The Doll

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  ‘He didn’t mention anything about being in trouble? Or involved in a dispute with someone?’

  ‘No. It was all very superficial. As usual. He wouldn’t have told me even if he had been in trouble.’

  ‘Can I ask why you went to see him? Was there some specific reason?’ Erla’s expression was stony, about as animated as one of the heads on Easter Island. Her complexion looked suitably grey as well.

  ‘Reason? Yes. I wanted to let him know that Grandma – his mother – is in hospital, dying. I thought he might want to say goodbye to her. I even offered to drive him there but he wouldn’t go. Just asked me to send his regards.’ Thorgeir uttered a brief, sarcastic laugh. It conveyed the young man’s perpetual disappointment in his father better than any list of all the times Binni had let him down.

  ‘So he didn’t go and see her?’ Huldar guessed Binni hadn’t been able to face it. A more charitable interpretation would be that he had thought it kinder for his mother to depart the world without having the image of him in his scarecrow state as the last thing she saw. It would be better if she remembered him as he used to be, before his life had unravelled. People suffering from serious addictions had lucid intervals when they were all too aware of their situation and their future prospects; an awareness that only deepened their craving for drug-or booze-fuelled oblivion.

  ‘No. As usual, he couldn’t think about anyone but himself. He said his ankle was killing him. Big deal. Like that’s comparable? To be dying of pain from an injured ankle or to be dying, full stop?’ Thorgeir broke off and lowered his eyes to the table, ashamed of his outburst. He was plainly battling with conflicting emotions: loss and relief, grief and anger.

  ‘Do you know where your father got his drugs from?’ Huldar asked, though he didn’t for a minute expect the son to possess this kind of information. Or indeed to care.

  Thorgeir looked surprised. ‘No. When I was there he said he’d quit the drugs. Said he’d been forced to; that from now on he’d stick to drinking.’

  A hint of pity softened Erla’s forbidding expression for a moment, before her face grew hard again. ‘We found drugs in his container. Opioids. So I’m afraid he was still using. Possibly dealing too. Do you know anything about that?’

  Thorgeir’s startled look was convincing. He hadn’t heard. Then he recovered, being no doubt unsurprised by anything where his father was concerned. ‘No. I hadn’t a clue about that. But then it wasn’t like he’d discuss it with me.’ Thorgeir straightened up. ‘I know nothing about drugs. I don’t even drink. Any more than I’d play Russian roulette. With my genes, alcohol would be the bigger gamble. A fifty-fifty chance of a fatal outcome.’

  Erla changed the subject. ‘Have you any idea who might have wanted to kill your father? Did he keep anything valuable in his container that would have been worth stealing?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know – either who killed him or if he owned anything valuable. I don’t even know what sort of thing the crowd he hung out with would consider valuable. Does murder always have to have a motive? Couldn’t it just have been something trivial? It’s not like his life had any logic to it. If you’re right that he was dealing, couldn’t that have been the motive? That he stole from the people who gave him the dope? It’s not like he could go abroad to buy it or grow it himself in his container. You must be looking into that possibility?’

  Again, Erla brushed off his speculation. She and Huldar were there to ask questions, not answer them. ‘Are you by any chance acquainted with a teenage girl called Rósa? She knew your father. She’s sixteen years old. Small. With dark hair.’ Erla handed Thorgeir a photo. It was the one they had been circulating in the media.

  ‘Isn’t that the girl who’s missing?’ Thorgeir looked from one of them to the other and they both nodded. ‘Is she a suspect?’

  ‘No, she isn’t. We just want to talk to her.’ Huldar could have kicked himself. Everyone knew that when the police wanted to talk to someone, it wasn’t just for a witness statement.

  ‘Well, I know nothing about her. I don’t recognise her. I’ve never come across her – in connection with Brynjólfur or anywhere else.’ Thorgeir sighed. ‘And I haven’t a clue who’d have wanted to kill him. Not a clue.’

  And the worst of it was that neither had they.

  Chapter 18

  Friday

  Tristan Berglindarson declined the offer of orange juice or water. Instead, he asked for a black coffee. This was unusual for a boy who had just turned seventeen and when he got the cup he barely touched it. Freyja guessed that he had opted for coffee not because he liked it but because he wanted to make himself appear more grown-up. She remembered ordering coffees herself during her formative years, sitting in a café with similarly gauche friends, trying to look as mature and sophisticated as the other customers. But the way their faces puckered at every sip, as Tristan’s was doing now, had given them away.

  He was impossibly good-looking, yet he seemed unaware of his beauty, not even bothering to pose. His conventional clothes, free from all logos or other form of ostentation, gave the impression that he wasn’t bothered about fashion either. He was much neater, too, than the adolescents who had preceded him in the chair. If Freyja hadn’t known better, it would never have occurred to her that the boy came from a problem family. She would more likely have taken him for an up-and-coming footballer.

  But if you looked closer, you could discern the marks of stress on his face that betrayed his difficult upbringing. The smile that touched his lips when he spotted the picture of Reagan and Gorbachev had quickly faded, and Freyja got the feeling that none of his smiles would last long. His face grew sombre again, as if his features naturally fell back into that expression.

  He had turned up at the appointed hour and, so far, had answered all Hafthór’s questions conscientiously. These had related to the care home and were designed to fill in any gaps in his previous interviews, as well as tidying up a few details that had emerged from questioning the other kids. Tristan came across as calm and convincing. He stuck to his guns about the abuse and didn’t budge from his earlier testimony. He said he couldn’t comment on anyone else’s experiences as he’d found it hard enough coping with his own problems during the period in question and hadn’t given any thought to whether others might have suffered the same mistreatment. Because the kids’ stays at the home only tended to overlap by a few weeks, they rarely became close. It was therefore perfectly natural, in Freyja’s opinion, that their welfare hadn’t been uppermost in Tristan’s mind, any more than people worry about the wellbeing of other patients in a doctor’s waiting room.

  Hafthór appeared to have run out of questions. He glanced at Huldar, raising his chin a little as a sign that he should take over. Before the boy arrived, they had agreed that they would talk about the care home first, before moving on to other matters. The time had now arrived to start quizzing Tristan about Rósa. The only person who wasn’t aware of this turning point in the conversation was Tristan himself.

  Huldar came straight to the point. ‘You’re a friend of Rósa Thrastardóttir, aren’t you?’

  The question threw Tristan. His eyes widened as he turned to Huldar, who had been sitting in silence up to now. ‘Er … yes.’

  ‘Did you know she was missing?’

  ‘Er … yes.’

  ‘Do you know where we can find her?’

  ‘Er … no.’ Tristan’s answers had suddenly become a lot more monosyllabic than when Hafthór had been asking the questions.

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ Huldar kept his eyes fixed on the boy’s face. ‘It would be best for you, for us, and most of all for her if you helped us find her.’

  Tristan didn’t say anything, just took a sip of coffee. It didn’t appear to make him feel any better.

  Huldar pressed on. ‘Of course, you’ll remember saying you’d confided in her about the abuse at the time. That’s correct, isn’t it?’

  Tristan nodded his blond head. ‘Yes.’

 
‘If we could get Rósa to confirm this, it would back up your statement. So let me ask you again: do you know where she is?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Tristan took a breath before continuing. ‘If I did, I’d tell you.’

  ‘When did you last speak to her?’

  ‘I don’t remember. It was, like, a while ago.’

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that. When was it? A week ago? Two weeks? A month?’

  ‘Maybe a week ago. Ten days. Something like that.’

  ‘Did you talk on the phone?’

  ‘Yes. I think so.’ Tristan fiddled with the leather band he wore round his right wrist like a bracelet. The ends were threaded with tiny coloured beads that he now began to play with.

  ‘Then could you check the exact date on your phone for me?’ Huldar gestured towards the pocket of the boy’s jacket.

  Tristan went on twisting the beads without looking up. ‘No, sorry. My phone’s in for repairs. I’m using a borrowed one from the shop.’

  Huldar gave no sign of believing this but left the question for now. ‘All right. When did you first meet Rósa?’

  ‘I was thirteen. She was twelve. So, four years ago.’

  ‘Was that at the care home run by Bergur?’

  ‘No. We were at a different home. They were looking for a foster family for her. I was in temporary care. I think we were there for, like, three or four months together. We became friends and stayed friends, though we weren’t always in the same homes.’

  ‘So you didn’t overlap again until later, at Bergur’s place?’

  ‘That’s right. Two years later. When she was fourteen and I was fifteen. That’s when I told her. It was a secret I couldn’t talk about to anyone. But she’d noticed I was unhappy. I asked her not to tell anyone, though. Don’t you believe me?’

  To Freyja, this account sounded rehearsed, as if he’d often trotted out the same sentences in the same order.

  Huldar left the boy’s question hanging. ‘On another matter: how did Rósa know Binni?’

  ‘Binni? Binni who?’ Tristan’s look of puzzlement struck Freyja as fake; his eyes were too wide open, his facial muscles too tense.

  ‘Binni. Brynjólfur. Binni Briefcase. He lived in the container colony on Grandi.’

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘Oh? You’ve never been there, then? With Rósa?’

  ‘Er … no. At least, not that I remember.’ Assuming Binni’s friend, the woman Freyja had bumped into on Grandi, had been telling the truth, Tristan must be lying. The agitated way he was fiddling with the saucer of his coffee cup and avoiding eye contact reinforced this impression.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes. Quite sure.’

  ‘That’s strange. A witness claims to have met you round at Binni’s place a year ago. With Rósa. Would you like a moment to reconsider?’

  Tristan flushed and silently accepted this offer. But he seemed intent on wasting it by staring at the little beads and twiddling them between his fingers. To prompt him, Freyja decided to intervene with a few friendly words. She was here to look out for the boy and the sudden turn the interview had taken seemed to have thrown him badly. One minute he was being questioned as the victim of abuse, the next he found himself being caught out in a lie as a witness in a completely different case. ‘It’s not an offence to have visited the man, Tristan. The questions are just part of the effort to trace Rósa. The police also need to find out how Rósa knew Binni and why she used to visit him – not just the time you went with her. It’s part of a different investigation that’s unconnected to yours. It’s just an odd coincidence that Rósa’s name happens to have cropped up in both.’

  Her friendly tone worked. The flush left Tristan’s cheeks and the muscles of his jaw relaxed a little. Soon he’d feel confident enough to raise his eyes. It was hard being caught out in a lie. Freyja thought it best to rephrase the question herself rather than let Huldar ask it again, as there was a risk he might sound too harsh. ‘Don’t you have any memory of going out to Grandi with Rósa? And dropping into Binni’s container? A year’s a long time, so no one would be surprised if it didn’t immediately come back to you.’

  Tristan raised his eyes gratefully to her. Letting go of his leather wristband, he cleared his throat. ‘Yes. Now that you mention it, I do vaguely remember. I did go there with her.’

  ‘What did she want?’ Huldar took over the questioning again.

  ‘I don’t know. Rósa said she had to talk to the guy. I just tagged along. We took a bus from Hlemmur—’

  Huldar cut him off. How they had got there was irrelevant. ‘Didn’t she tell you what she wanted to talk to the man about?’

  Tristan shook his head. ‘No. She didn’t.’

  ‘Weren’t you curious? Didn’t it strike you as odd that a young girl like her should want to go and see a rough character like Binni?’

  ‘I didn’t know he was an addict,’ Tristan protested. ‘Not until we got there. I’d never been there before.’ He added quickly: ‘Of course I’d been out to Grandi before, but not to the containers. You can’t see them from the main road.’

  ‘From Grandagardur, you mean?’ Freyja offered the street name since Huldar and Hafthór were looking uncertain.

  Tristan nodded. ‘Yes. Something like that. The one with the ice-cream parlour.’

  Huldar smiled. ‘OK. Going back to the actual visit. You say Rósa didn’t tell you what it was about, but once you got to Binni’s place, you must have heard what passed between them? The container’s too small for private conversations.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But she never got to the point. Some woman turned up and Rósa didn’t get a chance to have her talk with Binni. When the woman left, Binni got his drugs out. And after that you couldn’t get any sense out of him. So we went. Rósa seemed a bit down afterwards and I tried to cheer her up. I didn’t ask about the visit because it had obviously gone wrong. It would have been like – like rubbing a wound in salt, you know.’

  Freyja, Huldar and Hafthór all cleared their throats automatically, but none of them corrected the boy. This wasn’t a lesson in idioms.

  ‘I never went back there. I swear it. And Rósa never mentioned him again, so I avoided talking about the visit. It was all so embarrassing and stupid somehow.’

  ‘So you weren’t in the area the day before yesterday? On Wednesday evening?’

  Tristan gave Huldar a wondering look. ‘No. I just told you. I only went there that one time. And I definitely wasn’t there on Wednesday evening.’

  ‘Where were you, then?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Huldar gave a slow nod. ‘You. What were you doing on Wednesday evening?’

  ‘Er …’ The boy appeared to be racking his brain. Then he brightened. ‘Oh, yes – I was at home.’

  ‘Can anyone confirm that?’

  His elation evaporated. ‘Er …’

  ‘Did a friend visit you? Or was your mum home, maybe?’

  Tristan appealed to Freyja. ‘Does it matter? I said I was at home.’

  ‘Your answer matters, Tristan.’ Freyja didn’t explain why it was important since Huldar hadn’t yet mentioned the murder on Grandi and the boy gave no sign of having heard the news. If he had, he would have instantly made the connection.

  ‘Mum was home. She can tell you I was there.’ Tristan almost spat in his eagerness to get the words out. Freyja didn’t believe him. He hadn’t been home that evening. She didn’t for a moment believe he’d been out on Grandi, committing murder, but she’d bet anything he hadn’t been at home.

  ‘Moving on to another matter …’ It was impossible to tell from Huldar’s expression whether he believed the boy or not. ‘We know you went round with Rósa to see her grandparents back in the spring. While she was there, she mentioned something about a couple who were in the sea. Can you give us any idea what she meant?’

  Tristan shifted in his chair. ‘I don’t know what she was on about. But I do remember that visit. Her gran gave
us pancakes.’ He licked his dry lips, then continued. ‘Look, Rósa gets these crazy ideas sometimes and I have literally no idea what she’s talking about. I can’t really explain.’ Tristan reached for his coffee, but changed his mind as his fingers touched the cup.

  ‘Would you like some water? Your coffee must be cold by now.’ Freyja pushed over the water jug and handed him a glass. He accepted it gratefully, poured himself a glass and gulped down half in one go. Then, snatching a breath, he carried on talking in a high, tight voice. ‘Does that mean she’s an unreliable witness? Does it mean it won’t help if she swears to the judge that I told her about the abuse at the time?’ There was genuine fear in his eyes.

  ‘Don’t you worry about that,’ Hafthór intervened. ‘Your main concern at the moment should be whether Rósa turns up. Are you absolutely sure you don’t know where she goes when she does a runner like this? It sounds like you’re good mates. Have you never asked her about it?’

  ‘We’re friends. But we don’t meet up every day or anything like that. Just occasionally. I never know when she’s run away. We’re mostly in touch on our phones. We message each other and that kind of thing. I don’t always know where she is when she answers me.’ He paused, then went on, looking a little embarrassed. ‘We’re not going out with each other, if that’s what you think. We’re just mates.’

  The interview continued along the same lines until it became clear that the boy had run out of answers. Nothing new had emerged to lead them to Rósa, either because Tristan couldn’t help them or because he was covering up for the girl.

  Freyja and Huldar watched as Hafthór escorted the boy out. Freyja got the impression that Tristan had to force himself not to break into a run, so relieved was he that his ordeal was over. There was nothing odd about that. No one, whatever their age, enjoyed being interrogated by the police. Sticking a pot plant in one corner and a picture on the wall didn’t make the slightest difference. She and Huldar followed them out of the room.