Arnaldur Indridason - Voices

“I don’t know. I don’t have the faintest idea.”

The staff coffee room had little in common with the hotel’s splendid lobby and well-appointed rooms. There were no Christmas decorations, no Christmas carols, only a few shabby kitchen tables and chairs, linoleum on the floor, torn in one place, and in one corner stood a kitchenette with cupboards, a coffee machine and a refrigerator. It was as if no one ever tidied up there. There were coffee stains on the tables and dirty cups all around. The ancient coffee machine was switched on and burped water.

Several hotel employees were sitting in a semicircle around a young girl who was still traumatised after finding the body. She had been crying and black mascara was smudged down her cheeks. She looked up when Erlendur entered with the hotel manager.

“Here she is,” the manager said as if she were guilty of intruding upon the sanctity of Christmas, and shooed the other staff out. Erlendur ushered him out after them, saying he wanted to talk to the girl in private. The manager looked at him in surprise but did not protest, muttering about having plenty of other things to do. Erlendur closed the door behind him.

The girl wiped the mascara off her cheeks and looked at Erlendur, uncertain what to expect. Erlendur smiled, pulled up a chair and sat facing her. She was around the same age as his own daughter, in her early twenties, nervous and still in shock from what she had seen. Her hair was black and she was slim, dressed in the hotel chambermaid’s uniform, a light blue coat. A name tag was attached to her breast pocket. Osp.

“Have you been working here long?” Erlendur asked.

“Almost a year,” Osp said in a low voice. She looked at him. He did not give the impression that he would give her a hard time. With a snuffle she straightened up in her chair. Finding the body had clearly had a strong effect on her. She trembled slightly. Her name Osp — meaning aspen — suited her, Erlendur thought to himself. She was like a twig in the wind.

“And do you like working here?” Erlendur asked.

“No,” she said.

“So why do you?”

“You have to work.”

“What’s so bad about it?”

She looked at him as if he did not need to ask.

“I change the beds,” she said. “Clean the toilets. Vacuum. But it’s still better than a supermarket.”

“What about the people?”

“The manager’s a creep.”

“He’s like a fire hydrant with a leak.”

Osp smiled.

“And some of the guests think you’re only here for them to grope.”

“Why did you go down to the basement?” Erlendur asked.

“To fetch Santa. The kids were waiting for him.”

“Which kids?”

“At the Christmas ball. We have a Christmas party for the staff. For their children and any kids who are staying at the hotel, and he was playing Santa. When he didn’t show up I was sent to fetch him.”

“That can’t have been pleasant.”

“I’ve never seen a dead body before. And that condom.” Osp tried to drive the image out of her mind.

“Did he have any girlfriends at the hotel?”

“None that I know of?

“Do you know about any contacts of his outside the hotel?”

“I don’t know anything about that man, though I’ve seen more of him than I should of!

“Should have,” Erlendur corrected her.

“What?”

“You’re supposed to say “should have”, not “should of”.”

She gave him a pitying look.

“Do you think it matters?”

“Yes, I do,” Erlendur said.

He shook his head, a remote expression on his face.

“Was the door open when you found him?”

Osp thought

“No, I opened it. I knocked and got no reply, so I waited and was just going to leave when it occurred to me to open the door. I thought it was locked but then it suddenly opened and he was sitting there naked with a rubber on his…”

“Why did you think it would be locked?” Erlendur hurried to say. “The door.”

“I just did. I knew it was his room.”

“Did you see anyone when you went down to fetch him?”

“No, no one.”

“So he’d got ready for the Christmas party, but someone came down and disturbed him. He was wearing his Santa suit.”

Osp shrugged.

“Who did his bed?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who changed the linen? It hasn’t been done for a long time.”

“I don’t know. He must have done it himself?

“You must have been shocked.”

“It was a revolting sight,” Osp said.

“I know,” Erlendur said. “You should try to forget it as quickly as possible. If you can. Was he a good Santa?”

The girl looked at him.

“What?” Erlendur said.

“I don’t believe in Santa.”

The lady who organised the Christmas party was smartly dressed, short and, Erlendur thought, around thirty. She said she was the hotel’s marketing and PR manager, but Erlendur could not have been less interested; most of the people he met these days were marketing-somethings. She had an office on the second floor and Erlendur found her on the phone there. The media had got wind of an incident at the hotel and Erlendur imagined she was telling lies to a reporter. The conversation came to a very abrupt end. The woman slammed down the phone with the words that she had absolutely no comment to make.

Erlendur introduced himself, shook her dry hand and asked her when she had last spoken to the, aahemm, man in the basement. He did not know whether to say doorman or Santa, he had forgotten his name. He felt he could hardly say Santa.

“Gulli?” she said, solving the problem. “It was just this morning, to remind him of the Christmas party. I met him by the revolving doors. He was working. He was a doorman here as you perhaps know. And more than a doorman, a caretaker really. Mended things and all that.”

“Easy-going?”

“Pardon?”

“Helpful, easy-going, didn’t need much nagging?”

“I don’t know. Does that matter? He never did anything for me. Or rather, I never needed his help.”

“Why was he playing Santa? Was he fond of children? Funny? Fun?”

“That goes back before I started here. I’ve been working here for three years and this is the third Christmas party I’ve organised. He was the Santa the other two times and before that too. He was OK. As Santa. The kids liked him.”

Gudlaugur’s death did not seem to have had the slightest effect on the woman. It was none of her business. All that the murder did was to disturb the marketing and PR for a while. Erlendur wondered how people could be so insensitive and boring.

“But what sort of person was he?”

“I don’t know. I never got to know him. He was a doorman here. And the Santa. That was really the only time I ever spoke to him. When he was the Santa.”

“What happened to the Christmas party? When you found out that Santa was dead?”

“We called it off. Nothing else for it. Also out of respect for him,” she added, as if to show a hint of feeling at last. It was futile. Erlendur could tell that she could not care less about the body in the basement.

“Who knew this man best?” he asked. “Here at the hotel, I mean.”

“I don’t know. Try talking to the head of reception. The doorman worked for him.”

The telephone on her desk rang and she answered it. She gave Erlendur a look implying that he was in her way, and he stood up and walked out, thinking that she could not go on telling lies over the phone for ever.

The reception manager had no time to deal with Erlendur. Tourists swarmed around the front desk and even though three other employees were helping to check them in, they could hardly handle the crowd. Erlendur watched them looking at passports, handing over key cards, smiling and moving on to the next guest. The crowd stretched back to the revolving doors. Through them Erlendur saw yet another tourist shuttle stop outside the hotel.