The Absolution

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  Everyone ducked their heads, Huldar included, silently praying the task wouldn’t fall to them. From where Erla was standing, they must look like a bunch of kids playing musical statues. She frowned. ‘Someone needs to go through the ticket sales too. It’s not that common for people to go to the cinema on their own, so we’ll need a list of all those customers who bought single tickets. If we can find out when our man arrived, we may be able to narrow it down by checking who bought a single ticket from the box office at that time. As long as he paid by card. If he paid with cash, we’re screwed.’

  ‘He could have bought the ticket online. In advance.’ As usual, Gudlaugur turned pink the instant he had spoken. He was sitting beside Huldar, who nodded encouragingly at him. They formed their own little team within the team, sitting across the desk from each other in the open-plan office, and were usually assigned the same jobs. There were times when Huldar would have preferred to be partnered with a more experienced detective, but he’d learnt to appreciate the young man’s qualities. He could be perceptive when he didn’t let his low self-esteem and diffidence get in the way. ‘I mean … tickets aren’t only sold on site. You know … so …’

  Huldar interrupted as Gudlaugur started to flounder. ‘If the attacker bought them online he could easily have got two tickets to make himself less conspicuous. He must have realised we’d check the ticket sales, especially the single ones. But if he did buy online, he’ll have paid by card, which is a plus. Or it will be, once we’ve got the names of some potential suspects.’

  This intervention did nothing to soften Erla’s frown. When she spoke, it was to Gudlaugur, not Huldar. That was nothing new; their relationship had been strained ever since they were dragged through the internal inquiry into allegations that she’d sexually harassed him. Although no further action had been taken, the experience had left a bad taste in both their mouths. Since then she had behaved as if he didn’t exist, never looking in his direction or speaking to him first if she could help it. He didn’t know whether she was afraid their interaction might be misinterpreted or she just couldn’t stand the sight of him. Personally, he’d found the whole process excruciating, though in hindsight perhaps it had been worth it. There was no denying that he was relieved to have dodged the consequences of shagging her. No need now for the awkward conversation in which he broke it to her that their night together had been a mistake.

  Erla’s scowl deepened. ‘I know tickets are sold online. The total I mentioned included online sales. But if the perpetrator’s not a total fuckwit, he’ll have paid in cash. We’ll work on that basis for the moment, though of course we’ll go through the online payments too. Happy now?’ Erla’s eyes bored into Gudlaugur, who squirmed in his seat. He nodded. ‘Fine. If not, you can come up here and take over the meeting.’ Everyone except Gudlaugur and Huldar laughed.

  Erla didn’t so much as crack a smile. Picking up the remote, she selected the next video clip, then pressed ‘Play’ again. ‘Here he is, leaving the building. As you can see, it’s unlikely we’re looking for a living victim.’

  A different view appeared on screen. This time they were looking at a pair of glass doors that Huldar recognised as the cinema’s emergency exit, used mainly by smokers like him during the intervals. The officer who’d gone through the recordings with Erla earlier that morning made a face that didn’t bode well.

  The dark-clad figure appeared in the frame, his back to the camera, dragging Stella’s motionless body by the ankle. Her arms trailed behind her head, her long hair fanning out between them. Her jumper had ridden up in the process, revealing her bare midriff and a glimpse of bra. The man paused by the exit, dropping her leg, which landed heavily on the floor. He was about to lift the big steel bar that secured the door, when he hesitated and darted a quick glance back at the girl.

  ‘Whoa!’ A detective in the front row pointed at the screen. ‘Look! She moved.’

  Erla paused the recording. If her face had been grim before it was positively haggard now. ‘We believe the girl made a noise. Maybe she was coming round. Unless it was just her death throes. Anyway, it’s immaterial. Watch.’ She pressed ‘Play’ again.

  The team watched, collectively holding their breath, as the man stepped closer to the girl and prodded her with his right foot. Her bare stomach quivered slightly as if with a cramp, and the fingers of one hand twitched convulsively. The man swung his head around, surveying his surroundings, then made straight for a fire extinguisher fixed to the wall, detached it and carried it back to the girl.

  ‘Shit.’ Huldar didn’t care that he’d sworn aloud. He steeled himself not to look away. Next to him, he saw Gudlaugur screwing up his eyes to slits; but, like the others, he kept watching as the man raised the heavy cylinder and brought it down with brutal force on the girl’s head. A violent spasm shook her body. After that she didn’t move again.

  The man opened the door, grabbed the girl by the ankle and dragged her to the opening, where he took the time to pause and wave at the security camera. Then he vanished into the falling snow, towing the girl behind him.

  The door was left open. On the floor was a broad dark slick.

  Gudlaugur got up from his computer, running his hands through his fair hair. ‘I’m going to get a coffee. Want one?’ His face was ashen and Huldar didn’t blame him. Despite being an old hand himself, he still found it hard to stomach extreme violence and murder. Some officers became desensitised, others never got used to it. Time would tell which group Gudlaugur belonged to.

  ‘Yes, please. Black.’ Though in truth he could have done with something stronger.

  Gudlaugur made no move to fetch the coffee. Perhaps he didn’t really want it either. ‘Do you think he knew her or was it a random attack?’

  ‘He probably knew her, judging by the way he made her beg for forgiveness. But we can’t take anything for granted. Maybe she just got his order wrong at the kiosk.’ Huldar didn’t need to explain: Gudlaugur knew as much about the case as he did, having seen the horrific Snaps that had been sent from Stella’s phone to all her followers. After watching the CCTV clips, the inquiry team had been shown the Snaps; short videos of her saying sorry over and over again, with rising desperation, though what she was apologising for was anyone’s guess.

  The last Snap, which Huldar could have lived without, showed Stella’s head being repeatedly bashed against the toilet bowl. The only glimpse of the attacker was his gloved hand gripping her by the hair. Fortunately, the resolution in these clips had been even grainier than the CCTV footage, since they were films of videos playing on a small phone screen. The police had been forced to resort to this method for now because apparently it was impossible to save Snapchat messages once they’d been viewed. Efforts were under way to get hold of the original clips directly from Snap, the company behind the messaging app. Only then would it be possible to see them in full resolution. Even so, the poor quality did little to mitigate the girl’s piercing screams and moans, or the way they became progressively fainter until finally she went quiet. No way would Huldar be volunteering to watch the high-res versions when they finally arrived.

  Until the brief introduction earlier, he’d known next to nothing about the app. If he understood correctly, each Snap, like the ones sent from Stella’s phone, could only be viewed twice by the recipient, and once it had been seen by all the recipients, it would self-destruct. So if you wanted to watch it twice, you had to do so immediately. After that, the Snap was gone forever and there was literally no way of retrieving it. Not even when it was a police matter or a question of national security. It was pure luck that so many followers had received the videos from Stella’s phone. The police had managed to track down some of her friends that night, asked if they followed her on Snapchat, and confiscated their phones if they did. It had been crucial to ensure that not all her contacts viewed the Snaps, so they wouldn’t auto-destruct. Stella’s own phone hadn’t turned up yet. There was no sign of it on the network and the police assumed the perpetra
tor would dispose of it. Since he appeared to be no fool, it was unlikely he’d hang on to it, let alone switch it on and risk being traced.

  ‘How do you think her boyfriend felt after watching that?’ Gudlaugur still hadn’t moved, his offer of coffee apparently forgotten.

  ‘Devastated. No wonder he’s in shock.’ The young man had been on his way to pick Stella up when the Snaps started arriving. He had viewed one while waiting at the traffic lights and taken it for a sick joke. Then he’d started thinking maybe she’d been cheating on him and this was her way of apologising, though he couldn’t work out why she’d do it in the toilet like that.

  By the time the final Snap arrived, the boy had twigged that it was neither a joke nor an apology. By then he was nearly at the cinema, so instead of wasting time calling the police, he had driven the rest of the way like a maniac, leapt out of the car and started hammering frantically on the doors at the front entrance. According to the timeline the police were drawing up, at this point the perpetrator must have just left the cinema via the fire exit at the side of the building. When the boy had finally got round to circling the cinema in search of another way in, he had found the emergency exit open, seen the bloody trail and immediately rung the emergency services.

  Gudlaugur turned away from Huldar to stare out of the window. There was nothing to see: just a grey sky louring over an equally grey city. The heavy snowfall dumped on Reykjavík by the blizzard yesterday evening was turning to brown slush under the wheels of the morning traffic. Faced with this depressing view, Gudlaugur quickly turned back to Huldar. ‘What can she have done to the man to deserve that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Huldar said flatly. ‘Nothing could justify it. She was only sixteen.’ But Gudlaugur already knew this. ‘Still, our mission today is to find out. The sooner we start looking into her background, the sooner we’re likely to dig up a motive.’ He pulled over his mouse, ready to get stuck in. The background check had been assigned to them. It might not be the most exciting task but it was infinitely preferable to having to sit in on Erla’s conversation with the girl’s parents. Spotting them crossing the open-plan office in the direction of the small meeting room, he’d hastily dropped his eyes. He wasn’t the only one. The mother had been clutching her daughter’s laptop to her chest like a shield to protect herself against further shocks.

  The laptop was now sitting on Huldar’s desk, waiting for him to go through the contents. In stark contrast to the standard black office hardware, it was white and decorated with ladybird stickers; the computer of a teenage girl barely out of childhood. The conversation with her parents must have been gut-wrenching. Since Stella hadn’t been found yet, they were bound to be cherishing a faint hope that she would turn up alive, despite what they’d been told. One of the grim facts that Erla had to make clear to them was that their daughter was almost certainly dead.

  Huldar’s gaze was drawn inexorably to Erla’s office, the office that had once been his, though he didn’t miss it for a second. The parents had left and she was standing by the glass wall, arms folded, her demeanour as uncompromising as it had been in the incident room earlier. Their gazes met for a split second before skittering apart.

  Gudlaugur hadn’t noticed. He seemed as preoccupied as Huldar, though not for the same reason. Eventually he heaved a sigh and showed signs of going to fetch the coffee. But first he asked, without apparently expecting an answer: ‘Why the hell did he take her body with him? However hard I try, I can’t think why he’d do that.’

  He wasn’t the only one.

  Chapter 3

  ‘What do you know about teenage girls?’

  No hello, hi, good morning or how are you? No introduction. Not that there was any need. Though Freyja hadn’t seen or heard from Huldar for months, she recognised his voice instantly; far too quickly for comfort. Typical. She never got phone calls out of the blue from anyone she wanted to talk to.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said coolly. The moment she’d spoken, she regretted it. Why hadn’t she disguised her voice and pretended to be someone else? Told him Freyja would be out of the country for the next month? Whatever it was Huldar wanted, it could only lead to trouble and bruised feelings. She’d been there too many times before.

  ‘Oh. Hi. Sorry. It’s Huldar.’ He left a gap for her to respond. When she didn’t, he added: ‘I was wondering if you could help me. We’ve got a case involving a teenage girl and I wanted to ask your advice.’

  Freyja instantly made the connection and felt intrigued in spite of herself. She forgot her original intention of ending the call as soon as possible. Since lunchtime, news had been coming in of a brutal assault on a teenage girl the previous evening and her disappearance from the cinema where she worked. As usual the police weren’t releasing any details, so the media’s main sources at this stage were the girl’s friends and classmates, who had been sent phone messages containing video clips of the attack.

  Although descriptions of the content had been kept deliberately vague, reading between the lines you could tell that the videos weren’t for the faint-hearted. The young people interviewed so far had appeared to be in shock. Like the rest of the public, Freyja was impatient for more information, not from a morbid desire to wallow in the grisly details but from concern about what had happened to the girl and what could possibly have motivated her attacker. Though it was hopelessly naive to think they’d ever really understand it, since nothing could explain or justify such a savage assault. ‘Is this to do with the attack on that girl?’

  ‘Yes.’ She heard Huldar take a deep breath. ‘I don’t need to tell you how urgent it is that we find the girl and catch her attacker. Any chance you could come down to the station today? Preferably ASAP.’

  Much as she wanted to, Freyja couldn’t bring herself to say yes straight away. Her grubby little kitchen table was littered with textbooks and sheets of paper covered in her failed attempts to solve the maths problems she was supposed to hand in on Wednesday. Long before the phone rang she had been forced to face the fact that however often she tackled the questions, the result would be the same: a jumble of numbers and symbols that refused to relate to one another. Her decision to go part time at the Children’s House and enrol in a business studies course at the university had turned out to be a terrible mistake. The course had done nothing whatsoever to cure her existential crisis or improve her life. If anything, it had made things worse. ‘It’s my day off.’

  ‘I know. I rang the Child Protection Agency first to ask if I could borrow you, and they passed me on to the Children’s House. The director told me you were at home but that I should ring anyway. She said you could take your day off later.’

  ‘Really?’ Freyja was disconcerted. Her request to go part time had not been popular with the management. Up to now, far from accommodating her, they had thrown all sorts of obstacles in the way of her coordinating her work and studies. ‘She said that?’

  ‘Yes. After offering me various other psychologists. But I said I didn’t want them, I wanted you. For this job, I mean,’ he added hastily.

  Two contrasting emotions did battle inside Freyja. On the one hand, she was pleased Huldar had expressed his preference for her over her colleagues to her boss; on the other, she was irritated that he didn’t seem to have got the message and given up pursuing her, despite having learnt from bitter experience that they just weren’t meant to be together. They had originally met out clubbing, tumbled into bed together and had a great time, but then he’d ruined everything by doing a runner in the morning. Their acquaintance should have ended there, but their paths kept crossing through his job in the police and hers at the Children’s House. It had gone from being acutely embarrassing at first to being merely annoying. He was just so maddening. He kept giving the impression that he was eager to renew their acquaintance, then couldn’t resist the temptation to sleep with other women when she didn’t immediately lie flat on her back.

  Huldar was bad news: it was as simple as that. It was a pity he wa
s so attractive – in a scruffy way – and so good in bed too. But that wasn’t enough. Sadly, she had to face it: Huldar was the wrong man in the right body.

  But at this moment he offered a welcome escape from her maths woes. ‘If I do come, what is it you want me to do?’

  ‘Help me interview some teenage girls who knew the victim. The school thought it would be better for them to come to us than for me to go over there. The parents have given their permission, on condition that there’s a representative of children’s services present to make sure we don’t overstep the mark. Which is ridiculous as it’s not like they’re suspects. It’s only a formality really. Anyway, I’d be happier if I had someone there who understands girls their age. I don’t even know if teens require the same handling as younger kids – you know, whether questions can accidentally influence their testimony, that kind of thing. Because it’s vital that doesn’t happen. The sooner we can build up a picture of Stella’s life, the better. They reckon her attacker knew her.’

  ‘Why are you referring to her in the past tense? Has she been found? Is she dead?’

  ‘No, she hasn’t turned up yet.’

  Freyja noticed that he dodged her other question, which was a bad sign. ‘I can be with you in half an hour.’ The moment she’d spoken, her gaze fell on Molly, who was lying on the kitchen floor, guarding her bowl. She did this out of habit, though if anyone were ever foolish enough to steal her food, the result would be a foregone conclusion. Dogs didn’t come much larger or more menacing than Molly. Whenever Freyja took her out, she noticed the owners of small dogs stopping for friendly chats with one another, while she was doomed to walk alone. On the other hand, the deterrent effect was ideal for the dog’s real owner, Freyja’s brother Baldur, who was currently doing a spell inside. Having to look after Molly was one of the many downsides of living in his grotty little flat. But these were more than outweighed by the benefits, the most important of which was that she had a roof over her head and wasn’t reduced to sleeping on a bench in the park. Iceland’s unprecedented boom in tourism had created a chronic housing shortage in Reykjavík and there were no signs of things improving any time soon. Baldur was nearing his release date, and then she would have to find her own place, but luckily she still had a few months left to sort it out.