Voices de-5

by Arnaldur Indridason

  “Eh?”

  “Osp’s brother. You said he was a bigger tart than you.”

  “Ask her,” Stina said.

  “I will, but I mean, what… he’s her little brother, didn’t you say?”

  “Yes, and he’s a… bye-bye, baby.”

  “A bye-bye baby. You mean a…?”

  “Bisexual.”

  “And, does he prostitute himself?” Erlendur asked. “Like you?”

  “You bet. A junkie. There’s always someone wanting to beat him up because he owes them money”

  “And what about Osp? How do you know her?”

  “We were at school together. So was he. He’s only a year younger than her. We’re the same age. We were in the same class. She isn’t that bright.” Stina pointed at her head. “Not up there,” she said. “Left school at fifteen. Failed the lot. I passed them all. Finished secondary school.”

  Stina gave a broad smile.

  Erlendur sized her up.

  “I know you’re my daughter’s friend and you’ve been helpful,” he said, “but you shouldn’t go comparing yourself with Osp. For a start, she doesn’t have itchy stitches.”

  Stina looked at him, still smiling out of one corner of her mouth, then walked out of the office without a word and through the lobby. On the way she swung her fur-collared coat over her, but now her motions lacked all dignity. She came face to face with Sigurdur Oli and Gudlaugur’s sister as they entered the lobby, and Erlendur saw Sigurdur Oli goggle at Stina’s breasts. He thought to himself that she must have got her money’s worth after all.

  The hotel manager stood nearby as if he had been waiting for Erlendur’s meeting to finish. Osp was standing by the lift and watched Stina leave the hotel. It was obvious that Osp recognised her. When Stina walked past the head of reception who was sitting at his desk, he looked up and watched her go out through the door. He glanced over at the hotel manager who waddled off in the direction of the kitchen, and Osp entered the lift, which closed behind her.

  “What’s behind all this tomfoolery, may I ask?” Erlendur heard Gudlaugur’s sister say as she approached him. “What’s the meaning of such effrontery and rudeness?”

  “Effrontery and rudeness?” Erlendur said in a quizzical voice. “That doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “This man here,” the sister said, clearly unaware of Sigurdur Oli’s name, “this man has been rude to me and I demand an apology.”

  “Out of the question,” Sigurdur Oli said.

  “He pushed me and led me out of my home like a common criminal.”

  “I handcuffed her,” Sigurdur Oli said. “And I won’t apologise. She can forget that. She called me plenty of names and Elinborg too, and she resisted. I want to lock her up. She was impeding a police officer in the execution of his duty.”

  Stefania Egilsdottir looked at Erlendur and said nothing.

  “I’m not accustomed to such treatment,” she said at last.

  “Take her down the station,” Erlendur said to Sigurdur Oli. “Put her in the cell next to Henry Wapshott. We’ll talk to her tomorrow.” He looked at the woman. “Or the day after.”

  “You can’t do this,” Stefania said, and Erlendur could tell that she was severely taken aback. “You have no reason to treat me like this. Why do you think you can throw me in prison? What have I done?”

  “You’ve been lying,” Erlendur said. “Goodbye.” And then to Sigurdur Oli, “We’ll be in touch.”

  He turned away from them and set off in the direction the hotel manager had gone. Sigurdur Oli took Stefania by the arm and was about to lead her away, but she stood rooted to the spot and stared at Erlendur’s retreating back.

  “All right,” she called after him. She tried to shake off Sigurdur Oli. “This is not necessary,” she said. “We can sit down and talk this over like human beings”

  Erlendur stopped and turned around.

  “My brother,” she said. “Let’s talk about my brother if you want. But I don’t know what you’ll gain by it”

  They sat down in Gudlaugur’s little room. She said she wanted to go there. Erlendur asked whether she had been there before and she denied it. When he asked whether she had not met her brother in all those years, she repeated what she had said before, that she had not been in contact with her brother. Erlendur was convinced that she was lying. That her business at the hotel five days before Gudlaugur’s murder was in some way connected with him, not mere coincidence.

  She looked at the poster of Shirley Temple in the role of the Little Princess without the slightest change of expression or word of comment. Opening the wardrobe, she saw his doorman’s uniform. Finally she sat down on the only chair in the room, while Erlendur propped himself up against the wardrobe. Sigurdur Oli had meetings scheduled in Hafnarfjordur with more of Gudlaugur’s old classmates and left when they went down to the basement.

  “He died here,” the sister said without a hint of regret in her voice, and Erlendur wondered, just as he had at their first meeting, why this woman apparently lacked all feeling towards her brother.

  “Stabbed through the heart,” Erlendur said. “Probably with a knife from the kitchen,” he added. “There is blood on the bed.”

  “How sparse,” she said, looking around the room. “That he should have lived here all those years. What was the man thinking of?”

  “I was hoping you could help me with that one.”

  She looked at him and said nothing.

  “I don’t know” Erlendur went on. He regarded it as ample. Some people can only live in a villa five hundred metres square. I understand that he benefited from living and working at the hotel. There were plenty of perks.”

  “Have you found the murder weapon?” she asked.

  “No, but perhaps something resembling it,” Erlendur said. Then he stopped and waited for her to speak, but she did not utter a word and a good while elapsed until she broke the silence.

  “Why do you claim I’m lying to you?”

  “I don’t know how much of it is a lie but I do know that you’re not telling me everything. You’re not telling me the truth. But of course above all you’re not telling me anything and I’m astonished at your and your father’s reaction to Gudlaugur’s death. It’s as if he was nothing to do with you.”

  She took a good long look at Erlendur, then seemed to make a decision.

  “There were three years between us,” she said suddenly, “and, young as I was, I still remember the first time they brought him home. One of my first memories in life, I expect. He was the apple of his father’s eye from day one. Dad was always devoted to him and I think he had great things in mind for him from the very start. It didn’t come of its own accord, as it should have done perhaps — our father always had something big planned for when Gudlaugur grew up.”

  “What about you?” Erlendur asked. “Didn’t he see you as a genius?”

  “He was always kind to me,” she said, “but he worshipped Gudlaugur.”

  “And drove him on until he broke down.”

  “You want to have things simple,” she said “Things rarely are. I would have thought that a man like you, a policeman, realised that.”

  “I don’t think this revolves around me,” Erlendur said.

  “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  “How did Gudlaugur end up alone and abandoned in this little room? Why did you hate him so much? I could conceivably understand your father’s attitude if Gudlaugur cost him his health but I don’t understand why you take such a harsh stand against him.”

  “Cost him his health?” she said, looking at Erlendur in surprise.

  “When he pushed him down the stairs,” Erlendur said. “I’ve heard that story.”

  “From whom?”

  “That’s not important. Is it true? Did he cripple your father?”

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  “Definitely not,” Erlendur said. “Unless it concerns the investigation. Then I’m afraid i
t’s more people’s business than just you two.”

  Saying nothing, Stefania looked at the blood on the bed, while Erlendur pondered why she wanted to talk to him in the room where her brother had been murdered. He thought of asking her, but could not bring himself to.

  “It can’t always have been that way,” he said instead. “The choirmaster told me you came to your brother’s rescue when he lost his voice on stage. At some point you were friends. At some point he was your brother.”

  “How do you know what happened? How did you dig that up? Who have you been talking to?”

  “We’re gathering information. People from Hafnarfjordur remember it well. You weren’t totally indifferent to him then. When you were children.”

  Stefania remained silent.

  “The whole thing was a nightmare,” she said at last. “A terrible nightmare.”

  * * *

  In their house in Hafnarfjordur they spent the whole day excitedly looking forward to when he would sing at the cinema. She woke up early, made breakfast and thought about her mother, feeling that she had assumed that role in the household and was proud of it. Her father mentioned how helpful she was at looking after the two of them after her mother died. How grown-up and responsible she was in everything she did. Normally he never said anything about her. Ignored her. Always had.

  She missed her mother. One of the last things her mother said to her in hospital was that now she would need to look after her father and brother. She must not let them down. “Promise me that,” her mother said. “It won’t always be easy. It hasn’t always been easy. Your father can be so stubborn and strict and I don’t know whether Gudlaugur can take it. But if it ever comes to that you must stand with him, Gudlaugur, promise me that too,” her mother said, and she nodded and promised that too. And they held hands until her mother fell asleep, and then she stroked her hair and kissed her on the forehead.

  Two days later she was dead.

  “We’ll let Gudlaugur sleep a little bit longer,” her father said when he came down into the kitchen. “It’s an important day for him.”

  An important day for him.

  She did not recall any day being important for her. Everything revolved around him. His singing. The recording sessions. The two records that had been released. The invitation to tour Scandinavia. The concerts in Hafnarfjordur. The concert tonight. His voice. His singing practice when she had to sneak around the house so as not to disturb them as he stood by the piano and his father played the accompaniment, instructing and encouraging him and showing him love and understanding if he felt he did well, but being strict and firm if he did not think he concentrated enough. Sometimes he lost his temper and scolded him. Sometimes he hugged him and said he was wonderful.

  If only she had received a fraction of the attention lavished on him and the encouragement that he was given every day for having that beautiful voice. She felt unimportant, devoid of any talent that could attract her father’s attention. He sometimes said it was a shame that she did not have a voice. He regarded teaching her to sing as a hopeless task, but she knew that wasn’t the case. She knew that he could not be bothered to expend his energy on her, because she did not have a special voice. She lacked her brother’s gift. She could sing in a choir and hammer out a tune on the piano, but both her father, and the piano teacher he sent her to because he did not have the time to attend to her himself, talked about her lack of musical talent

  Her brother, on the other hand, had a wonderful voice and a profound feeling for music, but was still just a normal boy like she was a normal girl. She did not know what it was that distinguished them from each other. He was no different from her. To some extent she was in charge of his upbringing, especially after their mother fell ill. He obeyed her, did what she told him and respected her. Similarly, she loved him, but also felt jealous of the praise he earned. She was afraid of that feeling and mentioned it to no one.

  She heard Gudlaugur coming down the stairs, and then he appeared in the kitchen and sat down beside their father.

  “Just like Mum,” he said as he watched his sister pour coffee into their father’s cup.

  He often talked about their mother and she knew he missed her terribly. He had turned to her when something went wrong, when the boys bullied him or their father lost his temper, or simply when he needed someone to hold him without it being a special reward for a good performance.

  Expectation and excitement reigned in the house all day and had reached an almost unbearable pitch when towards evening they put on their best clothes and set off for the cinema. The two of them accompanied Gudlaugur backstage, their father greeted the choirmaster, and then they crept out into the auditorium as it began to fill up. The lights in the auditorium dimmed. The curtain rose. Quite big for his age, handsome and peculiarly determined as he stood on stage, Gudlaugur finally began to sing in his melancholy boy soprano.

  She held her breath and closed her eyes.

  The next thing she knew was her father grabbing her by the arm so tightly that it hurt, and hearing him moan: “Oh my God!”

  She opened her eyes and saw her father’s face, pale as death, and when she looked up at the stage she saw Gudlaugur trying to sing, but something had happened to his voice. It was like yodelling. She rose to her feet, looked all around the auditorium behind her and saw that people had started to smile and some were laughing. She ran up onto the stage to her brother and tried to lead him away. The choirmaster came to her assistance and eventually they managed to take him backstage. She saw her father standing rigid in the front row, staring up at her like the god of thunder.

  When she lay in bed that evening and thought back to that terrible moment her heart missed a beat, not from fear or horror at what had happened or how her brother must have felt, but from a mysterious glee for which she had no explanation and which she repressed like an evil crime.

  * * *

  “Did you have a guilty conscience about those thoughts?” Erlendur asked.

  “They were completely alien to me,” Stefania said. “I’d never thought anything like that before.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s anything abnormal about gloating over other people’s misfortunes,” Erlendur said. “Even people close to us. It may be an instinct, a kind of defence mechanism for dealing with shock.”

  “I shouldn’t be telling you this in such detail,” Stefania said. “It doesn’t paint a very appealing picture of me. And you may be right. We all suffered shock. An enormous shock, as you can imagine.”

  “What was their relationship like after this happened?” Erlendur asked. “Gudlaugur and his father.”

  Stefania ignored his question.

  “Do you know what it’s like not to be the favourite?” she asked instead. “What it’s like just being ordinary and never earning any particular attention. It’s like you don’t exist. You’re taken for granted, not favoured or shown any special care. And all the time someone you consider your equal is championed like the chosen one, born to bring infinite joy to his parents and the whole world. You watch it day after day, week after week and year after year and it never ceases, if anything it increases over the years, almost … almost worship.”

  She looked up at Erlendur.

  “It can only spawn jealousy,” she said. “Anything else would not be human. And instead of suppressing it the next thing you know is that you’re nourished by it, because in some odd way it makes you feel better.”

  “Is that the explanation for gloating over your brother’s misfortune?”

  “I don’t know,” Stefania said. “I couldn’t control that feeling. It hit me like a slap in the face and I trembled and shivered and tried to get rid of it, but it wouldn’t go. I didn’t think that could happen.”

  They fell silent.

  “You envied your brother,” Erlendur said then.

  “Maybe I did, for a while. Later I began to pity him.”

  “And eventually hate him.”

  She looked at Erl
endur.

  “What do you know about hate?” she said.

  “Not much,” Erlendur said. “But I do know that it can be dangerous. Why did you tell us that you hadn’t been in contact with your brother for almost three decades?”

  “Because it’s true,” Stefania said.

  “It’s not true,” Erlendur said. “You’re lying. Why are you lying about that?”

  “Are you going to send me to prison for lying?”

  “If I need to I will,” Erlendur said. “We know that you came to this hotel five days before he was murdered. You told us you hadn’t seen or been in contact with your brother for decades. Then we discover that you came to the hotel a few days before his death. On what business? And why did you lie to us?”

  “I could have come to the hotel without meeting him. It’s a big hotel. Did that ever occur to you?”

  “I doubt that. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you came to the hotel just before he died.”

  He saw that she was prevaricating. Saw that she was mulling over whether to take the next step. She had patently prepared herself to give a more detailed account than at their first meeting, and now was the moment to decide whether to take the plunge.

  “He had a key? she said in such a low voice that Erlendur could barely hear it. “The one you showed to me and my father.”

  Erlendur remembered the key ring that was found in Gudlaugur’s room and the little pink penknife with a picture of a pirate on it. There were two keys on the ring, one that he thought was a door key and the other that could well fit a chest, cupboard or box.

  “What about that key?” Erlendur asked. “Did you recognise it? Do you know what it fits?”

  Stefania smiled.

  “I have an identical key,” she said.

  “What key is it?”

  “It’s the key to our house in Hafnarfjordur.”

  “You mean your home?”

  “Yes,” Stefania said. “Where my father and I live. The key fits the basement door at the back of the house. Some narrow steps lead up from the basement to the hall and from there you can get into the living room and kitchen.”