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“Maybe you still don’t today,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“We had a look in our archives,” Qui
They looked at him blankly.
“Perhaps you’d like me to repeat that,” Qui
“So you lost him in Iceland?” Elinborg said.
“It’s the only case of this sort that we know about,” Qui
Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli mulled over his words.
“Could he have gone over to the enemy — I mean to you, the British or the French?” Sigurdur Oli said, trying to recall films and books about spies that he had seen and read. “And then gone underground?” he added, unsure of exactly what he was talking about. He was not a great fan of spy stories.
“Out of the question,” Qui
“Or used a false identity when he left the country?” Elinborg suggested, groping and as much in the dark as Sigurdur Oli.
“We knew most of them,” Qui
“What about in some other way from what you expected?” Sigurdur Oli said. “By ship?”
“That was one possibility we checked,” Qui
“What do you think happened? Or thought at the time?”
“That they killed him and buried him in the embassy garden,” Qui
Qui
“Fall 1968?” Elinborg said.
“That was when we noticed that he was no longer at the embassy. We investigated through specific cha
“What do you know about this man?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “Did he have friends here? Or enemies at home? Did he do anything wrong to your knowledge?”
“No. As I say, we’re not aware of that. And of course we don’t know everything. We suspect that something happened to him here in 1968. We don’t know what. He could just as easily have left the diplomatic service and made himself disappear. He knew how to do that, how to merge into the crowd. It’s up to you how you interpret this information. This is all we know.”
He paused.
“Perhaps he slipped away from us,” he said then. “Maybe there’s a rational explanation for it all. This is all we’ve got. Now you must tell me one thing. Bob asked about it. How was he killed? The man in the lake.”
Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli exchanged glances.
“He was hit over the head and sustained a hole in the skull just by the temple,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Hit over the head?” Qui
“He could have fallen, but it would have been from quite a height,” Elinborg said.
“So it’s not a straightforward execution? A bullet in the back of the head?”
“Execution?” Elinborg said. “We’re Icelanders. The last execution in this country was done with an axe almost two hundred years ago.”
“Yes, of course,” Qui
“Does it tell you anything, him dying like that?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “If it is this spy who was found in the lake?”
“No, nothing,” Qui
He stood up. They could tell that the conversation was coming to an end. Qui
“What was his name?”
“His name was Lothar,” Qui
“Lothar,” Elinborg parroted.
“Yes,” Qui
20
Later that day they requested a meeting at the German embassy, stating the reason to give the staff time to gather information about Lothar Weiser. The meeting was arranged for later in the week. They told Erlendur about what the meeting with Patrick Qui
“If he didn’t just fall on his head,” Elinborg said.
“No one falls on their head before being tied to a spying device and thrown into Kleifarvatn,” Erlendur said.
“Making any progress with the Falcon?” Elinborg asked.
“None at all,” Erlendur said, “except that I’ve been putting the wind up Leopold’s girlfriend, who can’t understand what I’m going on about.” Erlendur had told them about the brothers from outside Mosfellsbaer and his half-baked hypothesis that the man who owned the Falcon might even still be alive or, for that matter, living in another part of Iceland. They had discussed this idea before and regarded it in much the same way as the missing man’s girlfriend — they had nothing substantial to support it. “Too far-fetched for Iceland,” Sigurdur Oli said. Elinborg agreed. “Perhaps in a city of a million people.”
“Fu
“That’s the point,” Erlendur said. “Leopold, as he called himself — that much we do know — is quite a mysterious figure. Niels handled the case originally and never looked into his background properly, he never found any records. It wasn’t investigated as a criminal matter.”