The Draining Lake - By Arnaldur Indridason Page 0,13

shelves. He rarely had visitors and was reluctant to let Valgerdur call on him. She insisted, saying that she wanted to see how he lived. Eva Lind had called his apartment a hole that he crawled into to hide.

'Look at all those books,' Valgerdur said, standing in his living room. 'Have you read them all?'

'Most of them,' Erlendur said. 'Do you want some coffee? I bought some Danish pastries.'

She went over to the bookcase and ran her finger along the spines, browsed through a few titles and took one book off the shelf.

'Are these about ordeals and dangerous highland voyages?' she asked.

She had been quick to notice that Erlendur took a particular interest in missing persons and that he read whole series of accounts of people who had got lost and disappeared in the wilds of Iceland. He had told her what he had told no one else apart from Eva Lind, that his brother had died at the age of eight up in the highlands in eastern Iceland at the beginning of winter, when Erlendur was ten. There were three of them, the two boys and their father. Erlendur and his father found their way home safely, but his brother froze to death and his body was never found.

'You told me once that there was an account of you and your brother in one of these books,' Valgerdur said.

'Yes,' Erlendur said.

'Would you mind showing it to me?'

'I will,' Erlendur said, hesitantly. 'Later. Not now. I'll show you it later.'

Valgerdur stood up when he entered the restaurant and they greeted each other with their customary handshake. Erlendur was unsure what kind of a relationship this was but he liked it. Even after meeting regularly for almost half a year they had not slept together. At least their relationship was not a sexual one. They sat and talked about various aspects of their lives.

'Why haven't you left him?' he asked when they had eaten and drunk coffee and liqueur and talked about Eva Lind and Sindri and her sons and work. She repeatedly asked him about the skeleton in Kleifarvatn but there was little that he could tell her. Only that the police were talking to people whose loved ones had gone missing during a specific period around 1970.

Just before Christmas, Valgerdur had found out that her husband had been having an affair for the past two years. She already knew about an earlier incident which was not as 'serious', as he put it. She told him that she was going to leave him. He broke off the affair at once and nothing had happened since then.

'Valgerdur . . . ?' Erlendur began.

'You saw Eva Lind at her rehab, then,' she said hurriedly, as if sensing what would come next.

'Yes, I saw her.'

'Did she remember anything about being arrested?'

'No, I don't think she remembers being arrested. We didn't discuss it.'

'Poor girl.'

'Are you going to carry on with him?' Erlendur asked.

Valgerdur sipped her liqueur.

'It's so difficult,' she said.

'Is it?'

'I'm not prepared to put an end to it,' she said, looking into Erlendur's eyes. 'But I don't want to let go of you, either.'

When Erlendur went home that evening, Sindri Snaer was lying on the sofa, smoking and watching television. He nodded to his father and kept watching the programme. As far as Erlendur could see it was a cartoon. He had given his son a key to the flat and could expect him at any time, even though he had not agreed to let him stay.

'Would you mind switching that off?' he said as he took off his coat.

'I couldn't find the remote,' he said. 'Isn't this telly prehistoric?'

'It's only twenty years old or so,' Erlendur said. 'I don't use it much.'

'Eva phoned me today,' Sindri said, stubbing out his cigarette. 'Was it some friend of yours who arrested her?'

'Sigurdur Óli. She hit him. With a hammer. Tried to knock him out, but caught him on the shoulder instead. He wanted to charge her with assault and resisting arrest.'

'So you made a deal that she'd go into rehab instead.'

'She's never wanted therapy. Sigurdur Óli dropped the charges for my sake and she went into rehab.'

A dealer called Eddi had been involved in a drugs case and Sigurdur Óli and two other detectives had tracked him down to a den just up from Hlemmur bus station, close to the police station on Hverfisgata. Someone who knew Eddi had phoned the police. The only resistance they'd met had been from Eva Lind. She was