Daybreak

by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson

  The policeman opened the cage and called to the dog, “We’re here! Come on out!”

  The dog shook itself and jumped out of the car. It ran around, urinating here and there.

  “His name’s Bingo,” the policeman said, and the dog barked twice, as if in agreement.

  As they walked toward the crime scene, Birkir described the situation to the cop. The body had been removed, and all that was left was a dark pool of blood and the outline Anna had drawn with white spray paint. Nearby, another mark indicated where the severed leg had lain; and a third mark showed the position of the dead dog, which the local patrolman had taken away.

  They began by taking Bingo to the edge of the ditch where the gunman had probably hidden. The uniformed cop, clearly an experienced dog handler, gave the order to track, and the dog began nuzzling the turf with his snout; then, as the cop made encouraging noises, the dog ran around in circles for a while. Birkir watched from a suitable distance, doing his best to note the dog’s movements. Finally the dog raced up the hillside toward the boulders, where he nosed around, stopping the longest behind the boulder where they had found the spent shells. Here the yellow grass was partly trodden down; the area would have provided a good view of the ruined wall, making it a likely spot for the gunman to have positioned himself. After further prompting, the dog turned back and made a beeline for the road, running along it all the way up to the highway, where he stopped and barked furiously; in the distance they could hear the dogs at Litla-Fell joining in.

  Birkir came to the conclusion that there had probably been a single gunman, who had fired at the ruin from two directions. Having completed their task, the cop and his dog departed.

  While Birkir had followed the dog, Gunnar had helped the forensic team chart the area. After they’d measured distances with a long tape, he’d recorded everything in his notebook. They’d also positioned numbered markers on all the places where shots had made impact, most of which were in and around the ruin. They’d noticed that the victim had directed some of his fire up toward the hillside; these shots appeared random, as none had landed near the place they now assumed the gunman had been hiding.

  Anna had little luck finding footprints. For several days, the weather had been dry, and the earth was hard and empty of marks. She knew the ditch was the best place to look, since any person walking along its muddy bottom would have left some imprint; but oddly, although the ground was disturbed, there were no footprints.

  “I think he must have tidied up after himself,” she said, looking at her colleague. “It’s as if he covered up all his tracks with some sort of a tool. Maybe with the butt of his weapon.”

  After she had measured and photographed the disturbed area, her colleague took a plastic mold of an impression that was possibly made by a shotgun butt.

  21:00

  The police headquarters on Hverfisgata was quiet as the members of the investigating team filtered in one by one. The building was almost deserted and most of the rooms were dark. A young woman was washing the floor in the corridor, listening to music on her headphones and singing along, apparently unconcerned with how terrible she sounded.

  In the violent crime squad’s section, all the lights were ablaze, and Birkir detected a certain tension in the air. The first meeting in a murder inquiry was always like this. Everybody was waiting to see if the data could be assembled into a coherent whole. Would they find something that would bring them closer to solving the case, or would the puzzle pieces not fit together? There were seven of them involved in the investigation, and, apart from Detective Superintendent Magnús, they all looked rather tired. The “Super” had not left the building all day, but he had kept in phone contact with the team, organizing and coordinating their operations while dealing with questions from the media as news of the incident spread quickly. And, of course, there were also other ongoing investigations to supervise.

  Magnús still had a bit of a tan leftover from his vacation the month before, which looked good against his tidy gray hair and thick mustache. Usually he looked cheerful, but now the wrinkles between his eyebrows indicated he was worried. Two years shy of sixty, he looked fit for his age, and only the slightest bit of belly fat protruded over his belt. He’d managed to squeeze in a swim after work, at about five, when he’d realized that this briefing would take up most of his evening.

  Gunnar did not look as alert as his boss. He was visibly tired, his clothes were rumpled and stained, and when he stood up his colleagues could see that he hadn’t tucked his shirt into his pants. Leafing through his notebook, he described his and Birkir’s investigation at the crime scene. As he spoke, he wrote bullet points on a whiteboard with a blue marker.

  Incident takes place at dawn, 6:00–6:30 a.m.

  Weapon: a powerful shotgun.

  Farmer Gudjón reports the incident 9:30 a.m.

  The attack is focused and brutal.

  The assailant is probably quick on his feet.

  The victim tried to defend himself.

  Gudjón and a young grandson are at home.

  They hear a number of shots, probably about 30 in all.

  Farmer Gudjón says he owns a shotgun but refuses to produce it.

  Birkir also had his notebook open in front of him; he sat and listened to his colleague with critical attention, adding his input when he felt it was needed, which, actually, was not that often. Birkir looked in much better shape than his partner; his clothes were still clean, the creases in his pants were still visible, and his face looked alert.

  After Gunnar finished his report, it was Anna’s turn to cover the forensics. Large prints of the crime-scene photographs had been stuck up on the wall. But either the computer settings had been wrong, or the printer had been faulty, because the pictures were marred by too much blue ink. The blood wasn’t red; it was purple. But maybe that was actually an improvement—it made it all seem slightly less real.

  Anna pointed at the pictures with a cigarette as she detailed each item, her voice hoarser than ever. In the absence of an ashtray, she flicked the ash from the cigarette into her trusty film canister. Predictably, smoking was banned in the conference room, but Anna had special dispensation—she had a certificate, signed by a distinguished psychiatrist at the National University Hospital, saying that she should be permitted to smoke at work.

  She exhaled cigarette smoke and summed up her findings. “We have completed a preliminary investigation of the spent shells found on the hillside and in the ditch and concluded that those shots were, in all probability, fired from the same gun. That means that the murderer was probably acting alone, using a single weapon.”

  Opposite Gunnar and Birkir at the conference table were detectives Símon and Dóra. They had been busy gathering background information about the deceased and had interviewed as many of his family, friends, and coworkers in Reykjavik as they’d been able to track down.

  Dóra described their visit to the widow.

  “She’s around my age, late twenties. It was all a bit dramatic,” she said.

  “Too dramatic?” Magnús asked.

  “No, just suitably dramatic, given the circumstances. She had no part in this incident, if that’s what you’re asking,” Dóra replied. “I think,” she added, after a pause.

  Birkir had been expecting this addition. Dóra was very conscientious but prone to hesitation. He chalked it up to her inexperience, which would wear off as the years passed; learning how to correctly interpret people’s facial expressions when they were confronted by the police took time. Some detectives, in fact, never got it, as they were too wrapped up in their own egos. Dóra was not one of them.

  “I stayed with her until her mother arrived,” Dóra said. “She was beginning to recover by the time I left.”

  Dóra was a sturdy young woman with red hair and freckles; she was short and powerfully built but well proportioned. On her left cheekbone she bore a horizontal scar that, although prominent, somehow didn’t look bad on her.

  Sh
e had originally been part of the uniformed division; during her rehabilitation after a car accident, she had been drafted to spend time in the detective division for a short trial period. Her superiors there found her to be organized and precise, attributes that were handy in doing detective work. Then two detectives retired, and she was appointed to one of the vacancies.

  Símon had gotten the other position. He came from the crime prevention unit, where he had been pretty useless; this had something to do with his interpersonal skills, the rumors went. This flaw didn’t matter as much in the detective division, but he had, all the same, signed up for a leadership-training course with the hope of improving his people skills. Símon was thirty-five, with short black hair and dark five o’clock shadow. What people usually noticed first about him, however, were his prominent ears.

  “I went to the deceased’s law office,” he said. “They knew nothing.”

  “Nothing?” said Magnús. “Whom did you speak to?”

  “I spoke to the chief executive and Ólafur’s secretary. The chief executive was going to call a staff meeting and announce the death.”

  “How did the staff react?”

  “I don’t know. I had to go to the course.”

  “The course?”

  “Yep, Dale Carnegie. You told me to go, remember?”

  “Couldn’t you skip a session?”

  “No. They strongly recommend against that. But we should take a closer look at the farmer, don’t you think?” Símon said, trying to change the subject. “We need to search the farm buildings for the gun, don’t we? Shouldn’t we have done that already, earlier today?”

  Gunnar and Birkir looked wearily at one another.

  Magnús thought it over and then said, “It’s not advisable to apply for a warrant on such flimsy grounds. We need better reasons.”

  Gunnar said, “In that case it seems to me we should ask the sheriff to persuade the old guy to show us the shotgun, rather than force him. If he’s guilty and has taken Ólafur’s gun, then he will definitely have hidden it somewhere safe. We’d need to demolish the whole place to find it.”

  “Isn’t that going to happen anyway?” Símon asked.

  Birkir looked up from his notebook. “Whoever shot Ólafur isn’t going to leave the gun under his bed for us to find. Some thought has gone into all of this,” he said.

  23:30

  It was past Birkir’s usual bedtime when he got back to his little apartment on Bergstadastræti in the center of town. There was nobody waiting up for him; he lived alone, as he had for many years. The apartment was on the second floor of an unusual old house; it was cramped and oddly laid out, but had high ceilings and a homey atmosphere. It had a living room and a bedroom of similar size, a long and somewhat narrow kitchen, and a small bathroom tiled in a sickly pale green. The place looked just as it had when he bought it; he hadn’t gotten around to making any improvements. At this point he was used to it. All the walls were painted white, the ceilings gray-green, and the floor was covered in dark parquet. The living room had an ivory sofa and a glass-topped steel-frame coffee table, along with several big, lush potted plants that added ambience. The framed pictures on the walls, which included oil paintings, watercolors, and photographs, all depicted the same subject, if in different ways: people with stringed instruments. There was a watercolor depicting a sad clown with a violin; a black-and-white photograph in a beautiful old frame of the string section of a symphony orchestra; and a vibrant, stylized oil painting of a string quartet.

  Birkir switched on the light in the living room and opened a cupboard containing CDs. He picked a disc he had compiled with adagio sections from classical works, and put it on. He stood still for a little while, listening to the opening notes of the intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana; it was Semyon Bychkov conducting the Orchestre de Paris. He turned up the volume and went into the bathroom, where he undressed slowly and took a long, hot shower. Afterward, he dried himself with a large white towel and put on navy-blue cotton pajamas.

  Birkir Li Hinriksson was a loner. He had probably always been a loner, but nobody knew much about his childhood. Even his own memories of his early years were very limited. Originally known simply as Li, he’d been born toward the end of 1970 in Vietnam, when that country was still in the throes of a horrific war, and most of its inhabitants lived a precarious existence. His parents were tradespeople of Chinese origin, and by the time the war ended in 1975, they were living in extreme poverty. The extended family owned a battered old riverboat; twenty-three of them used it to sail out to sea in the hope of finding a better life in another country. This was how young Li became one of the boat people—one among thousands who, in the years after the war, drifted around the South China Sea on any manner of makeshift craft.

  His family actually had more luck than most. On their fortieth day at sea, they were picked up by a French freighter that was heading for Malaysia. By that time only eleven of them remained alive, the others having perished from hunger, thirst, or disease. Both of Li’s parents were already dead and his brothers and sisters were gone; his earliest memories began with what came after the freighter arrived in Malaysia. He was taken in by a family living in a refugee camp near Kuala Lumpur. It was a life of poverty, but he didn’t know anything else and he rarely suffered from hunger.

  In 1978 foreign visitors arrived at the camp—white people wearing badges with a red cross and speaking a very strange language. Li’s adopted family was invited to go live in a new country they had never heard of. The head of the family looked at a map that the foreign people carried with them and saw that it was an island, not far from the country he had always dreamed of going to, the United States of America. He had relatives there, and that was where he wanted to live, so he accepted the invitation to move to this northerly island, determined that he’d build a boat as soon as he arrived and travel to America with his whole family. The Red Cross had registered Li as a member of the family, so he was going with them.

  The group of twenty-nine refugees arrived in Iceland in pitch darkness on January 10, 1979. Li thought he would never see the sun again. But then it started snowing and that brought him happiness. At first, they all lived together in a big house and tried to learn Icelandic, but before long the group dispersed, and Li moved with his foster parents and four siblings into a small apartment in Kópavogur, where they shared three cramped rooms. Li had not learned any Icelandic during their first months in the country, so there was no point sending him to school. He did, however, meet Hinrik and Rúna, an old couple who lived in the same apartment building. Each morning the old man drove south to Vatnsleysuströnd, where he kept sheep; Li was allowed to go with him, and soon his Icelandic began to improve.

  Li’s foster father scanned the sea from the shore and came to the conclusion that it was not really advisable to travel to America in a homemade boat, so his big plans came to nothing. He did, however, manage to get in touch with his relatives in Minnesota, and the family decided to go for a visit, using their new Icelandic passports. Li was allowed to stay behind with his friends, Hinrik and Rúna, supposedly for two weeks—but his foster family never returned from their visit to America.

  Li continued to live with the old couple and became increasingly fluent in Icelandic. Hinrik taught him the language using the only method he knew; he made Li memorize the work of the classic Icelandic poets. Hinrik himself knew most of Einar Benediktsson’s verse and much of Jónas Hallgrímsson’s writing, in addition to the work of other poets. They spent the day in the old man’s jeep, in the sheepfolds, or in the kitchen, with Hinrik continuously reciting poetry that Li had to repeat; the boy loved doing this. In time, he learned to read, starting with the poems. Many years later he realized that he only needed to read or hear a poem once to know it by heart; the same was true for song lyrics, however inane.

  In the fall of 1980 Li started school, at which point he spoke very good, if somewhat old-fashioned, Icelandic. Although by now nearly ten years
old, he was put into a class with eight-year-olds; nobody knew exactly how old Li was, but he was the same height as an eight-year-old Icelander. This worked quite well, since he had never attended school before, but as a result the national register listed Li as having been born in 1972; the officials decided on January 10 as his birthday, that being the day in 1979 when he had arrived in Iceland. Asked to select a new name for himself, he chose Birkir as his first name, and based his patronymic on old Hinrik’s name to convey the only lineage he really knew. Birkir Li Hinriksson, as he was known after that, lived with the elderly couple until 1992, when he turned twenty, according to the official records. Old Rúna died that fall and Hinrik put his last sheep down and went into a nursing home. Two years later he died, too.

  Birkir recalled very little of his time in Malaysia. There, every day had been much the same and he had mostly been left to his own devices. He remembered nothing at all of the years before that, during the Vietnam War. Occasionally, if he detected the smell of something burning, strange fragments of memory would surface—but they were always too vague to make much sense. He hadn’t heard his native tongue for twenty-five years, and at this point, had no idea whether he would understand a word of it. Yet he hardly ever gave this any thought. He knew that a large community of people from Vietnam lived in the Reykjavik area, but felt no urge to look them up. He had no wish to revisit the language he had once spoken, and was, in any case, not at all gregarious. He simply liked his own company.

  Birkir graduated from Kópavogur High School and embarked on studies at the Iceland University of Education. Around this time, the Reykjavik Police got in touch and offered him a job on a trial basis; some Thai youths had been causing trouble, and senior officers at the police department had decided that it might be sensible to recruit an officer who was also an immigrant. It was a good idea, although not for the reasons the department had intended. Birkir turned out to be an excellent policeman. As for the Thai immigrants, Birkir looked just as alien to them as any other cop who tried to make contact—the only difference was that he looked more Chinese than Icelandic.