2012
When the phone rang, Chet Baker was on the record player, quite literally, in the form of an old vinyl LP from Helgi’s father’s collection.
The collection was full of priceless gems, and Helgi treated the records with the same care as he did the old books, so there wasn’t a scratch to be seen on any of them.
Aníta was due round any minute. She was in town with friends and had stayed out longer than planned, giving Helgi a welcome opportunity to tidy up the flat and finish his book.
He immediately had a horrible feeling that it was Bergthóra calling him.
For a while, he’d kidded himself that she had come to terms with the situation, that their relationship was over and would never be reignited.
He had hoped she would go into rehab, but in reality he hadn’t a clue how she was doing.
He didn’t follow her on social media or ask for news of her from their tiny handful of mutual friends.
The fact was, he didn’t care what happened to her, he’d rather forget she had ever existed, only now she had forced her way back into his life.
He reached for his phone; the number wasn’t one he recognized.
He could feel his dread mounting, the veins throbbing in his head. The ringing went on and on, each ring seeming louder and more importunate than the last, until his heart was racing and he could feel sweat breaking out all over his body. Hell .
He answered anyway.
A good police officer is always on duty , his first boss in the police used to say.
‘Hello.’
‘Is that Helgi?’
A woman’s voice, but not Bergthóra’s. He caught his breath.
‘Helgi, can you hear me? It’s Rut.’
He breathed a sigh of relief.
Elín must have turned up, or her publisher would hardly be disturbing him on a Saturday evening.
‘Yes, it is. Good to hear from you, Rut. How are you? Is there any news?’
‘Not as such, no.’
He was simultaneously disappointed but pleased with this answer. It was a disappointment that Elín was still missing, but, on the other hand, this case could be his chance to really shine in his job.
‘You haven’t heard from Elín, then?’
‘No, I haven’t. Have you?’
‘No, the investigation is still in its early stages, but don’t worry, everything’s going in the right direction.’
‘Yes, I see.’ She allowed a pause to develop. ‘I’ve been talking to my husband, and he reminded me… or, well… I don’t want to complicate things unnecessarily, it was all a long time ago, but…’
‘Fire away. You never know what details might put us on the trail, Rut.’
In that instant, the doorbell rang. He hadn’t given Aníta a key to the flat yet; somehow the subject had never come up, but it could only be a matter of days before he did. Unless it was too big a step for them at this stage.
Again, he heard the echo of his father’s voice: good things come to those who wait…
‘Just hang on a sec,’ he said to Rut, then got up and opened the front door.
Aníta smiled at him, and he smiled back, indicating the phone. She followed him through to the sitting room.
‘Sorry, what were you saying, Rut?’
‘I don’t suppose this will help, but the thing is that I’ve known Elín for nearly half a century, as you’re aware. And she has occasionally disappeared like this before.’
‘What?’
Why the hell hadn’t Rut mentioned this when they met?
‘Yes, three times, to be exact, by my calculation.’
‘What are you telling me? That she’s done this three times before?’
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Aníta’s gaze widen in surprise.
‘Yes, or rather no,’ Rut said. ‘You’re assuming the same thing has happened this time. But that’s not necessarily true…’
‘Fill me in briefly about what happened, Rut. We can talk about it in more detail tomorrow.’
‘Yes, all right.’ Another pause. ‘The first time was when she dropped out of university, in the middle of winter, in her fourth year, and left town. She didn’t tell anyone what she was doing and was uncontactable for months.
She just wrote to us – me, Thor and Lovísa – and her parents – explaining that she was trying to find the right direction in life, or words to that effect.
And that we weren’t to worry about her, though of course we were all worried.
But I knew she’d manage. She always lands on her feet, she’s the resilient type, though she has that artistic temperament, so you can never really predict what she’s going to do next. ’
‘Do we know what she was up to?’
‘Yes, we do now, sort of… She moved to ísafjordur and took a teaching job. Completely out of the blue. She didn’t have any family there, didn’t know a soul, but got a job teaching young children at the local school.
When she came back to Reykjavík, she announced that she was going to become a teacher, that this was where her future lay. ’
‘Had something happened, some sort of shock or crisis that might have explained her behaviour at the time?’
‘No, on the contrary. She was studying law, doing well, her life proceeding as normal, then quite without warning she decided the law wasn’t for her.
I’ve still got her letters; I was rereading them earlier.
Rut, I’ve got to learn how to stand on my own two feet at some point.
You, Thor and Lovísa can’t always be there to pick up the pieces.
I think she was happy in ísafjordur, though she never went back there.
She has nice things to say about the town, though she’s chosen to live close to Reykjavík ever since. ’
‘You said three times? Has she vanished like this three times in the past?’
‘Sorry, perhaps I was putting it a bit over-dramatically, but… yes, it’s happened three times that I’m aware of.
We have to bear in mind, though, that she’s always been single, hardly ever had a boyfriend, let alone anything more serious – so perhaps it doesn’t seem like such a big deal to her to go away for a while without alerting her friends.
Some people find it easy to be alone; others don’t. ’
‘Right,’ Helgi said, taking a deep breath.
‘She has fewer commitments than most people, and maybe she relishes her freedom.’
‘Rut, could you tell me about the other two occasions?’
‘Yes, of course. I remember that it happened again when a childhood friend of hers died very suddenly; I think she needed a bit of time to get over it, understandably. She was away for a week, if my memory’s correct.
She’d gone to a holiday cabin belonging to her union, the Teacher’s Union.
It was a long time ago, back in the days when it was easier to drop out of circulation for a while.
Anyway, you never quite know with these artistic types… ’
‘And the third time?’
‘When she wrote her first book, White Calm . Do you remember it?’
‘Yes, I’ve read it. Didn’t it come out in 1984?’
‘Yes, that’s right. We lost her for two weeks – she’d gone to a holiday cabin that time as well, to finish the manuscript.
She hadn’t told anyone she was writing a novel; it came out of nowhere.
But this was at the height of summer, so we weren’t too worried.
I mean, she didn’t have any particular duty to keep us informed of her movements.
Then she turned up on my doorstep one morning – I still remember that it was a sunny day and a redwing had made its nest by our front door, it was a beautiful summer…
anyway, sorry, I’m digressing, but she was holding the manuscript, a stack of handwritten pages, and presented it to me, saying: Is this the sort of thing you might consider publishing? That’s how she put it.’
‘Do you think that could be the situation now – that she’s just gone on, well, some kind of break?’
‘You know, I really, really hope so. But I’m worried. I don’t know why.’
‘She’s not finishing a book, we can be fairly confident of that,’ Helgi said. ‘And no one has died – have they?’
‘Sorry?’
‘No one’s died recently? A death that could have hit her hard?’
‘Oh. No, I don’t think so. I’d have known. We share most of our friends.’
‘And it’s a long time since it last happened, obviously. Nearly thirty years.’
‘Exactly. I suppose that’s the point. Why on earth would she play that game again now, at seventy? No, it’s incomprehensible.’
Helgi went to the record player and turned over the Chet Baker record, almost without being aware he was doing it.
‘Let’s hope for the best, Rut,’ he said after a moment, glancing at Aníta, who smiled at him again. She was never impatient, not like Bergthóra. ‘Can I talk to you tomorrow, Rut? Let’s sleep on this, and, needless to say, we hope she’ll turn up very soon.’
‘Yes. You’ll find her, won’t you? You’ll find her for me.’
‘Yes, you can depend on that,’ he answered – a little hesitantly, though.
‘Sorry, I sometimes feel I never get any time off,’ he said to Aníta once he had ended the call.
‘Couldn’t she have thrown herself into the sea?’ Aníta asked.
Helgi was taken aback by the question.
‘Elín? What makes you think that?’
Aníta hesitated, then said: ‘It just slipped out. You see, my great-uncle, my grandfather’s brother, went missing years ago, and in the end they discovered that he’d drowned himself in the sea. He was heavily in debt and I don’t know what else. It was all terribly sad.’
It occurred to Helgi that this was the problem.
Whoever he discussed the case with would come up with their own explanation, based on experience, news stories or fictional accounts.
Because that’s how people’s minds worked; indirect, tenuous connections giving rise to theories.
It was impossible to approach a case – any case – with complete objectivity.
There was no such thing as a blank slate.
Helgi was now forced to confront the preconceptions that he himself had unwittingly brought to the case. In the first place, he had immediately thought of Hulda. After all, he sat in her office every day.
Of course, he wasn’t getting his hopes up that the key to Elín’s disappearance could be found in Hulda’s – the world didn’t work that way – but tomorrow morning he meant to get in touch with Pétur, the man Hulda had been seeing.
Having a chat with him would break up the routine, get Helgi’s mind working, and perhaps bring him one step closer to working out what had become of his predecessor.
I fall in love too easily , he heard Chet Baker sing.
Helgi looked at Aníta.
‘I finished that book earlier.’ He indicated the copy of Cicely Disappears . ‘It was a good read.’
Aníta shrugged, as if she didn’t really care but was nevertheless pleased that Helgi wanted to share this fact with her. It was all so effortless, their communication, everything they had to say, both spoken and unspoken.
‘I ordered pizza on my way home,’ she said, almost proudly. ‘I thought it was a good idea. Don’t you agree?’
He settled down on the sofa, the missing author suddenly relegated to the back of his mind. Hulda hovered like a ghost in the background, a stranger he had never even met. Now Aníta was the be all and end all, and work could wait until tomorrow.
‘Would you mind coming over here?’ he asked.
‘What do you think?’
She snuggled up to him, like an anchor that prevented him from drifting out to sea, into the infinite void.