Daybreak

by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson

  Question six: this question is about a crime novel. Euphemism for death and bloodless hands. How does chapter 28 begin? Six hours.

  Gunnar copied the clue into a Google search, which yielded many hits, none linking to a book. He tried changing the word order and shortening the clue, but to no avail. “Bloodless” by itself referenced a song but not a book title.

  His only option was to call Emil Edilon yet again to ask for help. First he read the whole question to him, and then he had to spell out euphemism so Emil could write down the question.

  “This seems complicated,” Emil said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Gunnar hung up. “Now what?” he asked.

  “We’ve got to look at this from different angles,” Birkir said.

  “The question?” Gunnar asked.

  Birkir shook his head. “No. The homicides we’re investigating. Remember those?”

  Gunnar grinned apologetically and nodded.

  Birkir stood up, turned to the others, and asked them to listen. He gave them a blow-by-blow account of his conversations with Hjördís and Jóhann. “In conclusion,” he said, “it seems that there was considerable tension between Leifur and Jóhann on the one hand, and Hjördís on the other. I think we need to take a very close look at her.”

  “Could she be the Gander?” Magnús asked.

  “I don’t think so. She says she has an alibi for two mornings out of three. We’ll get that verified if need be. We have to consider the possibility that these are separate cases.”

  Gunnar said, “We began to take that view when the Gander claimed responsibility for only three murders, not four. But of course we won’t let him dictate our methodology.”

  Magnús agreed that they needed to investigate the trio—Leifur, Jóhann, and Hjördís—much more thoroughly. Tasks were allocated: Birkir was to undertake a comprehensive examination of Hjördís’s circumstances; Gunnar and Dóra were to continue looking for answers to the Gander’s latest riddle; and Símon was to visit the schoolteacher, Ragnar Jónsson, and pick up the list of names of the family and friends of his father-in-law, Vilhjálmur Arason. Símon planned to take a photo of Hjördís with him to show to Ragnar and his wife, Bára. If they knew her, it might be a major clue.

  20:10

  Símon didn’t think Ragnar Jónsson was looking very well. He had dark rings under his eyes and he had messed up on his shaving that morning—there was prominent black stubble on his upper lip, and he had a Band-Aid on his right cheek.

  “I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” he said. “I need to arrange my father-in-law’s funeral, and I am trying to write an obituary. My dear Bára has also been very miserable. She was so fond of her father. Recently he gave us money toward a larger car that would be easier for her to sit in. It’s so difficult for her to get into our little one.”

  Símon examined the piece of paper on which Ragnar had catalogued Vilhjálmur’s friends, family, and other connections in tidy, clear handwriting. There were in all only fourteen names and Hjördís was not among them.

  “Are you sure this is all?” Símon asked.

  Ragnar nodded. “I’ve looked at the names over and over,” he said.

  Símon showed him the picture of Hjördís. “Have you ever seen this woman?”

  Ragnar took the photograph and scrutinized it. “Is she in some way linked to these murders?” he asked.

  “It’s possible.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Hjördís.”

  Ragnar mulled this over for a long time. Finally he said, “There was an incident a couple of weeks ago.”

  He thought some more. “My father-in-law has a small apartment he rents out. The tenant had moved out a while ago, and he’d advertised it for rent. He and I arranged to meet at the building, because he wanted to paint the walls, and I was going to help him that evening. You know how these renters treat premises.”

  Símon nodded, and Ragnar continued. “When I got to the building, my father-in-law was arguing with some woman. She went off in a huff when I arrived, and my father-in-law said she was someone he knew slightly—the daughter of one of his acquaintances, or something. I think he said her name was Hjördís. Apparently she wanted to rent the apartment for peanuts because she was a sort of family friend, and she completely lost it when my father-in-law wouldn’t agree. That’s what they were arguing about. I’m just wondering if it’s possible she was the woman in the picture. I think it’s quite possible, actually.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, almost. Do you think it could have been her who shot my father-in-law?”

  “You saw the killer. What do you think?”

  “Well, I didn’t see whether it was a man or a woman. But come to think of it, I remember that the person had rather broad hips.”

  “Did you see the face?”

  “No. It was too far away.”

  “What about the hair?”

  Ragnar looked back at the picture. “It might well have been short and blonde.”

  “Did Vilhjálmur say anything else about this woman?”

  “He said that she was like…insane.”

  “Did he know if she was a lesbian?”

  “Yes, he mentioned that, too.”

  20:30

  Detective Superintendent Magnús Magnússon was married. In most people’s judgment, he had married well—his wife, Vilhelmína, was partner in a law firm with two other attorneys and a number of associates, and they had some very upscale clients. These types needed constant legal advice and were sufficiently well-off to pay large bills on the due date, frequently.

  Vilhelmína didn’t bother with the housekeeping. She knew some women put up with tasks like cleaning and washing, but she preferred to hire help and avoid being involved in such drudgery. Magnús was in charge of these arrangements, and he drew up the list of tasks for the help and made sure everything was tidy and in order.

  At lunch Vilhelmína usually ate with clients, and in the evening she just had a piece of fruit or something light in front of the television. A shopping list stuck to the fridge told the help what to buy. Magnús ate his lunch in the police station cafeteria and, at home after work, often dined on skyr and rye bread, sometimes with smoked lamb, sometimes with raw herring. He loved traditional Icelandic food, especially the yogurt-like skyr. He and his wife hardly ever ate together unless Vilhelmína had put it on her calendar; when they did eat at home, it was Magnús who cooked. They had separate bedrooms and only spent nights together by prior appointment. Lately, Magnús had started taking Viagra when these encounters were forthcoming, so he could be confident that nothing would go wrong.

  This household system suited the two of them very well, and there was little danger they would get bored with each other—they simply didn’t spend enough time together for that. They led their separate lives and mostly did what they wanted. The only condition was mutual fidelity in their conjugal life, and it didn’t occur to either of them to test that particular rule. Their only son lived with his wife and child in Washington DC and worked for the International Monetary Fund; they followed a prearranged schedule of twice-yearly family get-togethers.

  When Magnús arrived home, tired after what had been a long day, his wife was sitting in front of the television with her laptop on her knees, talking on the phone. He went into the kitchen, spooned some skyr into a bowl, and sat down at the table to scan the daily newspapers. The killings had attracted the biggest headlines; he glanced through the various reports and saw they merely repeated the information the police had given out in the press conferences. Nothing of significance had leaked out yet. One of the papers had taken the trouble to send a photographer to Litla-Fell after the police had left. The picture had evidently been taken in the farmyard through the side window of a car, because the rear-view mirror could be seen at the bottom of the picture. In the foreground were two snarling dogs.

  Magnús made coffee and took his wife a cup. She glanced up from her phone and co
mputer to give him a smile and then turned back to the television; she was watching CNN with the sound turned off while she talked on the phone.

  With that, his domestic duties for that evening were complete, and he took his coffee into his den. The room was a trout fisherman’s temple. On the walls hung stuffed fish, pictures of rivers and anglers, and framed fishing flies in carefully arranged rows, each fly identified on a white label. The bookshelves held many volumes on trout fishing, and above the worktable was a transparent plastic organizer with many small drawers containing the various raw materials needed to make trout fishing flies—feathers, hair tufts, and the like.

  He sat at his worktable, turned on the radio, and resumed knotting a fly he had started making the night before; secured to a small clip beneath a large magnifying glass and work light, its main feature was tiny green and blue feathers.

  This was Magnús’s favorite pastime—making flies, and fishing for trout in the summer. His job really just occupied the time in between. He didn’t particularly need the salary, but it covered the purchase of fishing licenses and replacing the SUV every other year. Any surplus went to investments; Vilhelmína paid the household expenses.

  The police work had, until now, been a convenient diversion. He was usually pretty astute when picking his colleagues and had created a department that more or less ran itself, which effectively put him in the role of administrative supervisor. Now, however, the office was in chaos, with four unsolved homicides and a probable serial killer at large. Maybe it was time to retire.

  He pondered the first message the murderer had sent.

  You ask why. Will that change anything? It is done and cannot be undone. What is that urge that drives the hunter a far distance into the predawn cold to bag a few geese he will hardly bother to eat? Or the urge that prompts some people to go fishing and then release their catch in the hope that the fish will either live and breed or be caught again?

  I am a killer by nature. I hunt men and I never let go.

  Was this directed at him? He caught trout, sometimes salmon, and he often released his catch, usually, to be honest, because he couldn’t be bothered to gut the fish and dress them for storage. He only liked freshwater fish smoked and generally didn’t really care to eat what he caught. He was not a “killer by nature.” The killing was an unpleasant part of the process, necessary in his view only when the fish swallowed the bait and you couldn’t extract it without injuring them. Magnús’s hunting instinct consisted in laying bait for the fish, and landing the catch after it had taken the bait.

  The telephone on his desk began to ring, but the answering machine picked up the call instantly, its mechanical voice reading out the phone number and prompting a message. Somebody began to speak; Magnús recognized the voice of the minister of justice and reluctantly pushed the speakerphone button to reply.

  “Magnús speaking,” he said loudly.

  “Any news?” came the voice from the speaker.

  “No, nothing significant, but we’re looking at a number of leads.”

  Magnús continued tying the fly as the minister droned on, giving him the benefit of some good advice—things he’d probably seen in police dramas on television—and said that the ministry would help them in any possible way. Magnús had started on a new fly when the minister asked whether it might not be a good idea to bring in foreign specialists to help with the investigation.

  Magnús made a face. “I don’t think that’s appropriate just yet,” he said, and blew on a tiny drop of glue he had placed on the end of the line to bind the feathers to the hook. “But I’ll check what possibilities we’ve got as far as that goes,” he added to prevent the minister from getting involved himself. The conversation ended, and Magnús soon lost himself in daydreams of trout fishing by a still brook, in calm weather with just a hint of drizzle.

  21:00

  After speaking with Ragnar, Símon was able to go straight home to his wife. He was not needed back at the station. Dóra was on sole duty that evening, monitoring the computer and the phone; the others were to gather strength, as Magnús had put it, and have a good night’s sleep. There was to be a meeting the following morning, and Símon was looking forward to seeing the looks on their faces when he delivered his report—this was brand-new information on the case, and it was he who had brought it to light. He had asked the right questions at the right time. Maybe now the others would treat him as part of the team and give him meatier tasks.

  Símon had been in the detective division for just under a year, having been in crime prevention the previous two years. He had started young as a traffic cop, when he’d also been playing soccer for some of the top teams in Southwest Iceland. Then he had moved to Norway to play semiprofessional soccer for a second-division team in Oslo. While there, he had enrolled in the Norwegian Police Academy to study planning and crime prevention. Part of the reason he got in was that the police commissioners of Reykjavik and Oslo had met at a Scandinavian police conference and decided to set up a student exchange program between the two countries’ police academies. Símon had been the first from Iceland to take part in the exchange—since he was in Oslo anyway playing soccer he’d been the obvious choice. Naturally, a Norwegian student had also gone to Iceland; but the guy had given up after two weeks, convinced he would never get the hang of the strange language spoken by Icelanders. Símon graduated from the academy after struggling mightily with the course work; he never stopped to wonder if they’d passed him only because it would have seemed rude to fail the police commissioner’s exchange student. Nobody seemed surprised when this first exchange turned out to be both the beginning and the end of the student program.

  When Símon started having trouble getting positions on soccer teams in Norway, he returned to Iceland and took up his old job as a traffic cop. Then the position of head of the crime prevention unit became vacant, and as Símon could show that he had graduated in that specialty in Norway, it was impossible to pass him over when he applied. It soon became apparent that he was completely unsuited for the work; but it took his superiors two years to find a solution to the problem, which was to redeploy him to the detective division’s violent-crime unit with the promise of a swift promotion depending on his success in the job. The promotion wasn’t happening fast enough, in Símon’s opinion, and it irritated him no end that he was always assigned to work the most trivial crimes. If someone got a smack in the face downtown, it was Símon who had to chase witnesses, write reports, and try to make sense of the endless lies spun by the respective petty criminals and psychopaths. But when more serious cases came along, he got pushed aside. This time he was going to show them he could solve real homicides.

  These daydreams absorbed his whole mind and, by the time he got home, had become so exaggerated that he had solved the case all by himself and was explaining to his open-mouthed colleagues how it all hung together. He was on such a high that he knew he’d want to tell his wife, Ingirídur, all about it.

  They had been married five years, and, to tell the truth, Ingirídur was not particularly enthusiastic about her husband’s profession. The hours were irregular and the salary was shamefully low. It had, in fact, always irritated Ingirídur how poorly her husband provided for them. His professional soccer career had come to nothing, and in his present job he evidently wasn’t a favorite. It seemed like the boss never told him anything. Over and over she read about major crimes in the papers, and Símon knew no more about them than she did. He was, after all, supposed to be a member of the detective division.

  Now at last he had something to say. In one short interview, he had managed to connect the most likely suspect with more than one murder. He explained Hjördís’s association with Leifur and Jóhann; the relationship with Fridrik in the Kleppsvegur house; and finally how he himself had found the link to another victim. And to top it all, she was a lesbian.

  Símon ate a reheated fish stew as he related his story, and afterward took his cup of coffee into the living room and lay
down on the sofa to catch the ten o’clock news.

  After supper, Ingirídur cleaned up in the kitchen and thought about this deviant lesbian’s unfortunate neighbors in the apartment building on Kleppsvegur. Her view was that the public needed to be told about dangerous, immoral characters at large in the community. If she broadcasted the news, she thought, she might even save a life. She seized the telephone and dialed a number she had often seen advertised in the newspaper.

  23:00

  Gunnar met Emil in the bar.

  “Any answers yet?” he asked.

  Emil shook his head. “No. I asked everyone. Nobody has called back so far with an answer.”

  “Fuck. Time’s running out,” Gunnar said.

  Emil looked at the handwritten note that lay on the table. “I wonder if it’s possible to find a list of euphemisms for death, and then check if anything reminiscent of a book title crops up.”

  Gunnar called Dóra.

  “Can you google something for me? ‘Euphemism for death, examples.’ Call me when you’ve got something.”

  He stood up to get a couple of beers and a Jägermeister for himself. When he got back to the table, his cell rang; Dóra was ready with a list. As Gunnar listened, he repeated the words to Emil, who listened with concentration. “At room temperature, be no more, became a root inspector, bite the dust, ceased to be, crossed over, flatline, go into the fertilizer business, liquidated, mortified, passed away, permanently out of print, six feet under, swan song, terminated, the big nap, turned their toes up—”

  “Hold it, hold it,” Emil said. “What did you say, the big…”

  “The big nap.”

  “The Big Sleep,” Emil said. “That might be the book title. Try looking for ‘The Big Sleep, bloodless hands.’”

  Gunnar relayed this to Dóra.

  “I found something,” she said. “Great Paragraphs: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.” He listened intently as she read a substantial chunk of text until at last the sought-after words came up.

  “That’s it! Bloodless hands!” said Gunnar. “Now we need the beginning of chapter twenty-eight. Can you find it?”