Arctic Chill Page 12

  'Dissing you?'

  'They think they're better than us. More important. More important than us Icelanders. Because they come from Thailand and the Philippines and Vietnam. They say everything's much better there, it's superior.'

  And did you fight?'

  Instead of replying, Gummi stared down at the floor.

  'Do you know what happened to Elías, Niran's brother?' Erlendur asked.

  'No,' Gummi said, his head still bowed. 'He wasn't with them.'

  'How did you explain to your parents about the injuries to your face?'

  Gummi looked up.

  'They don't give a shit.'

  Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg appeared in the corridor and Erlendur signalled to Gummi that he could go. They watched him close the classroom door behind him.

  'Getting anywhere?' Erlendur asked.

  'Nowhere,' Elínborg said. 'Though one of the boys did say that Kjartan, that Icelandic teacher, was "a bastard headcase". I had the impression he was always causing trouble but I didn't find out exactly how.'

  'Everything's just hunky dory with me,' Sigurdur Óli said.

  'Hunky dory?' Erlendur growled. 'Do you always have to talk like an idiot?'

  'What... ?'

  'There's nothing hunky dory about any of this!'

  The medical equipment bleeped at regular intervals in one of the wards but it was quiet in the room where Marion Briem lay on the brink of death. Erlendur stood at the foot of the bed, looking at the patient. Marion seemed to be asleep. Face nothing but bones, eyes sunken, skin pale and withered. On top of the duvet lay hands with long, slender fingers and long nails, untrimmed. The fingers were yellow from smoking and the nails black. No one had come to visit Marion, who had been lying in the terminal ward for several days. Erlendur had particularly asked about that. Probably no one will come to the funeral either, he thought. Marion lived alone, always had, and never wanted it otherwise. Sometimes when Erlendur saw Marion his thoughts turned to his own future of loneliness and solitude.

  For a long time Marion seemed to adopt the role of Erlendur's conscience, never tiring of asking about his private life, especially the divorce and his relationship with the two children he had left behind and took no care of. Erlendur, who bore a certain respect for Marion, was annoyed by this prying and their dealings had often ended with big words and raised voices. Marion laid claim to a part of Erlendur, claimed to have shaped him after he joined the Reykjavík CID. Marion was Erlendur's boss and had given him a tough schooling during his first years.

  'Aren't you going to do anything about your children?' Marion had asked once in a moralising tone.

  They were standing in a dark basement flat. Three fishermen on a week-long bender had got into a fight. One had pulled out a knife and stabbed his companion three times after the latter had made disparaging remarks about his girlfriend. The man was rushed to hospital but died of his wounds. His two companions were taken into custody. The scene of the crime was awash with blood. The man had virtually bled to death while the other two carried on drinking. A woman delivering newspapers had seen a man lying in his own blood through the basement window and called the police. The two other men had both passed out drunk by then and had no idea what had happened when they were woken up.

  'I'm working on it,' Erlendur had said, looking at the pool of blood on the floor. 'Don't you worry yourself about it.'

  'Someone has to,' Marion said. 'You can't feel too good, the way things are at the moment.'

  'It's none of your business how I feel,' Erlendur said.

  'It is my business if it's affecting your work.'

  'It's not affecting my work. I'll solve it. Don't fret about it.'

  'Do you think they'll ever amount to anything?'

  'Who?'

  'Your children.'

  'Please just let it go,' Erlendur said, staring at the blood on the floor.

  'You ought to stop and think about that: what it's like to grow up without a father.'

  The bloodstained knife lay on the table.

  'This isn't much of a murder mystery,' Marion said.

  'It rarely is in this city,' Erlendur said.

  Now Erlendur stood and looked at the shrunken body in the bed and knew what he had not known then: that Marion was trying to help him. Erlendur himself lacked a satisfactory explanation for why he had walked out on his two children when he was divorced and had done almost nothing to demand access to them afterwards. His ex-wife developed a hatred for him and swore that he would never have the children, not for a single day, and he did not put up much of a fight for that right. There was nothing in his life that he regretted as much, when later he discovered the state his two children were in once they reached adulthood.

  Marion's eyes slowly opened and saw Erlendur standing at the foot of the bed.

  Erlendur suddenly recalled his mother's words about an old relative of theirs from the East Fjords on his deathbed. She had been to visit him and sat by his bedside, and when she returned she said he had looked so shrivelled up and odd'.

  'Would you ... read to me ... Erlendur?'

  'Of course.'

  'Your story,' Marion said. 'And ... your brother's.'

  Erlendur said nothing.

  'You told me ... once that it was in ... one of those books of ordeals you're always reading.'

  'It is,' Erlendur said.

  'Will you... read it... to me?'

  At that moment Erlendur's mobile rang. Marion watched him. The ringtone had been set by Elínborg one rainy day when they were sitting in a police car behind the District Court, escorting prisoners in custody. She had changed the ringtone to Beethoven's Ninth.

  'The Ode to Joy' filled the little room at the hospital.

  'What's that music?' Marion asked, in a stupor from the strong painkillers.

  Erlendur finally managed to fish his mobile out of his jacket pocket and answer. 'The Ode' fell silent.

  'Hello,' Erlendur said.

  He could hear that there was someone at the other end, but no one answered.

  'Hello,' he said again in a louder voice.

  No answer.

  'Who is that?'

  He was about to ring off when the caller hung up.

  'I'll do that,' Erlendur said, putting his mobile back in his jacket pocket. 'I'll read that story to you.'

  'I hope . .. that this . .. will be over soon,' Marion said. The patient's voice was hoarse and trembled slightly, as if it took a particular effort to produce it. 'It's ... no fun ... going through this.'

  Erlendur smiled. His mobile began ringing again. 'The Ode to Joy'.

  'Yes,' he said.

  No one answered.

  'Bloody messing about,' Erlendur snarled. 'Who is that?' he said roughly.

  Still the line was silent.

  'Who is that?' Erlendur repeated.

  'I...'

  'Yes? Hello!'

  'Oh, God, I can't do it,' a weak female voice whispered in his ear.

  Erlendur was startled by the despair in the voice. At first he thought it was his daughter calling. She had called him before in terrible straits, crying out for help. But this was not Eva.

  'Who is that?' Erlendur said, his tone much gentler when he heard the woman on the other end weeping.

  'Oh, God ...' she said, as if incapable of stringing a sentence together.

  A moment passed in silence.

  'It can't go on like this,' she said, and rang off.

  'What? Hello?'

  Erlendur shouted down the mobile but heard only the dialling tone in his ear. He checked the caller ID but it was blank. He noticed that Marion had fallen asleep again. He looked back at his mobile and suddenly in his mind's eye he saw a woman's bluish-white face rippling in the waves and looking up at him with dead eyes.

  11

  Erlendur sat in the interview room, his thoughts focused on the telephone call he had received at the hospital. Oh God, I can't do it, the weak voice groaned over and over in his mind, and he could
not avoid the thought that the woman who had disappeared before Christmas might have just got in touch for the first time. She could have obtained his mobile number from the police switchboard without difficulty. It was his work number. His name had sometimes appeared in the papers in connection with police investigations. It had appeared in connection with the missing woman and now because of Elías's death. Not knowing the woman's voice, Erlendur could not tell whether it actually was her, but he intended to talk to her husband as soon as the opportunity arose.

  He recalled having once read that only five per cent of marriages or relationships that began with infidelity lasted for life. That did not strike him as a high proportion and he wondered whether it was, in fact, difficult to build up a trusting relationship after betraying others. Or maybe it was too harsh to talk of betrayal. Perhaps the prior relationships had been changing and evolving and new love was kindled at a sensitive moment. That happened and was always happening. The woman who vanished felt that she had found true love, judging by her friends' remarks. She loved her new husband with all her heart.

  The friends with whom she stayed in contact after the divorce stressed that point when Erlendur was seeking explanations for her disappearance. She had left her first husband and married for the second time with due ceremony. She was said to be very down-to-earth and realistic, then suddenly it was as if she had been transformed. Her friends did not doubt that her love for her new husband was genuine, and she always implied that her former marriage had run its course and she herself was 'completely different', as one of her friends put it. When Erlendur asked her to elaborate, it transpired that the woman had been elated after her divorce, talking about a new life and that she had never felt better. A grand wedding was held. They were married by a popular vicar. A huge crowd of guests celebrated with the couple on a lovely summer's day. They took a three-week honeymoon in Tuscany. When they returned they were relaxed, tanned and radiant.

  All that was missing from the beautiful wedding was her children. Her ex refused to let them take part in 'that circus'.

  It was not long before the expectation and excitement faded and turned into their opposite. Her friends described how, over time, the woman had been overwhelmed by sadness and regret, and ultimately by guilt at how she had treated her family. It did not help that her new husband's ex accused her constantly of destroying their family. His children moved in with them while she was fighting for custody of her own kids, a constant reminder of her culpability. All this was accompanied by crippling depression.

  It was not the first time her new husband had been divorced following an affair. Erlendur found out that he had been married three times. He traced his first wife, who lived in Hafnarfjördur and had long since remarried and had a child. Exactly the same process had taken place in that case. The husband excused his absences from home on the grounds of long meetings, travelling around the country for work, golf trips. Then one day, quite unexpectedly, he announced that it was all over, they had grown apart and he was planning to move out. All this struck his wife like a bolt from the blue. She had not been aware of any fatigue in their relationship, only of his absence.

  Erlendur also spoke to wife number two. She had not remarried and he sensed that she had not yet recovered from the divorce. She described the process in detail, accusing herself of not being wary enough. Trying to take her side, Erlendur said she was probably lucky to be rid of him. She gave a thin smile. 'I'm mainly thinking about the children,' she said. She had been unaware that he was married when he first began courting her. It was not until their relationship was several months old that he had said rather sheepishly that he had something to tell her. They were at a small hotel in the countryside where he had invited her to spend the night, and as they were sitting in the dining room that evening he announced that he had a wife. She stared at him in disbelief, but he was quick to add that his marriage was in ruins, it was only a question of time as to when he would leave her and he had told her so. She gave him an earful for not telling her he was married, but he managed to calm her down and win her over.

  After hearing this testimony and others from friends of the missing woman, Erlendur began to detest the man. He knew that the more time that elapsed, the more likely it was that she had committed suicide, and the accounts of her depression supported that theory. But the unexpected telephone call had kindled a hope within him that this was not the case. It kindled the hope that she had moved out from her marital home and did not want her husband to discover her whereabouts; that she was hiding from him and did not know where to turn.

  Only two years had passed since the fairytale wedding when the woman started whispering to a close friend of hers that her husband had begun to take part in weekend golf tournaments that she had never heard of.

  Erlendur broke away from his thoughts and nodded to Sigurdur Óli, who sat down beside him in the interview room. Now the interrogation could begin. The man sitting in front of them was in his mid-forties. Since the age of twenty he had repeatedly been involved with the police for offences of varying degrees of seriousness: burglary, robbery and assault, in some cases very brutal. He lived two blocks away from Sunee and the boys. The police had compiled a list of repeat offenders who could possibly have crossed Elías's path on his way home from school. This man was top of that list.

  The police had obtained a search warrant for his flat when they brought him in for questioning earlier that morning and had discovered large quantities of pornography, including child pornography. It was enough to bring charges against him yet again.

  His name was Andrés and he looked at Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli in turn, prepared for the worst. A lifelong alcoholic who showed all the signs: his expression drowsy and bleary, his little eyes shifty and questioning. He was a fairly short man, stocky and strongly built.

  Erlendur knew him. He had arrested Andrés more than once.

  'What are you hassling me for?' Andrés asked, rough and ragged from persistent drinking, his eyes darting from one officer to the other. 'What's going on?' He tried to make this sound manly, but it ended in a little squeak.

  'Do you know a boy by the name of Elías who lives in your neighbourhood?' Erlendur asked. 'Dark-skinned, of Thai descent. Ten years old.'

  A tape recorder lay on the table between them, whirring softly. Given Andrés's state of intoxication when he was taken into custody, he could well claim not to have heard about Elías's murder. However, there was no believing a word he said.

  'I don't know anything about any Elías,' Andrés said. Are you going to charge me? What are you going to charge me with? I haven't done a thing. Why are you picking on me?'

  'Don't worry,' Sigurdur Óli said.

  'What Elías are you talking about?' Andrés said, looking at Erlendur.

  'Do you remember where you were yesterday afternoon?'

  At home,' Andrés said. 'I was at home. I was home all day, all yesterday I mean. What boy are you talking about?'

  A ten-year-old boy was stabbed to death two blocks away from you,' Erlendur said. 'Was anyone with you yesterday? Can anyone confirm your alibi?'

  A boy killed?' Andrés said, shocked. 'Who ... ? Stabbed?'

  'Do you even know what day it is today?' Erlendur asked.

  Andrés shook his head.

  'Please speak into the tape recorder,' Sigurdur Óli said.