Black Skies (12 page)

Sigurdur Óli opened the door to the corridor.

‘I lent it to my brother,’ said Sara in a low voice.

‘What did you say?’

‘My brother borrowed the car,’ the girl said, louder this time. The look of defiance was gradually fading from her face.

‘Who’s he? What does he do?’

‘He doesn’t do anything. I sometimes lend him the car. He was driving it that evening, but I don’t know where he went or what he was up to.’

‘So why did you lie to me?’

‘He’s always getting into trouble. When you started asking about the car and where I’d been, I figured he might have done something stupid. But there’s no way I’m going to prison for his sake. He had the car.’

Sigurdur Óli fixed Sara with a penetrating glare, but she kept her gaze lowered. He wondered if she was lying again.

‘Why should I believe you?’

‘I don’t care what you believe. He had the car. That’s all I know. It’s not my problem. Ask him.’

‘What was he doing? What did he tell you?’

‘Nothing. We don’t talk much. He’s …’ Sara trailed off.

‘You just lend him your car,’ Sigurdur Óli finished for her.

Sara met Sigurdur Óli’s gaze. ‘No … I lied about that too,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘He didn’t borrow the car, he stole it. I was late for work the next day thanks to him. Had to take a taxi. My car was just missing from its parking space. He may be my brother but he’s a total dickhead.’

Sigurdur Óli learned that Sara’s brother was called Kristján and that she had stopped lending him her car a long time ago. He never kept his word; he had already lost his licence twice and often could
not
be bothered to bring the car back or else was incapable of doing so. On those occasions, rather than take the risk that her battered Micra might be sitting in the town centre, accumulating parking tickets, she would have to fetch it herself. As a result she would not lend him the car any more – or indeed money or any of her other possessions. He had stolen cash from her too, even taken her credit card once, as well as belongings from her flat that he would sell to buy drugs. He was forever in trouble, why she had no idea, since he had had no worse an upbringing than she had. Their parents were both teachers. There were five kids in all, four of them living respectable lives, but he had always been at odds with everyone and everything. The evening he took the car he had dropped in to see her, but as so often he had been restless and twitchy and only stayed briefly.

When she woke up the next day to go to work, she had been unable to find her car keys, then discovered that the car itself was missing.

Later, Sigurdur Óli checked whether Kristján was known to the police but there was nothing in the files. Following Sara’s directions, he drove over to where she believed her brother was living, in a basement flat owned by a friend. Officially he was still domiciled with his parents but had not in reality lived there in the last two years. Nor did he have a regular job. He had lasted precisely a week in his most recent employment at a twenty-four-hour grocery store, before being sacked for pilfering from the till on an almost daily basis.

Sigurdur Óli knocked on the door. The flat was located in a block in the Fell neighbourhood but had its own entrance. He knocked again and, getting no response, tried the bell, but there was no sound from within. Next he tried peering through the window that faced onto a dreary communal back garden but could see nothing of interest, only beer cans and rubbish littering all the surfaces, and
other
signs of squalor. Returning to the front door, he banged on it again, finally giving it a resounding kick.

At last a scrawny figure in underpants answered the door. He had a corpse-like pallor, unkempt shoulder-length hair and a grungy, hung-over air.

‘What’s going on?’ he mumbled, squinting blearily at Sigurdur Óli.

‘I’m looking for Kristján. Is that you?’

‘Me, nah …’

‘Then do you know where he is?’

‘What about him? Why –’

‘Is he in the flat?’

‘No.’

‘Are you expecting him?’

‘No. Anyway, who are you?’

‘I’m from the police and I need to get hold of him. Do you know where he might be?’

‘Well, he won’t be showing his face round here – he owes me big time for rent and that. If you see him you can tell him to pay up. Why are you from the police?’

‘Do you know where he might be?’ repeated Sigurdur Óli, trying to see past him into the flat. He did not believe a word the little runt said. Uncertain what the question ‘Why are you from the police?’ meant, he did not even attempt to answer it.

‘You can try the Hard Hat, he often hangs out there,’ the boy answered. ‘He’s a real basket case, man. A real basket case,’ he repeated, as if to emphasise that this did not apply to him.

The bartender at the Hard Hat knew Kristján all right, though he had not seen him recently and reckoned that the bar tab he had run up might be something of a deterrent. He smiled as he said this, as if it was no skin off his nose if someone owed the owner money. It was shortly after midday and the few customers were
huddled
over their beer glasses either by the bar or round a table. They regarded Sigurdur Óli with curiosity. He was not one of the regulars at this time of day, and they eavesdropped on every word that passed between him and the bartender. Sigurdur Óli had not yet revealed that he was from the police when a man of about thirty unexpectedly came to his assistance.

‘I saw Kiddi at Bíkó yesterday; I think he’s started working there,’ he volunteered.

‘Which branch of Bíkó?’

‘The one on Hringbraut.’

Sigurdur Óli recognised Kristján immediately from his sister’s description. It was true: he had just been taken on by the west Reykjavík branch of the DIY chain. Sigurdur Óli watched him before making his move, and observed that Kristján did his utmost to avoid any contact with customers, pretending to busy himself by the racks of screws but moving over to the light bulbs as soon as a customer approached, only to retreat from there slap bang into a man who said he needed help choosing a paintbrush. Kristján claimed to be busy and told the man to ask another member of staff. He had clocked Sigurdur Óli and was evidently nervous that he was going to ask for help when Sigurdur Óli finally managed to corner him.

‘Are you Kristján?’ he asked directly.

Kristján admitted that he was. The moment he set eyes on him, Sigurdur Óli realised that this could not be the man who had sprinted with such a terrific turn of speed towards the Kleppur mental hospital before vanishing into the night. He was not even convinced that such a feeble specimen would be able to lift a baseball bat, let alone wield it. Kristján cut an unimpressive figure: about twenty years old, his Bíkó uniform hanging from his skinny body like dirty laundry. Sheepish was the word that sprang to mind.

‘I’m from the police,’ Sigurdur Óli said, taking in their surroundings as he spoke. They were standing in the shelter of shelves
displaying
gardening tools, where Kristján was pretending to arrange the pruning shears. ‘I’ve just been talking to your sister,’ Sigurdur Óli continued, ‘and she told me you stole her car.’

‘That’s a lie, I didn’t steal it,’ Kristján said. ‘She lent it to me. And she got it back too.’

‘Where did you go in it?’

‘You what?’

‘What did you need the car for?’

Kristján hesitated. Avoiding Sigurdur Óli’s eye, he put down the shears and picked up a plastic bottle of weedkiller.

‘That’s my business,’ he said, with an unconvincing show of bravado.

‘The car was parked in a street not far from the Laugarás cinema, near where a woman was attacked and murdered on the same evening that you had use of the car. We know you were in the vicinity when the crime was committed.’

Kristján gaped at Sigurdur Óli, who pressed on before the boy could collect his wits.

‘What were you doing with the car? Why did you leave it behind overnight?’

‘It’s just that there’s been some kind of, some kind of misunderstanding,’ Kristján stammered.

‘Who were you with?’ Sigurdur Óli demanded. He spoke in a brusque, impatient voice, taking a step closer. ‘We know there were two of you. Who was with you? And why did you attack the woman?’

However Kristján may have prepared himself for this eventuality, his mind went blank when it came to the crunch. Sigurdur Óli had often seen boys like Kristján lose their nerve. They would stand in front of him, full of lies and defiance, answering back, denying everything and telling him to fuck off, then quite suddenly they would crumple, abandoning their insolence and becoming pathetically cooperative. Looking even more sheepish, Kristján replaced
the
weedkiller so clumsily that he knocked over three other bottles in the process, then stooped to pick them up and return them to the shelf. Sigurdur Óli watched his efforts dispassionately, offering no help.

‘I can’t believe Sara blabbed to you,’ Kristján said.

You contemptible little creep, thought Sigurdur Óli.

19

SIGURDUR ÓLI HAD
no interest whatsoever in learning how Kristján had gone off the rails. He had heard countless similar sob stories, used either as an excuse for a career of criminality, or as proof of the mess the welfare state was in. It was enough for him to know that Kristján had messed up to the point where he was up to his neck in debts, mostly drugs-related, and owed money all over town, even, in two instances, to individuals based in other parts of the country. Kristján was not much of an earner either; he managed to score casual jobs here and there, as there were more than enough to go round these days, but for the most part he loafed about, idle and shiftless. He scrounged loans for as long as he could get away with it, particularly from banks and savings institutions, managing to amass an array of debit and credit cards, which had now been passed on as bad debts to official debt-collection agencies. But it was the thought of another kind of debt collector that made Kristján nervous.

He had broken the law and got away with it, though he was not prepared to go into details for Sigurdur Óli, and had a history of
using
girls, sucking them dry financially before they eventually got wise to him. One prospective father-in-law, a former championship-winning footballer, had beaten him to a pulp when he discovered that Kristján had stolen valuables from his house and pawned them.

Some of this information had been supplied by his sister Sara; the rest Kristján explained to Sigurdur Óli down at the station on Hverfisgata.

For it seemed that Kristján was not averse to talking, now that he was in the hands of the police. Of course, it helped that he was suspected of being party to a murder and was therefore anxious to clear his name, but Sigurdur Óli thought that this was not the only reason. It was as if Kristján had never spoken to anyone about his life and after some initial vacillation and awkwardness, the floodgates opened and out poured episodes from his past and encounters with people who had led him astray. To begin with, his account was incoherent but gradually he managed to impose some order on the tale and one name began to crop up repeatedly, that of a certain Thórarinn who drove a delivery van for a living.

If Kristján’s word was anything to go by, Thórarinn was both a dealer and a debt collector, a common arrangement, which made for efficiency. Kristján did not think he imported drugs on any large scale but he was a hard man with little tolerance for people who owed him money, which was how Kristján had ended up in his hands. Since Kristján was seldom able to pay for his habit, and no amount of threats or beatings did any good, Thórarinn had started to use him instead for small jobs in part payment for the drugs. These ranged from being sent out to buy alcohol or groceries to picking up new consignments from smugglers or cannabis farmers, since Thórarinn avoided undertaking such errands personally. Nor did Thórarinn touch drugs himself, though he could drink anyone under the table, according to Kristján. A former athlete and now a family man with a wife and three children, he was careful to stay
under
the radar and often claimed that the drugs money was his pension and that he would quit the business once he had raised enough. Kristján frequently had to do jobs for him in the van and his wages went towards paying off his debts.

Sigurdur Óli studied Kristján as he sat facing him in the interview room, a miserable, hunched figure. He was inclined to take his statement with a pinch of salt, though he was prepared to believe that this feckless boy was effectively a slave to his dealer. His request to smoke had been met with a flat refusal, and he had received short shrift from Sigurdur Óli when he asked if he had anything for him to eat. Finally, he asked if he could go to the Gents but that was refused as well.

‘You can’t ban me from that,’ Kristján objected.

‘Oh, shut up,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘So, what happened on Monday evening?’

‘He didn’t want to use the van,’ Kristján said. ‘So he asked me to get hold of a car. Ordered me, more like. I told him I didn’t own one and he said to talk to my sister. I’d mentioned her to him, you see, and he knew she had a car.’

‘Did he tell you what he was going to do with it?’

‘No, he was just going to return it to me later that evening.’

‘You didn’t go with him?’

‘No.’

‘Did he go alone?’

‘Yes, I think so. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it.’

‘Is he always that careful? Taking the precaution of obtaining a car specially?’

‘He’s very careful,’ Kristján confirmed.

‘Have you met him since he borrowed the car?’

‘I … he dropped into Bíkó the next day,’ Kristján said after a pause. ‘Only for a minute. He told me where he’d left the car and that I wasn’t to mention to anyone that he’d borrowed it and that
we
mustn’t be in touch for the next few weeks or months or whatever. Then he just walked out. I spoke to Sara and told her where the car was. She went ballistic.’

‘Did this Thórarinn tell you what business he had with the woman in the house?’