“I…”
“Yes? Hello!”
“Oh, God, I can’t do it,” a weak female voice whispered in his ear.
Erlendur was startled by the despair in the voice. At first he thought it was his daughter calling. She had called him before in terrible straits, crying out for help. But this was not Eva.
“Who is that?” Erlendur said, his tone much gentler when he heard the woman on the other end weeping.
“Oh, God …” she said, as if incapable of stringing a sentence together.
A moment passed in silence.
“It can’t go on like this,” she said, and rang off.
“What? Hello?”
Erlendur shouted down the mobile but heard only the dialling tone in his ear. He checked the caller ID but it was blank. He noticed that Marion had fallen asleep again. He looked back at his mobile and suddenly in his mind’s eye he saw a woman’s bluish-white face rippling in the waves and looking up at him with dead eyes.
11
Erlendur sat in the interview room, his thoughts focused on the telephone call he had received at the hospital. Oh God, I can’t do it, the weak voice groaned over and over in his mind, and he could not avoid the thought that the woman who had disappeared before Christmas might have just got in touch for the first time. She could have obtained his mobile number from the police switchboard without difficulty. It was his work number. His name had sometimes appeared in the papers in connection with police investigations. It had appeared in connection with the missing woman and now because of Elias’s death. Not knowing the woman’s voice, Erlendur could not tell whether it actually was her, but he intended to talk to her husband as soon as the opportunity arose.
He recalled having once read that only five per cent of marriages or relationships that began with infidelity lasted for life. That did not strike him as a high proportion and he wondered whether it was, in fact, difficult to build up a trusting relationship after betraying others. Or maybe it was too harsh to talk of betrayal. Perhaps the prior relationships had been changing and evolving and new love was kindled at a sensitive moment. That happened and was always happening. The woman who vanished felt that she had found true love, judging by her friends” remarks. She loved her new husband with all her heart.
The friends with whom she stayed in contact after the divorce stressed that point when Erlendur was seeking explanations for her disappearance. She had left her first husband and married for the second time with due ceremony. She was said to be very down-to-earth and realistic, then suddenly it was as if she had been transformed. Her friends did not doubt that her love for her new husband was genuine, and she always implied that her former marriage had run its course and she herself was “completely different’, as one of her friends put it. When Erlendur asked her to elaborate, it transpired that the woman had been elated after her divorce, talking about a new life and that she had never felt better. A grand wedding was held. They were married by a popular vicar. A huge crowd of guests celebrated with the couple on a lovely summer’s day. They took a three-week honeymoon in Tuscany. When they returned they were relaxed, tanned and radiant.
All that was missing from the beautiful wedding was her children. Her ex refused to let them take part in “that circus’.
It was not long before the expectation and excitement faded and turned into their opposite. Her friends described how, over time, the woman had been overwhelmed by sadness and regret, and ultimately by guilt at how she had treated her family. It did not help that her new husband’s ex accused her constantly of destroying their family. His children moved in with them while she was fighting for custody of her own kids, a constant reminder of her culpability. All this was accompanied by crippling depression.
It was not the first time her new husband had been divorced following an affair. Erlendur found out that he had been married three times. He traced his first wife, who lived in Hafnarfjordur and had long since remarried and had a child. Exactly the same process had taken place in that case. The husband excused his absences from home on the grounds of long meetings, travelling around the country for work, golf trips. Then one day, quite unexpectedly, he announced that it was all over, they had grown apart and he was planning to move out. All this struck his wife like a bolt from the blue. She had not been aware of any fatigue in their relationship, only of his absence.
Erlendur also spoke to wife number two. She had not remarried and he sensed that she had not yet recovered from the divorce. She described the process in detail, accusing herself of not being wary enough. Trying to take her side, Erlendur said she was probably lucky to be rid of him. She gave a thin smile. “I’m mainly thinking about the children,” she said. She had been unaware that he was married when he first began courting her. It was not until their relationship was several months old that he had said rather sheepishly that he had something to tell her. They were at a small hotel in the countryside where he had invited her to spend the night, and as they were sitting in the dining room that evening he announced that he had a wife. She stared at him in disbelief, but he was quick to add that his marriage was in ruins, it was only a question of time as to when he would leave her and he had told her so. She gave him an earful for not telling her he was married, but he managed to calm her down and win her over.
After hearing this testimony and others from friends of the missing woman, Erlendur began to detest the man. He knew that the more time that elapsed, the more likely it was that she had committed suicide, and the accounts of her depression supported that theory. But the unexpected telephone call had kindled a hope within him that this was not the case. It kindled the hope that she had moved out from her marital home and did not want her husband to discover her whereabouts; that she was hiding from him and did not know where to turn.
Only two years had passed since the fairytale wedding when the woman started whispering to a close friend of hers that her husband had begun to take part in weekend golf tournaments that she had never heard of.
Erlendur broke away from his thoughts and nodded to Sigurdur Oli, who sat down beside him in the interview room. Now the interrogation could begin. The man sitting in front of them was in his mid-forties. Since the age of twenty he had repeatedly been involved with the police for offences of varying degrees of seriousness: burglary, robbery and assault, in some cases very brutal. He lived two blocks away from Sunee and the boys. The police had compiled a list of repeat offenders who could possibly have crossed Elias’s path on his way home from school. This man was top of that list.
The police had obtained a search warrant for his flat when they brought him in for questioning earlier that morning and had discovered large quantities of pornography, including child pornography. It was enough to bring charges against him yet again.
His name was Andres and he looked at Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli in turn, prepared for the worst. A lifelong alcoholic who showed all the signs: his expression drowsy and bleary, his little eyes shifty and questioning. He was a fairly short man, stocky and strongly built.
Erlendur knew him. He had arrested Andres more than once.
“What are you hassling me for?” Andres asked, rough and ragged from persistent drinking, his eyes darting from one officer to the other. “What’s going on?” He tried to make this sound manly, but it ended in a little squeak.
“Do you know a boy by the name of Elias who lives in your neighbourhood?” Erlendur asked. “Dark-skinned, of Thai descent. Ten years old.”
A tape recorder lay on the table between them, whirring softly. Given Andres’s state of intoxication when he was taken into custody, he could well claim not to have heard about Elias’s murder. However, there was no believing a word he said.