“I have no idea. Isn’t that your job? Isn’t it your job to find the bastard?”
Next Sigurdur Oli had arranged to meet the man’s neighbour, a young woman who studied medicine at the university and rented a small flat in the next-door block. She sat down for a chat, and Sigurdur Oli made an effort to concentrate better than he had when he spoke to the man, who had left in something of a huff.
The woman was about twenty-five and rather fat. Sigurdur Oli had caught a brief glimpse of her kitchen where fast-food packaging predominated.
She told Sigurdur Oli that her car was nothing special but it was still awful to have it scratched like that.
“Why the sudden interest now?” she asked. “Your lot could hardly be bothered to come round when I originally reported the damage.”
“Several other cars have been vandalised,” Sigurdur Oli said. “One belonging to someone from the block of flats next door. We need to put a stop to it.”
“I think I saw them,” the woman said, taking out a packet of cigarettes. The flat stank of smoke.
“Really?” Sigurdur Oli said, watching her light up. He thought of the fast-food packaging in the kitchen and had to remind himself that this woman was studying medicine.
“There were two boys loitering outside,” she said, exhaling smoke. “You see, I was at home when it happened. It was so peculiar. I had to run back inside because I’d forgotten my lunch. I left the car unlocked with the keys in the ignition, something you should never do.”
She gave Sigurdur Oli a look, as if she was giving him important advice.
“When I came out, only a few minutes later, there was this terrible scratch on my car.”
“Was it early in the morning?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“Yes, I was on my way to lectures.”
“How long ago was this?”
“A week or so.”
“And you saw who did it?”
“I’m sure it was them,” the woman said, stubbing out her cigarette. There was a small bowl of toffees on the table. She put one in her mouth and proffered the bowl to Sigurdur Oli who declined.
“What did you see?”
“I told the police all this last week but they didn’t seem very interested in the scratch at the time.”
“There have been other incidents,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Yours is not the only car they’ve vandalised. We want to catch them.”
“It was about eight o’clock,” she said. “Still pitch black, of course, but there’s a light by the entrance to the block and as I was on my way upstairs I saw two boys walk past. They can’t have been more than about fifteen, both carrying schoolbags. I told the police all this.”
“Did you notice which way they were going?”
“Towards the chemist’s.”
“The chemist’s?”
“And the school,” the woman said, chewing her toffee. “Where the boy was murdered.”
“Why do you think those boys scratched your car?”
“Because it wasn’t scratched when I ran upstairs and it was when I came back down. They were the only people I saw that morning. I’m sure they were hiding somewhere, laughing at me. What kind of people scratch cars? Tell me that. What kind of bastards are they?”
“Pathetic losers,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Would you recognise them again if you saw them?”
“I’m not a hundred per cent sure it was them.”
“No, I know that.”
“One had long, fair hair. They were wearing anoraks. The other had a woolly hat on. They were both sort of gangling.”
“Could you recognise them from photos?”
“Maybe. You lot didn’t bother to offer me the chance the other day.”
Erlendur shut the door when he got back to his office on Hverfisgata. He sat down at his desk with his hands in his lap and stared into space with unseeing eyes. He had made a mistake. He had broken one of the golden rules that he had always tried to obey. The first rule that Marion Briem had taught him: nothing is as you think it is. He had been over-confident. Arrogant. He had forgotten the caution designed to protect him from blundering when he did not know the terrain. Arrogance had led him astray. He had overlooked other obvious possibilities; something that should not have happened to him.
He tried to remember the phone calls, what the woman had said, what it had been possible to glean from her voice, what time of day she had phoned. He had misinterpreted everything she said. It can’t go on like this, he suddenly remembered her saying in her first phone call. In the most recent call he had refused to listen to her.
He knew that the woman wanted his help. She had something to hide and it was torturing her, so she had turned to him. There was only one possible explanation. If she was not the missing woman, it could only be connected to one case. He was handling the investigation into Elias’s death. The phone calls must have been linked to that. It couldn’t be anything else. This woman had information that might help the investigation into the child’s murder and he had told her to get lost.
Erlendur slammed his clenched fists on the desk as hard as he could, sending papers and forms flying.
He kept going over and over the question of what the woman might have been trying to tell him but simply could not work it out. He could only hope that she would call him again, although that was hardly likely after the way he had treated her the last time.
He heard a knock and Elinborg put her head round the door. She saw the papers on the floor and looked at Erlendur.
“Is everything all right?”
“Did you want something?”
“Everyone makes mistakes,” Elinborg said, shutting the door behind her.
“Any news?”
“Sigurdur Oli’s going over photos of the older pupils at the school with some car owner. A couple of them were loitering outside her block of flats when her car was vandalised.”
Elinborg began to pick up the papers from the floor.
“Leave them,” Erlendur said and started to help her.
“The pathologist is examining the body,” she said. “The woman appears to have drowned and on first impression there are no signs of anything suspicious. She’s been in the sea for at least two to three weeks.”
“I should have known better,” Erlendur said.
“So?”
“I made an error of judgement.”
“Come on, you weren’t to know.”
“I should have talked to her instead of being hostile. I judged her for what she had done. And it wasn’t even her.”
Elinborg shook her head.
“That woman phoned me so that I would reassure her and persuade her to help us, because she knows it’s the right thing to do. And I reacted by cutting her off. She knows something about Elias’s murder. A woman of uncertain age with a slightly husky voice, perhaps from smoking. Now, after the event, I realise how worried and frightened and apprehensive she was. I thought the missing woman and her husband were playing some kind of game. I couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t work out what they were up to and it got to me. Then it turns out I’d got the wrong end of the stick entirely.”
“What was she thinking of? Why did she throw herself in the sea?”
“I think . . .” Erlendur trailed off.
“What?”
“I think she’d fallen in love. She sacrificed everything for love: family, children, friends. Everything. Someone told me she had changed, become a different person. As if she’d found a new lease of life, discovered her true self during that time.”
Erlendur stopped again, lost in thought.
“And? What happened?”
“She found out that she’d been deceived. Her husband had started cheating on her. She was humiliated. All her . . . everything she had done, everything she had sacrificed, was for nothing.”
“I’ve heard about men like that,” Elinborg said. “They’re addicted to the first flush of passion and when that begins to fade, they go looking for it elsewhere.”
/> “But her love was genuine,” Erlendur said. “And she couldn’t bear it when she found out that it wasn’t reciprocated.”
25
Sigurdur Oli rang the doorbell at the entrance to a four-storey block of flats close to the school. He stood and waited, then rang the bell again. A cold wind blew about his legs in the meagre shelter by the front door and he stamped his feet. It seemed no one was home. The block, which was not unlike the one where Sunee lived with her sons, was in a poor state of repair. It had not been painted for a long time and the wall by the entrance was still stained with soot from a fire in the rubbish store. Dusk was falling. The morning’s snow flurries had deteriorated into a blizzard, cars were getting stuck on the roads and the Met Office had issued a severe weather warning for that evening. Sigurdur Oli’s thoughts went to Bergthora. He had not heard from her all day. She had already left for work when he woke up at the crack of dawn and lay alone with his thoughts.
The entryphone emitted a crackle.
“Hello?” he heard a voice say.
Sigurdur Oli introduced himself, explaining that he was from the police.
There was silence on the entryphone.
“What do you want?” the voice asked eventually.
“I want you to open the door,” Sigurdur Oli said, stamping his feet.
A long moment passed before the lock clicked and Sigurdur Oli entered the hall. He climbed up to the landing where the owner of the voice lived and knocked on the door. It opened and a boy of about fifteen peered shiftily into the corridor.
“Are you Anton?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“Yes,” the boy said.
He appeared in pretty good health considering; he was fully dressed and even had a little colour in his cheeks. Sigurdur Oli noticed a smell of pizza from inside the flat and when he peered inside he saw an anorak slung over a chair and an open pizza box with one slice missing. He had been informed that Anton was ill and had been absent from school for the last few days.
“Feeling better?” Sigurdur Oli asked, walking into the flat uninvited.
The boy retreated before him and Sigurdur Oli shut the door. He noticed that the boy had made himself comfortable in front of the television with a pizza and a fizzy drink and two or three videos. An action film was playing on the screen.
“What’s going on?” the boy asked in astonishment.
“It’s one thing to scratch cars, Anton, another to kill people,” Sigurdur Oli said, helping himself to a slice of pizza. “Your mum and dad not home?”
The boy shook his head.
“Several days ago you were spotted scratching a car near here,” Sigurdur Oli said and bit into the pizza. He watched the boy while he chewed.
“I haven’t scratched any cars,” Anton said.
“Where did you get the knife?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “And don’t lie to me.”
“I…” Anton hesitated.
“Yes?”
“Why do you say kill people?”
“The little Asian boy who was stabbed, I reckon you did that too.”
“I didn’t do that”
“Sure you did.”
“I haven’t done anything,” Anton said.
“Where can I get hold of your mother?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “She’ll need to come down to the station with us.”
Anton stared in bewilderment at Sigurdur Oli who calmly finished his pizza slice and surveyed the flat, as if Anton were an irrelevance. The medical student had identified the boy from a recent class photograph. She believed that he was one of the two boys she had seen outside the block of flats when her car was scratched. She was not quite so sure when shown a picture of Anton’s classmate Thorvaldur, though she said that he could well have been the other boy. It was all very vague so Sigurdur Oli did not have much to go on when he rang Anton’s doorbell. He decided to behave as if it was an open-and-shut case, and all that remained was to take the two friends down to the station. A mere formality. This tactic seemed to work on the boy.
Sigurdur Oli did not as yet have much information on Anton and Thorvaldur. They were in the same class, spent a lot of time together and sometimes got into trouble with the teachers and school authorities; disrupting school activities, it was called. Once they had attacked a caretaker and received a two-day suspension. They were typical wasters and troublemakers who only turned up to school to ruin things for everyone else.
“I didn’t stab anyone,” Anton said at Sigurdur Oli’s mention of his mother and the police station.
“Call your mother,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Tell her to meet us down at the station.”
Anton saw that Sigurdur Oli was in deadly earnest. This cop actually believed that he had stabbed the Asian boy. He tried to grasp the situation in which he suddenly found himself but could not quite take it in. They had vandalised a few cars, Doddi had done most of them, he himself maybe one, and now they had been caught. But the cop was also under the impression that he had attacked and killed that boy. Anton stood dithering in front of Sigurdur Oli, examining his options. His mother would go mental — again. She had often threatened to chuck him out. He looked at the video he had rented and the congealing pizza and the strange thing was that what he regretted most was being deprived of a quiet day in front of the television.
“I didn’t do anything,” he repeated.
“You can tell that to your mother,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Your mate Thorvaldur lost no time in squealing on you. Whined and blubbered throughout. He says you scratched the cars. He says he only went along with you.”
“Doddi? He said that?”
“The biggest wimp I’ve ever come across,” Sigurdur Oli said, though he had not, in fact, tracked Thorvaldur down yet.
Anton vacillated in front of him.
“He’s lying, he can’t have said that.”
“Yeah, right,” Sigurdur Oli said. “You two can discuss it down at the station.”
He made to grab Anton’s arm and lead him out but the boy tore himself away.
“I only scratched one car,” he said. “Doddi did the rest. He’s lying!”
Sigurdur Oli drew a deep breath.
“We didn’t do anything to that boy,” Anton added, as if to make it quite clear.
“You mean you and your mate?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Doddi, yes. He’s lying! It was him who scratched the cars.”
It was time to ease up the pressure a little, so Sigurdur Oli took a step back from the boy.
“How many cars was it?”
“I don’t know. A few.”
“Do you know the Icelandic teacher Kjartan’s car?”
“Yes.”
“Did you scratch his car? Outside the school?”
Anton hesitated before answering.
“That was Doddi. I didn’t even know. He just told me about it. He can’t stand Kjartan. Does Mum have to find out about this?”
“What did you make the scratches with?” Sigurdur Oli asked, ignoring his question.
A knife,” Anton said.
“What kind of knife?”
“It was Doddi’s.”
“He said it was yours,” Sigurdur Oli lied.
“It was his knife.”
“What kind of knife was it?”
“Like the one on TV,” Anton said.
“On TV?”
“The one they were showing pictures of. It was like our knife.”
Sigurdur Oli was speechless. He stared at the boy who gradually cottoned on to the fact that he had said something important. He wondered what it could have been and when it suddenly struck him, it was like a blow to the face. It had not occurred to him. Of course it was the same knife! He had seen pictures of it on television but had not made the connection with the damage that he and his mate Doddi had done to a few cars on the way to school. He began to see his situation as part of something much larger and more serious.
Sigurdur Oli took out his phone.
“I didn’t do it,” Anton said. “I swear it.�
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“Do you know where the knife is now?”
“Doddi has it. Doddi had it all along.”
Sigurdur Oli watched the boy as he waited for Erlendur to answer, then glanced round the little flat, noting how Anton had made himself comfortable before the intrusion.
“Call your mother,” he said. “You’re coming with me. Tell her to meet you down at the station.”
“Yes.” Erlendur answered his phone.
“I think I’m on to something,” Sigurdur Oli said. Are you at the station?”
“What have you got?” Erlendur asked.
“Is the knife there?”
“Yes, what are you going to do?”
“I’m on my way,” Sigurdur Oli said.
When the police arrived to fetch Doddi an hour or so later he was not at home. A man in his early forties answered the door to the two officers and looked them up and down. Doddi’s mother appeared in the doorway as well. They did not know where the boy was and demanded to be told what he had done wrong. The police officers said they did not know, they had simply been sent to bring him in to the police station on Hverfisgata along with a guardian.
“Since he’s under age,” one of them elaborated.
The officers were both in uniform and driving a patrol car. The intention was to put the fear of God into Doddi. They were standing on the doorstep of the small town house where Doddi lived, explaining their business, when the man, who turned out to be the boy’s stepfather, called out that there he was, there was Doddi!
“Come here!” he called. “Doddi, get over here!” The boy was walking round the corner of a nearby house, taking a footpath that cut through the area. He stopped dead when he heard his stepfather’s call, then spotted the police car, the two officers looking in his direction and his mother’s head craning from the doorway. It took him a moment to grasp the situation. He contemplated making a run for it, then decided it would be futile.
After an interrogation lasting nearly three hours, Doddi finally confessed to Sigurdur Oli that he had stolen a carving knife from the school and used it to vandalise cars that he and his friend Anton passed on their way to school. Both boys flatly denied having touched Elias, however, claiming that they did not even know him and had no idea who killed him. It was more than a week since they had scratched the car belonging to the young woman whom they had seen dashing back inside her block of flats, leaving the engine running. They did not realise that she had spotted them. At first they meant to steal the car as it had been handed to them on a plate with the engine left running and all, but when it came to the point they couldn’t be bothered. Doddi walked along beside it, scraping the point of the knife along the paintwork, then they ran and hid. This was the first time they had seen the owner of one of the cars they had vandalised and it heightened the adrenalin. They waited for the woman to come out again in order to watch her reaction when she saw the scratch. She soon came dashing back out of the house and opened the car door but stopped dead when she saw the scratch along the bodywork. She bent down to take a closer look, then peered round, walked out into the car park and scanned in all directions, before taking a frantic glance at her watch, returning to her car and driving away.
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