“Same here,” Valgerdur said. “I still draw like a three-year-old.”

“What do you do when you’re not at work?” she asked after a short silence.

Unprepared for this question, Erlendur dithered until she began to smile.

“I didn’t mean to invade your privacy,” she said when he gave no answer.

“No, it’s… I’m not accustomed to talking about myself? Erlendur said.

He could not claim to play golf or any other sport. At one time he had been interested in boxing, but that had waned. He never went to the cinema and rarely watched television. Travelled alone around Iceland in the summer, but had done less of that in recent years. What did he do when he wasn’t at work? He didn’t know the answer himself. Most of the time he was just on his own.

“I read a lot,” he said suddenly.

“And what do you read?” she asked.

Once more he hesitated, and she smiled again.

“Is it that difficult?” she said.

“About deaths and ordeals,” he said. “Death in the mountains. People who freeze to death outdoors. There are whole series of books about that. Used to be popular, once.”

“Deaths and ordeals?” she said.

“And plenty of other things, of course. I read a lot. History. Local history. Chronicles.”

“Everything that’s old and gone,” she said.

He nodded.

“But why deaths? People who freeze to death? Isn’t that awful to read?”

Erlendur smiled to himself.

“You ought to be in the police force,” he said.

In that short part of an evening she had penetrated a place in his mind that was carefully fenced off, even to himself. He did not want to talk about it. Eva Lind knew about it but was not entirely familiar with it and did not link it in particular with his interest in accounts of deaths. He sat in silence for a long time.

“It comes with age,” he said finally, regretting the lie immediately. “What about you? What do you do when you’ve finished sticking cotton wool buds in people’s mouths?”

He tried to rewind and make a joke but the bond between them had been tarnished and it was his fault.

“I really haven’t had time for anything other than work,” she said, realising that she had unwittingly struck a nerve. She became awkward and he sensed that.

“I think we ought to do this again soon,” he said to wind things up. The lie was too much for him.

“Definitely,” she said. “To tell you the truth I was very hesitant but I don’t regret it. I want you to know that.”

“Nor do I,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “Thank you for everything. Thanks for the Drambuie,” she added as she finished her liqueur. He had also ordered a Drambuie for himself to keep her company, but hadn’t touched it.

Erlendur lay stretched out on the bed in his hotel room looking up at the ceiling. It was still cold in the room and he was wearing his clothes. Outside, it was snowing. It was a soft, warm and pretty snow that fell gently to the ground and melted instantaneously. Not cold, hard and merciless like the snow that caused death and destruction.

“What are those stains?” Elinborg asked the father.

“Stains?” he said. “What stains?”

“On the carpet,” Erlendur said. He and Elinborg had just returned from seeing the boy in hospital. The winter sun lit up the stair carpet that led to the floor where the boy’s room was.

“I don’t see any stains,” the father said, bending down to scrutinise the carpet.

“They’re quite clear in this light,” Elinborg said as she looked at the sun through the lounge window. The sun was low and pierced the eyes. To her, the creamy marble tiles on the floor looked as if they were aflame. Close by the stairway stood a beautiful drinks cabinet. It contained spirits, expensive liqueurs, red and white wines rested forward onto their necks in racks. There were two glass windows in the cabinet and Erlendur noticed a smudge on one of them. On the side of the cabinet facing the staircase, a little drip had been spilt, measuring roughly a centimetre and a half. Elinborg put her finger on the drip and it was sticky.

“Did anything happen by this cabinet?” Erlendur asked.

The father looked at him.

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s like something’s been splashed on it. You’ve cleaned it recently.”

“No,” the father said. “Not recently.”

“Those marks on the staircase,” Elinborg said. “They look like a child’s footprints to me.”

“I can’t see any footprints on the staircase,” the father said. “Just now you were talking about stains. Now they’re footprints. What are you implying?”

“Were you at home when your son was assaulted?”

The father said nothing.

“The attack took place at the school,” Elinborg went on. “School was over for the day but he was playing football and when he set off home they attacked him. That’s what we think happened. He hasn’t been able to talk to you, nor to us. I don’t think he wants to. Doesn’t dare. Maybe because the boys said they would kill him if he told the police. Maybe because someone else said they would kill him if he talked to us.”

“Where’s all this leading?”

“Why did you come home early from work that day? You came home around noon. He crawled home and up to his room, and shortly afterwards you arrived and called the police and an ambulance.”

Elinborg had already been wondering what the father was doing at home in the middle of a weekday, but had not asked him until now.

“No one saw him on his way home from school,” Erlendur said.

“You’re not implying that I attacked … that I attacked my own boy like that? Surely you’re not implying that?”

“Do you mind if we take a sample from the carpet?”

“I think you ought to get out of here,” the father said.

“I’m not implying anything,” Erlendur said. “Eventually the boy will say what happened. Maybe not now and maybe not after a week or a month, maybe not after one year, but he will in the end.”

“Out,” the father said, enraged and indignant by now. “Don’t you dare … don’t you dare start… You leave. Get out. Out!”

Elinborg went straight to the hospital and into the children’s ward. The boy was asleep in his bed with his arm suspended from the hook. She sat down beside him and waited for him to wake up. After she had stayed by the bedside for fifteen minutes the boy stirred and noticed the tired-looking policewoman, but the sad-eyed man in the woollen cardigan who had been with her earlier that day was nowhere to be seen now. Their eyes met and Elinborg did her utmost to smile.

“Was it your dad?”

She went back to the father’s house when night had fallen, with a search warrant and forensics experts. They examined the marks on the carpet. They examined the marble floor and the drinks cabinet. They took samples. They swept up tiny grains from the marble. They plucked at the spilt drop on the cabinet. They went upstairs to the boy’s room and took samples from the head of his bed. They went to the laundry room and looked at the cloths and towels. They examined the dirty laundry. They opened the vacuum cleaner. They took samples from the broom. They went out to the dustbin and rummaged around in the rubbish. They found a pair of the boy’s socks in the bin.

The father was standing in the kitchen. He dialled a lawyer, his friend, as soon as the forensics team appeared. The lawyer came round promptly and looked at the warrant from the magistrate. He advised his client not to talk to the police.

Erlendur and Elinborg watched the forensics team at work. Elinborg glared at the father, who shook his head and looked away.

“I don’t understand what you want,” he said. “I don’t get it.”

The boy had not said it was his father. When Elinborg asked him, his only response was that his eyes filled with tears.

The head of forensics phoned two days later.

“It’s about the stains on the stair carpet,” he said.

“Yes,” Elinborg said.