“I don’t think anything of the sort.”
“Good.”
“Did Gudlaugur never try to contact you two? Or you him? All that time?”
“No. I think I’ve already answered your question. Apart from sneaking in sometimes without us noticing. He told me he’d been doing it for years.”
“You didn’t try to track him down?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Were he and his mother close?” Erlendur asked.
“She meant the world to him,” Stefania said.
“So her death was a tragedy to him.”
“Her death was a tragedy to us all.”
Stefania heaved a deep sigh.
“I suppose something died inside us when she passed away. Something that made us a family. I don’t think I realised until long afterwards that it was her who tied us together, created a balance. She and Dad never agreed about Gudlaugur, and they quarrelled about his upbringing, if you could call it quarrelling. She wanted to let him be the way he was, and even if he did sing beautifully not to make too much of it.”
She looked at Erlendur.
“I don’t think our father ever regarded him as a child, more of a task. Something for him alone to shape and create.”
“And you? What was your standpoint?”
“Me? I was never asked.”
They stopped talking, listened to the murmuring in the dining room and watched the tourists chatting together and laughing. Erlendur looked at Stefania, who seemed to have withdrawn inside her shell and the memories of her fragile family life.
“Did you have any part in your brother’s murder?” Erlendur asked cautiously.
It was as if she did not hear what he said, so he repeated the question. She looked up.
“Not in the slightest,” she said. “I wish he was still alive so that I could…”
Stefania did not finish.
“So you could what?” Erlendur asked.
“I don’t know, maybe make up for …”
She stopped again.
“It was all so terrible. All of it. It started with trivial things and then escalated beyond control. I’m not making light of him pushing our father down the stairs. But you take sides and don’t do much to change it. Because you don’t want to, I suppose. And time goes by and the years pass until you’ve really forgotten the feeling, the reason that set it all in motion, and you’ve forgotten, on purpose or accidentally, the opportunities you had to make up for what went wrong, and then suddenly it’s too late to set things straight. All those years have gone by and …” She groaned.
“What did you do after you caught him in the kitchen?”
“I talked to Dad. He didn’t want to know about Gulli, and that was that. I didn’t tell him about the night-time visits. A few times I tried to talk to him about a reconciliation. Said I’d bumped into Gulli in the street and he wanted to see his father, but Dad was absolutely immovable.”
“Did your brother never go back to the house after that?”
“Not as far as I know.”
She looked at Erlendur.
“That was two years ago and that was the last I saw of him.”
25
Stefania stood up, about to leave. It was as if she’d said all she had to say. Erlendur still had an inkling that she had been selective about what she wanted to go on record, and was keeping the rest to herself. He stood up as well, wondering whether to let that suffice for the time being or press her further. He decided to leave the choice to her. She was much more cooperative than before and that suited him for now. But he could not refrain from asking her about an enigma that she had left unexplained.
“I could understand your father’s lifelong anger at him because of the accident,” Erlendur said. “If he blamed him for the paralysis that has confined him to a wheelchair ever since. But you I can’t quite figure out. Why you reacted the same way. Why you took your father’s side. Why you turned against your brother and had no contact with him for all those years.”
“I think I’ve helped you enough,” Stefania said. “His death is nothing to do with my father and me. It’s connected with some other life that my brother led and neither I nor my father know. I hope you appreciate the fact that I’ve tried to be honest and helpful, and you won’t disturb us any more. You won’t handcuff me in my own home.”
She held out her hand as if wanting to seal some kind of pact that she and her father would be left undisturbed in future. Erlendur shook her hand and tried to smile. He knew the pact would be broken sooner or later. Too many questions, he thought to himself. Too few real answers. He wasn’t ready to let her off the hook just yet and thought he could tell that she was still lying to him, or at least circumventing the truth.
“You didn’t come to the hotel to meet your brother a few days before his death?” he said.
“No, I met a friend in this dining room. We had coffee together. You ask her if you think it’s not true. I’d forgotten that he worked here and I didn’t see him while I was here.”
“I might check that,” Erlendur said, and wrote down the woman’s name. “Then there’s something else: do you know a man called Henry Wapshott? He’s British and he was in contact with your brother.”
“Wapshott?”
“He’s a record collector. Interested in your brother’s recordings. It just so happens that he collects records of choral music and specialises in choirboys”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Stefania said. “Specialises in choirboys?”
“Actually there are stranger collectors than him,” Erlendur said, but did not venture into an account of airline sick bags. “He says your brother’s records are very valuable today, do you know anything about that?”
“No, not a thing,” Stefania said. “What was he suggesting? What does it mean?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Erlendur said. “But they’re valuable enough for Wapshott to want to come up here to Iceland to meet him. Did Gudlaugur have any of his own records?”
“Not that I know of?
“Do you know what happened to the copies that were released?”
“I think they just sold out,” Stefania said. “Would they be worth anything if they were still around?”
Erlendur sensed a note of eagerness in her voice and wondered whether she was masquerading, whether she was much better informed about all this than he was and was trying to establish just what he knew.
“Could well be,” Erlendur said.
“Is this British man still in the country?” she asked.
“He’s in police custody,” Erlendur said. “He may know more about your brother and his death than he wants to tell us.”
“Do you think he killed him?”
“You haven’t heard the news?”
“No.”
“He’s a candidate, no more than that.”
“Who is this man?”
Erlendur was about to tell her about the information from Scotland Yard and the child pornography that was found in Wapshott’s room. Instead, he repeated that Wapshott was a record collector who was interested in choirboys and had stayed at the hotel and been in contact with Gudlaugur, and was suspicious enough to be remanded in custody.
They exchanged cordial farewells and Erlendur watched her leave the dining room for the lobby. His mobile rang in his pocket. He fumbled for it and answered. To his surprise, Valgerdur was on the other end.
“Could I meet you tonight?” she asked without preamble. “Will you be at the hotel?”
“I can be,” Erlendur said, not bothering to conceal the surprise in his voice. “I thought…”
“Shall we say eight? In the bar?”
“All right,” Erlendur said. “Let’s say that What-?”
He was going to ask Valgerdur what was bothering her when she rang off and all he could hear was silence. Putting away his mobile, he wondered what she wanted. He had written off any chance of getting to know her and concluded he was probably a total loser as far as women were concerned. Then this telephone call came out of the blue and he didn’t know what to read into it.