A child star, Erlendur thought as he looked at the film poster for The Little Princess with Shirley Temple. What are you doing here? he asked the poster. Why did he keep you?
He took out his mobile.
“Marion,” he said when the call was answered.
“Is that you, Erlendur?”
“Anything new?”
“Did you know that Gudlaugur made song recordings when he was a child?”
“I’ve just found that out,” Erlendur said.
“The record company went bankrupt about twenty years ago and there’s not a trace of it left. A man by the name of Gunnar Hansson owned and ran it. The name was GH Records. He released a bit of hippy stuff but it all went down the plughole.”
“Do you know what happened to the stock?”
“The stock?” Marion Briem said.
“The records.”
“They must have gone towards paying off his debts. Isn’t that usually the case? I spoke to his family, two sons. The company never released much and I drew a total blank at first when I asked about it. The sons hadn’t heard it mentioned for decades. Gunnar died in the mid-eighties and all he left behind was a trail of debts.”
“There’s a man staying here at the hotel who collects choral music, choirboys. He was planning to meet Gudlaugur but nothing came of it. I was wondering whether his records might be worth something. How can I find out?”
“Find some collectors and talk to them,” Marion said. “Do you want me to?”
“Then there’s another thing. Could you locate a man called Gabriel Hermannsson who was a choirmaster in Hafnarfjordur in the sixties? You’re bound to find him in the phone directory if he’s still alive. He may have taught Gudlaugur. I’ve got a record sleeve here, there’s a photo of him and he looks to me as if he was in his twenties then. Of course, if he’s dead then it stops there.”
“That’s generally the rule.”
“What?”
“If you’re dead, it stops.”
“Quite.” Erlendur hesitated. “What are you talking about death for?”
“No reason.”
“Everything’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Thanks for throwing some morsels my way,” Marion said.
“Wasn’t that what you wanted? To spend your wretched old age delving into obscurities?”
“It absolutely makes my day,” Marion said. “Have you checked about the Cortisol in the saliva?”
“I’ll look into it,” Erlendur said and rang off.
The head of reception had a little room of his own in the lobby beside the reception desk and was doing some paperwork when Erlendur walked in and closed the door behind him. The man stood up and began to protest, saying he couldn’t spare the time to talk, he was on his way to a meeting, but Erlendur sat down and folded his arms.
“What are you running away from?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t come to work yesterday, in the hotel’s peak season. You acted like a fugitive when I spoke to you the evening the doorman was murdered. You’re all jittery now. To my mind you’re top of the list of suspects. I’m told you knew Gudlaugur better than anyone else at this hotel. You deny it — say you don’t know a thing about him. I think you’re lying. You were his boss. You ought to be a little more cooperative. It’s no joke spending Christmas in custody.”
The man stared at Erlendur without knowing what to do, then slowly sat back down in his chair.
“You haven’t got anything on me,” he said. “It’s nonsense to think I did that to Gudlaugur. That I was in his room and… I mean with the condom and all that.”
Erlendur was concerned by how the details of the case appeared to have leaked and how the staff were wallowing in them. In the kitchen, the chef knew precisely why they were collecting saliva samples. The reception manager could picture the scene in the doorman’s room. Maybe the hotel manager had blurted it all out, maybe the girl who found the body, maybe police officers.
“Where were you yesterday?” Erlendur asked.
“Off sick,” the reception manager said. “I was at home all morning.”
“You didn’t tell anyone. Did you go to the doctor? Did he give you a note? Can I talk to him? What’s his name.”
“I didn’t go to the doctor. I stayed in bed. I’m better now.” He forced out a cough. Erlendur smiled. This man was the worst liar he had ever encountered.
“Why these lies?”
“You haven’t got a thing on me,” the manager said. “All you can do is threaten me. I want you to leave me alone.”
“I could talk to your wife too,” Erlendur said. “Ask her if she brought you a cup of tea in bed yesterday.”
“You leave her out of it,” the manager said, and suddenly there was a tougher, more serious tone to his voice. He went red in the face.
“I’m not going to leave her out of it,” Erlendur said.
The manager glared at Erlendur.
“Don’t talk to her,” he said.
“Why not? What are you hiding? You’ve become too mysterious to get rid of me.”
The man stared into space, then heaved a sigh.
“Leave me alone. It’s nothing to do with Gudlaugur. These are personal problems I got myself into, which I’m trying to fix.”
“What are they?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything about them.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
“You can’t force me.”
“As I said, I can make a request for custody, or I can simply talk to your wife.”
The man groaned. He looked at Erlendur.
“This won’t go any further?”
“Not if it has nothing to do with Gudlaugur.”
“It’s nothing to do with him.”
All right then.”
“My wife received a phone call the day before yesterday,” the head of reception said. “The same day you found Gudlaugur.”
On the phone, a woman whose voice the manager’s wife did not recognise asked for him. This was in the middle of a weekday, but it was not uncommon for him to receive calls at home at such times. His acquaintances knew that he worked irregular hours. His wife, a doctor, worked shifts and the call woke her up: she was on duty that evening. The woman on the phone acted as though she knew the head of reception, but immediately took umbrage when his wife wanted to know who she was.
“Who are you?” she had asked. “What are you calling here for?”
“He owes me money? the voice on the phone said.
“Shed threatened that she would phone my house,” the reception manager told Erlendur.
“Who was it?”
He had gone out for a drink ten days before. His wife was at a medical conference in Sweden and he went out for a meal with three old friends. They had a lot of fun, went on a pub crawl after the restaurant and ended up at a popular nightspot in town. He lost his friends there, went to the bar and met some acquaintances from the hotel trade, stood by a small dance floor and watched the dancing. Although quite tipsy, he wasn’t too drunk to make sensible decisions. That was why he couldn’t understand it. He had never done anything like it before.
She approached him and, just like in a movie scene, held a cigarette between her fingers and asked him for a light Although he didn’t smoke, because of his job he made a point of always carrying a lighter. It was a habit from the days when people could smoke wherever they wanted. She started talking to him about something he had now forgotten, and asked if he was going to buy her a drink. He looked at her. But of course. They stood at the bar while he bought the drinks, then sat down at a little table when it became vacant. She was exceptionally attractive and flirted subtly with him. Unsure what was going on, he played along. Women didn’t treat him like this as a rule. She sat up close to him and was forward and self-assured. When he stood up to fetch a second drink she stroked his thigh. He looked at her and she smiled. An enchanting, beautiful woman who knew what she wanted. She could have been ten years his junior.