“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.