Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason

conversations until she became too weak to talk. We discussed death and how she would send me a sign. But of course all that happened was that she made the process of grieving easier for me.’
    Silence.
    ‘I don’t know if you understand me.’
    ‘I do. Go on.’
    ‘Then the other day, almost two years after my mother died – I’d given up watching the bookshelves and Proust by then – I woke up one morning and went to put on the coffee and fetch the paper, and when I was on my way back to the kitchen I happened to glance into the living room and . . .’
    The machine hissed in the silence that followed the woman’s words.
    ‘What?’ the medium whispered.
    ‘It was lying open on the floor.’
    ‘What was?’
    ‘ Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust. The first volume in the series.’
    Another long silence.
    ‘Is that why you came to me?’
    ‘Do you believe in life after death?’
    ‘Yes,’ Erlendur heard the medium whisper. ‘I do. I believe in life after death.’

8
     
    When Erlendur woke up early next morning, his thoughts returned to the old man who had visited him at the police station to ask for news of his son, almost thirty years after the boy’s disappearance. It was one of the first cases that Erlendur had kept open long after everyone else had given up on it. In those days the CID had been based in an industrial estate in Kópavogur. He remembered from around the same time two other missing-person cases that he had not investigated himself but whose details he was familiar with nonetheless. One, which had occurred several weeks earlier, involved a young man who had left a party in Keflavík with the intention of walking to the neighbouring village of Njardvík, but had never arrived there. It was winter and a blizzard had blown up during the night. Search parties were sent out and after three days one of his shoes was found down by the tide-line. He had been on the right track but seemed to have been driven by the storm towards the sea. Nothing had been heard of him since. He had been wearing a shirt, with no coat or sweater, when he left the party and had been drunk, according to his fellow partygoers.
    The other case concerned a young girl from the northern town of Akureyri. She was studying at the university and rented a flat in Reykjavík but it was impossible to tell exactly when she had disappeared. When her landlord did not receive his rent in advance for the month, he went round to chase up the money but found no one home. She did not have any compulsory classes at the university because she was writing up her biology dissertation at the time. Moreover, she was an only child and her parents were abroad on a two-month trip around Asia and were only in sporadic contact with her. By the time her parents came home and went to visit their daughter in town, she had vanished. The landlord let them into the flat. Everything was as it should have been, as if she had just popped out for a moment. Her textbooks lay open on the tables where she had been working on the dissertation. There were a couple of glasses in the sink and she had not made the bed. She had been in telephone contact with her friends in Akureyri some time before and two of her fellow students had heard from her and assumed that she had gone north to Akureyri some weeks earlier. To lend support to this theory, the battered old Austin Mini that she drove was also missing.
    Erlendur went into the kitchen and turned on the coffee-maker. He put some bread in the toaster, buttered it when it was done, then brought out the cheese and marmalade. He pondered what he had heard on the tape that Karen had lent him and wondered what to do about it. He now had a better appreciation of María’s state of mind before she’d killed herself.
    His thoughts moved on to Sindri and Eva and his ex-wife Halldóra. He couldn’t envisage a meeting between Halldóra and himself, whatever importance Eva Lind might place on bringing them together. Erlendur