The girl wiped the mascara off her cheeks and looked at Erlendur, uncertain what to expect. Erlendur smiled, pulled up a chair and sat facing her. She was around the same age as his own daughter, in her early twenties, nervous and still in shock from what she had seen. Her hair was black and she was slim, dressed in the hotel chambermaid’s uniform, a light blue coat. A name tag was attached to her breast pocket. Osp.
“Have you been working here long?” Erlendur asked.
“Almost a year,” Osp said in a low voice. She looked at him. He did not give the impression that he would give her a hard time. With a snuffle she straightened up in her chair. Finding the body had clearly had a strong effect on her. She trembled slightly. Her name Osp — meaning aspen — suited her, Erlendur thought to himself. She was like a twig in the wind.
“And do you like working here?” Erlendur asked.
“No,” she said.
“So why do you?”
“You have to work.”
“What’s so bad about it?”
She looked at him as if he did not need to ask.
“I change the beds,” she said. “Clean the toilets. Vacuum. But it’s still better than a supermarket.”
“What about the people?”
“The manager’s a creep.”
“He’s like a fire hydrant with a leak.”
Osp smiled.
“And some of the guests think you’re only here for them to grope.”
“Why did you go down to the basement?” Erlendur asked.
“To fetch Santa. The kids were waiting for him.”
“Which kids?”
“At the Christmas ball. We have a Christmas party for the staff. For their children and any kids who are staying at the hotel, and he was playing Santa. When he didn’t show up I was sent to fetch him.”
“That can’t have been pleasant.”
“I’ve never seen a dead body before. And that condom.” Osp tried to drive the image out of her mind.
“Did he have any girlfriends at the hotel?”
“None that I know of?
“Do you know about any contacts of his outside the hotel?”
“I don’t know anything about that man, though I’ve seen more of him than I should of!
“Should have,” Erlendur corrected her.
“What?”
“You’re supposed to say “should have”, not “should of”.”
She gave him a pitying look.
“Do you think it matters?”
“Yes, I do,” Erlendur said.
He shook his head, a remote expression on his face.
“Was the door open when you found him?”
Osp thought
“No, I opened it. I knocked and got no reply, so I waited and was just going to leave when it occurred to me to open the door. I thought it was locked but then it suddenly opened and he was sitting there naked with a rubber on his…”
“Why did you think it would be locked?” Erlendur hurried to say. “The door.”
“I just did. I knew it was his room.”
“Did you see anyone when you went down to fetch him?”
“No, no one.”
“So he’d got ready for the Christmas party, but someone came down and disturbed him. He was wearing his Santa suit.”
Osp shrugged.
“Who did his bed?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who changed the linen? It hasn’t been done for a long time.”
“I don’t know. He must have done it himself?
“You must have been shocked.”
“It was a revolting sight,” Osp said.
“I know,” Erlendur said. “You should try to forget it as quickly as possible. If you can. Was he a good Santa?”
The girl looked at him.
“What?” Erlendur said.
“I don’t believe in Santa.”
The lady who organised the Christmas party was smartly dressed, short and, Erlendur thought, around thirty. She said she was the hotel’s marketing and PR manager, but Erlendur could not have been less interested; most of the people he met these days were marketing-somethings. She had an office on the second floor and Erlendur found her on the phone there. The media had got wind of an incident at the hotel and Erlendur imagined she was telling lies to a reporter. The conversation came to a very abrupt end. The woman slammed down the phone with the words that she had absolutely no comment to make.
Erlendur introduced himself, shook her dry hand and asked her when she had last spoken to the, aahemm, man in the basement. He did not know whether to say doorman or Santa, he had forgotten his name. He felt he could hardly say Santa.
“Gulli?” she said, solving the problem. “It was just this morning, to remind him of the Christmas party. I met him by the revolving doors. He was working. He was a doorman here as you perhaps know. And more than a doorman, a caretaker really. Mended things and all that.”
“Easy-going?”
“Pardon?”
“Helpful, easy-going, didn’t need much nagging?”
“I don’t know. Does that matter? He never did anything for me. Or rather, I never needed his help.”
“Why was he playing Santa? Was he fond of children? Funny? Fun?”
“That goes back before I started here. I’ve been working here for three years and this is the third Christmas party I’ve organised. He was the Santa the other two times and before that too. He was OK. As Santa. The kids liked him.”
Gudlaugur’s death did not seem to have had the slightest effect on the woman. It was none of her business. All that the murder did was to disturb the marketing and PR for a while. Erlendur wondered how people could be so insensitive and boring.
“But what sort of person was he?”
“I don’t know. I never got to know him. He was a doorman here. And the Santa. That was really the only time I ever spoke to him. When he was the Santa.”
“What happened to the Christmas party? When you found out that Santa was dead?”
“We called it off. Nothing else for it. Also out of respect for him,” she added, as if to show a hint of feeling at last. It was futile. Erlendur could tell that she could not care less about the body in the basement.
“Who knew this man best?” he asked. “Here at the hotel, I mean.”
“I don’t know. Try talking to the head of reception. The doorman worked for him.”
The telephone on her desk rang and she answered it. She gave Erlendur a look implying that he was in her way, and he stood up and walked out, thinking that she could not go on telling lies over the phone for ever.
The reception manager had no time to deal with Erlendur. Tourists swarmed around the front desk and even though three other employees were helping to check them in, they could hardly handle the crowd. Erlendur watched them looking at passports, handing over key cards, smiling and moving on to the next guest. The crowd stretched back to the revolving doors. Through them Erlendur saw yet another tourist shuttle stop outside the hotel.
Policemen, most of them in plain clothes, were all over the building questioning the staff. A makeshift incident centre had been set up in the staff coffee room in the basement, from where the investigation was managed.
Erlendur contemplated the Christmas decorations in the lobby. A sentimental Christmas tune was playing over the sound system. He walked over to the large restaurant to one side of the lobby. The first guests were lining up around a splendid Christmas buffet. He walked past the table and admired the herring, smoked lamb, cold ham, ox tongue and all the trimmings, and the delicious desserts, ice cream, cream cakes and chocolate mousse, or whatever it was.
Erlendur’s mouth watered. He had eaten almost nothing all day.
He looked all around and, almost too fast to be seen, popped a bite of spicy ox tongue into his mouth. He did not think anyone had noticed, and his heart leaped when he heard a sharp voice behind him.
“No, listen, that’s not on. You mustn’t do that!�
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Erlendur turned round and a man wearing a large chef’s hat walked up to him glaring.
“What’s that supposed to mean, picking at the food? What kind of manners do you call that?”
“Take it easy,” Erlendur said, reaching for a plate. He began piling an assortment of delicacies onto the plate as if he had always intended to have the buffet.
“Did you know Santa Claus?” he asked to change the subject from the ox tongue.
“Santa Claus?” the cook said. “What Santa Claus? And please don’t put your fingers on the food. It’s not—”
“Gudlaugur,” Erlendur interrupted him. “Did you know him? He was a doorman and jack of all trades here, I’m told.”
“You mean Gulli?”
“Yes, Gulli.” Erlendur repeated his nickname as he put a generous slice of cold ham on his plate and a dash of yoghurt sauce over it. He wondered whether to call in Elinborg to appraise the buffet; she was a gourmet and had been assembling a book of recipes for many years.
“No, I… what do you mean by “did I know him”?” the cook asked.
“You haven’t heard?”
“What? Is something wrong?”
“He’s dead. Murdered. Hasn’t word got around yet?”
“Murdered?” the cook groaned. “Murdered! What, here? Who are you?”
“In his little room. Down in the basement. I’m from the police.”
Erlendur went on choosing goodies to put on his plate. The cook had forgotten the ox tongue.
“How was he murdered?”
“The least said the better.”
“At the hotel?”
“Yes.”
The cook looked all around.
“I don’t believe it,” he said. “Won’t there be hell to pay?”
“Yes,” Erlendur said. “There will be hell to pay?
He knew that the hotel would never be able to shake off the murder. It would never wipe away the smear. After this it would always be known as the hotel where Santa was found dead with a condom on his penis.
“Did you know him?” Erlendur asked. “Gulli?”
“No, hardly at all. He was a doorman here and fixed all sorts of stuff?
“Fixed?”
“Yes, mended. I didn’t know him at all.”
“Do you know who knew him best here?”
“No,” the cook said. “I don’t know anything about the man. Who could have murdered him? Here? At the hotel? My God!”
Erlendur could tell that he was more worried about the hotel than about the murdered man. He considered telling him that the murder might boost the occupancy rate. That’s the way people think these days. They could even advertise the hotel as a murder scene. Develop crime-based tourism. But he could not be bothered. He wanted to sit down with his plate and eat the food. Have a moment’s peace.
Sigurdur Oli turned up out of nowhere.
“Did you find anything?” Erlendur asked.
“No,” Sigurdur Oli said, looking at the cook, who hurried off to the kitchen with the news. “Are you eating now?” he added with indignation.
“Oh, don’t give me any crap. There was a compromising situation.”
“That man owned nothing, or if he did, he didn’t keep it in his room,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Elinborg found a couple of old records in his wardrobe. That was the lot. Shouldn’t we shut down the hotel?”
“Shut down the hotel, what kind of nonsense is that?” Erlendur said. “How are you going to go about shutting down this hotel? And how long do you plan to do that for? Are you going to send a search team into every room?”
“No, but the murderer could be one of the guests. We can’t ignore that.”
“That’s absolutely uncertain. There are two possibilities. Either he’s at the hotel, a guest or an employee, or he’s nothing to do with the hotel. What we need to do is to talk to all the staff and everyone who checks out over the next couple of days, especially those who check out earlier than they had planned, although I doubt that the person who did it would try to draw attention to himself like that.”
“No, right. I was thinking about the condom,” Sigurdur Oli said.
Erlendur looked for a vacant table, found one and sat down. Sigurdur Oli sat down with him and looked at the heaped plate, and his mouth began watering too.
“Well, if it’s a woman she’s still of child-bearing age, isn’t she? Because of the condom.”
“Yes, that would have been the case twenty years ago,” Erlendur said, savouring the lightly smoked ham. “Nowadays a condom’s more than just a contraceptive. It’s protection against bloody everything, chlamydia, Aids …”
“The condom might also tell us that he wasn’t very well acquainted with the … the person who was in his room. That it must have been a quickie. If he’d known the person well he may not have used a condom.”
“We must remember that the condom doesn’t rule out that he was with a man,” Erlendur said.
“What kind of implement could it be? The murder weapon?”
“We’ll see what comes out of the autopsy. Obviously there’s no problem getting hold of a knife at this hotel, if it was someone from here who attacked him.”
“Is that nice?” Sigurdur Oli asked. He had been watching Erlendur devouring the food and was sorely tempted to get some for himself but was afraid of causing even more of a scandal: two cops investigating a murder at a hotel, who sat down at the buffet as if nothing had happened.
“I forgot to check whether there was anything in it,” Erlendur said between bites.
“Do you think you ought to be eating at the murder scene?”
“This is a hotel.”
“Yes, but…”
“I told you, I ran into a compromising situation. This was the only way to get out of it. Was there anything in it? The condom?”
“Empty,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“The medical officer thought he’d had an orgasm. Twice in fact, but I didn’t really catch how he came to that conclusion.”
“I don’t know anyone who can work out what he’s talking about”
“So the murder was committed in full swing.”
“Yes. Something happened when everything was hunky dory”
“If everything was hunky dory, why take along a knife?”
“Maybe it was part of the game.”
“What game?”
“Sex has become much more complex than just the old missionary position,” Sigurdur Oli said. “So it could be anyone?”
“Anyone,” Erlendur said. “Why do they always talk about the missionary position? What’s the mission?”
“I don’t know.” Sigurdur Oli sighed. Sometimes Erlendur asked questions that irritated him because they were so simple but at the same time so infinitely complicated and dull.
“Is it something from Africa?”
“Or Catholicism,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Why missionary?”
“I don’t know.”
“The condom doesn’t rule out either sex,” Erlendur said. “Let’s establish that. The condom doesn’t rule out anything. Did you ask the manager why he wanted rid of Santa Claus?”
“No, did he want rid of Santa?”
“He mentioned it without any explanation. We have to find out what he meant.”
“I’ll jot that down,” said Sigurdur Oli, who always carried around a notepad and pencil.
“And then there’s one group that uses condoms more than other people.”
“Really?” Sigurdur Oli said, his face one huge question mark.
“Prostitutes.”
“Prostitutes?” Sigurdur Oli repeated. “Hookers? Do you think there are any here?”
Erlendur nodded.
“They do a lot of missionary work at hotels.”
Sigurdur Oli stood up and dawdled in front of Erlendur, who had finished his plate and was eyeing up the buffet again.
“Ehmmm, where will you be spending Christmas?” Sigurdur Oli asked awkwardly.
“Christmas?” Erlendur said. “I’ll be … what do you mean, where will I be spending Christmas? Where should I spend Christmas? What business of yours is that?”
Sigurdur Oli hesitated, then took the plunge.
“Bergthora was wondering if you’d be on your own.”
“Eva Lind has some plans. What did Bergthora mean? That I should visit you?”
“I don’t know,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Women! Who ever understands them?” Then he sauntered away from the table and down to the basement.
Elinborg was standing in front of the murdered man’s room, watching the forensics team at work, when Sigurdur Oli came walking down the dim corridor.
“Where’s Erlendur?” she asked, throttling her little bag of peanuts.
“At the buffet,” Sigurdur Oli said peevishly.
A preliminary test made that evening revealed that the condom was covered with saliva.
3
Forensics contacted Erlendur as soon as the biopsy results were available. He was still at the hotel. For a while the scene of the crime looked like a photographer’s studio. Flashes lit up the dim corridor at regular intervals. The body was photographed from all angles, along with everything found in Gudlaugur’s room. The corpse was then transported to the morgue on Baronsstigur where the postmortem would be performed. Forensics had combed the doorman’s room for fingerprints and found many sets, which would be checked against the police records. All the hotel staff were to be fingerprinted and the forensics team’s discovery also meant that saliva samples would have to be taken.
“What about the guests?” Elinborg asked. “Won’t we have to do the same with them?”
She yearned to get home and regretted the question; she wanted to finish her shift. Elinborg took Christmas very seriously and missed her family. She hung up fir branches and decorations all around her home. She baked delicious cookies, which she stored in her Tupperware boxes, carefully labelled by variety. Her Christmas roast was legendary, even outside her extended family. The main course every Christmas was a Swedish-style leg of pork, which she kept outside on the balcony to marinate for twelve days, and tended it just as carefully as if it had been the baby Jesus in swaddling clothes.
“I think we have to assume, initially, that the murderer is an Icelander,” Erlendur said. “Let’s keep the guests in reserve. The hotel is filling up for Christmas now and few people are checking out. We’ll talk to the ones who do, take saliva samples, even fingerprints. We can’t prevent them from leaving the country. They would have to be prime suspects for us to do that. And we need a list of the foreigners staying at the hotel at the time of the murder, we’ll forget about the ones who check in afterwards. Let’s try to keep it simple.”
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