The Reckoning

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  ‘Nothing really. Just to say don’t let those bastards get you down. They’ve probably just received a similar bollocking from the next level up and needed to let off steam.’ Huldar stepped inside and closed the door behind him. ‘I’m here to offer myself as a punch-bag if you need one.’

  Erla regarded him through narrowed eyes. ‘And who are you going to kick? Your dog?’

  ‘I don’t have a dog. Gudlaugur will have to do.’ Huldar’s grin wasn’t returned.

  ‘No need to feel sorry for me. I can handle it.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that, Erla. You know I am.’ Huldar paused but Erla made no move to fill the silence, so he carried on. ‘Regardless of what the top brass think, we both know that it was impossible to see this coming. Benedikt Toft was totally bewildered when the hands turned up – no one could have guessed that he had any connection to them.’ Erla seemed a little less tense; her shoulders had relaxed slightly and her jaw no longer gave the impression that she was chewing gravel. ‘Anyway, I didn’t come here just to talk about that crap. I wanted to know if we’re making any headway and if there’s anything I can do. I’ve got as far as I can with that list.’ He had offered to run through the names of all the people they could find who were connected in one way or another to the dead man, to check if they were still alive and in possession of both their hands. He hadn’t managed to reach everyone, but there was no point ringing back the remaining people yet. The plan was to send Gudlaugur round to their houses to peer through their letterboxes to try and work out if they were away.

  When Erla spoke again she sounded more like her normal self – still gruff and humourless, but not as bad as when he had first walked in. ‘Should we maybe expand the list? It’s got to be someone he knew. It stands to reason.’

  Huldar shrugged. ‘Unless Benedikt spotted the culprit putting the hands in the tub.’ The old man hadn’t admitted to that when questioned. According to Erla, the statement he gave that evening had sounded convincing. He’d insisted that he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, but of course the perpetrator couldn’t know that. ‘Say he was telling the truth when he swore he hadn’t seen anything – is it possible he could have witnessed something without realising it? A car outside, for example? Perhaps the perpetrator decided to dispose of a potential witness because he didn’t want to take any chances.’

  ‘Maybe. But the method of killing’s weirdly elaborate in that case. Wouldn’t it have been simpler to break into Benedikt’s house and stab him or batter him to death? This garage business carried a huge risk of being caught. It would be bloody stupid to kill the man like that unless the intention was to make him suffer.’ Erla sighed. ‘Then there’s the letter I got originally, tipping us off about something of interest in Benedikt’s garden. The only way I can read it is that the person who put the hands there didn’t trust Benedikt to notify the police when he found them. What other reason could there have been? The implication being that Benedikt had a guilty conscience. Any normal citizen would ring us straight away if they found a pair of sawn-off hands in their hot tub. So he must have had an idea who put them in there, despite his show of being all shocked and innocent. But of course that’s just a theory, like everything else in this bloody case.’

  Like everyone involved in the inquiry, Huldar had given a lot of thought to the method of killing. His only conclusion was that the case was utterly bizarre. They were waiting impatiently for the results of the post-mortem, though Huldar had no hope of being among the first to see them. ‘Have you been sent the CCTV footage from the garage yet?’

  Erla snorted. ‘There won’t be any. An unbelievable fucking balls-up.’

  ‘Oh?’ Two CCTV cameras had been visible in the garage, though neither was pointing directly at Kolbeinn’s car. One covered the entrance, the other the area in front of the spaces where Kolbeinn had parked. Assuming the killer hadn’t popped up out of the sewers, it would have been impossible to reach the car without being caught on film. Huldar assumed the killer had hidden his face, but his image would nevertheless give an idea of his age and build. The video might also show how he had entered the garage. The consensus was that he must have driven in, since how else could he have brought the victim there? And while they couldn’t rule out the possibility that he had tricked the man into entering the garage, it was difficult to imagine how. Huldar had assumed the CCTV footage would answer that question once and for all. But if there was a problem with the recordings, the prospects looked bleak: they would have a job on their hands if they had to question everyone who had used the car park that day and might conceivably have spotted the killer. ‘Weren’t the cameras hooked up?’ He knew it wasn’t that paint had been sprayed over the lenses as he had checked them himself and been profoundly relieved to see that the glass was clean.

  ‘They were hooked up all right. But the computer that was supposed to store the recordings broke down months ago and, according to the caretaker, the building committee decided there was no need to replace it as the cameras were a good enough deterrent by themselves.’ Erla scowled in disgust. ‘Part of the same cost-cutting drive that made them reduce the caretaker’s hours to part time.’

  Huldar tipped his head back and closed his eyes. Everything seemed to be conspiring against them. ‘Are we any clearer about when Benedikt went missing? Or where he was snatched from?’

  Erla shook her head. ‘No. We’re going over his house with a fine-tooth comb but haven’t turned up anything useful yet apart from his mobile phone. It hadn’t been used for two days, but no one knows how significant that is. The old man was a retired widower and his son lives abroad with his wife and children. The log of his previous usage makes it very clear that he rarely made or received any calls. And we haven’t managed to track down anyone who can tell us his movements in the twenty-four hours preceding the murder. The one piece of evidence we do have is that the morning papers were in the living room, which suggests he was at home on the morning of the murder.’ She gave a loud groan, then buried her face in her hands and rubbed it vigorously. ‘This is one big fucking mess. The analysis of the chain and gag had better produce some fingerprints. If not, everything’s against us. Everything. Nobody remembers selling or hiring out a chainsaw recently, so the next stage is to test all the chainsaws in the country in search of blood from the hands. Just the work of establishing who owns a chainsaw and where they’re all kept is enough to tie up the entire team for days.’

  ‘What about Kolbeinn? The owner of the car. What emerged from his interview?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Erla snorted dismissively again. ‘He says he hasn’t a clue why his car was targeted; he’d never seen the victim before and didn’t recognise the name. We still haven’t managed to uncover any connection between them.’ Erla rooted around among the papers that littered her desk. ‘I’ve got his statement here somewhere. It’s almost exactly like Benedikt’s. He knows nothing and can’t begin to understand why this should have happened to him. Which is worrying, given what happened to the old man.’

  ‘Maybe there isn’t a connection. His car was parked at the back of the garage and it’s a very powerful model. If I’d been planning something like that, I’d probably have chosen it. Anyway, the perpetrator must have waited for most of the cars to leave before setting the whole thing up. The question is how long he waited. Are we any clearer about when he might have arrived?’

  Erla shook her head. ‘No. I’m hoping the post-mortem will give us a time frame. It must be possible to tell from the wounds on the victim’s hands and feet how long he was tied up.’

  ‘The report’s due any minute, isn’t it?’ Huldar hoped this unusually long conversation was a sign that they were back to being confidantes, that he would finally be accepted as a fully paid-up member of CID again. He’d been out in the cold long enough. ‘Perhaps you’ll give me a heads-up about what it contains?’

  Erla frowned slightly. ‘We’ll see.’

  Huldar judged that now would be a good time to
make his exit. The conversation could only go downhill from here. ‘I’m going to grab a coffee. You coming?’ He threw her this offering in the hope she would accept: the moment she emerged from her office, the bollocking she had received would begin to fade from the memories of her underlings. It would be a difficult step but she had to take it sooner or later. However low his own standing with the team, it would be better if she went with him, if only so she could concentrate on what he was saying and ignore the rest of the office.

  ‘No, thanks. I need to get on with preparing for the progress meeting later.’

  ‘No problem.’ Huldar watched her turn back to the documents on her desk. He added in parting: ‘We’ll catch him, Erla. It’s only a matter of time before we stumble across a lead.’ He meant it; more often than not this was how cases were solved. In conventional killings, this usually happened as soon as the police arrived, since few Icelandic murderers made any attempt to cover their tracks. Some were still at the scene with the murder weapon in their hand. However different this case was shaping up to be, Huldar didn’t doubt that they would eventually chance on the solution.

  * * *

  Gudlaugur dropped into his chair. He was red in the face, from the cold this time rather than embarrassment. ‘Nothing. There’s no one left on the list.’

  Huldar shifted so he could see the young man’s face. ‘Were they all in?’

  ‘Three answered the door when I knocked and seem to have been too slow to answer the phone when you rang. One turned out to be in hospital, according to the woman in the flat next door, and the last one’s at sea. His wife was home.’

  Huldar rolled his chair back to his place. His eye happened to fall on the photocopies of the letters from the time capsule and his thoughts flew to Freyja. Grateful though he was to have a proper case to work on, he regretted not having an excuse to call her. Perhaps he would come across a child witness soon and she would have to conduct the interview. But it felt unrealistic. And he certainly wouldn’t wish for any child to be involved in these horrors. Pulling the photocopies over, he read the threatening letter again. The garage murder would be solved eventually and after that he could return to the mystery of the time capsule, call Freyja in for a meeting and try to win her round. Who knows, it might actually work this time. She didn’t seem to have started a new relationship, which was a definite plus.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ Gudlaugur’s head appeared over Huldar’s monitor.

  ‘No reason.’ Huldar quickly rearranged his features. ‘What are the names of the two men you still need to confirm are alive and well?’

  The head vanished, then reappeared. Gudlaugur read from a scrap of paper. ‘Ævar Einarsson and Haraldur Jóhann Gudnason. Why do you ask?’

  ‘No particular reason.’ Huldar didn’t feel like explaining, and in any case neither name fitted the initials on Thröstur’s hit-list. It had occurred to him that there could be a connection. Benedikt Toft’s initials had got him thinking: BT cropped up in the letter, but that could be pure coincidence. He hadn’t raised the matter with Erla for fear of being laughed at, especially if he added that K could stand for Kolbeinn and JJ for Jón Jónsson. No one was taking the time capsule investigation seriously, and in the absence of a link between Thröstur and the murder victim, he would have an uphill struggle persuading the team. He was sceptical enough himself. But hopelessly far-fetched though the idea was, he couldn’t get Thröstur out of his head, or the way he had freaked out when he realised why they had come round to see him.

  As Erla hadn’t given him any new assignment yet and it was still half an hour until the team briefing, Huldar decided to take a quick look at Thröstur’s father.

  Reading about the murder of Vaka Orradóttir left a bad taste in his mouth. The man, if you could call him a man, had raped the little girl in his daughter’s bed, then smothered her with a pillow. He had been unable to provide any explanation except that he had been too drunk to know what he was doing. His daughter Sigrún, who was in the same class at school as the murdered girl, had shut herself in a cupboard where she was discovered by the police when they turned up. Despite all their attempts, they had failed to extract a coherent account from her. It was thought that she hadn’t directly witnessed the rape or murder but had hidden in the cupboard either before it occurred or as soon as it became clear what was going to happen. The psychologist who treated Sigrún believed she would open up eventually but that she was so afraid of her father it was unlikely to happen before the case went to court. In contrast, her brother Thröstur, who was twelve years old at the time, had not been backward about giving his side of the story, though he had been at school when the tragedy happened. He had come home, gone straight to his room and shut himself in, completely unaware that there was a little girl lying dead in the room next door. Around suppertime, feeling hungry, he had gone downstairs to the kitchen, poured himself some Cheerios and eaten them alone, which wasn’t unusual. His mother was a cleaner and receptionist at an old people’s home; her shifts began at midday and finished at eight in the evening. Since she went to work by bus, she was never home before nine. His father hadn’t been about, which, according to Thröstur, wasn’t unusual either. He was always drunk, either comatose on the sofa in the living room or hunched, shaking, over an overflowing ashtray in the kitchen.

  His mother Agnes had returned home around nine, unusually tired, or so she claimed, as she was coming down with a cold. A medical examination carried out two days later could neither confirm nor refute this claim since by then her temperature had been normal and she wasn’t displaying any symptoms. In her statement she said that her husband Jón had been awake downstairs when she arrived home. By then Vaka had been dead in their daughter’s room for over five hours and rigor mortis would have been setting in. He stank of spirits and seemed in an unusually foul temper, which she understood was because she hadn’t bought him any alcohol, though she had never promised to do that – as if this detail had been of any relevance. Her husband had reacted furiously and hit her so hard that she had fallen, banging her head on the wall and almost losing consciousness. After that he had stormed out, leaving her on the floor. The same medical examination that had been unable to confirm her cold had shown that the woman had a large swelling on her right temple and a bruise extending from her left cheek down to her jaw, consistent with her statement. After he had gone, the woman had struggled to her feet and looked into the children’s rooms. Her daughter appeared to be lying asleep under her duvet, so she had shut the door, then exchanged a few words with her son. After that she had gone to bed and hadn’t woken up until the police arrived at eight the following morning. Thröstur had called them after finding Vaka’s body. He had gone to wake Sigrún and found her lying with a pillow over her face. When he removed it, he discovered that the girl underneath was a stranger. During the phone call, the boy didn’t seem to have grasped that she was dead; he said there was a sick girl lying in his sister’s bed and he couldn’t wake her up. She felt cold and strange to the touch, and although she was asleep her eyes were open. Sigrún was nowhere to be seen.

  The photographs from the scene were sickening. They showed the girl lying among torn, dirty bedclothes in a messy, shabbily furnished room. In the pictures taken before the police touched anything, the covers were pulled up to her neck. She was gaping up at the ceiling with the glazed, bloodshot eyes typical of asphyxiation victims. Her light brown hair was spread out like rays around her head, as if it had been arranged with a hairbrush. Her lips were blue, and at the corner of her mouth there was a small white feather from the pillow that had been used to suffocate her. The pillow lay beside her head, though according to the brother it had been over her face when he found her, so she couldn’t be seen from the doorway, which corroborated the mother’s story.

  The photos taken after the duvet had been removed were a lot more disturbing and Huldar shifted inadvertently backwards in his chair. The little girl had been stripped below the waist: her trousers were
hanging inside out from one ankle, along with her colourful childish knickers. The girl’s legs were splayed and between them was a dark patch of dried blood. It looked to Huldar as if there were other, older stains of the same kind on the sheet, which indicated strongly that Sigrún had also been abused by her brute of a father. Huldar recalled Freyja’s comment that Vaka was unlikely to have been Jón’s first and only victim. From the case file it was apparent that attempts had been made to question Thröstur and Sigrún on this very subject, but neither would respond. Their reluctance was attributed to fear of their father.

  Huldar closed the files on the investigation, and turned to the records of the trial, but these supplied no new information. Jón had been sentenced to sixteen years in prison at the district court and his sentence had been confirmed by the Supreme Court. Nothing unexpected about that. But Huldar’s search turned up the record of another, older court case. On that occasion the man had been acquitted. Neither the details nor the grounds for his acquittal were recorded. The only information provided was that a charge had been brought for sexual abuse of a minor and that the trial had been held behind closed doors. Huldar searched in the police filing system but could find no record of the investigation leading to the charge. He knew little about court cases tried in private, so couldn’t tell if the summing-up was unusually brief. It was all very puzzling and he returned to the uninformative verdict in case he could read between the lines.

  In the event he didn’t need to. His eye fell on the name of the prosecutor and he leapt to his feet: Benedikt Toft, the man who had died in the underground garage.

  Chapter 13

  Smoke was rising from the large barbecue in the Family Park and a crowd of children were swarming around it. As Æsa drew near, the smell of grilled meat brought on her hunger pangs. She wasn’t the only one: on her way through the zoo she had seen the animals standing pressed against their fences, sniffing the air.