It was decided that Erlendur, Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg would handle the Bones Mystery, as the media was calling it, by themselves. The CID couldn’t afford to put more detectives onto what was not a priority case. An extensive narcotics investigation was in full swing, using up a great deal of time and manpower, and the department could not deploy any more people on historical research, as their boss Hrolfur put it. No one was sure yet that it was even a criminal case at all.

Erlendur dropped in at the hospital early the next morning on his way to work, and sat by his daughter’s bedside for two hours. Her condition was stable. There was no sign of her mother. For a long while he sat in silence, watching his daughter’s thin, bony face, and thought back. Tried to recall the time he’d spent with his daughter when she was small. Eva Lind had just turned two when her parents separated, and he remembered her sleeping between them in their bed. Refusing to sleep in her cot, even though, because they only had a small flat with that single bedroom, a sitting room and kitchen, it was in their bedroom. She climbed out of hers, flopped into the double bed and snuggled up between them.

He remembered her standing by the door of his flat, well into her teens by then, after she had tracked down her father. Halldora flatly refused to allow him to see the children. Whenever he tried to arrange to meet them she would hurl abuse at him and he felt that every word she said was the absolute truth. Gradually he stopped calling them. He had not seen Eva Lind for all that time and then suddenly there she was, standing in his doorway. Her expression looked familiar. Her facial features were from his side of the family.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” she said after he had taken a long stare at her. She was wearing a black leather jacket, tattered jeans and black lipstick. Her nails were painted black. She was smoking, exhaling through her nose.

There was still a teenage look about her face, almost pristine.

He dithered. Caught unawares. Then invited her inside.

“Mum threw a wobbler when I said I was coming to see you,” she said as she walked past him, trailing smoke, and slammed herself down in his armchair. “Called you a loser. Always says that. To me and Sindri. ‘A fucking loser, that father of yours.’ And then: ‘You’re just like him, fucking losers.’”

Eva Lind laughed. She searched for an ashtray to put out her cigarette, but he took the butt and stubbed it out for her.

“Why…” he began, but did not manage to finish the sentence.

“I just wanted to see you,” she said. “Just wanted to see what the hell you look like.”

“And what do I look like?” he asked.

She looked at him.

“Like a loser,” she said.

“So we’re not that different,” he said.

She stared at him for a long time and he thought he detected a smile.

When Erlendur arrived at the office, Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli sat down with him and told him how they had learned nothing more from the present owners of Robert’s chalet. As the new owners put it, they had never noticed any crooked woman anywhere on the hill. Robert’s wife had died ten years before. They had two children. One of them, the son, died around the same time at the age of 60, and the other, a woman of 70, was waiting for Elinborg to call on her.

“And what about Robert, will we get anything more out of him?” Erlendur asked.

“Robert passed away last night,” Elinborg said with a trace of guilt in her voice. “He’d had enough of life. Seriously. I think he wanted to call it a day. A miserable old vegetable. That’s what he said. God, I’d hate to waste away in hospital like that.”

“He wrote a few words in a notebook just before he died,” Sigurdur Oli said. “She killed me.”

“Aiee, that sense of humour,” groaned Elinborg.

“You don’t need to see any more of him today,” Erlendur said, nodding in Sigurdur Oli’s direction. “I’m going to send him to Benjamin’s cellar to dig out some clues.”

“What do you expect to find there anyway?” Sigurdur Oli said, the grin on his face turning sour.

“He must have written something down if he rented out his chalet. No question of it. We need the names of the people who lived there. The National Statistics Office doesn’t seem likely to find them for us. Once we have the names we can check the missing persons register and whether any of these people are alive. And we need an analysis to determine the sex and age as soon as the skeleton is fully uncovered.”

“Robert mentioned three children,” Elinborg said. “At least one of them must still be alive.”

“Well, this is what we’ve got to go on,” Erlendur said. “And it’s not much: a family of five lived in a chalet in Grafarholt, a couple with three children, at some time before, during or after the war. They are the only people we know to have lived in the house, but others could have been there too. It doesn’t look as though they were registered as living there. So for now we can assume that one of them is buried there, or someone connected with them. And someone connected with them, the lady Robert remembered, used to go up there…”

“Often and later and was crooked,” Elinborg finished the sentence for him. “Could crooked mean she was lame?”

“Wouldn’t he have written ‘lame’ then?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“What happened to that house?” Elinborg asked. “There’s no sign of it on the hill.”

“Maybe you’ll find that out for us in Benjamin’s cellar or from his niece,” Erlendur said to Sigurdur Oli. “I clean forgot to ask.”

“All we need is the names of the residents and then to check them against the list of missing persons from that time, and it’s all sewn up. Isn’t that obvious?” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Not necessarily,” Erlendur said.

“Why not?”

“You’re only talking about the people who were reported missing.”

“Who else that went missing should I be talking about?”

“The disappearances that go unreported. You can’t be sure that everyone tells the police when someone disappears from their lives. Someone moves to the countryside and is never seen again. Someone moves abroad and is never seen again. Someone flees the country and is slowly forgotten. And then there are travellers who freeze to death. If we have a list of people who were reported to have got lost and died in the area at that time, we ought to examine that too.”

“I think we can all agree that it’s not that sort of case,” Sigurdur Oli said in an authoritative tone that was beginning to get on Erlendur’s nerves. “It’s out of the question that this man, or whoever it is lying there, froze to death. It was a wilful act. Someone buried him.”

“That’s precisely what I mean,” said Erlendur, who was a walking encyclopaedia about ordeals in the wilderness. “Someone sets off from a farm, say. It’s the middle of winter and the weather forecast is bad. Everyone tries to dissuade him. He ignores their advice, convinced he’ll make it. The strangest thing about stories of people who freeze to death is that they never listen to advice. It’s as if death lures them. They seem to be doomed. As if they want to challenge their fate. Anyway. This man thinks he’ll succeed. Except when the storm breaks, it’s much worse than he could have imagined. He loses his bearings. Gets lost. In the end he gets covered over in a snowdrift and freezes to death. By then he’s miles off the beaten track. That’s why the body’s never found. He’s given up for lost.”

Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli exchanged glances, uncertain of what Erlendur was driving at.

“That’s a typical Icelandic missing person scenario and we can explain it and understand it because we live in this country and know how the weather suddenly turns bad and how the story of that man repeats itself at regular intervals without anyone questioning it. That’s Iceland, people think, and shake their heads. Of course, it was a lot more common in the old days when almost everyone travelled on foot. Whole series of books have been written about it; I’m not the only one who’s interested in the subject. Modes of travel have only really changed over the past 60 to 70 years. People used to go missing and although you could never reconcile yourself to it, you understood their fate. There were rarely grounds for treating such disappearances as police or criminal matters.”