“You mean there were all kinds of nowhere places that nobody ever visited,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“I once heard a story about a woman,” Elinborg said, “who had this terrific boyfriend and everything was just fine until one day when he phoned her and said he was breaking it off, and after beating about the bush a bit he admitted he was going to marry someone else the next week. His girlfriend never heard any more of him. Like I say: there’s no limit to what creeps men can be.”

“So why was Leopold in Reykjavik under false pretences?” Erlendur asked. “If he didn’t dare tell his girlfriend that he’d met someone outside the city and started a new life? Why this game of hide-and-seek?”

“What does anyone know about these characters?” Elinborg said in a resigned tone.

They all fell silent.

“What about the body in the lake?” Erlendur finally asked.

“I think we’re looking for a foreigner,” Elinborg said. “It’s ridiculous to think it’s an Icelander with Russian spy equipment tied around him. I just can’t imagine it.”

“The Cold War,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Weird times.”

“Yes, weird times,” Erlendur said.

“To me, the Cold War was always the fear of the end of the world,” Elinborg said. “I always remember thinking that. Somehow you could never escape it. Doomsday constantly looming over you. That’s the only Cold War I knew.”

“One little fuse blows and ka-boom!” Sigurdur Oli said.

“That fear has to come out somewhere,” Erlendur said. “In what we do. In what we are.”

“You mean in suicides, like the man who drove the Falcon?” Elinborg said.

“Unless he’s alive and well and happily married in Sheepsville,” Sigurdur Oli said. He rolled up his baguette wrapping and threw it on the floor beside a nearby rubbish bin.

When Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg had left, Erlendur’s phone rang. On the other end was a man he did not recognise.

“Is that Erlendur?” the voice said, deep and angry.

“Yes — who is this?” Erlendur said.

“I want to ask you to leave my wife alone,” the voice said.

“Your wife?”

The words caught Erlendur completely off guard. It did not occur to him that the voice was talking about Valgerdur.

“Understand?” the voice said. “I know what you’re up to and I want you to stop.”

“It’s up to her what she does,” Erlendur said when it finally registered that this was Valgerdur’s husband. He remembered what Valgerdur had said about his affair and how meeting Erlendur had initially been an attempt on her part to get even with him.

“You leave her alone,” the voice said, more menacingly.

“Get lost,” Erlendur said and slammed down the phone.

Omar, the retired director general of the Foreign Ministry, was about eighty, completely bald, nimble and clearly pleased to have visitors; he had a broad face with a large mouth and chin. He complained bitterly to Erlendur and Elinborg about having been forced to retire when he turned seventy, still in fine fettle and with his capacity for work unimpaired. He lived in a large flat in Kringlumyri which he said he had swapped his house for after his wife died.

Several weeks had passed since the hydrologist from the Energy Authority had stumbled across the skeleton. It was now June and unusually warm and sunny. The city had unwound after the gloom of winter, people dressed more lightly and seemed somehow happier. Cafes had put out tables and chairs on the pavements in the continental fashion and people sat in the sunshine drinking beer. Sigurdur Oli was taking his summer holiday and barbecued whenever the chance arose. He invited Erlendur and Elinborg over. Erlendur was reluctant. He had not heard from Eva Lind but thought she was no longer in therapy. As far as he knew she had completed it. Sindri Snaer had not been in touch.

Omar was very fond of talking, especially about himself, and Erlendur began at once to try to stem the flow of words.

“As I told you over the phone…” Erlendur began.

“Yes, yes, quite, I saw it all on the news, about the skeleton in Kleifarvatn. You think it’s a murder and—”

“Yes,” Erlendur interrupted, “but what hasn’t been reported on the news and what no one knows and you must keep to yourself, is that a Russian listening device from the 1960s was tied to the skeleton. The equipment had clearly been tampered with to conceal its origin, but there’s no doubt that it came from the Soviet Union.”

Omar looked at them both and they saw how this aroused his interest. He seemed to turn more cautious and slip into his old ministry manner.

“How can I assist you with that?” he asked.

“The questions we’re considering mainly involve whether there was spying on any scale in Iceland at the time and whether it is likely to be an Icelander or a foreign embassy official.”

“Have you looked up the missing persons from this time?” Omar said.

“Yes,” Elinborg said. “It’s not possible to link any of them to Russian bugging devices.”

“I don’t think any Icelanders went in for serious spying,” Omar said after a long pause for thought, and they both sensed that he was choosing his words very carefully. “We know that the Warsaw Pact and NATO countries both tried to get them to, and we know that there was espionage in one form or another in neighbouring countries.”

“The other Nordic countries, for instance?” Erlendur said.

“Yes,” Omar said. “But of course there’s one obvious problem. If Icelanders were spying for either side we wouldn’t know about it if it was successful. No Icelandic spy of any note has ever been uncovered.”

“Is there any other possible explanation for that Russian equipment lying there with the skeleton?” Elinborg asked.

“Of course,” Omar said. “It needn’t have had anything to do with spying. But your inference is probably correct. It’s a reasonable enough explanation that such an unusual discovery is somehow related to the ex-Warsaw Pact embassies.”

“Could such a spy have come from, let’s say, the Foreign Ministry?” Erlendur asked.

“No official from the Foreign Ministry went missing, to my knowledge,” Omar said.

“What I mean is, where would it have been most useful for the Russians, for instance, to plant spies?”

“Probably anywhere in government,” Omar said. “The civil service is small and the officials are all closely acquainted, so they keep very few secrets from each other. Dealings with the US defence force largely took place through us in the Foreign Ministry, so it would have been worth having someone there. But I can imagine it would have been enough for foreign spies or embassy officials to read the Icelandic newspapers — which they did, of course. It was all there. In a democracy like ours there’s always a lot of public debate and things are difficult to conceal.”

“And then there were the cocktail parties,” Erlendur said.

“Yes, we mustn’t forget them. The embassies were quite clever at compiling their guest lists. We’re a small community, everyone knows everybody else and is related to everyone else, and they took advantage of that.”

“Did you never have the feeling that information was leaking out of the civil service?” Erlendur asked him.

“Never as far as I knew,” Omar said. “And if there was any espionage here on any scale, it would probably have come to light by now, after the Soviet system collapsed and the old-style secret services were disbanded in Eastern Europe. Former spies in those countries have been busily publishing their memoirs and there’s never been any mention of Iceland. Most of their archives were opened and people could remove the files they found about themselves. The old communist countries gathered a huge amount of personal information and those records were destroyed before the Berlin Wall came down. Shredded.”