Oblivion by Arnaldur Indridason Read Free Book Online

interrogate him further. She changed the subject.
    ‘Are you married?’
    ‘No … no, I’m divorced.’
    ‘Oh, sorry to hear that.’
    ‘Yes. So … now you know plenty about me,’ Erlendur said, trying to smile. ‘Everything, really, so –’
    ‘I don’t believe that for a minute,’ said Svava, smiling in her turn. ‘But enough to be going on with. No one’s asked me about poor Dagbjört for years, then you ring up out of the blue. I won’t deny it’s a shock. You’re the first person to show the slightest interest in her for more than twenty years. So, what do you want to know? How can I be of help?’

10
    SHE WAS JUST eighteen when she vanished one dark winter’s day in ’53. Not long before, she had invited some school friends round to celebrate her birthday. The girls played records on the family’s recently acquired gramophone. She had helped her father carry it indoors. It came in an imposing piece of furniture – a large walnut box supported on four legs, with a lid on top and a built-in wireless – and this was given pride of place in the sitting room. They played records that had been released that spring – Alfred Clausen’s ‘Gling gló’, Sigfús Halldórsson’s ‘Dagný’. One of the girls brought round some of the new singles from America that she had managed to procure from the US airbase at Keflavík, including one by Kay Starr, and Doris Day singing ‘Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee’. The girls danced and giggled and, once Dagbjört’s parents were safely out of the way, two of them produced some alcohol they had pinched from home. They shared it round and someone took out a packet of cigarettes and started smoking. The cigarettes were passed round too, a few of the girls puffing and making faces, others inhaling with an air of sophistication. They chatted about the school camping trip to Thórsmörk earlier that autumn and the proposed skiing trip to Hveradalir in the highlands after New Year, and exchanged gossip about who was dating who and the latest exploits of various Hollywood stars. A Dean Martin film was currently showing in the cinemas. They preferred him to Frank Sinatra. As the evening wore on they sang their school song with its lyrics about a bright, happy future, and played Sigfús’s hit single over and over again: ‘…
the glorious stars will shine / on our love, our joy and delight, / though the song of the breeze has fallen quiet
.’
    The girls were close friends and when one morning Dagbjört didn’t turn up to school or for the meeting a group of them had arranged for later that day, they rang her house to ask if she was ill. Dagbjört’s mother said no, she had gone to school as usual, at least as far as she knew. She called out to her daughter, went upstairs to her room, opened the front door and peered down the street, then stepped out into the garden, repeatedly calling her name. After this she phoned her husband at work and asked if he had heard from her or knew where she was. He was nonplussed. As far as he was aware, Dagbjört had gone to school that morning.
    When they still hadn’t heard from her by evening, her parents grew seriously alarmed and went out looking for her. They phoned round all their friends and relatives, but no one had any news of their daughter. A number of people came to their house, among them several of Dagbjört’s classmates, neighbours and close relatives, and together they retraced her customary route to school. Perhaps something had happened to her on the way. They looked everywhere, walked the streets, climbed into gardens, conducted a thorough search of Camp Knox, combed the park and area around Lake Tjörnin and the streets at the lower end of Thingholt, near the school. By then the police had got their act together, though opinion at the station was that it was a little premature to call out the search parties. They asked if she had ever done anything like this before but the response was a firm negative: she