Sigurdur Oli read the letter, the last testimony of a young man who had walked out of his parents” house in 1970 and had never come back.

The parents were now both aged 78 and in fine fettle. They had two other sons, both younger, now in their fifties. They knew that their eldest son had committed suicide. They did not know how he went about it, nor where his remains were. Sigurdur Oli asked them about Kleifarvatn, the radio transmitter and the hole in the skull, but they had no idea what he was talking about. Their son had never quarrelled with anyone and had no enemies; that was out of the question.

“It’s an absurd idea that he was murdered,” the mother said with a glance at her husband, still anxious after so many years about the fate of their son.

“You can tell from the letter,” the husband said. “It’s obvious what he had in mind.”

Sigurdur Oli reread the letter.

The letter was signed Jakob.

“It was that girl’s fault,” the wife said.

“We don’t know anything about that,” her husband said.

“She started going out with his friend,” she said. “Our boy couldn’t take it.”

“Do you think it’s him, it’s our boy?” the husband asked. They were sitting on the sofa, facing Sigurdur Oli and waiting for answers to the questions that had haunted them ever since their son went missing. They knew that he could not answer the toughest question, the one they had grappled with during all those years, concerning parental actions and responsibilities, but he could tell them whether or not he had been found. On the news they had only said that a male skeleton had been found in Kleifarvatn. Nothing about a radio transmitter and a smashed skull. They did not understand what Sigurdur Oli meant when he started probing about. They had only one question: Was it him?

“I don’t think that’s likely,” Sigurdur Oli said. He looked back and forth at them. The incomprehensible disappearance and death of a loved one had left its mark on their lives. The case had never been closed. Their son had still not come home and that was the way it had been all those years. They did not know where he was or what had happened to him, and this uncertainty spawned discomfort and gloom.

“We think he went into the sea,” the wife said. “He was a good swimmer. I’ve always thought that he swam out to sea until he knew he had gone too far out or until the cold took him.”

“The police told us at the time that because the body couldn’t be found, he’d most probably thrown himself in the sea,” the husband said.

“Because of that girl,” the wife said.

“We can’t blame her for it,” the husband said.

Sigurdur Oli could tell that they had slipped into an old routine. He stood up to take his leave.

“Sometimes I get so angry with him,” the wife said, and Sigurdur Oli did not know whether she was referring to her husband or her son.

Valgerdur was waiting for Erlendur at the restaurant. She was wearing the same full-length leather coat that she had worn on their first date. They had met by chance and in a moment of madness he’d invited her out for dinner. He had not known then if she was married but had discovered later that she was, with two grown-up sons who had moved out and a marriage that was failing.

At their next meeting she admitted that she had intended to use Erlendur to get even with her husband.

Valgerdur contacted Erlendur again soon afterwards and they had met several times since. Once she had gone back to his flat. He’d tried to tidy up as best he could, throwing away old newspapers, arranging books on the shelves. He rarely had visitors and was reluctant to let Valgerdur call on him. She insisted, saying that she wanted to see how he lived. Eva Lind had called his apartment a hole that he crawled into to hide.

“Look at all those books,” Valgerdur said, standing in his living room. “Have you read them all?”

“Most of them,” Erlendur said. “Do you want some coffee? I bought some Danish pastries.”

She went over to the bookcase and ran her finger along the spines, browsed through a few titles and took one book off the shelf.

“Are these about ordeals and dangerous highland voyages?” she asked.

She had been quick to notice that Erlendur took a particular interest in missing persons and that he read whole series of accounts of people who had got lost and disappeared in the wilds of Iceland. He had told her what he had told no one else apart from Eva Lind, that his brother had died at the age of eight up in the highlands in eastern Iceland at the beginning of winter, when Erlendur was ten. There were three of them, the two boys and their father. Erlendur and his father found their way home safely, but his brother froze to death and his body was never found.

“You told me once that there was an account of you and your brother in one of these books,” Valgerdur said.

“Yes,” Erlendur said.

“Would you mind showing it to me?”

“I will,” Erlendur said, hesitantly. “Later. Not now. I’ll show you it later.”

Valgerdur stood up when he entered the restaurant and they greeted each other with their customary handshake. Erlendur was unsure what kind of a relationship this was but he liked it. Even after meeting regularly for almost half a year they had not slept together. At least their relationship was not a sexual one. They sat and talked about various aspects of their lives.

“Why haven’t you left him?” he asked when they had eaten and drunk coffee and liqueur and talked about Eva Lind and Sindri and her sons and work. She repeatedly asked him about the skeleton in Kleifarvatn but there was little that he could tell her. Only that the police were talking to people whose loved ones had gone missing during a specific period around 1970.

Just before Christmas, Valgerdur had found out that her husband had been having an affair for the past two years. She already knew about an earlier incident which was not as “serious’, as he put it. She told him that she was going to leave him. He broke off the affair at once and nothing had happened since then.

“Valgerdur…?” Erlendur began.

“You saw Eva Lind at her rehab, then,” she said hurriedly, as if sensing what would come next.

“Yes, I saw her.”

“Did she remember anything about being arrested?”

“No, I don’t think she remembers being arrested. We didn’t discuss it.”

“Poor girl.”

“Are you going to carry on with him?” Erlendur asked.

Valgerdur sipped her liqueur.

“It’s so difficult,” she said.

“Is it?”

“I’m not prepared to put an end to it,” she said, looking into Erlendur’s eyes. “But I don’t want to let go of you, either.”

When Erlendur went home that evening, Sindri Snaer was lying on the sofa, smoking and watching television. He nodded to his father and kept watching the programme. As far as Erlendur could see it was a cartoon. He had given his son a key to the flat and could expect him at any time, even though he had not agreed to let him stay.

“Would you mind switching that off?” he said as he took off his coat.

“I couldn’t find the remote,” he said. “Isn’t this telly prehistoric?”

“It’s only twenty years old or so,” Erlendur said. “I don’t use it much.”

“Eva phoned me today,” Sindri said, stubbing out his cigarette. “Was it some friend of yours who arrested her?”

“Sigurdur Oli. She hit him. With a hammer. Tried to knock him out, but caught him on the shoulder instead. He wanted to charge her with assault and resisting arrest.”