Voices de-5

by Arnaldur Indridason

  “Do you mean …?” Erlendur tried to work out the implications of what she was saying. “Do you mean he went in the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I thought you weren’t in contact. You said you and your father hadn’t had anything to do with him for decades. That you didn’t want to have any contact with him. Why were you lying?”

  “Because Dad didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “That he came. Gudlaugur must have missed us. I didn’t ask him, but he must have done. For him to do that.”

  “What was it precisely that your father didn’t know?”

  “That Gudlaugur sometimes came to our house at night without us being aware, sat in the living room without making a sound and left before we woke up. He did it for years and we never knew.”

  She looked at the bloodstains on the bed.

  “Until I woke up in the middle of the night once and saw him.”

  24

  Erlendur watched Stefania, her words racing through his mind. She was not as haughty as at their first meeting when Erlendur had been outraged at her lack of feeling for her brother, and he thought he may have judged her too quickly. He knew neither her nor her story well enough to be able to sit on his high horse, and suddenly he regretted his remark on her lack of conscience. It was not up to him to judge others, though he was always falling into that trap. To all intents and purposes he knew nothing about this woman who had suddenly turned so pitiful and terribly lonely in front of him. He realised that her life had been no bed of roses, first as a child living in her brother’s shadow, then a motherless teenager and finally a woman who never left her father’s side and probably sacrificed her life for him.

  A good while passed in this way, each of them engrossed in their respective thoughts. The door to the little room was open and Erlendur went out into the corridor. All of a sudden he wanted to reassure himself that no one was outside, no one was eavesdropping. He looked along the poorly lit corridor but saw nobody. Turning round, he looked down to the end, but it was pitch dark. He thought to himself that anyone who went down there would have had to walk past the door and that he would have noticed. The corridor was empty. All the same, he had a strong feeling that they were not alone in the basement when he went back into the room. The smell in the corridor was the same as the first time he went there: something burning that he could not place. He did not feel comfortable. His first sight of the body was etched in his mind and the more he found out about the man in the Santa suit, the more wretched was the mental image he preserved and knew he could never shake off.

  “Is everything all right?” Stefania asked, still sitting on the chair.

  “Yes, fine,” Erlendur said. “A silly idea of mine. I had a feeling someone was in the corridor. Shouldn’t we go somewhere else? For coffee maybe?”

  She looked across the room, nodded and stood up. They walked along the corridor in silence, up the stairs and across the lobby to the dining room where Erlendur ordered two coffees. They sat down to one side and tried not to let all the tourists disturb them.

  “My father wouldn’t be pleased with me now,” Stefania said. “He’s always forbidden me to talk about the family. He can’t stand any invasion of his privacy”

  “Is he in good health?”

  “He’s in quite good health for his age. But I don’t know …” Her words trailed off.

  “There’s no such thing as privacy when the police are involved,” Erlendur said. “Not to mention when murder has been committed.”

  I’m starting to realise that. We were going to shake this off like it was none of our business, but I don’t expect anyone can claim immunity in these dreadful circumstances. I don’t suppose that’s part of the deal.”

  “If I understand you correctly? Erlendur said, “you and your father had broken off all contact with Gudlaugur but he sneaked into the house at night without being noticed. What was his motive? What did he do? Why did he do this?”

  “I never got a satisfactory answer out of him. He just sat still in the living room for an hour or two. Otherwise I’d have noticed him much earlier. He’d been doing it several times a year for years on end. Then one night about two years ago I couldn’t sleep and was lying in bed in a drowsy state at about four in the morning, when I heard a creaking noise in the sitting room downstairs, which of course startled me. My father’s room is downstairs and his door is always open at night, and I thought he was trying to get my attention. I heard another creak and wondered if it was a burglar, so I crept downstairs. I saw that the door to my father’s room was just as I’d left it, but when I entered the hall I saw someone dart down the stairs, and I called out to him. To my horror he stopped on the stairs, turned round and came back up.”

  Stefania paused and stared ahead as if transported away from time and place.

  “I thought he would attack me,” she began again. “I stood in the kitchen doorway and turned on the light, and there he was in front of me. I hadn’t seen him face to face for years, ever since he was a young man, and it took me a little while to realise that it was my brother.”

  “How did you react to it?” Erlendur asked.

  “It threw me completely. I was terrified too, because if it had been a burglar I should have rung the police instead of making all that fuss. I was trembling with fright and let out a scream when I switched on the light and saw his face. It must have been funny to see me so scared and nervous, because he started laughing.”

  * * *

  “Don’t wake Dad,” he said, putting a finger to his lips to hush her.

  She couldn’t believe her eyes.

  “Is that you?” she gasped.

  He wasn’t like the image she retained of him from his youth, and she saw how badly he had aged. He had bags under his eyes and his thin lips were pale; wisps of hair stood out in all directions and he regarded her with infinitely sad eyes. She automatically began working out how old he really was. He looked so much older.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m not doing anything. Sometimes I just want to come home.”

  * * *

  “That was the only explanation he gave for why he sometimes sneaked into the living room at night without letting anyone know,” Stefania said. “Sometimes he wanted to go home. I don’t know what he meant by that. Whether he associated it with childhood, when Mum was still alive, or whether he meant the years before he pushed Dad down the stairs. I don’t know. Maybe the house itself held some meaning for him, because he never had another home. Just a dirty little room in the basement of this hotel.”

  * * *

  “You ought to leave,” she said. “He might wake up.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said. “How is he? Is he all right?”

  “He’s doing fine. But he needs constant care. He has to be fed and washed and dressed and taken out and put down in front of the television. He likes films.”

  “You don’t know how bad I’ve felt about this,” he said. “All these years. I didn’t want it to turn out like this. It was all a huge mistake.”

  “Yes, it was,” she said.

  “I never wanted to be famous. That was his dream. My part was just to make it come true.”

  They fell silent.

  “Does he ever ask about me?”

  “No,” she said. “Never. I’ve tried to get him to talk about you but he won’t even hear your name mentioned.”

  “He still hates me.”

  “I don’t think he’ll ever get that out of his system.”

  “Because of the way I am. He can’t stand me because Im…”

  “That’s something between the two of you that…”

  “I would have done anything for him, you know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Always.”

  “Yes.”

  “All those demands he made on me. Endless practising. Concerts. Recordings. It was all his dream, not mine. H
e was happy and then everything was fine.”

  “I know.”

  “So why can’t he forgive me? Why can’t he make up with me? I miss him. Will you tell him that? I miss when we were together. When I used to sing for him. You are my family.”

  “I’ll try to talk to him.”

  “Will you? Will you tell him I miss him?”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “He can’t stand me because of the way I am.”

  Stefania said nothing.

  “Maybe it was a rebellion against him. I don’t know. I tried to hide it but I can’t be anything else than what I am.”

  “You ought to go now,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  He hesitated.

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Do you hate me too?”

  “You ought to go. He might wake up.”

  “Because it’s all my fault. The situation you’re in, having to look after him all the time. You must…”

  “Go,” she said.

  “Sorry:

  * * *

  “After he left home, after the accident, what happened then?” Erlendur asked. “Was he just erased as if he’d never existed?”

  “More or less. I know Dad listened to his records now and again. He didn’t want me to know, but I saw it sometimes when I got home from work. He’d forget to put the sleeve away or take the record off. Occasionally we heard something about him and years ago we read an interview with him in a magazine. It was an article about former child stars. “Where are they now?” was the headline or something equally appalling. The magazine had dug him up and he seemed willing to talk about his old fame. I don’t know why he opened up like that. He didn’t say anything in the interview except that it was fun being the main attraction.”

  “So someone remembered him. He wasn’t completely forgotten.”

  “There’s always someone who remembers.”

  “In the magazine he didn’t mention being bullied at school or your father’s demands, losing his mother and how his hopes, which I expect your father kindled, were dashed and he was forced to leave home?”

  “What do you know about the bullying at school?”

  “We know that he was bullied for being different. Isn’t that right?”

  “I don’t think my father kindled any expectations. He’s a very down-to-earth and realistic man. I don’t know why you talk like that. For a while it looked as if my brother would go a long way as a singer, performing abroad and commanding attention on a scale unknown in our little community. My father explained that to him but I also think he told him that even though it would take a lot of work, dedication and talent, he still shouldn’t set his hopes too high. My father isn’t stupid. Don’t you go thinking that.”

  “I don’t think anything of the sort.”

  “Good.”

  “Did Gudlaugur never try to contact you two? Or you him? All that time?”

  “No. I think I’ve already answered your question. Apart from sneaking in sometimes without us noticing. He told me he’d been doing it for years.”

  “You didn’t try to track him down?”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “Were he and his mother close?” Erlendur asked.

  “She meant the world to him,” Stefania said.

  “So her death was a tragedy to him.”

  “Her death was a tragedy to us all.”

  Stefania heaved a deep sigh.

  “I suppose something died inside us when she passed away. Something that made us a family. I don’t think I realised until long afterwards that it was her who tied us together, created a balance. She and Dad never agreed about Gudlaugur, and they quarrelled about his upbringing, if you could call it quarrelling. She wanted to let him be the way he was, and even if he did sing beautifully not to make too much of it.”

  She looked at Erlendur.

  “I don’t think our father ever regarded him as a child, more of a task. Something for him alone to shape and create.”

  “And you? What was your standpoint?”

  “Me? I was never asked.”

  They stopped talking, listened to the murmuring in the dining room and watched the tourists chatting together and laughing. Erlendur looked at Stefania, who seemed to have withdrawn inside her shell and the memories of her fragile family life.

  “Did you have any part in your brother’s murder?” Erlendur asked cautiously.

  It was as if she did not hear what he said, so he repeated the question. She looked up.

  “Not in the slightest,” she said. “I wish he was still alive so that I could…”

  Stefania did not finish.

  “So you could what?” Erlendur asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe make up for …”

  She stopped again.

  “It was all so terrible. All of it. It started with trivial things and then escalated beyond control. I’m not making light of him pushing our father down the stairs. But you take sides and don’t do much to change it. Because you don’t want to, I suppose. And time goes by and the years pass until you’ve really forgotten the feeling, the reason that set it all in motion, and you’ve forgotten, on purpose or accidentally, the opportunities you had to make up for what went wrong, and then suddenly it’s too late to set things straight. All those years have gone by and …” She groaned.

  “What did you do after you caught him in the kitchen?”

  “I talked to Dad. He didn’t want to know about Gulli, and that was that. I didn’t tell him about the night-time visits. A few times I tried to talk to him about a reconciliation. Said I’d bumped into Gulli in the street and he wanted to see his father, but Dad was absolutely immovable.”

  “Did your brother never go back to the house after that?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  She looked at Erlendur.

  “That was two years ago and that was the last I saw of him.”

  25

  Stefania stood up, about to leave. It was as if she’d said all she had to say. Erlendur still had an inkling that she had been selective about what she wanted to go on record, and was keeping the rest to herself. He stood up as well, wondering whether to let that suffice for the time being or press her further. He decided to leave the choice to her. She was much more cooperative than before and that suited him for now. But he could not refrain from asking her about an enigma that she had left unexplained.

  “I could understand your father’s lifelong anger at him because of the accident,” Erlendur said. “If he blamed him for the paralysis that has confined him to a wheelchair ever since. But you I can’t quite figure out. Why you reacted the same way. Why you took your father’s side. Why you turned against your brother and had no contact with him for all those years.”

  “I think I’ve helped you enough,” Stefania said. “His death is nothing to do with my father and me. It’s connected with some other life that my brother led and neither I nor my father know. I hope you appreciate the fact that I’ve tried to be honest and helpful, and you won’t disturb us any more. You won’t handcuff me in my own home.”

  She held out her hand as if wanting to seal some kind of pact that she and her father would be left undisturbed in future. Erlendur shook her hand and tried to smile. He knew the pact would be broken sooner or later. Too many questions, he thought to himself. Too few real answers. He wasn’t ready to let her off the hook just yet and thought he could tell that she was still lying to him, or at least circumventing the truth.

  “You didn’t come to the hotel to meet your brother a few days before his death?” he said.

  “No, I met a friend in this dining room. We had coffee together. You ask her if you think it’s not true. I’d forgotten that he worked here and I didn’t see him while I was here.”

  “I might check that,” Erlendur said, and wrote down the woman’s name. “Then there’s something else: do you know a man called Henry Wapshott? He’s British and he w
as in contact with your brother.”

  “Wapshott?”

  “He’s a record collector. Interested in your brother’s recordings. It just so happens that he collects records of choral music and specialises in choirboys”

  “I’ve never heard of him,” Stefania said. “Specialises in choirboys?”

  “Actually there are stranger collectors than him,” Erlendur said, but did not venture into an account of airline sick bags. “He says your brother’s records are very valuable today, do you know anything about that?”

  “No, not a thing,” Stefania said. “What was he suggesting? What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Erlendur said. “But they’re valuable enough for Wapshott to want to come up here to Iceland to meet him. Did Gudlaugur have any of his own records?”

  “Not that I know of?

  “Do you know what happened to the copies that were released?”

  “I think they just sold out,” Stefania said. “Would they be worth anything if they were still around?”

  Erlendur sensed a note of eagerness in her voice and wondered whether she was masquerading, whether she was much better informed about all this than he was and was trying to establish just what he knew.

  “Could well be,” Erlendur said.

  “Is this British man still in the country?” she asked.

  “He’s in police custody,” Erlendur said. “He may know more about your brother and his death than he wants to tell us.”

  “Do you think he killed him?”

  “You haven’t heard the news?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a candidate, no more than that.”

  “Who is this man?”

  Erlendur was about to tell her about the information from Scotland Yard and the child pornography that was found in Wapshott’s room. Instead, he repeated that Wapshott was a record collector who was interested in choirboys and had stayed at the hotel and been in contact with Gudlaugur, and was suspicious enough to be remanded in custody.