Black Skies (16 page)

The clip was also silent and yet words were clearly being spoken. The technicians could not distinguish them, however, nor could Sigurdur Óli work out what was being said, and it was then that the idea of a lip-reader came to him.

He would not have been interested in the film at all, but for what those twelve brief seconds failed to show. What caught Sigurdur Óli’s attention was what was hinted at. For the clip, however uninformative, told a very specific story; it was a silent witness to the misfortune and suffering endured by some of the most helpless members of society, giving a depressing promise of more and worse events than those it revealed. There was no reason to discount these fears, bearing in mind the manner in which the film clip had come into police hands. Experience suggested otherwise. Sigurdur Óli could not shake off the feeling that something much more harrowing would be revealed if the rest of the film could be found.

It was nearly six when he was called down to the lobby with the news that two women had arrived to see him. One, the lip-reader, was called Elísabet; the other, Hildur, was a sign-language interpreter. They exchanged introductions, then went up to Sigurdur Óli’s office where he had positioned a trolley carrying a DVD player and flat-screen TV. They took their seats on three chairs that he had arranged in front of the TV and he explained the situation in more detail for the lip-reader. The police had been sent a clip from a film but did not know exactly who it belonged to. It showed a possible crime, which seemed to have taken place at some indeterminate time in the past, and she might be able to help them by providing the missing soundtrack to the images. The sign-language interpreter conveyed his words as he was speaking. The two women could not have been more different: the lip-reader was around thirty, slender and petite, almost bird-like – she looked to Sigurdur Óli as fragile as a china doll – whereas the interpreter was a tall, immensely fat woman in her late fifties, with a booming voice. She had perfect
hearing
and it was fairly evident that she had never been mute, but what mattered was the unusual speed at which she was able to sign; nothing threw her, and she interpreted the lip-reader’s words clearly and concisely.

They watched the film. Then watched it again. Then a third time. What they saw was a boy of not much older than ten, who was trying to get away from the unseen person holding the camera. The boy was naked and fell off what appeared to be a couch or bed, lay on the floor for a moment, then crawled away from the camera, spider-like, looking directly either at the camera or at the person holding it, his lips moving. His grotesque efforts to escape were reminiscent of an animal in a trap. It was obvious that he was terrified of the cameraman and he appeared to be begging for mercy. The clip broke off as suddenly as it had begun, during a scene of helplessness and degradation. The suffering in the boy’s face distressed the two women as much as it had Sigurdur Óli when he first watched it. They both turned to him.

‘Who is it?’ Hildur asked. ‘Who’s the boy?’

‘We don’t know,’ Sigurdur Óli answered, and Hildur interpreted his words. ‘We’re trying to find out.’

‘What happened to him?’ asked Elísabet.

‘We don’t know that either,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘This is all we were sent. Can you tell us what the boy’s saying?’

‘It’s very hard to tell,’ Elísabet said via the interpreter. ‘I’ll need to see it again.’

‘You can watch it as many times as you like,’ said Sigurdur Óli.

‘Do you know who filmed this?’

‘No.’

‘It’s only short. Do you have any idea if there’s more?’

‘No. This is all we have.’

‘What year was it filmed?’

‘We don’t know but it’s probably old. We don’t have much to go
on
because there’s nothing in the frame that can be dated with any accuracy, and although we know that this type of film was in use up until 1990, there’s nothing to say that it wasn’t used more recently. The only thing we could conceivably go by is the boy’s haircut.’

Sigurdur Óli told the women that he had had three stills made and taken them to several barbershops with long-serving staff. When he showed them the pictures, all had made the same comment: the boy had the sort of cut that had been in fashion until about 1970, a short back and sides, with a long fringe.

‘So the film was made in the 1960s?’ Elísabet asked.

‘Possibly,’ replied Sigurdur Óli.

‘Weren’t lots of boys given a short back and sides in those days before being sent to work on farms over the summer?’ said Hildur. ‘I have two younger brothers who were born around 1960 and they were always trimmed like that before going to the country.’

‘You mean this might have been filmed somewhere in the countryside?’ said Sigurdur Óli.

Hildur shrugged.

‘It’s very difficult to see what he’s saying,’ she interpreted Elísabet’s comment, ‘but I think it could be Icelandic.’

They watched the clip again and Elísabet concentrated hard on the boy’s lip movements. The clip passed before their eyes again and again, ten times, twenty times, while Elísabet focused wholly on the boy’s mouth. Sigurdur Óli had tried himself to guess what the boy was saying, without success. He would have liked it to be a name, for it to transpire that he was addressing the cameraman by name, but knew it was unlikely to be that simple.

‘…
stop it
…’

The words were uttered by Elísabet, her eyes still fixed on the screen.

They emerged without emphasis, monotonous, robotic and a little distorted, her voice as high and clear as a child’s.

Hildur glanced from her to Sigurdur Óli.

‘I’ve never heard her speak before,’ she whispered in amazement.

‘…
stop it
…’ said Elísabet again. Then repeated: ‘
Stop it
.’

It was late in the evening before Elísabet finally felt fairly confident that she had made out the boy’s pleading words.

Stop it
.

Stop it
.

No more, please
…

Please, stop it
.

25

EARLIER THAT DAY
, while driving between barbershops with the film stills, Sigurdur Óli had made an effort to track down Andrés. He discovered that Andrés was registered at the same block of flats as the previous winter, so he drove there and banged on his door till the stairwell echoed. No one answered. He was considering forcing an entry when the door of the neighbouring flat opened and a woman of about seventy came out.

‘Are you the one making all this noise?’ She glared at Sigurdur Óli.

‘Do you know anything about Andrés’s whereabouts? Have you seen him recently?’ asked Sigurdur Óli, ignoring the woman’s angry expression.

‘Andrés? What do you want with him?’

‘Nothing. I just need to talk to him,’ said Sigurdur Óli, suppressing the impulse to tell the woman that it was none of her business.

‘Andrés hasn’t been around for ages,’ the woman said, giving Sigurdur Óli an appraising look.

‘He’s a bit of a tramp, isn’t he? An alcoholic?’ said Sigurdur Óli.

‘So what if he is?’ the woman replied, affronted. ‘He’s never bothered me. He’d do anything for you, he’s never noisy, never makes demands on other people. What does it matter if he has the odd drink?’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘And who are you, might I ask?’

‘I’m from the police,’ Sigurdur Óli answered, ‘and I need to talk to him. It’s nothing serious. I just need to see him. Can you tell me where he is?’

‘I haven’t a clue,’ the woman said, regarding Sigurdur Óli suspiciously.

‘Is it possible that he’s in his flat? In some sort of state which means he can’t hear me?’

Her eyes flitted to Andrés’s door.

‘You haven’t seen him for a long time,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘Has it occurred to you that he might be lying helpless in his flat?’

‘He gave me a key,’ the woman said.

‘You have a key to his flat?’

‘He said he was always losing his, so he asked me to keep a spare. He’s needed it sometimes too. Last time I saw Andrés was when he came to fetch the spare key.’

‘What sort of state was he in?’

‘Pretty rough, poor thing,’ admitted the woman. ‘He seemed very worked up, I don’t know why, but he told me not to worry about him.’

‘When was this?’

‘Late in the summer.’

‘Late summer!’

‘It’s perfectly normal for me not to see him for a while.’ The woman became defensive, as if she were somehow responsible for her neighbour.

‘Shouldn’t we open the door and check on him?’ suggested Sigurdur Óli.

The woman dithered. According to the smart copper plaque on her door, her name was Margrét Eymunds.

‘I can’t imagine that he would be in there,’ she said.

‘Wouldn’t it be better to make sure?’

‘I suppose it wouldn’t do any harm,’ she said. ‘Of course there’s a danger the poor man could have hurt himself. But you’re not to touch anything. I doubt he’d want the police snooping around his flat.’

She went and fetched the spare key, then unlocked Andrés’s door. As they stepped inside they were met by a shocking stench of filth and rotting food. Sigurdur Óli had been in this flat before and knew what to expect: the squalid evidence of an alcoholic existence. The flat was not large, so it did not take them long to assure themselves that Andrés was not lying there at death’s door or worse; in fact he was not there at all. Sigurdur Óli switched on the lights, revealing a scene of slovenly disorder.

He cast his mind back to the last time he had been there and what had passed between Andrés and Erlendur and himself. Andrés’s behaviour had been bizarre and he seemed to have been on a long bender. He had dropped hints that a dangerous man was living in the neighbourhood, a man he knew of old, who, from what they could gather, was a paedophile. But Andrés had obstinately refused to give them any more information about the man in question. They had found out by other means that he had been Andrés’s stepfather, a man called Rögnvaldur, who had used a number of aliases, including Gestur. After an initial sighting, he had given them the slip, however, and it did not help that all they had was Andrés’s limited and incoherent testimony, which they considered far from reliable. Andrés claimed that the man had ruined his life, that Rögnvaldur was a nightmare he could never wake from, and implied that he had committed a murder, but would not say a word more. Erlendur had taken this to mean that Andrés himself had been the
victim
of this ‘murder’, strange as it might seem; that he was referring obliquely to the suffering that Rögnvaldur had inflicted on him, which had blighted the rest of his life.

Sigurdur Óli could find no indications in the flat as to Andrés’s current whereabouts.

But there was one detail that took him by surprise amid the rubbish and neglect: Andrés had apparently been engaged in cutting up pieces of leather in the kitchen. Scraps of it littered the kitchen table and the floor around it, and a strong needle and thick thread lay on the table. Sigurdur Óli spent some time poring over the offcuts of leather, trying to deduce what Andrés had been up to. The woman tried to insist on his leaving, since Andrés was not at home, but he ignored her, stubbornly continuing to inspect the bits of leather, trying to assemble them mentally. There was some logic to them that escaped him at first, so he began to piece them together on the table in an attempt to work out what the man had been cutting out. Soon he stood back to find himself confronted by a square, with sides about forty centimetres long, out of which had been cut an oval piece that tapered towards the bottom.

Sigurdur Óli stared down at the table; at the needle and thread. There were a few small scraps of leather remaining, which he tried to fit into the picture. It was not very difficult and once they were in place he was met by the image of a face, with eyes and a mouth. It seemed, to Sigurdur Óli’s puzzlement, that Andrés had been making a mask of some kind.

Back at the station, Sigurdur Óli dug out Andrés’s police file. He had done time for theft and violence, though only for short stints. He was never a career criminal. Essentially, he was an alcoholic and drug addict who financed his habit largely by burglary and theft, and was sometimes forced to act in self-defence, or so he claimed
in
his statements to the police. People had often attacked Andrés unprovoked, in an attempt to take what was lawfully his, but he was quoted as saying that he wasn’t going to let any bloody bastard walk all over him.

Sigurdur Óli asked around among the experienced officers in an attempt to find out the latest news of Andrés. It turned out that he was pretty much out of sight, out of mind. Most people had forgotten all about Andrés, though one officer, at Sigurdur Óli’s insistence, rang a retired colleague and managed to obtain some further information. The man remembered Andrés clearly and mentioned that his chief friend and companion in the old days when both were living as down-and-outs in Reykjavík was a man called Hólmgeir, known as Geiri. Although straight nowadays and sober, with a regular job, he had spent many years in the gutter, well known to the police as a drunk and minor offender.

These days, Geiri was employed as a security guard on night shifts at a large furniture warehouse, part of an international chain, and was at work when Sigurdur Óli wanted to talk to him, so he decided to drop by and see him on his way home that evening. He had rung ahead and Hólmgeir, forewarned, let him in the back entrance. He was dressed in uniform, with a walkie-talkie fixed to one shoulder in a leather holster, a torch and other gear. There’s nothing like a convert, thought Sigurdur Óli, remembering that a mere decade earlier, Geiri had been on the streets.

Sigurdur Óli had already explained his business and asked him to think about it, so he weighed straight in, asking if Hólmgeir had any idea where Andrés might be living.

‘I’ve been racking my brains but I’m afraid I can’t be much help,’ said Hólmgeir, a fat man nearing fifty, who appeared to take pleasure in his uniform. His face bore evidence of past hardship and his voice was hoarse, as if from chronic catarrh.