Black Skies

12

One of the measures taken by the police in connection with the attack on Lína was to note down the licence plates of every vehicle parked near her house, in the hope that her assailant might have arrived by car. The idea was not implausible; in fact, it was highly likely. He would hardly have travelled on public transport with the baseball bat hidden inside his jacket, and a simple check confirmed that he had not taken a taxi. Another possibility was that he had walked there, in which case he was unlikely to have come far and might well live within a few kilometres of the crime scene. It was also conceivable that someone had given him a lift and had been waiting outside when they saw Sigurdur Óli enter the house, but Sigurdur Óli had not noticed anyone. The most likely scenario was that the assailant had arrived by car but instead of parking outside had left it in a side street and been forced to abandon it when Sigurdur Óli had disturbed him.

Most of the licence plates collected by the police, and there were dozens of them, were traced to addresses nearby, decent people with families and jobs who would not hurt a soul and did not know Lína and Ebbi from Adam. However, several were registered to owners who lived further away, in other neighbourhoods or even other parts of the country, though none had a police record for violence.

Sigurdur Óli, who was at least familiar with the assailant’s running style, volunteered to talk to the owners of any cars which required further investigation.

Lína’s condition remained unchanged and Ebbi had hardly left her bedside. The doctors believed that it could still go either way.

Sigurdur Óli’s evening with Bergthóra had ended badly, with accusations flying back and forth, until Bergthóra had finally stood up, said she could no longer cope with this and left.

Sigurdur Óli believed himself to be perfectly capable of working on the investigation despite his highly irregular personal involvement in the affair. After thinking it through, he decided that nothing he knew could be prejudicial to the interests of the inquiry, since he had absolutely no desire to protect Hermann and his wife, and Patrekur was not involved. He had done nothing that would require him to declare an interest and resign from the case. The only point that troubled him, and then only briefly, was the conversation about the photos he had had with Ebbi at the hospital. He was not acquainted with Lína or Ebbi; for all he knew they might be up to their necks in debt from drug use, a mortgage or a car loan, and might owe money to the kind of people who employed debt collectors. After all, drugs were not the only reason enforcers were set on defaulters. Sigurdur Óli thought it likely that Lína and Ebbi had gone too far in their clumsy attempts to blackmail fools like Hermann and his wife with their incriminating photos. It was not improbable that somebody who felt pushed into a corner would want to shut them up by violence, or at least by the threat of violence. Whether Hermann was behind it or not was another matter. He denied it now but time would tell.

He felt a nagging guilt at not having come clean to Finnur, either about the photos or Lína and Ebbi’s alleged blackmail attempt, since it was only a matter of time before the information would come out. And when that happened, and Hermann and his wife’s names became mixed up in the inquiry, Sigurdur Óli would have some explaining to do.

Preoccupied by these thoughts, he walked into a small meat-processing factory in search of a man called Hafsteinn, who turned out to be the foreman and who professed himself astonished by Sigurdur Óli’s visit, exclaiming that he had never spoken to a detective before in his life, as if this were a guarantee of a blameless existence. Hafsteinn invited him into his office and they both sat down. The foreman was wearing a white coat and a lightweight white hat bearing the firm’s logo on his head. He had the figure of a German beer drinker at Oktoberfest, stout and cheery, with plump red cheeks; hardly the type to attack a defenceless woman with a baseball bat, let alone run further than ten metres. This fact did not deter Sigurdur Óli, however, and he stuck doggedly to his task. After a short preamble, he said he wanted to know what Hafsteinn had been doing in the area where Lína was attacked, and whether there was anyone who could provide an alibi for his explanation, whatever it was.

The foreman gave Sigurdur Óli a long look.

‘Hang on a minute, what are you saying? Do I have to tell you what I was doing there?’

‘Your car was parked one street down from the crime scene. You live in Hafnarfjördur. What were you doing in Reykjavík? Were you driving the car yourself?’

Sigurdur Óli reasoned that even if the man had not attacked Lína, he might conceivably know something about the attack; he might have driven the assailant to the scene and abandoned his car in a panic.

‘Yes, I was driving. I was visiting someone. Do you need to know any more?’

‘Yes.’

‘May I ask what you’re going to do with the information?’

‘We’re trying to find the assailant.’

‘You don’t think I attacked the poor woman?’

‘Did you take part in the attack?’

‘Are you out of your mind?’

Sigurdur Óli observed that the red cheeks had lost some of their colour.

‘Can I speak to someone who can confirm your alibi?’

‘Are you going to mention this to my wife?’ Hafsteinn asked hesitantly.

‘Do I need to?’ Sigurdur Óli asked.

The man sighed heavily.

‘There’s no need,’ he said after a long pause. ‘I … I have a lady friend on that road. If you need to confirm my story you can talk to her. I can’t believe I’m telling you this.’

‘A lady friend?’

The man nodded.

‘You mean a mistress?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you were visiting her?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see. Did you notice anyone in the area who could have been connected to the attack?’

‘No. Is that it?’

‘Yes, I believe that’s all,’ Sigurdur Óli said.

‘Are you going to speak to my wife?’

‘Can she confirm any of this?’

The man shook his head.

‘Then I’ve no interest in talking to her,’ Sigurdur Óli said. He took the lady friend’s phone number just in case, then got up and left.

Later that day he met a man who was unaware that his car had been parked near Lína’s house, as he had not been driving it himself but had lent it to his son. After the man had made some enquiries it turned out that his son had been round at a nearby house with a friend. They were visiting a classmate from their sixth-form college and had all gone together to a film in the Laugarás cinema which had started at around the time Lína was attacked.

The man gave Sigurdur Óli a considering look.

‘You needn’t bother about the boy,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Scared of his own shadow.’

Finally Sigurdur Óli sat down with a woman of about thirty who worked on the switchboard at a soft-drinks bottling plant. After Sigurdur Óli had introduced himself, she asked someone to cover for her and since he did not want to explain his business where they could be overheard, she went and sat with him in the staff cafeteria.

‘What’s going on exactly?’ the woman asked. She had dark hair and a broad face, a small metal ring in one eyebrow and a tattoo on her forearm. Sigurdur Óli could not see what it was supposed to be; it looked like a cat but could equally have been a snake that wound around her arm. Her name was Sara.

‘I’d like to know what you were doing in the east of town, near the Laugarás cinema, on the evening of the day before yesterday.’

‘The day before yesterday?’ she said. ‘Why do you want to know that?’

‘Your car was parked not far from the street where a brutal attack occurred.’

‘I didn’t attack anyone,’ she said.

‘No,’ Sigurdur Óli agreed. ‘But your car was in the area.’

He explained that the police were checking up on the owners of any vehicle that had been seen in the vicinity that evening. It was a serious case of assault and battery, and the police wanted to ask all those who had been in the area whether they had noticed anything that might assist the investigation. It was a long speech and Sigurdur Óli could tell that Sara was bored.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ she said.

‘What were you doing in the area?’

‘Visiting a friend. What actually happened? I saw something on the news about a break-in.’

‘We don’t have any more information as yet,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘I’ll need your friend’s details.’

Sara gave them to him.

‘Did you stay the night?’

‘What? Are you spying on me?’ she asked.

The cafeteria door opened and an employee of the bottling plant nodded to Sara.

‘No. Is there any reason why I should?’ Sigurdur Óli asked.

Sara smiled. ‘I very much doubt it.’

Sigurdur Óli was getting into his car outside the plant when his phone rang. He recognised the number immediately. It was Finnur, who informed him brusquely that Sigurlína Thorgrímsdóttir had died a quarter of an hour earlier as a result of the blow to her head.

‘What the hell were you doing at her place, Siggi?’ Finnur whispered and hung up.