“What do you know about it? Is there anything you could help me with?”

“There are tarts everywhere. You can dial a number and they wait for you at the hotel. Classy tarts. They don’t call themselves tarts, they provide “escort services”.”

“Do you know of any who work this hotel? Girls or women who do that?”

“They don’t have to be Icelandic. They’re imported too. They can come over as tourists for a couple of weeks, then they don’t need any papers. Then come back a few months later.”

Eva Lind looked at her father.

“You could talk to Stina. She’s my friend. She knows the game. Do you think it was a tart who killed him?”

“I have no idea.”

They fell silent. Outside in the darkness snowflakes glittered as they fell to the ground. Erlendur vaguely recalled a reference to snow in the Bible, sins and snow, and tried to remember it: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.

“I’m freaking out,” Eva Lind said. There was no excitement in her voice. No eagerness.

“Maybe you can’t handle it by yourself,” Erlendur said; he had urged his daughter to seek counselling. “Maybe you need someone other than me to help you.”

“Don’t give me that psychology bollocks,” Eva said.

“You haven’t got over it and you don’t look well, and soon you’ll go and take the pain away the old way, then you’re back in exactly the same mess as before.”

Erlendur was on the verge of saying the sentence he still had not dared to say out loud to his daughter.

“Preaching all the time,” Eva Lind said, instantly on edge, and she stood up.

He decided to fire away.

“You’d be failing the baby that died.”

Eva Lind stared at her father, her eyes black with rage.

“The other option you have is to come to terms with this fucking life, as you call it, and put up with the suffering it involves. Put up with the suffering we all have to endure, always, to get through that and find and enjoy the happiness and joy that it brings us as well, in spite of our being alive.”

“Speak for yourself! You can’t even go home at Christmas because there’s nothing there! Not a fucking thing and you can’t go there because you know it’s just a hole with nothing in it which you can’t be bothered to crawl back into any more.”

“I’m always at home at Christmas,” Erlendur said.

Eva Lind looked confused.

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s the worst thing about Christmas,” Erlendur said. “I always go home.”

“I don’t understand you,” Eva Lind said, opening the door. I’ll never understand you.”

She slammed the door behind her. Erlendur stood up to run after her, but stopped. He knew that she would come back. He walked over to the window and watched his reflection in the glass until he could see through it into the darkness and the glittering snowflakes.

He had forgotten his decision to go home to the hole with nothing in it, as Eva Lind put it. He turned from the window and set Gudlaugur’s hymns playing again, stretched out on his bed and listened to the boy who, much later, would be found murdered in a little room at a hotel, and thought about sins as white as snow.

FOURTH DAY

17

He woke up early in the morning, still in his clothes and lying on top of the quilt. It took him a long time to shake off the sleep. A dream about his father followed him into the dark morning and he struggled to remember it but caught only snatches: his father, younger in some way, fitter, smiled at him in a deserted forest.

His hotel room was dark and cold. The sun would not be up for a few hours yet. He lay thinking about the dream, his father and the loss of his brother. How the unbearable loss had made a hole in his world. And how the hole was continually growing and he stepped back from its edge to look down into the void that was ready to swallow him when finally he let go.

He shook off these waking fantasies and thought about his tasks for the day. What was Henry Wapshott hiding? Why did he tell lies and make a forlorn attempt to flee, drunk and without luggage? His behaviour puzzled Erlendur. And before long his thoughts stopped at the boy in the hospital bed and his father: Elinborgs case, which she had explained to him in detail.

Elinborg suspected that the boy had been maltreated before and there were strong indications that it happened at home. The father was under suspicion. She insisted on having him remanded in custody for the duration of the investigation. A week’s custody was granted, against vociferous protests from both the father and his lawyer. When the warrant was issued Elinborg went to fetch him with four uniformed police officers and accompanied him down to Hverfisgata. She led him along the prison corridor and locked the door to his cell herself. She pulled back the hatch on the door and looked in at the man who was standing on the same spot with his back turned to her, hunched up and somehow helpless, like everyone who is removed from human society and kept like an animal in a cage.

He slowly turned round and looked her in the eye from the other side of the steel door, and she slid the hatch shut on him.

Early the next morning she began questioning him. Erlendur took part but Elinborg was in charge of the interrogation. The two of them sat facing him in the interrogation room. On the table between them was an ashtray screwed down to the table. The father was unshaven, wearing a crumpled suit and a scruffy white shirt buttoned at the neck with a tie knotted impeccably, as if it represented the last vestiges of his self-respect.

Elinborg switched on the tape recorder and recorded the interview, the names of those present and the number assigned to the case. She had prepared herself well. She had met the boy’s supervisor from school who talked about dyslexia, attention deficit disorder and poor school performance; a psychologist, a friend of hers, who talked about disappointment, stress and denial; and talked to the boy’s friends, neighbours, relatives, everyone whom it occurred to her to ask about the boy and his father.

The man would not yield He accused them of persecution, announced that he would sue them, and refused to answer their questions. Elinborg looked at Erlendur. A warden appeared who pushed the man to his cell again.

Two days later he was brought back for questioning. His lawyer had brought him more comfortable clothes from home and he was now dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a designer label on one of the breast pockets, which he wore like a medal rewarding him for absurdly expensive shopping. He was in a different frame of mind now. Three days in custody had dampened his arrogance, as it tends to do, and he saw that it depended on him alone whether he would stay confined in the cells or not.

Elinborg made sure that he came in for interrogation barefoot. His shoes and socks were taken away without explanation. When he sat down in front of them he tried to pull his feet under his chair.

Elinborg and Erlendur sat facing him, intractable. The tape recorder whirred softly.

“I talked to your son’s teacher,” Elinborg said. “And although what happens and passes between parent and teacher is confidential and she was very firm about that, she wanted to help the boy, help in the criminal case. She told me you assaulted him once in front of her.”

Assaulted him! I gave him a little rap on the jaw. That’s hardly what you call assault. He was being naughty, that’s all. Fidgeting all over the place. He’s difficult. You don’t know about that sort of thing. The strain.”

“So it’s right to punish him?”

“We’re good friends, my boy and I,” the father said. “I love him. I’m responsible for him all by myself. His mother…”

“I know about his mother,” Elinborg said. And of course it can be difficult bringing up a child by yourself. But what you did to him and do to him is … it’s indescribable.”