Voices

17

He woke up early in the morning, still in his clothes and lying on top of the quilt. It took him a long time to shake off the sleep. A dream about his father followed him into the dark morning and he struggled to remember it but caught only snatches: his father, younger in some way, fitter, smiled at him in a deserted forest.

His hotel room was dark and cold. The sun would not be up for a few hours yet. He lay thinking about the dream, his father and the loss of his brother. How the unbearable loss had made a hole in his world. And how the hole was continually growing and he stepped back from its edge to look down into the void that was ready to swallow him when finally he let go.

He shook off these waking fantasies and thought about his tasks for the day. What was Henry Wapshott hiding? Why did he tell lies and make a forlorn attempt to flee, drunk and without luggage? His behaviour puzzled Erlendur. And before long his thoughts stopped at the boy in the hospital bed and his father: Elinborgs case, which she had explained to him in detail.

Elinborg suspected that the boy had been maltreated before and there were strong indications that it happened at home. The father was under suspicion. She insisted on having him remanded in custody for the duration of the investigation. A week’s custody was granted, against vociferous protests from both the father and his lawyer. When the warrant was issued Elinborg went to fetch him with four uniformed police officers and accompanied him down to Hverfisgata. She led him along the prison corridor and locked the door to his cell herself. She pulled back the hatch on the door and looked in at the man who was standing on the same spot with his back turned to her, hunched up and somehow helpless, like everyone who is removed from human society and kept like an animal in a cage.

He slowly turned round and looked her in the eye from the other side of the steel door, and she slid the hatch shut on him.

Early the next morning she began questioning him. Erlendur took part but Elinborg was in charge of the interrogation. The two of them sat facing him in the interrogation room. On the table between them was an ashtray screwed down to the table. The father was unshaven, wearing a crumpled suit and a scruffy white shirt buttoned at the neck with a tie knotted impeccably, as if it represented the last vestiges of his self-respect.

Elinborg switched on the tape recorder and recorded the interview, the names of those present and the number assigned to the case. She had prepared herself well. She had met the boy’s supervisor from school who talked about dyslexia, attention deficit disorder and poor school performance; a psychologist, a friend of hers, who talked about disappointment, stress and denial; and talked to the boy’s friends, neighbours, relatives, everyone whom it occurred to her to ask about the boy and his father.

The man would not yield He accused them of persecution, announced that he would sue them, and refused to answer their questions. Elinborg looked at Erlendur. A warden appeared who pushed the man to his cell again.

Two days later he was brought back for questioning. His lawyer had brought him more comfortable clothes from home and he was now dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a designer label on one of the breast pockets, which he wore like a medal rewarding him for absurdly expensive shopping. He was in a different frame of mind now. Three days in custody had dampened his arrogance, as it tends to do, and he saw that it depended on him alone whether he would stay confined in the cells or not.

Elinborg made sure that he came in for interrogation barefoot. His shoes and socks were taken away without explanation. When he sat down in front of them he tried to pull his feet under his chair.

Elinborg and Erlendur sat facing him, intractable. The tape recorder whirred softly.

“I talked to your son’s teacher,” Elinborg said. “And although what happens and passes between parent and teacher is confidential and she was very firm about that, she wanted to help the boy, help in the criminal case. She told me you assaulted him once in front of her.”

Assaulted him! I gave him a little rap on the jaw. That’s hardly what you call assault. He was being naughty, that’s all. Fidgeting all over the place. He’s difficult. You don’t know about that sort of thing. The strain.”

“So it’s right to punish him?”

“We’re good friends, my boy and I,” the father said. “I love him. I’m responsible for him all by myself. His mother…”

“I know about his mother,” Elinborg said. And of course it can be difficult bringing up a child by yourself. But what you did to him and do to him is … it’s indescribable.”

The father sat and said nothing.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said eventually.

Elinborg crossed her legs and caught her foot on the father’s shin as she did so.

“Sorry? Elinborg said.

He winced, unsure whether she had done it on purpose.

“The teacher said you make unrealistic demands on your son,” she said, unruffled. “Is that true?”

“What’s unrealistic? I want him to get an education and make something of himself.”

“Understandably,” Elinborg said. “But he’s eight years old, dyslexic and borderline hyperactive. You didn’t finish school yourself?

“I own and run my own business.”

“Which is bankrupt. You’re losing your house, your fancy car, the wealth that’s brought you a certain social status. People look up to you. When the old classmates have a reunion you’re sure to be the big shot. Those golfing trips with your mates. You’re losing everything. How infuriating, especially when you bear in mind that your wife is in a psychiatric ward and your son’s behind at school. It all mounts up, and in the end you explode when Addi, who’s surely spilled milk and dropped plates on the floor all his life, knocks a bottle of Drambuie onto the marble floor of your lounge.”

The father looked at her. His expression did not change.

Elinborg had visited his wife at Kleppur mental hospital. She suffered from schizophrenia and sometimes had to be admitted when she began hallucinating and the voices overwhelmed her. When Elinborg met her she was on such strong medication that she could hardly speak. Sat rocking backwards and forwards and asked Elinborg for a cigarette. Had no idea why she was visiting her.

“I’m trying to bring him up as best I can,” the father said in the interrogation room.

“By pricking the back of his hand with needles.”

“Shut your mouth.”

Elinborg had talked to the man’s sister, who said she sometimes thought the boy’s upbringing rather harsh. She cited one example from a visit to their home. The boy was four at the time and complained that he was not feeling well, he cried a little and she thought he might even have the flu. Her brother lost his patience when the boy had been moaning at him for some while, and he picked him up and held him.

“Is anything wrong?” he asked the child brashly.

“No,” Addi said, his voice low and nervous, as if giving in.

“You shouldn’t be crying.”

“No,” the boy said.

“If there’s nothing wrong, then stop crying.”

“Yes.”

“So is there anything wrong?”

“No.”

“So everything’s OK.”

“Yes.”

“Good. You shouldn’t blubber about nothing.”

Elinborg recounted this story to the father, but his expression remained unchanged.

“My sister and I don’t get on,” he said. “I don’t remember that.”

“Did you assault your son with the result that he was admitted to hospital?” Elinborg asked.

The father looked at her.

Elinborg repeated the question.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t. Do you think any father would do that? He was beaten up at school.”

The boy was out of hospital. Child welfare had found a foster home for him and Elinborg went to see him when the interrogation was over. She sat down beside him and asked how he was doing. He hadn’t said a word to her since the first time they met, but now he looked at her as if he wanted to say something.

He cleared his throat, faltering.

“I miss my dad,” he said, choking back the sobs.

Erlendur was sitting at the breakfast table when he saw Sigurdur Oli come in followed by Henry Wapshott. Two detectives sat down at another table behind them. The British record collector was scruffier than before, his ruffled hair standing out in all directions and a look of suffering on his face, which expressed total humiliation and a lost battle with a hangover and imprisonment.

“What’s going on?” Erlendur asked Sigurdur Oli, and stood up. “Why did you bring him here? And why isn’t he done up?”

“Done up?”

“In handcuffs.”

“Does that look necessary to you?”

Erlendur looked at Wapshott.

“I couldn’t be bothered to wait for you,” Sigurdur Oli said. “We can only detain him until this evening, so you’ll have to make a decision on charges as soon as possible. And he wanted to meet you here. Refused to talk to me. Just wanted to talk to you. Like you were old friends. He hasn’t insisted on bail, hasn’t asked for legal aid or help from his embassy. We’ve told him he can contact the embassy but he just shakes his head.”

“Have you found out anything about him from Scotland Yard?” Erlendur said with a glance at Wapshott, who was standing behind Sigurdur Oli, his head hung low.

“I’ll explore that when you take him over,” said Sigurdur Oli, who had done nothing on the matter. “I’ll let you know what they’ve got on him, if anything.”

Sigurdur Oli said goodbye to Wapshott, stopped briefly with the two detectives, then left. Erlendur offered the British man a seat. Wapshott perched on a chair, looking down at the floor.

“I didn’t kill him,” he said in a low voice. “I could never have killed him. I’ve never been able to kill anything, not even flies. To say nothing of that wonderful choirboy.”

Erlendur looked at Wapshott.

“Are you talking about Gudlaugur?”

“Yes,” Wapshott said. “Of course.”

“He was a long way from being a choirboy,” Erlendur said. “Gudlaugur was almost fifty and played Santa Claus at Christmas parties.”

“You don’t understand,” Wapshott said.

“No, I don’t,” Erlendur said. “Maybe you can explain it to me.”

“I wasn’t at the hotel when he was attacked,” Wapshott said.

“Where were you?”

“I was looking for records.” Wapshott looked up and a pained smile passed across his face. “I was looking at the stuff you Icelanders throw away. Seeing what comes out of that recycling plant. They told me a dead person’s estate had come in. Including gramophone records for disposal.”

“Who?”

“Who what?”

“Told you about the dead person’s things?”

“The staff. I give them a tip if they let me know. They have my card. I’ve told you that. I go to the collectors” shops, meet other collectors and go to the markets. Kolaportid, isn’t that the name? I do what all collectors do, try to find something worth owning.”

“Was anyone with you at the time of the attack on Gudlaugur? Someone we can talk to?”

“No,” Wapshott said.

“But they must remember you at those places”

“Of course.”

“And did you find anything worth having? Any choirboys?”

“Nothing. I haven’t found anything on this trip.”

“Why were you running away from us?” Erlendur asked.

“I wanted to get home.”

“And you left all your stuff at the hotel?”

“Yes.”

Apart from a few of Gudlaugur’s records”

“Yes.”

“Why did you tell me you’d never been to Iceland before?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention. The murder has nothing to do with me.”

“It’s very easy to prove the opposite. You must have known, when you were lying, that I’d find out. That I’d find out you’d been at this hotel before.”

“The murder is nothing to do with me.”

“But now you’ve convinced me it is something to do with you. You couldn’t have drawn more attention to yourself?

“I didn’t kill him.”

“What was your relationship with Gudlaugur?”

“I’ve told you that story and I wasn’t lying then. I became interested in his singing, in old records by him as a choirboy, and when I heard he was still alive I contacted him.”

“Why did you lie? You’ve been to Iceland before, you’ve stayed at this hotel before and you’ve definitely met Gudlaugur before.”

“It’s nothing to do with me. The murder. When I heard about it I was afraid you’d find out that I knew him. I got more paranoid by the minute and I had to apply amazing self-discipline not to make a run for it at once, which would have pointed the finger at me. I had to let a few days go by, but then I couldn’t stand it any longer and I had to get away. My nerves couldn’t take it any more. But I didn’t kill him.”

“How much did you know about Gudlaugur’s background?”

“Not much.”

“Isn’t the point about collecting records to dig up information about what you collect? Have you done that?”

“I don’t know much,” Wapshott said. “I know he lost his voice at a concert, only two recordings of his songs were released, he fell out with his father…”

“Wait a minute, how did you hear about how he died?”

“What do you mean?”

“The hotel guests weren’t told it was a murder, but an accident or heart attack. How did you find out he’d been murdered?”

“How did I find out? You told me.”

“Yes, I told you and you were very surprised, but now you say that when you heard about the murder you were afraid we would link you to him. In other words, it was before we met. Before we linked you to him.”

Wapshott stared at him. Erlendur could tell when people were stalling for time, and he let Wapshott have all the time he needed. The two detectives sat calmly at a suitable distance. Erlendur had been late for breakfast and there were few people in the dining hall. He caught a glimpse of the big chef who had gone berserk when the saliva sample was supposed to be taken. Erlendur’s thoughts turned to Valgerdur. The biotechnician. What would she be doing? Sticking needles into children who were fighting back their tears or trying to kick her?

“I didn’t want to get involved in this,” Wapshott said.

“What are you hiding? Why don’t you want to talk to the British embassy? Why don’t you want a lawyer?”

“I heard people talking about it down here. Hotel guests. They were saying someone had been murdered. Some Americans. That’s how I heard. And I was worried that you would connect us and I’d end up in precisely the situation in which I now find myself. That’s why I fled. It’s as simple as that.”

Erlendur remembered the American Henry Bartlet and his wife. Cindy, she had told Sigurdur Oli with a smile.

“How much are Gudlaugur’s records worth?”

“What do you mean?”

“They must be worth a lot to make you come all the way up to the cold north here in the middle of winter to get hold of them. How much are they worth? One record. What does it cost?”

“If you want to sell it you auction it, even on E-bay, and there’s no telling how much it will fetch in the end.”

“But at a guess. What do you guess it would sell for?”

“I cant say.”

“Did you meet Gudlaugur before he died?”

Henry Wapshott hesitated.

“Yes,” he said at last.

“The note we found, 18.30, was that the time of your meeting?”

“That was the day before he was found dead. We sat down in his room and had a short meeting.”

“About what?”

“About his records.”

“What about his records?”

“I wanted to know, I’ve wanted to know for a long time, whether he had any more. Whether the handful I know about, in my own collection and others’, are the only copies in the world. For some reason he wouldn’t answer. I asked him first in a letter that I wrote him several years ago, and it was one of the first things I asked when I met him.”

“So, did he have any records for you?”

“He refused to say.”

“Did he know what his records were worth?”

“I gave him a fairly clear picture.”

“And how much are these records really worth?”

Wapshott did not reply immediately.

“When I met him the last time, he gave in,” he said. “He wanted to talk about his records. I…”

Wapshott hesitated again. He looked behind him and saw the two detectives who were guarding him.

“I gave him half a million.”

“Haifa million?”

“Krona. As a down payment or—”

“You told me we weren’t talking about huge sums”

Wapshott shrugged and Erlendur thought he detected a smile.

“So that’s another lie,” Erlendur said.

“Yes.”

“Down payment for what?”

“The records he owned. If he had any”

“And did you let him have the money the last time you met him without knowing if he had any records?”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“Then he was killed.”

“We didn’t find any money on him.”

“I don’t know anything about that. I gave him half a million the day before he died.”

Erlendur recalled asking Sigurdur Oli to check Gudlaugur’s bank account. He must remember to ask him what he had found out.

“Did you see the records in his room?”

“No.”

“Why should I believe that? You’ve lied about everything else. Why should I believe anything you say?”

Wapshott shrugged.

“So he had half a million on him when he was attacked?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that I gave him the money and then later he was killed.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about that money in the first place?”

“I wanted to be left alone,” Wapshott said. “I didn’t want you to think I’d killed him for the money”

“Did you?”

“No.”

They paused.

“Are you going to charge me?” Wapshott asked.

“I think you’re still hiding something,” Erlendur said. “I can hold you until the evening. Then we’ll see.”

“I could never have killed the choirboy. I worship him and still do. I’ve never heard such a beautiful voice from any boy.”

Erlendur looked at Henry Wapshott.

“Strange how alone you are in all this,” he said, before even realising it.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re so alone in the world.”

“I didn’t kill him,” Wapshott said. “I didn’t kill him.”

18

Wapshott left the hotel accompanied by the two policemen, while Erlendur found out that Osp, the girl who had discovered the body, was currently working on the fourth floor. He took the lift and when he arrived there he saw her loading a trolley with dirty laundry outside one of the rooms. She did not notice him until he walked up to her and said her name. She looked up and recognised him at once.

“Oh, is it you again?” she said indifferently.

She looked even more tired and depressed than when he had met her in the staff coffee room, and Erlendur thought to himself that Christmas was probably no season of joy in her life either. Before he knew it he had asked her.

“Does Christmas get you down?”

Instead of answering him she pushed the trolley to the next door, knocked and waited a moment before taking out her master key and opening the door. She called into the room in case someone was inside but had not heard her knocking, then went in and began cleaning, made the bed, picked up the towels from the bathroom floor, squirted cleaner on the mirror. Erlendur wandered into the room after her and watched her at work, and after a while she seemed to notice that he was still there with her.

“You mustn’t come into the room,” she said. “It’s private.”

“You do room 312 on the floor below,” Erlendur said. “A weird Brit was there. Henry Wapshott. Did you notice anything unusual in his room?”

She gave him a look of not quite following what he meant.

“Like a bloodstained knife, for example?” Erlendur said and tried to smile.

“No,” Osp said. She stopped to think. Then she asked: “What knife? Did he kill Santa?”

“I don’t quite remember how you put it the last time we spoke, but you said some of the guests grope you. I thought you were talking about sexual harassment. Was he one of them?”

“No, I only saw him once.”

“And was there nothing that—”

“He went ballistic,” she said. “When I went into the room.”

“Ballistic?”

“I disturbed him and he threw me out. I went to check what was going on and it turned out he’d made a special request at reception not to have his room tidied. No one told me anything. None of this bloody crew ever says a word to us. So I walked in on him and when he saw me he totally lost it. Went for me, the old sod. As if I have any say at this hotel. He should have gone for the hotel manager.”

“He is a little mysterious.”

“He’s a creep.”

“I mean that Wapshott.”

“Yes, both of them.”

“So you didn’t notice anything unusual in his room?”

“It was a real mess, but that’s nothing unusual.”

Osp stopped working, stood still for a moment and looked pensively at Erlendur.

“Are you getting anywhere? With Santa?”

“A little,” Erlendur said. “Why?”

“This is a weird hotel,” Osp said, lowering her voice and looking out into the corridor.

“Weird?” Erlendur had a sudden feeling that she was not quite so self-confident. “Are you afraid of something? Something here at the hotel?”

Osp did not answer.

“Are you frightened of losing your job?”

She looked at Erlendur.

“Yeah right, this is the sort of job you don’t want to lose.”

“So what is it?”

Osp hesitated, then seemed to make a decision. As if what she wanted to say was not worth bothering about any longer.

“They steal from the kitchen,” she said. “Everything they can. I don’t think they’ve had to go shopping for years.”

“Steal?”

“Everything that’s not bolted to the floor.”

“Who are they?”

“Don’t say I told you. The head chef. Him for starters.”

“How do you know?”

“Gulli told me. He knew everything that went on at this hotel”

Erlendur recalled when he stole the ox tongue from the buffet and the head chef saw him and chided him. Remembered his tone of indignation.

“When did he tell you this?”

“A couple of months ago.”

“So what? Did it worry him? Was he going to tell someone? Why did he tell you? I thought you didn’t know him.”

“I didn’t know him.” Osp paused. “They were having a go at me in the kitchen,” she continued. “Talking dirty. “How you feeling down there?” and that sort of thing. All the pathetic crap morons like that come up with. Gulli heard it and talked to me. Told me not to worry. He said they were all thieves and he could get them caught if he wanted.”

“Did he threaten to get them caught?”

“He didn’t threaten anything,” Osp said. “He just said it to cheer me up.”

“What do they steal?” Erlendur asked. “Did he mention anything in particular?”

“He said the manager knew but didn’t do anything, he’s on the take too. He buys black market stuff. For the bars. Gulli told me that too. The head waiter’s in on it with him.”

“Gudlaugur told you that?”

“Then they pocket the difference.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this when I first talked to you?”

“Is it relevant?”

“It might be.”

Osp shrugged.

“I didn’t know and I wasn’t quite myself after I found him. Gudlaugur. With the condom. And the knife wounds”

“Did you see any money in his room?”

“Money?”

“He’d recently been paid some money but I don’t know whether he had it on him when he was attacked.”

“I didn’t see a penny.”

“No,” Erlendur said. “You didn’t take the money? When you found him?”

Osp stopped working and threw her hands down by her sides.

“Do you mean, did I steal it?”

“These things happen.”

“You think I—”

“Did you take it?”

“No.”

“You had the chance.”

“So did the person who killed him.”

“That’s true,” Erlendur said.

“I didn’t see a penny.”

“No, all right.”

Osp went back to her cleaning. Sprayed disinfectant into the toilet bowl and scrubbed it with the brush, acting as if Erlendur wasn’t there. He watched her working for a little while, then thanked her.

“What do you mean, you disturbed him?” he said, stopping at the door. “Henry Wapshott. You could hardly have got very far into his room if you called out first the way you did here.”

“He didn’t hear me.”

“What was he doing?”

“I don’t know if I can …”

“It won’t go any further.”

“He was watching TV,” Osp said.

“He wouldn’t want that to get around,” Erlendur whispered conspiratorially.

“Or, you know, a video,” Osp said. “It was porn. Disgusting.”

“Do they show porn films at the hotel?”

“Not that sort of film, they’re banned everywhere.”

“What sort of film?”

“It was child pornography. I told the manager.”

“Child pornography? What sort of child pornography?”

“What sort? Do you want me to describe it?”

“What day was this?”

“Fucking pervert!”

“When was it?”

“The day I found Gulli.”

“What did the manager do?”

“Nothing,” Osp said. “Told me to keep my mouth shut about it.”

“Do you know who Gudlaugur was?”

“What do you mean, the doorman? He was the doorman. Was he something else?”

“Yes, when he was little. He was a choirboy and had a very good voice. I’ve heard his records”

“A choirboy?”

“A child star, really. Then somehow everything went wrong in his life. He grew up and it was over.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“No, no one knew about Gudlaugur any more,” Erlendur said.

They fell silent, deep in their own thoughts. Some minutes passed.

“Does Christmas get you down?” Erlendur asked again. It was as if he had found a soul mate.

She turned towards him.

“Christmas is for happy people.”

Erlendur looked at Osp and a hint of a wry smile moved across his face.

“You’d get on with my daughter,” he said, and took out his mobile phone.

Sigurdur Oli was surprised when Erlendur told him about the money that had probably been in Gudlaugur’s room. They discussed the need to verify Wapshott’s claim that he had been roaming the record markets at the time the murder was committed. Sigurdur Oli was standing in front of Wapshott’s cell when Erlendur phoned him, and he described the conditions under which his saliva sample had been taken.

The cell he was in had housed many poor unfortunates, the whole spectrum from wretched tramps to thugs and murderers, and they had covered the walls and scratched the paint with remarks about their miserable stay in custody.

In the cell was a toilet bowl and a bed, bolted to the floor. On top of it was a thin mattress and a hard pillow. There were no windows in the cell, but high above the prisoner was a strong fluorescent light that was never switched off, making it difficult for the occupants to tell whether it was day or night.

Henry Wapshott stood rigid against the wall, facing the heavy steel door. Two warders held him. Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli were also in the cell with a warrant ordering the test to be made, and Valgerdur was there too, cotton bud in hand, ready to take the sample.

Wapshott stared at her as if she were the devil incarnate, who had arrived to drag him down into eternal hell fire. His eyes were popping out of his head, he arched himself as far away from her as he could, and no matter how they tried, they could not make him open his mouth.

Eventually they laid him on the floor and held his nose until he had to give in and gasp for breath. Valgerdur seized the chance and rammed the cotton wool bud into his mouth, wiped it around until he retched, then whipped it back out of him and hurried from the cell.

19

When Erlendur went back down to the lobby on his way to the kitchen he saw Marion Briem standing at the reception desk in a shabby coat, wearing a hat and fidgeting. He noticed how badly his old boss had aged in the years since they had last met, but still had the same watchful and inquisitive eyes, and never wasted time on formalities.

“You look awful,” Marion said, sitting down. “What’s getting you down?” A cigarillo appeared from somewhere in the coat and a box of matches with it.

“This is a smoke-free zone, apparently,” Erlendur said.

“You can’t smoke anywhere any more,” Marion said, lighting up. Marion wore a pained expression, the skin grey, slack and wrinkled. Pallid lips puckered around the cigarillo. Anaemic nails stood out from bony fingers that reached for the cigarillo again once the lungs had taken their fill.

For all the long and eventful history of their acquaintance, Marion and Erlendur had never got along particularly well. Marion had been Erlendur’s boss for years and tried to teach him the profession. Erlendur was surly and did not accept guidance willingly; he couldn’t stand his superiors in those days and nothing had changed. Marion would take umbrage at this and they often clashed, but Marion knew that a better detective was difficult to find, if only because Erlendur was not tied down by family and the time-consuming commitments that entailed. Erlendur did nothing but work. Marion was the same, a lifelong recluse.

“What’s new with you?” Marion asked, puffing on the cigarillo.

“Nothing,” Erlendur said.

“Does Christmas annoy you?”

“I’ve never understood this Christmas business,” Erlendur said vaguely as he peered into the kitchen, on the lookout for the chef’s hat.

“No,” Marion said. “Too much cheer and joy, I would imagine. Why don’t you get yourself a girlfriend? You’re not that old. There are plenty of women who could take a fancy to an old fart like you.”

“I’ve tried that,” Erlendur said. “What did you find out about—”

“Do you mean your wife?”

Erlendur didn’t intend to spend the time discussing his private life.

“Stop it, will you?”

“I heard that—”

“I told you to stop it,” Erlendur said angrily.

“All right,” Marion said. “It’s none of my business how you live your life. All I know is that loneliness is a slow and painful death.” Marion paused. “But of course you’ve got your children, haven’t you?”

“Can’t we just skip all this?” Erlendur said. “You are—” He got no further.

“What am I?”

“What are you doing here? Couldn’t you have phoned?”

Marion looked at Erlendur and the hint of a smile played across that old face.

“I’m told you’ve been sleeping at this hotel. That you won’t go home for Christmas. What’s happening to you? Why don’t you go home?”

Erlendur didn’t answer.

“Are you that fed up with yourself?”

“Can’t we talk about something else?”

“I know the feeling. Being fed up with yourself. With the bastard that happens to be you and which you can’t get out of your own head. You can get rid of it for a while but it always comes back and starts on the same old bollocks. You can try to drink it away. Have a change of scenery. Stay at hotels when it gets really bad.”

“Marion,” Erlendur pleaded, “give me a break.”

“Anyone who owns Gudlaugur Egilsson’s records,” Marion said, suddenly getting to the point, “is sitting on a goldmine.”

“What makes you say that?”

“They’re a treasure trove today. Admittedly not many people own them or know about them, but people in the know are prepared to pay incredible sums for them. Gudlaugur’s records are a rarity in the collectors” world and very sought-after.”

“What kind of incredible sums? Tens of thousands?”

“Could be hundreds of thousands,” Marion said. “For a single copy.”

“Hundreds of thousands? You’re kidding.” Erlendur sat up in his seat. He thought about Henry Wapshott. Knew why he came to Iceland in search of Gudlaugur. In search of his records. It was not only admiration for choirboys that kindled his interest, as Wapshott would have him believe. Erlendur realised why he had given Gudlaugur half a million on the off-chance.

“As far as I’ve been able to find out, the boy made only two records,” Marion Briem said. “And what makes them valuable, besides the boy’s incredible singing, is that very few copies were cut and they hardly sold at all. There aren’t many people who own those records today.”

“Does the actual singing matter?”

“It seems to, but the rule is still that the quality of the music, the quality of what is on the record, is less important than its condition. The music might be bad but if it’s the right performer with the right song and the right label at the right time, it can be priceless. No one is interested solely in artistic value.”

“What happened to the copies? Do you know?”

“They’ve gone missing. They’ve been lost over the course of time or simply thrown away. That happens. Probably there weren’t more than a couple of hundred to start with. The main reason that the records are so valuable is that there only seems to be a handful in the world. The short career helps too. I understand he lost his voice and never sang again.”

“It happened at a concert, the poor boy Erlendur said. “A wolf in your voice, it’s called. When your voice breaks”

“Then decades later he’s found murdered.”

“If those records are worth hundreds of thousands …?”

“Well?”

“Isn’t that ample motive for killing him? We found one copy of each record in his room. There was really nothing else in there.”

“Then the person who stabbed him can’t have realised how much they are worth,” Marion Briem said.

“Because otherwise he would have stolen the records?”

“What were the copies like?”

“Pristine,” Erlendur said. “Not a spot or crease on the sleeves and I can’t see that they’ve ever been played…”

He looked at Marion Briem.

“Could Gudlaugur possibly have acquired all the copies?” he said.

“Why not?” Marion said.

“We found some keys in his room that we can’t figure out. Where might he have kept others?”

“It needn’t be the whole lot,” Marion said. “Maybe some of them. Who else would own them other than the choirboy himself?”

“I don’t know,” Erlendur said. “We’ve detained a collector who came over from the UK to meet Gudlaugur. A mysterious old sod who tried to run away from us and worships the ex-choirboy. He seems to be the only person around here who realises how much Gudlaugur’s records are worth.”

“Is he a nutter?” Marion Briem asked.

“Sigurdur Oli’s looking into that,” Erlendur said. “Gudlaugur was the hotel Santa,” he added, as if Santa was an official appointment there.

A smile passed over Marion’s grey old face.

“We found a note in Gudlaugur’s room saying Henry and the time 18.30, as if he’d been to a meeting or was supposed to go at that time. Henry Wapshott says he met him at half past six on the day before the murder.”

Erlendur fell silent, deep in thought.

“What are you brooding over?” Marion asked.

“Wapshott told me he paid Gudlaugur half a million kronur to prove he meant business, or words to that effect. In buying the records. That money could have been in the room when he was attacked.”

“Do you mean someone knew about Wapshott and his dealings with Gudlaugur?”

“Possibly.”

“Another collector?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Wapshott’s odd. I know he’s hiding something from us. Whether it’s about him or about Gudlaugur I don’t know.”

“And of course the money was gone when you found him.”

“Yes.”

“I must be going,” Marion said, standing up. Erlendur got to his feet too. “I can barely last half a day any more,” Marion said. “I’m dying of exhaustion. How’s your daughter doing?”

“Eva? I don’t know. I don’t think she feels too good.”

“Maybe you should spend Christmas with her.”

“Yes, maybe.”

“And your love life?”

“Stop going on about my love life,” Erlendur said, and his thoughts turned to Valgerdur. He wanted to phone her but lacked the nerve. What was he supposed to say? What business of hers was his past? What business of anyone’s was his life? Ridiculous, asking her out like that. He didn’t know what had come over him.

“I’m told you dined here with a woman,” Marion said. “That hasn’t happened for years to the best of our knowledge.”

“Who told you that?” Erlendur asked in astonishment.

“Who was the woman?” Marion asked back without answering him. “I hear she’s attractive.”

“There’s no woman,” Erlendur snarled and strutted away. Marion Briem watched him and then walked slowly out of the hotel, chuckling.

On his way down to the lobby, Erlendur had wondered how he could politely accuse the head chef of theft, but Marion had wound him up. After taking the man aside in the kitchen he had not an iota of discretion left in him.

“Are you a thief?” he asked straight out. “And all of you in the kitchen? Do you steal everything that isn’t bolted to the floor?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that Santa might have been stabbed to death because he knew about a massive pilfering operation at this hotel. Maybe he was stabbed because he knew who ran the scam. Maybe you crept down to his hovel in the basement and stabbed him to death so he wouldn’t go spilling the beans to everyone. What do you reckon to that theory? And you robbed him in the process.”

The chef stared at Erlendur. “You’re crazy!” he grunted.

“Do you steal from the kitchen?”

“Who have you been talking to?” the chef asked in a deadly serious tone. “Who’s been filling your head with lies? Was it someone from the hotel?”

“Have they taken your saliva sample?”

“Who told you?”

“Why didn’t you want to give a sample?”

“It was done eventually. I think you’re a retard. Taking samples from all the hotel staff! Why? To make us all look like a load of wankers! And then you come calling me a thief. I’ve never stolen as much as a head of cabbage from this kitchen. Never! Who’s been telling you these lies?”

“If Santa had some dirt on you, for thieving, could it just be that he blackmailed you into doing him favours? Like su—”

“Shut up!” the head chef shouted. “Was it the pimp? Who told you these lies?”

Erlendur thought the chef was about to jump on him. He moved so close that their faces almost touched. His chef’s hat bent forward.

“Was it the fucking pimp?” the chef hissed.

“Who’s the pimp?”

“That fucking fat bastard of a manager,” the chef said through gritted teeth.

Erlendur’s mobile started ringing in his pocket. They looked each other in the eye, neither of them prepared to back down. At last Erlendur took out his mobile. The chef walked off, seething.

The head of forensics was on the phone.

“It’s about the saliva on the condom,” he told Erlendur.

“Yes,” Erlendur said, “have you traced the owner?”

“No, we’re still a long way from that,” the head of forensics said. “But we’ve looked at it more closely, the composition I mean, and we found traces of tobacco.”

“Tobacco? You mean pipe tobacco?”

“Well, it’s more like quid,” the voice said over the telephone.

“Quid? I’m not with you.”

“The chemical composition. You used to be able to buy quid in tobacco shops once but I’m not sure if it’s still around. Maybe in sweetshops, I don’t know if they’re still allowed to sell it. We need to check that. You stick it under your lip, either in a lump or in a gauze, you must have heard of it.”

The chef kicked a cupboard door and spouted curses.

“You’re talking about chewing tobacco,” Erlendur said. “Are there traces of chewing tobacco in the sample from the condom?”

“Bingo,” the voice said.

“So what does that mean?”

“The person who was with Santa chews tobacco.”

“What do we gain by knowing that?”

“Nothing. Yet. I just thought you’d want to know. And there’s another thing. You were asking about the Cortisol in the saliva.”

“Yes.”

“There wasn’t very much, in fact it was quite normal.”

“What does that tell us? It was all quiet on that front?”

“A high level of Cortisol indicates a rise in blood pressure due to excitement or stress. The person who was with the doorman was as calm as a millpond all the time. No stress. No excitement. They didn’t have anything to fear.”

“Until something happened,” Erlendur said.

“Yes,” the head of forensics said. “Until something happened.”

They finished the conversation and Erlendur put his mobile back in his pocket. The head chef stood staring at him.

“Do you know anyone here who chews tobacco?” Erlendur asked.

“Fuck off!” the chef screamed.

Erlendur took a deep breath, clasped his hands over his face and rubbed it wearily, then suddenly saw an image of Henry Wapshott’s tobacco-stained teeth.

20

Erlendur asked for the hotel manager at reception and was told he had popped out. The head chef refused to explain the pimp moniker when he mentioned the “fucking fat bastard of a manager”. Erlendur had rarely met anyone with such a temper. The chef must have realised that in his agitation he had let slip something. Erlendur made no headway. All he could get out of him were snide remarks and abuse, since the man was on home ground in the kitchen. To level the playing field and irritate the chef even further Erlendur thought of arranging for four uniformed police officers to turn up at the hotel and take him off for questioning at the station on Hverfisgata.

After toying with the idea he decided to shelve it for the time being.

Instead, he went up to Henry Wapshotts room. He broke the police seal that had been put on the door. The forensics team had taken care not to move anything. Erlendur stood still for a long time, scanning all around. He was looking for some kind of wrapper from a packet of chewing tobacco.

It was a twin room with two single beds, both unmade as if Wapshott had either slept in both of them or had had a guest for the night. On one table was an old record player connected to an amplifier and two small speakers, and on the other was a 14-inch television set and a video player. Two tapes lay beside it. Erlendur put one in the player and turned on the television, but switched it off as soon as the picture came on. Osp was right about the pornography.

He opened the drawer of the bedside table, took a good look inside Wapshotts suitcase, checked the cupboard and went into the bathroom, but did not find chewing tobacco anywhere. He looked in the wastepaper basket, but it was empty.

“Elinborg was right,” said Sigurdur Oli, who suddenly appeared in the room.

Erlendur turned round.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Scotland Yard sent us some information about him at last,” Sigurdur Oli said, looking around the room.

“I’m looking for chewing tobacco,” Erlendur said. “They found some on the condom.”

“I think I know why he doesn’t want to contact his embassy or a lawyer and is just hoping all this will blow over,” Sigurdur Oli said before relaying Scotland Yard’s information on the record collector.

Henry Wapshott, unmarried with no children, was born on the eve of the Second World War, in 1938, in Liverpool. His father’s family owned several valuable properties in the city. Some were bombed during the war and rebuilt as quality residential and office premises, which ensured a certain degree of wealth. Wapshott had never needed to work. An only child, he had the best education, Eton and Oxford, but did not complete his degree. When his father died he took over the family business but, unlike the old man, he had little interest in property management and soon attended only the most important meetings, until he stopped that as well and handed over the operations entirely to his managers.

He always lived in his parents” house and his neighbours regarded him as an eccentric loner; kindly and polite but strange and withdrawn. His only interest was collecting records and he filled his house with albums that he bought from the estates of dead people or at markets. He did a great deal of travelling for his hobby and was said to own one of the largest private record collections in Britain.

He had twice been found guilty of a criminal offence and was on Scotland Yard’s register of sex offenders. On the first occasion he was imprisoned for raping a twelve-year-old boy. The boy was a neighbour of Wapshott’s and they got to know each other through a common interest in collecting records. The incident took place at Wapshott’s parents” house, and when his mother heard of her son’s behaviour she had a breakdown; it was blown up in the British media, especially the tabloids, which portrayed Wapshott, born into the privileged class, as a beast. Investigations revealed that he paid boys and young men handsomely to perform sexual acts.

By the time he finished his sentence his mother had died, and he sold his parents” house and moved to another district. Several years later he was back in the news when two boys in their early teens revealed how Wapshott had offered them money to undress at his home, and he was charged with rape again. When the matter came to light Wapshott was in Baden Baden in Germany and was arrested at Brenner’s Hotel Spa.

The second rape charge could not be proved and Wapshott moved abroad, to Thailand, but retained his British citizenship and kept his record collection in the UK, which he often visited on collecting missions. He used his mothers surname then, Wapshott; his real name was Henry Wilson. He had not fallen foul of the law since emigrating from Britain, but little was known about what he did in Thailand.

“So it’s not surprising that he wanted to keep a low profile,” Erlendur said when Sigurdur Oli had finished his account.

“He sounds like a pervert big time,” Sigurdur Oli said. “You can imagine why he chose Thailand.”

“Don’t they have anything on him at the moment?” Erlendur asked. “Scotland Yard.”

“No, but I’ll bet they’re relieved to be rid of him,” Sigurdur Oli said.

They had gone back to the ground floor and into the small bar there. The buffet table was packed. The tourists at the hotel were merry and noisy and gave the impression of being happy with everything they had seen and done, rosy-cheeked in their traditional Icelandic sweaters.

“Have you found any bank account in Gudlaugur’s name?” Erlendur asked. He lit a cigarette, looked around him and noticed that he was the only smoker at the bar.

“I’ve still got to look into that,” Sigurdur Oli said, and sipped his beer.

Elinborg appeared in the doorway and Sigurdur Oli waved her over. She nodded and elbowed her way to the bar, bought a large beer and sat down with them. Sigurdur Oli gave Elinborg a resume of Scotland Yard’s dossier on Wapshott, and she took the liberty of smiling.

“I bloody knew it,” she said.

“What?”

“That his interest in choirboys was sexually motivated. His interest in Gudlaugur too for certain.”

“Do you mean that he was having a bit of fun with Gudlaugur downstairs?” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Maybe Gudlaugur was forced to take part,” Erlendur said. “Someone was carrying a knife.”

“What a way to spend Christmas, having to puzzle all this out,” Elinborg sighed.

“Not exactly good for the appetite,” Erlendur said and finished his Chartreuse. He wanted another. Looked at his watch. If he had been at the office he would have finished work by now. The bar was a little less busy and he waved the waiter over.

“There must have been at least two people in there with him because you can’t threaten anyone if you’re down on your knees” Sigurdur Oli cast a glance at Elinborg and thought he might have gone a little too far.

“It gets better all the time,” Elinborg said.

“Ruins the taste of the Christmas cookies,” Erlendur said.

“OK, but why did he stab Gudlaugur?” Sigurdur Oli said. “Not just once, but repeatedly. As if he lost control of himself. If Wapshott attacked him first, something must have happened or been said in the basement room that made the pervert snap.”

Erlendur was going to order but the others declined and looked at their watches — Christmas was drawing quickly closer.

“I reckon he had a woman in there,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“They measured the level of Cortisol in the saliva on the condom,” Erlendur said. “It was normal. Any woman who was with Gudlaugur could have been gone by the time he was murdered.”

“I don’t think that’s likely, judging from how we found him,” Elinborg said.

“Whoever was with him wasn’t forced into anything,” Erlendur said. “I think that’s established. If any level of Cortisol had been found it would have been a sign of excitement or tension in the body.”

“So it was a whore then,” Sigurdur Oli said, going about her job.”

“Can’t we talk about something nicer?” Elinborg asked.

“It could be that they were fleecing the hotel and Santa knew about it,” Erlendur said.

“And that’s why he was killed?” Sigurdur Oli said.

“I don’t know. There might also be some low-key prostitution going on with the manager’s complicity. I haven’t quite worked out all this but we may need to look into these things”

“Was Gudlaugur tied up in it in any way?” Elinborg asked.

“Judging from the state he was in when he was found, we can’t rule it out,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“How’s it going with your man?” Erlendur asked.

“He was poker-faced in the district court,” Elinborg said, sipping her beer.

“The boy still hasn’t testified against his father, has he?” asked Sigurdur Oli, who was also familiar with the case.

“Silent as the grave, poor kid,” Erlendur said. “And that bastard sticks to his statement. Flatly denies hitting the boy. And he’s got good lawyers too.”

“So he’ll get the boy back?”

“It could well be.”

“And the boy?” Erlendur asked. “Does he want to go back?”

“That’s the weirdest part of all,” Elinborg said. “He’s still attached to his father. It’s as if he feels he deserved it.”

They fell silent.

“Are you going to spend Christmas at this hotel, Erlendur?” Elinborg asked. There was a tone of accusation in her voice.

“No, I suppose I’ll get myself home,” Erlendur said. “Spend some time with Eva. Boil some smoked lamb.”

“How’s she doing?” Elinborg asked.

“So-so,” Erlendur said. “Fine, I suppose.” He thought they could tell that he was lying. They were well aware of the problems his daughter had run into but rarely mentioned them. They knew he wanted to discuss them as little as possible and never asked in detail.

“St Thorlac’s Day tomorrow,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Got everything done, Elinborg?”

“Nothing.” She sighed.

“I’m wondering about that record collecting,” Erlendur said.

“What about it?” Elinborg said.

“Isn’t it something that starts in childhood?” Erlendur said. “Not that I know anything about it. I’ve never collected anything. But isn’t it an interest that develops when you’re a kid, when you collect cards and model planes, stamps of course, theatre programmes, records? Most people grow out of it but some go on collecting books and records until their dying day.”

“What are you trying to tell us?”

“I’m wondering about record collectors like Wapshott, although of course they’re not all perverts like him, whether the collecting fad is connected with some kind of yearning for lost youth. Connected with a need to keep hold of something that otherwise would disappear from their lives but which they want to retain for as long as they can. Isn’t collecting an attempt to preserve something from your childhood? Something to do with your memories, something you don’t want to let go but keep on cultivating and nourishing with this obsession?”

“So Wapshott’s record collecting, the choirboys, is some kind of nostalgia for youth?” Elinborg asked.

“And then when the nostalgia for youth appears before him in the flesh at this hotel, something snaps inside him?” said Sigurdur Oli. “The boy turned into a middle-aged man. Do you mean something like that?”

“I don’t know.”

Erlendur vacantly watched the tourists at the bar and noticed one who was middle-aged, Asian in appearance and American-sounding. He had a new video camera and was filming his friends. Suddenly it occurred to Erlendur that there might be security cameras at the hotel. The hotel manager had not mentioned it, nor the reception manager. He looked at Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg.

“Did you ask if there were security cameras at this hotel?” he asked.

They looked at each other.

“Weren’t you going to?” Sigurdur Oli said.

“I just forgot,” Elinborg said. “Christmas and all that. It completely slipped my mind.”

The reception manager looked at Erlendur and shook his head. He said the hotel had a very firm policy on this issue. There were no security cameras on the hotel premises, neither in the lobby nor lifts, corridors nor rooms. Especially not in the rooms, of course.

“Then we wouldn’t have any guests,” the manager said seriously.

“Yes, that had occurred to me,” Erlendur said, disappointed. For a moment he had entertained the vague hope that something had been caught on camera, something that did not tally with the stories and statements, something at odds with what the police had discovered.

He turned away from the reception to head back to the bar when the manager called out to him.

“There’s a bank in the south wing, on the other side of the building. There are souvenir shops and a bank, and you can enter the hotel from there. Fewer people use it as an entrance. The bank’s bound to have security cameras. But they’ll hardly show anyone besides their customers”

Erlendur had noticed the bank and souvenir shops, and he went straight there but saw that the bank was closed. Looking up, he saw the almost invisible eye of a camera above the door. No one was working in the bank. He knocked on the glass door so hard that it rattled, but nothing happened. Eventually he took out his mobile and insisted on having the bank manager fetched.

While he was waiting Erlendur looked at the souvenirs in the shop, sold at inflated prices: plates with pictures of Gullfoss and Geysir painted on them, a carved figurine of Thor with his hammer, key rings with fox fur, posters showing whale species off the Icelandic coast, a sealskin jacket that would set him back a month’s salary. He thought about buying a memento of this peculiar Tourist-Iceland that exists only in the minds of rich foreigners, but he couldn’t see anything cheap enough.

The bank manager, a woman of about forty, had been on her way to a Christmas party and was far from amused about being interrupted; at first she thought there had been a robbery at the bank. She had not been told what was going on when two uniformed police officers knocked on the door of her house and asked her to accompany them. She glared at Erlendur in front of the bank when he explained to her that he needed access to her security cameras. She lit a fresh cigarette with the butt of the old one and Erlendur thought to himself that he had not encountered a proper smoker like her for years.

“Couldn’t this wait until the morning?” she asked coldly, so coldly that he could almost hear the icicles dropping from her words, and thought that he would not like to owe this woman any money.

“Those things will kill you,” Erlendur said, pointing to the cigarette.

“They haven’t yet,” she said. “Why did you drag me out here?”

“Because of the murder,” Erlendur said. “At the hotel”

“And?” she said, unimpressed by murder.

“We’re trying to speed up the investigation.” He smiled, but it was pointless.

“Bloody farce this is,” she said, and ordered Erlendur to follow her inside. The two police officers had left, clearly relieved at being rid of the woman, who had hurled abuse at them on the way. She took him to the staff entrance to the bank, keyed in her PIN, opened the door and commanded him to hurry.

It was a small branch and inside her office the manager had four monitors connected to the security cameras: one behind each of the two cashiers, in the waiting area and above the entrance. She switched on the monitors and explained to Erlendur that the cameras rolled all day and night, and that tapes were kept for three weeks and then rewritten. The recorders were in a small basement below the bank.

Already on her third cigarette, she led him downstairs and pointed to the tapes, which were clearly labelled with the dates and locations of the cameras. The tapes were kept in a locked safe.

“A security guard comes here from the bank every day,” she said, “and takes care of it all. I don’t know how to use it and would ask you not to go fiddling with anything that’s none of your business.”

“Thank you” Erlendur said humbly. “I want to start on the day the murder was committed.”

“Be my guest,” she said, dropping her smoked cigarette on the floor where she diligently stamped it out.

He found the date he wanted on a tape labelled “Entrance” and put it in a video player that was connected to a small television. He didn’t think he needed to look at the tapes from the cashiers” cameras.

The bank manager looked at her gold watch.

“There’s a full twenty-four-hour period on each tape,” she groaned.

“How do you manage?” Erlendur asked. “At work?”

“What do you mean, how do I manage?”

“Smoking? What do you do?”

“What business is that of yours?”

“None at all,” Erlendur hastened to say.

“Can’t you just take the tapes?” she said. “I don’t have time for this. I was supposed to be somewhere else ages ago and I don’t plan to hang around here while you go through all of these.”

“No, you’re right,” Erlendur said. He looked at the tapes in the cupboard. “I’ll take the fortnight before the murder. That’s fourteen tapes”

“Do you know who killed the man?”

“Not yet,” Erlendur said.

“I remember him well,” she said. “The doorman. I’ve been manager here for seven years,” she added as if by way of explanation. “He struck me as a nice enough chap.”

“Did he talk to you at all recently?”

“I never talked to him. Not a word.”

“Was this his bank?” Erlendur asked.

“No, he didn’t have an account here. Not as far as I know. I never saw him in this branch. Did he have any money?”

Erlendur took the fourteen tapes up to his room and had a television and video player installed. He had started watching the first tape towards evening when his mobile rang. It was Sigurdur Oli.

“We’ve got to charge him or let him go,” he said. “Really we don’t have anything on him.”

“Is he complaining?”

“He hasn’t said a word.”

“Has he asked for a lawyer?”

“No.”

“Make a charge for child pornography”

“Child pornography?”

“He had tapes in his room containing child pornography. Possession of them is illegal. We have a witness who saw him watching that filth. We’ll take him for the porn and then we’ll see. I don’t want to let him go back to Thailand just yet. We need to find out if his story of going into town the day that Gudlaugur was murdered holds good. Let him sweat in his cell a bit and we’ll see what happens.”

21

Erlendur watched the tapes for almost the whole night.

He soon got the hang of using fast forward when no one walked past the camera. As expected, the heaviest footfall in front of the bank was over the period from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon, after which it slowed down sharply, and even further when the souvenir shops closed at six. The entrance to the hotel was open round the clock and there was an ATM but little traffic around it in the dead of night.

He saw nothing noteworthy the day Gudlaugur was murdered. The faces of the people going through the lobby were quite clearly visible but Erlendur didn’t recognise any of them. When he fast-forwarded through the night recordings, figures would dart in through the door and stop at the cash machine before rushing out again. An occasional person went into the hotel itself. He scrutinised them but couldn’t link any with Gudlaugur.

He saw that the hotel staff used the bank entrance. The head of reception, the fat hotel manager and Osp could be seen rushing past, and he thought to himself how relieved she probably felt to get away after her day at work. In one place he saw Gudlaugur cross the lobby, and he stopped the tape. This was three days before the murder. Gudlaugur, alone, paced slowly in front of the camera, looked inside the bank, turned his head, looked over at the souvenir shops and then went back to the hotel. Erlendur rewound and watched Gudlaugur again, then again and a fourth time. He found it odd to see him alive. He stopped the tape when Gudlaugur looked inside the bank and watched his frozen face on the screen. It was the choirboy in the flesh. The man who once had that lovely voice, that tear-jerking boy soprano. The boy who forced Erlendur to probe into his own most painful memories when he heard him.

There was a knock on the door, and he turned off the video and opened for Eva Lind.

“Were you asleep?” she asked, squeezing past him. “What are these tapes?”

“They’re to do with the case,” Erlendur said.

“Getting anywhere?”

“No. Nowhere.”

“Did you talk to Stina?”

“Stina?”

“The one I told you about. Stina! You were asking about tarts and the hotels.”

“No, I haven’t spoken to her. Tell me something else, do you know a girl of your age called Osp who works at this hotel? You have a similar attitude to life.”

“Meaning?” Eva Lind offered her father a cigarette, gave him a light and flopped down onto the bed. Erlendur sat at the desk and looked out through the window into the pitch-black night. Two days to Christmas, he thought. Then we’ll be back to normal.

“Pretty negative,” he said.

“Do you reckon I’m really negative?” Eva Lind said.

Erlendur said nothing, and Eva snorted, sending billows of smoke out through her nose.

“And what, you’re the picture of happiness?”

Erlendur smiled.

“I don’t know any Osp,” Eva said. “What’s she got to do with it?”

“She has nothing to do with it,” Erlendur said. “At least I don’t think so. She found the body and seems to know a few things about what goes on in this place. Quite a smart girl. A survivor, with a mouth on her. Reminds me a bit of you.”

“I don’t know her,” Eva said. Then she fell silent and stared at nothing, and he looked at her and said nothing either, and time went by. Sometimes they had nothing to say to each other. Sometimes they argued furiously. They never made small talk. Never talked about the weather or prices in the shops, politics, sport or clothes, or whatever it was that people spent their time discussing, which they both regarded as idle chatter. Only the two of them, their past and present, the family that was never a family because Erlendur walked out on it, the tragic circumstances of Eva and her brother Sindri, their mother’s malice towards Erlendur — that was all that mattered, their topic of conversation that coloured all contact between them.

“What do you want for Christmas?” Erlendur suddenly broke the silence.

“For Christmas?” Eva said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t want anything.”

“You must want something.”

“What did you get for Christmas? When you were a boy?”

Erlendur thought. He remembered some mittens.

“Little things,” he said.

“I always thought Mum gave Sindri better presents than me,” Eva Lind said. “Then she stopped giving me presents. Said I sold them to buy dope. She gave me a ring once and I sold it. Did your brother get better presents than you?”

Erlendur felt the way she cautiously probed him. Usually she went straight to the point and shocked him with her candour. At other times, much less frequently, she seemed to want to be delicate.

When Eva was in intensive care after her miscarriage, in a coma, the doctor told Erlendur to try to be with her as much as possible and talk to her all the same. One topic that Erlendur talked about to Eva was his brother’s disappearance and how he himself was rescued from the moor. When Eva regained consciousness and moved in with him he asked her whether she remembered what he had said to her, but she did not recall a word. Her curiosity was aroused and she pressed him until he repeated what he had told her, what he had never told anyone about before and no one knew about. He had never talked to her about his past and Eva, who never tired of calling him to account, felt that she moved a little closer to him, felt she knew her father a fraction better, although she also knew that she was a long way from understanding him fully. One question that haunted Eva made her angry and spiteful towards him, and shaped their relationship more than anything else. Divorces were common, she realised that. Couples were always getting divorced and some divorces were worse than others, when the partners never spoke again. Aware of this, she did not question it. But she was totally incapable of fathoming why Erlendur divorced his children too. Why he took no interest in them after he left. Why he continually neglected them until Eva herself sought him out and found him alone in a dark block of flats. She had discussed all this with her father, who so far could provide no answers to her questions.

“Better presents?” he said. “It was all the same. Really just like in the old Christmas rhyme: a candle and a pack of cards. Sometimes we would have liked something more exciting, but our family was poor. Everyone was poor in those days”

“What about after he died? Your brother.”

Erlendur said nothing.

“Erlendur?” Eva said.

“Christmas disappeared with him,” Erlendur said.

The birth of the Saviour was not celebrated after his brother died. More than a month had elapsed since his disappearance and there was no joy in the home, no presents and no visitors. It was a custom for Erlendur’s mother’s family to visit them on Christmas Eve when they would all sing Christmas carols. It was a small house and everyone sat close together, emanating warmth and light. His mother refused all visitors that Christmas. His father had sunk into a deep depression and spent most days in bed. He took no part in the search for his son, as if he knew it was futile, as if he knew he had failed; his son was dead and he could do nothing about it, nor anyone ever, and that it was his fault and no one else’s.

His mother was indefatigable. She made sure that Erlendur was nursed properly. She urged on the search party and took part herself. She was the last to come down from the moors when darkness fell and searching became futile, exhausted, and was the first to set off back into the highlands when it grew light again. After it became obvious that her son must be dead she kept on searching just as energetically. It was not until winter had set in completely, the snows were so deep and the weather so treacherous that she was forced to give up. Forced to face up to the fact that the boy had died in the wilds and she would have to wait until spring to look for his earthly remains. She turned towards the mountains every day, sometimes cursing. “May the trolls eat you who took my boy!”

The thought of his dead body lying up there was unbearable to Erlendur, who began seeing him in nightmares from which he awoke screaming and crying, fighting the blizzard, submerged in the snow, his little back turned against the howling wind and death by his side.

Erlendur did not understand how his father could sit motionless at home while all the others were hard at work. The incident seemed to break him completely, turn him into a zombie, and Erlendur thought about the power of grief, because his father was a strong, vigorous man. The loss of his son gradually drained him of the will to live and he never recovered.

Later, when it was all over, his parents argued for the first and only time about what happened, and Erlendur found out that their mother had not wanted their father to go up onto the moors that day, but he did not listen to her. “Well,” she said, “since you’re going anyway, leave the boys at home.” He paid no heed.

And Christmas was never the same again. His parents reached some kind of accord as time went by. She never mentioned that he had ignored her wishes. He never mentioned that he had been seized by stubbornness at hearing her tell him not to go and not to take the boys. There was nothing wrong with the weather and he felt she was meddling. They chose never to talk about what happened between them, as if breaking the silence would leave nothing to keep them together. It was in this silence that Erlendur tackled the guilt that swamped him at being the one who survived.

“Why’s it so cold in here?” Eva Lind asked, wrapping her coat tighter.

“It’s the radiator,” Erlendur said. “It doesn’t get warm. Any news about you?”

“Nothing. Mum got off with some bloke. She met him at the old-time dancing at Olver. You can’t imagine how gross that freak is. I think he still uses Brylcreem, he combs his hair into a quiff and wears shirts with sort of huge collars and he clicks his fingers when he hears some old crap on the radio. ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean…’”

Erlendur smiled. Eva was never as bitchy about anything as when she described her mother’s “blokes”, who seemed to become more pathetic with every year that went by.

Then they fell silent again.

“I’m trying to remember what I was like when I was eight,” Eva suddenly said. “I don’t really remember anything except my birthday. I can’t remember the party, just the day it was my birthday. I was standing in the car park outside the block and I knew it was my birthday that day and I was eight, and somehow this memory that is totally irrelevant has stuck with me ever since. Just that, I knew it was my birthday and I was eight.”

She looked at Erlendur.

“You said he was eight. When he died.”

“It was his birthday that summer.”

“Why was he never found?”

“I don’t know.”

“But he’s up there on the moor?”

“Yes.”

“His skeleton.”

“Yes.”

“Eight years old.”

“Yes.”

“Was it your fault? That he died?”

“I was ten.”

“Yes, but…”

“It was no one’s fault.”

“But you must have thought…”

“What are you driving at, Eva? What do you want to know?”

“Why you never contacted me and Sindri after you left us,” Eva Lind said. “Why didn’t you try to be with us?”

“Eva,…”

“We weren’t worth it, were we?”

Erlendur looked out of the window in silence. It had started snowing again.

“Are you drawing a parallel?” he said eventually.

“I’ve never been given an explanation. It crossed my mind…”

“That it was something to do with my brother. The way he died. You want to associate the two?”

“I don’t know,” Eva said. “I don’t know you in the slightest. It’s a couple of years since I first met you and I was the one who located you. That business with your brother is all I know about you apart from the fact you’re a cop. I’ve never been able to understand how you could leave Sindri and me. Your children.”

“I left it to your mother to decide. Maybe I should have been firmer about gaining access but…”

“You weren’t interested,” Eva finished the sentence for him.

“That’s not true.”

“Sure it is. Why didn’t you take care of your children like you were supposed to?”

Erlendur said nothing and stared down at the floor. Eva stubbed out her third cigarette. Then she stood up, went to the door and opened it.

“Stina’s going to meet you here at the hotel tomorrow,” she said. “At lunchtime. You can’t miss her with those new tits of hers.”

“Thanks for talking to her.”

“It was nothing,” Eva said.

She hesitated in the doorway.

“What do you want?” Erlendur asked.

“I don’t know.”

“No, I mean for Christmas”

Eva looked at her father.

“I wish I could have my baby back,” she said, and quietly closed the door behind her.

Erlendur heaved a deep sigh and sat on the edge of his bed for a long while before he resumed watching the tapes. People going about their Christmas errands rushed across the screen, many of them carrying bags and parcels of Christmas shopping.

He had reached the fifth day before Gudlaugur was murdered when he saw her. Initially he overlooked it but a flash went off somewhere in his mind and he stopped the recorder, rewound the tape and went back over the scene. It was not her face that caught Erlendur’s attention, but her bearing; her walk and haughtiness. He pressed “Play” again and saw her clearly, walking into the hotel. He fast-forwarded again. About half an hour later she reappeared on the screen when she left the hotel and strode past the bank and souvenir shops looking neither left nor right.

He stood up from the bed and stared at the screen.

It was Gudlaugur’s sister.

Who had not set eyes on her brother for decades.