He picked up the notebook again. There was a detail he needed to check, one he had forgotten to pin down. He reread his jottings from the past few days and saw that his oversight was minor: he had not yet checked a phone number that really ought to be verified. He looked at the clock; it was not that late, so he picked up the phone.
‘Hello,’ a voice said. It was a weary and indifferent woman’s voice.
‘Please excuse my ringing so late,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘But do you know a woman called Sara? Is she a friend of yours?’
There was a silence on the other end.
‘What can I do for you?’ the woman asked eventually.
‘Ah,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘Did she visit you last Monday evening? Could you confirm the fact?’
‘Who?’
‘Sara.’
‘Sara who?’
‘Your friend.’
‘Who is this, please?’
‘The police.’
‘What do you want with me?’
‘Was Sara at your address last Monday evening?’
‘Is this a joke?’
‘A joke?’
‘You must have the wrong number.’
Sigurdur Óli read out the number he had been given.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ the woman said, ‘but there’s no Sara working here. I don’t know any Sara. This is the box office at the University Cinema.’
‘So you’re not Dóra?’
‘No, and there’s no Dóra here either. I’ve been working here for years and I’ve never known anyone called Dóra.’
Sigurdur Óli stared at the number in his notebook, seeing in his mind’s eye the pierced eyebrow and tattooed arm of yet another liar, and a convincing one at that.
18
Sigurdur Óli was debating if he should call Sara in for questioning, send a car to fetch her from her workplace and see how she liked being escorted from the bottling plant between uniformed officers. That was one method he could envisage. Another would be to pay her a visit at work and intimidate her with all sorts of dire threats, such as leading her out in handcuffs, speaking to her boss, making her lies public. Since he did not know her at all, he was not sure how tough Sara was, but assumed she would be an unreliable witness and quick to lie. She had reeled off the telephone number of the cinema without hesitation, gambling that he would never check up on it.
He decided to adopt the latter approach, for although Sara had lied to him about her movements, this was no guarantee that the truth would have any bearing on Lína’s attack. She could have a hundred other reasons for lying to him.
There she sat at the bottling-plant switchboard with the ring through her eyebrow and the snake around her arm, each indicative of a small rebellion against bourgeois conservatism. Tasteless and tacky, thought Sigurdur Óli as he approached her. Sara was on the phone dealing with a customer, so he waited at first but when it appeared that the conversation would never end he lost patience and, seizing the receiver, cut the connection.
‘You and I need another chat,’ he announced.
Sara looked startled. ‘Hey, what’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Either here or down at the station, it’s up to you.’
A somewhat older woman was standing behind the desk, observing their conversation with surprise. Sara glanced at her and Sigurdur Óli saw that she was keen to avoid any trouble at work.
‘Is it OK with you if I take a short break?’ she asked the woman, who nodded calmly but asked her not to be long.
Sara led Sigurdur Óli towards the cafeteria, opened a door beside it, which turned out to lead to a staircase, and stopped just inside.
‘What on earth are you on about?’ she asked as the door closed behind them. ‘Why can’t you leave me alone?’
‘You weren’t visiting a friend on the evening of the attack — incidentally, it’s murder now, not assault and battery. The number you gave me for your friend was false.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Sara said, scratching her tattoo.
‘Why was your car parked in the area?’
‘I was visiting a friend.’
‘Dóra?’
‘Yes.’
‘Either you must be stupid or you think I am,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘Whatever, you’ll have plenty of time to mull it over while you’re in custody. From now on you’ll be treated as a suspect: the police will be coming to take you in later today. I’m going to go and print out a warrant for your arrest right now. It shouldn’t take long. By the way, don’t forget your toothbrush.’
Sigurdur Óli opened the door to the corridor.
‘I lent it to my brother,’ said Sara in a low voice.
‘What did you say?’
‘My brother borrowed the car,’ the girl said, louder this time. The look of defiance was gradually fading from her face.
‘Who’s he? What does he do?’
‘He doesn’t do anything. I sometimes lend him the car. He was driving it that evening, but I don’t know where he went or what he was up to.’
‘So why did you lie to me?’
‘He’s always getting into trouble. When you started asking about the car and where I’d been, I figured he might have done something stupid. But there’s no way I’m going to prison for his sake. He had the car.’
Sigurdur Óli fixed Sara with a penetrating glare, but she kept her gaze lowered. He wondered if she was lying again.
‘Why should I believe you?’
‘I don’t care what you believe. He had the car. That’s all I know. It’s not my problem. Ask him.’
‘What was he doing? What did he tell you?’
‘Nothing. We don’t talk much. He’s …’ Sara trailed off.
‘You just lend him your car,’ Sigurdur Óli finished for her.
Sara met Sigurdur Óli’s gaze. ‘No … I lied about that too,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘He didn’t borrow the car, he stole it. I was late for work the next day thanks to him. Had to take a taxi. My car was just missing from its parking space. He may be my brother but he’s a total dickhead.’
Sigurdur Óli learned that Sara’s brother was called Kristján and that she had stopped lending him her car a long time ago. He never kept his word; he had already lost his licence twice and often could not be bothered to bring the car back or else was incapable of doing so. On those occasions, rather than take the risk that her battered Micra might be sitting in the town centre, accumulating parking tickets, she would have to fetch it herself. As a result she would not lend him the car any more — or indeed money or any of her other possessions. He had stolen cash from her too, even taken her credit card once, as well as belongings from her flat that he would sell to buy drugs. He was forever in trouble, why she had no idea, since he had had no worse an upbringing than she had. Their parents were both teachers. There were five kids in all, four of them living respectable lives, but he had always been at odds with everyone and everything. The evening he took the car he had dropped in to see her, but as so often he had been restless and twitchy and only stayed briefly.
When she woke up the next day to go to work, she had been unable to find her car keys, then discovered that the car itself was missing.
Later, Sigurdur Óli checked whether Kristján was known to the police but there was nothing in the files. Following Sara’s directions, he drove over to where she believed her brother was living, in a basement flat owned by a friend. Officially he was still domiciled with his parents but had not in reality lived there in the last two years. Nor did he have a regular job. He had lasted precisely a week in his most recent employment at a twenty-four-hour grocery store, before being sacked for pilfering from the till on an almost daily basis.
Sigurdur Óli knocked on the door. The flat was located in a block in the Fell neighbourhood but had its own entrance. He knocked again and, getting no response, tried the bell, but there was no sound from within. Next he tried peering through the window that faced onto a dreary communal back garden but could see nothing of interest, only beer cans and rubbish littering all the surfaces, and other signs of squalor. Returning to the front door, he banged on it again, finally giving it a resounding kick.