Season of the Witch (38 page)

Rúnar is gone. On the dining room table is a note:
Thanks for your help.

After a strong coffee, accompanied by a chewy old pastry with hardened icing I found at the back of the fridge, I’m ready for anything.

Or I think I am.

I get my cell phone, remove the SIM card, and replace it with Skarphédinn’s.

The strings of letters and numbers in the
Calendar
remain as impenetrable as ever. I can’t make head or tail of them. Frustrated, I sling the phone down on the table, open the garden door, and have a cigarette. Then I close the door again, return to my room, and open Polly’s cage. Enjoying her freedom, she flies into the living room and perches on the curtain rail. Standing in the middle of the room, I look around me at the bookcase, CD racks, and TV. I’m so absorbed in my thoughts that nothing makes an impression. Short-term memory is slugging it out with long-term memory. Somewhere at the intersection, a vague idea is emerging.

I slump onto the sofa and light up another cigarette. I pick up the remote and check what’s on TV. Nothing.

And there’s the answer. Staring me in the face. The
Street Rider
cover is on top of the TV.

I press
Play,
then fast-forward to the scene that introduces the secret code used by the teen gang, led by motorcycle antihero Skarphédinn Valgardsson. Of course that was before the days of
cell phones, at a time when the words
code
and
encryption
were mostly identified with international espionage. In the movie, the kids exchange written notes containing coded messages. I remember secret codes like that in children’s books I read as a kid. In
Street Rider
, the kids use a simple substitution code: letters for numbers, numbers for letters. A becomes 1, B is 2, C is 3, D is 4, and so on. For numbers, the process is reversed.

Well, well
, I think to myself. I’m rather pleased with myself—even though codes don’t come much simpler.

I pick up the phone and pen and paper. I trace my way back, day by day, decrypting letter by letter by letter, digit by digit by digit, back for weeks and months in the cell phone record of the life of Skarphédinn Valgardsson.

Just before midnight, I call a halt.

I decide to do a spot check on my decryption method. I pick a series of digits that looks like a cell phone number. On the landline, I dial the number.

“What?” answers a grumpy voice, rudely awakened. It’s Ásgeir Eyvindarson of Yumm.

I hang up.

MURDER SOLVED BY THE VICTIM

A text message sent by an eight-year-old Belgian girl just before she was murdered led to the apprehension of her killer. The girl’s father, who was traveling at the time of his daughter’s death, did not see the message until the following day. The girl had written that her father’s girlfriend was trying to kill her. The father immediately contacted the police, who arrested the perpetrator.

Wow, that was an easy case for the police
, I think as I read the article in the paper. It’s all in the cells, as Gunnhildur said. But my case isn’t quite so straightforward. There are too many possibilities—not least in view of the affection and respect Skarphédinn apparently enjoyed. A jealous husband from downstairs? A young high school girl in love, spurned and out for revenge? A respected businessman who wanted to cut loose from the encumbrances of personal life and then conceal the evidence? Addled debt-collectors? Desperate stoners?

I’m spoilt for choice.

With the idea of clarifying the picture a little, I call a DJ on Akureyri local radio. I tell him I heard his show on the Saturday before Palm Sunday, when he played a request,
Season of the Witch
, for Skarphédinn and the other kids in the Akureyri High School Drama Group.

“Yeah?” he asks.

“I was wondering if you could tell me who sent in the request for the song? Whether you have a computer record or anything?”

“No need for a computer,” he replies. “If the boy hadn’t disappeared a few days later and then turned up dead, I’m sure I’d have forgotten it by now. But I remember.”

“And?”

“It was some guy who rang up. Said his name was Mördur.”

Oh, yes. Indeed.

I’m rudely awakened from my thoughts by Ásbjörn barging into my closet. He’s been cheerful for the past few days, and this has been manifested mainly in the form of excruciating comic stories and appalling jokes. The only thing to do is the smiley face: force the corners of my mouth upward and share his happiness.

“Einar,” he eagerly asks, “have you heard the one about the pastor baptizing the child?”

Ugh
, I think.
Please, no
. “No, Ásbjörn, I’m sure I haven’t heard it. Why do you suppose that might be?”

“Because I haven’t told it to you, of course!”

“And now you’re going to?”

“Absolutely! Right now,” he replies, glowing with pleasure. “There was a pastor who was asked to baptize a little boy. He was a little older than the usual age, about three years old. The boy was quite calm throughout the ceremony, not crying and wailing
like infants often are when they’re baptized. The pastor was pleased, and he suggested that perhaps it would be a good idea not to baptize children until they were old enough to understand. Then the pastor poured the baptismal water on the child. The boy glared at the pastor and said:
Why did you splash me, asshole?
Hahahahaha!”

Ásbjörn watches for my reaction.

“Haha,” is all I can manage. “Odd that I’ve never heard that one before. It’s such a funny story.”

“I got it from Ólafur Gísli. He knows hundreds of hilarious stories like that.”

“Hilarious,” I say, gravely. “It’s wonderful that the two of you are upholding the old tradition of comic storytelling.”

Ásbjörn’s happy expression gives way to a more anxious look. “But there’s one thing we’ve got to deal with, Einar.”

“Only one?”

“There have been much fewer news articles and features from Akureyri in the paper recently.”

“I do the
Question of the Day
every week,” I counter.

He doesn’t allow me to distract him. “It’s really nothing to do with me, except that it gradually has an impact on sales. Retail sales are down.”

“You know I’ve been focusing on these big cases. They’re going to sell loads of papers when the time comes.”

“When the time comes. That’s the thing. I gather from Ólafur Gísli that the case is going nowhere at present.”

“You know, I disagree. I think the case is going to be solved before long.”

“Have you got something new?”

“Not quite yet. But soon. Hopefully.”

Ásbjörn shuffles uncertainly.

“You must be sure to let Ólafur Gísli know about anything important. That’s what we agreed, isn’t it?”

I nod.

“But since you’re tied up on that case, and Jóa’s helping out in the office, I’ve written a few news items.”

He hands me three pages of printout: reports on road-building, a twin-town event, and a prediction that numbers of tourists in north Iceland will be up this summer.

“Great,” I say. “That’ll solve the sales problem for now.”

“But you’ll have to use your byline. Trausti will never agree to let me send in any news from here.”

Well, that’s the end of my professional reputation and prospects, then.

And now it’s time for action.

Unlike the little Belgian girl, Skarphédinn didn’t identify his killer on his cell phone. Nor did he leave a detailed record of his last minutes on earth. But he wrote plenty of clues. All I need is some more information for the clues to be transformed into evidence. And the source of that information is a young man who is teetering on the brink of desperation.

“You stole my SIM card.”

Rúnar sits facing me in Mördur Njálsson’s elegant living room. I’m soaking wet, having been caught in a typical northern wind-whipped rainstorm. The downpour is battering at the windows, drumming on the roof, in a heavy rhythmic riff to accompany this painful conversation. It’s good for the vegetation, anyway.

“It wasn’t your SIM card, it was Skarphédinn’s.”

He gazes down at his hands.

“Why did he get you to buy a cell phone and SIM card for him?”

No reply.

“Because,” I answer my own question, “he was covering his tracks. He used the cell phone to keep his records. He wanted to be sure there was nothing to connect it to him. So he made you an accessory.”

Rúnar looks up.

“The phone isn’t only his ‘little black book’ of all his sexual conquests and that kind of thing. It’s really quite a dangerous collection of information. For some people, anyway.”

The recalcitrant expression vanishes to be replaced by astonishment.

“How do you know?”

“I managed to break the code.”

“How? I didn’t get anywhere with it. It’s just strings of letters and numbers.”

“The solution was in an old teen movie.”

He stares at me.

“The teen movie you lent me.”

“
Street Rider
? How on earth? I haven’t seen it since I was a kid.”

I explain to him how his brother used the code to encrypt information about his extensive dealings in legal and illegal drugs.

“Rúnar,” I say. I’m being as friendly and unthreatening as I know how.

He’s shaking from head to foot.

“Rúnar, it’s over.”

He shakes his head.

“This is a good thing for you,” I go on. “You can relax now. Those sharks who’ve been after you for the phone will have other things on their minds. And they were just minnows playing at being sharks. The king of the sharks is someone else entirely.”

A wave of tension passes visibly across his fresh, childlike face.

“The real shark is the owner of this apartment you’re living in.”

Slowly, he nods in agreement.

“Why did you point me toward Mördur?”

Rúnar’s trembling fingers are drumming on the tiled top of the coffee table.

“You must have wanted him to be caught?”

He looks up at me with moist eyes. “When we met, when I was on my way to Sólrún’s funeral, that was the way I felt. I hated him, and I hated Skarpi.”

“For what they did to Sólrún? The drugs?”

“I wasn’t thinking clearly. I shouldn’t have…”

“Yes, you should. It was the right thing to do. And that’s why you did it.”

Tears are pouring down his face, like the rain outside the window.

“How did it start?”

He sniffs.

“It started down south, didn’t it? When Skarpi went there to act in
Street Rider
?”

Rúnar gets a grip on himself. “Yes. It started there. I was only nine, but I remember it all as if it happened yesterday. When Skarpi came home, he was a different person. It was as if he’d decided to become a different person.”

“What kind of a person?”

“Someone who does exactly what he wants. Someone who gets other people to do what he wants.”

“Did he become addicted to drugs?”

He shakes his head. “Skarpi never took dope. Never drank. Never smoked.”

“So he was a fine role model? He was the natural leader, respected by all?”

“He didn’t want to do anything that might weaken him. He wouldn’t allow anything to make it more difficult for him to become what he wanted.”

I recall Dr. Karl Hjartarson’s description of narcissistic personality disorder. It didn’t strike me then, but it does now. He told me NPD manifests as an absence of morals or conscience, along with delusional ideas about the nature of success, power, and talent. “There was a recent case of a British teenager, an outstanding student, convicted of murdering his parents, who had done everything for him,” the doctor told me. The adoring parents had the audacity to criticize their son for being careless with money, and they didn’t like his girlfriend. For that he beat them to death with a hammer, then stabbed them twenty or thirty times with a kitchen knife, so the bodies were almost unrecognizable when they were discovered some six weeks later. The son had gone off on a long vacation abroad, using his dead parents’ money. He was planning to enter medical school on his return. “Instead he found himself serving a life sentence, with a diagnosis of NPD. He had given the impression of a completely normal, promising young man,” Karl told me.

“I went to your place the night before last,” I tell Rúnar. “Your dad’s addicted to drugs, isn’t he?”

He looks down. “Dad’s a loser. A loser and a junkie.”

“He worked as a pharmacist before he got ill—I suppose he got addicted to his own drugs?”

No answer.

“He was no role model for Skarphédinn. He’s a poster boy for what not to do. Do you think that’s why your brother became what he was?”

“I don’t know. But his experience down south convinced him that he could control people by exploiting their weaknesses. And then they would do whatever he wanted.”

“And he met someone who thought the same way he did? Mördur Njálsson?”

“Yes.”

“And Skarpi encouraged Mördur to move up here to the north, so together they would get rich and powerful? Gain control of young people here in Akureyri and, in due course, older people too?”