Voices de-5

by Arnaldur Indridason

  “Then there’s another thing. Could you locate a man called Gabriel Hermannsson who was a choirmaster in Hafnarfjordur in the sixties? You’re bound to find him in the phone directory if he’s still alive. He may have taught Gudlaugur. I’ve got a record sleeve here, there’s a photo of him and he looks to me as if he was in his twenties then. Of course, if he’s dead then it stops there.”

  “That’s generally the rule.”

  “What?”

  “If you’re dead, it stops.”

  “Quite.” Erlendur hesitated. “What are you talking about death for?”

  “No reason.”

  “Everything’s all right, isn’t it?”

  “Thanks for throwing some morsels my way,” Marion said.

  “Wasn’t that what you wanted? To spend your wretched old age delving into obscurities?”

  “It absolutely makes my day,” Marion said. “Have you checked about the Cortisol in the saliva?”

  “I’ll look into it,” Erlendur said and rang off.

  * * *

  The head of reception had a little room of his own in the lobby beside the reception desk and was doing some paperwork when Erlendur walked in and closed the door behind him. The man stood up and began to protest, saying he couldn’t spare the time to talk, he was on his way to a meeting, but Erlendur sat down and folded his arms.

  “What are you running away from?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t come to work yesterday, in the hotel’s peak season. You acted like a fugitive when I spoke to you the evening the doorman was murdered. You’re all jittery now. To my mind you’re top of the list of suspects. I’m told you knew Gudlaugur better than anyone else at this hotel. You deny it — say you don’t know a thing about him. I think you’re lying. You were his boss. You ought to be a little more cooperative. It’s no joke spending Christmas in custody.”

  The man stared at Erlendur without knowing what to do, then slowly sat back down in his chair.

  “You haven’t got anything on me,” he said. “It’s nonsense to think I did that to Gudlaugur. That I was in his room and… I mean with the condom and all that.”

  Erlendur was concerned by how the details of the case appeared to have leaked and how the staff were wallowing in them. In the kitchen, the chef knew precisely why they were collecting saliva samples. The reception manager could picture the scene in the doorman’s room. Maybe the hotel manager had blurted it all out, maybe the girl who found the body, maybe police officers.

  “Where were you yesterday?” Erlendur asked.

  “Off sick,” the reception manager said. “I was at home all morning.”

  “You didn’t tell anyone. Did you go to the doctor? Did he give you a note? Can I talk to him? What’s his name.”

  “I didn’t go to the doctor. I stayed in bed. I’m better now.” He forced out a cough. Erlendur smiled. This man was the worst liar he had ever encountered.

  “Why these lies?”

  “You haven’t got a thing on me,” the manager said. “All you can do is threaten me. I want you to leave me alone.”

  “I could talk to your wife too,” Erlendur said. “Ask her if she brought you a cup of tea in bed yesterday.”

  “You leave her out of it,” the manager said, and suddenly there was a tougher, more serious tone to his voice. He went red in the face.

  “I’m not going to leave her out of it,” Erlendur said.

  The manager glared at Erlendur.

  “Don’t talk to her,” he said.

  “Why not? What are you hiding? You’ve become too mysterious to get rid of me.”

  The man stared into space, then heaved a sigh.

  “Leave me alone. It’s nothing to do with Gudlaugur. These are personal problems I got myself into, which I’m trying to fix.”

  “What are they?”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything about them.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.”

  “You can’t force me.”

  “As I said, I can make a request for custody, or I can simply talk to your wife.”

  The man groaned. He looked at Erlendur.

  “This won’t go any further?”

  “Not if it has nothing to do with Gudlaugur.”

  “It’s nothing to do with him.”

  All right then.”

  “My wife received a phone call the day before yesterday,” the head of reception said. “The same day you found Gudlaugur.”

  On the phone, a woman whose voice the manager’s wife did not recognise asked for him. This was in the middle of a weekday, but it was not uncommon for him to receive calls at home at such times. His acquaintances knew that he worked irregular hours. His wife, a doctor, worked shifts and the call woke her up: she was on duty that evening. The woman on the phone acted as though she knew the head of reception, but immediately took umbrage when his wife wanted to know who she was.

  “Who are you?” she had asked. “What are you calling here for?”

  “He owes me money? the voice on the phone said.

  “Shed threatened that she would phone my house,” the reception manager told Erlendur.

  “Who was it?”

  He had gone out for a drink ten days before. His wife was at a medical conference in Sweden and he went out for a meal with three old friends. They had a lot of fun, went on a pub crawl after the restaurant and ended up at a popular nightspot in town. He lost his friends there, went to the bar and met some acquaintances from the hotel trade, stood by a small dance floor and watched the dancing. Although quite tipsy, he wasn’t too drunk to make sensible decisions. That was why he couldn’t understand it. He had never done anything like it before.

  She approached him and, just like in a movie scene, held a cigarette between her fingers and asked him for a light Although he didn’t smoke, because of his job he made a point of always carrying a lighter. It was a habit from the days when people could smoke wherever they wanted. She started talking to him about something he had now forgotten, and asked if he was going to buy her a drink. He looked at her. But of course. They stood at the bar while he bought the drinks, then sat down at a little table when it became vacant. She was exceptionally attractive and flirted subtly with him. Unsure what was going on, he played along. Women didn’t treat him like this as a rule. She sat up close to him and was forward and self-assured. When he stood up to fetch a second drink she stroked his thigh. He looked at her and she smiled. An enchanting, beautiful woman who knew what she wanted. She could have been ten years his junior.

  Later that night she asked him to walk her home. She lived nearby. He was still unsure and hesitant, but excited as well. It was so strange for him that he might just as easily have been walking on the moon. In twenty-three years he had been faithful to his wife. Two or three times in all those years he’d perhaps had the chance to kiss another woman, but nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

  “I lost the plot completely,” he told Erlendur. “Part of me wanted to run home and forget the whole thing. Part of me wanted to go with the woman.”

  “I bet I know which part that was,” Erlendur said.

  They stood by the door to her flat, in the stairwell of a modern apartment block, and she put the key in the lock. Somehow even that act became voluptuous in her hands. The door opened and she moved close to him.’Come inside with me,” she said, stroking his crotch.

  He went inside with her. First she mixed drinks for them. He sat down on the sofa. She put on some music, came over to him with a glass in her hand and smiled, her beautiful white teeth shining behind the red lipstick. Then she sat beside him, put down her glass, grabbed the belt of his trousers and slowly unzipped his flies.

  “I’ve never … It was … She could do the most incredible things,” the reception manager said.

  Erlendur watched him without saying a word.

  “I was going to sneak out in the morning, but she was one step ahead. My conscience w
as killing me, I felt like shit for betraying my wife and children. We’ve got three children. I was going to get out and forget about it. Never wanted to see that woman again. She was wide awake when I started creeping around the room in the dark.”

  She sat up and switched on the beside lamp. “Are you going?” she asked. He said he was. Claimed to be late. For an important meeting. Something of that sort.

  “Did you enjoy it last night?” she asked.

  Holding his trousers in his hands, he looked at her.

  “It was amazing,” he said. “But I just can’t go on with this. I can’t. Sorry.”

  “I want eighty thousand kronur,” she said calmly, as if that was almost too obvious to mention.

  He looked at her as if he had not heard what she said.

  “Eighty thousand,” she repeated.

  “What do you mean?”

  “For the night,” she said.

  “The night?” he said. “What, are you selling yourself?”

  “What do you think?” she said.

  He didn’t understand what she was talking about.

  “Do you think you can get a woman like me for free?” she said.

  Gradually it dawned on him what she meant.

  “But you didn’t say anything about that!”

  “Did I need to say anything? Pay me eighty thousand and I might just let you come back home with me some other time.”

  “I refused to pay” the reception manager told Erlendur. “Walked out. She went berserk. Called work and threatened to phone my wife if I didn’t pay.”

  “What are they called?” Erlendur said. “A… hustler? Was she one of them? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I don’t know what she was but she knew what she was doing and in the end she phoned home and told my wife what happened.”

  “Why didn’t you just pay her? Then you’d have been rid of her.”

  “I’m not sure I would have been rid of her even if I had coughed up,” the manager said. “My wife and I went through all this yesterday. I described what happened just as I described it to you. We’ve been together for twenty-three years and although I have no excuse it was a trap, the way I see it. If that woman hadn’t been after money it would never have happened.”

  “So it was all her fault?”

  “No, of course not, but… it was still a trap.”

  They paused.

  “Does that sort of thing go on at this hotel?” Erlendur asked. “Prostitution?”

  “No,” the reception manager said.

  “It’s not something you’d miss?”

  “I was told you were asking about that. Nothing of that kind goes on here.”

  “Quite,” Erlendur said.

  “Are you going to keep schtum about this?”

  “I need the woman’s name if you have it. And her address. It won’t go any further.”

  The manager hesitated.

  “Fucking bitch,” he said, slipping for an instant out of the role of the polite hotelier.

  “Are you going to pay her?”

  “That was one thing we agreed on, my wife and I. She’s not getting a penny.”

  “Do you think it could have been a prank?”

  “A prank?” the manager said. “I don’t follow. What do you mean?”

  “I mean, could someone want to harm you so badly that they would set you up? Someone you’ve quarrelled with?”

  “The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. Are you suggesting that I’ve got enemies who would do something like that to me?”

  “They needn’t be enemies. Practical jokers, your friends”

  “No, my friends aren’t like that. Besides, as a practical joke that would have been going a bit far — way beyond funny”

  “Was it you who fired Santa?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was it you who told him the news? Or did he receive a letter, or…?”

  “I told him.”

  “And how did he take it?”

  “Not well. Understandably. He’d been working here for ages. Much longer than I have.”

  “Do you think he could have been behind it, if anyone was?”

  “Gudlaugur? No, I can’t imagine that. Gudlaugur? Doing that sort of thing? I think not. He was really not the joking sort. Absolutely not.”

  “Did you know Gudlaugur was a child star?”

  “A child star? How?”

  “He made records. A choirboy.”

  “I didn’t know that,” the manager said.

  “Just one final thing,” Erlendur said, standing up.

  “Yes?”

  “Could you fix me up with a record player in my room?” Erlendur asked, and saw that the head of reception did not have the faintest idea what he was talking about.

  When Erlendur went back into the lobby he saw the head of forensics coming up the stairs from the basement.

  “How’s it going with the saliva you found on the condom?” Erlendur asked. “Have you checked the Cortisol?”

  “We’re working on it. What do you claim to know about Cortisol?”

  “I know that too much of it in the saliva can prove dangerous.”

  “Sigurdur Oli was asking about the murder weapon,” the head of forensics said. “The pathologist doesn’t think it’s a particularly remarkable knife. Not very long, with a thin, serated edge.”

  “So it’s not a hunting knife or a carving knife?”

  “No, it sounds to me like a fairly unremarkable instrument,” the head of forensics said. “A pretty nondescript knife.”

  10

  Erlendur took the two records from Gudlaugur’s room up to his own, then called the hospital and asked for Valgerdur. He was put through to her department. Another woman answered. He asked for Valgerdur again. The woman said, “One moment, please,” and at last Valgerdur answered.

  “Have you got any of those cotton wool buds left?” he asked.

  “Is that Mr Deaths and Ordeals speaking?” she said.

  Erlendur grinned.

  “There’s a tourist at the hotel we need to test”

  “Is it a rush job?”

  “It will have to be done today.”

  “Will you be there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m on my way”

  Erlendur rang off. Mr Deaths and Ordeals, he chuckled to himself. He was supposed to meet Henry Wapshott at the hotel bar. He went down, sat at the bar and waited. The waiter asked if he wanted anything, but he declined. Changed his mind and called out to him to bring a glass of water. He looked along the shelves of drinks behind the bar, rows of bottles in all colours of the rainbow, rows of liqueurs.

  * * *

  They had found powdered glass, too minute to be seen, on the marble floor of the lounge. Traces of Drambuie on the drinks cabinet, Drambuie on the boy’s socks and on the staircase. They found fragments of glass in the broom and the vacuum cleaner. All the signs were that a bottle of liqueur had fallen onto the marble floor. The boy probably stepped in the puddle that it left, then ran straight up to his room. The marks on the staircase indicated that he ran rather than walked. Frightened little feet. They concluded that the boy broke the bottle, his father lost his temper and attacked him so brutally that he put him in hospital.

  Elinborg had him taken to the police station on Hverfisgata for questioning, where she told him about the results of the forensic tests, the boy’s reaction when he was asked whether his father had hit him, and her personal conviction that he was the culprit. Erlendur was present at the interrogation. She informed the father that he was in the legal position of being a suspect and was allowed to have a lawyer present. He should have one. The father protested his innocence and repeated that he was astonished to be under suspicion simply because a liqueur bottle had fallen onto his floor.

  Erlendur switched on the tape recorder in the interrogation room.

  “What we believe happened is this,” Elinborg said, acting as if reading aloud from a report; she tri
ed to put her emotions to one side. “The boy came home from school. It was just gone three o’clock. You came back shortly afterwards. We understand that you left work early that day. Maybe you were at home when it happened. For some reason the boy dropped a large bottle of Drambuie on the floor. Panicking, he ran up to his room. You flew into a rage, and more than that. You totally lost control of yourself and went up to the boy’s room to punish him. It got out of hand and you beat your son so badly that you then had to call an ambulance.”

  The father watched Elinborg without saying a word.

  “You used a weapon that we have not managed to identify, a rounded or at least blunt instrument; possibly you banged him against the head of the bed. You persistently kicked him. Before calling an ambulance you tidied up in the lounge. You wiped up the liqueur with three towels, which you threw in the dustbin outside the house. You vacuum-cleaned the tiniest fragments of glass. You swept the marble floor as well and gave it a quick scrub. You washed the cabinet carefully. You took the boy’s socks off and threw them in the dustbin. You used detergent on the stains on the stairs but did not manage to remove them completely.”

  “You can’t prove a thing, since it’s rubbish anyway. The boy hasn’t said anything. He hasn’t said a word about who assaulted him. Why don’t you try to find his classmates?”

  “Why didn’t you tell us about the liqueur?”

  “It’s nothing to do with this.”

  “And the socks in the dustbin? The little footprints on the staircase?”

  “A liqueur bottle did get broken, but I was the one who broke it. It happened two days before my boy was attacked. I was getting myself a drink when I dropped it on the floor and it smashed. Addi saw this and it made him jump. I told him to be careful where he walked, but by then he had trodden in the spillage and ran up the stairs to his room. This has nothing to do with him being attacked and I must say this scenario astonishes me. You haven’t a shred of evidence! Has he said that I hit him? I doubt that. And he never will say it, because it wasn’t me. I’d never do anything like this to him. Never.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us about it straight away?”