They did not see him come down to the dining room where they were eating, and talked about how he might have ordered a meal by room service. Valgerdur mentioned that he looked tired.
Erlendur had accompanied her to the cloakroom and helped her put on her smart leather coat, then walked with her to the revolving doors where they stood for a moment before she went out into the falling snow. When he lay on his bed, after Eva Lind had left, Valgerdur's smile accompanied him into sleep, along with the faint scent of perfume that lingered on his hand from when they had said their goodbyes.
'Erlendur?' Sigurdur Óli said. 'Hello! Wapshott, who is he?'
'All I know is that he's a British record collector,' Erlendur said, after telling them about his meeting with him. 'And he's leaving the hotel tomorrow. You ought to phone the UK and get some details on him. We're going to meet before noon and I'll get some more out of him.'
'A choirboy?' Elínborg said. 'Who could have wanted to kill a choirboy?'
'Naturally, he wasn't a choirboy any longer,' Sigurdur Óli said.
'He was famous once,' Erlendur said. 'Released some records that are clearly rare collectors' items today. Henry Wapshott comes up here from the UK on account of them, on account of him. He specialises in choirboys and boys' choirs from all over the world.'
"The only one I've heard of is the Vienna Boys' Choir,' Sigurdur Óli said.
'Specialises in choirboys' Elínborg said. 'What kind of man collects records of choirboys? Shouldn't we give that some thought? Isn't there something odd about that?'
Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli looked at her.
'What do you mean?' Erlendur asked.
'What?' Elínborg's expression turned to one of astonishment.
'Do you think there's something odd about collecting records?'
'Not records, but choirboys,' Elínborg said. 'Recordings of choirboys. There's a huge difference there, I reckon. Don't you see anything pervy about that?' She looked at them both in turn.
'I haven't got a dirty mind like you,' Sigurdur Óli said, looking at Erlendur.
'Dirty mind! Did I imagine seeing Santa Claus with his trousers down in a little basement room and a condom on his willy? Did I need a dirty mind for that? Then a man who worships Santa, but only when he was twelve years old or so, just so happens to be staying at the same hotel and comes over from the UK to meet him? Are you two plugged in?'
'Are you putting this in a sexual context?' Erlendur asked.
Elínborg rolled her eyes.
'You're like a couple of monks!'
'He's just a record collector,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'As Erlendur said, some people collect airline sick bags. What's their sex life like, according to your theories?'
'I can't believe how blind you two are! Or frustrated. Why are men always so frustrated?'
'Oh, don't you start,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'Why do women always talk about how frustrated men are? As if women aren't frustrated with all their stuff, "Oh, I can't find my lipstick"...'
'Blind, frustrated old monks,' Elínborg said.
'What does being a collector mean?' Erlendur asked. 'Why do people collect certain objects to have around them and why do they see one item as being more valuable than others?'
'Some items are more valuable than others,' Sigurdur Óli said.
'They must be looking for something unique,' Erlendur said. 'Something no one else has. Isn't that the ultimate goal? Owning a treasure that no one else in the whole wide world has?'
'Aren't they often pretty strange characters?' Elínborg said.
'Strange?'
'Loners. Aren't they? Weirdos?'
'You found some records in Gudlaugur's cupboard,' Erlendur said to her. 'What did you do with them? Did you look at them at all?'
'I just saw them in the cupboard,' Elínborg said. 'Didn't touch them and they're still there if you want to take a look.'
'How does a collector like Wapshott make contact with a man like Gudlaugur?' Elínborg continued. 'How did he hear about him? Are there intermediaries? What does he know about recordings of Icelandic choirboys in the 1960s? A boy soloist singing up here in Iceland more than thirty years ago?'
'Magazines?' Sigurdur Óli suggested. 'The Internet? Over the phone? Through other collectors?'
'Do we know anything else about Gudlaugur?' Erlendur asked.
'He had a sister,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'And a father who's still alive. They were informed of his death, of course. The sister identified him.'
'We should definitely take a saliva sample from Wapshott,' Elínborg said.
'Yes, I'll see to that,' Erlendur said.
Sigurdur Óli began gathering information about Henry Wapshott; Elínborg undertook to arrange a meeting with Gudlaugur's father and sister, and Erlendur headed down to the doorman's room in the basement. Walking past reception, he remembered that he still had to talk to the manager about his absence from work. He decided to do it later.
He found the records in Gudlaugur's cupboard. Two singles. One sleeve read: Gudlaugur sings Schubert's 'Ave Maria'. It was the same record that Henry Wapshott had shown him. The other showed the boy standing in front of a small choir. The choirmaster, a young man, stood to one side. Gudlaugur Egilsson sings solo was printed in large letters across the sleeve.
On the back was a brief account of the child prodigy.
Gudlaugur Egilsson has commanded much-deserved attention with Hafnarfjördur Children's Choir and this twelve-year-old singer definitely has a bright future ahead. On his second recording he sings with unique expression in his beautiful boy soprano under the direction of Gabriel Hermannsson, choirmaster of Hafnarfjördur Children's Choir. This record is a must for all lovers of good music. Gudlaugur Egilsson proves beyond all doubt that he is a singer in a class of his own. He is currently preparing for a tour of Scandinavia.
A child star, Erlendur thought as he looked at the film poster for The Little Princess with Shirley Temple. What are you doing here? he asked the poster. Why did he keep you?
He took out his mobile.
'Marion,' he said when the call was answered.
'Is that you, Erlendur?'
'Anything new?'
'Did you know that Gudlaugur made song recordings when he was a child?'
'I've just found that out,' Erlendur said.
'The record company went bankrupt about twenty years ago and there's not a trace of it left. A man by the name of Gunnar Hansson owned and ran it. The name was GH Records. He released a bit of hippy stuff but it all went down the plughole.'
'Do you know what happened to the stock?'
'The stock?' Marion Briem said.
'The records.'
'They must have gone towards paying off his debts. Isn't that usually the case? I spoke to his family, two sons. The company never released much and I drew a total blank at first when I asked about it. The sons hadn't heard it mentioned for decades. Gunnar died in the mid-eighties and all he left behind was a trail of debts.'
'There's a man staying here at the hotel who collects choral music, choirboys. He was planning to meet Gudlaugur but nothing came of it. I was wondering whether his records might be worth something. How can I find out?'
'Find some collectors and talk to them,' Marion said. 'Do you want me to?'
'Then there's another thing. Could you locate a man called Gabriel Hermannsson who was a choirmaster in Hafnarfjördur in the sixties? You're bound to find him in the phone directory if he's still alive. He may have taught Gudlaugur. I've got a record sleeve here, there's a photo of him and he looks to me as if he was in his twenties then. Of course, if he's dead then it stops there.'
'That's generally the rule.'
'What?'
'If you're dead, it stops.'
'Quite.' Erlendur hesitated. 'What are you talking about death for?'
'No reason.'
'Everything's all right, isn't it?'
'Thanks for throwing some morsels my way,' Marion said.
'Wasn't that what you
wanted? To spend your wretched old age delving into obscurities?'
'It absolutely makes my day,' Marion said. 'Have you checked about the Cortisol in the saliva?'
'I'll look into it,' Erlendur said and rang off.
*
The head of reception had a little room of his own in the lobby beside the reception desk and was doing some paperwork when Erlendur walked in and closed the door behind him. The man stood up and began to protest, saying he couldn't spare the time to talk, he was on his way to a meeting, but Erlendur sat down and folded his arms.
'What are you running away from?' he asked.
'What do you mean?'
'You didn't come to work yesterday, in the hotel's peak season. You acted like a fugitive when I spoke to you the evening the doorman was murdered. You're all jittery now. To my mind you're top of the list of suspects. I'm told you knew Gudlaugur better than anyone else at this hotel. You deny it – say you don't know a thing about him. I think you're lying. You were his boss. You ought to be a little more cooperative. It's no joke spending Christmas in custody.'
The man stared at Erlendur without knowing what to do, then slowly sat back down in his chair.
'You haven't got anything on me,' he said. 'It's nonsense to think I did that to Gudlaugur. That I was in his room and... I mean with the condom and all that.'
Erlendur was concerned by how the details of the case appeared to have leaked and how the staff were wallowing in them. In the kitchen, the chef knew precisely why they were collecting saliva samples. The reception manager could picture the scene in the doorman's room. Maybe the hotel manager had blurted it all out, maybe the girl who found the body, maybe police officers.
'Where were you yesterday?' Erlendur asked.
'Off sick,' the reception manager said. 'I was at home all morning.'
'You didn't tell anyone. Did you go to the doctor? Did he give you a note? Can I talk to him? What's his name.'
'I didn't go to the doctor. I stayed in bed. I'm better now.' He forced out a cough. Erlendur smiled. This man was the worst liar he had ever encountered.
'Why these lies?'
'You haven't got a thing on me,' the manager said. 'All you can do is threaten me. I want you to leave me alone.'
'I could talk to your wife too,' Erlendur said. 'Ask her if she brought you a cup of tea in bed yesterday.'
'You leave her out of it,' the manager said, and suddenly there was a tougher, more serious tone to his voice. He went red in the face.
'I'm not going to leave her out of it,' Erlendur said.
The manager glared at Erlendur.
'Don't talk to her,' he said.
'Why not? What are you hiding? You've become too mysterious to get rid of me.'
The man stared into space, then heaved a sigh.
'Leave me alone. It's nothing to do with Gudlaugur. These are personal problems I got myself into, which I'm trying to fix.'
'What are they?'
'I don't have to tell you anything about them.'
'Let me be the judge of that.'
'You can't force me.'
'As I said, I can make a request for custody, or I can simply talk to your wife.'
The man groaned. He looked at Erlendur.
'This won't go any further?'
'Not if it has nothing to do with Gudlaugur.'
'It's nothing to do with him.'
All right then.'
'My wife received a phone call the day before yesterday,' the head of reception said. 'The same day you found Gudlaugur.'
On the phone, a woman whose voice the manager's wife did not recognise asked for him. This was in the middle of a weekday, but it was not uncommon for him to receive calls at home at such times. His acquaintances knew that he worked irregular hours. His wife, a doctor, worked shifts and the call woke her up: she was on duty that evening. The woman on the phone acted as though she knew the head of reception, but immediately took umbrage when his wife wanted to know who she was.
'Who are you?' she had asked. 'What are you calling here for?'
'He owes me money? the voice on the phone said.
'Shed threatened that she would phone my house,' the reception manager told Erlendur.
'Who was it?'
He had gone out for a drink ten days before. His wife was at a medical conference in Sweden and he went out for a meal with three old friends. They had a lot of fun, went on a pub crawl after the restaurant and ended up at a popular nightspot in town. He lost his friends there, went to the bar and met some acquaintances from the hotel trade, stood by a small dance floor and watched the dancing. Although quite tipsy, he wasn't too drunk to make sensible decisions. That was why he couldn't understand it. He had never done anything like it before.
She approached him and, just like in a movie scene, held a cigarette between her fingers and asked him for a light Although he didn't smoke, because of his job he made a point of always carrying a lighter. It was a habit from the days when people could smoke wherever they wanted. She started talking to him about something he had now forgotten, and asked if he was going to buy her a drink. He looked at her. But of course. They stood at the bar while he bought the drinks, then sat down at a little table when it became vacant. She was exceptionally attractive and flirted subtly with him. Unsure what was going on, he played along. Women didn't treat him like this as a rule. She sat up close to him and was forward and self-assured. When he stood up to fetch a second drink she stroked his thigh. He looked at her and she smiled. An enchanting, beautiful woman who knew what she wanted. She could have been ten years his junior.
Later that night she asked him to walk her home. She lived nearby. He was still unsure and hesitant, but excited as well. It was so strange for him that he might just as easily have been walking on the moon. In twenty-three years he had been faithful to his wife. Two or three times in all those years he'd perhaps had the chance to kiss another woman, but nothing like this had ever happened to him before.
'I lost the plot completely,' he told Erlendur. 'Part of me wanted to run home and forget the whole thing. Part of me wanted to go with the woman.'
'I bet I know which part that was,' Erlendur said.
They stood by the door to her flat, in the stairwell of a modern apartment block, and she put the key in the lock. Somehow even that act became voluptuous in her hands. The door opened and she moved close to him.'Come inside with me,' she said, stroking his crotch.
He went inside with her. First she mixed drinks for them. He sat down on the sofa. She put on some music, came over to him with a glass in her hand and smiled, her beautiful white teeth shining behind the red lipstick. Then she sat beside him, put down her glass, grabbed the belt of his trousers and slowly unzipped his flies.
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