Outrage (2 page)

2

On her way home Elinborg stopped to buy food. She usually took her time shopping and avoided the no-frills supermarkets, finding that they offered a limited range and quality consistent with the bargain prices. But this time she was in a hurry. Both boys had rung to check that she would be cooking dinner as she had promised and she’d confirmed that she would, only she’d be a bit on the late side. She did her best to have a proper family dinner every day - if only for fifteen minutes while the kids wolfed down their food.

And she knew that if she didn’t cook then the boys would go and buy expensive fast food, wasting what little money they had earned during the summer holidays - or would get their dad to do so. Her husband Teddi, a motor mechanic, was a hopeless cook; he could prepare a sort of porridge, or fry an egg, but that was about it. But he was good at clearing and washing up, and did his bit around the house.

Elinborg looked around for something quick. At the cold counter she saw some minced fish which looked as if it would do, then she grabbed a bag of rice, some onions, a few other things she needed, and within ten minutes was back in the car.

About an hour later they sat down at the kitchen table. The older boy grumbled about the fish-balls, complaining that they’d had fish the day before. He would not eat onion and carefully left it at the side of his plate. The younger boy, like his father, ate whatever was put in front of him. The youngest of the children, Theodora, had rung to ask if she could have dinner at her friend’s house. They were doing their homework together.

‘Isn’t there anything but soy sauce?’ asked the older boy, Valthor. He was sixteen and had just started high school. He knew exactly what his ambitions were and had opted to complete his secondary education at the Commercial College. Elinborg thought he had a girlfriend, although he gave no hint. He never said anything about himself, but no detective work by his mother had been necessary: when she’d been putting his jeans into the washing machine a packet of condoms had fallen out of the pocket. She did not mention it to him: it was the way of the world, but she was glad he was taking precautions. She had not managed to gain his trust and their relationship could be tense; the boy was fiercely independent and sometimes truculent. It was a character trait that Elinborg disliked, and she did not know where he got it from. Teddi handled him better - father and son shared an interest in cars.

‘No,’ said Elinborg, pouring the dregs of a bottle of white wine into her glass. ‘I couldn’t be bothered to make a sauce.’

She looked at her son and considered yet again whether she ought to confront him about her discovery. But she felt too tired to cope with an argument. She was sure he would say that she was interfering.

‘You said you’d cook steak this evening,’ Valthor reminded her.

‘Who was the dead body you found?’ asked the younger boy, Aron. He had been watching the TV news and had caught sight of his mother outside the house in Thingholt.

‘A man of about thirty,’ Elinborg replied.

‘Was he killed?’ asked Valthor.

‘Yes,’ answered Elinborg.

‘It said on the news that they didn’t know yet whether it was murder,’ commented Aron. ‘They said
suspected
murder.’

‘The man was murdered,’ said Elinborg.

‘Who was he?’ asked Teddi.

‘No one we know.’

‘How was he killed?’ asked Valthor.

Elinborg looked at him. ‘You know you can’t ask me that.’

Valthor shrugged.

‘Was it drugs?’ asked Teddi. ‘Was that why—?’

‘Will you all please stop talking about it?’ pleaded Elinborg. ‘We don’t know anything yet.’

They knew that they must not press her. Elinborg felt it was inappropriate to discuss her job. The men of the family had always been fascinated by police work, and when she was involved in a major case they could not resist asking her for the details. They even came up with suggestions of their own, but if the investigation dragged on they generally lost interest and left her alone. They watched a lot of American crime drama on TV, and when the boys were smaller they had been excited and impressed that their mum was a detective like the heroes and heroines of the TV shows. But they had soon realised that the stories on screen were a world away from what she told them about her job - and what they saw for themselves. The TV detectives were glamorous, wise-cracking, insightful sharpshooters who traded repartee with plausible villains, engaged in white-knuckle car chases and, with never a hair out of place, talked psychopaths into surrender. In every episode horrifying murders were committed - two, three or four - and in the end the perpetrator was always caught and received his or her just deserts.

The boys were well aware that Elinborg did a lot of overtime. As she said, her basic salary was low so she needed to increase her earnings. She had never been in a car chase, she told them, and she carried no pistol, let alone an automatic rifle like an American cop: the Icelandic police were unarmed. The villains were mostly unfortunates and losers, as Sigurdur Oli called them: the usual suspects. Burglary and car theft made up the majority of cases. Assault. Drugs were the province of the Drug Squad, while serious crimes such as rape landed regularly on Elinborg’s desk. Murder was rare, but the numbers varied each year: some years went by without a single case, while in others there might be up to four. Recently the police had observed a dangerous trend: crime was becoming more organised, more people were carrying weapons, and violence was becoming more extreme.

Elinborg generally came home from work exhausted, made dinner, then spent a little time developing new recipes - cookery was her hobby. Or she simply lay down on the sofa and fell asleep watching TV.

Now and then the boys would look up from their cool crime dramas to glance at their mother. The Icelandic police did not impress them.

Elinborg’s daughter was quite unlike her brothers; from early childhood Theodora had shown herself to be unusually gifted, and this had led to problems at school. Elinborg was reluctant to move her up a year as she wanted her to develop socially in step with her contemporaries, but the schoolwork was far too easy for her. She needed constant stimulation: she played handball, took piano lessons, and was a Girl Guide. She did not watch much television and had no particular interest in films or video games; she was a bookworm who read from morning to night. When Theodora had been younger Elinborg and Teddi were kept busy borrowing books for her from the library, and as soon as she was old enough she got her own library card. She was now eleven years old. A few days earlier she had tried to summarise for her mother the main points of
A Brief History of Time
.

When Elinborg thought the children were out of earshot she would sometimes talk to Teddi about her work colleagues. They knew that one was a man named Erlendur, who was something of an enigma to them: sometimes Elinborg spoke as if she did not like working with him, while at other times it sounded as if she could not do without him. The youngsters had more than once heard their mother wonder aloud how such a failure of a father, such an irascible loner, could be such an insightful detective. She admired his work but she did not necessarily like him. Another person she sometimes discussed in whispers with Teddi was Sigurdur Oli: a bit of a weirdo, so far as the kids could tell. Their mother sometimes groaned when his name came up.

Elinborg was dozing off when she heard a sound. They were all in bed except Valthor, who was still on the computer; she did not know whether he was working on a school assignment, or just chatting or blogging. He would not sleep until the middle of the night. Valthor had his own internal clock: he did not go to bed until the early hours and would lie in until evening, given the chance. This worried Elinborg but she saw little point in discussing it. She had tried many times, but he was obstinate and dogmatic, insisting on his rights.

The Thingholt victim was on Elinborg’s mind all evening. Even if she had wanted to, she could not have described the horrifying scene to her boys: the man’s throat had been cut, and the chairs and tables in the living room had been drenched in blood. The pathologist had not yet made his report.

The police reckoned that the killing had been premeditated. The perpetrator must have come to the victim’s home with the intention of attacking him. There was little sign of a struggle and the actual wound appeared to be a confident slash straight across the throat, at precisely the right point to inflict maximum damage. Smaller cuts on the neck indicated that the blade had been held at the victim’s throat for some time. It looked as if the assault had been sudden and unexpected: there was no damage to the outside door, which might suggest that the victim had let his killer in, while another possibility was that someone who had entered the flat with the man, or had been his guest, had launched the brutal attack without warning. Nothing seemed to have been stolen and there was no sign that the flat had been ransacked.

It was unlikely that the victim had been killed by burglars but he might conceivably have disturbed them before any damage had been done, leading them to panic and attack him.

The body was almost completely drained of blood, much of which had pooled and dried on the floor of the flat. That meant that the man’s heart had continued to beat for a little while after the attack.

After seeing all that gore Elinborg simply could not have cooked a bloody steak, however much her elder son moaned about the dinner menu.

3

The name of the murdered man in Thingholt was Runolfur. He had worked for a telecoms company, had no criminal record, and had never come to the attention of the police. He had moved to Reykjavik from his home village more than ten years ago, and he lived alone. His elderly mother, who was still living in the same village, said he had not been in touch recently. A police officer and the local clergyman went to her home to notify her of her son’s death. Runolfur was an only child, and it transpired that his father had died in an accident some years before: he had collided with a lorry on the upland road over the Holtavorduheidi moor.

Runolfur’s landlord spoke well of him. He always paid his rent on time; he was neat and tidy; there was never any noise from his flat; he went out to work every morning. The landlord could not praise him highly enough.

‘All that blood,’ he said, with a resentful look at Elinborg. ‘I’ll have to get a cleaning company in. I’ll probably have to replace the flooring. Who would do a thing like that? It won’t be easy to find new tenants.’

‘So you’ve never heard anything from the flat?’ Elinborg asked.

‘Not a whisper,’ replied the landlord. He had a protruding belly, a week’s growth of white whiskers, a balding head, sagging shoulders and stubby arms. He lived above Runolfur. He said he had rented out the downstairs flat for years, and Runolfur had been his tenant for the past two years or so. He had discovered the body when he brought down some bills which had been mistakenly delivered to his flat; he pushed them through the letter box, but as he passed the living-room window he had seen the bare feet of someone who was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. He had felt the best thing was to ring the police at once.

‘Were you home on Saturday evening?’ asked Elinborg. She pictured the inquisitive landlord peering into the flat. It couldn’t have been easy to see in. The curtains were drawn, with only a narrow gap between them.

Preliminary investigations indicated that the murder had been committed either on the Saturday evening or during the night. It seemed more likely that someone had been in the flat with Runolfur before the attack occurred than that anyone had forced entry. The odds were on a woman. It looked as if Runolfur had had sex shortly before he died, as a condom had been found on the bedroom floor. The T-shirt he was wearing when he was discovered probably did not belong to him but to a woman. It was far too small for him, and in addition dark hairs were found on it, matching hairs collected from Runolfur’s sofa. There was a hair on his jacket, possibly from the same person, and in his bed, in a bedroom off the living room, there were pubic hairs. He might have invited a woman to stay the night.

It would have been easy to leave the house through the garden and climb over into an adjacent garden behind a three-storey concrete house in the next street. Nobody had been seen in the garden two days ago.

‘I’m at home most days,’ said the landlord.

‘You say Runolfur went out that evening?’

‘Yes, I saw him walk off down the street. It must have been about eleven. I didn’t see him after that.’

‘You didn’t notice when he came home?’

‘No. I was probably asleep by then.’

‘So you don’t know if anyone came back with him?’

‘No.’

‘Runolfur didn’t live with a woman, did he?’

‘No, nor with a man,’ the landlord replied, with an enigmatic smile.

‘Not at any time while he was your tenant?’

‘No.’

‘But do you know if he had girlfriends who stayed over?’ The landlord scratched his head. It was shortly past lunchtime; he had just finished eating horsemeat sausage, and now he was sitting calmly on a sofa opposite Elinborg. She had spotted the leftovers on a plate in the kitchen; a rancid smell hung in the air and she hoped the odour would not taint her coat, a recent sale bargain. She had no desire to stay here any longer than necessary.

‘Not particularly,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t think I ever saw him with a woman. Not as far as I remember.’

‘You didn’t know him all that well?’

‘No. I soon realised he wanted to be left alone. So … No, I didn’t have much to do with him.’

Elinborg stood up. She saw Sigurdur Oli at the door of the house across the road, talking to the neighbours. Other police officers were taking statements from local residents.

‘When can I hose down the flat?’ asked the landlord.

‘Soon,’ answered Elinborg. ‘We’ll let you know.’

Runolfur’s body had been removed the previous evening, but when Elinborg arrived with Sigurdur Oli, the morning after the discovery of the body, forensics officers were still at work in the flat. The evidence was that this was the home of a neat young man, who had wanted to make a pleasant, comfortable base for himself.