“Why the talk of the sea?”

“Some people thought they’d seen a woman heading towards the beach where Tryggvagata ends today. She was wearing a coat like my sister’s. Similar height. That was all.”

“What did they argue about?”

“Some petty matter. To do with the wedding. The preparations. Or at least that’s what Benjamin said.”

“You don’t think it was something else?”

“I have no idea.”

“And you don’t think it possible that it’s her skeleton we found on the hill?”

“Out of the question, yes. I have nothing to base that claim on, of course, and I can’t prove it, but I find it just so far-fetched. I simply can’t conceive of it.”

“Do you know anything about the tenants in Benjamin’s chalet in Grafarholt? Maybe people who were there during the war? Possibly a family of five, a couple with three children. Does that ring a bell?”

“No. But I know people lived in his chalet all throughout the war. Because of the housing shortage.”

“Do you have a keepsake from your sister, such as a lock of hair? In a locket maybe?”

“No, but Benjamin had a lock of her hair. I saw her cut it off for him. He asked her for a memento one summer when my sister went up north to Fljot for a couple of weeks to visit some relatives.”

When Elinborg got into her car she phoned Sigurdur Oli. He was on his way out of Benjamin’s cellar after a long, boring day, and she told him to keep his eyes open for a lock of hair from Benjamin’s fiancee. It might be inside a pretty locket, she said. She heard Sigurdur Oli groan.

“Come on,” Elinborg said. “We can prove whether it’s her if we find the lock of hair. It’s as simple as that.”

She rang off and was about to drive away when she had a sudden thought and switched off the engine. After pondering for a moment, nervously biting her lower lip, she decided to act.

When Bara answered the door she was surprised to see Elinborg again.

“Did you forget something? she asked.

“No, just one question,” Elinborg said awkwardly. “Then I’ll leave.”

“Well, what is it?” Bara said impatiently.

“You said your sister was wearing a coat the day she went missing.”

“So?”

“What sort of coat was it?”

“What sort? Just an ordinary coat that my mother gave her.”

“I mean, what colour? Do you know?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m curious,” Elinborg said, not wanting to go into explanations.

“I don’t remember.”

“No, of course not,” Elinborg said. “I understand. Thank you and sorry for bothering you.”

“But my mother said it was green.”

So many things changed during those strange years.

Tomas had stopped wetting the bed. Stopped enraging his father and in some way which eluded Simon, Grimur had started showing the younger boy more attention. He thought Grimur might have changed after the troops arrived. Or maybe Tomas was changing.

Simon’s mother never talked about the Gasworks which Grimur had teased her about so much, so eventually he got bored with it. You little bastard, he used to say, and called her Gashead and talked about the big gas tank and the orgy in it the night that the Earth was supposed to perish, smashed to smithereens in a collision with a comet. Although he understood little of what his father was saying, Simon noticed that it upset his mother. Simon knew that his words hurt her as much as when he beat her up.

Once when he went to town with his father they walked past the Gasworks and Grimur pointed to the big tank, laughing, saying that was where his mother came from. Then he laughed even more. The Gasworks was one of the largest buildings in Reykjavik and Simon found it disturbing. He decided to ask his mother about the building and the big gas tank that aroused his curiosity.

“Don’t listen to the nonsense he talks,” she said. “You ought to know by now the way he rants and raves. You shouldn’t believe a word he says. Not a word.”

“What happened at the Gasworks?”

“As far as I know, nothing. He’s making it all up. I don’t know where he got that story from.”

“But where are your mum and dad?”

She looked at her son in silence. She had wrestled with this question all her life and now her son had innocently put it to her and she was at a loss as to what to tell him. She had never known her parents. When she was younger she had asked about them, but never made any headway. Her first memory was of being in a household full of children in Reykjavik, and as she grew up she was told that she was no one’s sister and no one’s daughter; the council paid for her to be there. She mulled over those words, but did not find out what they meant until much later. One day she was taken from the home and went to live with an elderly couple as a kind of domestic servant, and when she reached adulthood she went to work for the merchant. That was her entire life before she met Grimur. She missed not having parents or a place to call home, a family with cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents and siblings, and in between girlhood and womanhood she went through a phase of incessantly puzzling over who she was and who her parents were. She did not know where to look for the answers.

She imagined they had been killed in an accident. This was her consolation, because she could not bear the thought that they had left her, their child. She fantasised they had saved her life and died in the process. Even sacrificed their lives for her. She always saw them in that light. As heroes battling for their lives and hers. She could not conceive of her parents being alive. For her, that was unthinkable.

When she met the fisherman, Mikkelina’s father, she enlisted him to help find the answer, and they called at a succession of offices without learning anything about her, except that she was an orphan; her parents’ names were missing from her entry in the national register. She was described as an orphan. Her birth certificate could not be located. She and the fisherman called on the family where she lived with all the other children, and they talked to the woman who had been her foster mother as far back as she could remember, but she had no answers either. “They paid for you,” she said. “We needed the money.” She had never enquired into the girl’s background.

She had long given up wondering about her parents by the time Grimur came home claiming to have discovered who they were and how she came into the world, and she saw the morbid pleasure on his face when he talked about the orgy in the gas tank.

All these thoughts passed through her mind as she looked at Simon, and for a moment she seemed to be on the brink of telling him something important before suddenly she told him to stop asking those endless questions.

War was raging in much of the world and it had reached all the way up to the other side of the hill where British occupying forces had begun erecting buildings shaped like loaves of bread, which they called barracks. Simon did not understand the word. Inside the barracks there was supposed to be something with another incomprehensible name. A depot.

Sometimes he ran over the hill with Tomas to watch the soldiers. They had transported timber up the hill, roofing beams, corrugated iron and fencing, rolls of barbed wire, bags of cement, a cement mixer and a bulldozer to clear the ground for the barracks. And they built the bunker overlooking Grafarvogur, and one day the brothers saw the British bringing a huge cannon up the hill. The cannon was installed in the bunker with its gigantic barrel sticking several metres out through a slit, ready to blow the enemy to pieces. They were defending Iceland from the Germans, who had started the war and killed everyone they got their hands on, even little boys like Simon and Tomas.

The soldiers erected the fencing around what turned out to be eight barracks in total, which went up in no time at all, and they put up a gate and signs in Icelandic saying that unauthorised access was strictly prohibited. A soldier with a rifle was always on guard in a sentry post at the gate. The soldiers ignored the boys, who made sure to keep a safe distance. When the weather was fine Simon and Tomas carried their sister over the hill, put her down on the moss and let her see what the soldiers were building and showed her the barrel projecting from the bunker. Mikkelina lay looking at everything around her, but was silent and contemplative, and Simon had the feeling that she was scared of what she saw. The soldiers and the big cannon.