Voices de-5

by Arnaldur Indridason

“Is he complaining?”

  “He hasn’t said a word.”

  “Has he asked for a lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “Make a charge for child pornography”

  “Child pornography?”

  “He had tapes in his room containing child pornography. Possession of them is illegal. We have a witness who saw him watching that filth. We’ll take him for the porn and then we’ll see. I don’t want to let him go back to Thailand just yet. We need to find out if his story of going into town the day that Gudlaugur was murdered holds good. Let him sweat in his cell a bit and we’ll see what happens.”

  21

  Erlendur watched the tapes for almost the whole night.

  He soon got the hang of using fast forward when no one walked past the camera. As expected, the heaviest footfall in front of the bank was over the period from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon, after which it slowed down sharply, and even further when the souvenir shops closed at six. The entrance to the hotel was open round the clock and there was an ATM but little traffic around it in the dead of night.

  He saw nothing noteworthy the day Gudlaugur was murdered. The faces of the people going through the lobby were quite clearly visible but Erlendur didn’t recognise any of them. When he fast-forwarded through the night recordings, figures would dart in through the door and stop at the cash machine before rushing out again. An occasional person went into the hotel itself. He scrutinised them but couldn’t link any with Gudlaugur.

  He saw that the hotel staff used the bank entrance. The head of reception, the fat hotel manager and Osp could be seen rushing past, and he thought to himself how relieved she probably felt to get away after her day at work. In one place he saw Gudlaugur cross the lobby, and he stopped the tape. This was three days before the murder. Gudlaugur, alone, paced slowly in front of the camera, looked inside the bank, turned his head, looked over at the souvenir shops and then went back to the hotel. Erlendur rewound and watched Gudlaugur again, then again and a fourth time. He found it odd to see him alive. He stopped the tape when Gudlaugur looked inside the bank and watched his frozen face on the screen. It was the choirboy in the flesh. The man who once had that lovely voice, that tear-jerking boy soprano. The boy who forced Erlendur to probe into his own most painful memories when he heard him.

  There was a knock on the door, and he turned off the video and opened for Eva Lind.

  “Were you asleep?” she asked, squeezing past him. “What are these tapes?”

  “They’re to do with the case,” Erlendur said.

  “Getting anywhere?”

  “No. Nowhere.”

  “Did you talk to Stina?”

  “Stina?”

  “The one I told you about. Stina! You were asking about tarts and the hotels.”

  “No, I haven’t spoken to her. Tell me something else, do you know a girl of your age called Osp who works at this hotel? You have a similar attitude to life.”

  “Meaning?” Eva Lind offered her father a cigarette, gave him a light and flopped down onto the bed. Erlendur sat at the desk and looked out through the window into the pitch-black night. Two days to Christmas, he thought. Then we’ll be back to normal.

  “Pretty negative,” he said.

  “Do you reckon I’m really negative?” Eva Lind said.

  Erlendur said nothing, and Eva snorted, sending billows of smoke out through her nose.

  “And what, you’re the picture of happiness?”

  Erlendur smiled.

  “I don’t know any Osp,” Eva said. “What’s she got to do with it?”

  “She has nothing to do with it,” Erlendur said. “At least I don’t think so. She found the body and seems to know a few things about what goes on in this place. Quite a smart girl. A survivor, with a mouth on her. Reminds me a bit of you.”

  “I don’t know her,” Eva said. Then she fell silent and stared at nothing, and he looked at her and said nothing either, and time went by. Sometimes they had nothing to say to each other. Sometimes they argued furiously. They never made small talk. Never talked about the weather or prices in the shops, politics, sport or clothes, or whatever it was that people spent their time discussing, which they both regarded as idle chatter. Only the two of them, their past and present, the family that was never a family because Erlendur walked out on it, the tragic circumstances of Eva and her brother Sindri, their mother’s malice towards Erlendur — that was all that mattered, their topic of conversation that coloured all contact between them.

  “What do you want for Christmas?” Erlendur suddenly broke the silence.

  “For Christmas?” Eva said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  “You must want something.”

  “What did you get for Christmas? When you were a boy?”

  Erlendur thought. He remembered some mittens.

  “Little things,” he said.

  “I always thought Mum gave Sindri better presents than me,” Eva Lind said. “Then she stopped giving me presents. Said I sold them to buy dope. She gave me a ring once and I sold it. Did your brother get better presents than you?”

  Erlendur felt the way she cautiously probed him. Usually she went straight to the point and shocked him with her candour. At other times, much less frequently, she seemed to want to be delicate.

  When Eva was in intensive care after her miscarriage, in a coma, the doctor told Erlendur to try to be with her as much as possible and talk to her all the same. One topic that Erlendur talked about to Eva was his brother’s disappearance and how he himself was rescued from the moor. When Eva regained consciousness and moved in with him he asked her whether she remembered what he had said to her, but she did not recall a word. Her curiosity was aroused and she pressed him until he repeated what he had told her, what he had never told anyone about before and no one knew about. He had never talked to her about his past and Eva, who never tired of calling him to account, felt that she moved a little closer to him, felt she knew her father a fraction better, although she also knew that she was a long way from understanding him fully. One question that haunted Eva made her angry and spiteful towards him, and shaped their relationship more than anything else. Divorces were common, she realised that. Couples were always getting divorced and some divorces were worse than others, when the partners never spoke again. Aware of this, she did not question it. But she was totally incapable of fathoming why Erlendur divorced his children too. Why he took no interest in them after he left. Why he continually neglected them until Eva herself sought him out and found him alone in a dark block of flats. She had discussed all this with her father, who so far could provide no answers to her questions.

  “Better presents?” he said. “It was all the same. Really just like in the old Christmas rhyme: a candle and a pack of cards. Sometimes we would have liked something more exciting, but our family was poor. Everyone was poor in those days”

  “What about after he died? Your brother.”

  Erlendur said nothing.

  “Erlendur?” Eva said.

  “Christmas disappeared with him,” Erlendur said.

  * * *

  The birth of the Saviour was not celebrated after his brother died. More than a month had elapsed since his disappearance and there was no joy in the home, no presents and no visitors. It was a custom for Erlendur’s mother’s family to visit them on Christmas Eve when they would all sing Christmas carols. It was a small house and everyone sat close together, emanating warmth and light. His mother refused all visitors that Christmas. His father had sunk into a deep depression and spent most days in bed. He took no part in the search for his son, as if he knew it was futile, as if he knew he had failed; his son was dead and he could do nothing about it, nor anyone ever, and that it was his fault and no one else’s.

  His mother was indefatigable. She made sure that Erlendur was nursed properly. She urged on the search party and took part herself. She was the last to come down from the moors
when darkness fell and searching became futile, exhausted, and was the first to set off back into the highlands when it grew light again. After it became obvious that her son must be dead she kept on searching just as energetically. It was not until winter had set in completely, the snows were so deep and the weather so treacherous that she was forced to give up. Forced to face up to the fact that the boy had died in the wilds and she would have to wait until spring to look for his earthly remains. She turned towards the mountains every day, sometimes cursing. “May the trolls eat you who took my boy!”

  The thought of his dead body lying up there was unbearable to Erlendur, who began seeing him in nightmares from which he awoke screaming and crying, fighting the blizzard, submerged in the snow, his little back turned against the howling wind and death by his side.

  Erlendur did not understand how his father could sit motionless at home while all the others were hard at work. The incident seemed to break him completely, turn him into a zombie, and Erlendur thought about the power of grief, because his father was a strong, vigorous man. The loss of his son gradually drained him of the will to live and he never recovered.

  Later, when it was all over, his parents argued for the first and only time about what happened, and Erlendur found out that their mother had not wanted their father to go up onto the moors that day, but he did not listen to her. “Well,” she said, “since you’re going anyway, leave the boys at home.” He paid no heed.

  And Christmas was never the same again. His parents reached some kind of accord as time went by. She never mentioned that he had ignored her wishes. He never mentioned that he had been seized by stubbornness at hearing her tell him not to go and not to take the boys. There was nothing wrong with the weather and he felt she was meddling. They chose never to talk about what happened between them, as if breaking the silence would leave nothing to keep them together. It was in this silence that Erlendur tackled the guilt that swamped him at being the one who survived.

  “Why’s it so cold in here?” Eva Lind asked, wrapping her coat tighter.

  “It’s the radiator,” Erlendur said. “It doesn’t get warm. Any news about you?”

  “Nothing. Mum got off with some bloke. She met him at the old-time dancing at Olver. You can’t imagine how gross that freak is. I think he still uses Brylcreem, he combs his hair into a quiff and wears shirts with sort of huge collars and he clicks his fingers when he hears some old crap on the radio. ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean…’”

  Erlendur smiled. Eva was never as bitchy about anything as when she described her mother’s “blokes”, who seemed to become more pathetic with every year that went by.

  Then they fell silent again.

  “I’m trying to remember what I was like when I was eight,” Eva suddenly said. “I don’t really remember anything except my birthday. I can’t remember the party, just the day it was my birthday. I was standing in the car park outside the block and I knew it was my birthday that day and I was eight, and somehow this memory that is totally irrelevant has stuck with me ever since. Just that, I knew it was my birthday and I was eight.”

  She looked at Erlendur.

  “You said he was eight. When he died.”

  “It was his birthday that summer.”

  “Why was he never found?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But he’s up there on the moor?”

  “Yes.”

  “His skeleton.”

  “Yes.”

  “Eight years old.”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it your fault? That he died?”

  “I was ten.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “It was no one’s fault.”

  “But you must have thought…”

  “What are you driving at, Eva? What do you want to know?”

  “Why you never contacted me and Sindri after you left us,” Eva Lind said. “Why didn’t you try to be with us?”

  “Eva,…”

  “We weren’t worth it, were we?”

  Erlendur looked out of the window in silence. It had started snowing again.

  “Are you drawing a parallel?” he said eventually.

  “I’ve never been given an explanation. It crossed my mind…”

  “That it was something to do with my brother. The way he died. You want to associate the two?”

  “I don’t know,” Eva said. “I don’t know you in the slightest. It’s a couple of years since I first met you and I was the one who located you. That business with your brother is all I know about you apart from the fact you’re a cop. I’ve never been able to understand how you could leave Sindri and me. Your children.”

  “I left it to your mother to decide. Maybe I should have been firmer about gaining access but…”

  “You weren’t interested,” Eva finished the sentence for him.

  “That’s not true.”

  “Sure it is. Why didn’t you take care of your children like you were supposed to?”

  Erlendur said nothing and stared down at the floor. Eva stubbed out her third cigarette. Then she stood up, went to the door and opened it.

  “Stina’s going to meet you here at the hotel tomorrow,” she said. “At lunchtime. You can’t miss her with those new tits of hers.”

  “Thanks for talking to her.”

  “It was nothing,” Eva said.

  She hesitated in the doorway.

  “What do you want?” Erlendur asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “No, I mean for Christmas”

  Eva looked at her father.

  “I wish I could have my baby back,” she said, and quietly closed the door behind her.

  Erlendur heaved a deep sigh and sat on the edge of his bed for a long while before he resumed watching the tapes. People going about their Christmas errands rushed across the screen, many of them carrying bags and parcels of Christmas shopping.

  He had reached the fifth day before Gudlaugur was murdered when he saw her. Initially he overlooked it but a flash went off somewhere in his mind and he stopped the recorder, rewound the tape and went back over the scene. It was not her face that caught Erlendur’s attention, but her bearing; her walk and haughtiness. He pressed “Play” again and saw her clearly, walking into the hotel. He fast-forwarded again. About half an hour later she reappeared on the screen when she left the hotel and strode past the bank and souvenir shops looking neither left nor right.

  He stood up from the bed and stared at the screen.

  It was Gudlaugur’s sister.

  Who had not set eyes on her brother for decades.

  FIFTH DAY

  22

  It was late when the noise woke Erlendur up the following morning. It took him a long time to stir after a dreamless night, and at first he did not realise what the awful din was that resounded in his little room. He had stayed up all night watching a succession of tapes, but only saw Gudlaugur’s sister that one day. Erlendur couldn’t believe it was purely coincidence that she went to the hotel — that she had business there other than to meet her brother, with whom she claimed to have had no contact for decades.

  Erlendur had unearthed a lie and he knew there was nothing more valuable for a criminal investigation.

  The noise refused to stop, and gradually Erlendur realised that it was his telephone. He answered and heard the hotel manager’s voice.

  “You must come down to the kitchen,” the manager said. “There’s someone here you should talk to.”

  “Who is it?” Erlendur asked.

  “A lad who went home sick the day we found Gudlaugur,” the manager said. “You ought to come.”

  Erlendur got out of bed. He was still in his clothes. He went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror and perused the several days” stubble, which made a noise like sandpaper being rubbed over rough timber when he stroked it. His beard was dense and coarse like his father’s.

  Before going downstairs he telephoned Sigurdur Oli and told him to go to with Elin
borg to Hafnarfjordur to take Gudlaugur’s sister in for questioning. He would meet them later that day. He did not explain why he wanted to talk to her. He did not want them to blurt it out. Wanted to see her expression when she realised that he knew she had been lying.

  When Erlendur went into the kitchen he saw the hotel manager standing with an exceptionally skinny man in his twenties. Erlendur wondered whether the contrast with the manager was playing tricks on his vision; beside him, everyone looked skinny.

  “There you are,” the manager said. “Anyone would think I’m taking over this investigation of yours, locating witnesses and whatever.”

  He looked at his employee.

  “Tell him what you know.”

  The young man began his account. He was fairly precise about details and explained that he had started to feel ill around noon on the day Gudlaugur was found in his room. In the end he vomited and just managed to grab a rubbish sack in the kitchen.

  The man gave the manager a sheepish look.

  He was allowed to go home and went to bed with a bad fever, a temperature and aches. Since he lived alone and did not watch the news he hadn’t mentioned to anyone what he knew until this morning when he came back to work and heard about Gudlaugur’s death. And he was certainly surprised to hear what had happened, and even though he didn’t know the man well — he had only been working in the hotel for just over a year — he did sometimes talk to him and even went down to his room and-

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the manager said impatiently. “We’re not interested in that, Denni. Just get on with it.”

  “Before I went home that morning Gulli came into the kitchen and asked if I could get him a knife.”

  “He asked to borrow a knife from the kitchen?” Erlendur said.

  “Yes. At first he wanted scissors, but I couldn’t find any so then he asked for a knife.”

  “Why did he need scissors or a knife, did he tell you?”

  “It was something to do with the Santa suit.”

  “The Santa suit?”

  “He didn’t go into detail, just some stitches he needed to unpick.”