“We didn’t find anything in the car to indicate that he’d been to the farm.”

“Did you take samples from the floor by the front seats? Under the pedals?”

“It’s in the files.”

“I didn’t see it. You could have established whether he visited the farmer. He would have picked stuff up on his shoes.”

“It wasn’t a complicated case, Erlendur. Nobody wanted to turn it into one. The man made himself vanish. Maybe he bumped himself off. We don’t always find the bodies. You know that. Even if we had found something under the pedals, it could have been from anywhere. He travelled around the country a lot. Selling agricultural machinery.”

“What did they say at his work?”

Niels thought about the question.

“It was such a long time ago, Erlendur.”

“Try to remember.”

“He wasn’t on the payroll, I remember that much, which was rare in those days. He was on commission and worked on a freelance basis.”

“Which means he would have had to pay his taxes himself.”

“As I said, there was no mention of him in the records under the name Leopold. Not a thing.”

“So you reckon he kept that woman when he was in Reykjavik but, what, lived somewhere else?”

“Or even had a family,” Niels said. “There are blokes like that.”

Erlendur sipped his wine and looked at the perfect tie knot under Niels’s shirt collar. He was not a good detective. To him, no case was ever complicated.

“You should have told her the truth.”

“That may well be, but she had happy memories of him. We concluded that it wasn’t a criminal matter. The disappearance was never investigated as a murder because no clues were found to warrant it.”

They stopped talking. The guests” murmuring had become a solid wall of noise.

“You’re still into these missing persons,” Niels said. “Why this interest? What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know,” Erlendur said.

“It was a routine disappearance,” Niels said. “Something else was needed to turn it into a murder investigation. No clues ever emerged to give grounds for that.”

“No, probably not.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of all this?” Niels asked.

“Sometimes.”

“And your daughter, she’s always involved in the same old shit,” said Niels, with his four educated children who had all started beautiful families and lived perfect, impeccable lives, just like him.

Erlendur knew that the whole force was aware of Eva Lind’s arrest and how she had attacked Sigurdur Oli. She sometimes ended up in police custody and received no special treatment for being his daughter. Niels had clearly heard about Eva. Erlendur looked at him, his tasteful clothing and his manicured nails, and wondered whether a happy life made people even more boring than they were to start with.

“Yes,” Erlendur said. “She’s as screwed up as ever.”

When Erlendur got home that evening there was no Sindri to welcome him. He had still not turned up when Erlendur went to bed just before midnight. There was no message, nor a telephone number where he could be reached. Erlendur missed his company. He dialled directory enquiries, but Sindri’s mobile number was not listed.

He was falling asleep when the telephone rang. It was Eva Lind.

“You know they dope you up in here,” she said in a slurred voice.

“I was asleep,” Erlendur lied.

“They give you tablets to bring you down,” Eva said. “I’ve never been so stoned in my life. What are you doing?”

“Trying to sleep,” Erlendur said. “Were you causing trouble?”

“Sindri stopped by today,” Eva said without answering him. “He said you’d had a talk.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Isn’t he with you?”

“I think he’s left,” Erlendur said. “Maybe he’s at your mother’s. Are you allowed to make phone calls from that place whenever you like?”

“Nice to hear from you too,” Eva snarled. “And I’m not causing any fucking trouble.” She slammed the telephone down on him.

Erlendur lay staring up into the darkness. He thought about his two children, Eva Lind and Sindri Snaer, and their mother, who hated him. He thought about his brother, for whom he had been searching in vain all these years. His bones were lying somewhere. Perhaps deep in a fissure, or higher up in the mountains than he could ever imagine. Even though he had gone far up the mountainsides, trying to work out how high a boy of eight could stray in bad conditions and a blinding blizzard.

“Don’t you ever get tired of all this?”

Tired of this endless search.

Hermann Albertsson opened the door to him just before noon the following day. He was a thin man aged around sixty, nimble, wearing scruffy jeans and a red check cotton shirt, and with a broad smile that never seemed to leave his face. From the kitchen came the smell of boiled haddock. He lived alone and always had done, he told Erlendur without being asked. He smelled of brake fluid.

“Do have some haddock,” he said when Erlendur followed him into the kitchen.

Erlendur declined firmly but Hermann ignored him and set a place at the table, and before he knew it he was sitting down with a complete stranger, eating softboiled haddock and buttered potatoes. They both ate the skin of the haddock and the skin of the potatoes, and for an instant Erlendur’s thoughts turned to Elinborg and her cookery book. When she’d been working on it she had used him as a guinea pig for fresh monkfish with lime sauce, yellow from the quarter-kilo of butter she had put in it. It took Elinborg all day and night to boil down the fish stock until only four tablespoons remained on the bottom, essence of monkfish; she had stayed up all night to skim off the froth from the water. The sauce is everything, was Elinborg’s motto. Erlendur smiled to himself. Hermann’s haddock was delicious.

“I did that Falcon up,” Hermann said, putting a large piece of potato in his mouth. He was a car mechanic and for a hobby he restored old cars and then tried to sell them. It was becoming increasingly difficult, he told Erlendur. No one was interested in old cars any more, only new Range Rovers that never faced tougher conditions than a traffic jam on the way to the city centre.

“Do you still own it?” Erlendur asked.

“I sold it in 1987,” Hermann said. “I’ve got a 1979 Chrysler now, quite a limo really. I’ve been under its bonnet for, what, six years.”

“Will you get anything for it?”

“Nothing,” said Hermann, offering him some coffee. “And I don’t want to sell it either.”

“You didn’t register the Falcon when you owned it.”

“No,” Hermann said. “It never had plates when it was here. I fiddled about with it for a few years and that was fun. I drove it around the neighbourhood and if I wanted to take it to Thingvellir or somewhere I borrowed the plates from my own car. I didn’t think it was worth paying the insurance.”

“We couldn’t find it registered anywhere,” Erlendur said, “so the new owner hasn’t bought licence plates for it either.”

Hermann filled two cups.

“That needn’t be the case,” Hermann said. “Maybe he gave up and got rid of it.”

“Tell me something else. The hubcaps on the Falcon, were they special somehow, in demand?”

Erlendur had asked Elinborg to check the Internet for him and on ford.com they had found photographs of old Ford Falcons. One was black and when Elinborg printed out the image for him, the hubcaps stood out very clearly.

“They were quite fancy,” Hermann said thoughtfully. “Those hubcaps on American cars.”

“One hubcap was missing,” Erlendur said. “At the time.”

“Really?”

“Did you buy a new hubcap when you got it?”

“No, one of the previous owners had bought a new set a long time before. The originals weren’t on when I bought it.”

“Was it a remarkable car, the Falcon?”