Gabriel paused.

“One of the last times I talked to him, he said his father had robbed him of his childhood. Turned him into a freak.”

“A freak?”

“That was the word he used, but I didn’t know any more than you what he meant by it. That was shortly after the accident”

“Accident?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I suppose Gudlaugur would have been in his teens. He moved away from Hafnarfjordur afterwards. We really had no contact by then but I could well imagine that the accident was caused by his rebellion. The rage that had built up inside him.”

“Did he leave home after this accident?”

“Yes, so I understand.”

“What happened?”

“There was a high, steep staircase in their house. I went there once. It led upstairs from the hall. Wooden stairs with a narrow well. Apparently it began with an argument between Gudlaugur and his father, who had his study upstairs. They were at the top of the staircase and I’m told Gudlaugur pushed him and he fell down the stairs. It was quite a fall. He never walked again. Broke his back. Paralysed from the waist down.”

“Was it an accident? Do you know?”

“Gudlaugur alone knew that. And his father. They completely shut him out afterwards, the father and daughter. Cut off all contact and refused to have anything more to do with him. That might suggest he went for his father. That it wasn’t a simple accident.”

“How do you know this? If you weren’t in touch with those people?”

“It was the talk of the town that he’d pushed his father down the stairs. The police investigated the matter.”

Erlendur looked at the man.

“When was the last time you saw Gudlaugur?”

“It was just here at the hotel, by sheer coincidence. I didn’t know where he was. I was out for dinner and caught a glimpse of him in his doorman’s uniform. I didn’t recognise him immediately. Such a long time had passed. This was five or six years ago. I went up to him and asked if he remembered me, and we chatted a little.”

“What about?”

“This and that. I asked him how he was doing and so on. He kept fairly quiet about his own affairs — didn’t seem comfortable talking to me. It was as if I reminded him of a past he didn’t want to revisit. I had the feeling he was ashamed of being in a doorman’s uniform. Maybe it was something else. I don’t know. I asked him about his family and he said they’d lost touch. Then the conversation dried up and we said goodbye to each other.”

“Do you have any idea who could have wanted to kill Gudlaugur?” Erlendur asked.

“Not the faintest,” Gabriel said. “How was he attacked? How was he killed?”

He asked cautiously, a mournful look in his eyes. There was no hint that he wished to gloat over it later; he simply wanted to know how the life of a promising boy he had once taught came to an end.

“I honestly can’t go into that,” Erlendur said. “It’s information that we’re trying to keep secret because of the investigation.”

“Yes, of course,” Gabriel said. “I understand. A criminal investigation … are you making any headway? Of course, you can’t talk about that either, listen to how I carry on. I can’t imagine who would have wanted to kill him, but then I lost touch with him long ago. I just knew that he worked at this hotel.”

“He’d been working here for years as a doorman and sort of jack of all trades. Playing Santa Claus, for example.”

Gabriel sighed. “What a fate.”

“The only thing we found in his room apart from these records was a film poster that he had on his wall. It’s a Shirley Temple film from 1939 called The Little Princess. Do you have any idea why he would have kept it, or glorified it? There was almost nothing else in the room.”

“Shirley Temple?”

“The child star.”

“The connection’s obvious,” Gabriel said. “Gudlaugur saw himself as a child star and so did everyone around him. But I can’t see any other significance as such.”

Gabriel stood up, put on his cap, buttoned his coat and wrapped his scarf around his neck. Neither of them said anything. Erlendur opened the door and walked out into the corridor with him.

“Thank you for coming to see me,” he said, offering his hand to shake.

“It was nothing,” Gabriel said. “It was the least I could do for you. And for the dear boy.”

He dithered as if about to add something else, unsure exactly how to phrase it.

“He was terribly innocent,” he said eventually. “A totally harmless boy. He’d been convinced that he was unique and he’d become famous, he could have had the world at his feet. The Vienna Boys” Choir. They make such an awful fuss about small things here in Iceland, even more now than they used to; it’s a national trait in a country of under-achievers. He was bullied at school for being different; he suffered because of it. Then it turned out he was just an ordinary boy and his world fell apart in a single evening. He needed to be strong to put up with that.”

They exchanged farewells and Gabriel turned round and walked down the corridor. Erlendur watched him leaving with the feeling that telling the tale of Gudlaugur Egilsson had drained the old choirmasters strength completely.

Erlendur shut the door. He sat down on the bed and thought about the choirboy and how he found him in a Santa suit with his trousers round his ankles. He wondered how his path had led to that little room and to death, at the end of a life paved with disappointment. He thought about Gudlaugur’s father, paralysed in a wheelchair, with his thick horn-rimmed glasses, and about his sister with her hooked eagle’s nose and her antipathy towards her brother. He thought about the fat hotel manager who had sacked him, and the man from reception who pretended not to know him. He thought about the hotel staff, who did not know who Gudlaugur was. He thought about Henry Wapshott who had travelled all that way to seek out the choirboy because the child Gudlaugur with his lovely voice still existed and always would.

Before he knew it he had started thinking about his brother.

Erlendur put the same record back on the turntable, stretched out, closed his eyes and let the song take him back home.

Maybe it was his song as well.

When Elinborg came back from Hafnarfjordur towards evening she went straight to the hotel to meet Erlendur.

She went up to his floor and knocked on the door, and again when she got no response, then a third time. She was turning away when the door opened at last and Erlendur let her in. He had been lying down thinking and had dozed off, and was rather vague when Elinborg began telling him what she had unearthed in Hafnarfjordur. She had spoken to the ex-headmaster of the primary school, an ancient man who remembered Gudlaugur well; his wife, who had died ten years before, had also been close to the boy. With the headmaster’s help Elinborg tracked down three of Gudlaugur’s classmates who were still living in Hafnarfjordur. One had been at the fateful concert. She talked to the family’s old neighbours and people who were in touch with them in those days.

“No one is ever allowed to excel in this dwarf state,” Elinborg said, sitting down on the bed. “No one’s allowed to be different.”

Everyone knew that Gudlaugur’s life was supposed to be something special. He never talked about it himself, never talked about himself at all really, but everyone knew. He was sent for piano lessons and learned to sing, first from his father and then with the choirmaster who was appointed to conduct the children’s choir, and finally with a well-known singer who once lived in Germany but had come back to Iceland. People praised him to the skies, applauded him, and he would take a bow in his white shirt and black trousers, gentlemanly and sophisticated. Such a beautiful child, Gudlaugur, people said. And he made recordings of his singing. Soon he would be famous in other countries.