The Darkness(6)
The victim’s name was Elena; she was an asylum seeker from Russia and had only been in Iceland four months. Perhaps one reason Hulda found it so hard to let the matter lie was the speed at which everyone else had forgotten about Elena. She had come to a foreign country in search of refuge and found only a watery grave. And nobody cared. Hulda knew that, if she didn’t seize this last chance to get to the bottom of the mystery, no one else would ever bother. Elena’s story would pass into oblivion: she’d simply be the girl who came to Iceland and died.
VI
Hulda drove south out of Reykjavík, following what used to be her daily commute when they lived in their little house down by the sea on álftanes. She hadn’t been out there for years, not since the house was sold and she made the decision never to go back. The peninsula now appeared, low and green, across the bay to her right. álftanes always used to feel semi-rural, its own little world, set apart from the urban sprawl of Reykjavík, but a whole new neighbourhood had sprung up there since her day.
As álftanes dropped behind, taking her old life with it, she focused on her destination, the small town of Njardvík, which lay close to Keflavík airport on the Reykjanes peninsula. She was going to visit the asylum-seekers’ hostel where, according to the case file, Elena had been living at the time of her death.
Hulda could have taken the rest of the day off and gone home. In spite of the rain, there was a hint of spring in the air. Now that May was here, you really began to notice how late it got dark, the light evenings holding out a promise of the midnight sun. It was a wonderful, life-affirming time of year, the darkness of the northern winter gradually receding, the evenings growing almost imperceptibly brighter every day until the middle of June, when the night was banished altogether. A vivid memory came back to her of those spectacular summer nights at their old place on álftanes. Out in their back garden, where there was room to really breathe, you could watch the sun dipping below the sea while the sky flamed orange and red and the shore birds piped all night in the soft afterglow. In a cramped flat in a city apartment block, all the seasons seemed the same, the days merging in a monotonous blur and time slipping away with bewildering speed.
As if summer wasn’t brief enough anyway. At its very height, in July, the darkness would begin its insidious return, creeping back into the lives of the islanders, first as no more than a hint of dusk, then by August, one of Hulda’s least favourite months, the nights would have closed in again, a reminder that winter was at hand.
No, there could be no question of going home now, not after Magnús had dropped his bombshell. Cooped up between the four walls of her flat, she would go stir crazy, with nothing to distract her from the soul-destroying prospect of giving up work. Retirement was something Hulda had never mentally prepared herself for. It had been merely a date, a year, an age, all purely hypothetical. Until today, when it had suddenly become cold, hard fact.
Her thoughts snapped back to the present. She was grateful for the stretches of dual carriageway where she could stick to the right-hand lane and allow the more impatient drivers to zip by. She drove an eighties Skoda, a relic of the times when most Icelanders drove around in affordable Eastern European cars – Soviet or Czech models, usually – from the countries with which Iceland traded fish. It was a bright-green, two-door model which had never had much acceleration and demanded an increasing amount of maintenance these days. Although practical, Hulda was no mechanic, but luckily she knew a man who lived for the chance to tinker with old cars and he kept the faithful Skoda on the road. For now.
It was a long time since Hulda had last driven south along this coast. She rarely had any need to go out to the Reykjanes peninsula. Even the international airport, the main draw in these parts, held little attraction for her. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy foreign travel – chance would be a fine thing – but her finances put the kibosh on any plans of that sort. Her police salary didn’t stretch to overseas holidays, not once she had covered her daily outgoings. In the old days, such luxuries had been comfortably within reach. Her husband had run his own investment firm, with what she’d naively assumed to be a very respectable turnover, so it had come as a shock, after his sudden death, to learn that their financial security had been an illusion. Once the lawyers had unravelled his affairs, the inherited debts had turned out to exceed their assets. The upshot was that she’d had to sell their beautiful house and start again, almost from scratch, in middle age. She’d left the financial side of things entirely to her husband and never put aside any savings for herself, so it had proved far from easy to learn to live within her means on her new, tight budget. She had initially bought a small flat, which she had subsequently sold, and now she lived in a slightly larger flat in an apartment block. By incredible bad luck, she had upgraded to this place with an index-linked mortgage on the eve of the banking collapse and was now stuck with a massive debt and eye-wateringly high monthly repayments.
Hulda had always found the drive to the airport bleak and rather dispiriting. The dark lava-fields extended on either side, empty, windswept and flat, broken only by the conical form of Keilir and other low mountains to the south, and merging into the treacherous grey sea to the north. It was a dangerous area, full of hidden volcanic craters and clouds of steam, scarred by the violent forces at work beneath the earth’s crust, here, where Iceland straddled the divide between two continental plates. The mountains were popular with hikers – Hulda had climbed quite a few of them herself – but otherwise this was a landscape better viewed from a distance than experienced on foot; anyone venturing into the lava-fields could so easily get injured and simply disappear.