The Commandments : A Novel (2021)

by Gudmundsson, Oskar

  ‘Are you the only one here?’

  ‘Yes. I was on a routine patrol through Vaðlaskógur when the report was called in. They were going to send a team, and then there was an update to say that you were on the way.’

  ‘And that’s Hróbjartur?’ she said, as if to herself, after squatting to peer more closely at the bruised face.

  She heard Gísli flipping through his notes.

  ‘That’s right. He’s been the parish priest for… some time. Not quite sure how long, but I understand he had a good reputation.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Unnar. He lives around here.’

  ‘Unnar who lives around here,’ Salka repeated, standing up. ‘Are you telling me that you’ve told someone here in the village what’s happened?’

  Gísli stared at her. He opened his mouth and was about to reply, but closed it again, as if he had swallowed what he had been about to say.

  ‘I know him,’ he said at last. ‘He was rolling home from a party somewhere, and came past the church, and went inside. So he saw Hróbjartur. He was drunk, so I escorted him out again.’

  ‘It’s going to be great to read about this in the morning papers.’

  ‘No, it’s all right. He won’t say anything. It’s confidential.’

  ‘Sure,’ Salka sighed. She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘How do you know this…?’

  ‘Unnar? I’m from around here, I mean from Grenivík, and know pretty much everyone. Spent my college years more or less in Akureyri. But Unnar’s one of those who likes a drink. He’s a colourful character.’

  ‘Precisely. And I suppose that’s why you’re certain he won’t breathe a word of this?’ she said and smiled.

  ‘Well, no… Or, he’s…’

  ‘Let’s not waste time on this, Gísli,’ she said, holding his eye for a long time. ‘News is going to get out soon enough anyway,’ she said, placing a hand on his shoulder. ‘How many people live here?’

  ‘I’d guess two hundred to two hundred and fifty here in the village, and another hundred in the countryside around it,’ he said, gesturing with his open palms, the relief evident in his voice.

  Salka took out her phone and called up a map of Grenivík.

  ‘The forensics team will be on the way as soon as the fog over Akureyri lifts and hopefully they’ll be here as soon as possible. Are any of your guys on the way?’

  ‘Two cars on the way. They should be here soon.’

  ‘You can meet them outside. You need to fence off the crime scene and the approach to the church. You also need to knock on the doors of all the houses that are within sight of the church,’ she said, holding the phone so that Gísli could see the screen. ‘It looks like ten or twelve houses below the pasture. So it’s a question of whether anyone saw anything,’ she said, turning back to Hróbjartur.

  ‘Sure,’ Gísli said and she could hear his uncertainty.

  ‘So maybe you could make a start on that, Gísli,’ she said when she saw that he hadn’t moved.

  She heard him mumble and the creak of the floorboards as he went towards the church doors. Salka sighed. She felt uncomfortable at how sharp she had been with him. He seemed a decent enough lad, but young and green, and somehow damned simple. No, he wasn’t simple, she thought, she was being unfair. He was simply insecure, and that was entirely understandable.

  ‘Where did Hróbjartur live?’

  ‘In Akureyri. I don’t have the address but I can find it…’ he said and was about to set off when there was a knock on the door. ‘Reinforcements are here,’ he reported once he had opened the door. ‘They say Skúli’s here.’

  ‘Give them instructions, and then you can sit with Skúli in your car. I’ll be right with you,’ she called after him.

  Gísli opened the door and looked over at Salka with unasked questions in his eyes. He seemed about to say something. She caught his eye. He swallowed, looked down at the floor for a second and was about to shut the door when Salka called him over.

  ‘Gísli, now we need to get a handle on things. If you’re going to work on this with me, you need to pull yourself together. How many guys have come from Akureyri?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Two of them to close off the road to the church and two to do the door-to-door stuff. You sit with Skúli in the car, but don’t talk to him until I get there. OK?’

  ‘Got it. No problem,’ he said and left the church.

  She stepped over the altar rail, checked the table beneath the altar and examined the gilded candelabra in the centre, the Bible and the book of Psalms. Everything appeared to be untouched and carefully arranged. Looking down at the altar floor, there was no blood to be seen. She bent down to lean closer to Hróbjartur. He wore black vestments with a white ruff. Salka was not wholly familiar with the customs and practices of the church, but she was aware that black was worn only on Good Friday and for funerals.

  A tiny patch on the chest of his cassock glittered, at the centre of a tear she guessed to be around twenty centimetres long and the work of a knife. She made out black trouser legs beneath the cassock, and black shoes polished to shine like mirrors. Salka found the sight of him disturbing. Fair hair had been neatly combed back from a high forehead, greying at the sides. His mouth hung slightly open. The puffed eyelids were shades of blue, red and yellow. A tracery of purple veins lay along a big nose that had been pushed to one side, more than likely by a blow. He had a broad jawline and thin lips. His fists were almost frighteningly large. Almost everything about this man was too big, just as she recalled from the last time they had met. Salka decided that whoever had attacked him had to be powerfully built. It would take determination to pick a fight with someone this size, she thought. Or would it? It wasn’t always size that mattered. It was courage. You can be small in size but still think big. She knew that when your life is threatened, the body’s instinctive brakes unconsciously stop working, providing access to huge reserves of strength in the struggle for survival.

  Salka felt cautiously around his hips and chest, hoping to find something that would indicate that he had a mobile phone or anything else in his jacket or trouser pockets, but they appeared to be empty.

  She peered closer at his left fist and saw the light catch something. As long as her eyesight hadn’t failed her in the dim light, she was sure she could make out the glint of a dark, twisting hair caught between his finger and thumb. She took a deep breath.

  She stepped over Hróbjartur to check his clenched right fist. The light caught the same sort of hair there as well.

  Salka looked closely at Hróbjartur’s face. She switched on her phone’s torch and played the beam of light over his mouth, and adjusted his chin so that his mouth opened further. She covered her mouth and nose with a hand as the powerful stench came at her like an ambush.

  ‘What did you do that was so bad you deserved this?’ she muttered and stood up.

  She stepped back to crouch at his feet, picked up the hem of the cassock and lifted it. She clicked on the phone’s torch. She dropped the cassock, rushed through the nave and out. By the time she reached the lychgate, she was retching.

  9

  ‘Are you all right?’ Gísli asked, half out of the patrol car, as she walked over to him and sat in the passenger seat.

  ‘Yes, fine,’ she said, and turned to look at Skúli who was sitting behind the driver’s seat. ‘Hello, my name’s Salka.’

  ‘Hello. Do you know who murdered him?’

  ‘Murdered?' she asked in surprise. ‘Who said anything about murder?’

  ‘Well. I thought he had been killed.’

  ‘We haven’t got that far yet. Do you know what happened to him?’

  ‘Me? No,’ he said firmly, and sounded offended. ‘You’re off your head if you think I know anything about this.’

  ‘Skúli,’ Gísli said, looking in the rear view mirror. ‘Mind your manners.’

  ‘What happened to you?’ she asked, nodding at Skúli.

  At fir
st he didn’t seem to be sure what she meant, then he lifted a hand to the bruise and the swelling across his right temple. The skin must have been broken, as he had fixed a circular plaster over the centre of the swelling.

  ‘That? I just walked into something with a bit of a bang.’

  ‘It looks recent. How did this happen?’

  ‘The sink at home was leaking,’ he said after a second’s hesitation. ‘I was bent double down there inside the cupboard and banged my head.’

  Salka turned to face forward. She glanced at Gísli, who appeared apologetic on Skúli’s behalf.

  It was immediately clear to her that Skúli was different to most people. He came across as childishly direct. She guessed he must be somewhere around twenty-five to twenty-seven. He was chubby, with fair hair down to his shoulders and it wasn’t easy to work out whether it was unwashed and uncared for, or styled to look that way. He had an outdoor complexion, his eyes were sharp and he appeared to be physically powerful. The grubby grey military-style jacket he wore over a black tee shirt could have done with being a size larger as it stretched over his bulky torso. Maybe it was the jacket that emphasised the colour of his eyes, making them look greyer than they really were.

  ‘Tell me about what happened when you went to the church,’ Salka said gently.

  ‘It was three in the morning and I saw Hróbjartur. It was a horrible sight.’

  ‘I can well believe it. What did you do when you saw him?’

  ‘Well, I called the cops right away. And Gísli turned up pretty quickly.’

  ‘Did you know Hróbjartur?’

  ‘I want a lawyer,’ Skúli said in a low voice.

  ‘What?’ Salka said, twisting around to face him. ‘Why do you want a lawyer?’

  ‘I don’t want to say anything until I have a lawyer present.’

  ‘Did you have anything to do with what happened?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Skúli, you don’t need a lawyer,’ Gísli said. ‘You haven’t been arrested and we just want to talk to you.’

  ‘Then at least I want to talk to Valgeir.’

  ‘Who’s Valgeir?’ Salka asked, turning to Gísli.

  ‘He’s a police officer and he’s running things while Kolbrún is away. Valgeir’s Skúli's uncle,’ Gísli said quietly and glanced at Skúli. ‘You don’t need Valgeir here. We just want to talk and find out what happened.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to say something I shouldn’t,’ he said and folded his arms over his chest, as if he were cold. He looked out of the window at his side.

  ‘Don’t be daft, Skúli,’ Gísli said sharply. ‘We just want to go through the events of last night, that’s all.’

  There was silence from the back seat.

  ‘Well,’ Salka said, as if speaking to herself. ‘We’d better take a look at your home.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s routine in a case like this,’ Salka said, after a pause.

  ‘Then you need a search warrant for that.’

  ‘Yes, sure. But do you have anything to hide?’

  ‘No, of course not. But you still need a warrant.’

  ‘Skúli, what’s got into you?’ Gísli said, clearly irritated, after twisting around in his seat to look at him.

  Salka looked over her shoulder and saw Skúli’s expressionless face.

  ‘Those are the rules,’ he said finally. ‘Apart from that, Mother doesn’t like having people with no business there rooting around her house.’

  Salka turned back to face the windscreen and smiled to herself.

  ‘You live with her?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah. Or she lives with me. We live in the same house.’

  ‘So shall we go and have a chat with your mum?’

  ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘She’s not home.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She had to go over to Dalvík. She’ll be back today.’

  This isn’t going our way, Salka wanted to say, but instead she just sighed.

  ‘Then I suppose you’d best come with us to the station, Skúli,’ she said gently.

  ‘What for?’ he demanded, edging forward in his seat and catching hold of the headrest in front of him.

  ‘Routine in this kind of case, and it’s not as if you’re being co-operative.’

  ‘I’ll have to go and check on the dog, she’s about to have pups.’

  ‘How far gone is she?’ Gísli asked.

  ‘Four weeks or so.’

  ‘Then you don’t need to worry. She’s got at least the same again before she drops them.’

  ‘What do you know about that?’

  ‘I know a thing or two.’

  ‘You have a dog, do you?’

  ‘Skúli, I know something about dogs,’ Gísli said, his irritation showing more clearly. Salka smiled, but took care to look to one side, out of the passenger window.

  ‘By all means check on the dog, as long as we come inside with you,’ she said.

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Fine. Then we’ll go to the station in Akureyri,’ she said, and turned to catch Skúli’s eye. The man put her in mind of a recalcitrant, overgrown child.

  10

  Salka drove to Akureyri, with Gísli following behind her with Skúli in the back of the patrol car. They parked behind the police station on Thórunnarstræti, looking down on the town below. A female officer was at reception and Salka asked for Skúli to be taken to an interview room, as she didn’t have the heart to have him put in a cell.

  All of a sudden they were aware of a man standing among them, asking if there was anything they could say at this moment. They stared at him in surprise.

  ‘You’ve no business here,’ Gísli said with determination, striding towards the journalist.

  ‘Who’s the dead person in the church? Is this a murder case?’

  Salka shook her head and thought of Gísli’s discreet friend who had shown up at the church during the night. She watched Gísli and another officer march the journalist out, past the gate he had ducked under, which barred access to the station from Thórunnarstræti.

  Gísli returned and Salka asked him to track down Skúli’s mother.

  ‘You must be this Salka I’ve been hearing so much about,’ said a slim man in an official white shirt and black tie, who appeared from a doorway at the end of the corridor when she reached the second floor of the building. ‘We need to talk.’

  Salka caught the man’s eye and went over to him. The tone jarred. This Salka. She was surprised to see the spiderweb veins on his face, at this time of year.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, and went into his office. She could sense he wasn’t delighted, as she hadn’t been invited in. ‘And you are…?’ she asked, as if his name had been plucked from her memory – even though she knew perfectly well who this man was.

  ‘Valgeir,’ he said, pushing glasses with golden frames higher up his nose. ‘You’ve come direct from Grenivík?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Salka said, making an effort to stifle a yawn. She almost managed it, taking a long breath through her nose. The stuffy air of the office had made her aware of how tired she was. She glanced at the clock on the wall, and saw that it was twenty past eight.

  ‘How are your parents?’ he asked, planting himself in his office chair so that it quivered beneath him.

  Salka sighed involuntarily.

  ‘They’re fine.’

  ‘And your dad? Still working?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Really? How come?’

  Salka wondered whether to take the chair facing his desk, or the sofa that stood against one wall of the spacious office. The chair option would leave her uncomfortably below Valgeir’s eye line. She chose the sofa and noticed that he shot a look of annoyance her way, past the computer screen on his desk.

  ‘What did you want to talk to me about?’ she asked, as she picked up a crumpled crocheted cushion that was on the sofa and put it to one side.

  ‘I’ve
heard from my guys in Grenivík. I’ve instructed them to go door-to-door at every house within sight of the church to see if there’s anyone who noticed anything unusual.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Salka said and smiled. She could let him have the glory of having taken that decision.

  ‘I understand you have some legal documentation for me,’ he said.

  ‘Then you understand wrong,’ she said quietly.

  Valgeir glared. She knew what he was thinking. He didn’t like her tone.

  ‘I don’t have anything to confirm your presence,’ he said.

  ‘I’m here at Kolbrún’s request. She must have sent some paperwork?’

  ‘Understood. She’s on holiday and I’m in charge in her absence,’ he said in a dry voice, without taking his eyes from the screen in front of him. For a moment Salka though he was looking at the ceiling, and then realised that he was using the reading point of his multifocal glasses.

  A printer spat out two sheets of paper.

  ‘Let’s see,’ he said, reaching for them. He hummed a few times as he read, a little too often for her liking, obviously taking his time.

  ‘I see that you handed in your warrant card in June 2010 when you moved to London and were with CID there. Then you came back to Iceland in October 2013 and… haven’t been involved in police work for around a year. Why’s that?’

  ‘Why’s what?’

  ‘Why haven’t you worked during this time?’

  ‘There’s nothing about that in your file?’ Salka asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, drawing out the word as he appeared to search through the document in his hands.

  ‘I’ve no idea what you’re looking at. If there’s nothing stated, then that’s probably because there’s nothing that should be stated there,’ she said and gave him a smile, a narrow little smile.

  ‘Hmm?’ he grunted. ‘Why on earth shouldn’t this be mentioned?’

  ‘Probably because it’s a personal matter. Apart from that, I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t supposed to be coming to you for a job interview today.’ Valgeir opened his mouth to speak, but Salka continued in her measured tone. ‘I’m here entirely at Kolbrún’s request. Probably on a temporary basis. She wanted me to investigate the case concerning Hróbjartur,’ she said, feeling herself getting hot under the collar. ‘And is Pétur here somewhere?’