“Only time will tell,” Erlendur said.
By midday the school staff had supplied them with the names of the boys who Niran was believed to spend most of his time with at school and in the neighbourhood. Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg took the list and set off. It contained four names, all of them boys from immigrant families who lived in the school’s catchment area: one of Thai origin, two from the Philippines and one from Vietnam. All except the Thai boy had been born in Asia, moved to Iceland after the age often, and had problems adapting to Icelandic society.
Erlendur spent the rest of the morning making the arrangements for Marion Briem’s funeral. He contacted the funeral director’s, who told him to leave it to them. A date was set and he placed an announcement of the death and funeral in the papers. He was not expecting a large turn-out and didn’t entertain the idea of a reception for long. Marion had left instructions for the funeral, including the name of a minister and a choice of hymns, and Erlendur followed them to the letter.
Once he had completed the preparations as best he could, he began his search for the stepfather that Marion had mentioned in connection with Andres, who might be the man that Andres had spotted by chance in the area. Erlendur traced the name of Andres’s mother and found his date of birth, then searched the register of Reykjavik residents for the period when he was growing up. According to the records Erlendur examined, the boy had been four years old when he lost his father. After that his mother was registered as living alone with her son. From what Erlendur could discover, Andres was her only child. If she had lived with anyone for any length of time, he or they were not registered at her home, apart from one man who turned out to have died thirteen years ago. Erlendur found the street names and numbers where the woman had lived. She had moved constantly, even within the same area, living in the city centre, in Skuggahverfi, in the suburb of Breidholt when it was under construction, and moved from there to Vogar and finally to Grafarvogur. She died early in the 1990s. At first glance, Erlendur could find no trace of the stepfather Marion had mentioned before dying.
Since he was digging through the police archives anyway, he decided to examine any reports of incidents linked to racial prejudice or hate crimes. Erlendur knew that other members of the CID had been detailed to look into that aspect of the case but he did not let this deter him. He generally did as he pleased, ignoring his place in the precise hierarchy of the investigation. In all, more than twenty detectives were working on Elias’s case, each assigned a specific task relating to the collection of information, surveillance of comings and goings from the country, or examination of transactions at car-rental companies and hotels in the city and surrounding area. They had also contacted the Bangkok police and enquired about any possible movements to or from the country by Sunee’s relatives. The Reykjavik CID were inundated with tip-offs every day, most of which were recorded and followed up, although this was a time-consuming process. Members of the public called in after watching the news or reading the papers, claiming to have important information about the case. Some of it was absurd and irrelevant: drunks claiming to have solved the case using nothing but their own ingenuity and even giving the names of relatives or acquaintances who were “a bunch of arseholes’. Every lead was investigated.
As far as Erlendur knew, there were not many individuals in the police files who were considered actively dangerous or likely to commit serious crimes from racist motives. A few violent thugs had been arrested, at their own homes in a couple of instances, and a variety of offensive weapons — clubs, knives and knuckledusters — had been removed, along with propaganda that could be described as neo-Nazi: material from the Internet, pamphlets, books, photocopies, flags and other racist paraphernalia. Much of it had been confiscated. This was no organised circulation of hate propaganda, and few people had been picked up by the police specifically for showing hostility towards immigrants. Most complaints about racial prejudice were the result of random, one-off incidents.
Erlendur rooted around in the boxes. In one he found a carefully folded Confederate flag and another bearing a swastika. There were also a variety of publications in English, which, judging from the titles, seemed to write off the holocaust as a Zionist conspiracy, and racist pamphlets featuring pictures of primitive African tribes. He unearthed articles from American and British magazines inciting hatred, and finally an old book of minutes from an association calling itself “Fathers of Iceland’.
The book recorded several meetings that took place in 1990, where the issues discussed included Hitler’s contribution to the reconstruction of post-Weimar Germany. At one point there was a passage referring to the problem of immigration in Iceland and discussing how to stem the tide. It predicted that the Nordic race would face extinction in Iceland within a hundred years if miscegenation continued. Among the measures to oppose this it advocated passing tougher laws on eligibility for citizenship, and even closing the borders to foreigners, regardless of whether they came to the country to work, for family reasons or as asylum seekers. The entries stopped abruptly. Apparently the association had disbanded without warning. Erlendur registered that the handwriting was elegant, the style terse and to the point, with no unnecessary digressions.
Although no list of members was appended, the minutes contained a name that seemed familiar to Erlendur. He was sitting racking his brains about where he had heard it before when his mobile rang. He recognised the voice immediately.
“I know I mustn’t call but I don’t know what…”
The woman began to sob.
“…I don’t know what to do.”
“Come and talk to me,” Erlendur said.
“I can’t. I can’t do it. It’s so terrible how…”
“What?” Erlendur said.
“I want to,” the voice said. “I do want to, but it’s impossible.”
“Where are you?”
“I . . . “
The woman abandoned what she had been going to say and there was silence.
“I can help you,” Erlendur said. “Tell me where you are and I’ll help you.”
“I can’t,” the voice said, and he could hear the woman crying down the phone. “I can’t . . . live like this . . .” She trailed off again.
“But you keep calling,” Erlendur said. “You can’t be in a good way if you’re phoning me like this. I’ll help you. Are you hiding because of him? Is it because of him that you’re in hiding?”
“I’d do anything for him, that’s why-‘ The woman broke off.
“We need to talk to you,” Erlendur said.
Silence.
“We can help you. I know it must be difficult but…”
“It should never have happened. Never.”
“Tell me where you are and we’ll talk,” Erlendur said. “It’ll be all right. I promise.”
He waited with bated breath. All he could hear over the phone was the woman’s sobbing. A long moment passed. Erlendur did not dare to speak. The woman was weighing up her options. His mind racing, he tried to find something to say to her to clinch the matter. Something about her husband. Her family. Her two children.
“Your children will certainly want to know—”
Erlendur got no further.
“Oh God!” the woman cried, and hung up.
Erlendur stared at the phone in his hand. The caller ID was blank like last time. He assumed the woman had called from a public payphone; the background noise had suggested as much. When he had her first call traced, it turned out to have been made from the Smaralind shopping mall. Information of this kind had little bearing as a rule. People who called the police from public payphones did so for a reason and avoided using phones near their home or workplace. The location would tell the police nothing.