Arctic Chill

16

The police attached the highest priority to locating Niran, who had not been heard of since the previous day. With the help of the school staff, they gathered information about his friends, boys he knew and spent most of his time with at school. A lower-profile and more personal search was also in progress, known only to Erlendur and based on Marion Briem’s memory of Andres’s stepfather. He wanted to keep that line of inquiry quiet because he had the feeling Andres was lying to them. He had done as much in the past.

When word spread that Sunee, the victim’s mother, had spirited her older son away to a safe haven, it became headline news and a talking point all over Iceland. The police were heavily criticised for their ineptitude. Either they had let a key witness slip through their hands or, even worse, they had driven him to flight through their own sheer incompetence. After suspicions were raised that the police had tried to conceal this information, like so much else connected with the investigation, a furore broke out about the information act and lack of cooperation with the media.

Erlendur despised nothing more than having to inform journalists and reporters about “the progress of the investigation’, as it was called. He had long maintained that police investigations had nothing to do with the media and that it could be downright damaging to give constant updates about the latest developments. Sigurdur Oli disagreed. He considered it a matter of course to give information, provided it did not jeopardise the interests of the investigation.

“Interests of the investigation?” Erlendur fumed. “Who invents phrases like that? That lot can stick it where the sun don’t shine. We shouldn’t be releasing any bloody information until we ourselves know what’s happened. It serves no purpose whatsoever.”

They were sitting in Erlendur’s office, with Elinborg. A press conference was to be held later that day in response to demands by the media, but Erlendur had refused to attend. This created quite a rumpus between him and his immediate superiors. The outcome was that Sigurdur Oli would be police spokesman and media liaison, along with the deputy head of Reykjavik CID. Erlendur considered it stupid to waste manpower on such pointless exercises.

He had met Odinn, Elias’s father, the previous day when it transpired that Niran had gone missing again and Sunee refused to disclose his whereabouts. Erlendur went to visit him in the flat on Snorrabraut. Odinn had taken several days off work. He did not look as if he had slept well that night, he was unkempt and in bad shape.

Sigridur, Sunee’s mother-in-law, had also taken leave from work and Sigurdur Oli visited her at her home. She said she had been on her way to see Sunee when she heard the news, and really could not understand what was going on. She had offered to sleep at their flat that night, but Sunee had declined. Sigridur had no idea of her movements and could not imagine what had become of Niran. She wondered why Sunee should take such drastic action. Sigurdur Oli hinted that she might have something to hide from the police, but Sigridur dismissed that as absurd. Rather Sunee was trying to protect the boy, she thought.

The most likely scenario was that Sunee had approached someone within the Thai community in the city. Elinborg spent a long time with her brother Virote. She could not tell whether he was lying when he claimed to know nothing. He was deeply anxious about his sister and Niran and reproached the police for allowing such a thing to happen. Elinborg visited the brother on her own, although he could not speak much more Icelandic than Sunee. She repeatedly asked him about Niran, but Virote stood firm.

“I can well understand if you don’t want to tell me where Niran is,” Elinborg said, “but you have to believe that it’s in his best interests to come out of hiding.”

“I not know about Niran,” Virote said. “Sunee not tell me nothing.”

“You must help us,” Elinborg said.

“I not know nothing.”

“Why did Sunee do this?” Elinborg asked.

“I not know what she do. She afraid. Afraid for Niran.”

“Why?”

“I not know nothing.”

The brother stuck to his guns until Elinborg gave up and left.

“We have to find Niran and tell him he can trust us,” Erlendur said. “Sunee has to understand that.”

“He can hardly spend long in hiding,” Elinborg said. “Surely Sunee will want him to attend Elias’s funeral. Anything else would be out of the question.”

“She could be getting the boy out of the way,” Sigurdur Oli said. “This bizarre twist has turned the spotlight on Niran, on what he knows and what he did. We can’t ignore that.”

“I can’t imagine that he attacked his brother,” Elinborg said. “I just can’t picture it. Maybe he does know something and he’s afraid, but I don’t believe he played any part in what happened.”

“If only we could go by what you can imagine, Elinborg,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Wouldn’t everything be just dandy?”

“There’s nothing bloody “dandy” about it,” Erlendur snapped.

Sigurdur Oli grinned.

“I told Sunee we couldn’t be sure when the body would be released because of the investigation,” Erlendur said. “One possibility is that she’s trying to win time. But time for what?”

“Is she waiting for us to solve the case?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “However we’re supposed to do that.”

“There are some small-scale racial clashes in or around the school,” Erlendur said. “Niran’s mixed up in them somehow. There’s a minor altercation. Elias isn’t necessarily involved but Niran is. When Elias is attacked, Niran disappears or doesn’t come home. When he finally does show up he’s obviously had a major shock. Maybe he saw what happened. Maybe he only heard about it. He was in a state of shock when I found him in the rubbish store. He’d locked himself away in some private place in his mind where he felt safe. Anyway, Niran tells his mother what he knows and she responds by bundling him off into hiding. What does that tell us?”

“That they know what happened,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Niran knows and he’s told his mother.”

Erlendur looked at Elinborg.

“Something happened when Niran was alone with his mother,” she said. “That’s all we can be sure of. Anything else is conjecture. They don’t necessarily know anything. She’s already lost one son and she’s not prepared to lose the only one she has left.”

“What about that little dealer’s claim that Niran and his friends were selling dope?” Erlendur asked.

“You can’t trust a word that girl says,” Elinborg said.

“Could it be that Sunee no longer feels safe among us?” Erlendur said. “Here in Iceland? Could that explain why she’s hidden her son? We can’t begin to understand what it’s really like for immigrants in this country. We can’t begin to understand what it’s like for someone from the other side of the globe to move over here, settle, start a family and try to integrate into Icelandic society. It’s bound to be tough and I think it’s very hard for us to put ourselves in their shoes. Racism may not be an everyday occurrence here but we know that not everyone’s happy with the way society is going.”

“According to surveys, the majority of young Icelanders feel things have gone far enough,” Sigurdur Oli chipped in. “Which shows they’re not exactly keen on multiculturalism.”

“We want foreigners to come here and do shitty jobs at power stations, fish factories and as cleaners, then pack up and leave again when we don’t need them any more,” Elinborg said. “ ‘Thanks for the help, don’t hurry back!’ God forbid that we might get stuck with these people. But if they do insist on coming here, they can stay away from us. Like the Yanks on the Base who’ve always been kept safely behind fences. Wasn’t it official policy for years that no black people were allowed on the Base? I reckon that’s still a common attitude: that foreigners ought to be kept behind fences.”

“You can’t rule out the possibility that they erect the fences themselves,” Sigurdur Oli said. “It’s not a one-way street. I think you’re oversimplifying. There are also cases of immigrants not wanting to integrate, only marrying within their own group and so on. Wanting to close ranks and ignore what goes on in the wider community.”

“From what I hear, it’s worked out best in the West Fjords,” Elinborg said, “where a variety of nationalities, people from literally dozens of countries, live in a small area and respect each other’s cultural differences and backgrounds while trying to make a life for themselves in Iceland.”

“If I can continue,” Erlendur said, “what I think may have happened is that Sunee sought refuge among her own kind. She doesn’t trust us, so she’s taken Niran somewhere where she thinks he’ll be safer. I reckon we ought to organise our search on that basis. She’s turned to the people she trusts best for protection, her own kind.”

Elinborg nodded.

“Very probably,” she said. “So it’s not necessarily a question of what Niran knows or has done.”

“Only time will tell,” Erlendur said.

By midday the school staff had supplied them with the names of the boys who Niran was believed to spend most of his time with at school and in the neighbourhood. Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg took the list and set off. It contained four names, all of them boys from immigrant families who lived in the school’s catchment area: one of Thai origin, two from the Philippines and one from Vietnam. All except the Thai boy had been born in Asia, moved to Iceland after the age often, and had problems adapting to Icelandic society.

Erlendur spent the rest of the morning making the arrangements for Marion Briem’s funeral. He contacted the funeral director’s, who told him to leave it to them. A date was set and he placed an announcement of the death and funeral in the papers. He was not expecting a large turn-out and didn’t entertain the idea of a reception for long. Marion had left instructions for the funeral, including the name of a minister and a choice of hymns, and Erlendur followed them to the letter.

Once he had completed the preparations as best he could, he began his search for the stepfather that Marion had mentioned in connection with Andres, who might be the man that Andres had spotted by chance in the area. Erlendur traced the name of Andres’s mother and found his date of birth, then searched the register of Reykjavik residents for the period when he was growing up. According to the records Erlendur examined, the boy had been four years old when he lost his father. After that his mother was registered as living alone with her son. From what Erlendur could discover, Andres was her only child. If she had lived with anyone for any length of time, he or they were not registered at her home, apart from one man who turned out to have died thirteen years ago. Erlendur found the street names and numbers where the woman had lived. She had moved constantly, even within the same area, living in the city centre, in Skuggahverfi, in the suburb of Breidholt when it was under construction, and moved from there to Vogar and finally to Grafarvogur. She died early in the 1990s. At first glance, Erlendur could find no trace of the stepfather Marion had mentioned before dying.

Since he was digging through the police archives anyway, he decided to examine any reports of incidents linked to racial prejudice or hate crimes. Erlendur knew that other members of the CID had been detailed to look into that aspect of the case but he did not let this deter him. He generally did as he pleased, ignoring his place in the precise hierarchy of the investigation. In all, more than twenty detectives were working on Elias’s case, each assigned a specific task relating to the collection of information, surveillance of comings and goings from the country, or examination of transactions at car-rental companies and hotels in the city and surrounding area. They had also contacted the Bangkok police and enquired about any possible movements to or from the country by Sunee’s relatives. The Reykjavik CID were inundated with tip-offs every day, most of which were recorded and followed up, although this was a time-consuming process. Members of the public called in after watching the news or reading the papers, claiming to have important information about the case. Some of it was absurd and irrelevant: drunks claiming to have solved the case using nothing but their own ingenuity and even giving the names of relatives or acquaintances who were “a bunch of arseholes’. Every lead was investigated.

As far as Erlendur knew, there were not many individuals in the police files who were considered actively dangerous or likely to commit serious crimes from racist motives. A few violent thugs had been arrested, at their own homes in a couple of instances, and a variety of offensive weapons — clubs, knives and knuckledusters — had been removed, along with propaganda that could be described as neo-Nazi: material from the Internet, pamphlets, books, photocopies, flags and other racist paraphernalia. Much of it had been confiscated. This was no organised circulation of hate propaganda, and few people had been picked up by the police specifically for showing hostility towards immigrants. Most complaints about racial prejudice were the result of random, one-off incidents.

Erlendur rooted around in the boxes. In one he found a carefully folded Confederate flag and another bearing a swastika. There were also a variety of publications in English, which, judging from the titles, seemed to write off the holocaust as a Zionist conspiracy, and racist pamphlets featuring pictures of primitive African tribes. He unearthed articles from American and British magazines inciting hatred, and finally an old book of minutes from an association calling itself “Fathers of Iceland’.

The book recorded several meetings that took place in 1990, where the issues discussed included Hitler’s contribution to the reconstruction of post-Weimar Germany. At one point there was a passage referring to the problem of immigration in Iceland and discussing how to stem the tide. It predicted that the Nordic race would face extinction in Iceland within a hundred years if miscegenation continued. Among the measures to oppose this it advocated passing tougher laws on eligibility for citizenship, and even closing the borders to foreigners, regardless of whether they came to the country to work, for family reasons or as asylum seekers. The entries stopped abruptly. Apparently the association had disbanded without warning. Erlendur registered that the handwriting was elegant, the style terse and to the point, with no unnecessary digressions.

Although no list of members was appended, the minutes contained a name that seemed familiar to Erlendur. He was sitting racking his brains about where he had heard it before when his mobile rang. He recognised the voice immediately.

“I know I mustn’t call but I don’t know what…”

The woman began to sob.

“…I don’t know what to do.”

“Come and talk to me,” Erlendur said.

“I can’t. I can’t do it. It’s so terrible how…”

“What?” Erlendur said.

“I want to,” the voice said. “I do want to, but it’s impossible.”

“Where are you?”

“I . . . “

The woman abandoned what she had been going to say and there was silence.

“I can help you,” Erlendur said. “Tell me where you are and I’ll help you.”

“I can’t,” the voice said, and he could hear the woman crying down the phone. “I can’t . . . live like this . . .” She trailed off again.

“But you keep calling,” Erlendur said. “You can’t be in a good way if you’re phoning me like this. I’ll help you. Are you hiding because of him? Is it because of him that you’re in hiding?”

“I’d do anything for him, that’s why-‘ The woman broke off.

“We need to talk to you,” Erlendur said.

Silence.

“We can help you. I know it must be difficult but…”

“It should never have happened. Never.”

“Tell me where you are and we’ll talk,” Erlendur said. “It’ll be all right. I promise.”

He waited with bated breath. All he could hear over the phone was the woman’s sobbing. A long moment passed. Erlendur did not dare to speak. The woman was weighing up her options. His mind racing, he tried to find something to say to her to clinch the matter. Something about her husband. Her family. Her two children.

“Your children will certainly want to know—”

Erlendur got no further.

“Oh God!” the woman cried, and hung up.

Erlendur stared at the phone in his hand. The caller ID was blank like last time. He assumed the woman had called from a public payphone; the background noise had suggested as much. When he had her first call traced, it turned out to have been made from the Smaralind shopping mall. Information of this kind had little bearing as a rule. People who called the police from public payphones did so for a reason and avoided using phones near their home or workplace. The location would tell the police nothing.

Pensively, he shoved the phone back in his pocket. Why was the woman calling him? She disclosed no information. She did not tell him why she was in hiding. She did not mention her husband or reveal anything about what she was thinking. Maybe she felt it was enough to let him know that she was alive. She might even be trying to prevent him from looking for her. What was she concealing? Why had she left him?

He had got little response when he put the same questions to her husband. The man shook his head as if he had no idea what was going on. It was almost his sole reaction to the disappearance. It was not until after New Year that Erlendur met his ex-wives and asked them what they thought could have happened. One received him at her home in Hafnarfjordur; her husband was abroad on business. The woman was eager to help Erlendur with his inquiries, eager to tell him what a shit her ex-husband was. He listened to the diatribe, then asked her if she thought her ex was capable of harming his new wife. The answer came instantly.

“No question,” she said. “I’m certain of it.”

“Why?”

“Men like him,” she said contemptuously, “they’re capable of anything.”

“Have you any proof of what you say?”

“No,” the woman said, “I just know. He’s the type. I bet he’s started sleeping around again. Men like that never give up. It’s like a disease. It’s like a disease with those bastards.”

The other woman was more informative when she came, at her own request, to see Erlendur down at the station. She did not want him to come to her house. He described the case to her and she listened attentively, especially when he began to hint at the possibility that her ex-husband might be involved in his new wife’s disappearance.

“Have you no idea what happened to her?” she asked, her eyes wandering around the office.

“Do you think he could have done something to her?” Erlendur asked.

“Is that what you think?”

“We don’t think anything,” Erlendur said.

“Yes you do or you wouldn’t be asking.”

“It’s simply a routine inquiry,” Erlendur said. “We try to consider every angle. It has no bearing on what we do or don’t think.”

“You think he killed her,” the woman said, seeming to perk up.

“I don’t think anything,” Erlendur said, more firmly this time.

“He’s capable of anything,” the woman said.

“Why do you say that?”

“He once threatened me,” she said. “Threatened to kill me. I refused to divorce him so he could get married for a third time to that bitch you’re looking for. I said I’d never give him a divorce and he’d never be able to marry again. I was very angry, maybe even hysterical. A friend of mine told me about the affair, she’d heard people gossiping about it at work and told me. Everyone knew but me. Do you know how humiliating it is when everyone knows except the person who’s being cheated on? I went berserk. He hit me. Then he said he’d kill me if I put up any fucking obstacles.”

“He threatened to kill you?”

“He said he’d throttle me nice and slow till I was dead.”

Erlendur started out of his musings. He looked down at the book he had been perusing and his thoughts returned to the name recorded under the minutes. He remembered who it might be. Sigurdur Oli had mentioned the name and how bad-tempered and unpleasant he had been. If it was the same man, Erlendur would have to bring forward the interview he had scheduled with Kjartan, the school’s Icelandic teacher.

His mobile rang. It was Elinborg. She had a printout listing Sunee’s incoming calls over the last month. Some were from her ex-mother-in-law, others from the chocolate factory or friends, and twice she had been called from the school.

“Then the same number crops up eight times.”

“Whose is it?”

“It’s a business number. An insurance company. It’s the only unexpected number on this list, as far as I can see. There aren’t many numbers.”

“Have you asked Sunee about it?”

“She claims not to recognise it. Says she vaguely remembers someone trying to sell insurance.”

“Do you think it’s the boyfriend?”

“We’ll soon find out.”