‘When did you last see him?’
‘And who are you, might I ask?’
‘I’m from the police,’ Sigurdur Óli answered, ‘and I need to talk to him. It’s nothing serious. I just need to see him. Can you tell me where he is?’
‘I haven’t a clue,’ the woman said, regarding Sigurdur Óli suspiciously.
‘Is it possible that he’s in his flat? In some sort of state which means he can’t hear me?’
Her eyes flitted to Andrés’s door.
‘You haven’t seen him for a long time,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘Has it occurred to you that he might be lying helpless in his flat?’
‘He gave me a key,’ the woman said.
‘You have a key to his flat?’
‘He said he was always losing his, so he asked me to keep a spare. He’s needed it sometimes too. Last time I saw Andrés was when he came to fetch the spare key.’
‘What sort of state was he in?’
‘Pretty rough, poor thing,’ admitted the woman. ‘He seemed very worked up, I don’t know why, but he told me not to worry about him.’
‘When was this?’
‘Late in the summer.’
‘Late summer!’
‘It’s perfectly normal for me not to see him for a while.’ The woman became defensive, as if she were somehow responsible for her neighbour.
‘Shouldn’t we open the door and check on him?’ suggested Sigurdur Óli.
The woman dithered. According to the smart copper plaque on her door, her name was Margrét Eymunds.
‘I can’t imagine that he would be in there,’ she said.
‘Wouldn’t it be better to make sure?’
‘I suppose it wouldn’t do any harm,’ she said. ‘Of course there’s a danger the poor man could have hurt himself. But you’re not to touch anything. I doubt he’d want the police snooping around his flat.’
She went and fetched the spare key, then unlocked Andrés’s door. As they stepped inside they were met by a shocking stench of filth and rotting food. Sigurdur Óli had been in this flat before and knew what to expect: the squalid evidence of an alcoholic existence. The flat was not large, so it did not take them long to assure themselves that Andrés was not lying there at death’s door or worse; in fact he was not there at all. Sigurdur Óli switched on the lights, revealing a scene of slovenly disorder.
He cast his mind back to the last time he had been there and what had passed between Andrés and Erlendur and himself. Andrés’s behaviour had been bizarre and he seemed to have been on a long bender. He had dropped hints that a dangerous man was living in the neighbourhood, a man he knew of old, who, from what they could gather, was a paedophile. But Andrés had obstinately refused to give them any more information about the man in question. They had found out by other means that he had been Andrés’s stepfather, a man called Rögnvaldur, who had used a number of aliases, including Gestur. After an initial sighting, he had given them the slip, however, and it did not help that all they had was Andrés’s limited and incoherent testimony, which they considered far from reliable. Andrés claimed that the man had ruined his life, that Rögnvaldur was a nightmare he could never wake from, and implied that he had committed a murder, but would not say a word more. Erlendur had taken this to mean that Andrés himself had been the victim of this ‘murder’, strange as it might seem; that he was referring obliquely to the suffering that Rögnvaldur had inflicted on him, which had blighted the rest of his life.
Sigurdur Óli could find no indications in the flat as to Andrés’s current whereabouts.
But there was one detail that took him by surprise amid the rubbish and neglect: Andrés had apparently been engaged in cutting up pieces of leather in the kitchen. Scraps of it littered the kitchen table and the floor around it, and a strong needle and thick thread lay on the table. Sigurdur Óli spent some time poring over the offcuts of leather, trying to deduce what Andrés had been up to. The woman tried to insist on his leaving, since Andrés was not at home, but he ignored her, stubbornly continuing to inspect the bits of leather, trying to assemble them mentally. There was some logic to them that escaped him at first, so he began to piece them together on the table in an attempt to work out what the man had been cutting out. Soon he stood back to find himself confronted by a square, with sides about forty centimetres long, out of which had been cut an oval piece that tapered towards the bottom.
Sigurdur Óli stared down at the table; at the needle and thread. There were a few small scraps of leather remaining, which he tried to fit into the picture. It was not very difficult and once they were in place he was met by the image of a face, with eyes and a mouth. It seemed, to Sigurdur Óli’s puzzlement, that Andrés had been making a mask of some kind.
Back at the station, Sigurdur Óli dug out Andrés’s police file. He had done time for theft and violence, though only for short stints. He was never a career criminal. Essentially, he was an alcoholic and drug addict who financed his habit largely by burglary and theft, and was sometimes forced to act in self-defence, or so he claimed in his statements to the police. People had often attacked Andrés unprovoked, in an attempt to take what was lawfully his, but he was quoted as saying that he wasn’t going to let any bloody bastard walk all over him.
Sigurdur Óli asked around among the experienced officers in an attempt to find out the latest news of Andrés. It turned out that he was pretty much out of sight, out of mind. Most people had forgotten all about Andrés, though one officer, at Sigurdur Óli’s insistence, rang a retired colleague and managed to obtain some further information. The man remembered Andrés clearly and mentioned that his chief friend and companion in the old days when both were living as down-and-outs in Reykjavík was a man called Hólmgeir, known as Geiri. Although straight nowadays and sober, with a regular job, he had spent many years in the gutter, well known to the police as a drunk and minor offender.
These days, Geiri was employed as a security guard on night shifts at a large furniture warehouse, part of an international chain, and was at work when Sigurdur Óli wanted to talk to him, so he decided to drop by and see him on his way home that evening. He had rung ahead and Hólmgeir, forewarned, let him in the back entrance. He was dressed in uniform, with a walkie-talkie fixed to one shoulder in a leather holster, a torch and other gear. There’s nothing like a convert, thought Sigurdur Óli, remembering that a mere decade earlier, Geiri had been on the streets.
Sigurdur Óli had already explained his business and asked him to think about it, so he weighed straight in, asking if Hólmgeir had any idea where Andrés might be living.
‘I’ve been racking my brains but I’m afraid I can’t be much help,’ said Hólmgeir, a fat man nearing fifty, who appeared to take pleasure in his uniform. His face bore evidence of past hardship and his voice was hoarse, as if from chronic catarrh.
‘When did you last see him?’
‘A lifetime ago,’ said Hólmgeir. ‘Maybe you haven’t heard but I was in a hell of a state back then, pretty down on my luck, living rough, sleeping in dumps. I’d been a drunk for years and that’s how I met Andrés. He was in an even worse state than me.’
‘What kind of man was he?’ asked Sigurdur Óli.
‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ Hólmgeir answered promptly. ‘Always a bit of a loner; just wanted to be left in peace. I don’t know how to describe it: he was very touchy about what people said or did to him. He could be totally impossible. I often had to help him out when he was being hassled. Why are the police looking for him? Can you say?’