The draining lake

The conventional symbols for darkness and illumination are reversed in Arnaldur Indridason's austere Icelandic police procedurals. In this arctic land where the natives "yearned for the cold black of night and the deep winter," shadows bring understanding, and nothing good comes with the light of day. Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson, the compassionate detective in this remarkable series, draws the curtains against the "relentless May sun" in THE DRAINING LAKE (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), instinctively blaming its warming rays for drying up Lake Kleifarvatn, where a hydrologist studying the shrinking water levels has turned up a human skeleton with a hole in its skull. (In point of fact, an earthquake opened fissures in the lake bed - suggestive of yet more alarming metaphors.) Were it not for the vintage Soviet radio transmitter found with the bones, the police would be inclined to write off these macabre findings as just another anonymous suicide. "It isn't considered significant in this country if people disappear," Erlendur dryly notes. But as someone who watched his only brother swept from sight in a winter storm when they were children, the detective comes naturally to his role as champion of the disappeared and comforter of those who still wait for them. This is a man who, while giving his professional attention to long-forgotten missing persons cases, spends his quiet hours reading accounts of avalanches and other catastrophes that leave no trace of the lives they sweep away. In this book as in Indridason's previous ones (all translated with grave sensitivity by Bernard Scudder), Erlendur's effort to reclaim one lost soul opens a broader investigation into a neglected piece of Icelandic history. Here it's the "weird times" of the cold war, when Iceland was of strategic interest to both the United States, which kept a military base at Keflavik, and the Soviet Union, which had plenty of spies on the ground. Indridason reclaims this historical moment with a parallel narrative line recalling the bitter disillusionment of Icelandic students whose socialist ideals were betrayed when they went to study in East Germany. Once again, Erlendur's persistent search for something of inestimable value that has long been lost - from one woman's beloved fiancé to the political innocence of an entire generation - becomes the touchstone for Indridason's pursuit of the missing chapters of his national heritage. You want cold? You want cheerless? Leave Iceland to its sultry spring and decamp for the Siberian Territory. Stuart M. Kaminsky's endearing Russian bear of a detective, Chief Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, is forced to voyage there in PEOPLE WHO WALK IN DARKNESS (Forge/Tom Doherty, $23.95) when a Canadian geologist is murdered after encountering a ghostly child deep below the earth in a diamond mine. The one-legged but indomitable Rostnikov is petrified of tunnels, yet he must avert the sabotage of Russia's diamond production before it affects the world market. ("I wonder," someone reflects, "if they ever have problems like this at DeBeers.") Faithful as ever to the split-focus formula of the police procedural, Kaminsky leaves it to Rostnikov's colleagues to untangle an intricate smuggling network connecting Moscow, Kiev and Botswana. Meanwhile, the chief inspector is dispatched to the wretched town of Devochka, which consists of eight identical single-story concrete buildings and a cracked concrete road to the mine. While some people can and do go mad in such places, Devochka inspires Kaminsky's sleuth to new levels of irony. Harsh environments are supposed to build strong character. But the seasons aren't "what they used to be" in the north woods of Minnesota where William Kent Krueger sets his rugged novels. Instead of toughening up over the long winter, citizens of the region's economically depressed mining and logging towns are turning mean-spirited and violent. In RED KNIFE (Atria, $25), ugly racial conflicts erupt when someone executes the leader of an Ojibwe youth gang and his wife. The culprits could be members of the Mexican drug cartel that's been using the Indian reservation as a depot, but there's so much hatred brewing here, it could be anyone. Cork O'Connor, a former sheriff whose Indian bloodline gives him tribal access, is one of those hometown heroes you rarely see (and can hardly believe in) anymore - someone so decent and true, he might restore his town's battered faith in the old values. No one shows you the ugly side of Alaska the way Stan Jones does in his somber novels about Nathan Active, an Eskimo state trooper posted back to Chukchi, his native village in the Arctic Circle. In FROZEN SUN (Bowhead, paper, $13.95), Nathan is sent to balmy Anchorage for computer training, giving him a chance to track down Grace Sikingik Palmer, a former "Miss North World" and onetime pride of the village, now rumored to be a homeless prostitute working Anchorage's infamous Four Street district. After giving her up for dead, Nathan learns that his fallen angel may be working in a fish-processing plant in the Aleutian Islands. It's a hellish place ("You not puke in here, you go in John," the line foreman warns Nathan), and Jones makes no attempt to prettify it. Just as he doesn't pretend to find anything remotely character-building in the conditions of those who have survived the unforgiving climate of the Arctic only to disappear on the streets. 'It isn't significant in this country if people disappear,' Arnaldur Indridason's Icelandic detective dryly observes.

THE DRAINING LAKE (Chapter 1) She stood motionless for a long time, staring at the bones as if it should not be possible for them to be there. Any more than for her. At first she thought it was another sheep that had drowned in the lake, until she moved closer and saw the skull half-buried in the lake bed and the shape of a human skeleton. The ribs protruded from the sand and beneath them could be seen the outlines of the pelvis and thigh bones. The skeleton was lying on its left side so she could see the right side of the skull, the empty eye sockets and three teeth in the upper jaw. One had a large silver filling. There was a wide hole in the skull itself, about the size of a matchbox, which she instinctively thought could have been made by a hammer. She bent down and stared at the skull. With some hesitation she explored the hole with her finger. The skull was full of sand. The thought of a hammer crossed her mind again and she shuddered at the idea of someone being struck over the head with one. But the hole was too large to have been left by a hammer. She decided not to touch the skeleton again. Instead, she took out her mobile and dialled emergency services. She wondered what to say. Somehow this was so completely unreal. A skeleton so far out in the lake, buried on its sandy bed. Nor was she on her best form. Visions of hammers and matchboxes. She found it difficult to concentrate. Her thoughts were roaming all over the place and she had great trouble rounding them up again. It was probably because she was hung-over. After planning to spend the day at home she had changed her mind and gone to the lake. She had persuaded herself that she must check the instruments. She was a scientist. She had always wanted to be a scientist and knew that the measurements had to be monitored carefully. But she had a splitting headache and her thoughts were far from logical. The National Energy Authority had held its annual dinner dance the night before and, as was sometimes the way, she had had too much to drink. She thought about the man lying in her bed at home and knew that it was on his account that she had hauled herself off to the lake. She did not want to be there when he woke up and hoped that he would be gone when she returned. He had come back to her flat after the dance but was not very exciting. No more than the others she had met since her divorce. He hardly talked about anything except his CD collection and carried on long after she had given up feigning any interest. Then she fell asleep in a living-room chair. When she woke up she saw that he had got into her bed, where he was sleeping with his mouth open, wearing tiny underpants and black socks. 'Emergency services,' a voice said over the line. 'Hello - I'd like to report that I've found some bones,' she said. 'There's a skull with a hole in it.' She grimaced. Bloody hangover! Who says that sort of thing? A skull with a hole in it. She remembered a phrase from a children's rhyme about a penny with a hole in it. Or was it a shilling? 'Your name, please,' said the neutral emergency-services voice. She straightened out her jumbled thoughts and stated her name. 'Where is it?' 'Lake Kleifarvatn. North side.' 'Did you pull it up in a fishing net?' 'No. It's buried on the bed of the lake.' 'Are you a diver?' 'No, it's standing up out of the bed. Ribs and the skull.' 'It's on the bottom of the lake?' 'Yes.' 'So how can you see it?' 'I'm standing here looking at it.' 'Did you bring it to dry land?' 'No, I haven't touched it,' she lied instinctively. The voice on the telephone paused. 'What kind of crap is this?' the voice said at last, angrily. 'Is this a hoax? You know what you can get for wasting our time?' 'It's not a hoax. I'm standing here looking at it.' 'So you can walk on water, I suppose?' 'The lake's gone,' she said. 'There's no water any more. Just the bed. Where the skeleton is.' 'What do you mean, the lake's gone?' 'It hasn't all gone, but it's dry now where I'm standing. I'm a hydrologist with the Energy Authority. I was recording the water level when I discovered this skeleton. There's a hole in the skull and most of the bones are buried in the sand on the bottom. I thought it was a sheep at first.' 'A sheep?' 'We found one the other day that had drowned years ago. When the lake was bigger.' There was another pause. 'Wait there,' said the voice reluctantly. 'I'll send a patrol car.' She stood still by the skeleton for a while, then walked over to the shore and measured the distance. She was certain the bones had not surfaced when she was taking measurements at the same place a fortnight earlier. Otherwise she would have seen them. The water level had dropped by more than a metre since then. The scientists from the Energy Authority had been puzzling over this conundrum ever since they'd noticed that the water level in Lake Kleifarvatn was falling rapidly. The authority had set up its first automatic surface-level monitor in 1964 and one of the hydrologists' tasks was to check the measurements. In the summer of 2000 the monitor seemed to have broken. An incredible amount of water was draining from the lake every day, twice the normal volume. She walked back to the skeleton. She was itching to take a better look, dig it up and brush off the sand, but imagined that the police would be none too pleased at that. She wondered whether it was male or female and vaguely recalled having read somewhere, probably in a detective story, that their skeletons were almost identical: only the pelvises were different. Then she remembered someone telling her not to believe anything she read in detective stories. Since the skeleton was buried in the sand she couldn't see the pelvis, and it struck her that she would not have known the difference anyway. Her hangover intensified and she sat down on the sand beside the bones. It was a Sunday morning and the occasional car drove past the lake. She imagined they were families out for a Sunday drive to Herdísarvík and on to Selvogur. That was a popular and scenic route, across the lava field and hills and past the lake down to the sea. She thought about the families in the cars. Her own husband had left her when the doctors ruled out their ever having children together. He remarried shortly afterwards and now had two lovely children. He had found happiness. All that she had found was a man she barely knew, lying in her bed in his socks. Decent men became harder to find as the years went by. Most of them were either divorced like her or, even worse, had never been in a relationship at all. She looked woefully at the bones, half-buried in the sand, and was close to tears. About an hour later a police car approached from Hafnarfjördur. It was in no hurry, lazily threading its way along the road towards the lake. This was May and the sun was high in the sky, reflecting off the smooth surface of the water. She sat on the sand watching the road and when she waved to the car it pulled over. Two police officers got out, looked in her direction and walked towards her. They stood over the skeleton in silence for a long time until one of them poked a rib with his foot. 'Do you reckon he was fishing?' he said to his colleague. 'On a boat, you mean?' 'Or waded here.' 'There's a hole,' she said, looking at each of them in turn. 'In the skull.' One officer bent down. 'Well,' he said. 'He could have fallen over in the boat and broken his skull,' his colleague said. 'It's full of sand,' said the first one. 'Shouldn't we notify CID?' the other asked. 'Aren't most of them in America?' his colleague said, looking up into the sky. 'At a crime conference?' The other officer nodded. Then they stood quietly over the bones for a while until one of them turned to her. 'Where's all the water gone?' he asked. 'There are various theories,' she said. 'What are you going to do? Can I go home now?' After exchanging glances they took down her name and thanked her, without apologising for having kept her waiting. She didn't care. She wasn't in a hurry. It was a beautiful day by the lake and she would have enjoyed it even more in the company of her hangover if she had not chanced upon the skeleton. She wondered whether the man in the black socks had left her flat and certainly hoped so. Looked forward to renting a video that evening and snuggling up under a blanket in front of the television. She looked down at the bones and at the hole in the skull. Maybe she would rent a good detective film. THE DRAINING LAKE Copyright (c) 2004 by Arnaldur Indridason. Excerpted from The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indriðason All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.