‘So what if I do?’
‘I’d like to buy it off you,’ Erlendur said. ‘For the same price you paid for it. What does a bottle of your home-made spirits cost?’
‘Hey, I’m not –’
‘Cut the crap.’ Erlendur didn’t want to waste time arguing. He was tired; he had been traipsing round all day, and the people he’d met and the things he’d seen had only exacerbated his fatigue. ‘I’m with the police,’ he continued. ‘I’m confident that if we entered your garage we’d find distilling apparatus and a store of illegal alcohol. And I’m sure you do a tidy line in smuggled booze – expensive stuff from abroad.’
‘The police?’ the man repeated.
‘Look, all I want is the earring,’ said Erlendur. ‘I know you’ve got it. Give it to me and I’ll leave you alone.’
The man hesitated.
‘There’s no point in hanging on to one earring,’ he said at last.
‘Exactly,’ Erlendur agreed.
‘And it’s not gold. No way. It’s a piece of crap. I had it valued. It’s plate.’
‘You mean you gave Thurí too much for it?’
‘No. Not really. It’s just not worth much so … you … you can have it if you like.’
The man’s eyes strayed to the garage door. Erlendur understood that he was trying to make the best of a bad situation.
26
The jeweller inspected the earring intently, thought for a while, then finally announced that he had never stocked it or anything like it.
‘Not a bad piece,’ he added. ‘The gold plate’s fairly thick and it’s a nice bit of work.’
‘What about the pearl?’ asked Erlendur.
‘That’s genuine. But I didn’t make this and I didn’t sell it either.’
In his professional opinion, the earring was unlikely to be very old as the style was still in fashion. It was fairly large, made of two quite substantial linked hoops. Suspended from the lower, slightly smaller, hoop was a tiny, white pearl. Altogether it was an attractive piece, possibly bespoke; good quality, though the jeweller did not recognise the handiwork. It could have been purchased in Reykjavík or elsewhere in Iceland, but just as easily from somewhere abroad.
The earring looked none the worse for its spell under the hot-water pipe. It couldn’t have been lying there for long before Thurí spotted it glinting in the darkness of the tunnel. Her lucky charm, she had called it. It hadn’t brought her much luck so far.
Two days had passed since Erlendur acquired the earring from Thurí’s supplier. He had been carrying it around with him ever since. He had studied it minutely under his office lamp but had no idea what secrets it might hold, nor if it had any bearing on Hannibal’s story. He’d most likely come across it by chance. But it was the only piece of the jigsaw that didn’t fit; the only piece that had arrived there without explanation. The only gleam of light in Hannibal’s squalid shelter.
The jeweller handed the earring back. He was the second expert Erlendur had consulted in the hope of tracing its owner. Erlendur was employing the only strategy he could think of: to take the earring to every jeweller in Reykjavík.
‘Nice Christmas present,’ commented the man. He was wearing a white coat and had a powerful magnifying glass hanging from a cord round his neck. ‘Not too expensive, but pretty. Or the sort of thing you might give your wife for a wedding anniversary. Or a birthday. I could make another to match it, if you like.’
‘Thanks, but there’s no need,’ said Erlendur. ‘I just happened to find it and was hoping I might be able to return it to its owner.’
‘Very conscientious of you,’ the man said with surprise.
‘No harm in trying.’
‘The clip’s all right,’ the jeweller continued, inspecting it carefully. ‘Nothing wrong with it. Though clip-ons like these can easily come off. Real earrings are less likely to get lost, but lots of women don’t like the idea of having their ears pierced.’
‘How do they come loose? Would they have to be knocked in some way? Or do they just slip off?’
‘They slip off,’ said the jeweller, confirming what Thurí had told him. ‘The clips vary in quality. What did you mean by knocked?’
‘If the owner was involved in a tussle, say.’
‘Well, yes, of course. It goes without saying.’
In the third shop a young woman examined the earring carefully before announcing that she did not recognise it. But she added that she had worked there less than two years – she was training to be a silversmith – so it might have been sold before her time. The manager had popped out for a minute but Erlendur was welcome to wait. She too was impressed by his attempt to trace the owner; she had never heard of anyone being so considerate. She wasn’t busy, so seemed keen to chat, but soon realised she was wasting her time.
Erlendur was weighing up his options – whether to come back later, or wait and see if the manager turned up soon – when the door opened. A tall man marched in, ignoring both of them, and closed the door of the workshop smartly behind him.
‘That’s him,’ the young woman whispered to Erlendur. ‘He’s getting a divorce,’ she added, as if embarrassed by the man’s behaviour.
‘Oh,’ said Erlendur discouragingly, finding this information quite unnecessary.
The assistant pursued the manager and a minute or two later he emerged from his workshop, having put on a white coat. It struck Erlendur as odd that jewellers dressed like doctors or scientists, but then again perhaps their work required the same precision as an operation or an experiment.
‘Can I see it?’ the man asked without preamble.
Erlendur handed it over. The jeweller recognised it immediately.
‘It’s one of mine,’ he said. ‘I made two pairs, if I remember rightly. A couple of years back. They sold almost at once. I gather you’ve lost the other one. Want me to make a replacement?’
‘No, he didn’t lose it,’ put in the young woman. ‘He found this one and wants to return it to the owner, if he can.’
‘That’s right,’ Erlendur said. ‘I was wondering if you could help me trace her.’
‘I don’t keep a record of small sales like this,’ the man said. He really was unusually tall and towered over the counter. ‘I didn’t charge much for them.’
‘But could you –?’
‘Though, now I come to think of it, I do remember one of them being sent back for repairs. They come with a warranty. Everything I sell comes with a warranty.’
He clamped a loupe in his eye and took a closer look.
‘I can’t tell if it was this one. There’s no sign of the pearl having worked loose. But I do remember the job. It wasn’t very complicated, so it’s hardly surprising if the repair’s invisible.’
‘You couldn’t find the owner’s name for me, could you?’
The man laid the earring on the counter.
‘Hang on a tick,’ he said.
The young woman gave Erlendur an encouraging smile. The jeweller reappeared from his office carrying a large file and began to leaf through it.
‘I make a record of repairs,’ he said, flicking through invoices, receipts, sums and notes, until he found what he was looking for.
‘Here we are.’ He removed a receipt from the file. ‘Repair under warranty. That rings a bell.’
‘What was the woman’s name?’ asked Erlendur.
‘It’s not on the invoice,’ the jeweller said. ‘It’s coming back to me now. It was a man who bought this set. I took down his name because of the repair. It’s here on the receipt. You should be able to track him down. I never met his wife, so I don’t know if they suited her. I have a feeling he said something about a birthday present, though I may be wrong.’
He passed over the receipt.
Erlendur committed the name to memory. Then, picking up the earring, he returned it to his pocket and thanked them both.
‘Very thoughtful of you,’ said the tall jeweller in parting.
‘I do my be
st.’
* * *
That evening, having unobtrusively obtained the necessary information from police records, he headed over to Fossvogur. It was only about half an hour’s walk, and before long he was standing by a small flat-roofed house, located on a quiet street. The husband now lived here alone. No movement was visible inside and the curtains were drawn. Perhaps he was out.
It had been his name on the jeweller’s receipt. None other than the man who had reported his wife missing the previous year. She had gone for a night out with colleagues at Thórskaffi and never come home. The police file had described her as mad about jewellery. Her husband had bought her a beautiful pair of earrings a year or so before she went missing, and now Erlendur knew beyond a doubt that Thurí had found one of them in Hannibal’s old camp.
27
The night was unusually hectic. They were called out to an altercation at a residential address, followed by another in front of a bar; then they stopped three motorists for speeding. One turned out to be a teenager without a licence, who was driving a stolen car and drunk into the bargain. They had noticed the car’s erratic progress along Miklabraut and sped off after him, lights flashing. The teenager had tried to make a break for it, skidding onto the Breidholt road, where he floored the accelerator. The car, however, was an ageing Cortina with a tiny engine, so they had no trouble overtaking and forcing him to pull over. The boy leapt out and raced south towards Kópavogur. Marteinn was the fastest. With a resigned sigh, he set off after the boy and eventually caught up with him. The boy swore at them as they drove him to the City Hospital for a blood test. With that, the incident was considered closed. As it was a first offence, there were no grounds for keeping him in custody overnight. The owner of the car had been informed but did not wish to press charges against the ‘young fool’. After all, his vehicle wasn’t damaged and he hadn’t even been aware it was missing until the police woke him with the news.
The boy’s father, on the other hand, was so apoplectic that they had to pacify him before releasing the boy into his care.
‘You’re nothing but bloody trouble,’ the father said, shoving his son out of the police station ahead of him.
Erlendur had been even more taciturn than usual that night and as they came off duty Gardar asked if he was all right. Erlendur had not confided in them, or indeed anyone else apart from Rebekka, about his private investigation.
‘All right? Of course.’ All night long he had been puzzling over the fate of the woman from Thórskaffi.
‘There’s something on your mind,’ insisted Gardar.
‘No, there isn’t.’
‘Are Marteinn and I really so boring?’
‘Well, you’re not exactly scintillating company.’
His companions chuckled. They parted outside the station and Erlendur made his way home in the morning sunshine, his mind still preoccupied with a succession of images: Hannibal, the earring, the house in Fossvogur that the missing woman had shared with her husband, her route home from Thórskaffi and what had happened on the way. He couldn’t begin to fathom the implications of her earring turning up in Hannibal’s camp just before he died. The woman had disappeared and Hannibal had drowned the same weekend, yet no one had thought to connect the two incidents, least of all Erlendur himself. They were two completely unrelated events. In fact, so much emphasis had been placed on finding the woman that the inquiry into Hannibal’s death had been brushed aside, as it appeared to be straightforward and not at all urgent.
Erlendur knew he shouldn’t read too much into the coincidence. Not as things stood. It was more likely that the husband had bought the earring for his wife than for another woman, such as his mother or sister – or even a mistress, if he had one. But that didn’t mean his wife had lost it the night she vanished. Living as she did within walking distance of the pipeline, she may well have passed it on a regular basis. There was every chance she’d dropped the earring another time and Hannibal had picked it up.
Alternatively, the woman might have walked along the pipeline one last time before deciding to take her own life. It was not far to Fossvogur or Skerjafjördur, where she could have waded into the sea. The earring could have slipped off without her noticing and fallen into a gap in the casing before she even set off on her final journey. In which case her disappearance and Hannibal’s demise were completely unconnected.
A further possibility was that Hannibal, or a friend who visited him, had found the piece of jewellery somewhere else entirely and later dropped it in the tunnel.
Only after running through all the permutations he could think of did Erlendur permit himself to visualise what might have happened if, after leaving Thórskaffi, the woman had encountered Hannibal. As far as he knew, they were not acquainted; indeed it was hard to imagine any circumstances in which they could have got to know each other. She had mentioned wanting to walk home to clear her head. One route she might have taken passed the pipeline. Something could have happened which caused her earring to fall off. In this version of events, she would have needed to be near Hannibal’s makeshift home, if not actually inside it.
Was it conceivable that he could have harmed her?
Erlendur was reluctant to pursue the thought to its logical conclusion. After all, the woman might have run into someone else and had an argument; perhaps it had turned violent and she had lost her earring and ultimately her life. Hannibal may never have seen the woman, let alone witnessed her fate.
Erlendur wrestled with the problem, repeatedly contradicting himself, until in the end he decided there was nothing for it but to go up to the pipeline again. First, however, he went home to pick up a powerful torch. Then he walked up to Öskjuhlíd, where he clambered onto the conduit and followed it east.
He saw no sign of Vilhelm, the previous occupant. No doubt he had found somewhere better to sleep. His litter remained, though: empty plastic bags, bottles and meths containers. The grass was still flattened around the entrance but the place was clearly deserted. Even the feral cats had gone.
Erlendur lowered himself to the ground, switched on the torch and eased his way inside. A faint warmth emanated from the pipes. The daylight did not extend much beyond the opening: the dark tunnel stretched out on either side, winding its way through miles of countryside. The rough concrete walls were at least a metre high and topped with a series of convex slabs, each three metres long, their joins sealed with mortar. Even a man of Erlendur’s size could fit between the pipes and the wall, and lie there with his back to the warmth if he so desired.
He shone the torch into the gloom to his left, the section that originated in the Mosfell valley, but could see nothing but pipes. The same went for the right-hand side, which ran back towards Öskjuhlíd. It was here, close to the entrance, that Hannibal had set up camp and where Vilhelm too had been sleeping when Erlendur encountered him. Thurí had found the earring under one of the pipes. Trying to master his sense of dread, Erlendur forced himself to crawl what felt like an interminable distance into the tunnel, first on one side, then on the other, looking for further traces of the woman from Thórskaffi.
It was a relief to emerge into the open air: he did not like narrow, enclosed spaces. Outside, he inspected the grass around the entrance, systematically widening the search area.
All he found was a golf ball, half buried in the turf. He doubted that it dated back to the time of the golf club. More likely it was recent; he recalled that the boy he met that evening in Kringlumýri had mentioned someone from Hvassaleiti practising there.
Pocketing the ball, he headed for home. It was mid morning and as so often that summer the sky was cloudless. He had done his best to reject the idea that Hannibal might have met the missing woman, but there was no getting away from the fact: Hannibal had been living in the pipeline when she vanished. And an earring, almost certainly hers, had turned up there.
It was not difficult to put two and two together.
Hard as it was to accept, Erlendur could not entirely
dismiss the possibility that Hannibal was responsible for the woman’s disappearance. He no longer knew how to proceed. Should he inform CID of his discoveries? Or would it be premature?
He hurried home wondering what on earth to do. In his mind’s eye he saw Hannibal: on the bench in the square, propped half-frozen against the corrugated-iron fence on Arnarhóll, in the cellar. A crazy tramp. And there was the accident in Hafnarfjördur, the death of his wife. Could he have been blind drunk or off his head on drugs when the woman from Thórskaffi crossed his path?
Erlendur could not rule it out.
It was a relief that he had found no further evidence in the tunnel. The enormity of it was too horrible to contemplate: that Hannibal might have seen the woman passing and dragged her inside, never to escape.
At least he had not left her body in the tunnel: Erlendur had made certain of that.
His last conversation with Hannibal now came back to him: he had talked of his misery. Had Hannibal been on the edge? Should Erlendur have realised then that he might be a danger to himself and others?
He didn’t know. He had no idea what to think any more.
28
The last time Erlendur saw Hannibal had been shortly before the boys found his body. He was coming to the end of his shift after a quiet night midweek. There had been few call-outs and Erlendur’s only companion in the patrol car had been a veteran officer called Sigurgeir. They had stopped three motorists for speeding and, as usual, much of their time had been taken up with blood tests and forms. They had also followed up a report of an attempted break-in on Laugavegur, but the thieves had got away. A witness had spotted them trying to force open the back door of a watch shop, but they hadn’t had much luck and had vanished before the police arrived.
As Sigurgeir swung into Hafnarstræti they heard over the radio that the thieves had been apprehended committing another burglary. Erlendur had found an old copy of the Althýdubladid newspaper left behind in the car and was immersed in a translated Swedish serial called The Laughing Policeman, about a shooting on a bus in Stockholm. He searched in vain for the author’s name. Sigurgeir, who was familiar with the story, said it was written by two people – a couple, he thought.
Reykjavik Nights Page 12