Voices (21 page)

'Did you ask if there were security cameras at this hotel?' he asked.

They looked at each other.

'Weren't you going to?' Sigurdur Óli said.

'I just forgot,' Elínborg 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 Óli.

'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.

He saw nothing noteworthy the day Gudlaugur was murdered. The faces of the people going through the lobby were quite clearly visible but Erlendur didn't recognise any of them. When he fast-forwarded through the night recordings, figures would dart in through the door and stop at the cash machine before rushing out again. An occasional person went into the hotel itself. He scrutinised them but couldn't link any with Gudlaugur.

He saw that the hotel staff used the bank entrance. The head of reception, the fat hotel manager and Ösp could be seen rushing past, and he thought to himself how relieved she probably felt to get away after her day at work. In one place he saw Gudlaugur cross the lobby, and he stopped the tape. This was three days before the murder. Gudlaugur, alone, paced slowly in front of the camera, looked inside the bank, turned his head, looked over at the souvenir shops and then went back to the hotel. Erlendur rewound and watched Gudlaugur again, then again and a fourth time. He found it odd to see him alive. He stopped the tape when Gudlaugur looked inside the bank and watched his frozen face on the screen. It was the choirboy in the flesh. The man who once had that lovely voice, that tear-jerking boy soprano. The boy who forced Erlendur to probe into his own most painful memories when he heard him.

There was a knock on the door, and he turned off the video and opened for Eva Lind.

'Were you asleep?' she asked, squeezing past him. "What are these tapes?'

'They're to do with the case,' Erlendur said.

'Getting anywhere?'

'No. Nowhere.'

'Did you talk to Stína?'

'Stína?'

'The one I told you about. Stína! You were asking about tarts and the hotels.'

'No, I haven't spoken to her. Tell me something else, do you know a girl of your age called Ösp who works at this hotel? You have a similar attitude to life.'

'Meaning?' Eva Lind offered her father a cigarette, gave him a light and flopped down onto the bed. Erlendur sat at the desk and looked out through the window into the pitch-black night. Two days to Christmas, he thought. Then we'll be back to normal.

'Pretty negative,' he said.

'Do you reckon I'm really negative?' Eva Lind said.

Erlendur said nothing, and Eva snorted, sending billows of smoke out through her nose.

'And what, you're the picture of happiness?'

Erlendur smiled.

'I don't know any Ösp,' Eva said. 'What's she got to do with it?'

'She has nothing to do with it,' Erlendur said. 'At least I don't think so. She found the body and seems to know a few things about what goes on in this place. Quite a smart girl. A survivor, with a mouth on her. Reminds me a bit of you.'

'I don't know her,' Eva said. Then she fell silent and stared at nothing, and he looked at her and said nothing either, and time went by. Sometimes they had nothing to say to each other. Sometimes they argued furiously. They never made small talk. Never talked about the weather or prices in the shops, politics, sport or clothes, or whatever it was that people spent their time discussing, which they both regarded as idle chatter. Only the two of them, their past and present, the family that was never a family because Erlendur walked out on it, the tragic circumstances of Eva and her brother Sindri, their mother's malice towards Erlendur – that was all that mattered, their topic of conversation that coloured all contact between them.

'What do you want for Christmas?' Erlendur suddenly broke the silence.

'For Christmas?' Eva said.

'Yes.'

'I don't want anything.'

'You must want something.'

'What did you get for Christmas? When you were a boy?'

Erlendur thought. He remembered some mittens.

'Little things,' he said.

'I always thought Mum gave Sindri better presents than me,' Eva Lind said. 'Then she stopped giving me presents. Said I sold them to buy dope. She gave me a ring once and I sold it. Did your brother get better presents than you?'

Erlendur felt the way she cautiously probed him. Usually she went straight to the point and shocked him with her candour. At other times, much less frequently, she seemed to want to be delicate.

When Eva was in intensive care after her miscarriage, in a coma, the doctor told Erlendur to try to be with her as much as possible and talk to her all the same. One topic that Erlendur talked about to Eva was his brother's disappearance and how he himself was rescued from the moor. When Eva regained consciousness and moved in with him he asked her whether she remembered what he had said to her, but she did not recall a word. Her curiosity was aroused and she pressed him until he repeated what he had told her, what he had never told anyone about before and no one knew about. He had never talked to her about his past and Eva, who never tired of calling him to account, felt that she moved a little closer to him, felt she knew her father a fraction better, although she also knew that she was a long way from understanding him fully. One question that haunted Eva made her angry and spiteful towards him, and shaped their relationship more than anything else. Divorces were common, she realised that. Couples were always getting divorced and some divorces were worse than others, when the partners never spoke again. Aware of this, she did not question it. But she was totally incapable of fathoming why Erlendur divorced his children too. Why he took no interest in them after he left. Why he continually neglected them until Eva herself sought him out and found him alone in a dark block of flats. She had discussed all this with her father, who so far could provide no answers to her questions.

'Better presents?' he said. 'It was all the same. Really just like in the old Christmas rhyme: a candle and a pack of cards. Sometimes we would have liked something more exciting, but our family was poor. Everyone was poor in those days'

'What about after he died? Your brother.'

Erlendur said nothing.

'Erlendur?' Eva said.

'Christmas disappeared with him,' Erlendur said.

*

The birth of the Saviour was not celebrated after his brother died. More than a month had elapsed since his disappearance and there was no joy in the home, no presents and no visitors. It was a custom for Erlendur's mother's family to visit them on Christmas Eve when they would all sing Christmas carols. It was a small house and everyone sat close together, emanating warmth and light. His mother refused all visitors that Christmas. His father had sunk into a deep depression and spent most days in bed. He took no part in the search for his son, as if he knew it was futile, as if he knew he had failed; his son was dead and he could do nothing about it, nor anyone ever, and that it was his fault and no one else's.

His mother was indefatigable. She made sure that Erlendur was nursed properly. She urged on the search party and took part herself. She was the last to come down from the moors when darkness fell and searching became futile, exhausted, and was the first to set off back into the highlands when it grew light again. After it became obvious that her son must be dead she kept on searching just as energetically. It was not until winter had set in completely, the snows were so deep and the weather so treacherous that she was forced to give up. Forced to face up to the fact that the boy had died in the wilds and she would have to wait until spring to look for his earthly remains. She turned towards the mountains every day, sometimes cursing. 'May the trolls eat you who took my boy!'

The thought of his dead body lying up there was unbearable to Erlendur, who began seeing him in nightmares from which he awoke screaming and crying, fighting the blizzard, submerged in the snow, his little back turned against the howling wind and death by his side.

Erlendur did not understand how his father could sit motionless at home while all the others were hard at work. The incident seemed to break him completely, turn him into a zombie, and Erlendur thought about the power of grief, because his father was a strong, vigorous man. The loss of his son gradually drained him of the will to live and he never recovered.

Later, when it was all over, his parents argued for the first and only time about what happened, and Erlendur found out that their mother had not wanted their father to go up onto the moors that day, but he did not listen to her. 'Well,' she said, 'since you're going anyway, leave the boys at home.' He paid no heed.

And Christmas was never the same again. His parents reached some kind of accord as time went by. She never mentioned that he had ignored her wishes. He never mentioned that he had been seized by stubbornness at hearing her tell him not to go and not to take the boys. There was nothing wrong with the weather and he felt she was meddling. They chose never to talk about what happened between them, as if breaking the silence would leave nothing to keep them together. It was in this silence that Erlendur tackled the guilt that swamped him at being the one who survived.

'Why's it so cold in here?' Eva Lind asked, wrapping her coat tighter.

'It's the radiator,' Erlendur said. 'It doesn't get warm. Any news about you?'

'Nothing. Mum got off with some bloke. She met him at the old-time dancing at Ölver. You can't imagine how gross that freak is. I think he still uses Brylcreem, he combs his hair into a quiff and wears shirts with sort of huge collars and he clicks his fingers when he hears some old crap on the radio. "My bonnie lies over the ocean ..."'

Erlendur smiled. Eva was never as bitchy about anything as when she described her mother's 'blokes', who seemed to become more pathetic with every year that went by.

Then they fell silent again.

'I'm trying to remember what I was like when I was eight,' Eva suddenly said. 'I don't really remember anything except my birthday. I can't remember the party, just the day it was my birthday. I was standing in the car park outside the block and I knew it was my birthday that day and I was eight, and somehow this memory that is totally irrelevant has stuck with me ever since. Just that, I knew it was my birthday and I was eight.'

She looked at Erlendur.

'You said he was eight. When he died.'

'It was his birthday that summer.'

'Why was he never found?'

'I don't know.'

'But he's up there on the moor?'

'Yes.'

'His skeleton.'

'Yes.'

'Eight years old.'

'Yes.'

'Was it your fault? That he died?'

'I was ten.'

'Yes, but...'

'It was no one's fault.'

'But you must have thought...'

'What are you driving at, Eva? What do you want to know?'

'Why you never contacted me and Sindri after you left us,' Eva Lind said. 'Why didn't you try to be with us?'

'Eva,..'

'We weren't worth it, were we?'