The Darkness(45)

VIII


He climbed into the bunk directly above hers. Though the proximity made her deeply uncomfortable, there wasn’t much she could do about it.

She had placed one of the candles on the chair beside the bed to give herself a little light. Their head torches were lying on the table where he had put them after switching them off, insisting that they needed to spare the batteries. She struggled into her sleeping bag, no easy task when bundled up in a thick jumper and woollen underwear, and wriggled down as far as she could. Then she blew out the candle, and the blackness closed in, relieved only, after a moment, by the faint grey outlines of the windows.

God, she was so cold, so terribly cold. The chill seemed to spread through her whole body. She tried to close the neck of her sleeping bag, clutching it tightly around her so the heat wouldn’t escape, and finally resorted to tucking her head inside as well, closing the gap until there was only a tiny opening for her nose and mouth. Yet even then she couldn’t get warm.

Normally, she was quick to drop off, but not here, in these alien surroundings. She lay, waiting for sleep to come, trying in vain to conquer her sense of suffocation.





IX


Ten minutes after leaving Keflavík, they took the turn-off to Vatnsleysustr?nd.

‘Just five minutes further along the coast,’ said ólíver, heaving a sigh. ‘And after that you’ll have a bit of a hike down to the sea, if you’re sure you can be bothered.’

‘We’ll have a hike, you mean,’ said Hulda, as if nothing could be more natural. ‘You’re coming with me to show me the spot.’

At this, ólíver gave a resigned nod.

He pulled up beside a track that looked as if it led down to the shore. It had been blocked off with a pile of rocks. ‘This is as far as we can go by car,’ he announced. ‘There’s no way round the barrier.’

The cove was further away than Hulda had expected, and the weather was lousy, too. Was she really going to put herself through this ordeal?

‘How long will it take us to walk there?’ she asked doubtfully.

ólíver gave her a measuring look, his expression betraying what he was thinking: how fast could an old woman like her be expected to move?

‘Quarter of an hour either way, give or take,’ he guessed, then, with a glance at his watch, added: ‘Look, I really haven’t got time for this and, anyway, it’s not like there’s anything to see down there.’

It was his reaction that tipped the scales. He was annoying her so much – though, in fairness, that might be partly the fault of her hangover – that she decided she was damn well going to drag him all the way down to the sea.

‘We’ll just have to make the best of it,’ she said briskly, getting out of the car and setting off down the track. A glance over her shoulder revealed that ólíver was following, albeit reluctantly. It was still drizzling and the wind was gusting hard here by the coast, but she found the effect invigorating. With any luck, it would blow away the cobwebs and, with them, the remnants of her headache. Being close to the sea improved her mood, too: she could feel her tension easing with every step. They trudged along the rough stony track, heads down into the wind, surrounded on either side by the moss-carpeted lava-field, which possessed its own brand of desolate beauty. Apart from the odd bird flying overhead, she and ólíver were the only moving figures in the landscape. You’d never guess that there were farms not far off, since this area was sufficiently out of the way that you could be quite alone here. As she walked, Hulda wondered what in the world Elena had been doing in such a lonely spot: had she come here of her own accord and died by accident? Had she taken her own life, or had she been lured here and murdered by some person unknown?

‘You didn’t come across a vehicle out here, did you?’ Hulda asked, raising her voice to be heard over the wind.

‘What? No,’ grunted ólíver, his hunched shoulders and sour expression conveying the message that he had more important things to take care of than trekking down to the shore with some old bag from Reykjavík CID.

They must be more than twenty kilometres from the hostel in Njardvík, Hulda reflected: not what you would call within easy walking distance. In this, as in other respects, Alexander’s report had been deficient, failing to pinpoint exactly where the body had been found. Someone must have given Elena a lift – it stood to reason. And surely it was significant that the final stretch down to the sea was impassable to vehicles, though Alexander had omitted that detail, too.

‘Was this track closed to traffic recently?’ Hulda asked.

‘Oh, no, that happened ages ago. No one lives here now. There’s nothing out this way but a couple of derelict buildings.’

‘So it’s unlikely that someone would have lugged a dead body down to the beach?’

‘Are you crazy? She must have died in the cove. If you ask me, it was an accident or suicide. You’re wasting your time trying to solve a crime that was never committed,’ he added bluntly. ‘There are more than enough urgent cases to be getting on with.’

The scenery was bleak and inhospitable; only the odd hardy plant clinging on here and there, and a lone, skeletal tree.

It didn’t take them long to reach the buildings, which were unmistakeably derelict. One, a two-storey house, was nothing more than a hollow shell: its twin-gabled roof still intact but the grey concrete blocks of its walls stripped bare by the elements, its windows and doors gaping holes so you could see right through it. The other house was a smaller, single-storey affair, with a red roof and peeling white paint on its walls. Once they were beside them, Hulda paused to take stock of their surroundings, noticing that they weren’t overlooked by any human habitation. Even the police car parked up by the road was out of sight. More than ever, she felt convinced that Elena had been murdered in this godforsaken spot, with no witnesses. What on earth were you doing out here, Elena? she asked herself again. And who were you with?