Black Skies de-8

by Arnaldur Indridason

  ‘We don’t know that either,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘This is all we were sent. Can you tell us what the boy’s saying?’

  ‘It’s very hard to tell,’ Elísabet said via the interpreter. ‘I’ll need to see it again.’

  ‘You can watch it as many times as you like,’ said Sigurdur Óli.

  ‘Do you know who filmed this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s only short. Do you have any idea if there’s more?’

  ‘No. This is all we have.’

  ‘What year was it filmed?’

  ‘We don’t know but it’s probably old. We don’t have much to go on because there’s nothing in the frame that can be dated with any accuracy, and although we know that this type of film was in use up until 1990, there’s nothing to say that it wasn’t used more recently. The only thing we could conceivably go by is the boy’s haircut.’

  Sigurdur Óli told the women that he had had three stills made and taken them to several barbershops with long-serving staff. When he showed them the pictures, all had made the same comment: the boy had the sort of cut that had been in fashion until about 1970, a short back and sides, with a long fringe.

  ‘So the film was made in the 1960s?’ Elísabet asked.

  ‘Possibly,’ replied Sigurdur Óli.

  ‘Weren’t lots of boys given a short back and sides in those days before being sent to work on farms over the summer?’ said Hildur. ‘I have two younger brothers who were born around 1960 and they were always trimmed like that before going to the country.’

  ‘You mean this might have been filmed somewhere in the countryside?’ said Sigurdur Óli.

  Hildur shrugged.

  ‘It’s very difficult to see what he’s saying,’ she interpreted Elísabet’s comment, ‘but I think it could be Icelandic.’

  They watched the clip again and Elísabet concentrated hard on the boy’s lip movements. The clip passed before their eyes again and again, ten times, twenty times, while Elísabet focused wholly on the boy’s mouth. Sigurdur Óli had tried himself to guess what the boy was saying, without success. He would have liked it to be a name, for it to transpire that he was addressing the cameraman by name, but knew it was unlikely to be that simple.

  ‘… stop it …’

  The words were uttered by Elísabet, her eyes still fixed on the screen.

  They emerged without emphasis, monotonous, robotic and a little distorted, her voice as high and clear as a child’s.

  Hildur glanced from her to Sigurdur Óli.

  ‘I’ve never heard her speak before,’ she whispered in amazement.

  ‘… stop it …’ said Elísabet again. Then repeated: ‘Stop it.’

  It was late in the evening before Elísabet finally felt fairly confident that she had made out the boy’s pleading words.

  Stop it.

  Stop it.

  No more, please …

  Please, stop it.

  25

  Earlier that day, while driving between barbershops with the film stills, Sigurdur Óli had made an effort to track down Andrés. He discovered that Andrés was registered at the same block of flats as the previous winter, so he drove there and banged on his door till the stairwell echoed. No one answered. He was considering forcing an entry when the door of the neighbouring flat opened and a woman of about seventy came out.

  ‘Are you the one making all this noise?’ She glared at Sigurdur Óli.

  ‘Do you know anything about Andrés’s whereabouts? Have you seen him recently?’ asked Sigurdur Óli, ignoring the woman’s angry expression.

  ‘Andrés? What do you want with him?’

  ‘Nothing. I just need to talk to him,’ said Sigurdur Óli, suppressing the impulse to tell the woman that it was none of her business.

  ‘Andrés hasn’t been around for ages,’ the woman said, giving Sigurdur Óli an appraising look.

  ‘He’s a bit of a tramp, isn’t he? An alcoholic?’ said Sigurdur Óli.

  ‘So what if he is?’ the woman replied, affronted. ‘He’s never bothered me. He’d do anything for you, he’s never noisy, never makes demands on other people. What does it matter if he has the odd drink?’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘And who are you, might I ask?’

  ‘I’m from the police,’ Sigurdur Óli answered, ‘and I need to talk to him. It’s nothing serious. I just need to see him. Can you tell me where he is?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ the woman said, regarding Sigurdur Óli suspiciously.

  ‘Is it possible that he’s in his flat? In some sort of state which means he can’t hear me?’

  Her eyes flitted to Andrés’s door.

  ‘You haven’t seen him for a long time,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘Has it occurred to you that he might be lying helpless in his flat?’

  ‘He gave me a key,’ the woman said.

  ‘You have a key to his flat?’

  ‘He said he was always losing his, so he asked me to keep a spare. He’s needed it sometimes too. Last time I saw Andrés was when he came to fetch the spare key.’

  ‘What sort of state was he in?’

  ‘Pretty rough, poor thing,’ admitted the woman. ‘He seemed very worked up, I don’t know why, but he told me not to worry about him.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Late in the summer.’

  ‘Late summer!’

  ‘It’s perfectly normal for me not to see him for a while.’ The woman became defensive, as if she were somehow responsible for her neighbour.

  ‘Shouldn’t we open the door and check on him?’ suggested Sigurdur Óli.

  The woman dithered. According to the smart copper plaque on her door, her name was Margrét Eymunds.

  ‘I can’t imagine that he would be in there,’ she said.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to make sure?’

  ‘I suppose it wouldn’t do any harm,’ she said. ‘Of course there’s a danger the poor man could have hurt himself. But you’re not to touch anything. I doubt he’d want the police snooping around his flat.’

  She went and fetched the spare key, then unlocked Andrés’s door. As they stepped inside they were met by a shocking stench of filth and rotting food. Sigurdur Óli had been in this flat before and knew what to expect: the squalid evidence of an alcoholic existence. The flat was not large, so it did not take them long to assure themselves that Andrés was not lying there at death’s door or worse; in fact he was not there at all. Sigurdur Óli switched on the lights, revealing a scene of slovenly disorder.

  He cast his mind back to the last time he had been there and what had passed between Andrés and Erlendur and himself. Andrés’s behaviour had been bizarre and he seemed to have been on a long bender. He had dropped hints that a dangerous man was living in the neighbourhood, a man he knew of old, who, from what they could gather, was a paedophile. But Andrés had obstinately refused to give them any more information about the man in question. They had found out by other means that he had been Andrés’s stepfather, a man called Rögnvaldur, who had used a number of aliases, including Gestur. After an initial sighting, he had given them the slip, however, and it did not help that all they had was Andrés’s limited and incoherent testimony, which they considered far from reliable. Andrés claimed that the man had ruined his life, that Rögnvaldur was a nightmare he could never wake from, and implied that he had committed a murder, but would not say a word more. Erlendur had taken this to mean that Andrés himself had been the victim of this ‘murder’, strange as it might seem; that he was referring obliquely to the suffering that Rögnvaldur had inflicted on him, which had blighted the rest of his life.

  Sigurdur Óli could find no indications in the flat as to Andrés’s current whereabouts.

  But there was one detail that took him by surprise amid the rubbish and neglect: Andrés had apparently been engaged in cutting up pieces of leather in the kitchen. Scraps of it littered the kitchen table and the floor around it, and a strong needle and thick th
read lay on the table. Sigurdur Óli spent some time poring over the offcuts of leather, trying to deduce what Andrés had been up to. The woman tried to insist on his leaving, since Andrés was not at home, but he ignored her, stubbornly continuing to inspect the bits of leather, trying to assemble them mentally. There was some logic to them that escaped him at first, so he began to piece them together on the table in an attempt to work out what the man had been cutting out. Soon he stood back to find himself confronted by a square, with sides about forty centimetres long, out of which had been cut an oval piece that tapered towards the bottom.

  Sigurdur Óli stared down at the table; at the needle and thread. There were a few small scraps of leather remaining, which he tried to fit into the picture. It was not very difficult and once they were in place he was met by the image of a face, with eyes and a mouth. It seemed, to Sigurdur Óli’s puzzlement, that Andrés had been making a mask of some kind.

  Back at the station, Sigurdur Óli dug out Andrés’s police file. He had done time for theft and violence, though only for short stints. He was never a career criminal. Essentially, he was an alcoholic and drug addict who financed his habit largely by burglary and theft, and was sometimes forced to act in self-defence, or so he claimed in his statements to the police. People had often attacked Andrés unprovoked, in an attempt to take what was lawfully his, but he was quoted as saying that he wasn’t going to let any bloody bastard walk all over him.

  Sigurdur Óli asked around among the experienced officers in an attempt to find out the latest news of Andrés. It turned out that he was pretty much out of sight, out of mind. Most people had forgotten all about Andrés, though one officer, at Sigurdur Óli’s insistence, rang a retired colleague and managed to obtain some further information. The man remembered Andrés clearly and mentioned that his chief friend and companion in the old days when both were living as down-and-outs in Reykjavík was a man called Hólmgeir, known as Geiri. Although straight nowadays and sober, with a regular job, he had spent many years in the gutter, well known to the police as a drunk and minor offender.

  These days, Geiri was employed as a security guard on night shifts at a large furniture warehouse, part of an international chain, and was at work when Sigurdur Óli wanted to talk to him, so he decided to drop by and see him on his way home that evening. He had rung ahead and Hólmgeir, forewarned, let him in the back entrance. He was dressed in uniform, with a walkie-talkie fixed to one shoulder in a leather holster, a torch and other gear. There’s nothing like a convert, thought Sigurdur Óli, remembering that a mere decade earlier, Geiri had been on the streets.

  Sigurdur Óli had already explained his business and asked him to think about it, so he weighed straight in, asking if Hólmgeir had any idea where Andrés might be living.

  ‘I’ve been racking my brains but I’m afraid I can’t be much help,’ said Hólmgeir, a fat man nearing fifty, who appeared to take pleasure in his uniform. His face bore evidence of past hardship and his voice was hoarse, as if from chronic catarrh.

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘A lifetime ago,’ said Hólmgeir. ‘Maybe you haven’t heard but I was in a hell of a state back then, pretty down on my luck, living rough, sleeping in dumps. I’d been a drunk for years and that’s how I met Andrés. He was in an even worse state than me.’

  ‘What kind of man was he?’ asked Sigurdur Óli.

  ‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ Hólmgeir answered promptly. ‘Always a bit of a loner; just wanted to be left in peace. I don’t know how to describe it: he was very touchy about what people said or did to him. He could be totally impossible. I often had to help him out when he was being hassled. Why are the police looking for him? Can you say?’

  ‘We need to talk to him about an old case,’ Sigurdur Óli replied, avoiding going into any detail. ‘Nothing particularly urgent but we do need to track him down.’

  He had been convinced from the outset that the boy in the film was Andrés himself and that by sending him the clip Andrés wanted to draw the attention of the police, or more precisely of Sigurdur Óli whom he had met before, to a crime or crimes that had been committed against him in his youth. The time frame fitted. The boy in the film was about ten years old. Andrés was forty-five, born in 1960, according to his police file. His statement about Rögnvaldur, his stepfather, had alleged that he was a paedophile, and Rögnvaldur had lived with Andrés’s mother during the period when it seemed likely that the film had been made.

  ‘Did he ever talk about how he ended up on the streets?’ asked Sigurdur Óli.

  ‘He never opened up about himself,’ Hólmgeir replied. ‘I sometimes used to ask him but he never answered. Some of the others were forever whining and moaning and blaming everyone but themselves. Pointing the finger, making accusations, that sort of crap. Including me, I might add. But I never heard him complain about anything. He just accepted his lot. But …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘But you got the feeling that he was angry; I never knew what about exactly. Although we hung around together, I never really got to know him. Andrés was very secretive. He was filled with loathing and rage, a seething rage he bottled up, which could boil over when you least expected it. But a lot of this is very hazy, you understand; I’m afraid there are long gaps in my memory.’

  ‘Do you know what he did before — what job, if he had one?’

  ‘Yes, he once tried to train as an upholsterer,’ Hólmgeir said. ‘He’d meant to learn the trade once, when he was young.’

  ‘Upholsterer?’ repeated Sigurdur Óli, picturing the scraps of leather at Andrés’s flat.

  ‘But it all came to nothing, of course.’

  ‘You don’t know if he’s been doing that sort of work recently?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘And you have no idea where he might be living?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he have any friends he could turn to?’ asked Sigurdur Óli. ‘Can you suggest anyone he might still be in touch with?’

  ‘No, he never went anywhere and no one ever visited him. There was a time he used to hang about the bus station at Hlemmur. It was warm and we were left in peace as long as we didn’t make any trouble. But he didn’t have any friends. Anyway, those friendships didn’t usually last long because people often wouldn’t survive the winter.’

  ‘No family?’

  Hólmgeir thought.

  ‘He sometimes talked about his mother but I gathered that she had died long ago.’

  ‘What did he say about her?’

  ‘He didn’t have a good word to say about her.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘I don’t remember exactly. I have a feeling it was to do with some people he’d been staying with in the countryside.’

  ‘Do you remember who they were?’

  ‘No, but Andrés spoke well of them. I think he’d wanted to stay there instead of coming to live in town. He said it was the only time in his life he’d been happy.’

  26

  Sigurdur Óli got home around midnight and collapsed on the sofa in front of the TV. He turned on an American comedy but soon lost interest and channel-surfed until he found a live broadcast of an American football game. But he could not concentrate on that either. His mind kept drifting to his mother and father and to Bergthóra and their relationship, and how it had all come off the rails without his making any real effort to save it. He had just let things run their course until they had gone irretrievably wrong and there was no turning back. Perhaps it was his obstinacy and indifference that had caused everything to break down.

  His thoughts moved on to Patrekur, from whom he had heard nothing since he was called in for questioning, and to Finnur, who had threatened to throw the book at him. This was unlike Finnur. He was good at what he did and it was out of character for him to act precipitately, but then of course Patrekur and Súsanna were not friends of his. Sigurdur Óli had nothing against Finnur. He was a family man, meticulous in his private and professional l
ives. His three daughters had been born at two-year intervals and all had birthdays in the same month. His wife was a part-time sixth-form teacher. He was conscientious almost to the point of pedantry, concerned that all his dealings should be above board, both with his colleagues and in his capacity generally as a police officer. So it was no surprise that he should take exception when Sigurdur Óli failed to take himself off the case, citing a conflict of interest. But Finnur had his foibles too, as Sigurdur Óli had reminded him. He had managed to pacify him for now but how long that would last he could not say. Sigurdur Óli could see nothing improper in continuing to work on the investigation despite his friend’s connection to the case. He had full confidence in his own judgement, and anyway Iceland was a small country; links to friends, acquaintances or family were inevitable. All that mattered was that they were handled in an honest, professional manner.

  The game ended and as Sigurdur Óli changed channels he thought about the film clip and the boy’s distressing pleas for mercy. He recalled the time he and Erlendur had visited Andrés shortly after New Year. Andrés, stinking and repulsive, had clearly been drinking for a long time. He had suddenly started referring to himself as little Andy, which Erlendur took to be a childhood nickname. So could it be little Andy on the clip? And where was the rest of the film? Were there others? Just what had little Andy been forced to endure at the hands of his stepfather? And where was this stepfather today? Rögnvaldur. Sigurdur Óli had checked the police records but found nobody by that name who could have been Andrés’s stepfather.

  If Andrés had looked terrible back in January when they had confronted him in his lair, he seemed in an even worse condition now, in the autumn. The wraithlike figure who had accosted Sigurdur Óli behind the police station had been a shadow of his former self: his haggard, grey face unshaven, a disgusting stench rising from his filthy clothes, his back hunched. A bundle of nerves. What had happened? Where had Andrés been hiding?

  Surely the boy in the film must be Andrés?

  Sigurdur Óli remembered how he had been at that age. His parents had recently divorced and he had been living with his mother but would spend some weekends with his father, accompanying him to work at times, as he seemed to work late seven days a week. Sigurdur Óli had learned a little about plumbing and discovered that his father had a nickname among his fellow tradesmen that puzzled him at first. He had gone with his father to a cafeteria one lunchtime; it was midweek but he had a day off school because it was Ash Wednesday, so he went with his father, who always ate lunch at the same place. The cafeteria was on Ármúli, somewhere tradesmen and labourers gathered to enjoy cheap, unpretentious platefuls of meatballs or roast lamb, shovelling down their food, smoking and swapping gossip before returning to work. It took no more than twenty minutes, half an hour at most, and then they were gone.