“It was just awful,” Rut said. “West Germany was redeveloping ten times as fast, with the west’s backing. In East Germany, things happened slowly, or not at all.”

“We understand that his role was to get students to work for him,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Or monitor them somehow. Were you ever aware of that?”

“They watched us,” Rut said. “We knew that and everyone else knew that. It was called interactive surveillance, another term for spying. People were supposed to come forward of their own accord and report anything that offended their socialist principles. We didn’t, of course. None of us. I never noticed Lothar trying to enlist us. All the foreign students had a liaison they could turn to but who also watched them. Lothar was one of them.”

“Do you still keep in touch with your student friends from Leipzig?” Elinborg asked.

“No,” Rut said. “It’s a long time since I saw any of them. We don’t keep in contact, or if they do, I don’t know about it. I left the party when I came back. Or maybe I didn’t leave, I just lost interest. It’s probably called withdrawing.”

“We have the names of some other students from the time you were there: Karl, Hrafnhildur, Emil, Tomas, Hannes…”

“Hannes was expelled,” Rut interjected. “I was told he stopped going to lectures and the Day of the Republic parades and generally didn’t fit in. We were supposed to take part in all that. And we did socialist work in the summer. On farms and in the coal mines. As I understand it Hannes didn’t like what he saw and heard. He wanted to finish his course but wasn’t allowed to. Maybe you should talk to him. If he’s still alive, I don’t know.”

She looked at them.

“Was it him you found in the lake?” she said.

“No,” Elinborg said. “It’s not him. We understand he lives in Selfoss and runs a guest house there.”

“I remember that he wrote about his Leipzig experiences when he came back to Iceland, and they tore him to shreds for it. The party old guard. Denounced him as a traitor and liar. The conservatives welcomed him like a prodigal son and championed him. I can’t imagine he would have cared for that. I think he just wanted to tell the truth as he saw it, but of course there was a price to pay. I met him once a few years later and he looked awfully depressed. Maybe he thought I was still active in the party, but I wasn’t. You ought to talk to him. He might have known Lothar better. I was there such a short time.”

Back out in the car, Elinborg scolded Sigurdur Oli for allowing his political opinions to influence a police enquiry. He ought to keep his mouth shut and not attack people, she said, especially elderly women who lived by themselves.

“What’s wrong with you, anyway?” she said as they drove away from the block of flats. “I’ve never heard such crap. What were you thinking? I agree with what she asked you: where does all this anger come from?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sigurdur Oli said. “My dad was a communist like that, never saw the light,” he added eventually. This was the first time that Elinborg had ever heard him mention his father.

Erlendur had just got back home when the telephone rang. It took him a while to realise which Benedikt Jonsson was on the other end, then suddenly he remembered. The one who had given Leopold a job with his company.

“Am I bothering you, phoning home like this?” Benedikt asked politely.

“No,” Erlendur said. “Is there something that…?”

“It was to do with that man.”

“Which man?”

“From the East German embassy or trade delegation or whatever it was,” Benedikt said. “The one who told me to hire Leopold and said the company in Germany would take action if I didn’t.”

“Yes,” Erlendur said. “The fat one. What about him?”

“As far as I recall,” Benedikt said, “he knew Icelandic. Actually, I think he spoke it pretty well.”

Everywhere he turned he ran up against antipathy and total indifference on the part of the authorities in Leipzig. No one would tell him what had happened to her, where she had been taken, where she was being detained, the reason for her arrest, which police department was responsible for her case. He tried to enlist the help of two university professors but they said they could do nothing. He tried to get the university vice-chancellor to intervene but he refused. He tried to get the chairman of the FDJ to make enquiries but the students” society ignored him.

In the end he telephoned the foreign ministry in Iceland, which promised to enquire about the matter but nothing came of it: Ilona was not an Icelandic national, they were unmarried, Iceland had no vested interest in the matter and did not maintain diplomatic relations with East Germany. His Icelandic friends at university tried to pep him up, but were equally at a loss about what to do. They did not understand what was going on. Maybe it was a misunderstanding. She would turn up sooner or later and everything would be clarified. Ilona’s friends and other Hungarians at the university, who were as determined as he was to find answers, said the same. They all tried to console him and told him to keep calm — everything would be explained eventually.

He discovered that Ilona had not been the only person arrested that day. The security police raided the campus and her friends from the meetings were among others taken into custody. He knew she had warned them after he found out they were being watched, that the police had photographs of them. A few were released the same day. Others were detained longer and some were still in prison when he was deported. No one heard anything of Ilona.

He contacted Ilona’s parents, who had heard of her arrest, and they wrote moving letters asking whether he knew of her whereabouts. To the best of their knowledge she had not been sent back to Hungary. They had received no word from her since she wrote to them a week before her disappearance. Nothing suggested that she was in danger. Her parents described their fruitless efforts to persuade the Hungarian authorities to look into their daughter’s fate in East Germany. The authorities were not particularly upset that she was missing. Given the situation in their own country, officials were not concerned about the arrest of an alleged dissident. Her parents said they had been refused permission to travel to East Germany to enquire into Ilona’s disappearance. They seemed to have reached a dead end.

He wrote back telling them he was looking for answers himself in Leipzig. He longed to tell them all that he knew, how she had spread underground propaganda against the communist party, against the student society FDJ, which was an arm of the party, against the lectures and against restrictions on freedom of speech, association and the press. That she had mobilised young Germans and organised clandestine meetings. And that she could not have foreseen her arrest. No more than he did. But he knew he could not write that kind of letter. Everything he sent would be censored. He had to be careful.

Instead, he said he would not rest until he had found out what had happened to Ilona and secured her release.

He stopped attending lectures. During the day he went from one government office to the next, asked to meet officials and sought help and information. As time went by, he did this more out of habit, as he received no answers and realised he never would. At night he paced the floor of their little room in anguish. He hardly slept, dozing for a few hours at a time. Strode back and forth hoping that she would appear, that the nightmare would come to an end, that they would let her off with a warning and she would come back to him so that they could be together again. He woke up at every sound on the street. If a car approached he went to the window. If the house creaked he stopped and listened, thinking it might be her. But it never was. And then a new day dawned and he was so terribly alone.