‘There’s something else too.’ Lína ploughed on, oblivious to Erla’s irritation.
‘What? Do you have any fucking idea how busy we are right now?’ Erla snarled, her scowl deepening dangerously.
‘Switchboard asked me to take a phone call from a guy who runs a bike rental.’ No one could touch Lína when it came to shrugging off Erla’s rudeness, Huldar reflected. She was probably the toughest nut on the floor, if not in the whole building.
‘Some bike rental guy?’ he asked. This sounded calculated to tip Erla over the edge. He didn’t know enough about pregnant women to tell whether sudden rage could bring on a bout of sickness, but the evidence seemed to suggest that it could.
‘Yes, he claims he called in the spring to report some stolen bikes but never heard back from us. Then recently someone drew his attention to some photos of bikes in a ditch that were posted on Facebook. He’s sure they’re his.’
Erla stared at Lína in disbelief. ‘Bikes?’
Huldar hastily intervened. ‘Lína, I think that’ll have to wait. We’re up to our necks here.’
But Erla appeared to disagree. ‘Where is this ditch?’
‘On the south coast. Between Eyrarbakki and Stokkseyri.’ Lína sounded uncertain, wrong-footed by Erla’s sudden interest. Huldar was similarly puzzled. He wondered if he should hustle Lína out of the door.
‘Well, as you’ve finished going over the boxes,’ Erla said in a deceptively mild voice, ‘I suggest you deal with the bike business. Borrow a car and get yourself over there.’
‘Me?’ Lína glanced enquiringly from Erla to Huldar. ‘What am I supposed to do when I get there?’
‘Sort it out. Bring the bikes back to town and give them to the rental guy. Take a report from him about who rented them and enter it in the system. Case closed. Everybody happy.’
Not least Erla, who would be rid of Lína for several hours.
‘Couldn’t we have used her for something more urgent?’ Huldar asked, once Lína had closed the door behind her. ‘She’s unbelievably meticulous, Erla.’
‘Oh, please.’ Erla shuddered. ‘I haven’t got time to look after a trainee right now. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re dealing with the bones of two Brits – who got here fuck knows how. We’ve got a murdered homeless guy who seems to have been dealing drugs on the side. We’ve got a murdered teenage girl. And now we’ve got a boy who decides to withdraw his allegations in the middle of an inquiry. A boy who’s sitting on vital information that we can’t now question him about.’
Tristan’s decision to retract his statement had been a bombshell, not only for the abuse inquiry but also for the investigation into Rósa’s death. Bergur’s lawyer had gone on the warpath, demanding that it be put on record that he was considering suing Tristan for wrongful accusation. This looked bad for the boy and had the effect of sending him into lockdown. He had refused to comment on the reasons for his retraction. His legal adviser had quickly become involved and asked to be allowed to confer with his young client, and Erla had felt it best to suspend the proceedings while they had their chat. The interview had been derailed anyway; a short break would be a good thing.
What she hadn’t expected was for Tristan and his lawyer to walk out of the station and go incommunicado. The break that should have been brief had now lasted nearly two hours. Bergur’s lawyer had lost patience and gone home. The same applied to Freyja, who still hadn’t been allotted a workstation in CID.
‘How’s Gudlaugur getting on with tracking down that colleague of Rósa’s mother?’ Erla ran both hands roughly through her short hair, leaving it standing on end.
‘When I left him he’d established that no one living in that area still works at her mother’s old office. So it must be someone who’s quit and moved on. But the guys at the Transport Authority are very eager to help and they’re busy compiling a list of everyone who worked there in her day. Do you want me to check on their progress? See if the list’s ready yet?’
‘No. Gudlaugur should have the sense to come to me the instant it’s available.’
Huldar agreed, though he didn’t think there was any need to wait for the list. ‘The man who took Rósa and her mother out on his boat the day before she died lives in Seljahverfi. I looked him up. His name was on file from when the business of the doll was being looked into. It’s mentioned there that they were work colleagues. I’m betting he’s our man.’
Erla nodded. ‘Could be. I still want to see that list, though. He may not be the only candidate. But I agree he sounds likely.’
She carried on reviewing the situation. Every other word was a curse.
All of a sudden, Huldar was hit by a violent longing for a smoke. Glancing at the clock, he saw that they’d been talking for over an hour since Lína left. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘we’re not achieving anything here. I’d better get back to work.’
‘Yeah, fine, go and have a fag, then.’ Erla shook her head wearily. They knew each other too well.
As he stood in the yard, listening to the rumble of traffic, Huldar couldn’t help envying the commuters on their way home from work. He tried to imagine what it would be like to do a job that didn’t follow you home at the end of the day: receptionist, dentist, baker, driver, builder – something unrelated to human misery and death. Yet he couldn’t see himself in any of those occupations. And he had grown accustomed to wrestling with intrusive thoughts about the victims – and sometimes the odd perpetrator too – that he came across in the line of duty. There was no way of switching the thoughts off, even if he wanted to. Not even when he was watching football.
He remembered the advice of a veteran officer he had worked with in the early days, who had told him that when the violence and the distressing stuff that went with the territory ceased to get to you, it was time to pack it in. You weren’t supposed to become inured to it. So Huldar supposed he could comfort himself that he was still in the right job, but this didn’t make the thoughts any easier to bear.
He resolved to stop going over and over the case in his mind and concentrate instead on the drone of traffic. He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. Why not?
It didn’t taste that good, though. It was like having two ice-creams with chocolate sauce in a row. The second one never lived up to the first.
To distract himself, Huldar decided to run through Lína’s tables. It would be better than listening to the traffic noise and dreading the year 2030 when Iceland would have switched over to one hundred per cent electric cars. What would it be like standing here, smoking and listening to the purr of traffic that sounded like a procession of Roomba vacuum cleaners?
The contents of the boxes turned out to be as uninteresting as Lína had said. There was nothing on her list that would help them find the motive for Binni’s murder. After all, it was highly unlikely that it was connected to anything in his past. By far the most plausible explanation was that the man’s murder had been linked to his drug dealing, though that line of inquiry hadn’t thrown up any results as yet either. The Drug Squad said that Binni hadn’t been on the payroll of any of the importers they were aware of. But of course they weren’t aware of all the suppliers: how else to account for all the drugs on the streets? In spite of this, they remained extremely sceptical about the idea that Binni had been dealing, since he hadn’t cropped up on their radar. Though they did qualify this by adding that he might only have started recently, as it took dealers time to make a name for themselves.
Huldar didn’t know what to think. The killer couldn’t have been an addict since there had been pills lying around in plain view when the police got there. Unless the container had been full of other drugs that the killer had taken away with him? Maybe he had been cunning enough to leave some behind to fool the investigators. But if all Binni’s clients were anything like the ditzy girl Huldar had met, this seemed improbable. She hadn’t exactly belonged to the premier league of users.
The CCTV footage culled from various cameras on G
randi hadn’t produced any results. There was quite a bit of traffic on Grandagardur, but less on Fiskislód, the nearest street to the container colony. When the footage from the various different cameras was put together, it appeared that none of the cars passing along the road had stopped there. Logically, therefore, if the murderer had arrived by car, he must have parked somewhere else. The police were compiling a list of all the registration numbers they could read from vehicles parked in nearby spaces at around the time of the murder. But none of the pedestrians caught on camera had been identified as yet, and no camera had been found that showed the area around the containers.
Huldar ran his eyes down Lína’s list. Clothes, clothes and more clothes. Shoes. Fishing gear. Old textbooks in English. A watch and an alarm clock. Books on angling and fly-tying. Stationery, including a pen with Brynjólfur’s initials on it. A packet of dried-up cigarettes. Whisky tumblers. An old can of aftershave, a razor, a comb and nail-clippers. Miscellaneous documents that Lína had skimmed and categorised according to content – all of which belonged in the shredder, in Huldar’s opinion. A big waste of time.
He took a last drag and turned over the final page, which consisted of a single line. It was a description of the contents of the last box, which, unlike the others, had contained only one object.
Huldar forgot to breathe when he read the description. ‘A doll’, followed, in brackets, by: ‘disgusting’. He was still coughing as he bounded up the stairs to his floor, taking them two at a time, then paused for a moment outside his department to catch his breath before going in.
‘Where did Lína put those boxes?’
Gudlaugur looked up, instantly on the alert when he heard the note of urgency in Huldar’s voice. He gestured to the far end of the room. ‘She stacked them in the empty workspace in the corner. The one they’re planning to give to Freyja.’
Huldar strode off without a word of thanks. He heard Gudlaugur push back his chair and get up to follow. When he reached the pile of boxes, he set about searching for the right one, using the numbers Lína had methodically written in marker pen on each. He’d been prepared to have to dig down to the bottom of the pile but for once he was in luck. The box was in the top layer, as it was smaller than the rest.
‘What’s up?’ Gudlaugur was standing behind Huldar, watching him shift the boxes, then stared at the small wine box that Huldar was holding as he scanned the room for an empty desk to put it on.
‘Could you grab me some gloves?’ Finding no space on the nearby desks, Huldar headed to the meeting room. He laid the box on the conference table and waited impatiently for Gudlaugur to reappear. When he did, Huldar broke his personal record in pulling the gloves on.
He cut the tape with a penknife. Lína must have assumed the box would never be opened again, which was no doubt true of the rest.
‘Right.’ Huldar opened the box, peered inside and grimaced. ‘What the hell is this?’
Gudlaugur, bending down to see, mirrored his expression of disgust. He didn’t look any less revolted when Huldar took the thing out. ‘I think we’d better give Erla a shout.’
Huldar put the doll on the table where it sat in all its glory, glowering at Huldar from its single eye, while Gudlaugur went to fetch Erla. He could feel his spine crawling and had no difficulty at all in understanding why a little girl might have become fixated on the idea that the doll was possessed. Besides only having one eye, its head was covered in tiny holes where half its hair had fallen out. In place of clothes it was encrusted with barnacles and worms. He had often seen mooring bollards but had never felt this kind of revulsion for the ecosystem clinging to them. When they were on a doll, though, with its resemblance to a human baby, the effect was deeply disturbing. He felt an irresistible urge to take out his knife and start scraping the horrible stuff off. But he checked the impulse. Instead, he picked the doll up and peered underneath it. He could just see the shape of a small, round plastic plug under the doll’s buttocks. He couldn’t tell if it had been made like that or if the plug had been a later addition, though from what he could see of the hole, it looked clean and smoothly curved enough to have been made in a factory. He shook the doll against his ear just in case, but couldn’t hear any loose object rattling around inside.
‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ Erla marched in and came straight over to the table. ‘That’s never the fucking doll?’
‘I think it must be.’ Huldar straightened up. ‘How’s that for a coincidence? From the list of the guy’s possessions, there was nothing to suggest he had a thing for kids’ toys. The rest was all adult stuff.’
Erla bent down to get a better look, her face wrinkling with distaste as Huldar’s and Gudlaugur’s had done – as any normal person’s would if they set eyes on the gruesome object. ‘If it’s the same doll that vanished the night Rósa’s mother died, how the hell did it end up in Binni’s possession?’
Huldar shrugged. ‘Maybe as a result of a perfectly natural sequence of events. Binni knew Rósa’s father. After he died, it’s possible Binni stayed in touch with the mother and maybe visited her after the girl had gone to bed. Though I admit it’s trickier to explain how the doll ended up in his possession.’ He paused. ‘Then there’s the other possibility, of course: that Binni didn’t go round to pay a friendly visit but with something much darker in mind. That he knocked her against the edge of the bath, grabbed the doll and got out of there.’
‘But why would he have stolen the doll?’ Gudlaugur was staring incredulously at Huldar. ‘Who’d want it?’
Their eyes were drawn irresistibly back to the doll but none of them could think of an answer.
‘Take that revolting thing down to Forensics. Get them to photograph it every which way, take any fingerprints they can with those barnacles on it and check if that chain’s valuable. Who knows, perhaps that’s a priceless necklace under all the crap. They might be able to find out the exact make of doll as well and when it would have been sold – in case it’s connected to this whole business, far-fetched as it may seem.’
There was nothing else to be done. They could stand there, gaping at the doll and thinking until their brains burnt out without coming up with any answers. What role, if any, could the doll have played in the deaths of Binni, Rósa and her mother? Sometimes strange objects found their way into people’s lives as a result of a series of coincidences. But in this case there was no one left alive to tell the tale.
Or was there? Huldar turned to Gudlaugur. ‘When did Binni’s wife say she’d put his stuff in storage? Wasn’t it shortly after he’d walked out on her? That was about five years before the doll was fished up out of the sea. So how did it end up in the storage unit?’
Gudlaugur scratched his head. ‘Now you’re asking.’
Huldar exhaled slowly. ‘If his wife put the doll in storage later, she must have come by it in a legitimate manner or she would never have passed it on to us.’
‘Maybe she’d forgotten about it.’ Erla was still staring at the doll. ‘We’ll find out in the end. Clearly, we need to talk to the woman again. But that doesn’t alter the fact that I want that horrible object taken down to Forensics ASAP.’
Huldar put the doll back inside the box. He felt strangely relieved once he had closed the flaps. But just as he was about to pick it up, his phone rang. It was a mobile number belonging to the police but not one that he’d saved as a contact.
It turned out to be Lína. ‘Huldar, I’ve found the bikes.’
‘Great, Lína.’ Before he could tell her that it wasn’t a good moment, she interrupted.
‘There’s more stuff here.’
‘Oh?’ Huldar said, his thoughts still on the doll.
‘I think you need to send Forensics out here. There’s something very strange about all this.’
‘Are you down in the ditch, Lína? It’s not unusual for rubbish to collect there.’
‘This isn’t rubbish. Or rather, it is now, but none of it looks to me like the kind of thing anyone would
throw away.’
‘Normal people don’t abandon rental bikes, Lína. If you’ve found other unusual items, they’re bound to have belonged to the same people. I wouldn’t waste too much time on it.’
‘But—’
‘It’s not our job to conduct the preliminary investigation of environmental crimes like fly tipping. Is the rubbish in the ditch likely to cause serious pollution or damage to the environment?’
‘No.’
‘Then it’s not our problem, Lína, except for the stolen bikes. Bring them back with you and we’ll report the rubbish to the Environment Agency. Just get yourself back to the office.’
‘Can I send you some pictures?’
Huldar sighed under his breath. ‘Yes, all right. Go on.’
They rang off and as Huldar went down to Forensics with the box, his phone kept bleeping to indicate that it was receiving a stream of picture files from Lína. Once he had handed over the doll and filled out the forms they shoved at him, ticking all the relevant boxes, Huldar opened the photos one after the other.
They showed an ugly mess and he could understand why an inexperienced, politically Left-Green trainee cop might think there was reason to investigate further. The ditch contained a weathered tent that appeared to have been lying there for some time in the constantly changing water level. One pole was poking up in the air, resting against the bank, while the canvas and the other poles lay in a heap at the bottom. As far as he could tell, there was nothing there to shock Lína unduly, since they’d all seen enough pictures in the media of the aftermath of outdoor festivals. In fact, this was mild compared to the usual chaos that looked as if a hurricane had sent the festival-goers fleeing for home, abandoning their rubbish where it lay.
The final photos were of a rucksack and of the tent, which Lína seemed to have rearranged to reveal what was inside it. Huldar had to admit that this looked pretty odd. The tent was full of everything people usually take with them when they go camping. By enlarging the image, he was able to make out sleeping bags, clothes, food, a shoe, coats and two quite nice-looking vape pens. All very peculiar. Even festival-goers would have the sense to take their most valuable possessions with them when they headed home.
The Doll Page 29
