Reykjavik Nights Read Online Free PDF

thief, Erlendur had gone to investigate the loot left lying in the road and discovered that the burglar had made off with the family fondue set.

7
    As it happened, Erlendur was well acquainted with the facts of the woman’s disappearance from Thórskaffi, since stories of people going missing held a particular fascination for him. He devoured news reports on everything from poorly equipped ptarmigan hunters failing to return home from the mountains at the appointed time, to travellers in the interior who had not been heard of for days, or youngsters, like the girl in the pink blouse, running away from home. Most turned up eventually, alive or dead, but some were never seen again, despite large search parties and rescue units combing the countryside for days. The missing left a series of unanswered questions behind them.
    Soon after Erlendur joined the police, he had begun to trawl through the archives for cases, old and more recent, in Reykjavík and the surrounding area. For years he had been reading up on tales of travellers going astray or surviving ordeals on the country’s high moors and mountain roads. His digging in the police records was merely an extension of this interest.
    Only rarely were these missing-persons cases attributed to criminal action, but then Erlendur’s interest was personal rather than professional. He spent hours leafing through reports of cold cases and familiarising himself with the circumstances of a variety of disappearances and unsolved crimes, though the latter did not have the same appeal. There were exceptions, however, such as Hannibal’s demise, though whether there had been anything suspicious about that was disputable. In this instance it was his acquaintance with the victim that had aroused his curiosity.
    One case in particular exerted such a powerful hold on Erlendur’s imagination that he had immersed himself in the details to the extent of visiting the sites in question. One day in 1953 an eighteen-year-old girl, a pupil at the Reykjavík Women’s College, had been due to meet her friends at a cafe much frequented by students on Lækjargata in the centre of town. Although they had originally come from different schools, the four girls had all started in the same class at the college and become good friends that first winter. They hung out together and signed up for all kinds of extracurricular activities. They had been meeting to plan an evening’s entertainment for their class. When only three of them turned up the girls were not unduly annoyed; they simply assumed their friend was ill since she had been absent from class that morning. They phoned her house from the cafe to find out how she was. The girl’s mother answered and it took her a minute or two to grasp what they were talking about. ‘We just wanted to know how she’s feeling,’ explained the friend. The girl’s mother was puzzled by the question: her daughter wasn’t ill; she’d gone to school.
    The girl almost invariably took the same route to the college. It was a fifteen-minute walk from where she lived in the west of town, via Camp Knox, the area of Nissen huts built by the American occupying force during the war, which later became a source of cheap housing for Reykjavík’s poorer families. From there she headed east along Hringbraut to Fríkirkjuvegur where the college was located. On other days she used to catch the bus, but the driver had failed to notice her among the passengers that morning. As it tended to be the same small group of people every morning, he claimed to know the girl by sight. So either she had walked in or hitched a lift with someone she knew. It would not have been the first time. And although she had never been known to accept a ride from a stranger, this could not be ruled out either. But nor could it be established with any certainty, since no one had come forward to say they had given her a lift.
    It was always