Black Skies (7 page)

‘Isn’t he always? I wouldn’t worry about it. I’ve never known your dad to be anything but down.’

‘I know.’

Neither of them spoke.

‘Will you say hi from me?’ Eva Lind asked.

‘Sure.’

‘Bye then.’

Sigurdur Óli said goodbye and put down the phone. Then he turned off the television and went to bed.

11

IT TOOK HIM
some time to find the old projector, tucked away in a low cubbyhole in the kitchen broom cupboard.

He had been sure the old man would not have destroyed it; a machine like that would never end up on the tip if that bastard had anything to do with it. Amazingly, after all these years the old lead-grey device still worked, but then the bastard was probably still using it. He felt its familiar weight as he lifted it out of its hiding place and set it up on the table in the sitting room, his eye falling on the manufacturer’s logo: Bell & Howell. He remembered how puzzled he had been as a boy by this name, until a friend explained it as almost certainly the names of two men, one called Bell, the other Howell, who had manufactured the machine together, most likely in America. The projector itself was concealed in a deep compartment under the lid. He pulled the lid off, swung out the reel arms, plugged in the old electric cable and flicked the switch. The wall opposite lit up.

The projector was one of the few possessions the bastard had brought with him when he moved in with his mother, Sigurveig.
He
had been unaware of the new man in her life since he was in the countryside at the time. Then one day word had come that his mother wanted him back. She had moved into a council block in one of the newer suburbs, and claimed that she had quit the booze and met a new man. Next he received a phone call from the woman whom he never addressed as Mother, only Sigurveig, because after two years apart she was like a stranger to him. It was the first and only time she rang him at the farm and the conversation was brief: she wanted her youngest child to come and live with her. He replied that he was happy on the farm. ‘I know, dear,’ he heard her say down the phone, ‘but now you’re coming home to me. It’s been approved. It’s all sorted.’

Some days later he said goodbye to the farmer’s wife and the couple’s two daughters, and the farmer himself drove him down to the main road and waited with him until the bus arrived. It was the height of summer and he felt he was betraying the farmer because the hay harvest was under way and they needed his help. The couple had often praised him for his diligence and helpfulness. One day, they said, he would turn out all right, more than all right. In the distance they saw the bus approaching and eventually it drew up beside them in a cloud of dust.

‘All the best, and maybe you’ll drop by and see us when you get the chance,’ the farmer said, making as if to shake his hand, then giving him a hug. He slipped a thousand-krona note into his hand. The bus set off with a jerk and the farmer disappeared as the dust rose again. He had never in his life owned any money before and on the journey to Reykjavík he kept taking the note out of his pocket and examining it in wonder, then folding it up and putting it back in his pocket, only to fish it out a minute or two later to study it again.

Sigurveig was supposed to be meeting him at the bus station but when he arrived she was nowhere to be seen. It was a cold evening
and
he stood for a long time beside his suitcase, waiting for her. Eventually he sat down on the case. He did not know how to get home, or what district the block of flats was in or even the name of the street, and he grew increasingly anxious as the evening wore on. There was no one he could turn to for help. He had been away for a long time; the farmer had told him ages ago that his father had gone to live abroad and he knew nothing about his two siblings, who were considerably older. There was nobody else.

He sat on his case, casting his mind back to his home or rather to the place that he had called home for the last two years. They would have finished in the cowshed by now and the girls would be mucking around. Then they would shoo the dogs out of the kitchen and dinner would be served up: boiled trout from the lake with melted butter, perhaps – his favourite.

‘I assume you’re the brat I’m supposed to be meeting.’

He looked up. A man he had never seen before was looming over him.

‘You’re little Andy, aren’t you?’ the man said.

No one had called him Andy since he had left town.

‘My name’s Andrés,’ he replied.

The man looked him up and down.

‘Then it must be you. Your mum says hello – or at least I think that’s what she said. She hasn’t been on particularly good form lately.’

He did not know how to answer, did not know what the man’s words meant or what he meant by form.

‘Let’s get a move on then,’ the man said. ‘Don’t forget your case.’

The man walked off in the direction of the car park in front of the bus station. After watching the stranger disappear round the corner, he stood up, picked up his case and followed. He did not know what else to do, but he was wary; from the first instant he had got the impression that this was a man who would not be easy
to
please. His tone of voice when he referred to his mother told him this, the scorn with which he had said ‘little Andy’. The man had not even greeted him; all he had said was: ‘I assume you’re the brat I’m supposed to be meeting.’ He noticed that the tip of one of the man’s forefingers was missing but it did not cross his mind either then or later to ask how it had happened.

Sigurveig was asleep in the bedroom when they reached the flat. The man announced that he was going out and said he was not to make any noise or to wake his mother, so he sat waiting quietly on a chair in the kitchen. The flat had one bedroom, behind a closed door, a living room, a kitchen and a small bathroom. Apparently the sofa in the living room was to be his bed. He was worn out from the journey and his long wait at the bus station but did not dare to lie down on the sofa, so he laid his head on his arms on the kitchen table and before he knew it he was asleep.

Just before he had dropped off his eye had been caught by an object in the living room. He had no idea what it was but there it stood on the table by the sofa, square and boxy, with a handle on top; an alien object from the outside world, with that incomprehensible logo on the side: Bell & Howell.

He was to discover later that the new man in his mother’s life also owned a film camera with another name that he could make neither head nor tail of, which puzzled him no less than the name of the projector. The name, Eumig, was burnt into his memory.

He stared for a long time at the old Bell & Howell projector and at the light it cast on the facing wall; snatches of memory seemed to play themselves out in the glare of the machine. The old man whimpered something and he turned round.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

The man in the chair was silent. There was a powerful stench of urine and the mask over his face was damp with sweat.

‘Where’s the camera?’

The man stared at him through the slits in the death mask.

‘And the films? Where are the films? Tell me. I can kill you if I want to. Do you understand that? I’m the one in control now! Me! Not you, you old shit. Me! I’m in control.’

Nothing. Neither cough nor groan emerged from behind the mask.

‘How do you like that, eh? How do you like that? Don’t you find it strange, after all these years, that I should be stronger than you? Who’s the wimp now, eh? Tell me that. Who’s the wimp now?’

The man did not move.

‘Look at me! Look at me if you dare. Do you see? Do you see what little Andy has turned into? Not so little now, is he? He’s all grown up and strong. Maybe you didn’t think that would ever happen. Maybe you thought Andy would always be the same little boy?’

He hit the old man.

‘Where’s the camera?’ he snarled.

He was going to find that camera and destroy it, along with all the films and the images they had recorded. He was convinced that the bastard still had the lot stashed away somewhere and he was not going to give up until he had found them and burnt them.

Still no answer.

‘Do you think I won’t find it? I’m going to tear this dump apart until I find it. I’m going to rip up the floors and pull down the ceilings. How do you like that, eh? How do you like little Andy now?’

The eyes behind the mask closed.

‘You took my thousand-krona note,’ he whispered. ‘I know it was you. You lied that I’d lost it but I know you took it.’

He was sobbing as he spoke.

‘You’ll burn in hell for that. For that and everything else you did. You’ll burn in hell!’

12

ONE OF THE
measures taken by the police in connection with the attack on Lína was to note down the licence plates of every vehicle parked near her house, in the hope that her assailant might have arrived by car. The idea was not implausible; in fact, it was highly likely. He would hardly have travelled on public transport with the baseball bat hidden inside his jacket, and a simple check confirmed that he had not taken a taxi. Another possibility was that he had walked there, in which case he was unlikely to have come far and might well live within a few kilometres of the crime scene. It was also conceivable that someone had given him a lift and had been waiting outside when they saw Sigurdur Óli enter the house, but Sigurdur Óli had not noticed anyone. The most likely scenario was that the assailant had arrived by car but instead of parking outside had left it in a side street and been forced to abandon it when Sigurdur Óli had disturbed him.

Most of the licence plates collected by the police, and there were dozens of them, were traced to addresses nearby, decent people with families and jobs who would not hurt a soul and did not know Lína
and
Ebbi from Adam. However, several were registered to owners who lived further away, in other neighbourhoods or even other parts of the country, though none had a police record for violence.

Sigurdur Óli, who was at least familiar with the assailant’s running style, volunteered to talk to the owners of any cars which required further investigation.

Lína’s condition remained unchanged and Ebbi had hardly left her bedside. The doctors believed that it could still go either way.

Sigurdur Óli’s evening with Bergthóra had ended badly, with accusations flying back and forth, until Bergthóra had finally stood up, said she could no longer cope with this and left.

Sigurdur Óli believed himself to be perfectly capable of working on the investigation despite his highly irregular personal involvement in the affair. After thinking it through, he decided that nothing he knew could be prejudicial to the interests of the inquiry, since he had absolutely no desire to protect Hermann and his wife, and Patrekur was not involved. He had done nothing that would require him to declare an interest and resign from the case. The only point that troubled him, and then only briefly, was the conversation about the photos he had had with Ebbi at the hospital. He was not acquainted with Lína or Ebbi; for all he knew they might be up to their necks in debt from drug use, a mortgage or a car loan, and might owe money to the kind of people who employed debt collectors. After all, drugs were not the only reason enforcers were set on defaulters. Sigurdur Óli thought it likely that Lína and Ebbi had gone too far in their clumsy attempts to blackmail fools like Hermann and his wife with their incriminating photos. It was not improbable that somebody who felt pushed into a corner would want to shut them up by violence, or at least by the threat of violence. Whether Hermann was behind it or not was another matter. He denied it now but time would tell.

He felt a nagging guilt at not having come clean to Finnur, either
about
the photos or Lína and Ebbi’s alleged blackmail attempt, since it was only a matter of time before the information would come out. And when that happened, and Hermann and his wife’s names became mixed up in the inquiry, Sigurdur Óli would have some explaining to do.

Preoccupied by these thoughts, he walked into a small meat-processing factory in search of a man called Hafsteinn, who turned out to be the foreman and who professed himself astonished by Sigurdur Óli’s visit, exclaiming that he had never spoken to a detective before in his life, as if this were a guarantee of a blameless existence. Hafsteinn invited him into his office and they both sat down. The foreman was wearing a white coat and a lightweight white hat bearing the firm’s logo on his head. He had the figure of a German beer drinker at Oktoberfest, stout and cheery, with plump red cheeks; hardly the type to attack a defenceless woman with a baseball bat, let alone run further than ten metres. This fact did not deter Sigurdur Óli, however, and he stuck doggedly to his task. After a short preamble, he said he wanted to know what Hafsteinn had been doing in the area where Lína was attacked, and whether there was anyone who could provide an alibi for his explanation, whatever it was.

The foreman gave Sigurdur Óli a long look.

‘Hang on a minute, what are you saying? Do I have to tell you what I was doing there?’

‘Your car was parked one street down from the crime scene. You live in Hafnarfjördur. What were you doing in Reykjavík? Were you driving the car yourself?’

Sigurdur Óli reasoned that even if the man had not attacked Lína, he might conceivably know something about the attack; he might have driven the assailant to the scene and abandoned his car in a panic.

‘Yes, I was driving. I was visiting someone. Do you need to know any more?’

‘Yes.’

‘May I ask what you’re going to do with the information?’

‘We’re trying to find the assailant.’

‘You don’t think I attacked the poor woman?’

‘Did you take part in the attack?’

‘Are you out of your mind?’

Sigurdur Óli observed that the red cheeks had lost some of their colour.

‘Can I speak to someone who can confirm your alibi?’

‘Are you going to mention this to my wife?’ Hafsteinn asked hesitantly.