The Doll

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  Huldar pondered this for a while. ‘What about a rowing boat or a kayak? Could they have been out in one of them? Small craft like that wouldn’t be equipped with a transmitter, so they’d be unlikely to show up on radar.’

  ‘In that case, it must have been a local one. You couldn’t paddle all the way to Iceland in one of those. No, if they were tourists who’d rented a boat or a kayak and hadn’t come back, the company responsible would have reported the incident. Anything else would be unthinkable.’

  It would. But Huldar persisted. ‘They could have brought a kayak or rubber dinghy to the country with them.’

  Erla screwed up her face in exasperation. ‘Oh, right. Would they have checked the kayak in or stuck it under the seat in front of them?’

  ‘They could have come by ferry; taken the Norröna to Seydisfjördur.’

  Erla’s sneer faded. ‘True.’ She seemed annoyed not to have thought of that possibility herself. ‘But it’s still unlikely that two tourists would go missing here and not turn up on the register. It’s not restricted to Icelanders.’

  They were both silent. The truth was, there were no systematic checks in place to establish whether visitors who didn’t turn up for their flights or ferry had in fact returned home by other means. There were a number of airlines operating flights to and from Iceland these days, which made it impossible to keep track of whether no-show passengers had left with other companies. Moreover, some airlines didn’t operate passport checks on flights within the Schengen area, which made it theoretically possible to travel under a false name. Fortunately, few travellers, if any, had a reason to do so. But there had been examples of people coming to Iceland in order to take their own lives in the wilderness – travelling under their own name. The incidents had only come to light later, when their family or friends reported them missing.

  ‘Is the plan to carry on searching the seabed?’ Huldar asked, breaking the silence.

  ‘Yes. They’re waiting for repairs to the small sub. The bloody thing developed a fault. But the moment it’s ready and there’s a let-up in the weather, they’ll resume the search. I’m told it’s unlikely to be today, though.’ Erla exhaled irritably. ‘There have to be more remains out there. There was nothing to suggest the bodies had been dismembered. The bones were undamaged apart from the sea-creature activity and that one groove in the ulna. But since it’s across the middle of the bone, apparently it can’t have been the result of any butchery. So the bodies were probably intact when they ended up in the sea, which means the rest of the skeletons must be there somewhere. And hopefully their clothes as well.’

  ‘Couldn’t they have been eaten by sea creatures?’

  Erla shrugged. ‘Unlikely, if the bodies have only been in the sea for a matter of months. Clothes take much longer to degrade than soft tissue. Especially manmade fibres.’ Evidently Erla had also been using the downtime to do a bit of online research. ‘I just can’t understand why we haven’t found anything. If the bones are fairly recent, I can only conclude that the people weren’t wearing many clothes. Maybe they were naked.’

  ‘Naked, in shoes?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ The sudden note of irritation in Erla’s voice was a warning sign that her patience was wearing thin. Perhaps she had finally steeled herself to ring the commission again. ‘Anyway, what did you want?’

  ‘I was hoping you’d have something for me to do. I’m willing to go to Hveragerdi and hunt for the cat killer, if nothing else.’ It was no lie. It would be a pleasure to hand that sadist over to the justice system. Or to take him – if it was a him – round the back of a house and deal with the matter using a shorter, sharper method than the courts would allow.

  Erla surveyed the open-plan office where the rest of the team were hard at work. ‘How about using your time like your colleagues and getting on top of the outstanding paperwork from your past cases? I got an email from the quality controller the other day asking me to give you a nudge. None of us are good at this bloody chore but he singled you out for criticism. Which gives me a fair idea of how behind you are.’

  Huldar gritted his teeth but managed to keep his cool. ‘Don’t you have anything more important for me to do?’

  Erla snorted. ‘More important? In my opinion everything’s more important than fucking box-ticking.’ She folded her arms across her chest. ‘But I don’t have a thing.’ Seeing the disappointment on Huldar’s face, she relented. Erla might be prickly, but she was capable of being human. Occasionally. Today it seemed his luck was in. ‘I happen to know they’re up against it down in Sexual Offences. They’ve got a child-abuse case that’s plastered all over the headlines, which means everything they do is subject to close scrutiny. It doesn’t help that they fucked up by failing to alert the city council when the original complaint was made. Anyway, they’re short-handed because everyone’s on holiday. If you’re at the end of your tether, I’m sure they’d welcome you with open arms.’

  Huldar didn’t wait to be told twice. As the pressure on the various departments was impossible to predict, dictated as it was entirely by the caprice of the offenders, it was common for people to be seconded to other teams. Struck by a thought, he paused in the doorway. ‘What about Gudlaugur? Can I take him with me?’

  Erla pursed her lips, regarding him inscrutably.

  ‘He’s bored shitless too, and it would do him good to be occupied.’ Huldar neglected to mention that Gudlaugur was at that moment having a nap.

  When she didn’t immediately answer, he added hurriedly: ‘I’ll tell them it’s strictly provisional. If anything changes here, we’ll be back like a shot.’

  She agreed then, albeit reluctantly. Which was fine. He chose to interpret it as meaning that their work in CID was appreciated, until he remembered that she hadn’t hesitated about letting him go. Perhaps it was only Gudlaugur’s contribution that she regarded as indispensable.

  ‘Hey!’ Erla called after him before he could disappear. ‘If you go to Sexual Offences, you won’t be able to come out on the boat with us when we get the call.’

  ‘Oh.’ Huldar tried to look downcast. ‘Yes. That’s true.’ He groped frantically for a way of justifying his absence, but Erla saved him the effort.

  ‘Your loss. I’ll find someone else.’

  Huldar forced his features to register disappointment, then turned, mentally raising a triumphant fist to the sky.

  Gudlaugur was awake and doing his best to give the impression of having been compos mentis ever since getting out of bed that morning. Huldar refrained from teasing him about it, merely slapped him lightly on the shoulder and told him they were being lent to Sexual Offences to help out with an inquiry there.

  Gudlaugur’s face brightened and he almost knocked down his chair in his hurry to get to his feet. Clearly, Huldar hadn’t been the only one doing his nut with boredom.

  Chapter 6

  Tuesday

  Freyja leant back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. She had been sitting in one position for far too long without stretching or getting up to refill her coffee cup. None of her colleagues had looked in and her phone had remained silent, emitting not so much as a ping to announce a text. It was as if the outside world, recognising the gravity of the case, wanted to ensure she had peace and quiet to work. As a result, she had made a good start.

  She had gone through half the reports and other documents relating to the thirty-three pre-teens and adolescents who formed the focus of the first stage of the investigation. Of course, she hadn’t yet been granted access to the files on the Child Protection Agency server, but those would mainly be useful for filling in the gaps, providing information about how the children had come to the attention of the agency and tracking their progress through the system. No doubt the amount of data on each child would vary enormously, depending on how long they had been involved with children’s services. Some had been luckier than others, their cases easier to solve due to their particular circumstances. Others had been right through the system
until they grew out of it. At the age of eighteen they were considered adults and most were then transferred to the care of social services.

  Having divided up the children according to gender, Freyja had decided to focus on the boys first. As far as she could tell, the victim who had spoken to the press had just turned twelve when the perpetrator first abused him. This was consistent with the information Freyja had found in the files, which recorded that Tristan Berglindarson had been placed in temporary care with Bergur three weeks before his twelfth birthday. To her, this suggested that, rather than being a classic paedophile, Bergur was what was known as a hebephile, someone sexually attracted to pubescent children. Despite being controversial among psychologists, the diagnosis had gained a degree of recognition. From what Freyja had read, such individuals were usually only attracted to one sex, unlike paedophiles. As the victim who had come forward was a boy, Freyja suspected that Bergur’s other victims would also turn out to be boys. On this basis, she put the girls to one side for the moment, intending to come to them later.

  Nothing she had read so far provided any corroborating evidence of the man’s crimes. There were various hints but nothing conclusive. Some of the boys had regressed after their time in his care; they had been caught using drugs and displayed signs of both physical and social deterioration. On the other hand, all these boys had been placed with Bergur following treatment for addictions, so it wasn’t as if they’d had far to fall. Few people managed to sort out their lives after a single spell in rehab. An alternative explanation was that their regression could have been a result of abuse, but as yet she had found nothing that pointed unambiguously to this. Nevertheless, she conscientiously noted down any increased signs of distress. She thought she could detect a difference between the wellbeing of the prepubescent boys and the pubescent age group. The little boys seemed to have been in a relatively good state of mind, considering that they had been removed from their homes and sent to live with strangers. Sadly, however, this age group had been in the minority, as the home had mainly catered for teenagers. If her analysis was correct, this was unlikely to have been a coincidence. Child abusers are cunning at engineering situations which provide them with easy access to victims in the desired age group.

  Freyja glanced back over her notes. The bulk of the material she was currently able to access consisted of information that was quantifiable, and questions that could be answered with a simple yes or no, and her comments were influenced by this. Much of what she had to go on were height and weight measurements, the results of drugs tests and answers to questions like: How are you feeling on a scale of one to six? None of the boys had scored a ‘six’. She had seen two ‘fours’, but most peaked at ‘three’. Two of the boys had apparently asked if they could answer ‘zero’. When they’d first arrived at the home, they had put their wellbeing at ‘two’. They were both in what she judged to be the at-risk age group. The same boys had complained of nightmares, of finding it hard to wake up in the mornings and of feeling sluggish when they did get up. Freyja thought it possible the man had abused these two after slipping them sleeping pills, which would have had similar side effects. However, the spot tests for drugs hadn’t checked for the active elements in sleeping pills, which meant her theory was impossible to prove.

  None of the boys had been given physical examinations for signs of sexual abuse during their time at the home. The occasional individual had been examined on first entering care, due to suspicions of earlier abuse, but they were the exception. Apparently it hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind that the boys might be at risk once they were in the hands of the system, since they were supposed to be safe there.

  She would have liked to read transcripts of interviews with the boys taken by therapists or social workers, but frustratingly there were few on the USB stick. It was mainly reports by their support workers, a number of which could immediately be discounted, since the support-worker role had been performed by the alleged abuser during the children’s stay at his home. Read with the benefit of hindsight, this was chilling stuff. All the reports spoke of happiness and good progress, except when Bergur noted that a boy was untruthful and had a tendency to invent stories as a way of seeking attention. Presumably these comments were designed to cover his back in case any of them complained. If Freyja’s theory was correct, Bergur’s comments would constitute a deliberate attempt to cover up his crimes.

  In the case of these boys, she would have to rely on other evidence. The children had seldom been taken to see experts but had occasionally received visits as the result of an incident; uncontrolled behaviour, aggression or a failed drug test being the usual reasons. As a result, the experts’ comments, recorded on file after the interview, mostly related to specific events. Although an attempt had been made to find out what had caused the outburst on each occasion, Freyja hadn’t come across any insinuations by the boys that the man who ran their home was abusing them. It was easy to be wise after the event and criticise the experts for not pushing harder for answers but, to be fair to them, their approach had been standard procedure. All the children had a history of problems and the occasional lapse was only to be expected.

  Freyja had been hoping one of the boys might have noticed something suspicious – been woken in the night by the abuser’s activities, perhaps – but none of them had reported anything of the kind. There hadn’t been many children accommodated in the home at any one time – at most three but usually only two. She didn’t have a floor plan or any other information about the premises but assumed that the children would have been given their own rooms. Perhaps it had been enough for Bergur to close their doors, yet in spite of this it seemed odd that in all these years none of the kids had ever lain awake, heard strange noises and got up to investigate. When she stopped to think about it, though, it occurred to her that Bergur might have slipped them all sleeping pills when he was on night shift.

  Freyja put the papers down on her desk and sighed. She’d have to head off soon. Her working day wasn’t officially over, but she wanted to be punctual to collect Saga. Her niece wasn’t wild about her nursery school, but then she didn’t really like anything that could be called normal. What Saga liked best was being alone with one of the three adults in her life: her mother, her father or Freyja. Whenever her niece was staying with her, therefore, Freyja tried to limit the amount of time the little girl spent at her nursery school.

  Before hurrying out of the office, Freyja rang Yngvi, as promised, to update him on the day’s progress. The phone call was as dry and impersonal as a conversation between two computers. Freyja made no attempt to play down her fears that a number of the boys might have been abused. It didn’t look good, despite the lack of solid evidence – not that this depressing conclusion came as a surprise to either of them. Once the mink’s got into the henhouse, it doesn’t stop at a single chicken. They ended the call as coolly as they had begun it. Neither made any reference to the new position of police liaison officer.

  Freyja shut down her computer, put the USB stick in her pocket and headed out.

  At the nursery school, Freyja was met by the familiar shrieking and wailing of tired children, bored of the battered toys and of each other. They looked up hopefully when she appeared in the doorway, their faces falling when they saw she hadn’t come to collect them. Two started crying. Saga had raised her head too but didn’t crack a smile on discovering that she was the lucky one. Instead, she simply abandoned what she had been doing alone in her corner, got to her feet and walked over to Freyja. Not in any hurry, though, as it wouldn’t do to look eager. On reaching her aunt, she held out her small, moist hand and allowed Freyja to lead her out. They went into the cloakroom, where Freyja helped the little girl into her wellington boots and anorak. Saga’s red puddle suit was hanging on her peg, but unlike the other children’s waterproofs, it was spotless. There was no sign that she had been running around outside like the other kids. Knowing her, she had probably stood there with a bucket and spade in her hand, watc
hing the others play. The psychologist in Freyja itched to go back inside and ask the teachers about Saga’s social development but she curbed the impulse. She was only the child’s aunt, not her mother.

  They drove out to Seltjarnarnes, the westernmost suburb on the peninsula on which Reykjavík was built, and Freyja parked her old banger in the almost empty spaces in front of the smart apartment block. The flat came with its own parking spot in the underground garage but this was occupied by the owner’s vehicle while he was stuck behind bars. His car, like those of the other residents, was too expensive to be left outside at the mercy of the elements. Still, at least this meant Freyja never had any trouble finding a space. It was yet another advantage of the arrangement, which she owed to her brother and his colourful friend. If you ignored the snake, there was little to fault about the flat, apart from the fact that she didn’t feel at home there. Most of the contents belonged to the owner, which made it feel almost like living in an Airbnb. No doubt the feeling would wear off over time, as she gradually made her mark on the place: her cosmetics in the bathroom, the Post-it notes on the fridge and the cafetière on the kitchen worktop were a good start.

  The afternoon passed in a whirl of activity, which didn’t leave Freyja with a spare moment to sit down. She went for a walk around the peninsula, with Molly on her lead and Saga in her buggy, meeting no one apart from other dog walkers, as no one in their right mind would go out in weather like this unless they had no choice. Heavy raindrops fell from a leaden sky, only to be snatched up by a cold northeasterly and flung horizontally into Freyja’s eyes as she tramped doggedly along the coast path. After they got home, Freyja fed them both, then gave Saga her bath, while Molly cringed behind the sofa, afraid that she would be next. Once Saga was in her pyjamas, they sat on the sofa in the sitting room and Freyja read her niece some of the children’s books she had collected. Storytime lasted longer than it should have done because Saga was determined to hear the same book over and over again. By the end, Freyja didn’t even need to look at the page as she knew the story off by heart.