Later that night she asked him to walk her home. She lived nearby. He was still unsure and hesitant, but excited as well. It was so strange for him that he might just as easily have been walking on the moon. In twenty-three years he had been faithful to his wife. Two or three times in all those years he’d perhaps had the chance to kiss another woman, but nothing like this had ever happened to him before.
“I lost the plot completely,” he told Erlendur. “Part of me wanted to run home and forget the whole thing. Part of me wanted to go with the woman.”
“I bet I know which part that was,” Erlendur said.
They stood by the door to her flat, in the stairwell of a modern apartment block, and she put the key in the lock. Somehow even that act became voluptuous in her hands. The door opened and she moved close to him.’Come inside with me,” she said, stroking his crotch.
He went inside with her. First she mixed drinks for them. He sat down on the sofa. She put on some music, came over to him with a glass in her hand and smiled, her beautiful white teeth shining behind the red lipstick. Then she sat beside him, put down her glass, grabbed the belt of his trousers and slowly unzipped his flies.
“I’ve never … It was … She could do the most incredible things,” the reception manager said.
Erlendur watched him without saying a word.
“I was going to sneak out in the morning, but she was one step ahead. My conscience was killing me, I felt like shit for betraying my wife and children. We’ve got three children. I was going to get out and forget about it. Never wanted to see that woman again. She was wide awake when I started creeping around the room in the dark.”
She sat up and switched on the beside lamp. “Are you going?” she asked. He said he was. Claimed to be late. For an important meeting. Something of that sort.
“Did you enjoy it last night?” she asked.
Holding his trousers in his hands, he looked at her.
“It was amazing,” he said. “But I just can’t go on with this. I can’t. Sorry.”
“I want eighty thousand kronur,” she said calmly, as if that was almost too obvious to mention.
He looked at her as if he had not heard what she said.
“Eighty thousand,” she repeated.
“What do you mean?”
“For the night,” she said.
“The night?” he said. “What, are you selling yourself?”
“What do you think?” she said.
He didn’t understand what she was talking about.
“Do you think you can get a woman like me for free?” she said.
Gradually it dawned on him what she meant.
“But you didn’t say anything about that!”
“Did I need to say anything? Pay me eighty thousand and I might just let you come back home with me some other time.”
“I refused to pay” the reception manager told Erlendur. “Walked out. She went berserk. Called work and threatened to phone my wife if I didn’t pay.”
“What are they called?” Erlendur said. “A… hustler? Was she one of them? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know what she was but she knew what she was doing and in the end she phoned home and told my wife what happened.”
“Why didn’t you just pay her? Then you’d have been rid of her.”
“I’m not sure I would have been rid of her even if I had coughed up,” the manager said. “My wife and I went through all this yesterday. I described what happened just as I described it to you. We’ve been together for twenty-three years and although I have no excuse it was a trap, the way I see it. If that woman hadn’t been after money it would never have happened.”
“So it was all her fault?”
“No, of course not, but… it was still a trap.”
They paused.
“Does that sort of thing go on at this hotel?” Erlendur asked. “Prostitution?”
“No,” the reception manager said.
“It’s not something you’d miss?”
“I was told you were asking about that. Nothing of that kind goes on here.”
“Quite,” Erlendur said.
“Are you going to keep schtum about this?”
“I need the woman’s name if you have it. And her address. It won’t go any further.”
The manager hesitated.
“Fucking bitch,” he said, slipping for an instant out of the role of the polite hotelier.
“Are you going to pay her?”
“That was one thing we agreed on, my wife and I. She’s not getting a penny.”
“Do you think it could have been a prank?”
“A prank?” the manager said. “I don’t follow. What do you mean?”
“I mean, could someone want to harm you so badly that they would set you up? Someone you’ve quarrelled with?”
“The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. Are you suggesting that I’ve got enemies who would do something like that to me?”
“They needn’t be enemies. Practical jokers, your friends”
“No, my friends aren’t like that. Besides, as a practical joke that would have been going a bit far — way beyond funny”
“Was it you who fired Santa?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was it you who told him the news? Or did he receive a letter, or…?”
“I told him.”
“And how did he take it?”
“Not well. Understandably. He’d been working here for ages. Much longer than I have.”
“Do you think he could have been behind it, if anyone was?”
“Gudlaugur? No, I can’t imagine that. Gudlaugur? Doing that sort of thing? I think not. He was really not the joking sort. Absolutely not.”
“Did you know Gudlaugur was a child star?”
“A child star? How?”
“He made records. A choirboy.”
“I didn’t know that,” the manager said.
“Just one final thing,” Erlendur said, standing up.
“Yes?”
“Could you fix me up with a record player in my room?” Erlendur asked, and saw that the head of reception did not have the faintest idea what he was talking about.
When Erlendur went back into the lobby he saw the head of forensics coming up the stairs from the basement.
“How’s it going with the saliva you found on the condom?” Erlendur asked. “Have you checked the Cortisol?”
“We’re working on it. What do you claim to know about Cortisol?”
“I know that too much of it in the saliva can prove dangerous.”
“Sigurdur Oli was asking about the murder weapon,” the head of forensics said. “The pathologist doesn’t think it’s a particularly remarkable knife. Not very long, with a thin, serated edge.”
“So it’s not a hunting knife or a carving knife?”
“No, it sounds to me like a fairly unremarkable instrument,” the head of forensics said. “A pretty nondescript knife.”
10
Erlendur took the two records from Gudlaugur’s room up to his own, then called the hospital and asked for Valgerdur. He was put through to her department. Another woman answered. He asked for Valgerdur again. The woman said, “One moment, please,” and at last Valgerdur answered.
“Have you got any of those cotton wool buds left?” he asked.
“Is that Mr Deaths and Ordeals speaking?” she said.
Erlendur grinned.
“There’s a tourist at the hotel we need to test”
“Is it a rush job?”