“No.”
“Do you mind? Valgerdur being an old name, I mean?”
“Me? No, I…” Erlendur stammered.
“Was there anything in particular?” Valgerdur said, reaching out for her bag. She smiled at this man standing in front of her in a cardigan buttoned up under a tattered jacket with worn elbows, looking at her with sorrowful eyes. They were of a similar age, but she looked ten years younger.
Without completely realising it, Erlendur blurted it out. There was something about this woman.
And he saw no wedding ring.
“I was wondering if I could invite you to the buffet here tonight, it’s delicious.”
He said this without knowing a thing about her, as if he had no chance of a reply in the affirmative, but he said it all the same and now he waited, thinking to himself that she would probably start laughing, was probably married with four children, a big house and a summer chalet, confirmation parties and graduation parties and had married off her oldest child and was waiting to grow old in peace with her beloved husband.
“Thank you,” she said. “It’s nice of you to ask. But … unfortunately. I can’t. Thanks all the same.”
She took her sampling kit from him, hesitated for a moment and looked at him, then walked away and out of the hotel. Erlendur was left behind in the cloakroom, half stunned. He hadn’t asked a woman out for years. His mobile starting ringing in his jacket pocket and he eventually took it out, absent-mindedly, and answered. It was Elinborg.
“He’s entering the courtroom,” she almost whispered into the telephone.
“Pardon?” Erlendur said.
“The father, he’s coming in with his two lawyers. That’s the minimum it will take to whitewash him.”
“Is anyone there?” Erlendur asked.
“Very few. It looks like the boy’s mother’s family, and the press are here too.”
“How’s he looking?”
“Unruffled as usual, in a suit and tie like he’s going out to dinner. He doesn’t have a shred of conscience.”
“Not true,” Erlendur said. “He definitely has a conscience.”
Erlendur had gone to the hospital with Elinborg to talk to the boy as soon as the doctors gave permission. By then he had undergone surgery and was in a ward with other children. There were children’s drawings around the walls, toys in their beds, parents by their bedsides, tired after sleepless nights, endlessly worried about their children.
Elinborg sat down beside him. The bandaging around the boy’s head left little of his face visible apart from his mouth and his eyes, which looked full of suspicion at the police officers. His arm was in a plaster cast, suspended by a small hook. The dressings after his operation were hidden by his quilt. They had managed to save his spleen. The doctor said they could talk to the boy, but whether the boy would talk to them was a different matter.
Elinborg started by talking about herself, who she was and what she did in the police, and how she wanted to catch the people who did this to him. Erlendur stood at a distance, watching. The boy stared at Elinborg. She knew that she was only supposed to talk to him in the presence of one of his parents. Elinborg and Erlendur had arranged to meet the father at the hospital but half an hour had gone by and he hadn’t turned up.
“Who was it?” Elinborg said at last when she thought it was time to get to the point.
The boy looked at her but said nothing.
“Who did this to you? It’s all right to tell me. They won’t attack you again. I promise.”
The boy cast a glance at Erlendur.
“Was it the boys from your school?” Elinborg asked. “The big boys. We’ve found out that two of the suspects are known troublemakers. They’ve beaten up boys like you before, but not so violently. They say they didn’t do anything to you but we know they were at the school at the time you were attacked.”
Silently, the boy watched Elinborg tell her story. She had gone to the school and talked to the headmaster and teachers, then gone to the homes of the two boys to find out about their backgrounds, where she heard them deny doing anything to him. The father of one of them was in prison.
The paediatrician entered the room. He told them that the boy needed to rest and they would have to come back later. Elinborg nodded and they took their leave.
Erlendur also accompanied Elinborg to meet the boys father at his house later the same day. The father’s explanation for not being able to go to the hospital was that he had to take part in an important conference call with his colleagues in Germany and the US. “It came up unexpectedly,” he told them. When he finally managed to get away they had left the hospital.
While he was saying this the winter sun started to shine in through the lounge window, illuminating the marble floor and the carpet on the stairs. Elinborg was standing and listening when she noticed the stain on the stair carpet and another on the stair above it.
Little stains, almost invisible had it not been for the winter sun pouring in.
Stains that had been almost cleansed from the carpet and on first impression seemed to be part of the texture of the material.
Stains that turned out to be little footprints.
“Are you there?” Elinborg said over the telephone. “Erlendur? Are you there?”
Erlendur came back to his senses.
“Let me know when he leaves,” he said, and they rang off.
The head waiter at the hotel was aged about forty, thin as a rake, wearing a black suit and shiny black patent leather shoes. He was in an alcove off the dining room, checking the reservations for that evening. When Erlendur introduced himself and asked whether he might disturb him for a moment, the head waiter looked up from his dogeared reservations book to reveal a thin black moustache, dark stubble that he obviously needed to shave twice a day, a brownish complexion and brown eyes.
“I didn’t know Gulli in the slightest,” said the man, whose name was Rosant. “Terrible what happened to him. Are you getting anywhere?”
“Nowhere at all,” Erlendur said curtly. His mind was on the biotechnician and the father who beat up his son, and he was thinking about his daughter, Eva Lind, who said she could not hold out any longer. Although he knew what that meant, he hoped he was wrong. “Busy around Christmas,” Erlendur said, “aren’t you?”
“We’re trying to make the most of the season. Trying to fill the dining room three times for each buffet, which can be very difficult because some people think that when they’ve paid it’s like a take-away. The murder in the basement doesn’t help.”
“No,” Erlendur said without any interest. “So you haven’t been working here long if you didn’t know Gudlaugur.”
“Two years. But I didn’t have much contact with him.”
“Who do you think knew him best among the hotel staff?”
“I just don’t know,” the head waiter said, stroking his black moustache with his index finger. “I don’t know anything about the man. The cleaners, maybe. When do we hear about the saliva tests?”
“Hear what?”
“Who was with him. Isn’t it a DNA test?”
“Yes,” Erlendur said.
“Do you have to send it abroad?”
Erlendur nodded.
“Do you know whether anyone visited him in the basement? People from outside the hotel?”
“There’s so much traffic here. Hotels are like that. People are like ants, in and out, up and down, never a moment’s peace. At catering college we were told that a hotel isn’t a building or rooms or service, but people. A hotel’s just people. Nothing else. Our job is to make them feel good. Feel at home. Hotels are like that.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” Erlendur said, and thanked him.