The Doll

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  Rafn introduced himself and explained that he was looking for Binni – Binni Briefcase. The man’s watery eyes wandered from Rafn to Huldar and then to Gudlaugur, then repeated the manoeuvre. ‘Hang on. How many of you are there? Two or four?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Wow, man. I could have sworn there were four of you. Or five, maybe.’ Inside, his friend started his tuneless singing again. Huldar resisted the urge to put his hands over his ears.

  ‘Do you know if Binni’s home or if he’s out somewhere?’

  ‘Binni?’

  The sunken-cheeked face looked more dazed than ever and the man rocked on his feet. ‘He’s not here.’ He turned to Huldar. ‘Got a fag, mate?’ He wasn’t so out of it that he couldn’t unerringly spot the only smoker among the three – or four – of them.

  Huldar fetched a cigarette from his pocket, then, thinking better of it, handed over four. From the way the man’s face lit up as he took them, he was presumably under the impression that there were more. Thanking Huldar profusely he shoved one in his mouth and lit up. As a result of some odd chemical reaction, sucking in the smoke seemed to sober him up a little. He grew steadier on his feet and his eyes managed to focus on one point for longer than a couple of seconds. Huldar seized this opportunity to repeat Rafn’s question about Binni.

  ‘Binni? Binni’s at home. Binni’s always at home. He’s broken his leg. Can’t go anywhere.’ The man took another drag, then played a riff on an air guitar, perfectly out of time.

  ‘What about a girl? Have you seen a teenage girl hanging around here recently? Her name’s Rósa. Dark hair. Small – about one metre sixty.’

  ‘A girl.’ The man puckered his brow. ‘Yeah. There was a girl here earlier. I asked her to run over to the shop and buy me a Coke but she couldn’t be arsed.’

  They thanked him and, after the man had thanked Huldar again for the cigarettes, he returned to his private party.

  Before trying Binni’s container again, Rafn ran back to the car and fetched the nasal spray. He wanted to be prepared in case Binni had overdosed and was lying unconscious inside. After banging on his door so loudly it must have woken the entire container colony, they peered in through his windows but their view was blocked by the tatty curtains. Then Rafn thought of trying the door handle and discovered that it was open.

  They didn’t enter immediately. Rafn called Binni’s name through the gap but there was no answer. He called again and was met by the same silence. Only then did Rafn step inside, while Huldar and Gudlaugur waited in the rain. When Rafn came out again, his face was white and he was still holding the Narcan spray, unopened. After Huldar had stuck his head inside, he understood that no antidote, drug or doctor could help Binni now.

  They rang to report the discovery of a body, then waited in the car for back-up. The whole shooting match: Forensics, a pathologist, a photographer and a team from CID.

  Judging by the scene inside, there wasn’t even a theoretical possibility that Binni had died from natural causes. Or, for that matter, from an overdose.

  Chapter 13

  Wednesday night

  There had been no let-up in the rain. The scene-of-crime team at work on Grandi had long ago abandoned the attempt to keep dry by putting up their hoods, donning waterproof ponchos or holding things over their heads. They had simply resigned themselves to being soaked to the skin, since once that stage had been reached, it was easier to concentrate on what needed to be done. Which was plenty. Secure the scene, carry out a preliminary examination of the deceased, photograph and fingerprint the interior of the container, collect biological samples, fibres and anything else that could conceivably qualify as evidence, and, trickiest of all, interview potential witnesses from the other containers. As yet nothing useful had been extracted from the neighbours, who were all either stoned or suffering from withdrawal symptoms; nothing in between.

  Huldar watched as the dead man was carried out on a stretcher and taken to the ambulance that was waiting to transfer him to the National Hospital mortuary. The sheet covering him had slipped as the paramedics tried to ease the stretcher out through the narrow doorway, and hadn’t immediately been twitched back into place. The leg, which according to Binni’s neighbour had been broken, appeared to have been set at home and bound in whatever had come to hand. A long shoehorn had been tied tight against the bone using a colourful if grubby pillowcase and a dishcloth, all wrapped around with masking tape. They would never know how well this makeshift arrangement had worked.

  Huldar averted his gaze, having seen enough when he stuck his head round the door earlier, when Rafn had found the body. After snatching a glimpse, he had hastily withdrawn. Apart from the horribly mutilated corpse, what had struck him most was how homely the place had been, if you overlooked the coffee table with its overflowing ashtray, collection of pills, tourniquet, syringe, lighter and aluminium foil, blackened with soot. That could have come straight out of a film set for a scene involving an addict, but it was in stark contrast to the rest of the room. The furniture, obtained no doubt from the Red Cross, was shabby, ugly and dated – stuff that had been thrown out of the country’s homes to make room for more modern pieces – but intact, nevertheless. A massive bookcase, taking up an unnecessary amount of the cramped interior, contained dog-eared books, ornaments and framed photos of people who Huldar took to be the man’s closest family. People who would presumably now mourn his death. They were probably better prepared for the news than most, though. Rough sleepers seldom lived to a great age.

  But it was rare, if not unheard of, for one of them to have his throat cut from ear to ear. It had taken Huldar several seconds to work out what he was looking at, after initially mistaking the wound for a wide grin.

  Seeing Erla bearing down on him, Huldar hastily stubbed out the cigarette he had finally managed to light. Blowing smoke in her face would not be a wise move right now. Even people with a more placid temperament than Erla might be forgiven for going off the deep end after being woken in the middle of the night and dragged out in the rain to attend the scene of a murder.

  ‘Can’t we even send you on a simple mission like looking for a child without you creating havoc?’ She took no notice of the raindrops trickling from her soaking hair down over her face and into her neckline.

  ‘Nothing to do with me, Erla. I didn’t top the guy.’

  She didn’t look remotely mollified by this statement of the obvious. ‘You know what I mean. Like the whole situation isn’t fucking confusing and complicated enough already. The last thing we need is another corpse. Who’s supposed to work on this? All my most experienced officers are on leave.’

  It was absurd for her to imply that Huldar wasn’t one of them, but he was too tired, cold and wet to quarrel. ‘Did they find the murder weapon?’ He already guessed they hadn’t, but the question stopped him from losing his temper with her and saying something he’d only regret.

  ‘No. Not yet. They’re still searching through the mountain of bloody rubbish around here. But the knife’s not inside that container. I’m waiting for search warrants for the neighbouring units but I’m not optimistic about finding it there. We’re too close to the sea where it could easily be disposed of for good, and anyway it’s not certain the warrants will be granted as we don’t have a lot of evidence to justify them. If we’re lucky we’ll get one. But there’s no way we’ll get permission to search all of them.’

  Huldar agreed. The courts would be accused of displaying prejudice against this social group if they granted a blanket warrant. After all, when the average citizen was murdered in an apartment block, the police wouldn’t automatically be given leave to search all the flats on their staircase. ‘What do the neighbours say? Did they notice anything?’

  ‘No. Not that they’re admitting, anyway. There was a guy half asleep or dopey from withdrawal symptoms in one of the units. The blokes in the other two were awake but claim they’ve stayed indoors. People don’t bother going outside to smoke here. We’re
not necessarily talking tobacco, either, which isn’t helping us get statements out of them. We’ll have to take them in for questioning, which is a bugger.’

  ‘Questioning? Are you going to drag the whole lot down to the station?’

  ‘No, not all of them. Just two. The occupants who were awake. They both had visitors but one had arrived relatively recently and the other was lying in a doped-up stupor on his mate’s sofa. So I’m just going to take the two occupants.’

  ‘On what grounds? Are either of them under suspicion?’

  Erla shrugged. ‘On the grounds that they’re unlikely to remember a bloody thing in the morning. Not even our visit. I wouldn’t put it past them to knock on the victim’s door, asking for a light, once they wake up.’ Sensing Huldar’s disapproval, she carried on justifying herself. ‘Come on. It’s not unlikely that one of the people who live here or their visitors were involved. In fact, the odds are that it was one of them. They could have fallen out over drugs or debts. Real or imagined.’

  It was possible. Binni could have had drugs that he didn’t want to share. That wouldn’t go down well with an addict tortured by cravings. ‘Did they find any drugs in his place?’

  ‘Fentanyl, OxyContin, Pethidine and Tramadol. All very likely smuggled to the country. There was also a two-litre Coke bottle containing the dregs of illegal spirits. And Elephant beer in the fridge.’

  ‘So whoever killed Binni wasn’t after his stash.’

  ‘No. Not unless they panicked and forgot to take the spoils with them.’ Erla wiped a raindrop off her forehead before it could trickle into her eye.

  Huldar had seen enough of the fallout from serious drug abuse in his job to realise that no addict who was desperate would have let a little thing like a dead body stop him or her from getting hold of the pills. If an addict had killed Binni for his stash, he or she would have stepped over the dead man, grabbed the gear, then got the hell out of there. Any pangs of remorse would only have surfaced later and no doubt have been medicated with more drugs, leading to another high, and so on and so on, down a slippery slope so steep it was almost vertical. ‘Does that seem plausible to you?’ he asked Erla.

  ‘No. Not really.’ Erla didn’t contradict him as she usually did. ‘I’m going back to the car to look up the names of the men we’ve already talked to. I’m almost sure one of them has a record of violence. I’ve seen him before. He could well have attacked Binni. His knuckles were bleeding.’

  Huldar assumed she was referring to the man whose door he, Rafn and Gudlaugur had knocked on. ‘How did he explain that?’

  ‘He looked at his knuckles like he was seeing his hands for the first time since he emerged from his mother’s womb. He couldn’t explain the grazes. Needless to say, he’s one of the two people we’ll be taking down to the station. And not just for interview. We need to take samples from him. With any luck there’ll be something under his nails.’

  ‘Was there a fight, then?’ Huldar hadn’t seen any signs of one when he’d looked into the victim’s container. It had seemed to him as if the attack had taken Binni by surprise as he sat on the rose-patterned sofa. Usually things got knocked over when people came to blows, however uneven the fight, especially in cramped conditions like that.

  ‘Unlikely, though that’s still not clear. Hopefully we’ll get a better idea of the situation in the morning. It’s impossible to think straight in this fucking downpour. It’s as if it gets into your head and waters down your thoughts.’

  Huldar had to agree. In his case, of course, it didn’t help that he’d had no sleep and would only be able to grab a couple of hours at most before he had to go in to work again. If he complained, they wouldn’t hesitate to give him the morning off, but he wanted to be there. The plan was to interview more youngsters from the care home and Freyja would be present. He wasn’t going to miss out on an opportunity like that. The advantage of working for two departments simultaneously was that Erla and Hafthór didn’t compare notes, just concentrated on the assignments he was doing for each of them separately. No one was keeping track of his overall hours.

  ‘What about blood-stains? I took a look inside when we found the body and it was like his artery had been connected to a garden sprinkler. Was there any blood on either of the other occupants?’

  ‘No. But they could have changed clothes or just escaped being splashed by coming at Binni from behind, cutting his throat, then taking a step backwards. The blood gushed forwards; none of it went behind him. There are two sets of footprints through the blood on the floor, which are being photographed and measured as we speak. If we get those search warrants, we may be lucky enough to find a pair of shoes with blood on the soles.’

  Huldar remembered that the neighbour he met had been barefoot – perhaps because his socks and shoes had been covered in blood. ‘Were the tracks made by a man’s shoes?’

  ‘One set. The other belonged to a woman or a man with very small feet. Or maybe a kid. The bigger prints lead from the pool of blood to the kitchen unit, then out of the door, while the smaller ones lead from the pool straight to the door. There are no tracks in the pool of blood itself, so it looks as if both individuals trod in it before it congealed. Which means either they were both there when Binni was murdered or they arrived shortly afterwards. Separately.’

  Small shoes. Huldar remembered the original reason for their visit. ‘Has anyone mentioned Rósa? We spoke to the man in the unit next door to Binni’s and he said he’d seen her around earlier in the evening. She was friendly with the victim. That’s why we were here.’ Gudlaugur and Rafn had left but Huldar had hung around; he didn’t really know why. It wasn’t as if he was needed. The three of them had already made a full report, but he’d wanted to talk to Erla, who hadn’t yet arrived by the time the other two went home. In the event, though, she hadn’t been interested in talking to him until now. So he had hung around in the rain like an idiot while she was examining the scene and knocking on doors. ‘The smaller prints could be hers,’ he added.

  Erla frowned. ‘What the fuck? Was she here this evening? Is this some kind of frigging joke? Don’t tell me she’s a witness in three cases now?’

  This aspect hadn’t occurred to Huldar. He had interpreted the drunken neighbour’s remark as meaning that Rósa had been there quite a bit earlier in the evening, though he’d had no particular reason to think that. Perhaps the rain had watered down his faculties, as Erla complained it had done to her. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know how long Binni had been lying there. He could have already been dead when Rósa arrived. Huldar hoped not, for the girl’s sake. He prayed that the small prints had belonged to some other woman or small-footed man. The girl had experienced more than enough traumas in her life without having to stumble across another dead body. ‘When do they reckon the man died, Erla?’

  ‘Around eleven in the evening. According to a rough estimate based on his body temperature. I asked the pathologist if a badly damaged liver could affect the reading but he didn’t answer, which usually means he thinks it’s a stupid question.’ Erla shrugged. ‘So, he probably died around 11 p.m., about an hour before you lot showed up. You didn’t see anything suspicious, did you?’

  Huldar shook his head.

  They stood and watched as a member of Forensics carried a box of personal effects out of Binni’s container. Huldar wondered if the family photos were among them. His tiredness was obviously getting to him. ‘I’m thinking of heading home.’

  Erla glared at him as if wanting a bit of sleep constituted a breach of his contract. ‘We’re not done here.’

  ‘Precisely. You’re not done. But I am. As far as I can see, you’ve got all the people you need.’ He didn’t remind her of his statutory rest period, not wanting to come across as whiny.

  ‘I’m recalling you from Sexual Offences. Our need’s greater than theirs. We’re going to have to comb this entire area by daylight and, given the state of it, we could do with more hands.’ She gestured at a derelict wooden
house that stood nearby. It had once been a handsome building but now all the windows were broken and holes had been made in the walls in several places. What remained of the cladding was covered in graffiti, but even the graffiti artists obviously hadn’t thought it worth making an effort. ‘That dump, for example. We need to search every nook and cranny in there. Be back here by midday. I’ll let Hafthór know about the change in arrangement.’

  Huldar didn’t protest, knowing it would be futile, but he resolved to go along to the morning interviews with the witnesses in the abuse case as planned. No need to mention the fact to Erla. He would return to his own department at lunchtime. With any luck he’d get away with it because Erla would come in late tomorrow, having been occupied here half the night. This would give him three or four hours in which to invite Freyja out, minus the time they spent doing the actual interviewing. So, around ten or fifteen minutes, then. He’d managed to secure a date in that short a window before. ‘I’ll be here. What about Gudlaugur?’

  Erla didn’t even pause to think. ‘No, he can stay on loan. I want that girl found ASAP. Gudlaugur will be able to keep up the pressure on them to track her down.’

  ‘Any news of the sub?’ Huldar sent up a silent prayer that it was still out of order. Although he was prepared to work when he was exhausted, there was no way in hell he was going out on the boat again.

  ‘Not yet. Though I’m hoping we’ll be able to go out tomorrow or the day after. You won’t be coming with us, though. I’ve got something else in mind for you.’

  Huldar broke into a grin. ‘What can I say? You’re the boss.’