“Do you know the Icelandic teacher at the school, a man by the name of Kjartan?”
“Yes.”
“Apparently he has certain views about immigrants.”
“That’s putting it mildly”
“Do you agree with him?”
“Me? No, he strikes me as a nutjob. He …”
“He what?”
“He’s rather bitter,” Vilhjalmur said. “Have you met him?”
“No.”
“He’s an old sporting hero,” Vilhjalmur said. “I remember him well from handball. Damn good player. Then something happened, he was badly injured and had to quit. Just as he was turning professional. He’d been signed up by a Spanish club. I think that festers. He’s not a likeable sort of character.”
Shouts and cries came from the boys” changing rooms along the corridor. Vilhjalmur set off in that direction to calm the boys down.
“Do you know what happened?” he said over his shoulder.
“Not yet,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Hope you catch the bastard. Was it racially motivated?”
“We don’t know anything.”
Kjartan’s wife was in her early thirties, slightly younger than the Icelandic teacher himself, and rather scruffily dressed in jogging pants that detracted unnecessarily from her looks. Two children stood behind her. Sigurdur Oli cast a glance inside the dim flat. The couple did not appear particularly house-proud. Instinctively, he thought about his own flat where everything was spick and span. The thought sent a warm feeling through him as he stood outside in the cold, pierced by the bitter wind. This flat was one of four in the building, on the ground floor.
The woman called her husband and he came to the door, also wearing jogging pants and a vest that looked two sizes too small and emphasised its owner’s expanding paunch. He seemed to make do with shaving once a week and there was a bad-tempered look on his face that Sigurdur Oli could not quite fathom, something about his eyes that expressed antipathy and anger. He remembered having seen that expression before, that face, and recalled Vilhjalmur’s words about the fallen sports star.
A face from the past, Erlendur would have said. He sometimes made remarks that Sigurdur Oli disliked because he did not understand them, snatches from those old tales that were Erlendur’s only apparent interest in life. The two men were poles apart in their thinking. While Erlendur sat at home reading old Icelandic folklore or fiction, Sigurdur Oli would sit in front of the television watching American cop shows with a bowl of popcorn in his lap and a bottle of Coke on the table. When he joined the police force he modelled himself on such programmes. He was not alone in thinking that a job with the police could sharpen one’s image. Recruits still occasionally turned up for work dressed like American TV cops, in jeans and back-to-front baseball cap.
“Is it about the boy?” Kjartan said, making no move to invite Sigurdur Oli in out of the cold.
“About Elias, yes.”
“It was only a matter of time,” Kjartan said with an intolerant ring to his voice. “They shouldn’t let those people into the country,” he went on. “It only causes conflict. This had to happen sooner or later. Whether it was this boy in this school in this district at this time or someone else at some other time … it makes no difference. It would have happened and will happen again. You can bet”
Sigurdur Oli began to recall more of Kjartan’s story as the man stood in front of him, feet apart, with one hand on the doorframe and the other on the door, his gut hanging out under his vest. Sigurdur Oli was a keen follower of sports, although he was more interested in American football and baseball than Icelandic sports. But he remembered this man as the great hope of Icelandic handball, recalled how he had already been in the national team when he was injured during a game in his early twenties and had to quit. The media made a big deal of him for a while, then Kjartan disappeared from the scene as quickly as he had been swept into it.
“So you think the attack was racially motivated?” Sigurdur Oli said, thinking how difficult it must have been for the man to say goodbye to professional handball. He might have been coming to the end of a star-studded career now had he not been injured, instead he was teaching at a secondary school.
“Is there any other possibility?” Kjartan asked.
“You’ve taught Elias.”
“Yes, as a substitute teacher.”
“What kind of a boy was he?”
“I don’t know him in the slightest. I heard he’d been stabbed. I don’t know any more than that. There’s no point asking me. It’s not my job to take care of those kids. I’m not working at a kids” playground!”
Sigurdur Oli gave him a searching look.
“There are three like him in his class,” Kjartan continued. “More than thirty in the school as a whole. I’ve stopped noticing when new ones enrol. They’re everywhere. Have you been to the flea market? It’s like Hong Kong! No one pays any attention to it. No one pays any attention to what’s becoming of our country”
“I—”
“Do you think it’s okay?”
“That’s none of your business,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“I can’t help you,” Kjartan said, preparing to shut the door.
“Do you think it’s too much to ask you to answer a few questions?” Sigurdur Oli said. “We could deal with it down at the station otherwise. You’re welcome to come with me. It’s more comfortable there too.”
“Don’t you go threatening me,” Kjartan said, undaunted. “I’m telling you I know nothing about this matter.”
“He might have been afraid of you,” Sigurdur Oli said. “You don’t exactly seem to have been friendly towards him. Or to any of the other children you teach.”
“Hey,” Kjartan protested. “I didn’t do anything to the boy. I don’t keep an eye out for the kids after school. They’re not my responsibility.”
“If I find out you threatened him in some way because you regarded him as a foreigner, we’ll be having another chat.”
“Wow… I’m scared shitless,” Kjartan said. “Leave me alone! I don’t know what happened to the boy; it’s nothing to do with me.”
“What about this clash you had with a teacher called Finnur?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“Clash?”
“In the staff room,” Sigurdur Oli said. “What happened?”
“There was no clash,” Kjartan said. “We had a bit of an argument. He seems to think it’s all right: the more foreigners that pour into this country the better. He never produces anything but that old left-wing bollocks. I told him so. He got a bit angry.”
“You think that’s acceptable, do you?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“What?”
“Talking that way about people? Are you sure you’re in the right line of work?”
“What bloody business is it of yours? Are you in the right line of work, sniffing around people who are none of your business?”
“Maybe not,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Weren’t you in handball in the old days?” he asked. “A bit of a star?”
Kjartan hesitated for a second. He seemed poised to say something, an insult to show that he did not care what Sigurdur Oli said or thought of him. But nothing occurred to him and he shut the door without saying a word.
“Great role model you would have made,” Sigurdur Oli said to the door.
Later that evening Erlendur drove back to the block of flats. The search for Niran had proved fruitless. Sunee and her brother had returned home. The police were still looking for the boy and the public had been asked to help by telephoning in information and even taking a walk around their neighbourhoods to look for a South East Asian teenager, a fairly small fifteen-year-old boy in a blue anorak and black woolly hat.