The Absolution

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  ‘OK. I’ll come. It’ll kill some time.’

  On the way out she walked disconcertingly close to Huldar, smiling and chatting matily with him as they passed between the desks. It didn’t take him long to twig: of course, she was trying to quash the rumours; give her underlings the impression that the two of them were getting friendly again. To hell with the internal inquiry and to hell with the effect it might have on him.

  The door was opened by Ævar’s son Davíd, the kid Egill had been picking on. He was noticeably small for his age, much smaller than Egill’s friends who’d come in to the police station earlier that day, though they were only a year older than him. He was thin and fair, with a sprinkling of pale freckles on his cheeks and nose. A pair of big blue eyes flickered nervously from Huldar to Erla under an overgrown fringe. The unexpected visit seemed to have made him anxious, though he had no reason to be; they were in plain clothes and there was nothing to suggest this was anything other than a friendly call. While he was waiting for them to introduce themselves, his father called from inside the flat to ask who it was. Erla broke the silence first. ‘Hello. Is your father in?’

  The boy nodded and called into the flat: ‘Dad, there are some people here to see you.’

  ‘What people?’

  The boy looked back at them and asked: ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Could you just fetch your dad, please?’ Huldar didn’t want to have to tell him why they were there. The boy disappeared inside and they were left staring down a short hallway. The walls were bare and there was nothing to see but a row of pegs for outdoor clothes, a few pairs of shoes and a coat stand. None of the usual hall furniture: no chest of drawers, bench or chair. A single unshaded bulb hung from the ceiling. Huldar guessed the man must have moved in recently. That would fit with the information he’d dug up that Davíd’s parents were divorced. In fact, he hadn’t expected to encounter the boy there, having taken it for granted that he’d be living with his mother.

  The man who came to the door looked belligerent. He had dark hair and was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans and holding a sandwich, obviously in domestic mode. Huldar noted his build: tall, broad-shouldered and muscular, the complete opposite of his son. But not unlike the killer in the CCTV footage. The man gripped the door-handle as if he was about to slam it in their faces. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Yes, you can. We’d prefer to have a word in private, though.’ Erla’s gaze slid past him to Davíd.

  Ævar turned and shooed his son back inside. Then he looked back at them. ‘What’s this about?’

  Erla explained who they were and said they’d like to talk to him about Egill’s disappearance. Instead of asking them in, the man asked, ‘Who’s Egill?’

  ‘The boy who’s been bullying your son. He’s missing and we’re trying to find him. Haven’t you seen the news?’

  The man shook his head. He still showed no signs of letting them in. ‘You don’t think he’s here?’

  ‘No,’ Erla answered shortly.

  ‘Well, what then? I know nothing about it. Neither does my son.’

  ‘Where were you on Tuesday evening?’ Huldar would rather have built up to this gradually but felt it couldn’t wait. He wouldn’t put it past the guy to shut the door on them. If they had to insist on finishing the interview down at the station, it would only give him time to prepare his story.

  ‘Tuesday evening? Why?’ Then it seemed to dawn on him. ‘Hang on a minute. Is that when this Egill went missing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you think I had something to do with that?’ The man looked at first astonished, then angry. ‘Why the hell would I have snatched him?’

  ‘Where were you on Tuesday evening?’

  ‘Er, I …’ The man frowned, thinking. ‘Oh yes, I was at my archery class.’

  ‘What time did it start and how long did it go on?’

  ‘From eight to nine. But I hung around chatting with some of the others afterwards, so I probably didn’t leave till about half past nine.’

  ‘Where are these classes held?’

  Ævar gave Huldar the street name but couldn’t remember the number, not that it mattered since there probably wasn’t another archery club in the city, let alone on the street in question.

  ‘Can anyone confirm you were there?’

  ‘Yes. Everyone who attended. There were nine or ten of us – I think. I don’t know the other members well enough to have their numbers or anything but the club must have a list of those registered for the class. And I can tell you the first names of a couple of the people I was chatting to afterwards.’

  Huldar duly noted these down. ‘What about before eight? Where were you then?’ According to the original files they’d obtained from Snapchat, the videos of the attack on Egill had been made at half past seven the evening he vanished. So the man could conceivably have attacked him at seven and been at the archery club by eight.

  ‘I was here. At home.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes, alone.’

  ‘I see.’ Huldar’s gaze wandered down the bare hallway behind the man. ‘What about your son? He wasn’t here?’

  ‘No. He was at his mother’s. If I say I was alone, I mean alone. Not alone with another person.’ The man had flushed, probably from anger.

  ‘We couldn’t see your anorak, could we?’ Huldar pointed at the coats hanging on the pegs behind the man.

  ‘My anorak?’ The man looked disgusted but reached out and took down a large, blue jacket, not unlike the one the attacker had been wearing. But when he held it out, they saw that it didn’t have a hood. They examined it anyway, noting that although it was a bit grubby, there were no traces of blood on it. Huldar handed it back and thanked the man.

  Ævar took the anorak and chucked it on the floor behind him. ‘Why the hell would you think I’d taken the boy?’

  ‘We’ve seen some of the things he wrote about your son online. You could have lost patience and decided not to wait for the problem to go away by itself.’

  ‘How about doing your homework next time?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Erla was clearly annoyed by the way Huldar had been steering the conversation.

  ‘That boy doesn’t bother my son any more. He’s no longer part of Davíd’s life. We took the decision to move him to another school last month. There are other, less drastic ways of dealing with bullying than abducting kids.’ The man stepped back from the door in order to close it. ‘I advise you to look somewhere else. The boy’s not here.’

  Before Huldar had a chance to point out that Egill’s most recent posts about Davíd dated from that weekend, the man had slammed the door in their faces.

  They stood there, staring blankly at the wood.

  Chapter 27

  Security was surprisingly lax at the hospital. Huldar slipped in through the ambulance entrance, nodding to the man on duty, who let him pass without comment. Perhaps he looked like a patient. He was unshaven and dishevelled after working flat out on the investigation all week and had dark circles under his eyes to rival Erla’s. At the last minute he had changed his mind about the uniform; he was too tired and couldn’t be bothered to put it on. Besides, he would be heading straight home after this and didn’t want to draw his neighbours’ attention to his job. They’d almost forgotten about it, which gave him a break from their endless requests to investigate who’d been in the dustbin store or what had happened to the post that had gone missing from the mailboxes.

  Despite being in plain clothes, he was allowed to wander through the hospital unchallenged. In his search for a lift, he soon found himself lost in a maze of passages. From time to time he encountered a member of staff but not one of them took any notice of him. They all seemed to be in a hurry and looked as tired as he felt. Evidently, if he wasn’t clutching at his heart or writhing on the floor in the throes of an epileptic fit, he was none of their business.

  Eventually he came across a lift.

  When the doors opened on
the correct floor, he was met by the characteristic hospital smell of disinfectant mixed with drugs, sick people and bad food. Huldar wrinkled his nose and shuddered. The moment he pushed open the door to the ward, the smell intensified, now accompanied by a low electronic bleeping.

  Apart from that it was quiet. This was a welcome change from the depressing noises you often got outside visiting hours. As he entered the ward, he hoped fervently that he wouldn’t end his days with a long stay in hospital, though the odds of that were not in his favour. Still, come to think of it, the alternative was little better. If he died young, it would almost inevitably be in an accident or involve something else sudden, which meant he might end up on the pathologist’s slab. His mind shrank away from the thought.

  The nurse in reception jumped when Huldar tapped on the high desk. Behind her, through a glass partition, he could see a bank of large screens displaying graphs and numbers. They reminded Huldar more of a financial institution than a hospital, as if the health service had rented out space in the ward to a firm of stockbrokers as a way of supplementing their income. The woman looked up, startled, from the papers she had been poring over. It wasn’t Ásta but then he’d realised that before he knocked; her hair was dark, with grey roots at the parting. ‘Good evening.’ He smiled, trying to project an aura of ‘normal’, since he could tell from the woman’s wide-eyed gaze that she had taken him for a fairly presentable junkie on the hunt for drugs.

  ‘Can I help you?’ She put down her pen. ‘Are you here to see a patient?’

  ‘No, actually. My name’s Huldar Traustason and I’m from the police. I’m looking for Ásta Einarsdóttir. I gather she’s on duty this evening.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ The woman got up, her curiosity roused, as Huldar had hoped it would be. Coming out from behind the desk, she added: ‘Ásta’s with a patient at the moment. Would you like to wait in the kitchen? I can offer you a coffee. Or some juice.’

  Huldar, picturing a faded plastic jug of diluted orange muck made from concentrate, hastily accepted a coffee. The nurse offered him a seat at a tiny kitchen table, fetched him a cup from the cupboard and filled it with black coffee. The room was so cramped that the woman could barely turn round and Huldar had difficulty folding his legs under the table. He felt like Alice in Wonderland after swallowing the ‘Eat Me’ cake. He was also embarrassingly aware of the smoke clinging to his clothes from the quick cigarette he’d sneaked outside.

  ‘Here you are.’ The woman handed him the cup and sat down opposite him. She had to twist sideways on the chair as no more legs would fit under the table. ‘Can I ask what this is about? Does it involve the hospital, since you’ve come to see her here?’

  ‘I just need a chat with her about a case we’re investigating. It has nothing to do with the hospital. I only came here because I was sure of finding her and I assumed she’d need to sleep during the day tomorrow. I promise not to distract her from her duties for long.’

  ‘We’ll cope. Though I’d advise you not to try catching her during the day shift. That would be quite a different story.’

  Huldar nodded and took a sip of scalding coffee. ‘No, of course not. I wouldn’t dream of it.’ He took another sip, allowing the silence to fuel the woman’s curiosity.

  He had to hand it to her: she resisted the temptation for an uncomfortably long time. Huldar was beginning to think he’d have to say something, comment on the weather or the plans to move the domestic airport from neighbouring Vatnsmýri to a new, out-of-town location, when suddenly she cracked. ‘What is this case, anyway? Excuse me being nosy, but Ásta’s such a lovely person that I can’t imagine her getting mixed up in anything illegal. Are you absolutely sure it’s not connected to her job? I ask because of that nurse you lot hauled through the courts for no good reason a couple of years ago. People here are still on edge about it, especially in wards like this one where deaths are inevitable.’

  ‘I promise you it has nothing to do with the hospital.’

  ‘Good.’ The woman seemed satisfied with this until she realised it hadn’t got her very far. Huldar could teach her a thing or two about interrogation, such as not asking several questions at once, since that gave the interviewee a choice about which one to answer. But there was no putting her off. ‘What case is it, then?’

  Huldar smiled and took another mouthful of coffee. ‘It involves a mobile phone.’

  ‘A mobile phone?’ the woman said incredulously. ‘You mean they make you work evenings and night shifts just because of a phone? Was it stolen?’

  Again, she had inadvertently given Huldar a choice of questions to answer. He went for the last one. ‘It’s connected to an incident that’s rather more serious than theft.’ He was surprised Ásta hadn’t told her colleagues. To him, that would have been the normal reaction of someone with a clear conscience. It wasn’t as if people like Ásta received a visit from the police every day. If she had nothing to hide and the phone had been dumped in her letterbox by chance, you’d have thought she’d have mentioned the incident during her coffee break. ‘You mean she hasn’t told you about it?’

  ‘No, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ At that moment a light-bulb seemed to come on in the woman’s head. ‘Hang on a minute. It’s not connected to the murdered girl, is it? The one in the news? Wasn’t there a mobile phone involved?’

  Huldar adopted a poker face. ‘I’m afraid I can’t comment.’

  The woman couldn’t hide her disappointment. ‘No, I don’t suppose you can. Though take it from me, Ásta can’t possibly be mixed up in that. Her job is to save lives, not kill people. Only last Friday she saved a man’s life by giving him CPR in the hospital car park on her way home from her shift. And that’s just one example. There’s a long list of people who owe their lives to her.’

  ‘I don’t doubt for a minute that she’s a good nurse. Honestly. This is just a formality and it’s up to her whether she tells you about it or not. Though I’d kind of assumed she’d have discussed it with her colleagues. But maybe you two haven’t been working together recently?’

  The woman frowned. ‘Yes, we have actually.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Ásta appeared in the doorway, a forbidding expression on her pretty face. Clearly, Huldar was the last person she wanted to see sitting there chatting to one of her colleagues. She wrung the disposable rubber glove in her hand. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to have a chat with you. I thought it would be more convenient than disturbing you at home since you work shifts and I’m never sure when you’ll be asleep.’ His smile did nothing to mollify her since it was so obviously fake. She must know he wouldn’t have thought twice about waking her up if it was necessary.

  ‘I’ve already answered all your questions. Several times.’ Ásta avoided the eye of the other woman, who was still sitting, embarrassed, at the little table. ‘This is neither the time nor the place to go through that nonsense again.’

  Huldar untangled his legs from under the table and stood up. ‘Shall we step outside the ward for a minute? I promise it won’t take long.’ His intention wasn’t necessarily to extract answers so much as to unnerve her and leave her in no doubt that they still had her in their sights.

  Ásta gave an infuriated sigh. ‘You can have five minutes.’

  They seated themselves on a sofa in the area by the lifts. Ásta planted herself at one end, Huldar at the other, to avoid sitting uncomfortably close.

  ‘You’ve got four minutes left.’ Ásta folded her arms in the instinctively defensive posture of someone who wants to put up a barrier between herself and the person she’s talking to. She was still wringing the rubber glove.

  ‘Has anything come back to you?’ Huldar draped one arm over the back of the sofa, purely to annoy her, and her face tightened. ‘You’ve had a bit of time to think about it now. Perhaps you’ve remembered something.’

  ‘No. Nothing’s come back to me because there’s nothing to remember. What do I have to do to get
through to you? Do you want me to make something up?’

  ‘No. For God’s sake, please don’t do that.’ Huldar spread himself out a bit more. ‘Just tell me the truth. We both know you know more than you’re letting on.’

  Ásta narrowed her eyes angrily, then unexpectedly smiled. ‘You reek of smoke. I advise you to drop by the cancer ward on your way out, if you want to see how you’ll end up. It’s a sobering experience, I can tell you.’

  Huldar met her fake smile with one of his own. ‘Sweet of you to be concerned about my health but that’s not what we’re discussing here. We’re talking about the murder of a young girl and the disappearance of a boy, which you’re withholding information about. I find that pretty incredible, given the way your colleague has just been singing your praises. She says you saved a man’s life only a few days ago, yet here you are, refusing to say a word when you could save a young person’s life. That takes some bloody nerve.’

  The blood mottled Ásta’s cheeks. Dropping her gaze, she looked away and stared silently into space.

  Taking this as a sign that he’d found a chink in her armour, Huldar increased the pressure. ‘Maybe you’d like to see some pictures of the treatment the girl was subjected to? Or the boy? You might find it of professional interest. You could tell me how long the boy’s likely to live after the injuries he received. Maybe then you’d understand why we haven’t got time to go running round after people who refuse to help us.’

  Ásta was still staring into space but her profile was now fretted with pain and he thought he detected a hint of fear as well. He was well aware that we have a tendency to read what we want to into other people’s reactions, but he reckoned he’d finally got through to her, especially when her jaw relaxed and she opened her mouth.

  ‘Your five minutes are up.’ She got up and stalked off, leaving Huldar alone on the sofa.