Voices (3 page)

The cook looked all around.

'I don't believe it,' he said. 'Won't there be hell to pay?'

'Yes,' Erlendur said. 'There will be hell to pay?

He knew that the hotel would never be able to shake off the murder. It would never wipe away the smear. After this it would always be known as the hotel where Santa was found dead with a condom on his penis.

'Did you know him?' Erlendur asked. 'Gulli?'

'No, hardly at all. He was a doorman here and fixed all sorts of stuff?

'Fixed?'

'Yes, mended. I didn't know him at all.'

'Do you know who knew him best here?'

'No,' the cook said. 'I don't know anything about the man. Who could have murdered him? Here? At the hotel? My God!'

Erlendur could tell that he was more worried about the hotel than about the murdered man. He considered telling him that the murder might boost the occupancy rate. That's the way people think these days. They could even advertise the hotel as a murder scene. Develop crime-based tourism. But he could not be bothered. He wanted to sit down with his plate and eat the food. Have a moment's peace.

Sigurdur Óli turned up out of nowhere.

'Did you find anything?' Erlendur asked.

'No,' Sigurdur Óli said, looking at the cook, who hurried off to the kitchen with the news. 'Are you eating now?' he added with indignation.

'Oh, don't give me any crap. There was a compromising situation.'

'That man owned nothing, or if he did, he didn't keep it in his room,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'Elínborg found a couple of old records in his wardrobe. That was the lot. Shouldn't we shut down the hotel?'

'Shut down the hotel, what kind of nonsense is that?' Erlendur said. 'How are you going to go about shutting down this hotel? And how long do you plan to do that for? Are you going to send a search team into every room?'

'No, but the murderer could be one of the guests. We can't ignore that.'

'That's absolutely uncertain. There are two possibilities. Either he's at the hotel, a guest or an employee, or he's nothing to do with the hotel. What we need to do is to talk to all the staff and everyone who checks out over the next couple of days, especially those who check out earlier than they had planned, although I doubt that the person who did it would try to draw attention to himself like that.'

'No, right. I was thinking about the condom,' Sigurdur Óli said.

Erlendur looked for a vacant table, found one and sat down. Sigurdur Óli sat down with him and looked at the heaped plate, and his mouth began watering too.

'Well, if it's a woman she's still of child-bearing age, isn't she? Because of the condom.'

'Yes, that would have been the case twenty years ago,' Erlendur said, savouring the lightly smoked ham. 'Nowadays a condom's more than just a contraceptive. It's protection against bloody everything, chlamydia, Aids ...'

'The condom might also tell us that he wasn't very well acquainted with the ... the person who was in his room. That it must have been a quickie. If he'd known the person well he may not have used a condom.'

'We must remember that the condom doesn't rule out that he was with a man,' Erlendur said.

'What kind of implement could it be? The murder weapon?'

'We'll see what comes out of the autopsy. Obviously there's no problem getting hold of a knife at this hotel, if it was someone from here who attacked him.'

'Is that nice?' Sigurdur Óli asked. He had been watching Erlendur devouring the food and was sorely tempted to get some for himself but was afraid of causing even more of a scandal: two cops investigating a murder at a hotel, who sat down at the buffet as if nothing had happened.

'I forgot to check whether there was anything in it,' Erlendur said between bites.

'Do you think you ought to be eating at the murder scene?'

'This is a hotel.'

'Yes, but...'

'I told you, I ran into a compromising situation. This was the only way to get out of it. Was there anything in it? The condom?'

'Empty,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'The medical officer thought he'd had an orgasm. Twice in fact, but I didn't really catch how he came to that conclusion.'

'I don't know anyone who can work out what he's talking about'

'So the murder was committed in full swing.'

'Yes. Something happened when everything was hunky dory'

'If everything was hunky dory, why take along a knife?'

'Maybe it was part of the game.'

'What game?'

'Sex has become much more complex than just the old missionary position,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'So it could be anyone?'

'Anyone,' Erlendur said. 'Why do they always talk about the missionary position? What's the mission?'

'I don't know.' Sigurdur Óli sighed. Sometimes Erlendur asked questions that irritated him because they were so simple but at the same time so infinitely complicated and dull.

'Is it something from Africa?'

'Or Catholicism,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'Why missionary?'

'I don't know.'

"The condom doesn't rule out either sex,' Erlendur said. 'Let's establish that. The condom doesn't rule out anything. Did you ask the manager why he wanted rid of Santa Claus?'

'No, did he want rid of Santa?'

'He mentioned it without any explanation. We have to find out what he meant.'

'I'll jot that down,' said Sigurdur Óli, who always carried around a notepad and pencil.

'And then there's one group that uses condoms more than other people.'

'Really?' Sigurdur Óli said, his face one huge question mark.

'Prostitutes.'

'Prostitutes?' Sigurdur Óli repeated. 'Hookers? Do you think there are any here?'

Erlendur nodded.

'They do a lot of missionary work at hotels.'

Sigurdur Óli stood up and dawdled in front of Erlendur, who had finished his plate and was eyeing up the buffet again.

'Ehmmm, where will you be spending Christmas?' Sigurdur Óli asked awkwardly.

'Christmas?' Erlendur said. 'I'll be ... what do you mean, where will I be spending Christmas? Where should I spend Christmas? What business of yours is that?'

Sigurdur Óli hesitated, then took the plunge.

'Bergthóra was wondering if you'd be on your own.'

'Eva Lind has some plans. What did Bergthóra mean? That I should visit you?'

'I don't know,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'Women! Who ever understands them?' Then he sauntered away from the table and down to the basement.

Elínborg was standing in front of the murdered man's room, watching the forensics team at work, when Sigurdur Óli came walking down the dim corridor.

'Where's Erlendur?' she asked, throttling her little bag of peanuts.

'At the buffet,' Sigurdur Óli said peevishly.

A preliminary test made that evening revealed that the condom was covered with saliva.

3

Forensics contacted Erlendur as soon as the biopsy results were available. He was still at the hotel. For a while the scene of the crime looked like a photographer's studio. Flashes lit up the dim corridor at regular intervals. The body was photographed from all angles, along with everything found in Gudlaugur's room. The corpse was then transported to the morgue on Barónsstígur where the postmortem would be performed. Forensics had combed the doorman's room for fingerprints and found many sets, which would be checked against the police records. All the hotel staff were to be fingerprinted and the forensics team's discovery also meant that saliva samples would have to be taken.

'What about the guests?' Elínborg asked. 'Won't we have to do the same with them?'

She yearned to get home and regretted the question; she wanted to finish her shift. Elínborg took Christmas very seriously and missed her family. She hung up fir branches and decorations all around her home. She baked delicious cookies, which she stored in her Tupperware boxes, carefully labelled by variety. Her Christmas roast was legendary, even outside her extended family. The main course every Christmas was a Swedish-style leg of pork, which she kept outside on the balcony to marinate for twelve days, and tended it just as carefully as if it had been the baby Jesus in swaddling clothes.

'I think we have to assume, initially, that the murderer is an Icelander,' Erlendur said. 'Let's keep the guests in reserve. The hotel is filling up for Christmas now and few people are checking out. We'll talk to the ones who do, take saliva samples, even fingerprints. We can't prevent them from leaving the country. They would have to be prime suspects for us to do that. And we need a list of the foreigners staying at the hotel at the time of the murder, we'll forget about the ones who check in afterwards. Let's try to keep it simple.'

'But what if it isn't that simple?' Elínborg asked.

'I don't think any of the guests know there was a murder,' said Sigurdur Óli, who wanted to get home too. Bergthóra, his partner, had phoned him towards evening and asked if he was on his way. It was exactly the right time now and she was waiting for him, she had said. Sigurdur Óli knew immediately what she meant by 'the right time'. They were trying to have a baby but nothing was happening and he had told Erlendur that they were beginning to talk about IVF.

'Don't you have to give them a jarful?' Erlendur asked.

'A jarful?' Sigurdur Óli said.

'In the mornings?'

Sigurdur Óli looked at Erlendur until he realised what he meant.

'I should never have told you,' he growled.

Erlendur sipped his foul-tasting coffee. The three of them were sitting by themselves in the staff coffee room in the basement. All the commotion was over, the police officers and forensics team had left, the room was sealed off. Erlendur was in no hurry. He had no one to go to, only his gloomy apartment in a block of flats. Christmas meant nothing to him. He had a few days holiday owing and nothing to do with them. Perhaps his daughter would visit him and they would boil smoked lamb. Sometimes her brother came with her. And Erlendur sat and read, which he always did anyway.

'You ought to get yourselves home,' he said. 'I'm going to potter around a little longer. Find out whether I can't talk to that head of reception who never has the time.'

Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli stood up.

'Will you be OK?' Elínborg asked. 'Why don't you just go home? Christmas is coming and—'

'What's with you and Sigurdur Óli? Why don't you leave me in peace?'

'It's Christmas,' Elínborg said with a sigh. Dithered. Then she said, 'Forget it.' She and Sigurdur Óli turned round and left the coffee room.

Erlendur sat for a good while, sunk in thought. He pondered Sigurdur Óli's question about where he was going to spend Christmas, and mulled over Elínborg's thoughtfulness. He saw an image of his flat, the armchair, the battered old television set and the books lining the walls.

Sometimes he bought a bottle of Chartreuse at Christmas and had a glass beside him while he read about ordeals and death in the days when people travelled everywhere on foot and Christmas could be the most treacherous time of the year. Determined to visit their loved ones, people would battle with the forces of nature, go astray and perish; for those awaiting them back home, Christmas turned from a celebration of salvation to a nightmare. The bodies of some travellers were found. Others were not. They were never found. These were Erlendur's Christmas carols.

The head of reception had taken off his hotel jacket and was putting on his raincoat when Erlendur located him in the cloakroom. He said he was exhausted and wanted to get home to his family like everyone else. He had heard about the murder, yes, terrible, but did not know how he could be of assistance.

'I understand you knew him better than most people at the hotel,' Erlendur said.

'No, I don't think that's right,' the head of reception said as he wrapped a thick scarf around his neck. 'Who told you that?'

'He worked for you, didn't he?' Erlendur replied, ignoring the question.

'Worked for me, yes, probably. He was a doorman, I'm in charge of the reception, the check-in, as you may know. Do you know how long the shops are open tonight?'

He gave the impression of not being particularly interested in Erlendur and his questions, which irritated the detective. And it irritated him that no one seemed to care in the slightest about the fate the man in the basement had met.

'Round the clock, I don't know. Who could have wanted to stab your doorman in the chest?'

'Mine? He wasn't my doorman. He was the hotel's doorman.'

'And why did he have his trousers round his ankles and a condom on his todger? Who was with him? Who normally came to visit him? Who were his friends at the hotel? Who were his friends outside the hotel? Who were his enemies? Why was he living at this hotel? What was the deal? What are you hiding? Why can't you answer me like a decent human being?'

'Hey, I, what...?' The man fell silent. 'I just want to get home,' he said eventually. 'I don't know the answers to all those questions. Christmas is coming. Can we talk tomorrow? I haven't had a moment's rest all day.'

Erlendur looked at him.

'We'll talk tomorrow,' he said. As he left the cloakroom he suddenly remembered the question that had been vexing him ever since he met the hotel manager. He turned round. The man was on his way out through the door when Erlendur called to him.

'Why did you want to get rid of him?'

'What?'

'You wanted to get rid of him. Santa. Why?'

The reception manager hesitated.

'He'd been sacked.'

Erlendur found the hotel manager sitting down to a meal. He was at a large table in the kitchen, wearing a chef's apron and devouring the contents of the half-empty trays that had been brought in from the buffet.

'You can't imagine how I love eating,' he said, wiping his mouth, when he noticed Erlendur staring at him. 'In peace,' he added.

'I know exactly what you mean,' Erlendur said.

They were alone in the large, polished kitchen. Erlendur could only admire him. He ate quickly, but deftly and without greed. There was something almost elegant about the motions of his hands. One bite after another disappeared inside him, smoothly and with a visible passion.

He was calmer now that the body had been removed from the hotel and the police had gone, along with the reporters who had been standing outside the hotel; the police had ordered them to stay out, the entire building was deemed a crime scene. The hotel was returning to business as normal. Very few tourists knew about the body in the basement, but many noticed the police activity and asked about it. The manager instructed his staff to say something about an old man and a heart attack.

'I know what you're thinking. You think I'm a pig, don't you?' he said, pausing to take a sip of red wine. His little finger darted out, the size of a cocktail sausage.

'No, but I do understand why you want to run a hotel,' Erlendur said. Then he lost his patience. 'You're killing yourself, you know that,' he said brashly.

'I weigh 180 kilos,' the manager said. 'Farmed pigs don't get much heavier. I've always been fat. Never known otherwise. Never been on a diet. I've never been able to think of changing my lifestyle, as they say. I feel good. Better than you, from the look of things,' he added.

Erlendur remembered hearing that fat people were supposed to be jollier than skinny people. He did not believe it himself.

'Better than me?' he said with a hint of a smile. 'You're the last person to judge. Why did you sack the doorman?'

The manager had resumed eating and some time passed before he put down his knife and fork. Erlendur waited patiently. He could see the manager weighing up the best answer, how to phrase it, given that he had found out about the dismissal.

'We haven't been doing too well,' he said eventually. 'We're overbooked in the summer and there's always plenty of traffic over Christmas and the New Year, but then come dead periods that can be damned difficult. The owners said we had to cut back. Lay off staff. I didn't think it was necessary to have a full-time doorman all year round.'

'But I'm told he was much more than just a doorman. Santa Claus, for example. A jack of all trades. Mended things. More like a caretaker.'

The manager had gone back to feeding his face yet again and another break in their conversation ensued. Erlendur looked around. After taking down their names and addresses, the police had allowed the staff who had finished their shifts to go home; it had still not been established who was the last person to talk to the victim, nor what happened on the last day of his life. No one had noticed anything unusual about Santa. No one had seen anybody go down to the basement. No one knew of him ever having visitors there. Only a couple of people knew that he lived there permanently, that the little room was his home, and apparently they wanted to know as little as possible about him. Very few said they knew him and he did not seem to have had any friends at the hotel. Nor did the employees know about any friends of his outside it.

A real Lone Wolf, Erlendur thought to himself.

'No one is indispensable,' the manager said, his sausagelike finger protruding again as he took another sip of red wine. 'Of course, firing people is never fun, but we can't afford to have a doorman all year. That's why he was sacked. No other reason. And there wasn't really much door-manning to do. He put on his uniform when film stars or foreign dignitaries came, and he threw out undesirables.'

'Did he take it badly? Being sacked?'

'He understood, I think.'

'Are any knives missing from the kitchen?' Erlendur asked.

'I don't know. We lose knives and forks and glasses worth hundreds of thousands of krónur every year. And towels and ... Do you think he was stabbed with a knife from the kitchen?'

'I don't know.'

Erlendur watched the manager eat.

'He worked here for twenty years and no one knew him. Don't you find that unusual?'

'Employees come and go,' the manager shrugged. 'There's a high staff turnover in this business. I think people knew about him, but who knows who? Don't ask me. I don't know anyone here that well.'

'You've stayed put through all these staff changes'

'I'm difficult to move.'

'Why did you talk about chucking him out?'

'Did I say that?'

'Yes.'