The Draining Lake - By Arnaldur Indridason Page 0,21

he could have been doing up at Kleifarvatn,' she said, glancing from one detective to the other. 'We never went there.'

They had not told her about the Soviet spying equipment or the smashed skull, only that a skeleton had been found where the lake had drained and that they were investigating persons reported missing during a specific period.

'Your car was found two days later outside the coach station,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'No one there recognised my partner from the descriptions,' the woman said. 'I had no photos of him. And he had none of me. We hadn't been together that long and we didn't own a camera. We never went away together. Isn't that when people mostly use cameras?'

'And at Christmas,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'Yes, at Christmas,' she agreed.

'What about his parents?'

'They'd died long before. He'd spent a lot of time abroad. He'd worked on merchant ships and lived in Britain and France too. He spoke with a slight accent, he'd been away that long. About thirty coaches left the station heading all over Iceland between the time he disappeared and when the car was found, but none of the drivers could say if he had been on board one. They didn't think so. The police were certain that someone would have noticed him if he'd been on a coach, but I know they were just trying to console me. I think they supposed he was on a bender in town and would turn up in the end. They said worried wives sometimes called the police when their husbands were out drinking.'

The woman fell silent.

'I don't think they investigated it very carefully,' she eventually said. 'I didn't feel they were particularly interested in the case.'

'Why do you think he took the car to the coach station?' Erlendur asked. He noticed Sigurdur Óli jotting down the remark about the police work.

'I haven't got the faintest idea.'

'Do you think someone else could have driven it there? To throw you off the track, or the police? To make people think he'd left town?'

'I don't know,' the woman said. 'Of course I wondered endlessly whether he had simply been killed, but I don't understand who was supposed to have done it and even less why. I just can't understand it.'

'It's often plain coincidence,' Erlendur said. 'There needn't always be an explanation. In Iceland there's rarely a real motive behind a murder. It's an accident or a snap decision, not premeditated and in most cases committed for no obvious reason.'

According to police reports, the man had gone on a short sales trip early that day and intended to go home afterwards. A dairy farmer just outside Reykjavík was interested in buying a tractor and he was planning to drop by to try to clinch the sale. The farmer said the man had never called. He had waited for him all day, but he had never showed up.

'Everything seems hunky-dory, then he makes himself disappear,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'What do you personally think happened?'

'He didn't make himself disappear,' the woman retorted. 'Why do you say that?'

'No, sorry,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'Of course not. He disappeared. Sorry.'

'I don't know,' the woman said. 'He could be a bit depressive at times, silent and closed. Perhaps if we'd had children . . . maybe it would all have turned out differently if we'd had children.'

They fell silent. Erlendur imagined the woman waiting outside the dairy shop, anxious and disappointed.

'Was he in contact with any embassies in Reykjavík at all?' Erlendur asked.

'Embassies?'

'Yes, the embassies,' Erlendur said. 'Did he have any connections with them, the Eastern European ones in particular?'

'Not at all,' the woman said. 'I don't follow . . . what do you mean?'

'He didn't know anyone from the embassies, work for them or that sort of thing?'

'No, certainly not, or at least not after I met him. Not that I knew of.'

'What kind of car did you have?' Erlendur asked. He could not remember the model from the files.

The woman pondered. These strange questions were confusing her.

'It was a Ford,' she said. 'I think it was called a Falcon.'

'From the case files, it doesn't look as if there were any clues to his disappearance in the car.'

'No, they couldn't find anything. One of the hubcaps had been stolen, but that was all.'

'In front of the coach station?' Sigurdur Óli asked.

'That's what they thought.'

'A hubcap?'

'Yes.'

'What happened to the car?'

'I sold it. I needed the money. I've never had much money.'

She remembered the licence plate and mechanically repeated the number to them. Sigurdur