8

The boys were playing indoor football with great zeal. They fought over every single ball and did not flinch from playing dirty. Sigurdur Oli saw one of them go in for a sliding tackle that could have broken his opponent’s leg. When the victim crashed to the floor he yelled at the top of his voice and clutched his ankle.

“Watch out, lads!” the coach shouted into the pitch. “None of that, Geiri! Come on, Raggi,” he called to the boy who was climbing to his feet after the tackle.

He sent on a substitute for Raggi and the game continued just as violently as before. There were far more boys at football practice than could play at once, so the coach made frequent substitutions. Sigurdur Oli watched from the sidelines. The coach was Vilhjalmur, Elias’s sports teacher. He had an extra part-time job as a boys” football trainer, as his wife had told Sigurdur Oli when he stood on their doorstep. She had directed him to the sports hall.

The practice was coming to an end. Vilhjalmur blew the whistle that hung around his neck and a boy who seemed unhappy with the result gave the ball an almighty kick, hitting one of his teammates on the back of the head. After some commotion, Vilhjalmur blew his whistle again and called out to the boys to stop that nonsense and get along to the showers. The two boys stopped their brawling.

“Isn’t that a bit rough?” Sigurdur Oli asked as he walked over to Vilhjalmur. The boys stared at the policeman. They had never seen such a well-dressed man in the hall before.

“They get quite boisterous sometimes,” Vilhjalmur said, shaking Sigurdur Oli’s hand. A short, chubby man aged about thirty, he gathered up the goalpost cones and balls and threw them into a storeroom that he then locked. “These kids need toughening up. They come here fat and lazy from pizza and computer games and I get them to take some exercise. Are you here about Elias?” he said.

“You were his last teacher today, I understand,” Sigurdur Oli said.

Vilhjalmur had heard about the murder and said he could hardly believe the news.

“You feel completely thrown by something like this,” he said. “Elias was a great kid — dedicated to sport. I think he really enjoyed playing football. I don’t know what to say.”

“Did you notice anything special or unusual about him today?”

“It was just a normal day. I made them run a bit and vault over the box, then we split them up into teams. They enjoy football most. Handball too.”

“Did Elias go straight home from school, do you think?”

“I have no idea where he went,” Vilhjalmur said.

“Was he the last to leave?”

“Elias was always the last to leave,” Vilhjalmur said.

“Was he a “flight attendant”?”

Are you from the Westman Islands too?”

“No. Not exactly. You’re … ?”

“We moved here when I was twelve.”

“Was Elias hanging around then, or … ?”

“That’s just the way he was,” Vilhjalmur said. “He took a long time to leave. He was slow at changing his clothes. He sort of dithered about and you had to chivvy him along.”

“What was he doing then?”

“Just preoccupied, in a world of his own.”

“Today too?”

“Probably, though I didn’t particularly notice. I had to rush off to a meeting.”

“Did you see anyone waiting for him outside? Notice if he met anyone? Did he seem afraid to go home? Could you sense anything like that about him?”

“No, nothing. I didn’t see anything unusual outside. The kids were heading off home. I don’t think anyone was waiting for him. But then, I wasn’t thinking along those lines. You don’t think about that sort of thing.”

“Not until afterwards,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Yes, of course. But as I say, I didn’t notice anything unusual. He displayed no signs of fear during the lesson. Didn’t say anything to me. He was just the same as always. After all, nothing of that kind has ever happened here before. Never. I can’t understand anyone wanting to attack Elias, simply can’t understand it. It’s horrific”

“Do you know the Icelandic teacher at the school, a man by the name of Kjartan?”

“Yes.”

“Apparently he has certain views about immigrants.”

“That’s putting it mildly”

“Do you agree with him?”

“Me? No, he strikes me as a nutjob. He …”

“He what?”

“He’s rather bitter,” Vilhjalmur said. “Have you met him?”

“No.”

“He’s an old sporting hero,” Vilhjalmur said. “I remember him well from handball. Damn good player. Then something happened, he was badly injured and had to quit. Just as he was turning professional. He’d been signed up by a Spanish club. I think that festers. He’s not a likeable sort of character.”

Shouts and cries came from the boys” changing rooms along the corridor. Vilhjalmur set off in that direction to calm the boys down.

“Do you know what happened?” he said over his shoulder.

“Not yet,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Hope you catch the bastard. Was it racially motivated?”

“We don’t know anything.”

Kjartan’s wife was in her early thirties, slightly younger than the Icelandic teacher himself, and rather scruffily dressed in jogging pants that detracted unnecessarily from her looks. Two children stood behind her. Sigurdur Oli cast a glance inside the dim flat. The couple did not appear particularly house-proud. Instinctively, he thought about his own flat where everything was spick and span. The thought sent a warm feeling through him as he stood outside in the cold, pierced by the bitter wind. This flat was one of four in the building, on the ground floor.

The woman called her husband and he came to the door, also wearing jogging pants and a vest that looked two sizes too small and emphasised its owner’s expanding paunch. He seemed to make do with shaving once a week and there was a bad-tempered look on his face that Sigurdur Oli could not quite fathom, something about his eyes that expressed antipathy and anger. He remembered having seen that expression before, that face, and recalled Vilhjalmur’s words about the fallen sports star.

A face from the past, Erlendur would have said. He sometimes made remarks that Sigurdur Oli disliked because he did not understand them, snatches from those old tales that were Erlendur’s only apparent interest in life. The two men were poles apart in their thinking. While Erlendur sat at home reading old Icelandic folklore or fiction, Sigurdur Oli would sit in front of the television watching American cop shows with a bowl of popcorn in his lap and a bottle of Coke on the table. When he joined the police force he modelled himself on such programmes. He was not alone in thinking that a job with the police could sharpen one’s image. Recruits still occasionally turned up for work dressed like American TV cops, in jeans and back-to-front baseball cap.

“Is it about the boy?” Kjartan said, making no move to invite Sigurdur Oli in out of the cold.

“About Elias, yes.”

“It was only a matter of time,” Kjartan said with an intolerant ring to his voice. “They shouldn’t let those people into the country,” he went on. “It only causes conflict. This had to happen sooner or later. Whether it was this boy in this school in this district at this time or someone else at some other time … it makes no difference. It would have happened and will happen again. You can bet”

Sigurdur Oli began to recall more of Kjartan’s story as the man stood in front of him, feet apart, with one hand on the doorframe and the other on the door, his gut hanging out under his vest. Sigurdur Oli was a keen follower of sports, although he was more interested in American football and baseball than Icelandic sports. But he remembered this man as the great hope of Icelandic handball, recalled how he had already been in the national team when he was injured during a game in his early twenties and had to quit. The media made a big deal of him for a while, then Kjartan disappeared from the scene as quickly as he had been swept into it.