“I didn’t know about it, and the carpenters certainly wouldn’t have seen those bones. Is it an ancient grave then?” Jon asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Erlendur said, unwilling to give any further information. “Do you know anything about that land over there to the east?” he asked, pointing towards the redcurrant bushes.

“All I know is that it’s good building land,” Jon said. “I didn’t think I’d live to see the day that Reykjavik would spread all the way out here.”

“Maybe the city’s grown out of all proportion,” Erlendur said. “Do redcurrants grow wild in Iceland, would you happen to know?”

“Redcurrants? No idea. Never heard of it.”

They talked briefly before Jon drove away again. Erlendur gained the impression that his creditors were about to expropriate the land, but that there was a glimpse of hope if he could manage to squeeze out yet another loan.

Erlendur intended to go home himself. The evening sun shed a beautiful red glow on the western sky, spreading in from the sea and across the land. It was beginning to cool down.

He scrutinised the dark swathe. He kicked at the soil and strolled around, unsure why he was dithering. There was nothing waiting for him at home, he thought, swinging his foot at the dirt. No family to welcome him, no wife to tell him what her day had been like. No children to tell him how they were doing at school. Only his clapped out television, an armchair, a worn carpet, wrappers from takeaway meals in the kitchen and whole walls of books that he read in his solitude. Many of them were about missing persons in Iceland, the tribulations of travellers in the wilds in days of old, and deaths on mountain roads.

Suddenly he felt something hard against his foot. It was like a little pebble standing up out of the dirt. He nudged at it a few times with his toe, but it stood firm. He bent down and began carefully to claw the soil away from it. Skarphedinn had told him not to move anything while the archaeologists were away. Erlendur pulled at the pebble half-heartedly but could not manage to free it.

He dug deeper, and his hands were filthy by the time he finally reached a similar pebble, then a third and fourth and fifth. Erlendur got down on his knees, scooping up dirt around him in all directions. The object came gradually into view and soon Erlendur stared at what, as far as he could make out, was a hand. Five bony fingers and the bone of a palm, standing up out of the earth. He rose slowly to his feet.

The five fingers were spread apart as if the person down there had stretched out a hand to clutch at something or defend himself, or perhaps to beg for mercy. Erlendur stood there, thunderstruck. The bones stretched up towards him out of the ground like a plea for clemency, and a shiver passed through him in the evening breeze.

Alive, Erlendur thought. He looked in the direction of the redcurrant bushes.

“Were you alive?” he said to himself.

At that very moment his mobile rang. Standing in the calm of evening, engrossed in his thoughts, he took a while to realise the phone was ringing. He took it out of his coat pocket and answered it. At first all he could hear was rumbling.

“Help me,” said a voice that he recognised immediately. “Please.”

Then the call was cut off.

He could not tell where the call came from. His mobile’s screen display said “Unknown”. It was the voice of his daughter, Eva Lind. He winced as he stared at the phone, like a splinter that had pierced his hand, but it did not ring again. He could not call back. Eva Lind had his number and he remembered that the last time they spoke was when she called him to say she never wanted to see him again. He stood transfixed, dumbfounded, waiting for a second call that never came.

Then he leaped into his car.

He had not been in touch with Eva Lind for two months. In itself there was nothing unusual about that. His daughter had been living her life without giving him much chance to interfere in it. She was in her twenties. A drug addict. Their last meeting had ended with yet another furious argument. It was in the block of flats where he lived and she stormed out, saying that he was repulsive.

Erlendur also had a son, Sindri Snaer, who had little contact with his father. He and Eva Lind were infants when Erlendur walked out and left them with their mother. Erlendur’s wife never forgave him after their divorce and did not allow him to see the children. He increasingly regretted having let her decide. They sought him out themselves when they were old enough.

The calm spring dusk was descending over Reykjavik when Erlendur sped out of the Millennium Quarter, onto the main road and into the city. He checked that his mobile was switched on and put it on the front seat. Erlendur did not know much about his daughter’s personal life and had no idea where to start looking for her until he remembered a basement flat in the Vogar district where Eva Lind had been living about a year before.

First he checked whether she had gone to his flat, but Eva Lind was nowhere to be seen. He ran around the block where he lived and up the other staircases. Eva had a key to his flat. He called out to her inside the flat, but she wasn’t there. He wondered about telephoning her mother, but couldn’t bring himself to do so. They had hardly spoken for 20 years. He picked up the phone and called his son. He knew that his children kept in contact with each other, albeit intermittently. He found out Sindri’s mobile number from directory enquiries. It turned out that Sindri was working out of town and had no idea of his sister’s whereabouts.

Erlendur hesitated.

“Bugger it,” he groaned.

He picked up the phone again and asked for his ex-wife’s number.

“Erlendur here,” he said when she answered. “I think Eva Lind’s in trouble. Do you know where she could be?”

Silence.

“She called me asking for help but was cut off and I don’t know where she is. I think something’s wrong.”

Still no reply.

“Halldora?”

“Are you calling me after 20 years?”

He felt the cold hatred still in her voice after all that time and realised that he’d made a mistake.

“Eva Lind needs help, but I don’t know where she is.”

“Help?”

“I think there’s something wrong.”

“Is that my fault?”

“Your fault? No. It’s not…”

“Don’t you think I didn’t need help? Alone with two kids. You weren’t helping me.”

“Hall…”

“And now your kids have gone off the rails. Both of them! Are you beginning to realise what you’ve done? What you’ve done to us? What you’ve done to me and to your children?”

“You refused to let me see…”

“Don’t you suppose I haven’t needed to sort her out a million times? Don’t you think I’ve never needed to be there for her? Where were you then?”

“Halldora, I…”

“You bastard,” she snarled.

She slammed down the phone on him. Erlendur cursed himself for having called. He got into his car, drove to the Vogar district and stopped outside a dilapidated building with basement flats half-submerged in the ground. At one of them he pressed the bell which hung loose from the doorframe, but couldn’t hear it ring inside, so he knocked on the door. He waited impatiently for the sound of someone coming to answer it, but nothing happened. He took hold of the handle. The door was not locked and Erlendur stepped cautiously inside. As he entered the cramped hallway he could hear a child’s faint crying from somewhere within. A stench of urine and faeces confronted him as he approached the living room.

A baby girl, about a year old, sat on the living-room floor, exhausted from crying. She shivered with heavy sobs, naked apart from a vest. The floor was covered with empty beer cans, vodka bottles, fast-food wrappers and dairy products that had gone mouldy, and the acrid stench mingled with the stink from the baby. There was little else in the living room apart from a battered sofa on which a woman was lying, naked, with her back to Erlendur. The baby paid no attention to him as he moved towards the sofa. He took the woman by the wrist and felt her pulse. There were needle marks on her arm.