‘Like it took Bergur?’

‘Sometimes I wish he’d leave me in peace. That a whole day would pass without him entering my thoughts.’

‘But it doesn’t?’

‘No. It doesn’t.’

Erlendur sat in his car outside the church, smoking and brooding on coincidences. He had long pondered the way simple coincidence could decide a person’s fate, decide their life and death. He knew examples of such coincidence from his work. More than once he had surveyed the scene of a murder that was committed for no motive whatsoever, without any warning or any connection between murderer and victim.

One of the cruellest examples of such a coincidence was that of a woman who was murdered on her way home from the supermarket in one of the city suburbs. The shop was one of a handful in those days that opened in the evenings. She encountered two men who were well known to the police. They meant to rob her but she clung on to her bag with a peculiar obstinacy. One of the repeat offenders had a small crowbar with him and struck her two heavy blows on the head. She was already dead by the time she was brought in to Accident and Emergency.

Why her? Erlendur had asked himself as he stood over the woman’s body one summer’s evening twenty years ago.

He knew that the two men who had attacked her were walking time bombs; in his view it had been inevitable that they would commit a serious crime one day, but it was by complete coincidence that their paths had crossed that of the woman. It could have been someone else that evening, or a week, a month, a year later. Why her, in that place, at that time? And why did she react as she did when she encountered them? When did the sequence of events begin that was to end with this murder? he asked himself. He was not for a moment trying to absolve the criminals of blame, only to examine the life that had ended in a pool of blood on a Reykjavík pavement.

He discovered that the woman was from the countryside and had lived in the city for more than seven years. Because of redundancies in the fisheries she had moved there with her two daughters and her husband from the fishing village where she’d been born. The trawler that their community relied on had been sold to another district, the prawn catch failed. Perhaps her final journey really began there. The family settled in the suburbs. She had wanted to move closer to the town centre but the same kind of flat would have been considerably more expensive there. That was another nail in her coffin.

Her husband found work in the construction business and she became a service rep for a phone company. The company moved their headquarters, making it harder for her to travel to work by public transport, so she handed in her notice. She was taken on as a caretaker at the local elementary school and liked the job; she got on well with the children. She went to work on foot every day and became a keen walker, dragging her husband out every evening, walking around the neighbourhood and only missing her breather if the weather was really bad. Their daughters were growing up. The eldest was nearing her twentieth birthday.

Her time was running out. That fateful evening the family were all at home and the elder daughter asked her mother for home-made ice cream. With that she set the chain of events in motion. They were out of cream and one or two other minor ingredients. The mother went out to the shop.

The younger daughter offered to run over for her but her mother said no, thanks. She fancied an evening stroll and caught her husband’s eye. He said he didn’t feel like it. There was a repeat on television of an Icelandic documentary featuring interviews with people from the countryside, some of them real oddballs, and he didn’t want to miss it. Perhaps that was one of the coincidences. If the programme hadn’t been on, he would have gone with her.

The mother went out and never came back.

The man who inflicted her death blow said that she wouldn’t let go of her handbag, no matter what they did. It turned out that the woman had withdrawn a large amount of cash earlier that day for the birthday present she planned to buy her daughter, and was carrying it in her bag. That was why she held on to it so tightly. She never normally carried so much money around.

That too was a coincidence.

She lost her life that summer’s evening with her daughter’s birthday present on her mind; all she had done wrong was to live her ordinary life and take loving care of her family.

Erlendur stubbed out his cigarette and stepped out of the car. He looked up at the church, a cold, grey lump of concrete, and thought to himself that the architect must have been an atheist. At any rate, he couldn’t see how the building could have been raised to the glory of God; if anything, it would have been to the glory of the company that supplied the concrete.

The vicar Eyvör was sitting in her office, talking on the phone. She gestured at a chair. He waited for her to finish her conversation. There was a cupboard containing a cassock, ruff and other vestments standing half-open in the office.

‘Back again?’ Eyvör said, having finished her conversation. ‘Is it still about María?’

‘I read somewhere that cremations are becoming increasingly popular,’ he said, hoping to avoid giving her a direct answer.

‘There are always people who choose that course and leave strict instructions to that effect. People who don’t want their body to rot in the ground.’

‘It has nothing to do with the Christian faith, then?’

‘No, not really.’

‘I understand Baldvin had María cremated,’ Erlendur said.

‘Yes.’

‘That it was her wish.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘She never discussed it with you?’

‘No.’

‘Did Baldvin discuss her wishes with you?’

‘No. He didn’t. He simply told me that it was what she would have wanted. We don’t require any proof of that sort of thing.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Her death seems to be preying on you,’ Eyvör commented.

‘Maybe,’ Erlendur said.

‘What do you think happened?’

‘I think she must have been suffering very badly,’ he said. ‘Very badly, for a long time.’

‘I think so too. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t as surprised as many other people about what happened.’

‘Did she talk to you at all about her visions, hallucinations or anything like that?’

‘No.’

‘Nothing about believing she had seen her mother?’

‘No.’

‘Visits to mediums?’

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘What did you talk about, if I may ask?’

‘Naturally it’s confidential,’ Eyvör said. ‘I can’t tell you in any detail, and anyway I don’t think it had any direct bearing on the way she chose to leave this world. We generally discussed religion.’

‘Any aspect in particular?’

‘Yes. Sometimes.’

‘What?’

‘Forgiveness. Absolution. Truth. How it sets people free.’

‘Did she ever talk to you about what happened at Lake Thingvallavatn when she was a child?’

‘No,’ Eyvör said. ‘Not that I remember.’

‘About her father’s death?’

‘No. I’m sorry I can’t help you at all.’

‘That’s all right,’ Erlendur said, standing up.

‘Though I can perhaps tell you one thing. We often discussed life after death, as I think I mentioned to you when we last talked. She was… what can I say… she became increasingly fascinated by the subject as the years went by, especially, of course, after her mother died. What she really wanted was proof of something of the kind and I had the feeling she was prepared to go quite a long way if necessary to obtain that proof.’

‘What do you mean?’

Eyvör leant forward over the desk. Out of the corner of his eye Erlendur glimpsed her vicar’s ruff in the cupboard.

‘I think she was ready to go all the way. But that’s just my opinion and I wouldn’t want you to spread it any further. Let’s keep it between ourselves.’