Arctic Chill de-7

by Arnaldur Indridason

  “Flight attendant?”

  “Vilhjalmur calls them that, the sports teacher. He’s from the Westman Islands.”

  Sigurdur Oli gave her a blank look.

  “The children who are last to leave after gym.”

  “You moved him to a different seat?” Sigurdur Oli said, at a complete loss about flight attendants and the Westman Islands.

  “It’s not uncommon,” Agnes said. “We do it for various reasons. I only did it indirectly because of him. Elias was good at maths. He was way ahead of his classmates, even of the rest of his year, but the boy who sat beside him, poor old Birgir — or Biggi, as he’s known — has trouble puzzling out how two and two could possibly make four.”

  Agnes looked Sigurdur Oli in the eye.

  “I know I shouldn’t say things like that,” she said sheepishly. Anyway, Biggi’s mother came to see me and told me how he was always complaining about being stupid, and when she wheedled out of him what it was all about he said that Elias was much better than him at everything. His mother was really quite embarrassed about it. It’s not uncommon and there’s often a simple solution. I made Elias sit somewhere else. I put him next to a lovely girl who’s another excellent pupil”

  Agnes inhaled the smoke, then blew it out of the window.

  “What about Elias? Didn’t he have any problems?”

  “Yes,” Agnes said. “He found Icelandic quite difficult. He and his brother used to speak Thai to each other. It’s what they spoke at home. Kids can get confused by that.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette.

  “So Elias was a bit late this morning?” Sigurdur Oli said.

  Holding the cigarette butt between her fingers, Agnes nodded.

  “I’d started taking the register when Elias finally showed up. The whole class watched him sit down. His hair was ruffled and he was sleepy, as if he hadn’t fully woken up yet. I asked him if he was all right and he just nodded. But he was very dreamy. He sat there with his bag on the desk, looking out of the window at the playground, and seemed to be in a world of his own. He didn’t hear me when I started teaching. Just sat staring out of the window. I went over and asked what he was thinking about.

  “ “About the bird,” he said. “What bird?” “The one I dreamed about,” he said. “The bird that died.””

  Agnes put the cigarette butt in her pocket and shut the window. It was cold indoors by now and she shivered when she stood up. A storm was forecast for that evening and night.

  “I didn’t ask him any more about it,” she said. “Children often say things like that. I didn’t see him again until lunchtime. In the break and at mealtime. I didn’t notice him in particular. They had an art lesson that morning, maybe you should talk to Brynhildur too. Then they had a double period with me after lunch. The last lesson was gym with Vilhjalmur. He was Elias’s last teacher today.”

  “He’s next on the list,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Can you tell me anything about…” He browsed through his notebook looking for the name that the principal had given him. “Kjartan, the Icelandic teacher?”

  “Kjartan’s not exactly a barrel of laughs,” Agnes said, “as you’ll soon discover for yourself. He doesn’t keep his views to himself. Quite a pain in the neck really. A former sports star. He used to play handball, then something happened to him. I don’t know exactly what. He’s not stupid though. He mainly teaches the older children.”

  With a nod, Sigurdur Oli put his notebook in his jacket and then said goodbye to Agnes. On his way out to the car, his mobile rang. It was his wife Bergthora. She had seen the news on television and knew he would be late home.

  “It’s awful,” she said. “Was he really stabbed?”

  “Yes,” Sigurdur Oli said. “I have a lot to do and we don’t know where to begin. Don’t wait up for me.”

  “Do you have any idea who did it?”

  “No. His brother’s gone missing. His elder brother. He might know something. Erlendur thinks so anyway.”

  “That he did it?”

  “No, but—”

  “Isn’t it more likely that he’s been attacked too? Has Erlendur considered that?”

  “I’ll pass that on to him,” Sigurdur Oli said drily. Sometimes Bergthora inadvertently revealed that she had more faith in Erlendur than in her husband when it came to criminal investigations. Sigurdur Oli knew that she meant well, but it got on his nerves.

  He grimaced. A response like that risked provoking Bergthora’s wrath but he was tired and peevish and knew that she wanted him to come home as soon as possible. They had to talk things over. Bergthora’s suggestion. A few days before she had proposed that they should look into the possibility of adopting a child from abroad. They could not have children together. Sigurdur Oli had been unenthusiastic about the idea. Hesitantly, he suggested that they put up with the status quo for the time being. Their attempts to have a baby had put a strain on their relationship. Sigurdur Oli wanted them to have a year free of worries about children or adoption. Bergthora was more impatient. She yearned to have a baby.

  “Oh, of course I shouldn’t go sticking my nose in,” she said over the phone.

  “It’s perfectly feasible that his brother was attacked too,” Sigurdur Oli said. “We’re examining all the possibilities.”

  There was silence on the line.

  “Has Erlendur found that woman?” Bergthora eventually asked.

  “No. She’s still missing.”

  “Do you know any more about that case?”

  “Not really.”

  “If I’m asleep, will you wake me up when you get home?”

  “I’ll do that,” Sigurdur Oli said, and they rang off.

  8

  The boys were playing indoor football with great zeal. They fought over every single ball and did not flinch from playing dirty. Sigurdur Oli saw one of them go in for a sliding tackle that could have broken his opponent’s leg. When the victim crashed to the floor he yelled at the top of his voice and clutched his ankle.

  “Watch out, lads!” the coach shouted into the pitch. “None of that, Geiri! Come on, Raggi,” he called to the boy who was climbing to his feet after the tackle.

  He sent on a substitute for Raggi and the game continued just as violently as before. There were far more boys at football practice than could play at once, so the coach made frequent substitutions. Sigurdur Oli watched from the sidelines. The coach was Vilhjalmur, Elias’s sports teacher. He had an extra part-time job as a boys” football trainer, as his wife had told Sigurdur Oli when he stood on their doorstep. She had directed him to the sports hall.

  The practice was coming to an end. Vilhjalmur blew the whistle that hung around his neck and a boy who seemed unhappy with the result gave the ball an almighty kick, hitting one of his teammates on the back of the head. After some commotion, Vilhjalmur blew his whistle again and called out to the boys to stop that nonsense and get along to the showers. The two boys stopped their brawling.

  “Isn’t that a bit rough?” Sigurdur Oli asked as he walked over to Vilhjalmur. The boys stared at the policeman. They had never seen such a well-dressed man in the hall before.

  “They get quite boisterous sometimes,” Vilhjalmur said, shaking Sigurdur Oli’s hand. A short, chubby man aged about thirty, he gathered up the goalpost cones and balls and threw them into a storeroom that he then locked. “These kids need toughening up. They come here fat and lazy from pizza and computer games and I get them to take some exercise. Are you here about Elias?” he said.

  “You were his last teacher today, I understand,” Sigurdur Oli said.

  Vilhjalmur had heard about the murder and said he could hardly believe the news.

  “You feel completely thrown by something like this,” he said. “Elias was a great kid — dedicated to sport. I think he really enjoyed playing football. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Did you notice anything special or unusual about him today?”

  “It was just a normal day. I made them run a bi
t and vault over the box, then we split them up into teams. They enjoy football most. Handball too.”

  “Did Elias go straight home from school, do you think?”

  “I have no idea where he went,” Vilhjalmur said.

  “Was he the last to leave?”

  “Elias was always the last to leave,” Vilhjalmur said.

  “Was he a “flight attendant”?”

  Are you from the Westman Islands too?”

  “No. Not exactly. You’re … ?”

  “We moved here when I was twelve.”

  “Was Elias hanging around then, or … ?”

  “That’s just the way he was,” Vilhjalmur said. “He took a long time to leave. He was slow at changing his clothes. He sort of dithered about and you had to chivvy him along.”

  “What was he doing then?”

  “Just preoccupied, in a world of his own.”

  “Today too?”

  “Probably, though I didn’t particularly notice. I had to rush off to a meeting.”

  “Did you see anyone waiting for him outside? Notice if he met anyone? Did he seem afraid to go home? Could you sense anything like that about him?”

  “No, nothing. I didn’t see anything unusual outside. The kids were heading off home. I don’t think anyone was waiting for him. But then, I wasn’t thinking along those lines. You don’t think about that sort of thing.”

  “Not until afterwards,” Sigurdur Oli said.

  “Yes, of course. But as I say, I didn’t notice anything unusual. He displayed no signs of fear during the lesson. Didn’t say anything to me. He was just the same as always. After all, nothing of that kind has ever happened here before. Never. I can’t understand anyone wanting to attack Elias, simply can’t understand it. It’s horrific”

  “Do you know the Icelandic teacher at the school, a man by the name of Kjartan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Apparently he has certain views about immigrants.”

  “That’s putting it mildly”

  “Do you agree with him?”

  “Me? No, he strikes me as a nutjob. He …”

  “He what?”

  “He’s rather bitter,” Vilhjalmur said. “Have you met him?”

  “No.”

  “He’s an old sporting hero,” Vilhjalmur said. “I remember him well from handball. Damn good player. Then something happened, he was badly injured and had to quit. Just as he was turning professional. He’d been signed up by a Spanish club. I think that festers. He’s not a likeable sort of character.”

  Shouts and cries came from the boys” changing rooms along the corridor. Vilhjalmur set off in that direction to calm the boys down.

  “Do you know what happened?” he said over his shoulder.

  “Not yet,” Sigurdur Oli said.

  “Hope you catch the bastard. Was it racially motivated?”

  “We don’t know anything.”

  Kjartan’s wife was in her early thirties, slightly younger than the Icelandic teacher himself, and rather scruffily dressed in jogging pants that detracted unnecessarily from her looks. Two children stood behind her. Sigurdur Oli cast a glance inside the dim flat. The couple did not appear particularly house-proud. Instinctively, he thought about his own flat where everything was spick and span. The thought sent a warm feeling through him as he stood outside in the cold, pierced by the bitter wind. This flat was one of four in the building, on the ground floor.

  The woman called her husband and he came to the door, also wearing jogging pants and a vest that looked two sizes too small and emphasised its owner’s expanding paunch. He seemed to make do with shaving once a week and there was a bad-tempered look on his face that Sigurdur Oli could not quite fathom, something about his eyes that expressed antipathy and anger. He remembered having seen that expression before, that face, and recalled Vilhjalmur’s words about the fallen sports star.

  A face from the past, Erlendur would have said. He sometimes made remarks that Sigurdur Oli disliked because he did not understand them, snatches from those old tales that were Erlendur’s only apparent interest in life. The two men were poles apart in their thinking. While Erlendur sat at home reading old Icelandic folklore or fiction, Sigurdur Oli would sit in front of the television watching American cop shows with a bowl of popcorn in his lap and a bottle of Coke on the table. When he joined the police force he modelled himself on such programmes. He was not alone in thinking that a job with the police could sharpen one’s image. Recruits still occasionally turned up for work dressed like American TV cops, in jeans and back-to-front baseball cap.

  “Is it about the boy?” Kjartan said, making no move to invite Sigurdur Oli in out of the cold.

  “About Elias, yes.”

  “It was only a matter of time,” Kjartan said with an intolerant ring to his voice. “They shouldn’t let those people into the country,” he went on. “It only causes conflict. This had to happen sooner or later. Whether it was this boy in this school in this district at this time or someone else at some other time … it makes no difference. It would have happened and will happen again. You can bet”

  Sigurdur Oli began to recall more of Kjartan’s story as the man stood in front of him, feet apart, with one hand on the doorframe and the other on the door, his gut hanging out under his vest. Sigurdur Oli was a keen follower of sports, although he was more interested in American football and baseball than Icelandic sports. But he remembered this man as the great hope of Icelandic handball, recalled how he had already been in the national team when he was injured during a game in his early twenties and had to quit. The media made a big deal of him for a while, then Kjartan disappeared from the scene as quickly as he had been swept into it.

  “So you think the attack was racially motivated?” Sigurdur Oli said, thinking how difficult it must have been for the man to say goodbye to professional handball. He might have been coming to the end of a star-studded career now had he not been injured, instead he was teaching at a secondary school.

  “Is there any other possibility?” Kjartan asked.

  “You’ve taught Elias.”

  “Yes, as a substitute teacher.”

  “What kind of a boy was he?”

  “I don’t know him in the slightest. I heard he’d been stabbed. I don’t know any more than that. There’s no point asking me. It’s not my job to take care of those kids. I’m not working at a kids” playground!”

  Sigurdur Oli gave him a searching look.

  “There are three like him in his class,” Kjartan continued. “More than thirty in the school as a whole. I’ve stopped noticing when new ones enrol. They’re everywhere. Have you been to the flea market? It’s like Hong Kong! No one pays any attention to it. No one pays any attention to what’s becoming of our country”

  “I—”

  “Do you think it’s okay?”

  “That’s none of your business,” Sigurdur Oli said.

  “I can’t help you,” Kjartan said, preparing to shut the door.

  “Do you think it’s too much to ask you to answer a few questions?” Sigurdur Oli said. “We could deal with it down at the station otherwise. You’re welcome to come with me. It’s more comfortable there too.”

  “Don’t you go threatening me,” Kjartan said, undaunted. “I’m telling you I know nothing about this matter.”

  “He might have been afraid of you,” Sigurdur Oli said. “You don’t exactly seem to have been friendly towards him. Or to any of the other children you teach.”

  “Hey,” Kjartan protested. “I didn’t do anything to the boy. I don’t keep an eye out for the kids after school. They’re not my responsibility.”

  “If I find out you threatened him in some way because you regarded him as a foreigner, we’ll be having another chat.”

  “Wow… I’m scared shitless,” Kjartan said. “Leave me alone! I don’t know what happened to the boy; it’s nothing to do with me.”

  “What about this clash you had with a teacher called Finnur?” S
igurdur Oli asked.

  “Clash?”

  “In the staff room,” Sigurdur Oli said. “What happened?”

  “There was no clash,” Kjartan said. “We had a bit of an argument. He seems to think it’s all right: the more foreigners that pour into this country the better. He never produces anything but that old left-wing bollocks. I told him so. He got a bit angry.”

  “You think that’s acceptable, do you?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

  “What?”

  “Talking that way about people? Are you sure you’re in the right line of work?”

  “What bloody business is it of yours? Are you in the right line of work, sniffing around people who are none of your business?”

  “Maybe not,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Weren’t you in handball in the old days?” he asked. “A bit of a star?”

  Kjartan hesitated for a second. He seemed poised to say something, an insult to show that he did not care what Sigurdur Oli said or thought of him. But nothing occurred to him and he shut the door without saying a word.

  “Great role model you would have made,” Sigurdur Oli said to the door.

  Later that evening Erlendur drove back to the block of flats. The search for Niran had proved fruitless. Sunee and her brother had returned home. The police were still looking for the boy and the public had been asked to help by telephoning in information and even taking a walk around their neighbourhoods to look for a South East Asian teenager, a fairly small fifteen-year-old boy in a blue anorak and black woolly hat.

  Odinn, Elias’s father, took an active part in the search. He met Sunee and they had a long talk in private. That evening he had told Erlendur more about their marriage, how he had wanted to keep Elias after the divorce but the boy had wanted to be with his mother, so he had let the matter rest. He could not give Erlendur any details about the new man in Sunee’s life. Nor had she mentioned any boyfriend to the police. Perhaps the relationship had broken down. Odinn knew nothing about it.

  Erlendur stopped in front of the block of flats. He drove a Ford Falcon, more than thirty years old, which he had acquired that autumn, black with white interior fittings. He left the engine running and lit a cigarette. It was the last one in the pack. He crumpled the packet and was about to throw it onto the back seat as he used to do in his old car, but refrained and put the empty packet in his overcoat pocket. He treated the Ford with a certain amount of respect.