“Feel free to have a cry,” he said.
Eva looked at him.
“I don’t deserve to cry,” she said.
She sat in a wheelchair in Fossvogur cemetery and watched the vicar strewing the three spadefuls of soil over the coffin, with an expression of unflinching toughness. Only with difficulty could she stand, but she pushed Erlendur away when he moved to help her. She made the sign of the cross over her daughter’s grave and her lips quivered; Erlendur couldn’t tell whether through fighting back the tears or mouthing a silent prayer.
It was a beautiful spring day, the sun was glittering on the surface of the water in the bay and down in Nautho1svik people could be seen strolling in the fine weather. Halldora stood some distance away and Sindri Snaer by the edge of the grave, far from his father. They could hardly have stood further apart; a disparate group with nothing in common except the misery of their lives. Erlendur reflected that the family hadn’t been all together for almost a quarter of a century. He looked over at Halldora, who avoided looking his way. He did not speak to her, nor she to him.
Eva Lind slumped back into the wheelchair and Erlendur attended to her and heard her groan.
“Fuck life.”
Erlendur snapped out of his thoughts when he remembered something that the man from the reception had said which he wanted to insist on an explanation for. He stood up, went into the corridor and saw the man disappearing into the lift. Eva was nowhere to be seen. He called out to the man who held the lift door, stepped back out and sized up Erlendur as he stood in front of him, barefoot, in his underpants with the quilt still draped over him.
“What did you mean when you said “Because of what happened”?” Erlendur asked.
“Because of what happened?” the man repeated with a puzzled expression.
“You said I couldn’t have the girl in my room because of what happened.”
“Yes.”
“You mean what happened to Santa in the basement.”
“Yes. What do you know about…?”
Erlendur looked down at his underpants and hesitated for a moment.
“I’m taking part in the investigation,” he said. “The police investigation.”
The man looked at him, unable to conceal an expression of disbelief.
“Why did you make that connection?” Erlendur hurried to say.
“I don’t follow,” the man said, dithering in front of him.
“So if Santa hadn’t been killed it would be all right to have a girl in the room. That was the way you said it. You see what I mean?”
“No,” the man said. “Did I say “Because of what happened”? I don’t remember that.”
“You said just that. The girl wasn’t allowed to be in the room because of what happened. You thought my daughter was a …” Erlendur tried to put it delicately but failed. “You thought my daughter was a tart and you came to throw her out because Santa got murdered. If that hadn’t happened it would have been all right to have a girl in the room. Do you allow girls in the rooms? When everything’s all right?”
The man looked at Erlendur.
“What do you mean by girls?”
“Tarts,” Erlendur said. “Do tarts hang around the hotel, nipping into the rooms, and you ignore it apart from now because of what happened? What did Santa have to do with that? Was he connected with it somehow?”
“I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,” the man said.
Erlendur changed tack.
“I can understand that you want to exercise caution when there’s been a murder at the hotel. You don’t want to draw attention to anything unusual or abnormal even if it’s innocent, and there’s nothing to say about that. People can do what they want and pay for it for all I care. What I need to know is whether Santa was connected with prostitution at this hotel.”
“I don’t know anything about any prostitution,” the man said. “As you saw, we keep a lookout for girls who go to rooms on their own. Was that really your daughter?”
“Yes,” Erlendur said.
“She told me to fuck off?
“That’s her.”
Erlendur closed the door to his room behind him, lay down on the bed and soon fell asleep, dreaming that the heavens were strewn over him, and that he heard the sound of weathervanes rattling in the wind.
SECOND DAY
5
The reception manager had not yet arrived for work when Erlendur went down to the lobby and asked for him. He had given no explanation for his absence, nor phoned in sick or to say he needed the day off to run some errands. A lady in her thirties who worked at reception told Erlendur that it was certainly unusual for the reception manager not to turn up on time, always such a punctual man, and incomprehensible of him not to get in touch if he needed time off.
She told Erlendur this in between pauses while a bio-technician from the National Hospital took a swab of her saliva. Three biotechnicians were collecting samples from the hotel staff. Another group went to the homes of the employees who were not at work. Soon the biotechnicians would have DNA from the hotel’s entire staff to compare with the saliva on Santa’s condom.
Detectives interrogated the staff about their acquaintanceship with Gudlaugur and the whereabouts of each and every one of them the previous afternoon. The entire Reykjavik CID took part in the murder investigation while information and evidence were being collected.
“What about people who’ve recently left or worked here a year ago or whatever, and knew Santa?” Sigurdur Oli asked. He sat down beside Erlendur in the dining room and watched him partake of herring and ryebread, cold ham, toast and piping hot coffee.
“Let’s see what we discover from this for starters,” Erlendur said, slurping his coffee. “Have you found out anything about this Gudlaugur?”
“Not much. There doesn’t seem to be a lot to say about him. He was forty-eight, single, no children. He’d been working here for the past twenty years or so. I understand he lived in that little room down in the basement for years. It was only supposed to be a temporary solution at the time, that fat manager implied. But he says he’s not familiar with the matter. Told us to talk to the previous manager. He was the one who made the deal with Santa. Fatso reckoned Gudlaugur had lost the place he was renting and was allowed to keep his stuff in the room, and he just never left.”
Sigurdur Oli paused, then said: “Elinborg told me you stayed at the hotel last night.”
“I can hardly recommend it. The room’s cold and the staff never give you a moment’s peace. But the food’s good. Where is Elinborg?”
The dining room was busy and the hotel guests made a din as they indulged in the breakfast spread. Most of them were tourists wearing traditional Icelandic sweaters, hiking boots and thick winter clothing, even though they were going no further than the city centre, ten minutes” walk away. The waiters made sure their coffee cups were refilled and their used plates taken away. Christmas songs were playing softly over the sound system.
“The main hearing starts today. You knew that, didn’t you?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“Yes.”
“Elinborg’s down there. How do you think it will turn out?”
“I suppose it will be a couple of months, suspended. Always the same with those bloody judges.”
“Surely he won’t be allowed to keep the boy.”
“I don’t know,” Erlendur said.
“The bastard,” Sigurdur Oli said. “They ought to put him in the stocks in the town square.”
Elinborg had been in charge of the investigation. An eight-year-old boy had been committed to hospital after being seriously assaulted. No one had been able to get a word out of him about the attack. The initial theory was that older children had set on him outside the school and beaten him up so badly that he suffered a broken arm, fractured cheekbone and two loose upper teeth. He crawled home in a terrible state. His father notified the police when he got back from work shortly afterwards. An ambulance took the boy to hospital.