The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indridason

Author:Arnaldur Indridason
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Mystery & Detective - General, Detective, Police Procedural, Detective and mystery stories, Crime & mystery, Mystery & Detective, Mystery, Iceland, Fiction - Mystery, General, Reykjavik, Thrillers, Police, Crime & Thriller, Fiction
ISBN: 9781846550959
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Published: 2010-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

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 Quinn had revealed, and discussed the possibility that the man in the lake was an East German spy. A number of signs pointed to that, they felt, notably the Russian device and the location. They agreed that there was something foreign about the murder. Something about the case that they had seldom, if ever, seen before. Admittedly it was ferocious, but all murders were ferocious. More importantly, it appeared to have been carefully planned, skilfully executed, and had remained covered up for so many years. Icelandic murders were not generally committed in this way. They were more coincidental, clumsy and squalid, and the perpetrators almost without exception left a trail of clues.

'If he didn't just fall on his head,' Elínborg 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?' Elínborg 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 Óli said. Elínborg agreed. 'Perhaps in a city of a million people.'

'Funny that this guy can't be found anywhere in the system, though,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'That's the point,' Erlendur said. 'Leopold, as he called himself – that much we do know – is quite a mysterious figure. Níels handled the case originally and never looked into his background properly, he never found any records. It wasn't investigated as a criminal matter.'

'No more than most missing persons in Iceland,' Elínborg chipped in.

'Only a few people had that name then and they can all be identified. I did a quick check. His girlfriend said he had spent a lot of time abroad. He may even have been born abroad. You never know.'

'Why do you think he was called Leopold in the first place?' Sigurdur Óli asked. 'Isn't that a rather odd name for an Icelander?'

'It was the name he used, at least,' Erlendur said. 'He may well have used another name elsewhere. That's quite likely actually. We know nothing about him until he suddenly surfaces selling bulldozers and farm machinery and as the boyfriend of a woman who somehow becomes the victim in the whole affair. She knows precious little about him but is still in mourning for him. We have no background. No birth certificate. Nothing about his schooling. We just know that he travelled widely, lived abroad and might have been born there.

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