At last a scrawny figure in underpants answered the door. He had a corpse-like pallor, unkempt shoulder-length hair and a grungy, hung-over air.
‘What’s going on?’ he mumbled, squinting blearily at Sigurdur Óli.
‘I’m looking for Kristján. Is that you?’
‘Me, nah …’
‘Then do you know where he is?’
‘What about him? Why — ’
‘Is he in the flat?’
‘No.’
‘Are you expecting him?’
‘No. Anyway, who are you?’
‘I’m from the police and I need to get hold of him. Do you know where he might be?’
‘Well, he won’t be showing his face round here — he owes me big time for rent and that. If you see him you can tell him to pay up. Why are you from the police?’
‘Do you know where he might be?’ repeated Sigurdur Óli, trying to see past him into the flat. He did not believe a word the little runt said. Uncertain what the question ‘Why are you from the police?’ meant, he did not even attempt to answer it.
‘You can try the Hard Hat, he often hangs out there,’ the boy answered. ‘He’s a real basket case, man. A real basket case,’ he repeated, as if to emphasise that this did not apply to him.
The bartender at the Hard Hat knew Kristján all right, though he had not seen him recently and reckoned that the bar tab he had run up might be something of a deterrent. He smiled as he said this, as if it was no skin off his nose if someone owed the owner money. It was shortly after midday and the few customers were huddled over their beer glasses either by the bar or round a table. They regarded Sigurdur Óli with curiosity. He was not one of the regulars at this time of day, and they eavesdropped on every word that passed between him and the bartender. Sigurdur Óli had not yet revealed that he was from the police when a man of about thirty unexpectedly came to his assistance.
‘I saw Kiddi at Bíkó yesterday; I think he’s started working there,’ he volunteered.
‘Which branch of Bíkó?’
‘The one on Hringbraut.’
Sigurdur Óli recognised Kristján immediately from his sister’s description. It was true: he had just been taken on by the west Reykjavík branch of the DIY chain. Sigurdur Óli watched him before making his move, and observed that Kristján did his utmost to avoid any contact with customers, pretending to busy himself by the racks of screws but moving over to the light bulbs as soon as a customer approached, only to retreat from there slap bang into a man who said he needed help choosing a paintbrush. Kristján claimed to be busy and told the man to ask another member of staff. He had clocked Sigurdur Óli and was evidently nervous that he was going to ask for help when Sigurdur Óli finally managed to corner him.
‘Are you Kristján?’ he asked directly.
Kristján admitted that he was. The moment he set eyes on him, Sigurdur Óli realised that this could not be the man who had sprinted with such a terrific turn of speed towards the Kleppur mental hospital before vanishing into the night. He was not even convinced that such a feeble specimen would be able to lift a baseball bat, let alone wield it. Kristján cut an unimpressive figure: about twenty years old, his Bíkó uniform hanging from his skinny body like dirty laundry. Sheepish was the word that sprang to mind.
‘I’m from the police,’ Sigurdur Óli said, taking in their surroundings as he spoke. They were standing in the shelter of shelves displaying gardening tools, where Kristján was pretending to arrange the pruning shears. ‘I’ve just been talking to your sister,’ Sigurdur Óli continued, ‘and she told me you stole her car.’
‘That’s a lie, I didn’t steal it,’ Kristján said. ‘She lent it to me. And she got it back too.’
‘Where did you go in it?’
‘You what?’
‘What did you need the car for?’
Kristján hesitated. Avoiding Sigurdur Óli’s eye, he put down the shears and picked up a plastic bottle of weedkiller.
‘That’s my business,’ he said, with an unconvincing show of bravado.
‘The car was parked in a street not far from the Laugarás cinema, near where a woman was attacked and murdered on the same evening that you had use of the car. We know you were in the vicinity when the crime was committed.’
Kristján gaped at Sigurdur Óli, who pressed on before the boy could collect his wits.
‘What were you doing with the car? Why did you leave it behind overnight?’
‘It’s just that there’s been some kind of, some kind of misunderstanding,’ Kristján stammered.
‘Who were you with?’ Sigurdur Óli demanded. He spoke in a brusque, impatient voice, taking a step closer. ‘We know there were two of you. Who was with you? And why did you attack the woman?’
However Kristján may have prepared himself for this eventuality, his mind went blank when it came to the crunch. Sigurdur Óli had often seen boys like Kristján lose their nerve. They would stand in front of him, full of lies and defiance, answering back, denying everything and telling him to fuck off, then quite suddenly they would crumple, abandoning their insolence and becoming pathetically cooperative. Looking even more sheepish, Kristján replaced the weedkiller so clumsily that he knocked over three other bottles in the process, then stooped to pick them up and return them to the shelf. Sigurdur Óli watched his efforts dispassionately, offering no help.
‘I can’t believe Sara blabbed to you,’ Kristján said.
You contemptible little creep, thought Sigurdur Óli.
19
Sigurdur Óli had no interest whatsoever in learning how Kristján had gone off the rails. He had heard countless similar sob stories, used either as an excuse for a career of criminality, or as proof of the mess the welfare state was in. It was enough for him to know that Kristján had messed up to the point where he was up to his neck in debts, mostly drugs-related, and owed money all over town, even, in two instances, to individuals based in other parts of the country. Kristján was not much of an earner either; he managed to score casual jobs here and there, as there were more than enough to go round these days, but for the most part he loafed about, idle and shiftless. He scrounged loans for as long as he could get away with it, particularly from banks and savings institutions, managing to amass an array of debit and credit cards, which had now been passed on as bad debts to official debt-collection agencies. But it was the thought of another kind of debt collector that made Kristján nervous.
He had broken the law and got away with it, though he was not prepared to go into details for Sigurdur Óli, and had a history of using girls, sucking them dry financially before they eventually got wise to him. One prospective father-in-law, a former championship-winning footballer, had beaten him to a pulp when he discovered that Kristján had stolen valuables from his house and pawned them.
Some of this information had been supplied by his sister Sara; the rest Kristján explained to Sigurdur Óli down at the station on Hverfisgata.
For it seemed that Kristján was not averse to talking, now that he was in the hands of the police. Of course, it helped that he was suspected of being party to a murder and was therefore anxious to clear his name, but Sigurdur Óli thought that this was not the only reason. It was as if Kristján had never spoken to anyone about his life and after some initial vacillation and awkwardness, the floodgates opened and out poured episodes from his past and encounters with people who had led him astray. To begin with, his account was incoherent but gradually he managed to impose some order on the tale and one name began to crop up repeatedly, that of a certain Thórarinn who drove a delivery van for a living.