‘Do you know if he had, or if there was anyone who might have wanted to harm him?’
Vilhelm stared at Erlendur through the thick lenses.
‘What do you want to know for?’ His shoulders shook with another coughing fit.
‘No particular reason.’
‘Come on.’
‘No, honest.’
‘You reckon maybe he didn’t drown all on his own?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I haven’t the foggiest.’ Vilhelm rose to his feet and flexed his back, then came and sat down next to Erlendur on the casing. ‘You couldn’t spare a little change?’
‘What do you want it for?’
‘Tobacco. That’s all.’
Erlendur took out two fifty-króna pieces. ‘That’s all I have on me.’
‘Thanks.’ Vilhelm was quick to palm them. ‘That’ll do for one packet. Did you know a bottle of vodka’s getting on for two thousand krónur these days? I reckon the lot who run this country have lost the plot. Totally lost the plot.’
‘The pools down there aren’t very deep,’ Erlendur remarked, returning to his theme.
Vilhelm coughed into his gloves. ‘Deep enough.’
‘You’d have to be pretty determined to drown in one, though.’
‘I couldn’t say.’
‘Or drunk,’ Erlendur persisted. ‘They found a fair amount of alcohol in his blood.’
‘Oh, Hannibal could drink all right. Christ!’
‘Do you remember who he was hanging around with most before he died?’
‘Not with me, at any rate,’ Vilhelm replied. ‘Hardly knew him. But I spotted him a couple of times at the Fever Hospital. In fact, that’s the last place I saw him; he was trying to get a bed but they said he was drunk.’
No more information was forthcoming. He said he was planning to spend at least one more night by the pipes, then he would see. Erlendur tried to dissuade him, asking if it was really his only option. At this hint of interference, Vilhelm told him to bloody well leave him alone. Erlendur left after that. He was pursued by the sound of coughing as he stepped up onto the conduit and followed it west through the light arctic night as far as Öskjuhlíd, before jumping down and heading home to Hlídar.
Hannibal had no doubt tested the limits of the shelter’s ban on alcohol more than once. Perhaps that was why he had taken refuge in the pipeline at last, an outcast, free from all interference, removed from human society.
6
Towards the end of their shift Erlendur, Marteinn and Gardar were sent to escort a runaway prisoner back to jail at Litla-Hraun. Two days earlier the fugitive, who was serving a two-and-a-halfyear sentence for drug smuggling, had felt the urge to nip into town and had escaped without much effort. Although only twenty-five, he was well known to the police in connection with drugs, alcohol smuggling, theft and forgery. At twenty he had spent several months inside for a series of burglaries. Subsequently, he had been caught with a significant quantity of cannabis at Keflavík Airport, high as a kite after four days in Amsterdam. The customs officials had him on a watch list but they would have stopped this gangly hippy, with his beard and long hair, anyway. It transpired that he had hardly even bothered to hide his stash. The goods were wrapped in a pair of jeans inside a brand-new sports bag.
After his latest escapade, he had given himself up at the police station on Hverfisgata, and now Erlendur and company ushered him out to the van. The man was garrulous; he must have got hold of something good before handing himself in.
‘Why did you run away?’ asked Marteinn as they drove out of town.
‘It was my mum’s birthday. The old girl’s fifty!’
‘Was it a big do?’ asked Gardar.
‘Yeah, hell of a party, man. Loads of booze.’
‘Was she pleased to see you?’ asked Marteinn.
The police had been watching his mother’s house but had failed to catch him.
‘She was over the moon!’
‘And you had no trouble giving them the slip?’
‘At Hraun? Nah. I more or less walked out.’
‘You know they’ll increase your sentence.’
‘It’ll be bugger all. Anyway, it’s not so bad inside. Mum had an important birthday, man. No way was I going to miss that!’
‘No, of course not,’ said Marteinn.
The van climbed laboriously over Hellisheidi with the fugitive chatting all the way back to his cell, about life in the nick and the other inmates; about the local football team and the rubbish season they’d been having, and how his English team wasn’t doing much better; about this crap film he’d seen on TV while in hiding; the coffee shop he had visited in Amsterdam; prison food; a steakhouse in Amsterdam. Nothing was off limits.
They were thoroughly fed up with him by the time they dropped him off at Litla-Hraun. Later, as they were trundling back into town, there was an alert about a young girl who had gone missing. She had left her home in Reykjavík three days earlier and not been heard of since. She was nineteen years old and when last seen had been wearing jeans, a pink peasant blouse, a camouflage jacket, and trainers.
‘Remember the lad who woke up the other side of the country in Akureyri – last year, wasn’t it?’ said Marteinn. ‘He went for a night out in Reykjavík without telling anyone. When they hadn’t heard from him for four days, his parents called the police. They were a respectable family. He was in a newsagent’s when he saw a picture of himself in the papers.’
‘What about the woman who went for a few drinks at Thórskaffi?’ said Gardar. ‘She was never found. That wasn’t so long ago.’
‘Out with friends, wasn’t she?’ said Marteinn. ‘And never came home.’
‘That’s right. She was going to walk back.’
‘Wonder what happened to her.’
‘Threw herself in the sea, surely?’
‘Hey, Erlendur,’ said Marteinn, ‘wasn’t that around the same time as your tramp drowned?’
‘My tramp?’ Erlendur had not heard that one before, though he had told them of his encounters with Hannibal and the indifference of the investigating officers. ‘Yes, it was around then.’
Their shift was ending. All they had to do was return the van and go home, when a notification came through about a burglary in Vogar.
‘Shit!’ exclaimed Gardar. ‘Do we have to take it?’
They were the closest vehicle, so Erlendur swung off the main road into the residential streets. As they approached the house in question they caught sight of a figure sprinting away. The man paused for a split second when he saw the police van, then dodged into the next-door garden. Erlendur braked violently. Gardar hurtled out with Marteinn on his heels. Within minutes they had run the man down, wrestled him to the ground, then bundled him into the van.
They discovered a watch and some jewellery on him. He had also been observed discarding a large object when he first spotted them. While Gardar and Marteinn were chasing the thief, Erlendur had gone to investigate the loot left lying in the road and discovered that the burglar had made off with the family fondue set.
7
As it happened, Erlendur was well acquainted with the facts of the woman’s disappearance from Thórskaffi, since stories of people going missing held a particular fascination for him. He devoured news reports on everything from poorly equipped ptarmigan hunters failing to return home from the mountains at the appointed time, to travellers in the interior who had not been heard of for days, or youngsters, like the girl in the pink blouse, running away from home. Most turned up eventually, alive or dead, but some were never seen again, despite large search parties and rescue units combing the countryside for days. The missing left a series of unanswered questions behind them.
Soon after Erlendur joined the police, he had begun to trawl through the archives for cases, old and more recent, in Reykjavík and the surrounding area. For years he had been reading up on tales of travellers going astray or surviving ordeals on the country’s high moors
and mountain roads. His digging in the police records was merely an extension of this interest.
Only rarely were these missing-persons cases attributed to criminal action, but then Erlendur’s interest was personal rather than professional. He spent hours leafing through reports of cold cases and familiarising himself with the circumstances of a variety of disappearances and unsolved crimes, though the latter did not have the same appeal. There were exceptions, however, such as Hannibal’s demise, though whether there had been anything suspicious about that was disputable. In this instance it was his acquaintance with the victim that had aroused his curiosity.
One case in particular exerted such a powerful hold on Erlendur’s imagination that he had immersed himself in the details to the extent of visiting the sites in question. One day in 1953 an eighteen-year-old girl, a pupil at the Reykjavík Women’s College, had been due to meet her friends at a cafe much frequented by students on Lækjargata in the centre of town. Although they had originally come from different schools, the four girls had all started in the same class at the college and become good friends that first winter. They hung out together and signed up for all kinds of extracurricular activities. They had been meeting to plan an evening’s entertainment for their class. When only three of them turned up the girls were not unduly annoyed; they simply assumed their friend was ill since she had been absent from class that morning. They phoned her house from the cafe to find out how she was. The girl’s mother answered and it took her a minute or two to grasp what they were talking about. ‘We just wanted to know how she’s feeling,’ explained the friend. The girl’s mother was puzzled by the question: her daughter wasn’t ill; she’d gone to school.
The girl almost invariably took the same route to the college. It was a fifteen-minute walk from where she lived in the west of town, via Camp Knox, the area of Nissen huts built by the American occupying force during the war, which later became a source of cheap housing for Reykjavík’s poorer families. From there she headed east along Hringbraut to Fríkirkjuvegur where the college was located. On other days she used to catch the bus, but the driver had failed to notice her among the passengers that morning. As it tended to be the same small group of people every morning, he claimed to know the girl by sight. So either she had walked in or hitched a lift with someone she knew. It would not have been the first time. And although she had never been known to accept a ride from a stranger, this could not be ruled out either. But nor could it be established with any certainty, since no one had come forward to say they had given her a lift.
It was always possible that she had never intended to go in that day, that she had met up with some unknown person, with disastrous consequences, or had, alternatively, been bent on taking her own life in such a manner that her body was never found. She had not, as far as anyone was aware, had a boyfriend or gone out on dates or kept some relationship secret from her parents. And she had always been conscientious about her attendance. Could she have killed herself? There was no hint of any personal problems that could have pushed her to the brink of despair; on the contrary, she was popular and outgoing. But, then again, she had vanished during the blackest months of winter, and the darkness could take its toll on people’s mental health, so suicide could not be entirely ruled out. Indeed, the fact that her body never turned up suggested that it may have been swallowed without trace by the sea.
Erlendur had traced the girl’s route to school on foot, though much had changed in the intervening years; the Nissen huts were long gone and new buildings had risen in their place. On another occasion he had caught the bus to Fríkirkjuvegur. He had also stood in front of her old home in the west of town. She had been an only child. He saw the garden where she had played, the door she had walked through. He lingered only briefly, no more than a minute or two, but it had been long enough for his eyes to drink in the sadness.
The fate of the Thórskaffi woman was shrouded in the same mystery. Admittedly her friends had voiced suspicions of depression, though the woman had never confided in anyone, and unhappiness in her marriage. Her husband had flatly denied this, however, while conceding that he had been aware of mood swings and maybe low spirits. He had reported his wife missing early on Monday morning, by which point he had not heard from her since Saturday evening when she had gone out with friends from the estate agency where she worked. When she did not return home the following day, he had rung round her colleagues, but it was no use: some had only the haziest recollection of how the evening had ended.
They had gone out for dinner at Naustid to celebrate the firm’s fifth anniversary. Spouses were not invited and in their absence everyone had let their hair down and consumed copious amounts of alcohol. They had stayed at the restaurant until late, then someone had suggested moving on to Thórskaffi, a busy nightclub where a popular band was playing. Once there, the group had gradually dispersed, either calling it a night or running into other friends. No one had noticed when or with whom the woman had left. The last person she was known to have talked to was the oldest employee of the firm, a receptionist in her fifties. The receptionist had offered to share a taxi but she had said no thanks; she was going to stay on a bit longer and would probably walk home as it would do her good to clear her head. She lived in the new neighbourhood at the western end of the Fossvogur valley but said she didn’t mind the distance.
Later, when interviewed by the police, none of the other customers at Thórskaffi could recall much about the missing woman. Her colleagues had seen her chatting to a handful of other people, and two of these had come forward when the search was at its height. One was an old college friend who had been there with his wife. To them she had not appeared drunk, merely in high spirits, as they reminisced about their school days. The other witness was a woman she had known since her teens. A little later this friend had observed her talking to a man she did not recognise and could only describe in the vaguest terms since it had been dark in the club.
The search had yielded no results. The woman had simply vanished into thin air and the subsequent investigation had uncovered little that might explain her fate, apart from the detail that three years previously she had cheated on her husband. The circumstances had been so similar that when she failed to return home her husband had initially assumed that she had been up to her old tricks again. After the first occasion she had insisted it was the only time she had been unfaithful; it had been a moment of madness during a rough patch in their marriage. He had no reason to doubt her words.
One theory was that she had either bumped into her old lover or gone home with a new man, and that something had happened and she vanished without trace. When questioned, the former lover swore blind he had not met her that evening. The man her friend had seen her talking to had never come forward.
Yet in spite of this they saw no reason to treat the woman’s disappearance as a crime. Suicide was deemed more likely.
A single detail had struck Erlendur as he read the file one evening when he did not feel like going straight home after his shift. Two of the people interviewed had mentioned that the woman had been mad about jewellery.
* * *
Erlendur started awake, worried that he had overslept. He had been having a nap as he sometimes did before going on duty. Relieved to discover that it was still early, he got up and prepared for yet another night shift. He had lain there for a long time that evening, brooding over the fates of the girl from the women’s college and the woman from Thórskaffi, and wondering if his decision to join the police had been precipitated by his fascination with stories like theirs.
8
The Fever Hospital on Thingholtsstræti, a handsome, two-storey wooden building dating from the nineteenth century, was the first purpose-built hospital in Reykjavík. For the past four years, however, it had played a new role, providing shelter for the city’s homeless; a hot meal, washing facilities and a bed for the night if they wanted it. Discipline was strict. The doors were locked at a respectable hour and the occupants ha
d to be out by a set time in the morning. The rule that they had to be sober throughout their stay was non-negotiable.
The men seeking admittance ranged from humbly grateful for anything they might receive after a tough spell on the streets, to those who were argumentative or even drunkenly aggressive. The last group were turned away. Some of the men were in good shape, others so frail that the staff took them straight to hospital.
One evening, Erlendur dropped by before work, just as they were refusing entry to a man who was bundled up in a thick winter coat and woolly hat despite the summer heat. He was arguing with a member of staff, who then took the man’s arm and led him out. In the faint hope of arousing pity, the drunk protested, though not very vehemently, that he could not face another night in the Nissen hut.
‘Come back when you’ve sobered up,’ the staff member said. ‘You know the rule, my friend. It’s perfectly simple.’
He closed the door and turned to Erlendur.
‘Looking for someone?’
‘No.’
‘You’re not seeking admission?’ The man’s tone made it clear that Erlendur looked far too fit to require the services of the Fever Hospital.
‘Got many residents at the moment?’
‘No, five, though we can expect more tonight.’
‘That’s not many, is it?’
‘Not compared to last Christmas,’ said the man. ‘We were bursting at the seams. Put up something like thirty men. Christmas is always busiest.’
‘I’m after information about a homeless man who died suddenly about a year ago. Name of Hannibal. Jog your memory at all?’
‘Hannibal? You mean the fellow who drowned in Kringlumýri?’
Erlendur nodded.
‘I remember him well.’ The man was middle-aged, a little plump, his beard neatly trimmed around his mouth. ‘He used to drop in from time to time. Yes, I remember Hannibal all right. Strange fellow. Did you know him?’
‘We were acquainted,’ Erlendur replied, without elaborating. ‘Did he stay here often?’
Reykjavik Nights Page 3
