“Interests of the investigation?” Erlendur fumed. “Who invents phrases like that? That lot can stick it where the sun don’t shine. We shouldn’t be releasing any bloody information until we ourselves know what’s happened. It serves no purpose whatsoever.”
They were sitting in Erlendur’s office, with Elinborg. A press conference was to be held later that day in response to demands by the media, but Erlendur had refused to attend. This created quite a rumpus between him and his immediate superiors. The outcome was that Sigurdur Oli would be police spokesman and media liaison, along with the deputy head of Reykjavik CID. Erlendur considered it stupid to waste manpower on such pointless exercises.
He had met Odinn, Elias’s father, the previous day when it transpired that Niran had gone missing again and Sunee refused to disclose his whereabouts. Erlendur went to visit him in the flat on Snorrabraut. Odinn had taken several days off work. He did not look as if he had slept well that night, he was unkempt and in bad shape.
Sigridur, Sunee’s mother-in-law, had also taken leave from work and Sigurdur Oli visited her at her home. She said she had been on her way to see Sunee when she heard the news, and really could not understand what was going on. She had offered to sleep at their flat that night, but Sunee had declined. Sigridur had no idea of her movements and could not imagine what had become of Niran. She wondered why Sunee should take such drastic action. Sigurdur Oli hinted that she might have something to hide from the police, but Sigridur dismissed that as absurd. Rather Sunee was trying to protect the boy, she thought.
The most likely scenario was that Sunee had approached someone within the Thai community in the city. Elinborg spent a long time with her brother Virote. She could not tell whether he was lying when he claimed to know nothing. He was deeply anxious about his sister and Niran and reproached the police for allowing such a thing to happen. Elinborg visited the brother on her own, although he could not speak much more Icelandic than Sunee. She repeatedly asked him about Niran, but Virote stood firm.
“I can well understand if you don’t want to tell me where Niran is,” Elinborg said, “but you have to believe that it’s in his best interests to come out of hiding.”
“I not know about Niran,” Virote said. “Sunee not tell me nothing.”
“You must help us,” Elinborg said.
“I not know nothing.”
“Why did Sunee do this?” Elinborg asked.
“I not know what she do. She afraid. Afraid for Niran.”
“Why?”
“I not know nothing.”
The brother stuck to his guns until Elinborg gave up and left.
“We have to find Niran and tell him he can trust us,” Erlendur said. “Sunee has to understand that.”
“He can hardly spend long in hiding,” Elinborg said. “Surely Sunee will want him to attend Elias’s funeral. Anything else would be out of the question.”
“She could be getting the boy out of the way,” Sigurdur Oli said. “This bizarre twist has turned the spotlight on Niran, on what he knows and what he did. We can’t ignore that.”
“I can’t imagine that he attacked his brother,” Elinborg said. “I just can’t picture it. Maybe he does know something and he’s afraid, but I don’t believe he played any part in what happened.”
“If only we could go by what you can imagine, Elinborg,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Wouldn’t everything be just dandy?”
“There’s nothing bloody “dandy” about it,” Erlendur snapped.
Sigurdur Oli grinned.
“I told Sunee we couldn’t be sure when the body would be released because of the investigation,” Erlendur said. “One possibility is that she’s trying to win time. But time for what?”
“Is she waiting for us to solve the case?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “However we’re supposed to do that.”
“There are some small-scale racial clashes in or around the school,” Erlendur said. “Niran’s mixed up in them somehow. There’s a minor altercation. Elias isn’t necessarily involved but Niran is. When Elias is attacked, Niran disappears or doesn’t come home. When he finally does show up he’s obviously had a major shock. Maybe he saw what happened. Maybe he only heard about it. He was in a state of shock when I found him in the rubbish store. He’d locked himself away in some private place in his mind where he felt safe. Anyway, Niran tells his mother what he knows and she responds by bundling him off into hiding. What does that tell us?”
“That they know what happened,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Niran knows and he’s told his mother.”
Erlendur looked at Elinborg.
“Something happened when Niran was alone with his mother,” she said. “That’s all we can be sure of. Anything else is conjecture. They don’t necessarily know anything. She’s already lost one son and she’s not prepared to lose the only one she has left.”
“What about that little dealer’s claim that Niran and his friends were selling dope?” Erlendur asked.
“You can’t trust a word that girl says,” Elinborg said.
“Could it be that Sunee no longer feels safe among us?” Erlendur said. “Here in Iceland? Could that explain why she’s hidden her son? We can’t begin to understand what it’s really like for immigrants in this country. We can’t begin to understand what it’s like for someone from the other side of the globe to move over here, settle, start a family and try to integrate into Icelandic society. It’s bound to be tough and I think it’s very hard for us to put ourselves in their shoes. Racism may not be an everyday occurrence here but we know that not everyone’s happy with the way society is going.”
“According to surveys, the majority of young Icelanders feel things have gone far enough,” Sigurdur Oli chipped in. “Which shows they’re not exactly keen on multiculturalism.”
“We want foreigners to come here and do shitty jobs at power stations, fish factories and as cleaners, then pack up and leave again when we don’t need them any more,” Elinborg said. “ ‘Thanks for the help, don’t hurry back!’ God forbid that we might get stuck with these people. But if they do insist on coming here, they can stay away from us. Like the Yanks on the Base who’ve always been kept safely behind fences. Wasn’t it official policy for years that no black people were allowed on the Base? I reckon that’s still a common attitude: that foreigners ought to be kept behind fences.”
“You can’t rule out the possibility that they erect the fences themselves,” Sigurdur Oli said. “It’s not a one-way street. I think you’re oversimplifying. There are also cases of immigrants not wanting to integrate, only marrying within their own group and so on. Wanting to close ranks and ignore what goes on in the wider community.”
“From what I hear, it’s worked out best in the West Fjords,” Elinborg said, “where a variety of nationalities, people from literally dozens of countries, live in a small area and respect each other’s cultural differences and backgrounds while trying to make a life for themselves in Iceland.”
“If I can continue,” Erlendur said, “what I think may have happened is that Sunee sought refuge among her own kind. She doesn’t trust us, so she’s taken Niran somewhere where she thinks he’ll be safer. I reckon we ought to organise our search on that basis. She’s turned to the people she trusts best for protection, her own kind.”
Elinborg nodded.
“Very probably,” she said. “So it’s not necessarily a question of what Niran knows or has done.”