“We didn’t mean to do it,” Hallur said.
“It just happened,” Agust added.
They had nothing else to say.
“So it wasn’t Agust who stabbed him?” his mother asked.
“They were both involved,” Hallur’s father said firmly. “Your son was holding him.”
“Your son stabbed him.”
A row broke out and the boys looked on. The brother and sister, Hallur’s mother and Agust’s father, eventually managed to calm down their spouses. Agust’s father proposed that they should not go to the police yet.
They quarrelled again. In the end, the fathers went out looking for Elias. If he had disappeared from the path it might mean that he was all right. As they drove through the neighbourhood they noticed police cars parked by a block of flats. Cruising slowly past they saw uniformed officers in the garden of the block and a number of squad cars, their blue lights reflecting off the surrounding buildings in the winter dusk.
They drove away.
They waited at Agust’s house for the news, caught between hope and fear. The radio reported that Elias had been found dead. The police were refusing to release any details but the attack seemed to have been entirely unprovoked and might conceivably have had a racist motive. It was not known who was behind the deed and no witness to the incident had yet come forward.
In the end they agreed to wait. Hallur’s father would dispose of the knife. The cousins were not to meet for a while. They would behave as if nothing had happened. The damage had been done, their boys had killed another boy, but surely it was an accident rather than premeditated murder. It had started out as a harmless prank. They hadn’t meant to hurt the boy. Of course they would never be able to forget what had happened but they had to think about their sons” future, at least for the time being. Wait and see.
Erlendur took part in cross-examining Agust’s mother. She had been seeing a psychiatrist since the arrest and was on tranquillisers.
“Of course we should never have done it,” she said. “But we weren’t thinking of ourselves, we were thinking of the boys.”
“Of course you were thinking of yourselves,” Erlendur said.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Did you really think you’d be able to live with that on your conscience?” Erlendur asked.
“No,” she said. “Not me. I…”
“You called me,” Erlendur said. “You were the weakest link.”
“I can’t describe it,” she said, rocking in her seat. “I was suicidal. It was a mistake. Not a minute has passed since it happened when I haven’t thought about that poor little boy and his family. Of course it was an error of judgement on our parts, a moral lapse but-‘ She broke off.
“I know we shouldn’t have done it. I know it was wrong and I tried to tell you. But you . . . you reacted so strangely.”
“I know,” Erlendur said. “I thought you were somebody else.”
“We believed them when they said it was an accident. Things like that can happen. We wouldn’t have done it otherwise. We would never have tried to cover up a murder. My husband said that every parent would understand what we did. Understand our reaction.”
“I don’t believe that,” Erlendur said. “You wanted it to go away, to disappear as if it had nothing to do with you. You added outrage to an already terrible crime.”
When it was all over, the police had obtained their confessions and the case was officially deemed to be closed, Erlendur sat down with Hallur in an interview room at the place where he was being held by the Child Welfare Agency. They talked over the incident at length and Erlendur asked why they had decided to attack Elias. What had given them the idea.
“Just, you know,” Hallur said.
“You know what?”
“He was there.”
“That was the only reason?”
“We were bored.”
30
Erlendur held the urn in his hand, a plain, green ceramic pot with a decorated lid, containing the ashes of Marion Briem. It had been delivered to him in a brown paper bag. He looked down into the small grave, then stooped and lowered the urn into it. The minister looked on, making the sign of the cross. They were the only two people in the cemetery on that raw January afternoon.
The snow that had fallen in the blizzard the night Niran attacked Kjartan had mostly thawed during the two days of rain that followed. After that the mercury had plummeted again, the ground was frozen hard and a bitter north wind chilled them to the bone.
Erlendur stood over the grave in the freezing cold, searching for a purpose to the whole business of life and death. As usual he could find no answers. There were no final answers to explain the life-long solitude of the person in the urn, or the death of his brother all those years ago, or why Erlendur was the way he was, and why Elias was stabbed to death. Life was a random mass of unforeseeable coincidences that governed men’s fates like a storm that strikes without warning, causing injury and death.
Erlendur thought about Marion Briem and their shared story, which was now at an end. He felt a sense of loss and regret. He had not realised until he was standing there alone with the urn in his hands that it was over. He thought about their relationship, the experiences they had shared, the story that was part of him, that he could not and would not have done without. It was him.
Before coming to the cemetery, Erlendur had gone to see Andres and had tried yet again to persuade him to disclose more details about his stepfather. Andres was obdurate.
“What are you going to do?” Erlendur asked.
“I don’t know if I’ll do anything,” Andres said.
He stood at the door of his flat, staring bleakly at Erlendur.
“What are you lot going to do?” he asked.
“We have no reason to do anything unless you want us to,” Erlendur said. “We have nothing on him. We know nothing about this man. If you know where he lives, why won’t you tell me?”
“What for?” Andres said.
Erlendur regarded him in silence.
“Were you referring to yourself?” he asked. “When you said he was a murderer?”
Andres did not answer.
“Was it you he killed?”
Andres finally nodded.
“Are you going to do anything about it?” Erlendur asked.
Andres stared at Erlendur for a long moment without answering, then shut the door on him.
Kjartan survived the attack, although he lost a lot of blood and his life hung in the balance for a while. The knife had missed his cardiac muscle by millimetres but thanks to quick action by the police he had reached a doctor before it was too late. Niran was in the care of the Child Welfare Agency. He had been convinced that Kjartan had killed his brother and as time passed his head became filled with nothing but thoughts of revenge. He had talked of revenge to Johann who had tried to persuade him that it was pointless. Niran had told his mother that he had been threatened but would not reveal by whom. Kjartan had been beside himself with rage and, convinced that Niran had been involved in vandalising his car, threatened to kill him. Sunee was afraid for Niran and to be on the safe side had asked Johann to look after him for a few days.
Several days after Elias’s funeral Erlendur went to visit Sunee. They sat in the boys” room while Virote, who was staying with his sister, made tea. Elinborg took a seat in the kitchen and talked to him about the service. Odinn and his family had stood with Sunee’s family who had come over from Thailand to follow Elias to the grave. His body had been cremated and the ashes given to Sunee in an urn.
“You didn’t cry,” Erlendur said. Gudny, who was sitting with them, interpreted.
“I’ve cried enough,” she said.