“He can hardly spend long in hiding,” Elinborg said. “Surely Sunee will want him to attend Elias’s funeral. Anything else would be out of the question.”
“She could be getting the boy out of the way,” Sigurdur Oli said. “This bizarre twist has turned the spotlight on Niran, on what he knows and what he did. We can’t ignore that.”
“I can’t imagine that he attacked his brother,” Elinborg said. “I just can’t picture it. Maybe he does know something and he’s afraid, but I don’t believe he played any part in what happened.”
“If only we could go by what you can imagine, Elinborg,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Wouldn’t everything be just dandy?”
“There’s nothing bloody “dandy” about it,” Erlendur snapped.
Sigurdur Oli grinned.
“I told Sunee we couldn’t be sure when the body would be released because of the investigation,” Erlendur said. “One possibility is that she’s trying to win time. But time for what?”
“Is she waiting for us to solve the case?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “However we’re supposed to do that.”
“There are some small-scale racial clashes in or around the school,” Erlendur said. “Niran’s mixed up in them somehow. There’s a minor altercation. Elias isn’t necessarily involved but Niran is. When Elias is attacked, Niran disappears or doesn’t come home. When he finally does show up he’s obviously had a major shock. Maybe he saw what happened. Maybe he only heard about it. He was in a state of shock when I found him in the rubbish store. He’d locked himself away in some private place in his mind where he felt safe. Anyway, Niran tells his mother what he knows and she responds by bundling him off into hiding. What does that tell us?”
“That they know what happened,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Niran knows and he’s told his mother.”
Erlendur looked at Elinborg.
“Something happened when Niran was alone with his mother,” she said. “That’s all we can be sure of. Anything else is conjecture. They don’t necessarily know anything. She’s already lost one son and she’s not prepared to lose the only one she has left.”
“What about that little dealer’s claim that Niran and his friends were selling dope?” Erlendur asked.
“You can’t trust a word that girl says,” Elinborg said.
“Could it be that Sunee no longer feels safe among us?” Erlendur said. “Here in Iceland? Could that explain why she’s hidden her son? We can’t begin to understand what it’s really like for immigrants in this country. We can’t begin to understand what it’s like for someone from the other side of the globe to move over here, settle, start a family and try to integrate into Icelandic society. It’s bound to be tough and I think it’s very hard for us to put ourselves in their shoes. Racism may not be an everyday occurrence here but we know that not everyone’s happy with the way society is going.”
“According to surveys, the majority of young Icelanders feel things have gone far enough,” Sigurdur Oli chipped in. “Which shows they’re not exactly keen on multiculturalism.”
“We want foreigners to come here and do shitty jobs at power stations, fish factories and as cleaners, then pack up and leave again when we don’t need them any more,” Elinborg said. “ ‘Thanks for the help, don’t hurry back!’ God forbid that we might get stuck with these people. But if they do insist on coming here, they can stay away from us. Like the Yanks on the Base who’ve always been kept safely behind fences. Wasn’t it official policy for years that no black people were allowed on the Base? I reckon that’s still a common attitude: that foreigners ought to be kept behind fences.”
“You can’t rule out the possibility that they erect the fences themselves,” Sigurdur Oli said. “It’s not a one-way street. I think you’re oversimplifying. There are also cases of immigrants not wanting to integrate, only marrying within their own group and so on. Wanting to close ranks and ignore what goes on in the wider community.”
“From what I hear, it’s worked out best in the West Fjords,” Elinborg said, “where a variety of nationalities, people from literally dozens of countries, live in a small area and respect each other’s cultural differences and backgrounds while trying to make a life for themselves in Iceland.”
“If I can continue,” Erlendur said, “what I think may have happened is that Sunee sought refuge among her own kind. She doesn’t trust us, so she’s taken Niran somewhere where she thinks he’ll be safer. I reckon we ought to organise our search on that basis. She’s turned to the people she trusts best for protection, her own kind.”
Elinborg nodded.
“Very probably,” she said. “So it’s not necessarily a question of what Niran knows or has done.”
“Only time will tell,” Erlendur said.
By midday the school staff had supplied them with the names of the boys who Niran was believed to spend most of his time with at school and in the neighbourhood. Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg took the list and set off. It contained four names, all of them boys from immigrant families who lived in the school’s catchment area: one of Thai origin, two from the Philippines and one from Vietnam. All except the Thai boy had been born in Asia, moved to Iceland after the age often, and had problems adapting to Icelandic society.
Erlendur spent the rest of the morning making the arrangements for Marion Briem’s funeral. He contacted the funeral director’s, who told him to leave it to them. A date was set and he placed an announcement of the death and funeral in the papers. He was not expecting a large turn-out and didn’t entertain the idea of a reception for long. Marion had left instructions for the funeral, including the name of a minister and a choice of hymns, and Erlendur followed them to the letter.
Once he had completed the preparations as best he could, he began his search for the stepfather that Marion had mentioned in connection with Andres, who might be the man that Andres had spotted by chance in the area. Erlendur traced the name of Andres’s mother and found his date of birth, then searched the register of Reykjavik residents for the period when he was growing up. According to the records Erlendur examined, the boy had been four years old when he lost his father. After that his mother was registered as living alone with her son. From what Erlendur could discover, Andres was her only child. If she had lived with anyone for any length of time, he or they were not registered at her home, apart from one man who turned out to have died thirteen years ago. Erlendur found the street names and numbers where the woman had lived. She had moved constantly, even within the same area, living in the city centre, in Skuggahverfi, in the suburb of Breidholt when it was under construction, and moved from there to Vogar and finally to Grafarvogur. She died early in the 1990s. At first glance, Erlendur could find no trace of the stepfather Marion had mentioned before dying.
Since he was digging through the police archives anyway, he decided to examine any reports of incidents linked to racial prejudice or hate crimes. Erlendur knew that other members of the CID had been detailed to look into that aspect of the case but he did not let this deter him. He generally did as he pleased, ignoring his place in the precise hierarchy of the investigation. In all, more than twenty detectives were working on Elias’s case, each assigned a specific task relating to the collection of information, surveillance of comings and goings from the country, or examination of transactions at car-rental companies and hotels in the city and surrounding area. They had also contacted the Bangkok police and enquired about any possible movements to or from the country by Sunee’s relatives. The Reykjavik CID were inundated with tip-offs every day, most of which were recorded and followed up, although this was a time-consuming process. Members of the public called in after watching the news or reading the papers, claiming to have important information about the case. Some of it was absurd and irrelevant: drunks claiming to have solved the case using nothing but their own ingenuity and even giving the names of relatives or acquaintances who were “a bunch of arseholes’. Every lead was investigated.