Voices

9

Erlendur, Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg held a meeting early the following morning. They sat at a little round table to one side of the dining room and had breakfast from the buffet. It had snowed during the night, then turned warmer and the streets were clear. The weathermen were forecasting a green Christmas. Long queues of cars built up at every junction and the city swarmed with people.

“This Wapshott,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Who is he?”

Much ado about nothing, Erlendur thought to himself as he sipped his coffee and looked out of the window. Odd places, hotels. He found staying at a hotel a welcome change but it was accompanied by the strange experience of having someone go into his room when he was not in it to tidy everything up. In the morning he left his room and the next time he returned someone had been in and restored it to normal: made the bed, changed the towels, put fresh soap on the sink. He was aware of the presence of the person who put his room back in order but saw no one, did not know who tidied up his life.

When he went downstairs in the morning he asked reception not to have his room cleaned any more.

Wapshott was going to meet him again later that morning and tell him more about his record collecting and Gudlaugur Egilsson’s singing career. They had shaken hands on parting when Valgerdur interrupted them the previous evening. Wapshott had stood to attention, waiting for Erlendur to introduce him to the woman, but when nothing of the sort happened he had held out his hand, introduced himself and bowed. Then he’d asked to be excused; he was tired and hungry and was going up to his room to deal with some business before dining and going to bed.

They did not see him come down to the dining room where they were eating, and talked about how he might have ordered a meal by room service. Valgerdur mentioned that he looked tired.

Erlendur had accompanied her to the cloakroom and helped her put on her smart leather coat, then walked with her to the revolving doors where they stood for a moment before she went out into the falling snow. When he lay on his bed, after Eva Lind had left, Valgerdur’s smile accompanied him into sleep, along with the faint scent of perfume that lingered on his hand from when they had said their goodbyes.

“Erlendur?” Sigurdur Oli said. “Hello! Wapshott, who is he?”

“All I know is that he’s a British record collector,” Erlendur said, after telling them about his meeting with him. “And he’s leaving the hotel tomorrow. You ought to phone the UK and get some details on him. We’re going to meet before noon and I’ll get some more out of him.”

“A choirboy?” Elinborg said. “Who could have wanted to kill a choirboy?”

“Naturally, he wasn’t a choirboy any longer,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“He was famous once,” Erlendur said. “Released some records that are clearly rare collectors” items today. Henry Wapshott comes up here from the UK on account of them, on account of him. He specialises in choirboys and boys” choirs from all over the world.”

“The only one I’ve heard of is the Vienna Boys” Choir,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Specialises in choirboys” Elinborg said. “What kind of man collects records of choirboys? Shouldn’t we give that some thought? Isn’t there something odd about that?”

Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli looked at her.

“What do you mean?” Erlendur asked.

“What?” Elinborg’s expression turned to one of astonishment.

“Do you think there’s something odd about collecting records?”

“Not records, but choirboys,” Elinborg said. “Recordings of choirboys. There’s a huge difference there, I reckon. Don’t you see anything pervy about that?” She looked at them both in turn.

“I haven’t got a dirty mind like you,” Sigurdur Oli said, looking at Erlendur.

“Dirty mind! Did I imagine seeing Santa Claus with his trousers down in a little basement room and a condom on his willy? Did I need a dirty mind for that? Then a man who worships Santa, but only when he was twelve years old or so, just so happens to be staying at the same hotel and comes over from the UK to meet him? Are you two plugged in?”

“Are you putting this in a sexual context?” Erlendur asked.

Elinborg rolled her eyes.

“You’re like a couple of monks!”

“He’s just a record collector,” Sigurdur Oli said. “As Erlendur said, some people collect airline sick bags. What’s their sex life like, according to your theories?”

“I can’t believe how blind you two are! Or frustrated. Why are men always so frustrated?”

“Oh, don’t you start,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Why do women always talk about how frustrated men are? As if women aren’t frustrated with all their stuff, “Oh, I can’t find my lipstick”…”

“Blind, frustrated old monks,” Elinborg said.

“What does being a collector mean?” Erlendur asked. “Why do people collect certain objects to have around them and why do they see one item as being more valuable than others?”

“Some items are more valuable than others,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“They must be looking for something unique,” Erlendur said. “Something no one else has. Isn’t that the ultimate goal? Owning a treasure that no one else in the whole wide world has?”

“Aren’t they often pretty strange characters?” Elinborg said.

“Strange?”

“Loners. Aren’t they? Weirdos?”

“You found some records in Gudlaugur’s cupboard,” Erlendur said to her. “What did you do with them? Did you look at them at all?”

“I just saw them in the cupboard,” Elinborg said. “Didn’t touch them and they’re still there if you want to take a look.”

“How does a collector like Wapshott make contact with a man like Gudlaugur?” Elinborg continued. “How did he hear about him? Are there intermediaries? What does he know about recordings of Icelandic choirboys in the 1960s? A boy soloist singing up here in Iceland more than thirty years ago?”

“Magazines?” Sigurdur Oli suggested. “The Internet? Over the phone? Through other collectors?”

“Do we know anything else about Gudlaugur?” Erlendur asked.

“He had a sister,” Sigurdur Oli said. “And a father who’s still alive. They were informed of his death, of course. The sister identified him.”

“We should definitely take a saliva sample from Wapshott,” Elinborg said.

“Yes, I’ll see to that,” Erlendur said.

Sigurdur Oli began gathering information about Henry Wapshott; Elinborg undertook to arrange a meeting with Gudlaugur’s father and sister, and Erlendur headed down to the doorman’s room in the basement. Walking past reception, he remembered that he still had to talk to the manager about his absence from work. He decided to do it later.

He found the records in Gudlaugur’s cupboard. Two singles. One sleeve read: Gudlaugur sings Schubert’s “Ave Maria”. It was the same record that Henry Wapshott had shown him. The other showed the boy standing in front of a small choir. The choirmaster, a young man, stood to one side. Gudlaugur Egilsson sings solo was printed in large letters across the sleeve.

On the back was a brief account of the child prodigy.

Gudlaugur Egilsson has commanded much-deserved attention with Hafnarfjordur Children’s Choir and this twelve-year-old singer definitely has a bright future ahead. On his second recording he sings with unique expression in his beautiful boy soprano under the direction of Gabriel Hermannsson, choirmaster of Hafnarfjordur Children’s Choir. This record is a must for all lovers of good music. Gudlaugur Egilsson proves beyond all doubt that he is a singer in a class of his own. He is currently preparing for a tour of Scandinavia.

A child star, Erlendur thought as he looked at the film poster for The Little Princess with Shirley Temple. What are you doing here? he asked the poster. Why did he keep you?

He took out his mobile.

“Marion,” he said when the call was answered.

“Is that you, Erlendur?”

“Anything new?”

“Did you know that Gudlaugur made song recordings when he was a child?”

“I’ve just found that out,” Erlendur said.

“The record company went bankrupt about twenty years ago and there’s not a trace of it left. A man by the name of Gunnar Hansson owned and ran it. The name was GH Records. He released a bit of hippy stuff but it all went down the plughole.”

“Do you know what happened to the stock?”

“The stock?” Marion Briem said.

“The records.”

“They must have gone towards paying off his debts. Isn’t that usually the case? I spoke to his family, two sons. The company never released much and I drew a total blank at first when I asked about it. The sons hadn’t heard it mentioned for decades. Gunnar died in the mid-eighties and all he left behind was a trail of debts.”

“There’s a man staying here at the hotel who collects choral music, choirboys. He was planning to meet Gudlaugur but nothing came of it. I was wondering whether his records might be worth something. How can I find out?”

“Find some collectors and talk to them,” Marion said. “Do you want me to?”

“Then there’s another thing. Could you locate a man called Gabriel Hermannsson who was a choirmaster in Hafnarfjordur in the sixties? You’re bound to find him in the phone directory if he’s still alive. He may have taught Gudlaugur. I’ve got a record sleeve here, there’s a photo of him and he looks to me as if he was in his twenties then. Of course, if he’s dead then it stops there.”

“That’s generally the rule.”

“What?”

“If you’re dead, it stops.”

“Quite.” Erlendur hesitated. “What are you talking about death for?”

“No reason.”

“Everything’s all right, isn’t it?”

“Thanks for throwing some morsels my way,” Marion said.

“Wasn’t that what you wanted? To spend your wretched old age delving into obscurities?”

“It absolutely makes my day,” Marion said. “Have you checked about the Cortisol in the saliva?”

“I’ll look into it,” Erlendur said and rang off.

The head of reception had a little room of his own in the lobby beside the reception desk and was doing some paperwork when Erlendur walked in and closed the door behind him. The man stood up and began to protest, saying he couldn’t spare the time to talk, he was on his way to a meeting, but Erlendur sat down and folded his arms.

“What are you running away from?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t come to work yesterday, in the hotel’s peak season. You acted like a fugitive when I spoke to you the evening the doorman was murdered. You’re all jittery now. To my mind you’re top of the list of suspects. I’m told you knew Gudlaugur better than anyone else at this hotel. You deny it — say you don’t know a thing about him. I think you’re lying. You were his boss. You ought to be a little more cooperative. It’s no joke spending Christmas in custody.”

The man stared at Erlendur without knowing what to do, then slowly sat back down in his chair.

“You haven’t got anything on me,” he said. “It’s nonsense to think I did that to Gudlaugur. That I was in his room and… I mean with the condom and all that.”

Erlendur was concerned by how the details of the case appeared to have leaked and how the staff were wallowing in them. In the kitchen, the chef knew precisely why they were collecting saliva samples. The reception manager could picture the scene in the doorman’s room. Maybe the hotel manager had blurted it all out, maybe the girl who found the body, maybe police officers.

“Where were you yesterday?” Erlendur asked.

“Off sick,” the reception manager said. “I was at home all morning.”

“You didn’t tell anyone. Did you go to the doctor? Did he give you a note? Can I talk to him? What’s his name.”

“I didn’t go to the doctor. I stayed in bed. I’m better now.” He forced out a cough. Erlendur smiled. This man was the worst liar he had ever encountered.

“Why these lies?”

“You haven’t got a thing on me,” the manager said. “All you can do is threaten me. I want you to leave me alone.”

“I could talk to your wife too,” Erlendur said. “Ask her if she brought you a cup of tea in bed yesterday.”

“You leave her out of it,” the manager said, and suddenly there was a tougher, more serious tone to his voice. He went red in the face.

“I’m not going to leave her out of it,” Erlendur said.

The manager glared at Erlendur.

“Don’t talk to her,” he said.

“Why not? What are you hiding? You’ve become too mysterious to get rid of me.”

The man stared into space, then heaved a sigh.

“Leave me alone. It’s nothing to do with Gudlaugur. These are personal problems I got myself into, which I’m trying to fix.”

“What are they?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything about them.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“You can’t force me.”

“As I said, I can make a request for custody, or I can simply talk to your wife.”

The man groaned. He looked at Erlendur.

“This won’t go any further?”

“Not if it has nothing to do with Gudlaugur.”

“It’s nothing to do with him.”

All right then.”

“My wife received a phone call the day before yesterday,” the head of reception said. “The same day you found Gudlaugur.”

On the phone, a woman whose voice the manager’s wife did not recognise asked for him. This was in the middle of a weekday, but it was not uncommon for him to receive calls at home at such times. His acquaintances knew that he worked irregular hours. His wife, a doctor, worked shifts and the call woke her up: she was on duty that evening. The woman on the phone acted as though she knew the head of reception, but immediately took umbrage when his wife wanted to know who she was.

“Who are you?” she had asked. “What are you calling here for?”

“He owes me money? the voice on the phone said.

“Shed threatened that she would phone my house,” the reception manager told Erlendur.

“Who was it?”

He had gone out for a drink ten days before. His wife was at a medical conference in Sweden and he went out for a meal with three old friends. They had a lot of fun, went on a pub crawl after the restaurant and ended up at a popular nightspot in town. He lost his friends there, went to the bar and met some acquaintances from the hotel trade, stood by a small dance floor and watched the dancing. Although quite tipsy, he wasn’t too drunk to make sensible decisions. That was why he couldn’t understand it. He had never done anything like it before.

She approached him and, just like in a movie scene, held a cigarette between her fingers and asked him for a light Although he didn’t smoke, because of his job he made a point of always carrying a lighter. It was a habit from the days when people could smoke wherever they wanted. She started talking to him about something he had now forgotten, and asked if he was going to buy her a drink. He looked at her. But of course. They stood at the bar while he bought the drinks, then sat down at a little table when it became vacant. She was exceptionally attractive and flirted subtly with him. Unsure what was going on, he played along. Women didn’t treat him like this as a rule. She sat up close to him and was forward and self-assured. When he stood up to fetch a second drink she stroked his thigh. He looked at her and she smiled. An enchanting, beautiful woman who knew what she wanted. She could have been ten years his junior.

Later that night she asked him to walk her home. She lived nearby. He was still unsure and hesitant, but excited as well. It was so strange for him that he might just as easily have been walking on the moon. In twenty-three years he had been faithful to his wife. Two or three times in all those years he’d perhaps had the chance to kiss another woman, but nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

“I lost the plot completely,” he told Erlendur. “Part of me wanted to run home and forget the whole thing. Part of me wanted to go with the woman.”

“I bet I know which part that was,” Erlendur said.

They stood by the door to her flat, in the stairwell of a modern apartment block, and she put the key in the lock. Somehow even that act became voluptuous in her hands. The door opened and she moved close to him.’Come inside with me,” she said, stroking his crotch.

He went inside with her. First she mixed drinks for them. He sat down on the sofa. She put on some music, came over to him with a glass in her hand and smiled, her beautiful white teeth shining behind the red lipstick. Then she sat beside him, put down her glass, grabbed the belt of his trousers and slowly unzipped his flies.

“I’ve never … It was … She could do the most incredible things,” the reception manager said.

Erlendur watched him without saying a word.

“I was going to sneak out in the morning, but she was one step ahead. My conscience was killing me, I felt like shit for betraying my wife and children. We’ve got three children. I was going to get out and forget about it. Never wanted to see that woman again. She was wide awake when I started creeping around the room in the dark.”

She sat up and switched on the beside lamp. “Are you going?” she asked. He said he was. Claimed to be late. For an important meeting. Something of that sort.

“Did you enjoy it last night?” she asked.

Holding his trousers in his hands, he looked at her.

“It was amazing,” he said. “But I just can’t go on with this. I can’t. Sorry.”

“I want eighty thousand kronur,” she said calmly, as if that was almost too obvious to mention.

He looked at her as if he had not heard what she said.

“Eighty thousand,” she repeated.

“What do you mean?”

“For the night,” she said.

“The night?” he said. “What, are you selling yourself?”

“What do you think?” she said.

He didn’t understand what she was talking about.

“Do you think you can get a woman like me for free?” she said.

Gradually it dawned on him what she meant.

“But you didn’t say anything about that!”

“Did I need to say anything? Pay me eighty thousand and I might just let you come back home with me some other time.”

“I refused to pay” the reception manager told Erlendur. “Walked out. She went berserk. Called work and threatened to phone my wife if I didn’t pay.”

“What are they called?” Erlendur said. “A… hustler? Was she one of them? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know what she was but she knew what she was doing and in the end she phoned home and told my wife what happened.”

“Why didn’t you just pay her? Then you’d have been rid of her.”

“I’m not sure I would have been rid of her even if I had coughed up,” the manager said. “My wife and I went through all this yesterday. I described what happened just as I described it to you. We’ve been together for twenty-three years and although I have no excuse it was a trap, the way I see it. If that woman hadn’t been after money it would never have happened.”

“So it was all her fault?”

“No, of course not, but… it was still a trap.”

They paused.

“Does that sort of thing go on at this hotel?” Erlendur asked. “Prostitution?”

“No,” the reception manager said.

“It’s not something you’d miss?”

“I was told you were asking about that. Nothing of that kind goes on here.”

“Quite,” Erlendur said.

“Are you going to keep schtum about this?”

“I need the woman’s name if you have it. And her address. It won’t go any further.”

The manager hesitated.

“Fucking bitch,” he said, slipping for an instant out of the role of the polite hotelier.

“Are you going to pay her?”

“That was one thing we agreed on, my wife and I. She’s not getting a penny.”

“Do you think it could have been a prank?”

“A prank?” the manager said. “I don’t follow. What do you mean?”

“I mean, could someone want to harm you so badly that they would set you up? Someone you’ve quarrelled with?”

“The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. Are you suggesting that I’ve got enemies who would do something like that to me?”

“They needn’t be enemies. Practical jokers, your friends”

“No, my friends aren’t like that. Besides, as a practical joke that would have been going a bit far — way beyond funny”

“Was it you who fired Santa?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was it you who told him the news? Or did he receive a letter, or…?”

“I told him.”

“And how did he take it?”

“Not well. Understandably. He’d been working here for ages. Much longer than I have.”

“Do you think he could have been behind it, if anyone was?”

“Gudlaugur? No, I can’t imagine that. Gudlaugur? Doing that sort of thing? I think not. He was really not the joking sort. Absolutely not.”

“Did you know Gudlaugur was a child star?”

“A child star? How?”

“He made records. A choirboy.”

“I didn’t know that,” the manager said.

“Just one final thing,” Erlendur said, standing up.

“Yes?”

“Could you fix me up with a record player in my room?” Erlendur asked, and saw that the head of reception did not have the faintest idea what he was talking about.

When Erlendur went back into the lobby he saw the head of forensics coming up the stairs from the basement.

“How’s it going with the saliva you found on the condom?” Erlendur asked. “Have you checked the Cortisol?”

“We’re working on it. What do you claim to know about Cortisol?”

“I know that too much of it in the saliva can prove dangerous.”

“Sigurdur Oli was asking about the murder weapon,” the head of forensics said. “The pathologist doesn’t think it’s a particularly remarkable knife. Not very long, with a thin, serated edge.”

“So it’s not a hunting knife or a carving knife?”

“No, it sounds to me like a fairly unremarkable instrument,” the head of forensics said. “A pretty nondescript knife.”

10

Erlendur took the two records from Gudlaugur’s room up to his own, then called the hospital and asked for Valgerdur. He was put through to her department. Another woman answered. He asked for Valgerdur again. The woman said, “One moment, please,” and at last Valgerdur answered.

“Have you got any of those cotton wool buds left?” he asked.

“Is that Mr Deaths and Ordeals speaking?” she said.

Erlendur grinned.

“There’s a tourist at the hotel we need to test”

“Is it a rush job?”

“It will have to be done today.”

“Will you be there?”

“Yes.”

“I’m on my way”

Erlendur rang off. Mr Deaths and Ordeals, he chuckled to himself. He was supposed to meet Henry Wapshott at the hotel bar. He went down, sat at the bar and waited. The waiter asked if he wanted anything, but he declined. Changed his mind and called out to him to bring a glass of water. He looked along the shelves of drinks behind the bar, rows of bottles in all colours of the rainbow, rows of liqueurs.

They had found powdered glass, too minute to be seen, on the marble floor of the lounge. Traces of Drambuie on the drinks cabinet, Drambuie on the boy’s socks and on the staircase. They found fragments of glass in the broom and the vacuum cleaner. All the signs were that a bottle of liqueur had fallen onto the marble floor. The boy probably stepped in the puddle that it left, then ran straight up to his room. The marks on the staircase indicated that he ran rather than walked. Frightened little feet. They concluded that the boy broke the bottle, his father lost his temper and attacked him so brutally that he put him in hospital.

Elinborg had him taken to the police station on Hverfisgata for questioning, where she told him about the results of the forensic tests, the boy’s reaction when he was asked whether his father had hit him, and her personal conviction that he was the culprit. Erlendur was present at the interrogation. She informed the father that he was in the legal position of being a suspect and was allowed to have a lawyer present. He should have one. The father protested his innocence and repeated that he was astonished to be under suspicion simply because a liqueur bottle had fallen onto his floor.

Erlendur switched on the tape recorder in the interrogation room.

“What we believe happened is this,” Elinborg said, acting as if reading aloud from a report; she tried to put her emotions to one side. “The boy came home from school. It was just gone three o’clock. You came back shortly afterwards. We understand that you left work early that day. Maybe you were at home when it happened. For some reason the boy dropped a large bottle of Drambuie on the floor. Panicking, he ran up to his room. You flew into a rage, and more than that. You totally lost control of yourself and went up to the boy’s room to punish him. It got out of hand and you beat your son so badly that you then had to call an ambulance.”

The father watched Elinborg without saying a word.

“You used a weapon that we have not managed to identify, a rounded or at least blunt instrument; possibly you banged him against the head of the bed. You persistently kicked him. Before calling an ambulance you tidied up in the lounge. You wiped up the liqueur with three towels, which you threw in the dustbin outside the house. You vacuum-cleaned the tiniest fragments of glass. You swept the marble floor as well and gave it a quick scrub. You washed the cabinet carefully. You took the boy’s socks off and threw them in the dustbin. You used detergent on the stains on the stairs but did not manage to remove them completely.”

“You can’t prove a thing, since it’s rubbish anyway. The boy hasn’t said anything. He hasn’t said a word about who assaulted him. Why don’t you try to find his classmates?”

“Why didn’t you tell us about the liqueur?”

“It’s nothing to do with this.”

“And the socks in the dustbin? The little footprints on the staircase?”

“A liqueur bottle did get broken, but I was the one who broke it. It happened two days before my boy was attacked. I was getting myself a drink when I dropped it on the floor and it smashed. Addi saw this and it made him jump. I told him to be careful where he walked, but by then he had trodden in the spillage and ran up the stairs to his room. This has nothing to do with him being attacked and I must say this scenario astonishes me. You haven’t a shred of evidence! Has he said that I hit him? I doubt that. And he never will say it, because it wasn’t me. I’d never do anything like this to him. Never.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about it straight away?”

“Straight away?”

“When we found the stains. You didn’t say anything about it then.”

“This is precisely what I thought would happen. I knew you’d link that accident with Addi getting beaten up. I didn’t want to complicate matters. The boys at the school did it.”

“Your company’s heading for bankruptcy,” Elinborg said. “You’ve laid off twenty employees and expect to make more redundancies. I expect you’re under a lot of strain. You’re losing your house…”

“That’s just business,” he said.

“We have reason to believe you’ve used violence before.”

“Hey, wait a minute …”

“We checked the medical reports. Twice in the past four years he has broken his finger.”

“Have you got kids? Kids are always having accidents. This is nonsense.”

“A paediatrician remarked on the broken finger the second time and informed the child welfare agency. It was the same finger. The agency sent people to your house. Examined the conditions. Found nothing of note. The paediatrician came and found needlemarks on the back of the boy’s hand.”

The father said nothing.

Elinborg could not control herself.

“You bastard,” she hissed.

“I want to talk to my lawyer,” he said and looked away.

“I said, good morning!”

Erlendur returned to his senses and saw Henry Wapshott standing over him. Absorbed in his thoughts about the fleeing boy, he hadn’t noticed Wapshott walk into the bar or heard his greeting.

He leaped to his feet and shook him by the hand. Wapshott was wearing the same clothes as the previous day. His hair was more unkempt and he looked tired. He ordered coffee, and so did Erlendur.

“We were talking about collectors,” Erlendur said.

“Yes,” Wapshott said, a wincing smile forming on his face. “A bunch of loners, such as myself!

“How does a collector like you in the UK find out that forty years ago there was a choirboy with a beautiful voice in Hafnarfjordur in Iceland?”

“Oh, much more than a beautiful voice,” Wapshott said. “Much, much more than that. He had a unique voice, that boy.”

“How did you hear about Gudlaugur Egilsson?”

“Through people with the same interest as me. Record collectors specialise, as I believe I told you yesterday. If we take choral music, for example: collectors can be divided into those who collect only certain songs or certain arrangements, and others who collect certain choirs. Others still, like me, choirboys. Some collect only choirboys who recorded 78 rpm glass records, which they stopped manufacturing in the sixties. Others go in for 45 rpm singles, but only from one particular label. There are infinite types of specialisation. Some look for all the versions of a single song, let’s say “Stormy Weather”, which I’m sure you know. Just so you understand what’s involved. I heard about Gudlaugur through a group or association of Japanese collectors who run a big website for trading. No one collects Western music on the scale of the Japanese. They go all over the world like Hoovers, buying up everything that’s ever been released that they can get their hands on. Particularly Beatles and hippy music. They’re renowned in the record markets, and the best thing of all is that they have money.”

Erlendur was wondering whether it was permitted to smoke at the bar and decided to give it a shot. Seeing that he was about to have a cigarette, Wapshott took out a crumpled packet of Chesterfields and Erlendur gave him a light.

“Do you think we can smoke here?” Wapshott asked.

“We’ll find out,” Erlendur said.

“The Japanese had one copy of Gudlaugur’s first single,” Wapshott said. “The one I showed you last night. I bought it from them. Cost me a fortune but I don’t regret it. When I asked about its background they said they’d bought it from a collector from Bergen in Norway at a record fair in Liverpool. I got in touch with the Norwegian collector and found out that he’d bought some records from the estate of a music publisher in Trondheim. He may have had the copy sent from Iceland, possibly even by someone who wanted to promote the boy abroad.”

“A lot of research for an old record,” Erlendur said.

“Collectors are like genealogists. Part of the fun is tracing the origin. Since then I’ve tried to acquire more copies of his records, but it’s very tough. He only made the two recordings.”

“You said the Japanese sold you your copy for a fortune. Are these records worth anything?”

“Only to collectors,” Wapshott said. “And we’re not talking about huge sums”

“But big enough for you to come up here to Iceland to buy more. That’s why you wanted to meet Gudlaugur. To find out if he had any copies”

“I’ve been dealing with two or three Icelandic collectors for some time now. That goes back long before I became interested in Gudlaugur. Unfortunately, virtually none of his records are around any more. The Icelandic collectors couldn’t locate any. I might have a copy on the way through the Internet from Germany. I came here to meet those collectors, to meet Gudlaugur because I adore his singing, and to go to record shops here and look at the market.”

“Do you make a living from this?”

“Hardly,” Wapshott said, chugging on his Chesterfield, his fingers yellow after decades of smoking. “I came into an inheritance. Properties in Liverpool. I manage them, but most of my time goes on collecting records. You could call it a passion.”

“And you collect choirboys”

“Yes.”

“Have you found anything interesting on this trip?”

“No. Nothing. There doesn’t seem to be much interest in preserving anything here. It all has to be modern. Old stuff is rubbish. Nothing is worth keeping. People seem to treat records badly here. They’re just thrown away. From dead people’s estates, for example. No one is called in to examine them. They’re just driven off to the dump. For a long time I used to think that a company in Reykjavik called Sorpa was a collectors” society. It was always being mentioned in correspondence. It turned out to be a recycling plant that runs a second-hand outlet on the side. Collectors here find all kinds of valuables among the rubbish and sell them over the Internet for good money.”

“Is Iceland of special interest to collectors?” Erlendur asked. “On its own.”

“The big plus about Iceland for collectors is the small size of the market. Only a few copies of each record are released and it doesn’t take long for them to disappear and become lost. Like Gudlaugur’s records.”

“It must be exciting to be a collector in a world where people hate everything old and useless. It must make you happy to think you’re rescuing things of cultural value.”

“We’re a few nutters who resist destruction,” Wapshott said.

“And you profit from it.”

“You can.”

“What happened to Gudlaugur Egilsson? What happened to the child star?”

“What happens to all child stars,” Wapshott said. “He grew up. I don’t know exactly what became of him, but he never sang as a teenager or adult. His career was short but beautiful, then he vanished into the crowd and stopped being unique. Nobody championed him any more and he surely missed it. You need strong nerves to withstand admiration and fame at such a young age, and even stronger nerves when people turn their backs on you.”

Wapshott looked at the clock that hung above the bar, then at his watch, and cleared his throat.

“I’m taking the evening flight to London and need to run a few errands before I set off. Was there anything else you wanted to know?”

Erlendur looked at him.

“No, I think that’s all. I thought you were going to leave tomorrow.”

“If there’s anything further I can help you with, here’s my card,” Wapshott said as he took a card out of his breast pocket and handed it to Erlendur.

“It’s changed,” Erlendur said. “Your flight.”

“Because I didn’t meet Gudlaugur,” Wapshott said. “I’ve finished most of what I planned to do on this trip and I’ll save myself the price of a night at the hotel.”

“There’s just one thing,” Erlendur said.

“OK.”

“A biotechnician is coming here to take a saliva sample from you, if that’s all right.”

“A saliva sample?”

“For the murder investigation.”

“Why saliva?”

“I can’t tell you at the moment.”

“Am I a suspect?”

“We’re taking samples from everyone who knew Gudlaugur. For the investigation. That says nothing about you.”

“I understand,” Wapshott said. “Saliva! How queer.”

He smiled, and Erlendur stared at the teeth in his lower jaw, stained black from nicotine.

11

They entered the hotel through the revolving doors: he was old and frail and in a wheelchair; and she followed behind, short and slim, with a thin, hooked nose and tough, piercing eyes that scoured the lobby. The woman was in her fifties, dressed in a thick, brown winter coat and long leather boots, pushing him along in front of her. The man looked about eighty, white straggles of hair stood out from under the brim of his hat and his skinny face was deathly pale. He sat hunched up, white bony hands protruding from the sleeves of a black coat. He had a scarf around his neck and thick black horn-rimmed glasses that magnified his eyes like a fish’s.

The woman pushed him to the check-in desk. The head of reception, who was leaving his office, watched them approach.

“Can I help you?” he asked when they reached the desk.

The man in the wheelchair ignored him, but the woman asked for a detective named Erlendur who she had been told was at work at the hotel. Leaving the bar with Wapshott, Erlendur had seen them enter. They caught his attention immediately. There was something reminiscent of death about them.

He wondered whether to ground Wapshott and stop him from going back to the UK for the time being, but could not think of a good enough reason to detain him. He was pondering who those people could be, the man with haddock eyes and the woman with the eagle’s beak, when the head of reception saw him and waved to him. Erlendur was about to say goodbye to Wapshott, but suddenly he was gone.

“They’re asking for you,” the head of reception said as Erlendur approached the check-in desk.

Erlendur walked behind the desk. The haddock’s eyes stared at him from beneath the hat.

“Are you Erlendur?” the man in the wheelchair asked in an old and slurred voice.

“Do you want to talk to me?” Erlendur asked. The eagle’s beak pointed up in the air.

“Are you in charge of the investigation into the death of Gudlaugur Egilsson at this hotel?” the woman asked.

Erlendur said he was.

“I’m his sister,” she said. “And this is our father. Can we talk somewhere quiet?”

“Do you want me to help you with him?” Erlendur offered. She looked insulted and pushed the wheelchair along. They followed Erlendur into the bar and over to the table where he had been sitting with Wapshott. They were the only people inside. Even the waiter had disappeared. Erlendur did not know whether the bar was open before noon as a rule. Since the door was unlocked he assumed that it must be, but few people seemed to know about it.

The woman steered the wheelchair up to the table and locked the wheels. Then she sat down facing Erlendur.

“I was just on my way to see you,” Erlendur lied; he had intended to let Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg talk to Gudlaugur’s family. He could not remember whether he had actually asked them to do so.

“We’d prefer not to have the police inside our house,” the woman said. “That has never happened. A lady phoned us, presumably your colleague, I think she said her name was Elinborg. I asked who was in charge of the investigation and she told me you were one of them. I was hoping we could get this over with and that you would then leave us in peace.”

There was no hint of sorrow in their demeanour. No mourning for a loved one. Only cold nastiness. They felt they had certain duties to dispatch, felt obliged to give a report to the police, but clearly had a repulsion against doing so and did not mind showing it. It didn’t seem as if the corpse found in the hotel basement was any concern of theirs in the slightest. As if they were above that.

“You know the circumstances in which Gudlaugur was found,” Erlendur said.

“We know he was killed,” the old man said. “We know he was stabbed.”

“Do you know who could have done it?”

“We don’t have the faintest idea,” the woman said. “We had no contact with him. We don’t know who he associated with. Don’t know his friends, nor his enemies if he had any”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

Elinborg walked into the bar. She approached them and sat down beside Erlendur. He introduced her to them but they showed no reaction, both equally determined to allow none of this to ruffle them.

“I suppose he must have been about twenty then,” the woman said. “The last time we saw him.”

“Twenty?” Erlendur thought he must have misheard.

“As I said, there was no contact.”

“Why not?” Elinborg asked.

The woman did not even look at her.

“Isn’t it enough for us to talk to you?” she asked Erlendur. “Does this woman have to be here too?”

Erlendur looked at Elinborg. He seemed to cheer up slightly.

“You don’t seem to be mourning his fate very much,” he said without answering her. “Gudlaugur. Your brother” he said, and looked at the woman again. “Your son,” he said, and looked at the old man. “Why? Why haven’t you seen him for thirty years? And as I told you, her name is Elinborg,” he added. “If you have any more comments to make we’ll take you down to the police station and continue there, and you can lodge a formal complaint. We’ve got a police car outside.”

The eagle’s beak rose, offended. The haddock’s eyes narrowed.

“He lived his own life,” she said. “We lived ours. There’s not much more to say about it. There was no contact. That’s the way it was. We were happy with that. So was he.”

“Are you telling me that you last saw him in the mid-seventies?” Erlendur said.

“There was no contact,” she repeated.

“Not once in all that time? Not one phone call? Nothing?”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“That’s a family matter,” the old man said. “Nothing to do with this. Not a bit. Over and done with. What more do you want to know?”

“Did you know he was working at this hotel?”

“We heard about him every so often,” the woman said. “We knew he was a doorman here. Put on some stupid uniform and held the door open for the hotel guests. And I understand he used to play Santa Claus at Christmas parties.”

Erlendur’s eyes were riveted to her. She said this as if Gudlaugur could not have humiliated his family more, except by being found murdered, half naked, in a hotel basement

“We don’t know much about him,” Erlendur said. “He doesn’t seem to have had many friends. He lived in a little room at this hotel. He seems to have been liked. People thought he was good with children. As you say, he played Santa at the hotel’s Christmas parties. However, we’ve just heard that he was a promising singer. A young boy who made gramophone recordings, two of them I think, but of course you know more about that. I saw on a record sleeve that he was going to tour Scandinavia, and it sounded as if he had the world at his feet. Then somehow that came to an end, apparently. No one knows that boy today apart from a few nutters who collect old records. What happened?”

The eagle’s beak had lowered and the haddock’s eyes dimmed while Erlendur was talking. The old man looked away from him and down at the table, and the woman, who still tried to retain her air of authority and pride, no longer appeared quite so self-assured.

“What happened?” Erlendur repeated, suddenly remembering that he had Gudlaugur’s singles up in his room.

“Nothing happened,” the old man said. “He lost his voice. He matured early and lost his voice at the age of twelve and that was the end of that”

“Couldn’t he sing afterwards?” Elinborg asked.

“His voice turned bad,” the old man said irritatedly. “You couldn’t teach him anything. And you couldn’t do anything for him. He turned against singing. Rebellion and anger took hold of him and he opposed everything. Opposed me. Opposed his sister who tried to do her best for him. He attacked me and blamed me for it all.”

“If there isn’t anything else,” the woman said with a look at Erlendur. “Haven’t we said enough? Haven’t you had enough?”

“We didn’t find much in Gudlaugur’s room,” Erlendur said, pretending not to have heard her. “We found some of his records and we found two keys.”

He had asked forensics to return the keys when they had been examined. Taking them out of his pocket, he placed them on the table. They dangled from a key ring with a miniature penknife. It was set in pink plastic and on one side was a picture of a pirate with a wooden leg, cutlass and patch over one eye, with the word PIRATE written in English underneath it.

After a quick glance at the keys the woman said she did not recognise them. The old man adjusted his glasses on his nose and looked at the keys, then shook his head.

“One is probably a front door key,” Erlendur said. “The other looks like the key to a cupboard or locker of some kind.” He watched them but received no response, so he put the keys back in his pocket.

“Did you find his records?” the woman asked.

“Two,” Erlendur said. “Did he make any more?”

“No, there weren’t any more,” the old man said, glaring at Erlendur for an instant but quickly averting his gaze.

“Could we have the records?” the woman asked.

“I assume you’ll inherit everything he left,” Erlendur replied. “When we consider the investigation to be over you’ll get everything he owned. He had no other family, did he? No children? We haven’t been able to locate anything of that kind.”

“The last time I knew he was single,” the woman said. “Can we help you any further?” she then asked, as if they had made a major contribution to the investigation by taking the trouble to call at the hotel.

“It wasn’t his fault that he matured and lost his voice,” Erlendur said. He could stand their indifference and haughtiness no longer. A son had lost his life. A brother had been murdered. Yet it was as if nothing had happened. As if it was nothing to do with them. As if his life had long ago ceased to be part of their lives, because of something that was being kept from Erlendur.

The woman looked at Erlendur.

“If there wasn’t anything else,” she said again, and released the brake on the wheelchair.

“We’ll see,” Erlendur said.

“You don’t think we show enough sympathy, do you?” she suddenly said.

“I don’t think you show any sympathy,” Erlendur said. “But that’s no business of mine.”

“No,” the woman said. “It’s no business of yours.”

“But all the same, what I want to know is whether you had any feelings towards the man. He was your brother.” Erlendur turned to the old man in the wheelchair. “Your son.”

“He was a stranger to us,” the woman said, and stood up. The old man grimaced.

“Because he didn’t live up to your expectations?” Erlendur rose to his feet as well. “Because he failed you at the age of twelve. When he was a child. What did you do? Did you throw him out? Did you throw him out on the street?”

“How dare you talk to my father and me in that tone?” the woman said through clenched teeth. “How dare you? Who appointed you the conscience of the world?”

“Who took your conscience away?” Erlendur snarled back.

She looked daggers at him. Then she seemed to give up. She jerked the wheelchair towards her, swung it away from the table and pushed it in front of her out of the bar. She strode across the lobby towards the revolving door. Over the sound system an Icelandic soprano was singing melancholically… O touch my harp, you heaven-born goddess … . Erlendur and Elinborg set off after them and watched them leave the hotel, the woman holding her head high but the old man sunk even deeper into his wheelchair, nothing of him visible apart from his head nodding above the back.

… And others will little children e’er abide…

12

When Erlendur went back to his room shortly after midday, the reception manager had set up a record player and two loudspeakers. The hotel had a few old turntables that had not been used for some time. Erlendur owned one himself so he quickly worked out how to operate it. He had never had a CD player and hadn’t bought a record for years. He didn’t listen to modern music. For a long time after hearing people at work talking about hip-hop he thought it was a variation on hopscotch.

Elinborg was on her way to Hafnarfjordur. Erlendur had told her to go there and find out where Gudlaugur attended school. He had intended to ask the father and sister but hadn’t had the chance when their meeting came to its abrupt end. He would talk to them again later. In the meantime, he wanted Elinborg to locate people who knew Gudlaugur when he was a child star, to talk to his schoolmates. He wanted to know what effect his reputed fame had on the boy at such a young age. Also what his schoolmates had thought about it, and he wanted to know whether any remembered what happened when he lost his voice, and what became of him in the first few years afterwards. He was also wondering whether anyone knew of any enemies of Gudlaugur s from that time.

Outlining all this to Elinborg in the lobby, he noticed her irritation at having it all spelled out. She knew what the case involved and was quite capable of setting targets for herself.

“And you can buy yourself an ice cream on the way he added to tease her even more. With a few muttered curses about male chauvinist pigs, she went out of the door.

“How do I recognise this tourist?” said a voice behind him, and when he turned round he saw Valgerdur standing there, sampling kit in hand.

“Wapshott? You met him last night. He’s the haggard old Brit with stained teeth who collects choirboys,” Erlendur said.

She smiled.

“Stained teeth?” she said. “And collects choirboys?”

“It’s a long, long story that I’ll tell you some time. Any news about all those samples?”

He was strangely pleased to see her again. His heart almost skipped a beat when he heard her behind him. The gloom lifted from him for a moment and his voice became animated. He felt slightly breathless.

“I don’t know how it’s going,” she said. “There’s an incredible amount of samples”

“I, er …” Erlendur groped for an excuse for what had happened the previous night “I really seized up last night. Deaths and fatalities. I didn’t quite tell you the truth when you asked about my interest in people dying in the wilds”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said.

“Yes, I definitely do need to tell you,” Erlendur said. “Is there any chance we could do that again?”

“Don’t…” She paused. “Don’t make an issue of it. It was great. Let’s forget it. OK?”

“OK, if that’s the way you want it,” Erlendur said, much against his wishes.

“Where is this Wapshott guy?”

Erlendur accompanied her to reception where she was given the number of his room. They shook hands and she walked over to the lift. He watched her. She waited for the lift without looking back. He wondered whether to pounce and was on the verge of doing so when the door opened and she stepped inside. She glanced at him the moment that the door closed, smiling an almost imperceptible smile.

Erlendur stood still for a moment and watched the number of the lift as it stopped on Wapshott’s floor. Then he pressed the button and ordered it back. He could smell Valgerdur’s perfume on the way up to his floor.

He put a recording of choirboy Gudlaugur Egilsson on the turntable and made sure the speed was set to 45 rpm. Then he stretched out on the bed. The record was brand new. It sounded as though it had never been played. Not a scratch or speck of dust on it. After a slight crackle at the beginning came the prelude, and finally a pure and celestial boy soprano started to sing “Ave Marial

He stood alone in the passageway, carefully opened the door to his father’s room and saw him sitting on the edge of the bed, staring into space in silent anguish. His father did not take part in the search. He had battled his way home to the farm after losing sight of his two sons on the moor in the storm that broke without warning. He had roamed around in the blizzard calling to them, unable to see a thing with the howling of the storm smothering his shouts. His desperation defied description. He had taken the boys along to help round up the sheep and bring them back to the folds. Winter had arrived but it seemed to be a fine day when they set off. But it was only a forecast and only an outlook. The storm came unannounced.

Erlendur approached his father and stopped by his side. He could not understand why he was sitting on the bed instead of joining the search party up on the moor. His brother had still not been found. He might be alive, though it was unlikely. Erlendur read the hopelessness in the faces of the exhausted men returning home to rest and eat before setting out again. They came from the villages and farms all around, everyone who was up to the task, bringing dogs and long sticks that they plunged into the snow. That was how they had found Erlendur. That was how they were going to find his brother.

They went up to the moor in teams of eight to ten, stabbing their sticks into the snow and shouting his brother’s name. Two days had passed since they had found Erlendur and three days since the storm had split up the three travellers. The brothers had stayed together for a long time. They shouted into the blizzard and listened for their father’s voice. Two years the elder, Erlendur led his brother by the hand, but their hands were numbed by the frost and Erlendur did not feel when he lost his grip. He thought he was still holding his brothers hand when he turned round and could not see him any longer. Much later he thought he remembered the hand slipping away from his, but that was an invention. He never actually felt it happen.

He was convinced that he would die at the age of ten in a seemingly incessant blizzard. It attacked him from all directions, tore him and cut him and blinded his sight, cold and harsh and merciless. In the end he fell down into the snow and tried to bury himself. Lay there thinking about his brother who was also dying on the moor.

A sharp jab in his shoulder woke him and suddenly a face he did not recognise appeared. He could not hear what the man said. He wanted to go on sleeping. He was heaved out of the snow and the men took turns carrying him down from the moor, although he remembered little of the journey home. He heard voices. He heard his mother nursing him. A doctor examined him. Frostbite on his feet and legs, but not very severe. He saw inside his father’s room. Saw him sitting alone on the edge of the bed as if nothing that had happened had affected him.

Two days later, Erlendur was up and about again. He stood beside his father, helpless and afraid. Strange pangs of conscience had haunted him when he began to recover and regain his strength. Why him? Why him and not his brother? And if they had not found him, would they possibly have found his brother instead? He wanted to ask his father about this and wanted to ask why he was not taking part in the search. But he asked nothing. Just watched him, the deep lines etched into his face, his stubble, his eyes black with sorrow.

A long time elapsed and his father ignored him. Erlendur put his hand on his father’s and asked whether it was his fault. That his brother was missing. Because he had not held him tightly enough, should have taken better care of him, should have had him by his side when he himself was found. He asked in a soft and hesitant voice but lost control of himself and began whimpering. His father bowed his head. Tears welled up in his eyes, he hugged Erlendur and started to weep as well, until his huge body shook and trembled in his son’s arms.

All this passed through Erlendur’s mind until the record began crackling again. He had not allowed himself these contemplations for a long time, but suddenly the memories unfolded within him and he once again felt the heavy sorrow that he knew would never be completely buried or forgotten.

Such was the power of the choirboy.

13

The telephone on the bedside table rang. He sat up, lifted the needle from the record and switched off the player. Valgerdur was calling. She told him that Henry Wapshott was not in his room. When she had the hotel staff call his room and look for him, he was nowhere to be found.

“He was going to wait around for the sample,” Erlendur said. “Has he checked out of the hotel? I understand he had a flight booked for tonight.”

“I haven’t asked about that,” Valgerdur said. “I can’t wait here much longer and …”

“No, of course not, sorry” Erlendur said. “I’ll send him to you when I find him. Sorry about that”

“OK then, I’m off?

Erlendur hesitated. Although he didn’t know what to say, he didn’t want to let her go immediately. The silence became prolonged and suddenly there was a knock on his door. He thought Eva Lind had come to visit him.

“I’d so like to meet you again,” he said, “but I understand if you can’t be bothered.”

Again there was a knock on the door, harder this time.

“I wanted to tell you the truth about that deaths and ordeals business,” Erlendur said. “If you can be bothered to listen.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you fancy that?”

He didn’t know himself exactly what he meant Why he wanted to tell this woman what he had never told anyone but his daughter before. Why he would not wind up the matter, get on with his life and let nothing disturb it, not now or ever.

Valgerdur did not answer immediately, and there was a third knock on the door. Erlendur put down the phone and opened the door without looking outside to see who was there; he assumed it could only be Eva. When he picked up the telephone again, Valgerdur had gone.

“Hello,” he said. “Hello?” There was no reply.

After putting down the receiver again, he turned around. In his room stood a man he had never seen before. He was short, wearing a thick, dark blue winter coat and a scarf, with a blue peaked cap on his head. Drops of water glittered on his cap and coat where the snow had melted. He was fairly fat-faced with thick lips, and enormous, dark bags beneath small, tired eyes. He reminded Erlendur of photographs of the poet W. H. Auden. A drip hung from the end of his nose.

“Are you Erlendur?” he said.

“Yes.”

“I was told to come to this hotel and talk to you,” the man said. He took off his cap, tapped it against his coat and wiped the drip from his nose.

“Who told you that?” Erlendur asked.

“Someone by the name of Marion Briem. I don’t know who that is. Something about the Gudlaugur Egilsson investigation and talking to everyone who knew him in the past. I used to know him and that Marion told me to talk to you about it.”

“Who are you?” Erlendur said, trying to recall where he had seen his face before.

“My name’s Gabriel Hermannsson and I used to conduct the Hafnarfjordur Children’s Choir once,” the man said. “May I sit down on the bed? Those long corridors…”

“Gabriel? Be my guest. Have a seat.” The man unbuttoned his coat and loosened his scarf. Erlendur picked up one of Gudlaugur’s record sleeves and looked at the photograph of the Hafnarfjordur Children’s Choir. The choirmaster stared cheerfully into the camera. “Is this you?” he asked, handing him the sleeve.

Gabriel looked at the sleeve and nodded.

“Where did you get that?” he asked. “Those records have been unavailable for decades. I stupidly lost mine somehow or other. Lent it to someone. You should never lend anything.”

“It belonged to Gudlaugur,” Erlendur said.

“I’m only, what, twenty-eight there,” Gabriel said. “When the photo was taken. Incredible how time flies”

“What did Marion say to you?”

“Not much. I said what I knew about Gudlaugur and was told to talk to you. I was coming to Reykjavik anyway so I thought it would be ideal to use the opportunity.”

Gabriel hesitated.

“I couldn’t quite tell from the voice,” he said, “but I was wondering whether it was a man or a woman. Marion. I thought it would be rude to ask but I couldn’t make up my mind. Normally you can tell from the voice. Funny name. Marion Briem.”

Erlendur discerned in his voice a note of interest, almost eagerness, as if it mattered to know.

“I’ve never thought about that,” Erlendur said. “That name. Marion Briem. I was listening to this record,” he said, pointing to the sleeve. “His voice has a strong effect, there’s no denying that. Considering how young the lad was.”

“Gudlaugur was probably the best choirboy we ever had,” Gabriel said as he looked at the sleeve. “In retrospect. I don’t think we realised what we had in our hands until much later, maybe not even until only a few years ago.”

“When did you first get to know him?”

“His father brought him to me. The family lived in Hamarfiordur then, and still do, I think. The mother died a little while later and he brought the children up entirely by himself: Gudlaugur and a girl who was some years older. The father knew that I’d just got back from studying music abroad. I taught music, private lessons and other things. I was appointed choirmaster when I managed to round up enough children to form a choir. It was mostly girls, as always, but we advertised specially for boys and Gudlaugur’s father brought him to my house one day. He was ten at the time and had a wonderful voice. That wonderful voice. And he knew how to sing. I could tell straight away that his father made great demands on the boy and was strict with him. He said he’d taught him everything he knew about singing. I later found out that he was hard on the boy, punished him, kept him indoors when he wanted to go out and play. I don’t think you could call it a good upbringing because so much was expected of him and he wasn’t allowed to hang around with friends much. He was a classic example of parents taking control of their children and trying to turn them into what they want. I don’t think Gudlaugur had a particularly happy childhood.”

Gabriel stopped.

“You’ve wondered about this quite a lot, haven’t you?” Erlendur said.

“I just saw it happening.”

“What?”

“Strict discipline and unwavering demands can have an awful effect on children. I’m not talking about discipline when children are naughty and need restraint or guidance, that’s a completely different matter. Of course children need discipline. I’m talking about when children aren’t allowed to be children. When they’re not allowed to enjoy being what they are and what they want to be, but are shaped and even broken to make them something different. Gudlaugur had this beautiful boy soprano and his father intended a big role for him in life. I’m not saying that he treated him badly in a conscious, calculated way, he just deprived him of his life. Robbed him of his childhood.”

Erlendur diought about his own father who did nothing but teach him good manners and show him affection. The single demand he made was to behave well and treat other people kindly. His father had never tried to turn him into anything he was not. Erlendur thought about the father who was awaiting sentence for a brutal assault on his own son, and he imagined Gudlaugur continually trying to live up to his father’s expectations.

“Maybe we see this most clearly with religion,” Gabriel continued. “Children who find themselves in certain religions are made to adopt their parents” faith and in effect live their parent’s lives much more than their own. They never have the opportunity to be free, to step outside the world they’re born into, to make independent decisions about their lives. Of course the children don’t realise until much later, and some never do. But often when they are adolescents or grown-up, they say: “I don’t want this any more”, and conflicts can arise. Suddenly the child doesn’t want to live its parents” life, and that can lead to great tragedy. You see it everywhere: the doctor who wants his child to be a doctor. The lawyer. The company director. The pilot. There are people all over the place who make impossible demands of their children.”

“Did that happen in Gudlaugur’s case? Did he say, “This is where I draw the line”? Did he rebel?”

Gabriel waited before replying.

“Have you met Gudlaugur’s father?” he asked.

“I spoke to him this morning,” Erlendur said. “Him and his daughter. They’re full of some kind of anger and antipathy and they clearly didn’t have any warm feelings for Gudlaugur. They didn’t shed a tear for him.”

“And was he in a wheelchair? The father?”

“Yes.”

“That happened several years afterwards,” Gabriel said.

“After what?”

“Several years after the performance. That dreadful performance just before the boy was due to tour Scandinavia. It had never happened before, a boy leaving Iceland to sing solo with choirs in Scandinavia. His father sent his first record to Norway, a record company there became interested and organised a concert tour with the aim of releasing his records in Scandinavia. His father once told me that his dream, nota bene his dream, not necessarily Gudlaugur’s, was for the lad to sing with the Vienna Boys” Choir. And he could have, no question about it”

“So what happened?”

“What always happens sooner or later with boy sopranos; nature intervened,” Gabriel said. “At the worst imaginable time in the boy’s life. It could have happened at a rehearsal, could have happened while he was alone at home. But it happened there and the poor child …”

Gabriel looked at Erlendur.

“I was with him backstage. The children’s choir was supposed to sing some songs and a crowd of local children were there, leading musicians from Reykjavik, even a couple of critics from the papers. The concert was widely advertised and his father was sitting in the middle of the front row, of course. The boy came to see me later, much later, when he’d left home, and told me how he felt on that fateful night, and since then I’ve often thought how a single incident can mark a person for life.”

Every seat in Hafnarfjordur cinema was occupied and the audience was buzzing. He’d been to that charming building twice before to watch films and was enchanted by everything he saw: the beautiful lighting in the auditorium and the raised stage where plays were performed. His mother had taken him to Gone with the Wind and he had been with his father and sister to see a Walt Disney cartoon.

But these people had come not to watch the heroes of the silver screen, but to listen to him. Him singing with the voice that had already featured on two records. Instead of shyness, he was beset by uncertainty now. He had sung in public before, in the church in Hafnarfjordur and at school, in front of large audiences. Often he was shy and downright scared. Later he came to realise that he was sought-after by others, which helped him overcome his reticence. There was a reason that people came to hear him sing, a reason that people wanted to hear him, and it was nothing to be shy about. The reason was his voice and his singing. Nothing else. He was the star.

His father had shown him the advertisement in the newspaper: Iceland’s best boy soprano is performing tonight. There was no one better. His father was beside himself with joy and much more excited than the boy himself. Talked about it for days on end. If only your mother could have lived to see you singing at that place, he said. That would have pleased her so much. It would have pleased her indescribably.

People in other countries were impressed with his singing and wanted him to perform there too. They wanted to release his records there. I knew it, his father said over and again. I knew it. He had worked hard on preparing the trip. The concert in Hafnarfjordur was the finishing touch to that work.

The stage manager showed him how to peep through into the auditorium to watch the audience taking then-seats. He listened to the murmurings and saw people he knew he would never meet. He saw the choirmaster’s wife sit down with their three children at the end of the third row. He saw several of his classmates with their parents, even some who had teased him, and he saw his father take his place in the middle of the front row, with his big sister beside him, staring up at the ceiling. His mother’s family were there too, aunts he hardly knew, men holding their hats in their hands waiting for the curtain to open.

He wanted to make his father proud. He knew how much his father had sacrificed to make a successful singer of him, and now the fruits of that toil were going to be seen. It had cost relentless training. Complaining was futile. He had tried that and it made his father angry.

He trusted his father completely. That was the way it had always been. Even when he was singing in public against his own wishes. His father drove him on, encouraged him and had his own way in the end. It was torture for the boy the first time he sang for strangers: stage fright, bashful-ness in front of all those people. But his father would not yield an inch, not even when the boy was bullied over his singing. The more he performed in public, at school and in church, the worse the boys and some girls too treated him, calling him names, even mocking his voice. He could not understand what motivated them.

He did not want to provoke his father’s wrath. He was devastated after their mother died. She contracted leukaemia and it killed her within months. Their father was by her bedside day and night, accompanied her to the hospital and slept there while her life ebbed away. The last words he said before they left home for the concert were: Think about your mother. How proud she would have been of you.

The choir had taken up its position on the stage. All the girls in identical frocks paid for by the town council. The boys in white shirts and black trousers, just like he was wearing. They whispered together, excited at all the attention the choir was receiving, determined to do their best. Gabriel, the choirmaster, was talking to the stage manager. The compere stubbed out a cigarette on the floor. Everything was ready. Soon it would be curtain up.

Gabriel called him over.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

“Yes. It’s a packed house.”

“And they’ve all come to see you. Remember that. They’ve all come to see you and hear you sing and no one else, and you ought to be proud of that, pleased with yourself and not shy. Maybe you’re a bit nervous now, but that will wear off as soon as you start singing. You know that.”

“Yes.”

“Shall we start then?”

He nodded.

Gabriel put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“It’s bound to be difficult for you to look all those people in the eye, but you only need to sing and everything will be all right.”

“Yes.”

“The compere doesn’t come on until after the first song. We’ve rehearsed all this. You start singing and everything will be fine.”

Gabriel gave a sign to the stage manager. He gestured to the choir who immediately fell silent and lined up. Everything was in place. They were all ready.

The lights in the auditorium dimmed. The murmuring stopped. The curtain went up.

Think of your mother.

The last thought that crossed his mind before the auditorium opened up in front of him was his mother on her deathbed the final time he saw her, and for a second he lost his concentration. He was with his father, they were sitting together on one side of the bed, and she was so weak she could hardly keep her eyes open. She closed them and seemed to have fallen asleep, then opened them slowly, looked at him and tried to smile. They could not speak to each other any longer. When it was time to say goodbye they stood up, and he always regretted not having given her a farewell kiss, because this was the last time they were together. He simply stood up and walked out of the ward with his father, and the door closed behind them.

The curtain rose and he met his father’s gaze. The auditorium vanished from his sight and all he could see was his father’s glaring eyes.

Someone in the auditorium began laughing.

He came back to his senses. The choir had begun to sing and the choirmaster had given a sign, but he had missed it. Trying to gloss over the incident, the choirmaster took the choir through another round of the verse, and now he came in at the right place and had just started the song when something happened.

Something happened to his voice.

“It was a wolf,” Gabriel said, sitting in Erlendur’s cold hotel room. “There was a wolf in his voice, as the saying goes. Straight away in the first song, and then it was all over.”

14

Gabriel sat motionless on the bed, staring straight ahead, transported back to the stage at Hafnarfjordur cinema as the choir gradually fell silent. Gudlaugur, who could not understand what was happening to his voice, cleared his throat repeatedly and kept on trying to sing. His father got to his feet and his sister ran up onto the stage to make her brother stop. People whispered to each other at first, but soon the occasional half-smothered laugh broke out, gradually growing louder, and a few people whistled. Gabriel went to lead Gudlaugur off, but the boy stood as if nailed to the floor. The stage manager tried to bring down the curtain. The compere walked onto the stage with a cigarette in his hand, but did not know what to do. In the end Gabriel managed to move Gudlaugur and push him away. His sister was with him and shouted out to the audience not to laugh. His father was still standing in the same place in the front row, thunderstruck.

Gabriel came to earth and looked at Erlendur.

“I still shudder to think of it,” he said.

“A wolf in his voice?” Erlendur said. “I’m not too well up on…”

“It’s an idiom for when your voice breaks. What happens is that the vocal cords stretch in puberty, but you go on using your voice in the same way and it shifts an octave lower. The result isn’t pretty, you sort of yodel downwards. This is what ruins all boys” choirs. He could have had another two or three years, but Gudlaugur matured early. His hormones started working prematurely and produced the most tragic night of his life.”

“You must have been a good friend of his, if you were the first person he went to later to discuss the whole affair.”

“You could say that. He regarded me as a confidant. Then that gradually ended, the way it does. I tried to help him as best I could and he continued singing with me. His father did not want to give up. He was going to make a singer out of his son. Talked about sending him to Italy or Germany. Even Britain. They’ve cultivated the most boy sopranos and have hundreds of fallen choral stars. Nothing is as short-lived as a child star.”

“But he never became a singer?”

“No. It was over. He had a reasonable adult voice, nothing special actually, but his interest was gone. All the work that had been put into singing, his whole childhood really, turned to dust that evening. His father took him to another teacher but nothing came of that. The spark had gone. He just played along for his father’s sake, then he gave up for good. He told me he had never really wanted any of it. Being a singer and a choirboy and performing in public. It was all his fathers wish.”

“You mentioned something before that happened some years later,” Erlendur said. “Some years after the concert at the cinema. I thought it was connected with his father being in a wheelchair. Was I mistaken?”

“A rift gradually developed between them. Between Gudlaugur and his father. You described the way the old man behaved when he came to see you with his daughter. I don’t know the whole story. Only a fragment of it.”

“But you give the impression that Gudlaugur and his sister were close.”

“There was no question about that,” Gabriel said. “She often came to choir practice with him and was always there when he sang at school and in church. She was kind to him, but she was devoted to her father too. He had an incredibly strong character. He was unflinching and firm when he wanted his own way, but could be tender at other times. In the end she took her father’s side. The boy was in rebellion. I can’t explain what it was, but he ended up hating his father and blaming him for what happened. Not just up there on the stage but everything.”

Gabriel paused.

“One of the last times I talked to him, he said his father had robbed him of his childhood. Turned him into a freak.”

“A freak?”

“That was the word he used, but I didn’t know any more than you what he meant by it. That was shortly after the accident”

“Accident?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I suppose Gudlaugur would have been in his teens. He moved away from Hafnarfjordur afterwards. We really had no contact by then but I could well imagine that the accident was caused by his rebellion. The rage that had built up inside him.”

“Did he leave home after this accident?”

“Yes, so I understand.”

“What happened?”

“There was a high, steep staircase in their house. I went there once. It led upstairs from the hall. Wooden stairs with a narrow well. Apparently it began with an argument between Gudlaugur and his father, who had his study upstairs. They were at the top of the staircase and I’m told Gudlaugur pushed him and he fell down the stairs. It was quite a fall. He never walked again. Broke his back. Paralysed from the waist down.”

“Was it an accident? Do you know?”

“Gudlaugur alone knew that. And his father. They completely shut him out afterwards, the father and daughter. Cut off all contact and refused to have anything more to do with him. That might suggest he went for his father. That it wasn’t a simple accident.”

“How do you know this? If you weren’t in touch with those people?”

“It was the talk of the town that he’d pushed his father down the stairs. The police investigated the matter.”

Erlendur looked at the man.

“When was the last time you saw Gudlaugur?”

“It was just here at the hotel, by sheer coincidence. I didn’t know where he was. I was out for dinner and caught a glimpse of him in his doorman’s uniform. I didn’t recognise him immediately. Such a long time had passed. This was five or six years ago. I went up to him and asked if he remembered me, and we chatted a little.”

“What about?”

“This and that. I asked him how he was doing and so on. He kept fairly quiet about his own affairs — didn’t seem comfortable talking to me. It was as if I reminded him of a past he didn’t want to revisit. I had the feeling he was ashamed of being in a doorman’s uniform. Maybe it was something else. I don’t know. I asked him about his family and he said they’d lost touch. Then the conversation dried up and we said goodbye to each other.”

“Do you have any idea who could have wanted to kill Gudlaugur?” Erlendur asked.

“Not the faintest,” Gabriel said. “How was he attacked? How was he killed?”

He asked cautiously, a mournful look in his eyes. There was no hint that he wished to gloat over it later; he simply wanted to know how the life of a promising boy he had once taught came to an end.

“I honestly can’t go into that,” Erlendur said. “It’s information that we’re trying to keep secret because of the investigation.”

“Yes, of course,” Gabriel said. “I understand. A criminal investigation … are you making any headway? Of course, you can’t talk about that either, listen to how I carry on. I can’t imagine who would have wanted to kill him, but then I lost touch with him long ago. I just knew that he worked at this hotel.”

“He’d been working here for years as a doorman and sort of jack of all trades. Playing Santa Claus, for example.”

Gabriel sighed. “What a fate.”

“The only thing we found in his room apart from these records was a film poster that he had on his wall. It’s a Shirley Temple film from 1939 called The Little Princess. Do you have any idea why he would have kept it, or glorified it? There was almost nothing else in the room.”

“Shirley Temple?”

“The child star.”

“The connection’s obvious,” Gabriel said. “Gudlaugur saw himself as a child star and so did everyone around him. But I can’t see any other significance as such.”

Gabriel stood up, put on his cap, buttoned his coat and wrapped his scarf around his neck. Neither of them said anything. Erlendur opened the door and walked out into the corridor with him.

“Thank you for coming to see me,” he said, offering his hand to shake.

“It was nothing,” Gabriel said. “It was the least I could do for you. And for the dear boy.”

He dithered as if about to add something else, unsure exactly how to phrase it.

“He was terribly innocent,” he said eventually. “A totally harmless boy. He’d been convinced that he was unique and he’d become famous, he could have had the world at his feet. The Vienna Boys” Choir. They make such an awful fuss about small things here in Iceland, even more now than they used to; it’s a national trait in a country of under-achievers. He was bullied at school for being different; he suffered because of it. Then it turned out he was just an ordinary boy and his world fell apart in a single evening. He needed to be strong to put up with that.”

They exchanged farewells and Gabriel turned round and walked down the corridor. Erlendur watched him leaving with the feeling that telling the tale of Gudlaugur Egilsson had drained the old choirmasters strength completely.

Erlendur shut the door. He sat down on the bed and thought about the choirboy and how he found him in a Santa suit with his trousers round his ankles. He wondered how his path had led to that little room and to death, at the end of a life paved with disappointment. He thought about Gudlaugur’s father, paralysed in a wheelchair, with his thick horn-rimmed glasses, and about his sister with her hooked eagle’s nose and her antipathy towards her brother. He thought about the fat hotel manager who had sacked him, and the man from reception who pretended not to know him. He thought about the hotel staff, who did not know who Gudlaugur was. He thought about Henry Wapshott who had travelled all that way to seek out the choirboy because the child Gudlaugur with his lovely voice still existed and always would.

Before he knew it he had started thinking about his brother.

Erlendur put the same record back on the turntable, stretched out, closed his eyes and let the song take him back home.

Maybe it was his song as well.

15

When Elinborg came back from Hafnarfjordur towards evening she went straight to the hotel to meet Erlendur.

She went up to his floor and knocked on the door, and again when she got no response, then a third time. She was turning away when the door opened at last and Erlendur let her in. He had been lying down thinking and had dozed off, and was rather vague when Elinborg began telling him what she had unearthed in Hafnarfjordur. She had spoken to the ex-headmaster of the primary school, an ancient man who remembered Gudlaugur well; his wife, who had died ten years before, had also been close to the boy. With the headmaster’s help Elinborg tracked down three of Gudlaugur’s classmates who were still living in Hafnarfjordur. One had been at the fateful concert. She talked to the family’s old neighbours and people who were in touch with them in those days.

“No one is ever allowed to excel in this dwarf state,” Elinborg said, sitting down on the bed. “No one’s allowed to be different.”

Everyone knew that Gudlaugur’s life was supposed to be something special. He never talked about it himself, never talked about himself at all really, but everyone knew. He was sent for piano lessons and learned to sing, first from his father and then with the choirmaster who was appointed to conduct the children’s choir, and finally with a well-known singer who once lived in Germany but had come back to Iceland. People praised him to the skies, applauded him, and he would take a bow in his white shirt and black trousers, gentlemanly and sophisticated. Such a beautiful child, Gudlaugur, people said. And he made recordings of his singing. Soon he would be famous in other countries.

He was not from Hafnarfjordur. The family was from the north and had lived in Reykjavik for a while. His father was said to be the son of an organist who had studied singing abroad when he was younger. Rumour had it that he bought the house in Hafnarfjordur with what he inherited from his father, who had made money by trading with the American military after the war. It was said that he inherited enough to live comfortably afterwards. But he was never showy about his wealth. He kept a low profile in the community. Doffed his hat when he went out for walks with his wife and greeted people politely. She was said to be the daughter of a trawler owner. No one knew where. They made few friends in the town. Most of their friends were in Reykjavik, if they had any at all. They did not seem to have many visitors.

When the local boys and Gudlaugur’s classmates called round for him the usual answer was that he had to stay in and do his homework, either for school or for singing and piano practice. Sometimes he was allowed to go out with them and they noticed that he was not as coarse as they were, and strangely sensitive. His clothes never got dirty, he never jumped in puddles, he was rather a wimp at football and spoke very properly. Sometimes he talked about people with foreign names. Some Schubert bloke. And when they told him about the latest action comics they were reading or what they had seen at the cinema, he told them he read poetry. Maybe not necessarily because he really wanted to, but because his father said it was good for him to read poetry. They had a hunch that his father set him lessons to learn and was very strict about it. One poem every evening.

His sister was different. Tougher. More like her father. The father did not seem to make such great demands on her as on the boy. She was learning the piano and like her brother, had joined the children’s choir when it was set up. Her friends described how she was sometimes jealous of her brother when their father praised him; their mother appeared to favour the son as well. People thought Gudlaugur and his mother were close. She was like his guardian angel.

One of Gudlaugur’s classmates was shown into the drawing room once while the family debated whether he could go out to play. The father stood on the stairs wearing his thick glasses, Gudlaugur on the landing and his mother by the door to the drawing room, and she said it did not matter if the boy went out to play. He did not have so many friends and they did not call for him very often. He could go on practising later.

“Get on with your exercises!” the father shouted. “Do you think it’s something you can pick up and put down as you please? You don’t understand the dedication it involves, do you? You’ll never understand that!”

“He’s just a child,” his mother said. “And he doesn’t have many friends. You can’t keep him shut up indoors all day. He must be allowed to be a child too.”

“It’s all right,” Gudlaugur said, and walked over to the boy visiting him. “I might come out later. Go home and I’ll come afterwards.”

As the boy left, before the door closed behind him, he heard Gudlaugur’s father shout down the stairs: “You shall never do that again, argue with me in front of strangers.”

Over time Gudlaugur became isolated at school and the boys in the top form started to tease him. It was very innocent at first. They all teased each other and there were fights in the playground and pranks just as in all schools, but by the age of eleven Gudlaugur had clearly become the butt of the bullying and practical jokes. It was not a large school by modern standards and everyone knew that Gudlaugur was different. He was wan and sickly. A stay-at-home. The boys where he lived stopped calling for him and started teasing him at school. His satchel would go missing or be empty when he picked it up. Boys pushed him over. They ripped his clothes. He was beaten up. He was called names. No one invited him to birthday parties.

Gudlaugur did not know how to fight back. He did not understand what was going on. His father complained to the headmaster, who promised to put an end to it, but it proved to be beyond his control and Gudlaugur would go home from school as before covered in bruises and clutching his empty satchel. His father contemplated removing him from the school, even moving out of the town, but he was obstinate and refused to give in, having taken part in founding the children’s choir. He was pleased with the young conductor, and, knowing that choir was a place for Gudlaugur to practise and draw attention to himself eventually, felt that the bullying — for which there was no word in the Icelandic language in those days, Elinborg interjected — was something Gudlaugur simply had to put up with.

The boy responded with total surrender and became a dreamy loner. He concentrated on singing and the piano and appeared to derive some peace of mind from them. In that field everything went in his favour. He could see what he was capable of. But most of the time he felt bad and when his mother died it was as if he turned to nothing.

He was always seen alone and tried to smile if he met children from the school. He made a record that was reported in the newspapers. It was as if his father had been right all the time. Gudlaugur would be something special in life.

And soon, because of a closely guarded secret, he earned a new name in the neighbourhood.

“What was he called?” Erlendur asked.

“The headmaster didn’t know,” Elinborg said, “and his classmates either pretended not to remember or refused to tell. But it had a profound effect on the boy. They all agreed on that.”

“What time is it anyway?” Erlendur suddenly asked, as if in panic.

“I suppose it must be past seven,” Elinborg said. “Is something wrong?”

“Bugger it, I’ve slept all day,” Erlendur said, leaping to his feet. “I have to find Henry Wapshott. They were supposed to take a sample from him at lunchtime and he wasn’t here.”

Elinborg looked at the record player, loudspeakers and records.

“Is he any good?” she asked.

“He’s brilliant,” Erlendur said. “You ought to listen to him.”

“I’m going home,” Elinborg said, standing up now too.

“Are you going to stay at the hotel over Christmas? Aren’t you going to get yourself home?”

“I don’t know,” Erlendur said. “I’ll see.”

“You’re welcome to join us. You know that. I’ll be having cold leg of pork. And ox tongue.”

“Don’t worry so much,” Erlendur said as he opened the door. “You get off home, I’m going to check on Wapshott.”

“Where’s Sigurdur Oli been all day?” Elinborg asked.

“He was going to see if he could find out anything about Wapshott from Scotland Yard. He’s probably home by now.”

“Why’s it so cold in your room?”

“The radiator’s broken,” Erlendur said, closing the door behind them.

When they went down to the lobby he said goodbye to Elinborg and found the head of reception in his office. Henry Wapshott had not been seen at the hotel all day. His key card was not in the pigeon hole and he had not checked out. He still had to pay the bill. Erlendur knew that he was catching the evening flight to London and he had nothing concrete to prevent him from leaving the country. He had not heard from Sigurdur Oli. He dithered in the lobby.

“Could you let me into his room?” he asked the reception manager.

The manager shook his head.

“He could have fled,” Erlendur said. “Do you know when the plane for London leaves tonight? What time?”

“The afternoon flight was badly delayed,” the man said. Knowing all about the flights was part of his job. “It will take off around nine, they think.”

Erlendur made a couple of telephone calls. He found out that Henry Wapshott had a flight booked to London. He had not checked in yet. Erlendur took measures for passport control to apprehend him at the airport and have him sent back to Reykjavik. Needing to find a reason for the Keflavik police to detain him, he hesitated for a moment and wondered whether to invent something. He knew that the press would have a field day if he told the truth, but he couldn’t think of a plausible lie on the spot, and in the end he said, which was true, that Wapshott was under suspicion in a murder inquiry.

“Can’t you let me into his room?” Erlendur asked the manager again. “I won’t touch anything. I just need to know if he’s done a runner. It would take me ages to get a warrant. I just need to put my head round the door.”

“He may yet check out,” the manager said stiffly. “There’s a good while before the flight yet and he has plenty of time to come back here, pack, pay his bill, check out and take the shuttle to Keflavik airport. Won’t you hang on a while?”

Erlendur pondered.

“Can’t you send someone up to tidy his room and I can walk past the door when it’s open? Is that any problem?”

“You must understand the position I’m in,” the manager said. “Above all we safeguard the interests of our guests. They’re entitled to privacy, just like being at home. If I break that rule and word gets out or it’s reported in the trial documents, our guests won’t be able to trust us any longer. It couldn’t be simpler. You must understand.”

“We’re investigating a murder that was committed at this hotel,” Erlendur said. “Isn’t your reputation gone to buggery anyway?”

“Bring a warrant and there won’t be any problem.”

Erlendur walked away from reception with a sigh. He took out his mobile and called Sigurdur Oli. The phone rang for a long while before he answered. Erlendur could hear voices in the background.

“Where on earth are you?” Erlendur asked.

“I’m doing the bread,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Doing the bread?”

“Carving patterns in the wafer bread. For Christmas. With Bergthora’s family. It’s a regular feature on our Christmas agenda. Have you gone home?”

“What did you find out from Scotland Yard about Henry Wapshott?”

“I’m waiting to hear. I’ll find out tomorrow morning. Is anything happening with him?”

“I think he’s trying to dodge the saliva sample,” Erlendur said, noticing the head of reception walking up with a sheet of paper in his hand. “I think he’s trying to leave the country without saying goodbye to us. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Don’t cut your fingers”

Erlendur put his mobile in his pocket. The manager was standing in front of him.

“I decided to check out about Henry Wapshott,” he said, handing Erlendur the piece of paper. “To help you a bit. I shouldn’t be doing this but…”

“What is it?” Erlendur said as he looked at the paper. He saw Henry Wapshott’s name and some dates.

“He’s spent Christmas at this hotel for the past three years,” the manager said. “If that helps at all.”

Erlendur stared at the dates.

“He said he’s never been to Iceland before.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” the man said. “But he’s been at this hotel before.”

“Do you remember him? Is he a regular?”

“I don’t remember ever checking him in. There are more than two hundred rooms at this hotel and Christmas is always busy, so he can easily disappear into the crowd, besides which, he only makes short stops. Just a couple of days. I haven’t noticed him this time around but the penny dropped when I looked at the printout. He’s just like you in one respect. He has the same special needs.”

“What do you mean, like me? Special needs?” Erlendur could not imagine what he had in common with Henry Wapshott.

“He appears to be interested in music”

“What are you talking about?”

“You can see here,” the manager said, pointing at the sheet of paper. “We make a note of our guests” special requirements. In most cases.”

Erlendur read down the list.

“He wanted a player in his room,” the manager said. “Not a smart CD player, but some old heap. Just like you.”

“Bloody liar,” Erlendur hissed, and took out his mobile again.

16

A warrant for Henry Wapshott’s arrest was issued that evening. He was apprehended when he went to catch the plane for London. Wapshott was taken to the cells in the police station on Hverfisgata and Erlendur obtained a warrant to search his room. The forensics team arrived at the hotel around midnight. They combed the room in search of the murder weapon, but found nothing. All they found was a suitcase that Wapshott clearly intended to leave behind, his shaving kit in the bathroom, an old record player similar to the one Erlendur had borrowed from the hotel, a television and video player, and several British newspapers and magazines. Including Record Collector.

Fingerprint experts looked for clues that Gudlaugur had been in his room, scouring the edges of the table and the door frame. Erlendur stood out in the corridor watching the forensics team. He wanted a cigarette and even a glass of Chartreuse because Christmas was coming, wanted his armchair and books. He intended to go home. Did not really know why he stayed at that deathly hotel. Did not really know what to do with himself.

White dust from the fingerprinting sprinkled onto the floor.

Erlendur saw the hotel manager waddling along the corridor. He wielded his handkerchief and was puffing and blowing. After taking a look inside the room where the forensics team were at work, he smiled all over his face.

“I heard you’ve caught him,” he said, wiping his neck. “And that it was a foreigner.”

“Where did you hear that?” Erlendur asked.

“On the radio,” the manager said, unable to conceal his glee at all this good news. The man had been found, it was not an Icelander who committed the deed and it was not one of the hotel staff either. The manager panted: “They said on the news that he was arrested at Keflavik airport on his way to London. A Brit?”

Erlendur’s mobile started ringing.

“We don’t know whether he’s the one we’re looking for,” he said as he took out his phone.

“You don’t need to come down to the station,” Sigurdur Oli said when Erlendur answered. “Not for the time being.”

“Shouldn’t you be doing the Christmas bread?” Erlendur asked, and turned away from the manager with his mobile in his hand.

“He’s drunk,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Henry Wapshott. It’s pointless trying to talk to him. Shall we let him sleep it off tonight and talk to him in the morning?”

“Did he cause any trouble?”

“No, not at all. They told me he went along with them without saying a word. They stopped him immediately at passport control and kept him in the body search room, and when the police arrived they took him straight out to the van and drove to Reykjavik. No trouble. He was apparently very reticent and fell asleep in the van on his way into town. He’s sleeping in his cell now.”

“It was on the news, so I’m told,” Erlendur said. “About the arrest” He looked at the manager. “People are hoping we’ve got the right man.”

“He only had a case with him. A big briefcase.”

“Is there anything in it?”

“Records. Old ones. The same sort of vinyl crap we found in the room in the basement.”

“You mean Gudlaugur’s records?”

“Looked like it. Not many. And he had some others. You can examine it all tomorrow.”

“He’s hunting for Gudlaugur’s records.”

“Maybe he managed to add to his collection,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Should we meet down here at the station tomorrow morning?”

“We need a saliva sample from him,” Erlendur said.

“I’ll see to that,” Sigurdur Oli said, and they rang off.

Erlendur put his mobile back in his pocket.

“Has he confessed?” the hotel manager asked. “Did he confess?”

“Do you remember seeing him in the hotel before? Henry Wapshott. From Liverpool. Looks about sixty. He told me this was his first visit to Iceland, then it turns out that he’s stayed here before.”

“I don’t remember anyone by that name. Do you have a photograph of him?”

“I need to get one. Find out if any of the staff recognise him. It might ring a bell somewhere. Even the tiniest detail could be important.”

“Hopefully you’ll get it all sorted,” the manager grunted. “We’ve had cancellations because of the murder. Icelanders mostly The tourists haven’t heard so much about it. But the buffet’s not so busy and our bookings are down. I should never have allowed him to live down there in the basement. Bloody kindness will be the death of me.”

“You positively ooze with it,” Erlendur said.

The manager looked at Erlendur, unsure whether he was mocking him. The head of forensics came out into the corridor to them, greeted the manager and drew Erlendur to one side.

“It all looks like a typical tourist in a double room in a Reykjavik hotel,” he said. “The murder weapon isn’t lying on his bedside table, if that’s what you were hoping for, and there are no bloodstained clothes in his suitcase — nothing to connect him with the man in the basement really. The room’s covered with fingerprints. But he’s obviously done a runner. He left his room as if he was on his way down to the bar. His electric shaver is still plugged in. Spare pairs of shoes on the floor. And some slippers he’d brought with him. That’s really all we can say at this stage. The man was in a hurry. He was fleeing.”

The head of forensics went back into the room and Erlendur walked over to the manager.

“Who does the cleaning on this corridor?” he asked. “Who goes into the rooms? Don’t the cleaners share the floors out between them?”

“I know which women do this floor,” the manager said. “There are no men. For some reason.”

He said this sarcastically, as if cleaning was obviously not a man’s job.

“And who are they then?” Erlendur asked.

“Well, the girl you talked to, for example.”

“Which girl I talked to?”

“The one in the basement,” the manager said. “Who found the body. The girl who found the dead Santa. This is her floor.”

When Erlendur went back to his room two storeys above, Eva Lind was waiting for him in the corridor. She was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, with her knees up under her chin, and appeared to be asleep. When he walked over she looked up and smoothed out her clothes.

“It’s fantastic coming to this hotel,” she said. “When are you going to get your arse back home?”

“The plan was soon,” Erlendur said. “I’m growing tired of this place too.”

He slid his card into the slot on the door. Eva Lind got to her feet and followed him inside. Erlendur closed the door and Eva threw herself flat out onto his bed. He sat down at the desk.

“Getting anywhere with the bizz?” Eva asked, lying on her stomach with her eyes closed as if trying to fall asleep.

“Very slowly,” Erlendur said. “And stop calling it “bizz”. What’s wrong with “business”, or even “case”?”

“Aw, shut your face,” Eva Lind said, her eyes still closed. Erlendur smiled. He looked at his daughter on the bed and wondered what kind of parent he would have been. Would he have made great demands on her? Signed her up for ballet classes? Hoped she was a little genius? Would he have hit her if she had knocked his chartreuse onto the floor?

“Are you there?” she asked, eyes still closed.

“Yes, I’m here,” Erlendur said wearily.

“Why don’t you say anything?”

“What am I supposed to say? What are people ever supposed to say?”

“Well, what you’re doing at this hotel, for instance. Seriously.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t want to go back to the flat. It’s a bit of a change.”

“Change! What’s the difference between hanging around by yourself in this room and hanging around by yourself at home?”

“Do you want to hear some music?” Erlendur asked, trying to steer the conversation away from himself. He began outlining the case to his daughter, point by point, to gain some kind of a picture of it himself. He told her about the girl who found a stabbed Santa, once an exceptionally gifted choirboy who had made two records that were sought-after by collectors. His voice was unique.

He reached for the record he had yet to listen to. It contained two hymns and was clearly designed for Christmas. On the sleeve was Gudlaugur wearing a Santa hat, with a wide smile showing his adult teeth, and Erlendur thought about the irony of fate. He put the record on and the choirboy’s voice resounded around the room in beautiful, bitter-sweet song. Eva Lind opened her eyes and sat up on the bed.

“Are you joking?” she said.

“Don’t you think it’s magnificent?”

“I’ve never heard a kid sing like that,” Eva said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone sing so beautifully” They sat in silence and listened to the end of the song. Erlendur reached over to the record player, turned the record over and played the hymn on the other side. They listened to it, and when it was over Eva Lind asked him to play it again.

Erlendur told her about Gudlaugur’s family, the concert in Hafnarfjordur, his father and sister who had not been in touch with him for more than thirty years, and the British collector who tried to leave the country and was only interested in choirboys. Told her that Gudlaugur’s records might be valuable today.

“Do you think that’s why he got done?” Eva Lind asked. “Because of the records? Because they’re valuable now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are there any still around?”

“I don’t think so,” Erlendur said, “and that’s probably what makes them collectors” items. Elinborg says collectors look for something that’s unique. But that might not be important. Maybe someone at the hotel attacked him. Someone who didn’t know about the choirboy at all.”

Erlendur decided not to tell his daughter about the way Gudlaugur was found. He knew that when she was taking drugs she had prostituted herself and knew how it operated in Reykjavik. Yet he flinched from broaching that subject with her. She lived her own life and had her own way without him ever having any say in the matter. But since he thought there was a possibility that Gudlaugur had paid for sex at the hotel, he asked her if she knew of any prostitution there.

Eva Lind looked at her father.

“Poor bloke,” she said without answering him. Her mind was still on the choirboy. “There was a girl like that at my school. Primary school. She made a few records. Her name was Vala Dogg. You remember anything by her? She was really hyped. Sang Christmas carols. A pretty little blonde girl.”

Erlendur shook his head.

“She was a child star. Sang on children’s hour and TV shows and sang really well, a little sweetie-pie sort of type. Her dad was some obscure pop singer but it was her mum who was a bit of a nutter and wanted to make a pop star out of her. She got teased big time. She was really nice, not a show-off or pretentious in the least, but people were always bugging her. Icelanders get jealous and annoyed so easily. She was bullied, so she left school and got a job. I met her a lot when I was doing dope and she’d turned into a total creep. Worse than me. Burned-out and forgotten. She told me it was the worst thing that ever happened to her.”

“Being a child star?”

“It ruined her. She never escaped from it. Was never allowed to be herself. Her mum was really bossy. Never asked her if it was what she wanted. She liked singing and being in the spotlight and all that, but she had no idea what was going on. She could never be anything more than the little cutie on children’s hour. She was only allowed to have one dimension. She was pretty little Vala Dogg. And then she got teased about it, and couldn’t understand why until she got older and realised that she’d never be anything but a pretty little dolly singing in her frock. That she’d never be a world-famous pop star like her mum always told her.”

Eva Lind stopped talking and looked at her father.

“She totally fell to bits. She said the bullying was the worst thing, it turns you into shit. You end up with exactly the same opinion of yourself as the people who persecute you.”

“Gudlaugur probably went through the same,” Erlendur said. “He left home young. It must be a strain for kids having to go through all that.”

They fell silent.

“Of course there are tarts at this hotel,” Eva Lind suddenly said, throwing herself back on the bed. “Obviously.”

“What do you know about it? Is there anything you could help me with?”

“There are tarts everywhere. You can dial a number and they wait for you at the hotel. Classy tarts. They don’t call themselves tarts, they provide “escort services”.”

“Do you know of any who work this hotel? Girls or women who do that?”

“They don’t have to be Icelandic. They’re imported too. They can come over as tourists for a couple of weeks, then they don’t need any papers. Then come back a few months later.”

Eva Lind looked at her father.

“You could talk to Stina. She’s my friend. She knows the game. Do you think it was a tart who killed him?”

“I have no idea.”

They fell silent. Outside in the darkness snowflakes glittered as they fell to the ground. Erlendur vaguely recalled a reference to snow in the Bible, sins and snow, and tried to remember it: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.

“I’m freaking out,” Eva Lind said. There was no excitement in her voice. No eagerness.

“Maybe you can’t handle it by yourself,” Erlendur said; he had urged his daughter to seek counselling. “Maybe you need someone other than me to help you.”

“Don’t give me that psychology bollocks,” Eva said.

“You haven’t got over it and you don’t look well, and soon you’ll go and take the pain away the old way, then you’re back in exactly the same mess as before.”

Erlendur was on the verge of saying the sentence he still had not dared to say out loud to his daughter.

“Preaching all the time,” Eva Lind said, instantly on edge, and she stood up.

He decided to fire away.

“You’d be failing the baby that died.”

Eva Lind stared at her father, her eyes black with rage.

“The other option you have is to come to terms with this fucking life, as you call it, and put up with the suffering it involves. Put up with the suffering we all have to endure, always, to get through that and find and enjoy the happiness and joy that it brings us as well, in spite of our being alive.”

“Speak for yourself! You can’t even go home at Christmas because there’s nothing there! Not a fucking thing and you can’t go there because you know it’s just a hole with nothing in it which you can’t be bothered to crawl back into any more.”

“I’m always at home at Christmas,” Erlendur said.

Eva Lind looked confused.

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s the worst thing about Christmas,” Erlendur said. “I always go home.”

“I don’t understand you,” Eva Lind said, opening the door. I’ll never understand you.”

She slammed the door behind her. Erlendur stood up to run after her, but stopped. He knew that she would come back. He walked over to the window and watched his reflection in the glass until he could see through it into the darkness and the glittering snowflakes.

He had forgotten his decision to go home to the hole with nothing in it, as Eva Lind put it. He turned from the window and set Gudlaugur’s hymns playing again, stretched out on his bed and listened to the boy who, much later, would be found murdered in a little room at a hotel, and thought about sins as white as snow.