Voices de-5 Read online

  On the way up to Bartlet’s floor, Sigurdur Oli told Erlendur that they had talked to most of the hotel employees who were on duty when Gudlaugur was attacked. All had alibis and named people to corroborate their stories.

  Bartlet was about thirty, a stockbroker from Colorado. He and his wife had seen a programme about Iceland on American breakfast television some years before and were enchanted by the dramatic scenery and the Blue Lagoon — they had since been there three times. They had decided to make a dream come true and spend Christmas and the New Year in the distant land of winter. The beautiful landscape enthralled them, but they found the prices exorbitant at the restaurants and bars in the city.

  Sigurdur Oli nodded. To him, America was paradise on earth. He was impressed on meeting the couple and discussing baseball and American Christmas preparations with them, until Erlendur had had enough and gave him a prod.

  Sigurdur Oli explained the death of the doorman and told them about the note in his room. Mr and Mrs Henry Bartlet stared at the detectives as if they had suddenly been transported to a different planet.

  “You didn’t know the doorman, did you?” Sigurdur Oli said when he saw their expressions of astonishment.

  “A murder?” Henry groaned. At this hotel?”

  “Oh my God,” his wife said and sat down on the double bed.

  Sigurdur Oli decided not to mention the condom. He explained how the note implied that Gudlaugur had arranged to meet a man called Henry, but they did not know what day, whether the meeting had taken place or whether it was supposed to be after two days, a week, ten days.

  Henry Bartlet and his wife flatly denied all knowledge of the doorman. They hadn’t even noticed him when they arrived at the hotel four days before. Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli’s questions had clearly upset them.

  “Jesus,” Henry said. “A murder!”

  “You have murders in Iceland?” his wife — Cindy, she had told Sigurdur Oli her name when they greeted each other — asked, glancing over at the Icelandair brochure on the bedside table.

  “Rarely? he said, trying to smile.

  “This Henry character is not necessarily a guest at the hotel,” Sigurdur Oli said while they waited for the lift back down. “He doesn’t even have to be a foreigner. There are Icelanders by the name of Henry.”

  6

  Sigurdur Oli had located the former hotel manager, so he said goodbye to Erlendur when they got to the lobby and went off to meet him. Erlendur asked for the head of reception but he had still not turned up for work and had not phoned in. Henry Wapshott had left the key card to his room at reception early that morning without anyone noticing him. He had spent almost a week at the hotel and was expected to stay for two more days. Erlendur asked to be notified as soon as Wapshott reappeared.

  The hotel manager plodded past Erlendur.

  “I hope you’re not disturbing my guests,” he said.

  Erlendur took him to one side.

  “What are the rules about prostitution at this hotel?” Erlendur asked straight out as they stood next to the Christmas tree in the lobby.

  “Prostitution? What are you talking about?” The hotel manager heaved a deep sigh and wiped his neck with a scruffy handkerchief.

  Erlendur looked at him in anticipation.

  “Don’t you go mixing up any bloody nonsense in all this,” the manager said.

  “Was the doorman involved with tarts?”

  “Come off it,” the manager said. “There are no tar-no prostitutes at this hotel.”

  “There are prostitutes at all hotels.”

  “Really?” the manager said. “Are you talking from experience?”

  Erlendur didn’t answer him.

  “Are you saying that the doorman was a pimp?” the manager said in a shocked tone. “I’ve never heard such rubbish in my life. This isn’t a strip joint. This is one of the largest hotels in Reykjavik!”

  “No women in the bars or lobby who stalk the men? Go up to their rooms with them?”

  The manager hesitated. He acted as though he wanted to avoid antagonising Erlendur.

  “This is a big hotel,” he said eventually. “We can’t keep an eye on everything that goes on. If it’s straightforward prostitution and there’s no question about it, we try to prevent it, but it’s a difficult matter to deal with. Otherwise the guests are free to do what they like in their rooms.”

  “Tourists and businessmen, regional people, isn’t that how you described the guests?”

  “Yes, and much more besides, of course. But this isn’t a doss-house. It’s a quality establishment and as a rule the guests can easily afford the accommodation. Nothing smutty goes on here and for God’s sake don’t go spreading that kind of rumour around. The competition is tough enough as it is; it’s terrible to shake off a murder.”

  The hotel manager paused.

  “Are you going to continue sleeping at this hotel?” he asked. “Isn’t that highly irregular?”

  “The only thing that’s irregular is the dead Santa Claus in your basement” Erlendur smiled.

  He saw the biotechnician from the kitchen leaving the bar on the ground floor with her sampling kit in her hand. With a nod to the manager he walked over to her. She had her back to him and was walking towards the cloakroom by the side door.

  “How’s it going?” Erlendur asked.

  She turned and recognised him at once, but kept walking.

  “Is it you who’s in charge of the investigation?” she asked, going into the cloakroom where she took a coat from a hanger. She asked Erlendur to hold her sampling kit.

  “They let me tag along,” Erlendur said.

  “Not everyone was pleased with the idea of saliva samples,” she said, “and I don’t just mean the chef?

  “Above all we were eliminating the staff from our enquiries, I thought you were told to give that explanation.”

  “Didn’t work. Got any others?”

  “That’s an old Icelandic name, Valgerdur, isn’t it?” Erlendur said, without answering her question. She smiled.

  “So you’re not allowed to talk about the investigation?”

  “No.”

  “Do you mind? Valgerdur being an old name, I mean?”

  “Me? No, I…” Erlendur stammered.

  “Was there anything in particular?” Valgerdur said, reaching out for her bag. She smiled at this man standing in front of her in a cardigan buttoned up under a tattered jacket with worn elbows, looking at her with sorrowful eyes. They were of a similar age, but she looked ten years younger.

  Without completely realising it, Erlendur blurted it out. There was something about this woman.

  And he saw no wedding ring.

  “I was wondering if I could invite you to the buffet here tonight, it’s delicious.”

  He said this without knowing a thing about her, as if he had no chance of a reply in the affirmative, but he said it all the same and now he waited, thinking to himself that she would probably start laughing, was probably married with four children, a big house and a summer chalet, confirmation parties and graduation parties and had married off her oldest child and was waiting to grow old in peace with her beloved husband.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It’s nice of you to ask. But … unfortunately. I can’t. Thanks all the same.”

  She took her sampling kit from him, hesitated for a moment and looked at him, then walked away and out of the hotel. Erlendur was left behind in the cloakroom, half stunned. He hadn’t asked a woman out for years. His mobile starting ringing in his jacket pocket and he eventually took it out, absent-mindedly, and answered. It was Elinborg.

  “He’s entering the courtroom,” she almost whispered into the telephone.

  “Pardon?” Erlendur said.

  “The father, he’s coming in with his two lawyers. That’s the minimum it will take to whitewash him.”

  “Is anyone there?” Erlendur asked.

  “Very few. It looks like the boy’s mother’s family, and the press are h
ere too.”

  “How’s he looking?”

  “Unruffled as usual, in a suit and tie like he’s going out to dinner. He doesn’t have a shred of conscience.”

  “Not true,” Erlendur said. “He definitely has a conscience.”

  Erlendur had gone to the hospital with Elinborg to talk to the boy as soon as the doctors gave permission. By then he had undergone surgery and was in a ward with other children. There were children’s drawings around the walls, toys in their beds, parents by their bedsides, tired after sleepless nights, endlessly worried about their children.

  Elinborg sat down beside him. The bandaging around the boy’s head left little of his face visible apart from his mouth and his eyes, which looked full of suspicion at the police officers. His arm was in a plaster cast, suspended by a small hook. The dressings after his operation were hidden by his quilt. They had managed to save his spleen. The doctor said they could talk to the boy, but whether the boy would talk to them was a different matter.

  Elinborg started by talking about herself, who she was and what she did in the police, and how she wanted to catch the people who did this to him. Erlendur stood at a distance, watching. The boy stared at Elinborg. She knew that she was only supposed to talk to him in the presence of one of his parents. Elinborg and Erlendur had arranged to meet the father at the hospital but half an hour had gone by and he hadn’t turned up.

  “Who was it?” Elinborg said at last when she thought it was time to get to the point.

  The boy looked at her but said nothing.

  “Who did this to you? It’s all right to tell me. They won’t attack you again. I promise.”

  The boy cast a glance at Erlendur.

  “Was it the boys from your school?” Elinborg asked. “The big boys. We’ve found out that two of the suspects are known troublemakers. They’ve beaten up boys like you before, but not so violently. They say they didn’t do anything to you but we know they were at the school at the time you were attacked.”

  Silently, the boy watched Elinborg tell her story. She had gone to the school and talked to the headmaster and teachers, then gone to the homes of the two boys to find out about their backgrounds, where she heard them deny doing anything to him. The father of one of them was in prison.

  The paediatrician entered the room. He told them that the boy needed to rest and they would have to come back later. Elinborg nodded and they took their leave.

  Erlendur also accompanied Elinborg to meet the boys father at his house later the same day. The father’s explanation for not being able to go to the hospital was that he had to take part in an important conference call with his colleagues in Germany and the US. “It came up unexpectedly,” he told them. When he finally managed to get away they had left the hospital.

  While he was saying this the winter sun started to shine in through the lounge window, illuminating the marble floor and the carpet on the stairs. Elinborg was standing and listening when she noticed the stain on the stair carpet and another on the stair above it.

  Little stains, almost invisible had it not been for the winter sun pouring in.

  Stains that had been almost cleansed from the carpet and on first impression seemed to be part of the texture of the material.

  Stains that turned out to be little footprints.

  “Are you there?” Elinborg said over the telephone. “Erlendur? Are you there?”

  Erlendur came back to his senses.

  “Let me know when he leaves,” he said, and they rang off.

  The head waiter at the hotel was aged about forty, thin as a rake, wearing a black suit and shiny black patent leather shoes. He was in an alcove off the dining room, checking the reservations for that evening. When Erlendur introduced himself and asked whether he might disturb him for a moment, the head waiter looked up from his dogeared reservations book to reveal a thin black moustache, dark stubble that he obviously needed to shave twice a day, a brownish complexion and brown eyes.

  “I didn’t know Gulli in the slightest,” said the man, whose name was Rosant. “Terrible what happened to him. Are you getting anywhere?”

  “Nowhere at all,” Erlendur said curtly. His mind was on the biotechnician and the father who beat up his son, and he was thinking about his daughter, Eva Lind, who said she could not hold out any longer. Although he knew what that meant, he hoped he was wrong. “Busy around Christmas,” Erlendur said, “aren’t you?”

  “We’re trying to make the most of the season. Trying to fill the dining room three times for each buffet, which can be very difficult because some people think that when they’ve paid it’s like a take-away. The murder in the basement doesn’t help.”

  “No,” Erlendur said without any interest. “So you haven’t been working here long if you didn’t know Gudlaugur.”

  “Two years. But I didn’t have much contact with him.”

  “Who do you think knew him best among the hotel staff?”

  “I just don’t know,” the head waiter said, stroking his black moustache with his index finger. “I don’t know anything about the man. The cleaners, maybe. When do we hear about the saliva tests?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Who was with him. Isn’t it a DNA test?”

  “Yes,” Erlendur said.

  “Do you have to send it abroad?”

  Erlendur nodded.

  “Do you know whether anyone visited him in the basement? People from outside the hotel?”

  “There’s so much traffic here. Hotels are like that. People are like ants, in and out, up and down, never a moment’s peace. At catering college we were told that a hotel isn’t a building or rooms or service, but people. A hotel’s just people. Nothing else. Our job is to make them feel good. Feel at home. Hotels are like that.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” Erlendur said, and thanked him.

  He checked whether Henry Wapshott had returned to the hotel, but he was still out. However, the head of reception was back at work and he greeted Erlendur. Yet another coach had pulled up outside, full of tourists, who swarmed into the lobby, and he gave Erlendur an awkward smile and shrugged, as if it was not his fault they couldn’t talk and their business would have to wait.

  7

  Gudlaugur Egilsson joined the hotel in 1982, at the age of twenty-eight. He had held various jobs before, most recently as a nightwatchman at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. When it was decided to employ a full-time doorman at the hotel, he got the job. Tourism was booming then. The hotel had expanded and was taking on more staff. The previous hotel manager couldn’t remember exactly why Gudlaugur was selected, but he didn’t recall there having been many applicants.

  He made a good impression on the hotel manager. With his gentlemanly manner, polite and service-minded, he turned out to be a fine employee. He had no family, neither a wife nor children, which caused the manager some concern, because family men often proved to be more loyal. In other respects Gudlaugur did not say much about himself and his past.

  Shortly after joining the staff he went to see the manager and asked if there was a room at the hotel for him to use while he was finding himself a new place to live. After losing his room at short notice he was on the street. He pointed out that there was a little room at the far end of the basement corridor where he could stay until he found a place of his own. They went down to inspect the room. All kinds of rubbish had been stored away in it and Gudlaugur said he knew of a place where it could all be kept, although most of it deserved to be thrown out anyway.

  So in the end Gudlaugur, then a doorman and later a Santa Claus, moved into the little room where he would stay for the rest of his life. The hotel manager thought he would be there for a couple of weeks at the very most. Gudlaugur spoke in those terms and the room was not the sort of place anyone would want to live permanently. But Gudlaugur demurred about finding himself proper living quarters and soon it was taken for granted that he lived at the hotel, especially after his job developed more towards caretaking than
being a straightforward doorman. As time wore on it was seen as a convenient arrangement to have him on call round the clock, lest something went wrong and a handyman was needed.

  “Shortly after Gudlaugur moved into the room, the old manager left,” said Sigurdur Oli, who was up in Erlendur’s room describing his meeting. It was well into the afternoon and beginning to get dark.

  “Do you know why?” Erlendur asked. He was stretched out on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. “The hotel had just been expanded, loads of new staff recruited and he leaves shortly afterwards. Don’t you find that strange?”

  “I didn’t go into that. I’ll find out what he says if you think it’s of the slightest importance. He didn’t know Gudlaugur had played Santa Claus. That started after his day and he was really shocked to hear that he was found murdered in the basement.”

  Sigurdur Oli looked around the bare room.

  “Are you going to spend Christmas here?”

  Erlendur didn’t answer.

  “Why don’t you get yourself off home?”

  Silence.

  “The invitation still stands”

  “Thank you, and give my regards to Bergthora,” Erlendur said, deep in thought.

  “What’s the name of the game anyway?”

  “It’s none of your business, if the game … actually has a name.”

  “I’m off home, anyway,” Sigurdur Oli said.

  “How’s it going with starting a family?”

  “Not too well.”

  “Is it your problem or just a coincidence between the two of you?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t had ourselves checked. But Bergthora’s started talking about it”

  “Do you want children anyway?”

  “Yes. I don’t know. I don’t know what I want”

  “What’s the time?”

  “Just gone half past six.”

  “Go home,” Erlendur said. “I’m going to check out our other Henry”