They stopped at a red light at the junction between Laugavegur high street and Snorrabraut. Both streets were empty, there wasn’t another car in sight, but even so Rafn resisted the temptation to jump the lights. He sat there patiently, his eyes on the road ahead. This was just as well, since, out of nowhere, two tourists suddenly crossed right in front of the car, barely visible in their dark clothes, and headed down Snorrabraut towards the sea. Huldar watched them until the light turned green and Rafn set off along Laugavegur.
‘Do the kids often hang out in this area?’ Gudlaugur piped up from the back seat. He didn’t sound happy, exactly, but his mood did seem to be improving at last.
Rafn cruised along at walking pace, peering around in search of faces familiar from the missing-persons’ notices. ‘It happens. There are still several bars tucked away on Laugavegur, although the touristy “puffin shops” are pushing them out. The kids sometimes manage to sneak in when it’s busy.’
Huldar looked down the empty street. There was no way you could claim it was ‘busy’ tonight but he held his tongue and copied Rafn by scanning their surroundings in the hope of spotting any signs of life. ‘Are you looking for other kids as well as Rósa?’
‘Yes. Three. Including her.’
‘Is that a lot or a little?’ Huldar hoped it was a record.
‘Fairly typical. The average is about twenty kids a month, but of course they don’t all go missing at once and some of them disappear repeatedly. The record was six, following the August bank holiday weekend. The public don’t get to hear about all of them, as some aren’t advertised as missing. We work on a case-by-case basis. Advertising doesn’t necessarily help. It certainly doesn’t make life any easier for the kids to have their problems flashed up in front of the entire country.’
‘Do most of them have a drug problem?’ Huldar assumed this was the case but still thought it worth asking.
‘The majority, yes. But others have behavioural or mental issues. It’s not a homogeneous group, if that’s what you think. They come from very different family backgrounds and circumstances. It’s not just the children of people who have problems themselves, which is a common misconception, although of course they’re less likely to come out unscathed, since they have no back-up at home.’
‘Do they all turn up?’
‘Yes. We always find them in the end.’
‘That’s good.’ Huldar was glad to hear something positive.
‘Not necessarily. They always turn up in the end. But not necessarily alive.’
Silence fell in the car and lasted until Gudlaugur rejoined the conversation. ‘Are you talking about drugs? Overdoses?’
‘Yes. Opioids. Since they’ve come on the market, these kids have been at far greater risk. You don’t have to miscalculate the dose by much for it to be fatal. It’s not like they carry much body weight. Most of them are desperately thin.’ Rafn glanced at Huldar. ‘Take a look in the glove compartment.’
It turned out to be full of small square containers with long white stoppers, resembling bottles of clear nail varnish; but examining one, Huldar saw that it was something else entirely: the bottle was labelled Narcan Nasal Spray 4 mg. Huldar had heard of the spray, which could be used to revive the victims of overdoses. The numbers involved were daunting. In the worst periods, they were looking at almost one death a week from opioids. Not all these people were drug addicts, let alone kids, but the situation was serious enough that a committee had been set up to decide whether police officers should be routinely equipped with the spray. Their recommendations were unlikely to be delivered any time soon, though. ‘Is it an antidote to opioids?’
‘Yes.’ Apparently catching sight of a movement, Rafn slowed the car almost to a stop and peered down an alleyway. A tabby cat strolled out and stopped dead, staring around in alarm as if expecting a police ambush. It paid no attention to the car, however, and after a moment continued calmly along the pavement in the direction of Hlemmur Square. Rafn shook his head and began to move forward again.
‘Have you ever had to use it yourself?’
‘Yes. Not often, luckily. But it’s good to have it to hand if I do come across someone who needs it. There’s no time to drive to A&E if a teenager’s OD’d. By then, it’s usually too late.’
Huldar put the little bottle back and closed the glove compartment. The atmosphere in the car was so subdued that it seemed better to keep quiet for a while and concentrate on what was happening outside. But he couldn’t hold his tongue for long. As they passed the junction where Laugavegur became Bankastræti, he felt compelled to break the silence. ‘I understand you’ve searched for her before. Rósa, I mean.’
‘Yes. Several times. Though I can’t claim I found her, except on a couple of occasions. She’s an expert at lying low and usually only turns up when she’s good and ready.’
‘When’s that? When the dope’s finished so she might as well crawl back?’
‘No. She’s different from most of the other kids. She has various issues, but they don’t include drugs and alcohol. Not yet, anyway.’
Huldar heard Gudlaugur muttering from the back that he already knew this. He’d been helping Rafn for several hours before Erla had imposed Huldar on them, directly after the visit to Rósa’s grandparents. To Erla, nothing was more important at that moment than locating the girl and bringing her in for questioning.
Huldar, who had been hoping they would find Rósa without too much hassle, didn’t feel he could complain about back-to-back shifts and lack of sleep. He was supposed to go in tomorrow morning for the interviews with more juveniles from the care home but it wouldn’t be the first time he had done his job with dark shadows under his eyes, tanked up on coffee. From Rafn’s comments, he deduced that Rósa was unlikely to be found on this trip, however. Nor on the next one, tomorrow evening. ‘If she’s not on drugs and doesn’t drink, is there any point in looking for her at night? Isn’t she more likely to be out and about during the day, like normal people?’
‘Well, good luck searching by day. All she’d have to do is pull up her hood and you wouldn’t be able to spot her in the crowd. Both times I’ve found her it was late in the evening or at night. Runaways all tend to use their freedom in the same way, whether or not they’re addicts. They stay up as late as they like and go where they want. Adult restrictions no longer apply.’
They drove past a couple who were leaning together as they walked towards a taxi parked on Lækjargata. The couple sped up as it began to spit with rain, just making it to the car before the heavens opened. Rafn put the windscreen wipers on full, craned forwards to peer up at the sky and cursed. ‘That’s that, then. Even kids who are free to do as they please won’t want to be outside in this.’
With the wipers labouring to cope with the downpour, Rafn drove out to Grandi. For once, he told them where they were going without having to be asked – to a colony of container housing for the homeless, located on the edge of a plot of land that was still used for various kinds of industry. They both knew the place Rafn was referring to. ‘Housing’ was a rather grand term for a cluster of re-purposed containers. Huldar had driven past them the previous winter and it had struck him then that the location was typical of the general policy towards those on the bottom rung of society. The few housing solutions on offer were all aimed at keeping the homeless out of sight. The plot in the industrial area of Grandi, to the west of Reykjavík harbour, was as close as you could get in a welfare state to sweeping the homeless into the sea.
Gudlaugur got in first with the question that had immediately occurred to both of them: ‘Surely she won’t go there if she’s not a user?’ The inhabitants of the container colony were mostly individuals with serious drink or drug problems; the long-term homeless who had reached the end of the road.
‘No, probably not. But I once found her visiting one of the occupants. You know, the people who live in the containers are all right, despite their self-destructive tendencies. If the kids I’m looking for fin
d their way there, they’re usually given a warm welcome. The container folk try to help them as best they can. It’s just a pity that their idea of help is different from mine. For them, getting the kids to go home isn’t a priority. After all, they hardly know what the word means after years on the streets. I was very surprised the first time I ran into Rósa there, though, because, like I said, she’s not into drugs.’
Rafn drove past the foundations that were swiftly rising on the sea front next to the Harpa Concert Hall. For the moment, there was nothing to hint at the promised super-luxury hotel they were to become; they were just grey concrete forms, along with the inevitable rubbish that accompanies construction projects. In this weather, they couldn’t even see the glow of the concert hall. The light show had been switched off, presumably because the management had decided there was no point trying to compete with the gloom.
Huldar turned his gaze from the depressing view to the eagle-eyed officer at the wheel. ‘Do you think Rósa could have been staying there all those times she vanished and couldn’t be found?’
‘No. I very much doubt it. If these kids stay anywhere, it’s usually with people in their late teens or early twenties, who’ve been in the same situation themselves. People who’ve failed to grow up and can’t drag themselves out of the mess they’re in. You could say they’re older versions of the missing kids – what they’ll turn into if things are handled wrong. But Rósa hasn’t been spotted anywhere like that, so there’s no point looking for her there. And it seems she’s only a visitor to Grandi. If we’re in luck, we might find her there now.’
‘This late?’ Gudlaugur sounded disapproving.
Rafn looked round and smiled for the first time since Huldar had met him. ‘Late? Like I said before, we’re not talking about some nine-to-five existence. These kids’ day begins at noon, at the earliest.’
Huldar waited for Rafn to turn back to face the road. Thanks to Gudlaugur’s interruption, he’d been forced to postpone his own question. ‘Where did she go to ground then? The other times she’s disappeared. Does no one have any idea?’
‘No. No one has a clue. But it was somewhere indoors, you can be sure of that. When she reappeared she was clean and neatly dressed, with freshly brushed teeth and combed hair. Not like a kid who’s been sleeping rough in a tent or an underpass for days. Then there are those letters that suggest she’s with somebody responsible. Sort of.’
‘Letters?’
‘Every time she runs away, Reykjavík children’s services get a letter saying she’s safe. Or something along those lines. Apparently they received one yesterday, but no one knows who sends them. Maybe she does it herself. She’s an unusual kid, to say the least.’
Huldar tried to come up with a few suggestions, though he realised he wouldn’t be saying anything new. All the places that occurred to him must already have been checked by the police. ‘Could it be her grandparents? Another relative? Or a school friend, maybe?’
‘No, none of those. No one they’ve spoken to will admit to sheltering her or writing the letters. And Rósa herself is as silent as the grave. I’ve tried to get it out of her to make life easier next time she does a runner, but it’s hopeless. She just clams up and looks away. I try not to treat these poor kids like criminals. If I started behaving like I was interrogating them, I’d soon lose their trust. When it was clear she didn’t want to tell me, I stopped asking.’
Once out on Grandi, Rafn parked in some spaces by the empty plot where the four container units had been lined up. They were unobtrusive, with pale-grey exteriors, though an attempt had been made to cheer them up by painting the doors in different colours. But when even the Harpa Concert Hall’s light show couldn’t overpower the dreary weather, these little dwellings didn’t have a chance. To make the scene even more dismal, the surroundings were littered with all kinds of junk and scrap metal that the inhabitants had amassed. In the gloom, the area resembled the set of an apocalyptic film in which every piece of scrap had acquired the status of a treasure.
Curtains were drawn over the mean little windows high up on the walls beside the doors. The side walls were blank but Huldar knew there were large windows at the back, and assumed the curtains were also drawn over those, as the occupants weren’t keen to share their private lives with the outside world. They appeared to be awake, however, as lights showed through the tatty curtains in all the units, though the rain swallowed up the faint glow so that it barely illuminated the wet gravel outside. Since there was no street lighting in the vicinity, the three police officers walked carefully over the uneven ground, trying not to trip over the endless rubbish.
Huldar surveyed the bleak surroundings of what had once been the beating heart of Reykjavík’s fishing industry. He had come here as a boy with his father, on one of the family’s few outings to the capital. His mother and sisters had wanted to visit the famous Kringlan shopping centre, but father and son had fled out to Grandi. Ever since Huldar could remember, his father had sought out any overwhelmingly male spaces, no doubt as an antidote to the gender imbalance at home. In those days, Grandi had been that sort of place: the fishing fleet in the harbour, a tangled mess of nets, and tubs of fish wherever you looked. His father had filled his lungs as they got out of the car by Kaffivagninn, the old café on the docks, and surveyed his surroundings with a broad smile.
Over doughnuts and hot chocolate, he had told Huldar bits and bobs about the history of the area. Huldar remembered little except the parts that had captivated him as a child, such as the fact that the end of the isthmus had once been an island, and that after the Second World War the citizens of Reykjavík had been treated to a display of exotic animals there, including monkeys, sea lions and polar bears, to celebrate the Fisherman’s Festival. That had been before the days of the Icelandic Food and Veterinary Authority, with all its health and safety regulations. According to his father, there had been plans to turn the island into an outdoor recreation area for the city’s inhabitants, but these had had to be abandoned in the face of the swiftly expanding fishing industry and oil depot. Work was begun on landfill around the Grandi or ‘isthmus’ that connected the island to the shore, and after this the oil tanks and other industrial buildings had quickly sprung up. Apart from the tanks, there were now few reminders of that time. Nor was there any way of telling where the old island of Örfirisey had ended and the landfill began. In the next street, the fishing industry had mostly been displaced by restaurants, art and design studios, and shops selling ice-cream, cakes and cheese. If the trend continued, the original plan of using the island as a recreational area would eventually come about organically.
Gudlaugur pulled up the hood of his jacket to protect himself from the rain. Rafn followed suit but Huldar didn’t bother. There was no point. The water always got in where it wanted to in the end. He put his hand in his pocket and fished out a cigarette. A fat raindrop landed right on top of his lighter just as he was raising it to the tip and after that he couldn’t coax a flame from it, however hard he tried. Disgruntled, he shoved the lighter back in his pocket and chucked away the now soggy cigarette.
‘Should we knock on all the doors?’
‘We only need to visit one. Rósa always goes to see the same guy. Binni Briefcase.’
‘Briefcase?’ Huldar raised his eyebrows enquiringly.
‘They call him that because he used to be a white-collar type, once upon a time. Until he went off the rails. As far as I know, Rósa hasn’t had any contact with the other people who live here, so we needn’t disturb them.’
Huldar and Gudlaugur were relieved to hear this. The rain showed no signs of letting up and the thought of tramping from container to container, hanging around outside the doors while they interviewed the inhabitants wasn’t remotely tempting. But it was unlikely anyone would want to invite them in when they were all dripping wet. Each container was less than fifteen square metres inside, and none of the three officers were what you would call small men. If they were invited in, they’
d have to cart some of the furniture outside to make room.
Rafn walked past two of the containers and stopped in front of the purple door of the third. They could hear the sound of a loud altercation but it seemed to be coming from next door. Although Huldar couldn’t make out the words, he had the feeling the quarrel was the kind people have just for the sake of it. The kind that is common when both parties are too drunk to remember what they’re arguing about and keep changing their standpoint as a result.
When no one answered Rafn’s knock, he pressed his ear to the door. Huldar and Gudlaugur waited in silence. Then Rafn straightened up, grimaced and shook his head. Either there was nobody home or the occupant was out for the count. Rafn knocked again, just to be on the safe side, but no one came to the door.
‘What now?’ Huldar half hoped that Rafn would suggest going back to the station for a coffee. But it seemed his luck was out.
‘I’m going to ask the guy next door if he knows where Binni is. It sounds like he’s awake.’
The altercation seemed to have stopped and music suddenly started blasting from the neighbouring unit, the radio or music system almost drowned out by the tone-deaf caterwauling of the people inside. Huldar didn’t recognise the song as it wasn’t his kind of thing. Too bland. No guitar riffs and hardly any discernible drumbeat.
Rafn had to hammer long and hard before the occupant finally heard and answered the door. He looked as if he was pushing sixty but in reality was probably much younger. He was bare-chested and so thin they could count his ribs. His dirty jeans hung off his skinny hips and he didn’t appear to be wearing any underwear, or any socks on his filthy feet which were covered in puncture holes. His face was haggard, his knuckles were bloody and his dead-white arms and the backs of his hands were covered in needle scars like his feet. Some of them were raised and purple, others red and still others crusted over with scabs that were as white as his skin. His wrists were dyed black from all the metal bracelets he wore. ‘Whoa!’ he exclaimed. ‘Who are you?’
The Doll Page 12
