“It has to happen right away, Osp,” he said.
31
When Erlendur went back down to the lobby he noticed Elinborg at the reception desk. The head of reception pointed towards him and Elinborg turned round. She was looking for him and walked over briskly wearing a concerned expression that Erlendur seldom saw.
“Is something the matter?” he asked as she approached.
“Can we sit down somewhere?” she said. “Is the bar open yet? God, what a pathetic job this is! I don’t know why I bother.”
“What’s up?” Erlendur asked, taking her by the arm and leading her to the bar. The door was closed but not locked, and they went inside. Although the room was open, the bar itself seemed to be closed. Erlendur saw a sign saying it would not open for another hour. They sat down in one of the booths.
“And my Christmas is being ruined,” Elinborg said. “I’ve never done so little baking. And all the in-laws are coming tonight and—”
“Tell me what happened,” Erlendur said.
“What a cock-up,” Elinborg said. “I don’t understand him. I simply don’t understand him.”
“Who?”
“The boy!” Elinborg said. “I don’t understand what he means”
She told Erlendur that, instead of going home and baking cookies the previous evening, she had dropped in at Kleppur mental hospital. Exactly why she did not know, but she couldn’t get the case of the boy and his father out of her mind. When Erlendur chipped in that she may just have had enough of baking for her in-laws, she didn’t even smile.
She had been to the mental hospital once before to try to talk to the boy’s mother, but the woman was so ill then that she hardly uttered a word of sense. The same happened again on this second visit. His mother sat rocking back and forth, in a world of her own. Elinborg wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to hear her say, but thought she might know something about the relationship between the father and the son that had not yet come to light.
She knew that his mother would only be in hospital temporarily. She was admitted intermittently, when she went through a phase of flushing her psychiatric medication down the toilet. When she took her pills she was generally in reasonable condition. She took good care of their home. When Elinborg mentioned the boy’s mother to his teachers, they also said she seemed to look after him well.
Elinborg sat in the hospital lounge where the nurse had brought the boy’s mother, and watched her twiddling her hair around her index finger, muttering something Elinborg could not make out. She tried to talk to her but the mother seemed to be miles away. Offered no response to her questions. It was as though she was sleepwalking.
After sitting with her for a while, Elinborg started thinking about all the assortments of cookies that she still had to bake. She stood up to fetch someone to take the woman back to the ward and found a warder in the corridor. He was about thirty and looked like a bodybuilder. He was wearing white trousers and a white T-shirt, and his strong biceps rippled with every movement of his body. His hair was crewcut and he had a round, chubby face with little eyes sunk deep into his head. Elinborg didn’t ask his name.
He followed her into the lounge.
“Oh, it’s old Dora,” the warder said, walking over and taking the woman by the arm. “You’re pretty quiet tonight”
The woman stood up, just as confused as ever.
“Stoned out of your tree again, are you, old girl,” the warder said in a tone that Elinborg disliked. It was like he was talking to a five-year-old. And what did he mean by saying she was pretty quiet tonight? Elinborg couldn’t hold herself back.
“Will you stop talking to her like a little kid,” she said, more brashly than she had intended.
The warder looked at her.
“Is that any of your business?” he said.
“She’s entitled to be treated with respect just like everyone else,” Elinborg said, but desisted from saying she was from the police.
“Maybe she is,” the warder said. “And I don’t think I’m treating her disrespectfully. Come on, Dora,” he went on, leading her out into the corridor.
Elinborg followed close behind.
“What did you mean when you said she’s pretty quiet tonight?”
“Quiet tonight?” the warder repeated, turning his head towards Elinborg.
“You said she was pretty quiet tonight,” Elinborg said. “Wasn’t she supposed to be?”
“I sometimes call her the Fugitive,” the warder said. “She’s always on the run.”
Elinborg didn’t follow.
“What are you talking about?”
“Haven’t you seen the movie?” the warder asked.
“Does she escape?” Elinborg said. “From this hospital?”
“Or when we take them on trips into town,” the warder said. “She ran away the last time we went. We were shitting bricks when you found her at the bus station and brought her back here to the ward. You didn’t treat her with much respect then.”
“I found her?”
“I know you’re from the cops. The cops literally threw her at us.”
“What day was this?”
He thought about it. He had been accompanying her and two other patients when she slipped away. They were on Laekjartorg square at the time. He remembered the date well, it was the same day that he set his personal best on the bench press.
The date matched that of the attack on the boy.
“Wasn’t her husband informed when she ran away from you?” Elinborg asked.
“We were about to phone him when you found her. We always give them a few hours to come back. Otherwise we’d spend all our time on the phone.”
“Does her husband know that you call her that? The Fugitive.”
“We don’t call her that. It’s only me. He doesn’t know.”
“Does he know that she runs away?”
“I haven’t told him. She always comes back.”
“I don’t believe this,” Elinborg said.
“When she comes in here she has to be drugged right up to stop her running off,” the warder said.
“This changes everything!”
“Come on, Dora old girl,” the warder said, and the door to the ward closed behind him.
Elinborg stared at Erlendur.
“I was positive it was him. The father. Now she could have run away, gone home, assaulted the boy and hopped back out. If only the boy would open his mouth!”
“Why should she assault her son?”
“I’ve no idea,” Elinborg said. “Maybe she hears voices”
“And the broken fingers and bruises? All that over the years? Is it always her then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you spoken to the father?”
“I’ve just come from seeing him.”
“And?”
“Naturally, we’re not the best of friends. He hasn’t been allowed to see the boy since we burst into their home and turned everything upside-down. He showered me with abuse and—”
“Did he say anything about his wife, the boy’s mother?” Erlendur butted in impatiently. “He must have suspected her.”
“And the boy hasn’t said a thing,” Elinborg continued.
“Except that he misses his father,” Erlendur said.
“Yes, apart from that. So his father finds him in his room upstairs and thinks he’s crawled home from school in that state.”
“You visited the boy in hospital and asked if it was his father who assaulted him, and he made some reaction that convinced you it was.”
“I must have misunderstood him,” Elinborg said, her head bowed. “I read something into his manner…”
“But we have nothing to prove it was the mother. We have nothing to prove it wasn’t the father.”
“I told him, the boy’s father, that I’d been to the hospital to talk to his wife and that we know nothing about her whereabouts on the day of the assault. He was surprised. As if it never occurred to him that she could escape from the hospital. He’s still convinced it was the boys in the school playground. He said the boy would tell us if his mother had assaulted him. He’s convinced of that.”