“Was Gudlaugur tied up in it in any way?” Elinborg asked.
“Judging from the state he was in when he was found, we can’t rule it out,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“How’s it going with your man?” Erlendur asked.
“He was poker-faced in the district court,” Elinborg said, sipping her beer.
“The boy still hasn’t testified against his father, has he?” asked Sigurdur Oli, who was also familiar with the case.
“Silent as the grave, poor kid,” Erlendur said. “And that bastard sticks to his statement. Flatly denies hitting the boy. And he’s got good lawyers too.”
“So he’ll get the boy back?”
“It could well be.”
“And the boy?” Erlendur asked. “Does he want to go back?”
“That’s the weirdest part of all,” Elinborg said. “He’s still attached to his father. It’s as if he feels he deserved it.”
They fell silent.
“Are you going to spend Christmas at this hotel, Erlendur?” Elinborg asked. There was a tone of accusation in her voice.
“No, I suppose I’ll get myself home,” Erlendur said. “Spend some time with Eva. Boil some smoked lamb.”
“How’s she doing?” Elinborg asked.
“So-so,” Erlendur said. “Fine, I suppose.” He thought they could tell that he was lying. They were well aware of the problems his daughter had run into but rarely mentioned them. They knew he wanted to discuss them as little as possible and never asked in detail.
“St Thorlac’s Day tomorrow,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Got everything done, Elinborg?”
“Nothing.” She sighed.
“I’m wondering about that record collecting,” Erlendur said.
“What about it?” Elinborg said.
“Isn’t it something that starts in childhood?” Erlendur said. “Not that I know anything about it. I’ve never collected anything. But isn’t it an interest that develops when you’re a kid, when you collect cards and model planes, stamps of course, theatre programmes, records? Most people grow out of it but some go on collecting books and records until their dying day.”
“What are you trying to tell us?”
“I’m wondering about record collectors like Wapshott, although of course they’re not all perverts like him, whether the collecting fad is connected with some kind of yearning for lost youth. Connected with a need to keep hold of something that otherwise would disappear from their lives but which they want to retain for as long as they can. Isn’t collecting an attempt to preserve something from your childhood? Something to do with your memories, something you don’t want to let go but keep on cultivating and nourishing with this obsession?”
“So Wapshott’s record collecting, the choirboys, is some kind of nostalgia for youth?” Elinborg asked.
“And then when the nostalgia for youth appears before him in the flesh at this hotel, something snaps inside him?” said Sigurdur Oli. “The boy turned into a middle-aged man. Do you mean something like that?”
“I don’t know.”
Erlendur vacantly watched the tourists at the bar and noticed one who was middle-aged, Asian in appearance and American-sounding. He had a new video camera and was filming his friends. Suddenly it occurred to Erlendur that there might be security cameras at the hotel. The hotel manager had not mentioned it, nor the reception manager. He looked at Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg.
“Did you ask if there were security cameras at this hotel?” he asked.
They looked at each other.
“Weren’t you going to?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“I just forgot,” Elinborg said. “Christmas and all that. It completely slipped my mind.”
The reception manager looked at Erlendur and shook his head. He said the hotel had a very firm policy on this issue. There were no security cameras on the hotel premises, neither in the lobby nor lifts, corridors nor rooms. Especially not in the rooms, of course.
“Then we wouldn’t have any guests,” the manager said seriously.
“Yes, that had occurred to me,” Erlendur said, disappointed. For a moment he had entertained the vague hope that something had been caught on camera, something that did not tally with the stories and statements, something at odds with what the police had discovered.
He turned away from the reception to head back to the bar when the manager called out to him.
“There’s a bank in the south wing, on the other side of the building. There are souvenir shops and a bank, and you can enter the hotel from there. Fewer people use it as an entrance. The bank’s bound to have security cameras. But they’ll hardly show anyone besides their customers”
Erlendur had noticed the bank and souvenir shops, and he went straight there but saw that the bank was closed. Looking up, he saw the almost invisible eye of a camera above the door. No one was working in the bank. He knocked on the glass door so hard that it rattled, but nothing happened. Eventually he took out his mobile and insisted on having the bank manager fetched.
While he was waiting Erlendur looked at the souvenirs in the shop, sold at inflated prices: plates with pictures of Gullfoss and Geysir painted on them, a carved figurine of Thor with his hammer, key rings with fox fur, posters showing whale species off the Icelandic coast, a sealskin jacket that would set him back a month’s salary. He thought about buying a memento of this peculiar Tourist-Iceland that exists only in the minds of rich foreigners, but he couldn’t see anything cheap enough.
The bank manager, a woman of about forty, had been on her way to a Christmas party and was far from amused about being interrupted; at first she thought there had been a robbery at the bank. She had not been told what was going on when two uniformed police officers knocked on the door of her house and asked her to accompany them. She glared at Erlendur in front of the bank when he explained to her that he needed access to her security cameras. She lit a fresh cigarette with the butt of the old one and Erlendur thought to himself that he had not encountered a proper smoker like her for years.
“Couldn’t this wait until the morning?” she asked coldly, so coldly that he could almost hear the icicles dropping from her words, and thought that he would not like to owe this woman any money.
“Those things will kill you,” Erlendur said, pointing to the cigarette.
“They haven’t yet,” she said. “Why did you drag me out here?”
“Because of the murder,” Erlendur said. “At the hotel”
“And?” she said, unimpressed by murder.
“We’re trying to speed up the investigation.” He smiled, but it was pointless.
“Bloody farce this is,” she said, and ordered Erlendur to follow her inside. The two police officers had left, clearly relieved at being rid of the woman, who had hurled abuse at them on the way. She took him to the staff entrance to the bank, keyed in her PIN, opened the door and commanded him to hurry.
It was a small branch and inside her office the manager had four monitors connected to the security cameras: one behind each of the two cashiers, in the waiting area and above the entrance. She switched on the monitors and explained to Erlendur that the cameras rolled all day and night, and that tapes were kept for three weeks and then rewritten. The recorders were in a small basement below the bank.
Already on her third cigarette, she led him downstairs and pointed to the tapes, which were clearly labelled with the dates and locations of the cameras. The tapes were kept in a locked safe.
“A security guard comes here from the bank every day,” she said, “and takes care of it all. I don’t know how to use it and would ask you not to go fiddling with anything that’s none of your business.”
“Thank you” Erlendur said humbly. “I want to start on the day the murder was committed.”