“Was it you who fired Santa?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was it you who told him the news? Or did he receive a letter, or…?”

“I told him.”

“And how did he take it?”

“Not well. Understandably. He’d been working here for ages. Much longer than I have.”

“Do you think he could have been behind it, if anyone was?”

“Gudlaugur? No, I can’t imagine that. Gudlaugur? Doing that sort of thing? I think not. He was really not the joking sort. Absolutely not.”

“Did you know Gudlaugur was a child star?”

“A child star? How?”

“He made records. A choirboy.”

“I didn’t know that,” the manager said.

“Just one final thing,” Erlendur said, standing up.

“Yes?”

“Could you fix me up with a record player in my room?” Erlendur asked, and saw that the head of reception did not have the faintest idea what he was talking about.

When Erlendur went back into the lobby he saw the head of forensics coming up the stairs from the basement.

“How’s it going with the saliva you found on the condom?” Erlendur asked. “Have you checked the Cortisol?”

“We’re working on it. What do you claim to know about Cortisol?”

“I know that too much of it in the saliva can prove dangerous.”

“Sigurdur Oli was asking about the murder weapon,” the head of forensics said. “The pathologist doesn’t think it’s a particularly remarkable knife. Not very long, with a thin, serated edge.”

“So it’s not a hunting knife or a carving knife?”

“No, it sounds to me like a fairly unremarkable instrument,” the head of forensics said. “A pretty nondescript knife.”

Erlendur took the two records from Gudlaugur’s room up to his own, then called the hospital and asked for Valgerdur. He was put through to her department. Another woman answered. He asked for Valgerdur again. The woman said, “One moment, please,” and at last Valgerdur answered.

“Have you got any of those cotton wool buds left?” he asked.

“Is that Mr Deaths and Ordeals speaking?” she said.

Erlendur grinned.

“There’s a tourist at the hotel we need to test”

“Is it a rush job?”

“It will have to be done today.”

“Will you be there?”

“Yes.”

“I’m on my way”

Erlendur rang off. Mr Deaths and Ordeals, he chuckled to himself. He was supposed to meet Henry Wapshott at the hotel bar. He went down, sat at the bar and waited. The waiter asked if he wanted anything, but he declined. Changed his mind and called out to him to bring a glass of water. He looked along the shelves of drinks behind the bar, rows of bottles in all colours of the rainbow, rows of liqueurs.

They had found powdered glass, too minute to be seen, on the marble floor of the lounge. Traces of Drambuie on the drinks cabinet, Drambuie on the boy’s socks and on the staircase. They found fragments of glass in the broom and the vacuum cleaner. All the signs were that a bottle of liqueur had fallen onto the marble floor. The boy probably stepped in the puddle that it left, then ran straight up to his room. The marks on the staircase indicated that he ran rather than walked. Frightened little feet. They concluded that the boy broke the bottle, his father lost his temper and attacked him so brutally that he put him in hospital.

Elinborg had him taken to the police station on Hverfisgata for questioning, where she told him about the results of the forensic tests, the boy’s reaction when he was asked whether his father had hit him, and her personal conviction that he was the culprit. Erlendur was present at the interrogation. She informed the father that he was in the legal position of being a suspect and was allowed to have a lawyer present. He should have one. The father protested his innocence and repeated that he was astonished to be under suspicion simply because a liqueur bottle had fallen onto his floor.

Erlendur switched on the tape recorder in the interrogation room.

“What we believe happened is this,” Elinborg said, acting as if reading aloud from a report; she tried to put her emotions to one side. “The boy came home from school. It was just gone three o’clock. You came back shortly afterwards. We understand that you left work early that day. Maybe you were at home when it happened. For some reason the boy dropped a large bottle of Drambuie on the floor. Panicking, he ran up to his room. You flew into a rage, and more than that. You totally lost control of yourself and went up to the boy’s room to punish him. It got out of hand and you beat your son so badly that you then had to call an ambulance.”

The father watched Elinborg without saying a word.

“You used a weapon that we have not managed to identify, a rounded or at least blunt instrument; possibly you banged him against the head of the bed. You persistently kicked him. Before calling an ambulance you tidied up in the lounge. You wiped up the liqueur with three towels, which you threw in the dustbin outside the house. You vacuum-cleaned the tiniest fragments of glass. You swept the marble floor as well and gave it a quick scrub. You washed the cabinet carefully. You took the boy’s socks off and threw them in the dustbin. You used detergent on the stains on the stairs but did not manage to remove them completely.”

“You can’t prove a thing, since it’s rubbish anyway. The boy hasn’t said anything. He hasn’t said a word about who assaulted him. Why don’t you try to find his classmates?”

“Why didn’t you tell us about the liqueur?”

“It’s nothing to do with this.”

“And the socks in the dustbin? The little footprints on the staircase?”

“A liqueur bottle did get broken, but I was the one who broke it. It happened two days before my boy was attacked. I was getting myself a drink when I dropped it on the floor and it smashed. Addi saw this and it made him jump. I told him to be careful where he walked, but by then he had trodden in the spillage and ran up the stairs to his room. This has nothing to do with him being attacked and I must say this scenario astonishes me. You haven’t a shred of evidence! Has he said that I hit him? I doubt that. And he never will say it, because it wasn’t me. I’d never do anything like this to him. Never.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about it straight away?”

“Straight away?”

“When we found the stains. You didn’t say anything about it then.”

“This is precisely what I thought would happen. I knew you’d link that accident with Addi getting beaten up. I didn’t want to complicate matters. The boys at the school did it.”

“Your company’s heading for bankruptcy,” Elinborg said. “You’ve laid off twenty employees and expect to make more redundancies. I expect you’re under a lot of strain. You’re losing your house…”

“That’s just business,” he said.

“We have reason to believe you’ve used violence before.”

“Hey, wait a minute …”

“We checked the medical reports. Twice in the past four years he has broken his finger.”

“Have you got kids? Kids are always having accidents. This is nonsense.”

“A paediatrician remarked on the broken finger the second time and informed the child welfare agency. It was the same finger. The agency sent people to your house. Examined the conditions. Found nothing of note. The paediatrician came and found needlemarks on the back of the boy’s hand.”

The father said nothing.

Elinborg could not control herself.

“You bastard,” she hissed.

“I want to talk to my lawyer,” he said and looked away.

“I said, good morning!”

Erlendur returned to his senses and saw Henry Wapshott standing over him. Absorbed in his thoughts about the fleeing boy, he hadn’t noticed Wapshott walk into the bar or heard his greeting.