He entered the hallway and pressed the buzzer. The door opened, and Ragnar met him at the door of his ground-floor apartment in stocking feet but wearing a jacket. A bit like a visitor who, in the usual Icelandic fashion, had taken his shoes off on arrival, Birkir thought.
Ragnar showed Birkir in.
“This is Bára, my wife,” he said. “It’s difficult for her to get up.”
A very large woman sat in a deep armchair with a stool under her feet. Her face seemed lost in the rolls of fat that encased her neck and shoulders; it bore no expression, but now and again a fat hand brought a handkerchief up to her eyes to wipe away invisible tears. A dark-blue dress covered her immense body like a tent.
“We are completely beside ourselves with grief,” Ragnar said. “My wife was my father-in-law’s only child.”
Birkir turned to the woman and said, “My condolences to you both. I know that this is a very difficult time for you. I do, however, need to ask you some questions.”
There was no reply from the woman.
“What sort of questions?” Ragnar asked.
Birkir turned to him. “Can you describe to me the events leading up to the hunting trip?”
Ragnar looked surprised. “But I told the other policeman all that yesterday. Isn’t that enough?”
“You may be able to remember more detail today,” Birkir said. “Please, just go over it again. Step by step.”
“Very well, I’ll try,” Ragnar said. He hesitated a moment before beginning. “For many years, my father-in-law and I have made it a habit to go on an annual goose-hunting trip in September. We always try to go on the last Sunday of the month, to be exact. My father-in-law’s relatives own a farm in the Mýrar district, and he always has permission to shoot birds on their land. I’m not really much of a hunter myself, but my father-in-law was fond of it and he enjoyed having companionship. We began to prepare for the trip two weeks ago, but when news came of the murders I wanted to call it off. Isn’t that right, darling?”
Bára’s nose appeared to move up and down in her face. This was the only perceptible indication that her head was nodding in agreement; her chin and jaw were hidden beneath her voluminous double chins.
Ragnar continued. “But my father-in-law wouldn’t hear of putting off the trip. We’re not going to let ourselves be scared off, he said. But then it happened, just like that, as you know.”
“Did many people know of this hunting trip?” Birkir asked.
“Yes, although everybody naturally thought that we’d call it off. But my father-in-law was so determined, wasn’t he, love?”
The woman’s nose moved up and down again.
“Is it possible that someone followed you?”
“If they did, I wasn’t aware of it.”
“Is the area where you were a popular hunting ground?”
“It’s private land, so only people who get permission can hunt there—not many do.”
Birkir checked his notebook before saying, “The landowner says you were the only ones with license to hunt yesterday.”
The son-in-law nodded. “Yes, that’s correct.”
“Is it possible that you encountered somebody who was hunting there illegally?”
“I don’t know. Isn’t that most likely?”
“Yes, unless someone followed you.”
“Who could that have been?”
“Did anybody have a quarrel with your father-in-law?”
“No, not at all.”
“What about you?”
“Good heavens, no.”
“How old was your father-in-law?”
“Sixty-five in July.”
“What was his occupation?”
“He used to own a small fishing company, but sold it and retired when he turned sixty.”
Birkir checked his notebook. “He was single, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. His wife, my Bára’s mother, died eight years ago. She suffered from hypertension.”
“Was Vilhjálmur an enthusiastic hunter?”
“Yes, he used to do a lot of salmon fishing, and in the fall he would shoot birds, both goose and ptarmigan. He had plenty of time, of course, after he retired.”
“Are you sure he didn’t have any enemies?”
“None, so help me God. Why would you think that?”
“He was killed, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, that’s true, but who would these enemies be?”
Birkir decided to change the subject. “What’s your occupation?” he asked.
Ragnar relaxed. “I’m an elementary school teacher. The head teacher granted me leave for a few days because of our loss. He was very kind; he brought flowers from the school and the rest of the staff. He said he would arrange a substitute for me.”
Birkir got up and looked out the window at the yard.
“It’s a nice place you’ve got,” he said.
“Yes,” Ragnar said, adding somewhat proudly, “I take full responsibility for the garden. Our neighbors are all happy to leave it in my hands.”
He was visibly relieved to be able to talk about something other than the murder, and continued enthusiastically. “I always have plenty of time during my summer vacation to putter around in it. It suits me to be outside, and I love seeing how the plants thrive. There is a particularly beautiful Rosa moyesii here by the south wall. The spirea has also flowered beautifully for me in recent years. We’ve got a number of fruit bushes—red currants, black currants, and gooseberries. We always have a lot of berries, but the kids sometimes pick them before they’re ripe. The birds are also always after them. Around the perimeter I’ve got a Salix pentandra hedge that I trim every year. On the whole it’s all very successful, but I’d really like to increase the number of beds on the south side, and have a small greenhouse here by the east side of the house.”
“Can’t you do that?”
“No. I haven’t been able to get consent from the others for that. Also, the children in the building need somewhere to play. But they can be a bit boisterous and careless.”
Birkir felt sympathy for this meticulous gardener who seemed to have a lot to put up with. But it was time to return to the business at hand.
“I need you to make a list of everybody your father-in-law knew,” he said. He passed Ragnar a sheet of paper listing the various categories—family, friends, neighbors, and so on.
“I’ll try to put this together,” said Ragnar. “Bára will help me with it.”
“Do you have you a photograph of Vilhjálmur that I can borrow?”
“Yes.” Ragnar took down a framed picture from the wall and handed it to Birkir. “This one is relatively recent.”
11:35
Kristján, a detective from Akureyri, gazed in disbelief, first at the endless wilderness that surrounded them, and then at what lay at his feet—a human body wrapped in filthy black plastic. Brown tape had been wound several times around the bundle, but by now it was beginning to come apart, making the contents partly visible. The smell was appalling.
The men who had discovered the body had scooped it up with a digger and deposited it here. In retrospect, it would have been better to examine the body in situ, but Kristján let that pass. He hadn’t quite gotten his head around the fact that something like this could happen. That some geologist looking for road-building material could root up a half-rotten body wrapped in plastic, especially in this uninhabited vastness. Whoever dug this grave cannot have expected its contents to ever come to the surface. Sure, it had been buried just half a meter deep, but in ordinary circumstances that would have been enough to keep it from being discovered, even taking into account the considerable erosion caused by surface drying and constant wind.
Fródi Bergkvist and the digger operator were waiting in the Land Rover, which they had moved a good distance upwind of the excavation pit. They clearly didn’t want to remain anywhere near their find, nor to be exposed to the stench it emitted.
Kristján had already done a preliminary report
after obtaining from Fródi a detailed explanation of what the two men had been doing in this place, and what had led Fródi to select this precise spot for his soil sample.
“Geologically speaking, this area is quite promising,” Fródi had said. “There is also good vehicular access from the track down there. Other than that, it was pure chance.”
“The odds must be one in a billion to find a body this way,” Kristján declared to his colleague from the Húsavík police, who were responsible for this district. “We won’t hit another jackpot like this in our careers,” he added.
They were waiting for the hearse to arrive from Akureyri, bearing a hermetically sealed container for the remains. A forensic scientist from the Reykjavik detective division was on the way to Akureyri to open up the plastic bundle in the mortuary there. They would carry out further crime scene investigation at a later date if necessary. Actually, there was nothing to be seen on the ground here—no footprints or the like. The wind erosion in recent months had seen to that.
12:00
“…My nature is to kill. I hunt men and I never let go.”
When Gunnar finished reading the Gander’s e-mail, Magnús called the computer specialist from the economic crime division to ask for assistance. It was noon before the man turned up, and while they waited the team didn’t do much apart from stare at the screen and bite their nails. Over and over they read the reply to the question why. What on earth were they dealing with? What was in the mind of a person who could write something like that and then follow it through? I hunt men. Was there no reason for the murders apart from the instinct to kill? Was this just some horrifying game? Had the victims’ only crime been that they went hunting? Why did the Gander choose to kill hunters?
When the expert finally arrived, Magnús straightaway pointed at the computer screen. “Is it possible to trace this to the user?” he asked.
“Hotmail address,” the computer guy said, peering at the screen through thick glasses.
“Meaning?”
“It’s a mailbox that anybody with Internet access can create from anywhere.”
“But can it be traced, like a phone call?”
“It’s possible we could find an IP address, but it’s a long process that might take some time. It’ll go through a string of foreign servers.”
“How long?”
“For us? Probably days. It’s not a simple task. Best thing would be to keep him talking, try to get some more mail from him. Maybe he uses more than one computer.”
Magnús patted Gunnar on the back and said, “Do something.”
Gunnar again tapped at the keyboard: WHO ARE YOU? After a brief interval a reply arrived, but not with an answer to the question Gunnar had asked.
Distinguished opponents. It is your turn to answer some questions. We are going to play a little game. I shall pose you a riddle to solve, and you will reply within the time limit I set. If you give the wrong answer, someone will die. I may either choose the victim carefully or just pick at random. It depends how I feel. So there is much at stake. Let us begin with a few easy literary questions. The first is as follows: Whose eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming? Time limit 30 minutes. Good luck.
Magnús read the quotation aloud. “How do we find this in thirty minutes?” he asked despairingly.
The computer guy answered instantly, saying to Gunnar, “Do a Google search on the text.”
Gunnar did as he was told, and immediately a number of hits came up. Tensely the team scanned the screen.
“It’s a poem by Edgar Allan Poe,” said Gunnar, seeing that name mentioned in most of the results shown.
Magnús clapped his hands and said, “Great! Send him our reply.”
Gunnar looked at the clock. “No. We need to know whose eyes he’s writing about.”
He clicked on one of the sites listed and urgently began reading. “It’s a metaphor,” he said finally, “comparing the raven’s eyes to those of a demon.”
“We’ve got it, then,” said Magnús. “The Raven.”
Taking Gunnar’s place at the computer, the specialist forwarded all the exchange of messages to his own mailbox. “I’ll try to do what I can with this. Copy me on everything that passes between you. Don’t CC me on the e-mails, just forward them,” he said and left.
Magnús heard his cell phone ringing and disappeared into his office. He quickly came back and said, “That was the police in Akureyri. They found a body.”
12:30
Birkir was in the car outside Ragnar Jónsson’s home when his cell rang. It was Gunnar.
“Listen, a corpse has turned up near Mývatn. It was buried. Magnús wants you to go help the guys from Akureyri deal with the situation.”
“Why? Don’t we already have enough to deal with here?”
“Yeah, but the thing is, the victim’s been shot with a shotgun. Many times.”
“A shotgun?”
“Yeah, like all the others. Could be connected.”
“Is the body in reasonable condition?”
“No. It’s far gone—just over a year, we think. The guy was in his twenties, name of Leifur Albert Rúnarsson.”
“How do you know that?”
“He had some ID in his pocket.”
“A stroke of luck,” Birkir said. “Has he been missing? I can’t remember having heard about it.”
“It is actually a bit peculiar,” Gunnar replied. “He was declared dead about a year ago. Suicide. The media didn’t make much of it.”
“Hang on a minute. How so—suicide?”
“The Akureyri guys thought he had thrown himself into Dettifoss. His car was discovered by the falls, and there was a handwritten farewell note. It all seemed to be clear cut.”
“I see.”
“So, Elías from forensics flew up north this morning. He already removed the body from the plastic they found it in and took a preliminary look. Now he needs to go look around the place where it was buried. Can you get on the next flight?”
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
“What about you?”
“I’m busy playing a quiz game.”
12:45
Two minutes before their time was up, Gunnar typed in the answer: The Raven. Then he clicked Send.
The Gander replied quickly.
Well done. You are evidently well versed in the magic of Google search. Now we can get serious, with questions that the computer can’t manage. Question two: Which book’s final sentence asks the question, “What about Solitaire’s back?” You have four hours to solve this. Remember that a human life is at stake. We’ll communicate again at five o’clock. Bye.
Gunnar did a search on the word “Solitaire,” but got well over a hundred thousand hits. Then he tried “What about Solitaire’s back?” with quotation marks, which produced no results. He tried again, without quotes, and there were more than forty-seven million choices; scrolling through the first hundred, he found no book references. They added “a book” to the search string, then “end of a book,” but were still no nearer to an answer.
“What can we do?” Magnús asked, sounding desperate.
“We could just ignore him,” Gunnar said.
“What if he kills someone?”
“I think he’ll do that anyway if we don’t catch him soon.”
“But we’ll win time if we find the answer, right?”
“Yeah, but we’ll also lose time looking for it.”
“Can we get some help with this?”
Gunnar gave it some thought. Finally he said, “Maybe we could try to enlist help from guys that are used to this kind of question-and-answer thing. The bar I go to has a quiz night every Friday. There always seems to be some geek there who knows practically everything. I’ll run this question past the crowd over there. Maybe someone will know the answer.”
14:00
Birkir caught the one o’clock flight to Akureyri, landing an hour after take-off. Elías, his colleague from forensics,
was there to meet him in the company of the local detective officer, Kristján.
Kristján was short and stocky, with close-cropped hair, a round face, and, Birkir found as he shook his hand, stubby fingers.
“What a goddamn mess,” the man said in an emphatic northern accent. “We were sure we had it all wound up last fall when the guy went missing. It’s true we didn’t come across the car until day three of the search, but this letter seemed to explain the whole thing.” He waved a photocopy of the handwritten note.
Elías took over. “The letter was sent to us in Reykjavik at the time. Anna examined it and pronounced it genuine.”
Birkir took the note from Kristján and read, “My dearest Mom. Life has become unbearable over the past few months. I haven’t been able to sleep and everything seems so hopeless. This will no doubt come as a surprise to you, as I have tried to spare you these tribulations of mine. But now I have decided to put an end to it all, and when you read this you will know that all is now well with me. Your son, Leifur Albert.”
“Anna got hold of something that the guy had written earlier,” Elías explained. “She compared it with this note and confirmed it was the same handwriting. She’s the only one of us who has specialized in handwriting analysis.”
“Anyway, who else would have written it?” said Kristján defensively.
Birkir took out his notebook. “When was the disappearance reported?”
Kristján replied quickly. “Saturday, October second. The same day that we lost the Cup Final in Reykjavik. A very bad day.”
From the airport, the three of them drove to the Central Hospital. In the mortuary, Leifur Albert’s earthly remains had been laid out on a slab.
“We’ll send him to Reykjavik tomorrow,” Kristján said, covering his nose and mouth. “We have no forensic pathologists here.”
Birkir studied the body and its clothing. The man was dressed for hunting, in green, yellow, and brown outdoor gear. A shotgun blast, obviously from close range, had taken off two fingers of his right hand—the thumb and index finger. There was a big shotgun wound to his left groin, and the top part of his head had been blown off with another close-range shot. Putrefaction had rendered his face unrecognizable, so there was no point in asking anyone to identify him. A mercy for the family. Besides, they had other ways to establish that this was Leifur’s body, like through DNA analysis.
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