‘Did she say anything?’ Ebeneser asked as he measured out the coffee. ‘When you found her?’
‘No,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘She was unconscious. And her assailant went for me almost immediately.’
‘You needn’t have chased him.’ Ebeneser turned to Sigurdur Óli. ‘You could have tended to her instead, but you didn’t. She might have got to hospital sooner. That’s all that counts, all that counts in … circumstances like that.’
‘Of course,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘That’s why I rang for assistance straight away. I’d already done that when the man jumped me. I wanted to catch her attacker — it was a natural reaction. In fact I don’t see how I could have behaved any differently.’
Ebeneser switched on the coffee-maker but remained standing.
‘Anyway, what about you?’ asked Sigurdur Óli.
‘What about me?’ Ebeneser responded, his eyes on the coffee machine.
‘You’re obviously looking for a scapegoat, but what about you? What part did you play in the attack on Lína? What were you two up to? Who did you cross? Was it all your idea? Did you drag Lína into some scam? Are you in debt? What about your responsibility, Ebeneser? Have you asked yourself that?’
The other man was silent.
‘Why won’t you tell us?’ persisted Sigurdur Óli. ‘I know you’ve tried to blackmail people with photographs, there’s no use denying it. We’re in the process of interviewing them now, hearing how you and Lína held swingers’ parties and took photos of people having sex with you, then used the pictures to extort money from them. You’re going down, Ebeneser. On top of everything else, you’ll be charged with blackmail.’
Ebeneser did not look up. The coffee-maker belched and black liquid began to rise inside the glass jug.
‘You’ve destroyed these people’s lives,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘You’ve destroyed your own life, Ebeneser. And for what? For who? How much was it worth to you? What price did you put on Lína? Half a million? Was that what she was worth to you?’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ hissed Ebeneser through clenched teeth, his eyes still glued to the coffee. ‘And get out.’
‘You’ll be called in for questioning, probably later this evening, and treated as a suspect in a sordid case of blackmail. You may even be remanded in custody, for all I know. Maybe you’ll find yourself having to apply for parole to attend Lína’s funeral.’
Ebeneser stared at the coffee jug as if it were the only fixed point in his life.
‘Think about it, Ebbi.’
The man did not answer.
‘Are you acquainted with a man by the name of Hermann? You sent him a photo. He showed it to me.’
Ebeneser did not flinch. Sigurdur Óli took a deep breath: he was not sure if he wanted to ask the next question.
‘What about a man called Patrekur?’ he asked after a moment. ‘With a wife called Súsanna. Are they involved as well?’
Rising to his feet, he walked over to Ebeneser and took a photo from his coat pocket. He had fetched it from his flat before coming there; it showed Patrekur and Súsanna at home with him and Bergthóra back in the days when life was still good. The picture had been taken in summer, their faces were tanned and they were holding glasses of white wine. Sigurdur Óli placed the photo on the table beside the percolator.
‘Do you know these people?’ he asked.
Ebeneser glanced at the picture.
‘You have no right to be here,’ he said, so quietly that Sigurdur Óli could barely hear him. ‘Get out. Get out and take that bloody thing with you!’ He swept the photograph to the floor. ‘Get out!’ he yelled again, raising his arms as if to shove Sigurdur Óli away. Having rescued the picture, Sigurdur Óli backed off. They eyed each other until Sigurdur Óli turned on his heel and walked out of the kitchen, out of the house and back to his car. As he was getting in he looked up at the kitchen window which faced onto the street and saw Ebeneser grab the coffee jug and hurl it at the wall with all his strength. The jug shattered and black liquid spattered all over the kitchen like bloodstained vomit.
On his way home Sigurdur Óli stopped at the gym, where he ran several kilometres, lifted weights as if his life depended on it and burnt off his energy on a variety of machines. He generally bumped into the same people during these morning and evening sessions. Sometimes he would share a little light banter, at other times he would shut himself off, wanting to be left in peace. Like now, for instance. He spoke to nobody and if anyone addressed him he answered tersely and moved away. After finishing his exercises, he made straight for home.
Once there he prepared himself a thick hamburger on ciabatta, with sweet onion and fried egg, which he consumed with an American beer, while watching an American comedy on TV. He was too restless to watch television for long, however, and switched it off when a Swedish crime series came on. He sat in his TV chair, still preoccupied with thoughts of his father’s visit, wondering if he should make an appointment with a specialist or leave it and hope for the best. He hated the idea of suddenly becoming a statistic, a member of some risk group. As someone who had always taken great care of his health and never needed to visit a doctor, he regarded himself as the robust type and was proud of never having been in hospital. Admittedly, he came down with heavy colds or flu from time to time, like the bout he was recovering from now, but that was about it.
His notebook lay on the floor where it had fallen out of his pocket when he folded his coat over the back of the chair. Sigurdur Óli stood up, retrieved it and turned the pages before putting it on the desk in the sitting room. He had never been a hypochondriac, never worried about contracting a serious, incurable illness; since he was the picture of health the possibility had simply never crossed his mind. Eventually, however, after mulling it over, he decided to talk to a specialist, knowing it would be impossible to live with the uncertainty.
He picked up the notebook again. There was a detail he needed to check, one he had forgotten to pin down. He reread his jottings from the past few days and saw that his oversight was minor: he had not yet checked a phone number that really ought to be verified. He looked at the clock; it was not that late, so he picked up the phone.
‘Hello,’ a voice said. It was a weary and indifferent woman’s voice.
‘Please excuse my ringing so late,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘But do you know a woman called Sara? Is she a friend of yours?’
There was a silence on the other end.
‘What can I do for you?’ the woman asked eventually.
‘Ah,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘Did she visit you last Monday evening? Could you confirm the fact?’
‘Who?’
‘Sara.’
‘Sara who?’
‘Your friend.’
‘Who is this, please?’
‘The police.’
‘What do you want with me?’
‘Was Sara at your address last Monday evening?’
‘Is this a joke?’
‘A joke?’
‘You must have the wrong number.’
Sigurdur Óli read out the number he had been given.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ the woman said, ‘but there’s no Sara working here. I don’t know any Sara. This is the box office at the University Cinema.’
‘So you’re not Dóra?’
‘No, and there’s no Dóra here either. I’ve been working here for years and I’ve never known anyone called Dóra.’
Sigurdur Óli stared at the number in his notebook, seeing in his mind’s eye the pierced eyebrow and tattooed arm of yet another liar, and a convincing one at that.
18
Sigurdur Óli was debating if he should call Sara in for questioning, send a car to fetch her from her workplace and see how she liked being escorted from the bottling plant between uniformed officers. That was one method he could envisage. Another would be to pay her a visit at work and intimidate her with all sorts of dire threats, such as leading her out in handcuffs, speaking to her boss, making her lies
public. Since he did not know her at all, he was not sure how tough Sara was, but assumed she would be an unreliable witness and quick to lie. She had reeled off the telephone number of the cinema without hesitation, gambling that he would never check up on it.
He decided to adopt the latter approach, for although Sara had lied to him about her movements, this was no guarantee that the truth would have any bearing on Lína’s attack. She could have a hundred other reasons for lying to him.
There she sat at the bottling-plant switchboard with the ring through her eyebrow and the snake around her arm, each indicative of a small rebellion against bourgeois conservatism. Tasteless and tacky, thought Sigurdur Óli as he approached her. Sara was on the phone dealing with a customer, so he waited at first but when it appeared that the conversation would never end he lost patience and, seizing the receiver, cut the connection.
‘You and I need another chat,’ he announced.
Sara looked startled. ‘Hey, what’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Either here or down at the station, it’s up to you.’
A somewhat older woman was standing behind the desk, observing their conversation with surprise. Sara glanced at her and Sigurdur Óli saw that she was keen to avoid any trouble at work.
‘Is it OK with you if I take a short break?’ she asked the woman, who nodded calmly but asked her not to be long.
Sara led Sigurdur Óli towards the cafeteria, opened a door beside it, which turned out to lead to a staircase, and stopped just inside.
‘What on earth are you on about?’ she asked as the door closed behind them. ‘Why can’t you leave me alone?’
‘You weren’t visiting a friend on the evening of the attack — incidentally, it’s murder now, not assault and battery. The number you gave me for your friend was false.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Sara said, scratching her tattoo.
‘Why was your car parked in the area?’
‘I was visiting a friend.’
‘Dóra?’
‘Yes.’
‘Either you must be stupid or you think I am,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘Whatever, you’ll have plenty of time to mull it over while you’re in custody. From now on you’ll be treated as a suspect: the police will be coming to take you in later today. I’m going to go and print out a warrant for your arrest right now. It shouldn’t take long. By the way, don’t forget your toothbrush.’
Sigurdur Óli opened the door to the corridor.
‘I lent it to my brother,’ said Sara in a low voice.
‘What did you say?’
‘My brother borrowed the car,’ the girl said, louder this time. The look of defiance was gradually fading from her face.
‘Who’s he? What does he do?’
‘He doesn’t do anything. I sometimes lend him the car. He was driving it that evening, but I don’t know where he went or what he was up to.’
‘So why did you lie to me?’
‘He’s always getting into trouble. When you started asking about the car and where I’d been, I figured he might have done something stupid. But there’s no way I’m going to prison for his sake. He had the car.’
Sigurdur Óli fixed Sara with a penetrating glare, but she kept her gaze lowered. He wondered if she was lying again.
‘Why should I believe you?’
‘I don’t care what you believe. He had the car. That’s all I know. It’s not my problem. Ask him.’
‘What was he doing? What did he tell you?’
‘Nothing. We don’t talk much. He’s …’ Sara trailed off.
‘You just lend him your car,’ Sigurdur Óli finished for her.
Sara met Sigurdur Óli’s gaze. ‘No … I lied about that too,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘He didn’t borrow the car, he stole it. I was late for work the next day thanks to him. Had to take a taxi. My car was just missing from its parking space. He may be my brother but he’s a total dickhead.’
Sigurdur Óli learned that Sara’s brother was called Kristján and that she had stopped lending him her car a long time ago. He never kept his word; he had already lost his licence twice and often could not be bothered to bring the car back or else was incapable of doing so. On those occasions, rather than take the risk that her battered Micra might be sitting in the town centre, accumulating parking tickets, she would have to fetch it herself. As a result she would not lend him the car any more — or indeed money or any of her other possessions. He had stolen cash from her too, even taken her credit card once, as well as belongings from her flat that he would sell to buy drugs. He was forever in trouble, why she had no idea, since he had had no worse an upbringing than she had. Their parents were both teachers. There were five kids in all, four of them living respectable lives, but he had always been at odds with everyone and everything. The evening he took the car he had dropped in to see her, but as so often he had been restless and twitchy and only stayed briefly.
When she woke up the next day to go to work, she had been unable to find her car keys, then discovered that the car itself was missing.
Later, Sigurdur Óli checked whether Kristján was known to the police but there was nothing in the files. Following Sara’s directions, he drove over to where she believed her brother was living, in a basement flat owned by a friend. Officially he was still domiciled with his parents but had not in reality lived there in the last two years. Nor did he have a regular job. He had lasted precisely a week in his most recent employment at a twenty-four-hour grocery store, before being sacked for pilfering from the till on an almost daily basis.
Sigurdur Óli knocked on the door. The flat was located in a block in the Fell neighbourhood but had its own entrance. He knocked again and, getting no response, tried the bell, but there was no sound from within. Next he tried peering through the window that faced onto a dreary communal back garden but could see nothing of interest, only beer cans and rubbish littering all the surfaces, and other signs of squalor. Returning to the front door, he banged on it again, finally giving it a resounding kick.
At last a scrawny figure in underpants answered the door. He had a corpse-like pallor, unkempt shoulder-length hair and a grungy, hung-over air.
‘What’s going on?’ he mumbled, squinting blearily at Sigurdur Óli.
‘I’m looking for Kristján. Is that you?’
‘Me, nah …’
‘Then do you know where he is?’
‘What about him? Why — ’
‘Is he in the flat?’
‘No.’
‘Are you expecting him?’
‘No. Anyway, who are you?’
‘I’m from the police and I need to get hold of him. Do you know where he might be?’
‘Well, he won’t be showing his face round here — he owes me big time for rent and that. If you see him you can tell him to pay up. Why are you from the police?’
‘Do you know where he might be?’ repeated Sigurdur Óli, trying to see past him into the flat. He did not believe a word the little runt said. Uncertain what the question ‘Why are you from the police?’ meant, he did not even attempt to answer it.
‘You can try the Hard Hat, he often hangs out there,’ the boy answered. ‘He’s a real basket case, man. A real basket case,’ he repeated, as if to emphasise that this did not apply to him.
The bartender at the Hard Hat knew Kristján all right, though he had not seen him recently and reckoned that the bar tab he had run up might be something of a deterrent. He smiled as he said this, as if it was no skin off his nose if someone owed the owner money. It was shortly after midday and the few customers were huddled over their beer glasses either by the bar or round a table. They regarded Sigurdur Óli with curiosity. He was not one of the regulars at this time of day, and they eavesdropped on every word that passed between him and the bartender. Sigurdur Óli had not yet revealed that he was from the police when a man of about thirty unexpectedly came to his assistance.
‘I
saw Kiddi at Bíkó yesterday; I think he’s started working there,’ he volunteered.
‘Which branch of Bíkó?’
‘The one on Hringbraut.’
Sigurdur Óli recognised Kristján immediately from his sister’s description. It was true: he had just been taken on by the west Reykjavík branch of the DIY chain. Sigurdur Óli watched him before making his move, and observed that Kristján did his utmost to avoid any contact with customers, pretending to busy himself by the racks of screws but moving over to the light bulbs as soon as a customer approached, only to retreat from there slap bang into a man who said he needed help choosing a paintbrush. Kristján claimed to be busy and told the man to ask another member of staff. He had clocked Sigurdur Óli and was evidently nervous that he was going to ask for help when Sigurdur Óli finally managed to corner him.
‘Are you Kristján?’ he asked directly.
Kristján admitted that he was. The moment he set eyes on him, Sigurdur Óli realised that this could not be the man who had sprinted with such a terrific turn of speed towards the Kleppur mental hospital before vanishing into the night. He was not even convinced that such a feeble specimen would be able to lift a baseball bat, let alone wield it. Kristján cut an unimpressive figure: about twenty years old, his Bíkó uniform hanging from his skinny body like dirty laundry. Sheepish was the word that sprang to mind.
‘I’m from the police,’ Sigurdur Óli said, taking in their surroundings as he spoke. They were standing in the shelter of shelves displaying gardening tools, where Kristján was pretending to arrange the pruning shears. ‘I’ve just been talking to your sister,’ Sigurdur Óli continued, ‘and she told me you stole her car.’
‘That’s a lie, I didn’t steal it,’ Kristján said. ‘She lent it to me. And she got it back too.’
‘Where did you go in it?’
‘You what?’
‘What did you need the car for?’
Kristján hesitated. Avoiding Sigurdur Óli’s eye, he put down the shears and picked up a plastic bottle of weedkiller.
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