She gave Sigurdur Oli a look, as if she was giving him important advice.

“When I came out, only a few minutes later, there was this terrible scratch on my car.”

“Was it early in the morning?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“Yes, I was on my way to lectures.”

“How long ago was this?”

“A week or so.”

“And you saw who did it?”

“I’m sure it was them,” the woman said, stubbing out her cigarette. There was a small bowl of toffees on the table. She put one in her mouth and proffered the bowl to Sigurdur Oli who declined.

“What did you see?”

“I told the police all this last week but they didn’t seem very interested in the scratch at the time.”

“There have been other incidents,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Yours is not the only car they’ve vandalised. We want to catch them.”

“It was about eight o’clock,” she said. “Still pitch black, of course, but there’s a light by the entrance to the block and as I was on my way upstairs I saw two boys walk past. They can’t have been more than about fifteen, both carrying schoolbags. I told the police all this.”

“Did you notice which way they were going?”

“Towards the chemist’s.”

“The chemist’s?”

“And the school,” the woman said, chewing her toffee. “Where the boy was murdered.”

“Why do you think those boys scratched your car?”

“Because it wasn’t scratched when I ran upstairs and it was when I came back down. They were the only people I saw that morning. I’m sure they were hiding somewhere, laughing at me. What kind of people scratch cars? Tell me that. What kind of bastards are they?”

“Pathetic losers,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Would you recognise them again if you saw them?”

“I’m not a hundred per cent sure it was them.”

“No, I know that.”

“One had long, fair hair. They were wearing anoraks. The other had a woolly hat on. They were both sort of gangling.”

“Could you recognise them from photos?”

“Maybe. You lot didn’t bother to offer me the chance the other day.”

Erlendur shut the door when he got back to his office on Hverfisgata. He sat down at his desk with his hands in his lap and stared into space with unseeing eyes. He had made a mistake. He had broken one of the golden rules that he had always tried to obey. The first rule that Marion Briem had taught him: nothing is as you think it is. He had been over-confident. Arrogant. He had forgotten the caution designed to protect him from blundering when he did not know the terrain. Arrogance had led him astray. He had overlooked other obvious possibilities; something that should not have happened to him.

He tried to remember the phone calls, what the woman had said, what it had been possible to glean from her voice, what time of day she had phoned. He had misinterpreted everything she said. It can’t go on like this, he suddenly remembered her saying in her first phone call. In the most recent call he had refused to listen to her.

He knew that the woman wanted his help. She had something to hide and it was torturing her, so she had turned to him. There was only one possible explanation. If she was not the missing woman, it could only be connected to one case. He was handling the investigation into Elias’s death. The phone calls must have been linked to that. It couldn’t be anything else. This woman had information that might help the investigation into the child’s murder and he had told her to get lost.

Erlendur slammed his clenched fists on the desk as hard as he could, sending papers and forms flying.

He kept going over and over the question of what the woman might have been trying to tell him but simply could not work it out. He could only hope that she would call him again, although that was hardly likely after the way he had treated her the last time.

He heard a knock and Elinborg put her head round the door. She saw the papers on the floor and looked at Erlendur.

“Is everything all right?”

“Did you want something?”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Elinborg said, shutting the door behind her.

“Any news?”

“Sigurdur Oli’s going over photos of the older pupils at the school with some car owner. A couple of them were loitering outside her block of flats when her car was vandalised.”

Elinborg began to pick up the papers from the floor.

“Leave them,” Erlendur said and started to help her.

“The pathologist is examining the body,” she said. “The woman appears to have drowned and on first impression there are no signs of anything suspicious. She’s been in the sea for at least two to three weeks.”

“I should have known better,” Erlendur said.

“So?”

“I made an error of judgement.”

“Come on, you weren’t to know.”

“I should have talked to her instead of being hostile. I judged her for what she had done. And it wasn’t even her.”

Elinborg shook her head.

“That woman phoned me so that I would reassure her and persuade her to help us, because she knows it’s the right thing to do. And I reacted by cutting her off. She knows something about Elias’s murder. A woman of uncertain age with a slightly husky voice, perhaps from smoking. Now, after the event, I realise how worried and frightened and apprehensive she was. I thought the missing woman and her husband were playing some kind of game. I couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t work out what they were up to and it got to me. Then it turns out I’d got the wrong end of the stick entirely.”

“What was she thinking of? Why did she throw herself in the sea?”

“I think . . .” Erlendur trailed off.

“What?”

“I think she’d fallen in love. She sacrificed everything for love: family, children, friends. Everything. Someone told me she had changed, become a different person. As if she’d found a new lease of life, discovered her true self during that time.”

Erlendur stopped again, lost in thought.

“And? What happened?”

“She found out that she’d been deceived. Her husband had started cheating on her. She was humiliated. All her . . . everything she had done, everything she had sacrificed, was for nothing.”

“I’ve heard about men like that,” Elinborg said. “They’re addicted to the first flush of passion and when that begins to fade, they go looking for it elsewhere.”

“But her love was genuine,” Erlendur said. “And she couldn’t bear it when she found out that it wasn’t reciprocated.”

25

Sigurdur Oli rang the doorbell at the entrance to a four-storey block of flats close to the school. He stood and waited, then rang the bell again. A cold wind blew about his legs in the meagre shelter by the front door and he stamped his feet. It seemed no one was home. The block, which was not unlike the one where Sunee lived with her sons, was in a poor state of repair. It had not been painted for a long time and the wall by the entrance was still stained with soot from a fire in the rubbish store. Dusk was falling. The morning’s snow flurries had deteriorated into a blizzard, cars were getting stuck on the roads and the Met Office had issued a severe weather warning for that evening. Sigurdur Oli’s thoughts went to Bergthora. He had not heard from her all day. She had already left for work when he woke up at the crack of dawn and lay alone with his thoughts.

The entryphone emitted a crackle.

“Hello?” he heard a voice say.

Sigurdur Oli introduced himself, explaining that he was from the police.

There was silence on the entryphone.

“What do you want?” the voice asked eventually.

“I want you to open the door,” Sigurdur Oli said, stamping his feet.

A long moment passed before the lock clicked and Sigurdur Oli entered the hall. He climbed up to the landing where the owner of the voice lived and knocked on the door. It opened and a boy of about fifteen peered shiftily into the corridor.