House of Evidence (19 page)

“Yes, I would like that,” Hrefna said gratefully. She knew she would remember this evening for years to come.

Diary VI

May 3, 1920. The
Gullfoss
set sail from Leith harbor this morning. We settled ourselves into an excellent two-berth cabin on the starboard side. This ship is very similar to the
Godafoss
, in which I sailed to Leith a few years ago. You could say that I am now completing a journey begun then. Both my wife and I are a little bit anxious. I have lived abroad for nearly ten years and Elizabeth feels she is heading for the great unknown…

May 4, 1920. The ship makes around 12 knots, and the captain estimates that we shall be docking in Reykjavik on the morning of May 8. The weather is reasonable and I am enjoying spending time with the other passengers. Elizabeth is a little bit seasick…

May 5, 1920. Elizabeth is feeling better and was able to eat. We piled on some warm clothes and
are sitting on the upper deck, where there are nice wooden benches. I am teaching Elizabeth Icelandic. She is now able to say hello and good-bye properly…

May 7, 1920. Got up at 10 o’clock a.m. The Westman Islands are rising over the horizon. The glaciers are not very visible, as their tops are draped in fog…

May 8, 1920. Homecoming. My father and Matthías met us on the pier. Little Matthías has turned into a handsome young man. My father has aged. Everything seems so small to me, in spite of all the construction projects that have taken place since I left the country. My father had borrowed an automobile to take us and all our luggage home to Birkihlíd. It annoys me how people here keep staring at Elizabeth and me. They have no manners…

H
alldór was reading an article in
Morgunbladid
about police reinforcement when the phone rang. It was only seven thirty, and it was rare for anyone to call at such an early hour. Halldór looked at Stefanía. “Are you going to answer, dear?”

“It’s bound to be for you. Nobody I know would ring so early in the morning, and on a Saturday at that. It’s not polite,” Stefanía grumbled, going over to the phone.

“Hello,” she said sharply into the receiver. Halldór noticed the scowl quickly disappear from her face.

“Oh no, no need to apologize. Of course we are up,” she said cheerily.

“Yes, yes, he is here. Hold on a moment, please.” She covered the mouthpiece and whispered to her husband, “It’s Jón Björnsson, the bank manager. He wants to talk to you.”

Jón Björnsson was a former government minister and now a bank manager—a résumé his wife would appreciate, Halldór thought to himself.

“Come on then. Don’t keep him waiting,” she said as he put the paper aside.

“Please excuse the intrusion,” the bank manager said when Halldór answered. “I was told that you were in charge of the
investigation into the death of Jacob Kieler, one of our staff members.”

“Yes?”

“Well, some rather unpleasant things have come to light here at the bank. Our accountants have been going over this all night.”

“Oh?”

“It seems that Jacob has been embezzling a considerable sum of money from the bank.”

“How so?”

“By using a series of checking accounts. He has taken advantage of the fact that withdrawals take up to twenty-four hours longer to process than deposits. This should of course have come out when we did spot-checks, but he has been able to use his position in the bank to conceal it.”

“Is it a large sum of money?”

“We haven’t got the final figure yet, but he seems to have accumulated several million krónur.”

“I am astonished,” Halldór gasped.

“Yes, but that is not the whole story.”

“Oh?”

“The late Mr. Kieler was treasurer of a society that a few worthy gentlemen here in the city belong to—Gethsemane, a Christian brotherhood. Do you know it?”

“Yes, I have heard of it.”

“When the brotherhood’s board checked their accounts here at the bank yesterday, they discovered they were mostly empty.”

“Good grief! Was it a large sum of money?”

“Yes, quite a bit. The brotherhood has been liquidizing its assets recently, sold an apartment and other things, because they are about to extend their clubhouse. They’ll need to examine their accounts further to get the final figure.”

“Has this been going on for long?”

“He seems to have used money from the brotherhood to disguise the checking fraud when he needed to, but then all the money disappeared from the accounts over a period of a few weeks.”

“I see,” Halldór said. He now understood where Jacob had gotten the money to pay the deposit on Birkihlíd when the contracts were exchanged.

“Can you come to a meeting with us later this morning? Say around ten?” the bank manager asked, adding, “And we would appreciate for this to be kept confidential.”

Halldór agreed to come to the bank, and then hung up the phone.

“What did the minister want?” Stefanía asked.

“He is no longer a minister, only a bank manager.”

“Yes, but what did he want?”

“Nothing special. Just a police matter.”

Stefanía shrugged a little disappointedly and turned back to her tea and magazine. Much to his relief, it looked as though she had accepted this explanation. He sat back down again at the kitchen table and picked up the paper, thinking how good it would be to have Erlendur here to help with the bankers instead of on his way to Austria. Erlendur was a business-school graduate and nearly the only one in the investigation team who knew the difference between a debit and a credit.

Diary VI

May 9, 1920. It is strange to have finally come home. Everything seems so unfamiliar and at the same time so familiar. I know the smell and the cold breeze that
kisses me. This spring has not been good, I am told. There is still a layer of ice on the lake…

May 10, 1920. I went to see the Government Chief Engineer. He thanked me for the letter I sent him last fall. He showed me the papers they have on the railway: measurements, calculations, etc. There will definitely be projects for me soon, when the finances are there…

May 11, 1920. I find myself turning round when I hear people speak Icelandic out on the streets. It is such a long time since I have been among people who speak the language. The best thing is hearing the children talking…

May 12, 1920. There is a report in
Ísafold
about my return home. It details my studies and employment abroad, and my marriage. The editor opines that it is very fortunate for the country that I have chosen to return home to work here…

June 3, 1920. I have decided to pen various articles in the papers, particularly on employment and education issues and, of course, the railroad question…

June 22, 1920. I went to see the Government Chief Engineer again. He gave me some surveying
assignments in connection with the proposed railroad track as per our conversation at our meeting this spring. I calibrated my optical square and leveling instrument in the evening. Matthías helped me…

June 23, 1920. I called Kristján to meet with me. We agreed he would assist me on the surveying trip and provide horses. I shall supply a tent and food…My wife and I went for a midnight walk to take advantage of the light. Elizabeth is fascinated by these light nights. I hope the dark nights of winter will not discomfort her…

June 24, 1920. Reasonable weather. We set off east at eleven o’clock with seven horses. Matthías is coming too…We took the South Road through Svínahraun lava field, but where it turns east toward the Hveradalir valleys, there is a faint track forking off to the south west. It leads to the pass between Stakihnjúkur and Lambafell mountains, and goes by the name of Threngsli. I measured the gradient, and conclude that the highest point is no more than 252 meters above sea level, similar to that of Kolvidarhóll. This seems the ideal route for the railroad. After the pass, the track turns directly south and goes through passable moorland beneath
the western side of the Meitill Mountains, while there is continuous lava field on the other side of the road. We set up camp on the south side of the hollow between Greater and Lesser Meitill. From here there is a wonderful view toward the Bláfjöll Mountains, standing picturesque and majestic against the western sky…

E
gill was up early. The day before he had dragged Marteinn around town looking for a young man who didn’t seem to exist, even though they both felt sure they had spoken to him in the lobby of the house the previous evening.

They had a name, and had even found an ID number in the books of the sound studio where the young man had been working when he supplied the police with his fingerprints.

They had the address in the Old Town that the employer had provided on the fingerprint card, where they found and then lost the guy once already. They also had an official home address the Public Records Office had registered against the ID number, Brekkustígur 25, but that house, they discovered, didn’t exist anymore.

They had trudged between sound studios, record shops, musical-instrument shops, clubs, cafés, music colleges, and a number of other haunts where they imagined they might find people who knew a left-handed guitarist with dark shoulder-length hair named Sigurdur Sigurdsson. Egill had relied on Marteinn to do most of the talking, while he just stood by with a look on his face meant to show these hippies that they meant business. It didn’t seem to matter. Nobody knew anything about the guy.

Halldór had not yet arrived at the office, and Egill was not looking forward to reporting the details of their fruitless search, even though they had kept at it well into the night. While he waited, he decided to see if the others had had better luck.

All the information that the team had gathered on the case so far was kept in three-ring binders in a fixed place, so that everyone could keep up-to-date on the progress of the investigation.

Egill paged to the report Halldór had written after his interviews with Matthías, then he scanned the reports Hrefna had written after her interviews with Sveinborg and her search through Jacob Junior’s papers, and finally he read the report Erlendur had written after his interview with Reverend Ingimar.

The data on the investigation into Jacob Senior’s death caught his attention. The search warrant that had been issued for the home of Sigurdur Jónsson way back in 1945 listed the same address as that of Sigurdur Sigurdsson’s registered address, Brekkustígur 25. And Halldór’s notes showed that Sigurdur Jónsson’s widow had lived in the house following her husband’s death.

Sigurdur Jónsson and Sigurdur Sigurdsson. They could be related—the younger Sigurdur’s patronymic showed he was the son of a Sigurdur, and according to the Records Office, his birth date was August 8, 1950, the same year that Sigurdur Jónsson died. Could it be that Sigurdur Sigurdsson the guitarist was the son of Sigurdur Jónsson the laborer? Born after his father’s death and named for him?

If so, it was certainly more than coincidence that Sigurdur Senior was arrested for the murder of Jacob Senior and then Sigurdur Junior’s fingerprints were found in the place where Jacob Junior was murdered twenty-seven years later.

Egill was convinced he was on to something. He decided to check the history of the disappearing house and its inhabitants.
This was proper police work, he thought, and if all went according to plan, the next hippie he spoke to would be in handcuffs.

The abandoned lot where Brekkustígur 25 had once stood was as far west as you could get and still be in Reykjavik. Egill walked around the site, outlining the former rooms as he paced; it had been no mansion, that’s for sure. He heard scraping sounds, and saw an elderly man chipping ice off the front steps of an old house nearby. Egill went over and greeted him.

“Morning,” the man replied.

“Have you lived here long?” Egill asked.

“I moved here in ’49.”

“Do you remember a man who lived next door and who died in an accident at the harbor? In 1950? Name of Sigurdur.”

“Yes, I remember him. We called him Siggi Pistol.”

“Oh, why was that?”

“They said he killed a man.”

“Do you know what happened to his family, the wife and the kids?”

“Why are you asking?” he asked suspiciously.

“I’m from the detective division,” Egill explained, pulling his ID out of his leather wallet and showing it to the old man. “We’re investigating a case they are connected with.”

“I see. Are the boys in trouble again?”

“Could be.”

“Well. They were good lads, but it must have been hard being brought up so poor.”

“Do you know where they are living now?”

“No. Kristín, the widow, she became an invalid, and I think she’s in one of those institutions now. As far as I remember, the
kids moved out of Reykjavik and the boys went to sea. Except perhaps the youngest one.”

“What is his name?”

“Sigurdur, what else? He wasn’t born until after the accident, and was named for his father. Nicknamed Diddi.”

“Do you know anything about him?’

“He’s some sort of musician. I think he may have been in a band.”

“What happened to this house?”

“The authorities had it demolished. It had become so run-down and rat infested; it leaked and stank of mildew. It just wasn’t fit to live in.”

Diary VI

July 22, 1920. I bought a bicycle for 140 krónur. Read
Black Feathers
by Davíd Stefánsson. One of the poems is called “By Train.” It’s a long narrative poem in eleven verses. The poet describes a journey by railroad that is, at the same time, life itself. The train speeds along non-stop, and the engineer is “that kingly soul, than whom none higher, who stokes the all-empow’ring fire.”

August 3, 1920. Plotted the Threngsli gradient survey onto graph paper. Weighed myself, I am 73 kilos…

September 20, 1920. Sheep-farmers here have now brought their flocks down from the summer pastures. They do not, however, bother to keep them penned,
and the animals target the townsfolk’s gardens with great enthusiasm. I got up twice last night and chased them out of our garden…

November 1, 1920. Met with the minister this morning. He is very pleased with the work I did in the summer, and feels certain I shall be appointed Chief of Railroads as soon as the office is established…

November 17, 1920. Attended a meeting at the Association of Chartered Engineers on the subject of waterfalls. There were some excellent, forward-looking speeches on harnessing their power. I stood up during the debate to say that I personally was of the opinion that the first public power company and the railroad business should progress simultaneously. There is no need to elaborate on the necessity of building railroads in this country; everybody realizes this and it has practically become a vital necessity for Reykjavik and the lowlands in the south…

November 18, 1920. Elizabeth and I went to a show given by the Students’ Union. There were readings with dancing afterwards. At the end, we all sang the national anthem and “Mothers of our Homeland.”
It was a most successful entertainment. Elizabeth can now understand a good deal of Icelandic, but she does not care to speak the language. I find this difficult to understand, as she was very enthusiastic in the beginning.