Arnaldur Indridason: Voices

“Hey, I, what…?” The man fell silent. “I just want to get home,” he said eventually. “I don’t know the answers to all those questions. Christmas is coming. Can we talk tomorrow? I haven’t had a moment’s rest all day.”

Erlendur looked at him.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said. As he left the cloakroom he suddenly remembered the question that had been vexing him ever since he met the hotel manager. He turned round. The man was on his way out through the door when Erlendur called to him.

“Why did you want to get rid of him?”

“What?”

“You wanted to get rid of him. Santa. Why?”

The reception manager hesitated.

“He’d been sacked.”

Erlendur found the hotel manager sitting down to a meal. He was at a large table in the kitchen, wearing a chef’s apron and devouring the contents of the half-empty trays that had been brought in from the buffet.

“You can’t imagine how I love eating,” he said, wiping his mouth, when he noticed Erlendur staring at him. “In peace,” he added.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Erlendur said.

They were alone in the large, polished kitchen. Erlendur could only admire him. He ate quickly, but deftly and without greed. There was something almost elegant about the motions of his hands. One bite after another disappeared inside him, smoothly and with a visible passion.

He was calmer now that the body had been removed from the hotel and the police had gone, along with the reporters who had been standing outside the hotel; the police had ordered them to stay out, the entire building was deemed a crime scene. The hotel was returning to business as normal. Very few tourists knew about the body in the basement, but many noticed the police activity and asked about it. The manager instructed his staff to say something about an old man and a heart attack.

“I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m a pig, don’t you?” he said, pausing to take a sip of red wine. His little finger darted out, the size of a cocktail sausage.

“No, but I do understand why you want to run a hotel,” Erlendur said. Then he lost his patience. “You’re killing yourself, you know that,” he said brashly.

“I weigh 180 kilos,” the manager said. “Farmed pigs don’t get much heavier. I’ve always been fat. Never known otherwise. Never been on a diet. I’ve never been able to think of changing my lifestyle, as they say. I feel good. Better than you, from the look of things,” he added.

Erlendur remembered hearing that fat people were supposed to be jollier than skinny people. He did not believe it himself.

“Better than me?” he said with a hint of a smile. “You’re the last person to judge. Why did you sack the doorman?”

The manager had resumed eating and some time passed before he put down his knife and fork. Erlendur waited patiently. He could see the manager weighing up the best answer, how to phrase it, given that he had found out about the dismissal.

“We haven’t been doing too well,” he said eventually. “We’re overbooked in the summer and there’s always plenty of traffic over Christmas and the New Year, but then come dead periods that can be damned difficult. The owners said we had to cut back. Lay off staff. I didn’t think it was necessary to have a full-time doorman all year round.”

“But I’m told he was much more than just a doorman. Santa Claus, for example. A jack of all trades. Mended things. More like a caretaker.”

The manager had gone back to feeding his face yet again and another break in their conversation ensued. Erlendur looked around. After taking down their names and addresses, the police had allowed the staff who had finished their shifts to go home; it had still not been established who was the last person to talk to the victim, nor what happened on the last day of his life. No one had noticed anything unusual about Santa. No one had seen anybody go down to the basement. No one knew of him ever having visitors there. Only a couple of people knew that he lived there permanently, that the little room was his home, and apparently they wanted to know as little as possible about him. Very few said they knew him and he did not seem to have had any friends at the hotel. Nor did the employees know about any friends of his outside it.

A real Lone Wolf, Erlendur thought to himself.

“No one is indispensable,” the manager said, his sausagelike finger protruding again as he took another sip of red wine. “Of course, firing people is never fun, but we can’t afford to have a doorman all year. That’s why he was sacked. No other reason. And there wasn’t really much door-manning to do. He put on his uniform when film stars or foreign dignitaries came, and he threw out undesirables.”

“Did he take it badly? Being sacked?”

“He understood, I think.”

“Are any knives missing from the kitchen?” Erlendur asked.

“I don’t know. We lose knives and forks and glasses worth hundreds of thousands of kronur every year. And towels and … Do you think he was stabbed with a knife from the kitchen?”

“I don’t know.”

Erlendur watched the manager eat.

“He worked here for twenty years and no one knew him. Don’t you find that unusual?”

“Employees come and go,” the manager shrugged. “There’s a high staff turnover in this business. I think people knew about him, but who knows who? Don’t ask me. I don’t know anyone here that well.”

“You’ve stayed put through all these staff changes”

“I’m difficult to move.”

“Why did you talk about chucking him out?”

“Did I say that?”

“Yes.”

“Then it was just a turn of phrase. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“But you’d sacked him and were going to chuck him out,” Erlendur said. “Then someone comes along and kills him. It hasn’t exactly been going well for him recently.”

The manager acted as though Erlendur was not even there while he filled himself with cakes and mousse with his delicate, gourmandising motions, trying to savour the treats.

“Why was he still here if you’d sacked him?”

“He was supposed to leave at the end of last month. I’d been hurrying him along, but didn’t pressure him. I should have. Then I’d have avoided this nonsense.”

Erlendur watched the manager scoffing his food, and said nothing. Maybe it was the buffet. Maybe the gloomy block of flats. Maybe the time of year. The microwave dinner waiting for him at home. The lonely Christmas. Erlendur did not know. Somehow the question just came out. Before he knew it.

“A room?” the manager said, as if not understanding what Erlendur meant.

“It doesn’t have to be anything special,” Erlendur said.

“You mean for you?”

“A single room is fine,” Erlendur said.

“We’re fully booked. Unfortunately” The hotel manager stared at Erlendur. He didn’t want to have the detective over him day and night.

“The head of reception said there was a vacant room,” Erlendur lied, more firmly now. “He said it was no problem if I just talked to you.”

The manager stared at him. Looked down at his unfinished mousse. Then he pushed the plate away, his appetite ruined.

It was cold in the room. Erlendur stood gazing out of the window, but saw nothing apart from his own reflection in the glass. He hadn’t looked that man in the face for some time and he noticed in the darkness how he was ageing. Snowflakes fell cautiously to the ground, as if the heavens had split open and their dust was being strewn over the world.

A little book of verse that he owned suddenly entered his mind, exceptionally elegant translations of poems by Holderlin. He let his mind wander through them until he stopped at a line that he knew applied to the man looking back at him from the window.