threw a glance at the clock on his way out to the car: it was nearly three in the morning. He threaded his way through the empty streets, heading west towards the centre from his home in the suburb of Árbær, on the eastern edge of the city. Svanhildur had been at the National Hospital for more than thirty years. They’d known each other a long while, having worked on various cases together during his time as a detective in CID, and he was grateful to her now for the heads-up. As he drove, he thought about the glacier and Sigurvin and all the long years that had passed since his disappearance. They had dragged harbours, combed beaches, searched ditches, buildings, cars and volcanic fissures, but it had never crossed anyone’s mind to scour the country’s ice caps. Konrád thought back to all the people the police had interviewed over the course of the inquiry but couldn’t remember a single connection to glacier tours.
Copyright © 2017 by Arnaldur Indridason. English translation copyright © 2021 by Victoria Cribb
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