Marteinn was just coming back from lunch when Egill turned up at the office with the name of a woman who might possibly help them trace Sigurdur the guitarist. They began by phoning hospitals and clinics in the city.
“Good afternoon, this is the detective division,” Marteinn said to the first operator he spoke with. “Do you have a patient named Kristín Jósefsdóttir?”
She didn’t seem impressed by the detective division at all, and made him wait a long time. When she finally came back on the line, she replied rather curtly, “No one by the name of Kristín Jónsdóttir is registered here.”
“Jósefsdóttir,” said Marteinn patiently.
“One mo—” she said, and again put Marteinn on hold.
“No, she is not here” was the final reply a few long moments later.
They spent a considerable time getting the same answer at the other places they phoned.
“What about the nursing homes,” Marteinn suggested.
This they tried, and finally got a hit: a nursing home in Hafnarfjördur had a resident named Kristín Jósefsdóttir.
There was nobody in reception, so they went into the sitting room, where they found a neatly dressed old lady seated listening to the radio. She smiled when they bade her good afternoon.
“We are looking for Kristín Jósefsdóttir,” Egill said.
“Yes.” The old lady nodded.
“Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“We are from the detective division,” Marteinn said.
“Yes.”
A voice from behind them warned, “She doesn’t know nothing, not even her own name.”
An ancient woman leaning on a metal walker, her back so bent she was unable to look them in the eye, asked, “What do you want?”
“We’re looking for Kristín Jósefsdóttir,” explained Egill.
“Kristín is in the infirmary. Room 102. The bed next to the window.”
Room 102 contained three beds, the two nearest of which had clearly been slept in but were currently unoccupied; in the third bed, next to the window, as the old lady had described, lay a woman who, though she seemed younger than the other residents, looked very sickly and had an oxygen tube running up into her nose.
“Let me do the talking,” Egill whispered to Marteinn. He then raised his voice. “Kristín Jósefsdóttir?”
“Yes, that’s me,” the woman whispered.
Egill smiled sweetly. “We’re looking for your son, Diddi. We owe him money and would like to pay him. Do you know where he is?”
Kristín smiled back with some difficulty. “Well, he came here yesterday. I think he was planning to go to Ólafsvík to work in a fish factory.”
Egill looked at Marteinn and smiled knowingly, then moved closer to the woman and leaned over her.
“We are from the detective division. We know your husband shot engineer Jacob Kieler.”
Kristín pulled the bedclothes up to her chin and looked at him apprehensively, but gave no reply. Marteinn shifted uncomfortably.
“You were the one who looked after the gun, isn’t that right?” Egill continued.
“There never was any gun. Why are you saying this?”
Marteinn whispered apprehensively, “Go easy.”
“Diddi told us he got the gun from you.”
“That’s not true. Nobody would have said that.”
Kristín whimpered and shrank away from Egill when he put his hand on her shoulder.
“You’d better tell us everything. It’ll be best for him.”
Kristín cried out in a cracked voice, “No, there was no gun.”
“What are you doing here?” a voice demanded from behind them.
Marteinn looked around and saw a tiny woman in a nursing assistant’s uniform.
“How dare you behave like this! Get out!” she shrieked. The old woman with the walker was standing behind her.
Marteinn heaved a sigh of relief, glad to be interrupted.
Egill smiled apologetically. “We are from the detective division, and were just looking for some information—”
“The police? What the…! Out of here, at once!” demanded the petite nurse.
Marteinn took Egill’s arm. “Let’s go,” he whispered.
“We’ll be back,” Egill warned Kristín.
A group of old people who had gathered outside the room moved anxiously out of the way when Marteinn and Egill emerged, hotly followed by the nursing assistant.
“Let’s get out of here before the grannies start throwing their chamber pots at us,” Egill whispered to Marteinn.
Diary IX
May 23, 1925. I have been re-examining my cost calculations for the railroad. Prices are all coming down so it is right to review the figures. I also think it would be safe to reduce the width of the track bed by 10%. Taking all this into account the railroad should cost only 5,750,000 krónur…