“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.”
“Be my guest,” she said, dropping her smoked cigarette on the floor where she diligently stamped it out.
He found the date he wanted on a tape labelled “Entrance” and put it in a video player that was connected to a small television. He didn’t think he needed to look at the tapes from the cashiers” cameras.
The bank manager looked at her gold watch.
“There’s a full twenty-four-hour period on each tape,” she groaned.
“How do you manage?” Erlendur asked. “At work?”
“What do you mean, how do I manage?”
“Smoking? What do you do?”
“What business is that of yours?”
“None at all,” Erlendur hastened to say.
“Can’t you just take the tapes?” she said. “I don’t have time for this. I was supposed to be somewhere else ages ago and I don’t plan to hang around here while you go through all of these.”
“No, you’re right,” Erlendur said. He looked at the tapes in the cupboard. “I’ll take the fortnight before the murder. That’s fourteen tapes”
“Do you know who killed the man?”
“Not yet,” Erlendur said.
“I remember him well,” she said. “The doorman. I’ve been manager here for seven years,” she added as if by way of explanation. “He struck me as a nice enough chap.”
“Did he talk to you at all recently?”
“I never talked to him. Not a word.”
“Was this his bank?” Erlendur asked.
“No, he didn’t have an account here. Not as far as I know. I never saw him in this branch. Did he have any money?”
Erlendur took the fourteen tapes up to his room and had a television and video player installed. He had started watching the first tape towards evening when his mobile rang. It was Sigurdur Oli.
“We’ve got to charge him or let him go,” he said. “Really we don’t have anything on him.”
“Is he complaining?”
“He hasn’t said a word.”
“Has he asked for a lawyer?”
“No.”
“Make a charge for child pornography”
“Child pornography?”
“He had tapes in his room containing child pornography. Possession of them is illegal. We have a witness who saw him watching that filth. We’ll take him for the porn and then we’ll see. I don’t want to let him go back to Thailand just yet. We need to find out if his story of going into town the day that Gudlaugur was murdered holds good. Let him sweat in his cell a bit and we’ll see what happens.”
21
Erlendur watched the tapes for almost the whole night.
He soon got the hang of using fast forward when no one walked past the camera. As expected, the heaviest footfall in front of the bank was over the period from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon, after which it slowed down sharply, and even further when the souvenir shops closed at six. The entrance to the hotel was open round the clock and there was an ATM but little traffic around it in the dead of night.