‘Do you know if he had any dealings with the army?’ asked Flóvent.
‘No. Are you asking if he worked for them?’
‘Yes, or if he was acquainted with any soldiers.’
‘No,’ said the woman, ‘that is... not that we were aware.’
Flóvent sat with the couple for a little while longer before returning to Felix Lunden’s flat. The body had been removed and taken to the mortuary at the National Hospital. The district medical officer and photographer had left, but a uniformed policeman was standing guard outside to ensure that no one entered the flat. Flóvent was currently the only detective working for Reykjavík’s Criminal Investigation Department. All his colleagues had been seconded to other, more urgent policing roles at the beginning of the war, but he thought he might have to recall some of them to assist him with this case, which promised to be both complex and challenging.
He studied the bloodstain on the living-room floor, then examined the spent bullet that had been buried in a floorboard. He rolled it in his palm, picked it up between his fingers and held it to the light. Every gun left signature marks on the bullet, as unique as a fingerprint. If he could only find the firearm, he could prove that it was the right one by comparing the marks on the bullet to those produced by the barrel.
He recognised the make and calibre of bullet. It belonged to a Colt .45 pistol, the standard-issue sidearm carried by American servicemen. His question about whether the neighbours had seen Felix Lunden in the company of GIs had not been an idle one. All the evidence suggested that he had been killed by someone connected to the military, and the message was clear: Felix had deserved nothing better than a cold-blooded execution.
4
The plane taxied to the end of the runway, turned and prepared for take-off. Thorson, driving after it at breakneck speed, could see no alternative but to block its path. He had no intention of wasting any more time on the entertainer if he could possibly avoid it.
The man had finally turned up when an elderly woman living on Öldugata had reported him to the police. They had been searching for him all morning. At first, when she found the man sleeping on the steps outside her house, she had taken him for a tramp. But then it occurred to her that he was the best-dressed tramp she had ever seen. After taking a closer look, she concluded that he must be a foreigner, here with the army perhaps — though he wasn’t in uniform. When the police informed her that he was an American singer who had gone missing in town, and was quite the drinker to boot, she had laughed and said had she known she would have invited him in.
Thorson had wasted the entire day on that pain in the neck, all so he could shove him onto a plane and send him home. The singer was from New York. He had arrived in Iceland a week ago with a group of his fellow countrymen to entertain the troops, had been drunk more or less throughout his stay and had managed to get himself into a series of scrapes.
Thorson had been dragged into it when the man was beaten up after drunkenly insulting a bunch of soldiers after one of his shows. The US Military Police Corps was called in and Thorson had taken the man’s statement when he was brought in to the sick bay to be cleaned up before being sent back to Hótel Ísland, where all the entertainers were staying. The singer had no idea who his assailants were; they didn’t come forward and there had been no witnesses. All he could remember was that there had been three of them, they had found fault with his singing, and he had accused them of being rednecks. The incident had taken place behind the large barracks where the show, and a dance, had been held for the troops. The singer hadn’t come out of it well. He had a split lip and a black eye and complained that his side hurt where he’d been kicked in the ribs.
Two days later, when all the performers were due to fly home, he failed to show up at the airfield. Thorson was given the task of finding him and getting him on that plane, no matter what. The singer wasn’t in his hotel room and hadn’t packed; the place looked like a bomb had hit it, with clothes, empty bottles and sheet music littering the floor. Thorson soon discovered that he had been playing poker in the kitchen with the cooks until the small hours. One of them told Thorson that the man had been ranting about getting even with a bunch of punks, and that he had last been seen, at the crack of dawn, heading in the direction of the harbour.
‘Was he any good at poker?’ asked Thorson.
‘Had the shirts off our backs,’ said the sleepy cook ruefully.
Thorson phoned the airfield and extracted a promise that the plane wouldn’t take off until the singer turned up. After that, he called out several of his fellow MPs to join in the search, and they scoured the town, checking all the watering holes and guesthouses and even people’s gardens. He also alerted the Icelandic police in case they got wind of the man’s whereabouts. The singer hadn’t been in Reykjavík long enough to acquire any regular haunts, so there was no telling where he might be. A man answering his description was seen trying to scrounge a bottle of brennivín at the seamen’s hostel run by the Salvation Army; while customers standing outside Mrs Marta Björnsson’s restaurant on Hafnarstræti reported seeing an American weaving his way unsteadily towards the west end. Then a mature woman, wearing Icelandic national costume, reported that she had been accosted by a foreigner who had started following her in the vicinity of White Star, a late-night bar on Laugavegur, and offered her money to sleep with him. There had been the odd incident of this kind ever since someone had started the rumour that women who wore peysuföt were prostitutes.
It wasn’t until midday that the police heard from the housewife on Öldugata. The singer was delivered into the hands of Thorson, who drove him at high speed first to his hotel to collect his belongings, then out to the Reykjavík airfield where they learnt that the pilot’s patience had run out. The plane was revving up for takeoff. Without further ado Thorson stamped on the accelerator and raced down the runway. By then the entertainer was waking up to the realisation that his plane was about to leave and that he was in danger of being stranded on this remote island. He stood up in the jeep, waving his arms frantically and raising his fine tenor voice to bellow at the plane to stop.
The pilot sat watching their approach and for a moment it appeared that he was going to ignore them, then he threw up his hands in surrender and waited while Thorson pulled up alongside. The noise of the propellers was ear-splitting. A door in the fuselage opened and the singer leapt out of the jeep, grabbed his suitcase and was about to race to the plane when he remembered his saviour. Turning to Thorson, he drew himself up straight, raised a hand smartly to his brow in a salute, then climbed aboard. Thorson heaved a sigh of relief, swung the jeep out of the way, and watched the plane trundling down the runway, before lifting clumsily into the air and vanishing into the west.
On the way to the airfield Thorson had tried to find out how the hell the singer had ended up asleep on a doorstep in Öldugata. The man, who had only a hazy recollection of meeting Thorson before, said he had no idea what he had been doing there. But some women had approached him at Hótel Ísland and one of them had given him an address, so perhaps he had been trying to find their place.
‘At least you’ve been keeping busy during your stay in Iceland,’ remarked Thorson, looking the man over. The singer was Italian American: dark hair, sun-bronzed skin. When he smiled there was a flash of fine white teeth.
‘Why are you staring at me like that?’ he asked, catching Thorson’s eye.
‘Sorry, I was miles away. I guess I haven’t been sleeping too well lately,’ said Thorson. ‘This place gets to you after a while.’