The Girl by the Bridge

About the AuthorArnaldur Indriðason was the winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award for the top crime novel of the year in the English language for Silence of the Grave. He also has the rare distinction of having won the Nordic Crime Novel Prize two years running. The Shadow District – the first book in the Reykjavík Wartime Mystery series – won the Premio RBA de Novela Negra, one of the world’s most prestigious crime fiction prizes.Indriðason’s novels have sold over 18 million copies worldwide, in over forty languages. The Darkness Knows is the first novel in the series about Detective Konrád. The Girl by the Bridge is the second novel in the series. Arnaldur IndriðasonTHE GIRL BY THE BRIDGETranslated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton Contents Chapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Chapter 23Chapter 24Chapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Chapter 28Chapter 29Chapter 30Chapter 31Chapter 32Chapter 33Chapter 34Chapter 35Chapter 36Chapter 37Chapter 38Chapter 39Chapter 40Chapter 41Chapter 42Chapter 43Chapter 44Chapter 45Chapter 46Chapter 47Chapter 48Chapter 49Chapter 50Chapter 51Chapter 52Chapter 53Chapter 54Chapter 55Chapter 56Chapter 57Chapter 58Chapter 59Chapter 60Chapter 61Chapter 62Chapter 63Credits Do you believe in angels who have somehow lost their way, and roam the city’s streets and squares, lonely and astray? Bubbi Morthens 1The young man walked west along Skothúsvegur Street, stopped on the bridge over the Pond and, leaning over the railing, saw the doll in the water.The bridge formed an elegant, low arch where the Pond narrowed and extended southward into Hljómskálagarður Park. The man stood at the crown of the arch, and as it was evening, there was little traffic on the road. A single car slowed down as it passed over the arch and then disappeared from view, its noisy engine breaking the stillness on the bridge. He thought he saw someone cross Sóleyjargata Street, and another person wearing a trench coat and hat walked by him without looking up. The young man leaned on the railing and looked over the Pond towards the Iðnó Culture House, the city centre and, further still, to where Mount Esja rose in the twilight, solid and immovable. Over the mountain, the moon shone like a fairy tale from a distant world, and when he looked down, he saw the doll, half submerged.He immediately found something poetic about it, inspiring various musings typical to a young writer like him. From his jacket pocket, he pulled a small notepad and fountain pen that he always carried with him and began jotting down a few words about lost innocence, the impermanence of childhood, and the water that was both a source of life and a destructive force. The notepad, which was bound in black leather and inscribed with the date 1961 in gold numerals, was full of the observations of a young man who was slowly but surely treading the path of a writer and took that role seriously. He had already put together a volume of poetry but hadn’t had the courage to show it to a publisher. He feared criticism and rejection more than anything else and spent a good deal of time polishing each poem to perfection, constantly making small changes or adding details, as he was doing now with this new poem of his on the transience of life.He guessed that a girl who had been walking next to the Pond had dropped her doll in the water and hadn’t been able to recover it. This thought, too, he jotted down. He tried to put the stillness of the evening into words. The city lights that were reflected on the water’s surface. He looked towards the islet in the middle of the Pond, which the Arctic terns occupied every spring. Now those birds were as silent as the night that laid its veil over the city, he wrote in his notepad. Then he crossed out the words ‘the night’. Wrote ‘dusk’ in their place. Crossed out ‘its veil’. Wrote ‘night’ again. Tried ‘its curtain’ in place of ‘its veil’, but felt that that didn’t work either.He stuck the pen and notepad back in his jacket pocket and was about to continue on his way when it crossed his mind to fish the doll up out of the water and lay it against the bridge’s railing in case the poor girl came there in search of her toy. He walked to the end of the bridge, scrambled down to the Pond’s bank and tried reaching for the doll, but it was too far beneath the bridge. He went back up to the street and looked around for something that he could use to catch hold of the doll, a stick or tree branch, but saw nothing useful.He abandoned his plan and walked up Skothúsvegur Street towards Hólavallagarður Cemetery. He found particular inspiration for his poems in cemeteries. He’d gone a short distance when he found the stick he’d been looking for, grabbed it, returned to the bridge and went down to the bank beneath it. He managed to hook the doll with the stick, but discovered that it was stuck. He poked at and hit the doll with the end of the stick, and was about to give up a second time when the doll came loose and floated away from him under the bridge. He watched it for a moment before dashing back up to the street, crossing it and scrambling down the Pond’s bank on the other side, where he fished the doll out of the water as it floated by.The doll was old and a bit tatty, had eyelids that flicked open and shut, and was wearing a flimsy dress. Its mouth was half open and a little whistle came from it when he pressed the doll’s stomach. Its hair was frazzled and in some places there were holes in the scalp where it was missing. He pressed the doll’s stomach again and water leaked from its eyes, as if the doll were crying.The young