They took a statement from me and that was it.”
“And the man left you after the fight?” Erlendur said, thinking of lazy Niels.
“Yes.”
“With one hubcap missing?”
“Yes. He stormed off without bothering about the hubcap.”
“What did you do with it? Or did you ever find it?”
“I buried it. After you started asking about that bloke. Joi told me where he’d put it and I dug a little hole behind the house and buried it in the ground. You’ll find it there.”
“All right,” Erlendur said. “We’ll poke around behind the house and see if we can’t find it. But I still think you’re lying to us.”
“I don’t care,” Haraldur said. “You can think what you like.”
“Anything else?” Erlendur said.
Haraldur sat without saying a word. Perhaps he felt he had said enough. There wasn’t a sound in his little room. Noises were heard from the canteen and the corridor: old people wandering around, waiting for their next meal. Erlendur stood up.
“Thank you,” he said. “This will be useful. We should have been told this more than thirty years ago, but…”
“He dropped his wallet,” Haraldur said.
“His wallet?”
“In the fight. The salesman. He dropped his wallet. We didn’t find it until after he’d gone. It was where his car had been parked. Joi saw it and hid it. He wasn’t
“What did you do with it?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“I buried it with the hubcap,” Haraldur said, a sudden vague smile on his face. “You’ll find that there, too.”
“You didn’t want to return it?”
“I tried, but I couldn’t find the name in the phone book. Then you lot started asking about that bloke, so I hid it with the hubcap.”
“You mean Leopold wasn’t in the directory?”
“No, and nor was the other name.”
“The other name?” Sigurdur Oli said. “Did he have another name?”
“I couldn’t figure out why, but some documents in the wallet had the name he introduced himself by, Leopold, and on others there was a different name.”
“What name?” Erlendur asked.
“Joi was funny,” Haraldur said. “He was always hanging around the spot I buried the hubcap. Sometimes he’d lie on the ground or sit down where he knew it was. But he never dared dig it up. Never dared touch it again. He knew he’d done something wrong. He cried in my arms after that fight. The poor boy.”
“What name was it?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“I can’t remember,” Haraldur said. “I’ve told you all you need to know, so bugger off. Leave me alone.”
Erlendur drove to the abandoned farm just outside Mosfellsbaer. A cold northerly wind was getting up and autumn was descending over the land. He felt chilly when he walked behind the house. He pulled his coat tighter around him. At one time there had been a fence around the yard, but it had broken up long before and the yard was now mostly overgrown with grass. Before they left, Haraldur had given Erlendur a fairly detailed description of where he had buried the hubcap.
He took a shovel from the farmhouse, paced out the distance from the wall and began to dig. The hubcap would not be buried very deep. The digging made him hot, so he took a rest and lit a cigarette. Then he carried on. He dug down about one metre but found no sign of the hubcap. He began widening the hole. He took another break. It was a long time since he had done manual work. He smoked another cigarette.
About ten minutes later there was a chink when he thrust the shovel’s blade down, and he knew he had found the hubcap from the black Falcon.
He dug carefully around it, then got down on his knees and scraped the dirt away with his hands. Soon the entire hubcap was visible and he lifted it carefully from the earth. Although rusty, the hubcap was clearly from a Ford Falcon. Erlendur stood up and knocked it against the wall, and the dirt fell away. The hubcap made a ringing sound when it struck the wall.
Erlendur put it down and peered into the hole. He still had to find the wallet that Haraldur had described. It was not yet visible, so he knelt down again, leaned over the hole and dug away at the earth with his hands.
Everything that Haraldur had told him was true. Erlendur found the wallet in the ground nearby. After carefully extracting it he stood up. It was a regular, long, black leather wallet. The moisture in the ground meant that the wallet had begun to rot and he had to handle it carefully because it was in tatters. When he opened it he saw a cheque book, a few Icelandic banknotes long since withdrawn from circulation, a few scraps of paper and a driving licence in Leopold’s name. The damp had seeped through and the photograph was ruined. In another compartment he found another card. It looked like a foreign driving licence and the photograph on it was not so badly damaged. He peered at it, but did not recognise the man.
As far as Erlendur could tell the licence had been issued in Germany, but it was in such a bad condition that only the odd word was legible. He could see the owner’s name clearly, but not his surname. Erlendur stood holding the wallet and looked up.
He recognised the name on the driving licence.
He recognised the name Emil.
35
Lothar Weiser shook him, shouted at him and slapped him repeatedly around the face. Gradually he came to his senses and saw how the pool of blood under Emil’s head had spread across the dirty concrete floor. He looked into Lothar’s face.
“I killed Emil,” he said.
“What the hell happened?” Lothar hissed. “Why did you attack him? How much did you know about him? How did you track him down? What are you doing here, Tomas?”
“I followed you,” he said. “I saw you and followed you. And now I’ve killed him. He said something about Ilona.”
“Are you still thinking about her? Aren’t you ever going to forget that?”
Lothar went over to the door and closed it carefully. He looked around the shed as if searching for something. Tomas stood riveted to the spot, watching Lothar as if in a trance. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness and he could now see better inside the shed. It was full of piles of old rubbish: chairs and gardening tools, furniture and mattresses. Scattered across the bench he noticed various pieces of equipment, some of which he did not recognise. There were telescopes, cameras of different sizes and a large tape recorder that seemed to be connected to something resembling a radio transmitter. He also noticed photographs lying around, but could not see clearly what they showed. On the floor by the bench was a large black box with dials and buttons whose function eluded him. Beside it was a brown suitcase that the black box could fit inside. It appeared to be damaged — the dials were smashed and the back had dropped open onto the floor.
He was still mesmerised. In a strange, dreamlike state. What he had done was so unreal and remote that he could not begin to face it. He looked at the body on the floor and at Lothar tending to it.
“I thought I recognised him…”
“Emil could be a real bastard,” Lothar said.
“Was it him? Who told you about Ilona?”
“Yes, he drew our attention to her meetings. He worked for us in Leipzig. At the university. He didn’t care who he betrayed or what secrets he spilled. Even his best friends weren’t safe. Like you,” Lothar said and stood up again.
