'I've never ... It was ... She could do the most incredible things,' the reception manager said.
Erlendur watched him without saying a word.
'I was going to sneak out in the morning, but she was one step ahead. My conscience was killing me, I felt like shit for betraying my wife and children. We've got three children. I was going to get out and forget about it. Never wanted to see that woman again. She was wide awake when I started creeping around the room in the dark.'
She sat up and switched on the beside lamp. 'Are you going?' she asked. He said he was. Claimed to be late. For an important meeting. Something of that sort.
'Did you enjoy it last night?' she asked.
Holding his trousers in his hands, he looked at her.
'It was amazing,' he said. 'But I just can't go on with this. I can't. Sorry.'
'I want eighty thousand krónur,' she said calmly, as if that was almost too obvious to mention.
He looked at her as if he had not heard what she said.
'Eighty thousand,' she repeated.
'What do you mean?'
'For the night,' she said.
'The night?' he said. 'What, are you selling yourself?'
'What do you think?' she said.
He didn't understand what she was talking about.
'Do you think you can get a woman like me for free?' she said.
Gradually it dawned on him what she meant.
'But you didn't say anything about that!'
'Did I need to say anything? Pay me eighty thousand and I might just let you come back home with me some other time.'
'I refused to pay' the reception manager told Erlendur. 'Walked out. She went berserk. Called work and threatened to phone my wife if I didn't pay.'
'What are they called?' Erlendur said. 'A... hustler? Was she one of them? Is that what you're saying?'
'I don't know what she was but she knew what she was doing and in the end she phoned home and told my wife what happened.'
'Why didn't you just pay her? Then you'd have been rid of her.'
'I'm not sure I would have been rid of her even if I had coughed up,' the manager said. 'My wife and I went through all this yesterday. I described what happened just as I described it to you. We've been together for twenty-three years and although I have no excuse it was a trap, the way I see it. If that woman hadn't been after money it would never have happened.'
'So it was all her fault?'
'No, of course not, but... it was still a trap.'
They paused.
'Does that sort of thing go on at this hotel?' Erlendur asked. 'Prostitution?'
'No,' the reception manager said.
'It's not something you'd miss?'
'I was told you were asking about that. Nothing of that kind goes on here.'
'Quite,' Erlendur said.
'Are you going to keep schtum about this?'
'I need the woman's name if you have it. And her address. It won't go any further.'
The manager hesitated.
'Fucking bitch,' he said, slipping for an instant out of the role of the polite hotelier.
'Are you going to pay her?'
'That was one thing we agreed on, my wife and I. She's not getting a penny.'
'Do you think it could have been a prank?'
'A prank?' the manager said. 'I don't follow. What do you mean?'
'I mean, could someone want to harm you so badly that they would set you up? Someone you've quarrelled with?'
'The thought hadn't even crossed my mind. Are you suggesting that I've got enemies who would do something like that to me?'
'They needn't be enemies. Practical jokers, your friends'
'No, my friends aren't like that. Besides, as a practical joke that would have been going a bit far – way beyond funny'
'Was it you who fired Santa?'
'What do you mean?'
'Was it you who told him the news? Or did he receive a letter, or...?'
'I told him.'
'And how did he take it?'
'Not well. Understandably. He'd been working here for ages. Much longer than I have.'
'Do you think he could have been behind it, if anyone was?'
'Gudlaugur? No, I can't imagine that. Gudlaugur? Doing that sort of thing? I think not. He was really not the joking sort. Absolutely not.'
'Did you know Gudlaugur was a child star?'
'A child star? How?'
'He made records. A choirboy.'
'I didn't know that,' the manager said.
'Just one final thing,' Erlendur said, standing up.
'Yes?'
'Could you fix me up with a record player in my room?' Erlendur asked, and saw that the head of reception did not have the faintest idea what he was talking about.
When Erlendur went back into the lobby he saw the head of forensics coming up the stairs from the basement.
'How's it going with the saliva you found on the condom?' Erlendur asked. 'Have you checked the Cortisol?'
"We're working on it. What do you claim to know about Cortisol?'
'I know that too much of it in the saliva can prove dangerous.'
'Sigurdur Óli was asking about the murder weapon,' the head of forensics said. 'The pathologist doesn't think it's a particularly remarkable knife. Not very long, with a thin, serated edge.'
'So it's not a hunting knife or a carving knife?'
'No, it sounds to me like a fairly unremarkable instrument,' the head of forensics said. 'A pretty nondescript knife.'
10
Erlendur took the two records from Gudlaugur's room up to his own, then called the hospital and asked for Valgerdur. He was put through to her department. Another woman answered. He asked for Valgerdur again. The woman said, 'One moment, please,' and at last Valgerdur answered.
'Have you got any of those cotton wool buds left?' he asked.
'Is that Mr Deaths and Ordeals speaking?' she said.
Erlendur grinned.
'There's a tourist at the hotel we need to test'
'Is it a rush job?'
'It will have to be done today.'
'Will you be there?'
'Yes.'
'I'm on my way'
Erlendur rang off. Mr Deaths and Ordeals, he chuckled to himself. He was supposed to meet Henry Wapshott at the hotel bar. He went down, sat at the bar and waited. The waiter asked if he wanted anything, but he declined. Changed his mind and called out to him to bring a glass of water. He looked along the shelves of drinks behind the bar, rows of bottles in all colours of the rainbow, rows of liqueurs.
*
They had found powdered glass, too minute to be seen, on the marble floor of the lounge. Traces of Drambuie on the drinks cabinet, Drambuie on the boy's socks and on the staircase. They found fragments of glass in the broom and the vacuum cleaner. All the signs were that a bottle of liqueur had fallen onto the marble floor. The boy probably stepped in the puddle that it left, then ran straight up to his room. The marks on the staircase indicated that he ran rather than walked. Frightened little feet. They concluded that the boy broke the bottle, his father lost his temper and attacked him so brutally that he put him in hospital.
Elínborg had him taken to the police station on Hverfisgata for questioning, where she told him about the results of the forensic tests, the boy's reaction when he was asked whether his father had hit him, and her personal conviction that he was the culprit. Erlendur was present at the interrogation. She informed the father that he was in the legal position of being a suspect and was allowed to have a lawyer present. He should have one. The father protested his innocence and repeated that he was astonished to be under suspicion simply because a liqueur bottle had fallen onto his floor.
Erlendur switched on the tape recorder in the interrogation room.
'What we believe happened is this,' Elínborg said, acting as if reading aloud from a report; she tried to put her emotions to one side. "The boy came home from school. It was just gone three o'clo
ck. You came back shortly afterwards. We understand that you left work early that day. Maybe you were at home when it happened. For some reason the boy dropped a large bottle of Drambuie on the floor. Panicking, he ran up to his room. You flew into a rage, and more than that. You totally lost control of yourself and went up to the boy's room to punish him. It got out of hand and you beat your son so badly that you then had to call an ambulance.'
The father watched Elínborg without saying a word.
'You used a weapon that we have not managed to identify, a rounded or at least blunt instrument; possibly you banged him against the head of the bed. You persistently kicked him. Before calling an ambulance you tidied up in the lounge. You wiped up the liqueur with three towels, which you threw in the dustbin outside the house. You vacuum-cleaned the tiniest fragments of glass. You swept the marble floor as well and gave it a quick scrub. You washed the cabinet carefully. You took the boy's socks off and threw them in the dustbin. You used detergent on the stains on the stairs but did not manage to remove them completely.'
'You can't prove a thing, since it's rubbish anyway. The boy hasn't said anything. He hasn't said a word about who assaulted him. Why don't you try to find his classmates?'
'Why didn't you tell us about the liqueur?'
'It's nothing to do with this.'
'And the socks in the dustbin? The little footprints on the staircase?'
'A liqueur bottle did get broken, but I was the one who broke it. It happened two days before my boy was attacked. I was getting myself a drink when I dropped it on the floor and it smashed. Addi saw this and it made him jump. I told him to be careful where he walked, but by then he had trodden in the spillage and ran up the stairs to his room. This has nothing to do with him being attacked and I must say this scenario astonishes me. You haven't a shred of evidence! Has he said that I hit him? I doubt that. And he never will say it, because it wasn't me. I'd never do anything like this to him. Never.'
'Why didn't you tell us about it straight away?'
'Straight away?'
'When we found the stains. You didn't say anything about it then.'
'This is precisely what I thought would happen. I knew you'd link that accident with Addi getting beaten up. I didn't want to complicate matters. The boys at the school did it.'
'Your company's heading for bankruptcy,' Elínborg said. 'You've laid off twenty employees and expect to make more redundancies. I expect you're under a lot of strain. You're losing your house...'
'That's just business,' he said.
'We have reason to believe you've used violence before.'
'Hey, wait a minute ...'
'We checked the medical reports. Twice in the past four years he has broken his finger.'
'Have you got kids? Kids are always having accidents. This is nonsense.'
'A paediatrician remarked on the broken finger the second time and informed the child welfare agency. It was the same finger. The agency sent people to your house. Examined the conditions. Found nothing of note. The paediatrician came and found needlemarks on the back of the boy's hand.'
The father said nothing.
Elínborg could not control herself.
'You bastard,' she hissed.
'I want to talk to my lawyer,' he said and looked away.
*
'I said, good morning!'
Erlendur returned to his senses and saw Henry Wapshott standing over him. Absorbed in his thoughts about the fleeing boy, he hadn't noticed Wapshott walk into the bar or heard his greeting.
He leaped to his feet and shook him by the hand. Wapshott was wearing the same clothes as the previous day. His hair was more unkempt and he looked tired. He ordered coffee, and so did Erlendur.
'We were talking about collectors,' Erlendur said.
'Yes,' Wapshott said, a wincing smile forming on his face. 'A bunch of loners, such as myself!
'How does a collector like you in the UK find out that forty years ago there was a choirboy with a beautiful voice in Hafnarfjördur in Iceland?'
'Oh, much more than a beautiful voice,' Wapshott said. 'Much, much more than that. He had a unique voice, that boy.'
'How did you hear about Gudlaugur Egilsson?'
'Through people with the same interest as me. Record collectors specialise, as I believe I told you yesterday. If we take choral music, for example: collectors can be divided into those who collect only certain songs or certain arrangements, and others who collect certain choirs. Others still, like me, choirboys. Some collect only choirboys who recorded 78 rpm glass records, which they stopped manufacturing in the sixties. Others go in for 45 rpm singles, but only from one particular label. There are infinite types of specialisation. Some look for all the versions of a single song, let's say "Stormy Weather", which I'm sure you know. Just so you understand what's involved. I heard about Gudlaugur through a group or association of Japanese collectors who run a big website for trading. No one collects Western music on the scale of the Japanese. They go all over the world like Hoovers, buying up everything that's ever been released that they can get their hands on. Particularly Beatles and hippy music. They're renowned in the record markets, and the best thing of all is that they have money.'
Erlendur was wondering whether it was permitted to smoke at the bar and decided to give it a shot. Seeing that he was about to have a cigarette, Wapshott took out a crumpled packet of Chesterfields and Erlendur gave him a light.
'Do you think we can smoke here?' Wapshott asked.
'We'll find out,' Erlendur said.
'The Japanese had one copy of Gudlaugur's first single,' Wapshott said. 'The one I showed you last night. I bought it from them. Cost me a fortune but I don't regret it. When I asked about its background they said they'd bought it from a collector from Bergen in Norway at a record fair in Liverpool. I got in touch with the Norwegian collector and found out that he'd bought some records from the estate of a music publisher in Trondheim. He may have had the copy sent from Iceland, possibly even by someone who wanted to promote the boy abroad.'
'A lot of research for an old record,' Erlendur said.
'Collectors are like genealogists. Part of the fun is tracing the origin. Since then I've tried to acquire more copies of his records, but it's very tough. He only made the two recordings.'
'You said the Japanese sold you your copy for a fortune. Are these records worth anything?'
'Only to collectors,' Wapshott said. 'And we're not talking about huge sums'
'But big enough for you to come up here to Iceland to buy more. That's why you wanted to meet Gudlaugur. To find out if he had any copies'
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