Arnaldur Indridason: The Draining Lake

“Who’s that with you?” he asked when he saw Sigurdur Oli.

“He works with me,” Erlendur said.

Instead of greeting Sigurdur Oli, Haraldur shot him a warning look. Erlendur sat on a chair facing Haraldur. Sigurdur Oli remained standing and leaned against the wall.

The door opened and another grey-haired resident put his head in.

“Haraldur,” he said, “there’s choir practice in room eleven tonight.”

Without waiting for an answer, he closed the door again.

Erlendur gaped at Haraldur.

“Choir practice?” he said. “Surely you don’t go in for that?”

“”Choir practice” is code for a booze-up,” Haraldur grunted. “I hope I don’t disappoint you.”

Sigurdur Oli grinned to himself. He was having trouble concentrating. What he had said to Elinborg that morning was not entirely true. Bergthora had been to the doctor, who had told her that it was fifty-fifty. Bergthora had tried to be positive when she related this, but he knew that she was in torment.

“Let’s get a move on,” Haraldur said. “Maybe I didn’t tell you the whole truth, but I can’t see why you need to go around sticking your nose into other people’s affairs. But… I wanted…”

Erlendur sensed an unusual hesitation in Haraldur when the old man lifted his head to be able to look him in the face.

“Joi didn’t get enough oxygen,” he said, looking back at the floor. “That was why. At birth. They thought it was all right, he grew properly, but he turned out different. He wasn’t like the other kids.”

Sigurdur Oli indicated to Erlendur that he had no idea what the old man was talking about. Erlendur shrugged. Something about Haraldur had changed. He was not his usual self. He was in some way milder.

“It turned out that he was a bit funny,” Haraldur continued. “Simple. Backward. Kind inside but couldn’t cope, couldn’t learn, never knew how to read. It took a long time to emerge and we took a long time to accept it and come to terms with it.”

“That must have been difficult for your parents,” Erlendur said after a long silence, once Haraldur seemed unlikely to say anything else.

“I ended up looking after Joi when they died,” Haraldur said at last, his eyes trained on the floor. “We lived out there on the farm, barely scraping a living towards the end. Had nothing to sell but the land. It was worth quite a lot because it was so close to Reykjavik and we made a fair bit on the deal. We could buy a flat and still have money left over.”

“What was it you were going to tell us?” Sigurdur Oli said impatiently. Erlendur glared at him.

“My brother stole the hubcap from the car,” Haraldur said. “That was the whole crime and now you can leave me alone. That’s the long and the short of it. I don’t know how you can make such a fuss about it. After all these years. He stole a hubcap! What kind of a crime is that?”

“Are we talking about the black Falcon?” Erlendur asked.

“Yes, it was the black Falcon.”

“So Leopold did visit your farm,” Erlendur said. “You’re admitting that now.”

Haraldur nodded.

“Do you think you were right to sit on this information for your whole life?” Erlendur asked angrily. “Causing everyone unnecessary trouble?”

“Don’t you go preaching to me,” Haraldur said. “It won’t get you anywhere.”

“There are people who have been suffering for decades,” Erlendur said.

“We didn’t do anything to him. Nothing happened to him.”

“You ruined the police investigation.”

“Put me in the nick, then,” Haraldur said. “It won’t make much difference.”

“What happened?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“My brother was a bit simple,” Haraldur said. “But he never harmed that man. There wasn’t a violent bone in him. He thought the bloody hubcaps were pretty so he stole one. He thought it was enough for that bloke to have three.”

“And what did the man do?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“You were looking for a missing man,” Haraldur went on, staring at Erlendur. “I didn’t want to complicate things. You would have complicated it if I’d told you that Joi took the hubcap. Then you would have wanted to know if he killed him, which he didn’t, but you’d never have believed me and you’d have taken Joi away.”

“What did this man do when Joi took the hubcap?” Sigurdur Oli repeated.

“He seemed very tense.”

“So what happened?”

“He attacked my brother,” Haraldur said. “He shouldn’t have done that, because even though Joi was stupid, he was strong. Threw him off like a sack of feathers.”

“And killed him,” Erlendur said.

Haraldur raised his head.

“What did I just tell you?”

“Why should we believe you now, after you’ve been lying all these years?”

“I decided to pretend that he never came. That we’d never met him. That was the obvious thing to do. We never touched him, apart from Joi defending himself. He left and he was fine then.”

“Why should we believe you now?” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Joi didn’t kill anyone. He never could have. He never hurt a fly, Joi. But you wouldn’t have believed that. I tried to get him to give the hubcap back, but he wouldn’t say where he’d hidden it. Joi was like a raven. He liked pretty things and they were nice, shiny hubcaps. He wanted to own one. As simple as that. The bloke got really worked up and threatened us both, and then he went for Joi. We had a fight and then he left and we never saw him again.”

“Why should I believe this?” Erlendur asked again.

Haraldur snorted.

“I don’t give a monkey’s what you believe,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police this touching tale about you and your brother when they were searching for the man?”

“The police didn’t seem interested in anything much,” Haraldur said. “They didn’t ask for any explanations. 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 that stupid.”

“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?”