Silence of the Grave

4

He could not tell where the call came from. His mobile’s screen display said “Unknown”. It was the voice of his daughter, Eva Lind. He winced as he stared at the phone, like a splinter that had pierced his hand, but it did not ring again. He could not call back. Eva Lind had his number and he remembered that the last time they spoke was when she called him to say she never wanted to see him again. He stood transfixed, dumbfounded, waiting for a second call that never came.

Then he leaped into his car.

He had not been in touch with Eva Lind for two months. In itself there was nothing unusual about that. His daughter had been living her life without giving him much chance to interfere in it. She was in her twenties. A drug addict. Their last meeting had ended with yet another furious argument. It was in the block of flats where he lived and she stormed out, saying that he was repulsive.

Erlendur also had a son, Sindri Snaer, who had little contact with his father. He and Eva Lind were infants when Erlendur walked out and left them with their mother. Erlendur’s wife never forgave him after their divorce and did not allow him to see the children. He increasingly regretted having let her decide. They sought him out themselves when they were old enough.

The calm spring dusk was descending over Reykjavik when Erlendur sped out of the Millennium Quarter, onto the main road and into the city. He checked that his mobile was switched on and put it on the front seat. Erlendur did not know much about his daughter’s personal life and had no idea where to start looking for her until he remembered a basement flat in the Vogar district where Eva Lind had been living about a year before.

First he checked whether she had gone to his flat, but Eva Lind was nowhere to be seen. He ran around the block where he lived and up the other staircases. Eva had a key to his flat. He called out to her inside the flat, but she wasn’t there. He wondered about telephoning her mother, but couldn’t bring himself to do so. They had hardly spoken for 20 years. He picked up the phone and called his son. He knew that his children kept in contact with each other, albeit intermittently. He found out Sindri’s mobile number from directory enquiries. It turned out that Sindri was working out of town and had no idea of his sister’s whereabouts.

Erlendur hesitated.

“Bugger it,” he groaned.

He picked up the phone again and asked for his ex-wife’s number.

“Erlendur here,” he said when she answered. “I think Eva Lind’s in trouble. Do you know where she could be?”

Silence.

“She called me asking for help but was cut off and I don’t know where she is. I think something’s wrong.”

Still no reply.

“Halldora?”

“Are you calling me after 20 years?”

He felt the cold hatred still in her voice after all that time and realised that he’d made a mistake.

“Eva Lind needs help, but I don’t know where she is.”

“Help?”

“I think there’s something wrong.”

“Is that my fault?”

“Your fault? No. It’s not…”

“Don’t you think I didn’t need help? Alone with two kids. You weren’t helping me.”

“Hall…”

“And now your kids have gone off the rails. Both of them! Are you beginning to realise what you’ve done? What you’ve done to us? What you’ve done to me and to your children?”

“You refused to let me see…”

“Don’t you suppose I haven’t needed to sort her out a million times? Don’t you think I’ve never needed to be there for her? Where were you then?”

“Halldora, I…”

“You bastard,” she snarled.

She slammed down the phone on him. Erlendur cursed himself for having called. He got into his car, drove to the Vogar district and stopped outside a dilapidated building with basement flats half-submerged in the ground. At one of them he pressed the bell which hung loose from the doorframe, but couldn’t hear it ring inside, so he knocked on the door. He waited impatiently for the sound of someone coming to answer it, but nothing happened. He took hold of the handle. The door was not locked and Erlendur stepped cautiously inside. As he entered the cramped hallway he could hear a child’s faint crying from somewhere within. A stench of urine and faeces confronted him as he approached the living room.

A baby girl, about a year old, sat on the living-room floor, exhausted from crying. She shivered with heavy sobs, naked apart from a vest. The floor was covered with empty beer cans, vodka bottles, fast-food wrappers and dairy products that had gone mouldy, and the acrid stench mingled with the stink from the baby. There was little else in the living room apart from a battered sofa on which a woman was lying, naked, with her back to Erlendur. The baby paid no attention to him as he moved towards the sofa. He took the woman by the wrist and felt her pulse. There were needle marks on her arm.

A kitchen went off the living room and in a small room beside that Erlendur found a blanket, which he draped over the woman on the sofa. Inside the room was another door, leading to a little bathroom with a shower. Erlendur picked up the baby from the floor, carried her into the bathroom, carefully washed her with warm water and wrapped her in a towel. The baby stopped crying. Between her legs her skin was raw with a rash from urine. He presumed that the baby must be starving, but could not find anything edible to give her apart from a little bar of chocolate which he happened to have in his pocket. He broke off a lump and gave it to the baby while talking to her in a soothing voice. When he noticed the marks on her arms and back, he grimaced.

He found a cot, tossed away the beer can and hamburger wrapper that were inside it, and gently laid the baby down. Seething with rage, he went back into the living room. He didn’t know whether the heap on the sofa was the baby girl’s mother. Nor did he care. He snatched the woman up and carried her into the bathroom, laid her on the floor of the shower and sprayed ice-cold water over her. She twitched, gasped for breath and screamed as she tried to protect herself from it.

Erlendur kept spraying the woman for a good while before he turned off the water, threw the blanket in to her, led her back into the living room and made her sit down on the sofa. She was awake but dazed and looked at Erlendur with slothful eyes. Looked all around as if something was missing. Suddenly she remembered what it was.

“Where’s Perla?” she asked, shivering beneath the blanket.

“Perla?” Erlendur said angrily. “That’s the kind of name you give to a puppy!”

“Where’s my girl?” the woman repeated. She looked 30 or so, with hair cut short, wearing make-up that had run under the shower and was now smeared all over her face. Her upper lip was swollen, she had a bump on her forehead and her right eye was bruised and blue.

“You’ve no right even to ask about her,” Erlendur said.

“What?”

“Stubbing out cigarettes on your baby?”

“What? No! Who…? Who are you?”

“Or is it the brute who beats you up who does that too?”

“Beats me up? What? Who are you?”

“I’m going to take Perla away from you,” Erlendur said. “I’m going to catch the man who does that to her. So you need to tell me two things.”

“Take her away from me?”

“A girl used to live here a few months back, maybe a year ago, do you know anything about her? Her name’s Eva Lind. Slim, black hair…”

“Perla’s a pest. Cries. All the time.”

“Poor you…”

“It drives him crazy.”

“Let’s start with Eva Lind. Do you know her?”

“Don’t take her away from me. Please.”

“Do you know where Eva Lind is?”

“Eva moved out months ago.”

“Do you know where to?”

“No. She was with Baddi.”

“Baddi?”

“He’s a bouncer. I’ll tell the papers if you take her away. What about that? I’ll tell the papers.”

“Where is he a bouncer?”

She told him. Erlendur stood up and called an ambulance and the emergency shift at the Child Welfare Council, giving a brief account of the circumstances.

“Then there’s the second thing,” Erlendur said as he waited for the ambulance. “Where’s that bastard who beats you up?”

“Leave him out of this,” she said.

“So he can keep doing it? Is that what you want?”

“No.”

“So where is he?”

“It’s just…”

“Yes, what? What’s just…”

“If you’re going to take him…”

“Yes.”

“If you’re going to take him, make sure you kill him. If you don’t, he’ll kill me,” she said with a cold smile at Erlendur.

Baddi was muscular with an unusually small head, and he worked as a bouncer at a strip club called Count Rosso in the centre of Reykjavik. He hadn’t been on the door when Erlendur arrived, but another bouncer of a similar build had told Erlendur where he could find him.

“He’s taking care of the privates,” the bouncer had said, and Erlendur didn’t understand him immediately.

“The private dancing,” the bouncer explained. “Private shows.” Then he rolled his eyes in resignation.

Erlendur walked inside the club which was lit up with dull red lights. There was one bar in the room, a few tables and chairs and a couple of men watching a young girl sliding up against a metal pole on a raised dance floor to the monotonous beat of a pop tune. She looked at Erlendur, started dancing in front of him as if he were a likely customer, and slipped off her tiny bra. Erlendur gave her a look of such profound pity that she became flustered and lost her footing, then regained her balance and wriggled away from him before dropping her bra casually to the floor in an attempt to preserve some dignity.

Trying to work out where the private shows might be held, he saw a long corridor directly opposite the dance floor and walked over to it. The corridor was painted black with stairs at the end leading down to the basement. Erlendur could not see very well, but he inched his way down the stairs until he reached another black corridor. A lonely red light bulb hung down from the ceiling and at the end of the corridor stood a huge beefy bouncer with his stout arms crossed over his chest, and he glared at Erlendur. In the corridor between them were six doors, three on either side. He could hear the sound of a violin playing melancholy music in one of the rooms.

The muscular bouncer walked up to Erlendur.

“Are you Baddi?” Erlendur asked him.

“Where’s your girl?” the bouncer demanded, his little head protruding like a wart on top of his fat neck.

“I was about to ask you that,” Erlendur said in surprise.

“Me? No, I don’t set up the girls. You have to go upstairs and get one and then bring her down here.”

“Oh, I see,” Erlendur said, realising the misunderstanding. “I’m looking for Eva Lind.”

“Eva? She quit ages ago. Were you with her?”

Erlendur stared at him.

“Quit ages ago? What do you mean?”

“She was here sometimes. How do you know her?”

A door opened along the corridor and a young man walked out, zipping up his flies. Erlendur could see a naked girl bending down to pick up some clothes from the floor in the room. The young man squeezed past them, patted Baddi on the shoulder and disappeared up the stairs. The girl in the room looked Erlendur in the face, then slammed the door.

“Do you mean down here?” Erlendur said in astonishment. “Eva Lind was down here?”

“Long time ago. There’s one who looks just like her in this room,” Baddi said with all the enthusiasm of a used-car salesman, and pointed to a door. “She’s a medical student from Lithuania. And that girl playing the violin. Did you hear her? She’s in some famous school in Poland. They come over here. Make some money. Then go on studying.”

“Do you know where I can find Eva Lind?”

“We never say where the girls live,” Baddi said with a peculiarly beatific expression.

“I don’t want to know where the girls live,” Erlendur said wearily. He took care not to lose his temper, knew he had to be cautious, had to obtain the information diplomatically, even though he felt most of all like wringing the man’s neck. “I think Eva Lind’s in trouble and she asked me to help her,” he said as calmly as he could possibly manage.

“And who are you, her dad?” Baddi said sarcastically, with a giggle.

Erlendur looked at him, wondering how he could get a hold on that little bald head. The grin froze on Baddi’s face when he realised that he had scored a bull’s-eye. By accident as usual. He slowly took one step backwards.

“Are you the cop?” he asked.

Erlendur nodded.

“This is a completely legitimate establishment.”

“That’s none of my business. Do you know about Eva Lind?”

“Is she lost?”

“I don’t know,” Erlendur said. “She’s lost to me. She spoke to me earlier and asked me to help her, but I don’t know where she is. I was told you knew her.”

“I was with her for a while, did she tell you that?”

Erlendur shook his head.

“She’s hopeless to be with. A real nutter.”

“Can you tell me where she is?”

“It’s a long time since I’ve seen her. She hates you. Did you know that?”

“When you were going out with her, who got her stuff for her?”

“You mean her dealer?”

“Her dealer, yes.”

“Are you going to lock him up?”

“I’m not going to lock anyone up. I’ve got to find Eva Lind. Can you help me or not?”

Baddi weighed up his options. He didn’t need to help this man at all, or Eva Lind. She could go to hell for all he cared. But there was an expression on the detective’s face that told him it would be better to have him on his side rather than against him.

“I don’t know anything about Eva,” he said. “Talk to Alli.”

“Alli?”

“And don’t tell him I sent you.”