The Flatey Enigma Read Online Free PDF

The sailing routes are far west, and the next inhabited area is miles away. There are no fishing grounds around here, so no one comes until the Ystakot clan comes here to collect the eiderdown from the nests and hunt seal. There’s nothing else that would draw anyone here.”
    “So did he starve to death?” Kjartan asked.
    “Yeah, and froze. He wouldn’t have been able to keep any heat in here without any fire. Especially if he crawled up here after being drenched in the sea.”
    “How the hell did he get all the way out here?” Högni asked. “There’s no boat he could have come on. There’s no regular sailing route that passes through here, so he could hardly have fallen off some ship.”
    “He must have come out here on a boat and lost it,” Grímur answered. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
    “It would have been noticed if a man and his boat had gone missing from the fjord,” said Högni.
    “Unless he’s from further afield,” said Grímur.
    “Doesn’t matter. He still would’ve been missed,” said Högni categorically.
    “There was a shipwreck this winter in the distant west coast. Some men were presumed dead. Maybe one of them reached here on a lifeboat that drifted into the fjord and landed here.”
    “And the boat?”
    “He could have lost it again.”
    “No,” Högni disagreed. He stooped over the body and examined the clothes. “This is no sailor. Look at his shoes. These are the type of hiking shoes that tourists wear, leather.”
    “Right then,” said Grímur, “this needs to be better investigated. Let’s get him into the casket and head straight back to Flatey.”
    They fetched the casket and laid it by the side of the body. Next Grímur and Högni hoisted the body up with their shovels while Kjartan held the casket. Then they turned the casket so that the body rolled into it facedown. The patch of grass that appeared under the body was yellow and withered, apart from the swarm of maggots squirming in the roots of the grass.
    “Shouldn’t we turn him the right way around in the casket?” Kjartan asked.
    “No,” Grímur answered. “He won’t be too bothered about which way he lies on such a short trip.”
    He took a glass receptacle out of his pocket, unscrewed the lid, and sprinkled it inside the casket. “I got this from the doctor,” he said. “It’ll reduce the smell and kill the flies and maggots.”
    The lid of the casket was lined with a rubber seal strip, designed to block out any air once it had been tightly screwed to the box.
    They systematically combed the island for signs of the man’s stay there. On a patch of grass at the tip of the isle, some flat stones had been arranged to clearly read as SOS, and each letter was about ten feet long. By the shelter they found an open plastic flask with a thin layer of water and some broken shells. There was nothing inside the shelter itself, however. Every possible crag was examined for any trace of information that the man might have scratched onto flat surfaces, but they found no marks that could have been left by a human. On one flat rock there were many small pebbles that seemed to form letters, although some of them had now been scattered by the forces of nature. Nevertheless, Kjartan drew a picture of them on a piece of paper, as precisely as he could, and readjusted two stones that seemed to have been thrown out of alignment and tried to form a word:

     
    Grímur and Högni watched with interest. “Lucky? Does that have any special meaning around here?” Kjartan asked.
    “No,” Högni answered. “Although there’s a stud bull in Hvallátrar called Lucky. The bull was given the name when he was young and got stranded on a skerry flooded at high water and had to swim to survive. It was a long way to land, and he probably wouldn’t have survived if some people from Skáleyjar hadn’t been passing there on their way to a dance in Flatey. At first they thought it was a seal that was swimming there, but then