Last Rituals Read online

  “Just before his death, Harald withdrew a lot of money from a fund set up in his name. It’s proved impossible so far to establish where the money went. It was a lot more than Harald would have needed to buy drugs. Even if he had planned on staying stoned for years.”

  “Couldn’t he have been investing in drugs?” asked Thóra, adding: “Financing smuggling or something like that?”

  Matthew snorted. “Out of the question. Harald didn’t need the money. He was independently wealthy. He inherited a fortune from his grandfather.”

  “I understand.” Thóra did not want to press him on this point, but wondered whether there may have been another reason for him to get involved in drug smuggling; maybe for kicks, or just sheer stupidity.

  “There’s no evidence that the dealer took the money. The only link the police have found between Harald and the drug scene is that he bought dope every now and then.”

  The food arrived and they ate in silence. Thóra felt a little awkward. This man was clearly not the type with whom silence was comfortable. However, she had never been good at making idle chatter even if the silence was oppressive, so she decided to restrain herself.

  They ordered coffee and two hot cups soon arrived with a sugar bowl and silver milk jug.

  “This is a very strange country, is it not?” said Matthew suddenly, his eyes following the retreating waiter.

  “Well, no. Not really,” replied Thóra, suppressing the instinct to jump to the defense of her beloved homeland. “It’s just small. There are only three hundred thousand people living here. Why do you find it strange?”

  Matthew shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the cleanliness of the city, or the feeling of being surrounded by dolls’ houses, but I think it has more to do with the people. Most locals I have spoken to seem to live by a different logic from the one I’m used to. They answer questions with questions, for example. Maybe it’s just a language thing.” He went quiet and shifted his gaze to a woman hurrying across the square outside. Thóra sipped her coffee, then broke the silence: “Did you bring a contract for me to look at?”

  The man reached for the briefcase that lay beside his chair and took out a thin folder. He handed it across the table to Thóra. “Take the contract with you. Tomorrow we can go over what you want to change and I’ll inform the Guntliebs. It’s a fair deal and I doubt you’ll find much fault with it.” He bent down again, fetched a thicker folder, and put it on the table between them. “Take this too. It’s the folder I mentioned earlier. I’d like you to browse through it before you make up your mind. There are some gruesome elements to this case that I want you to know about beforehand.”

  “Don’t you think I can handle it?” asked Thóra, half insulted.

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you to look through the file. It contains pictures of the crime scene that aren’t exactly pleasant, and all kinds of reading material that’s hardly any better. I managed to acquire an assortment of documents from the investigation with the assistance of a man whom I’d prefer not to name.”

  He put his hand on the file.

  “It also contains details on Harald’s life. They’re not widely known and not for the faint of heart. I trust that, if you decide to back out of the whole matter, you will keep these matters confidential. The family does not care to have them spread around.”

  He took his hand off the folder and looked Thóra in the eye. “I don’t wish to add to their tragedy.”

  “I understand,” Thóra said. “I can assure you that I don’t gossip about my work.” She stared back and added, firmly: “Ever.”

  “Good.”

  “But since you’ve collected all this material—why do you need me? You seem able to acquire information I’m not sure I could get hold of.”

  “Do you want to know why we need you?”

  “I think that’s what I said,” Thóra answered.

  He inhaled quickly through his nose. “I’ll tell you why. I’m a foreigner in this country and a German as well. We need to discuss things with certain people who will never tell me anything of importance. I gathered the bulk of the details about Harald’s personal life in Germany, but I’ve really just scratched the surface. I’m not the sort of person that people find it pleasant to discuss uncomfortable and difficult personal matters with.”

  “I’ve realized that,” Thóra blurted out.

  The man smiled for the first time. Thóra was surprised to see that his smile was beautiful, somehow genuine, even though his teeth were unnaturally white and straight. She could not help returning the smile, then added in embarrassment: “What uncomfortable matters am I supposed to discuss with these people?”

  His smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Erotic asphyxiation, masochism, sorcery, self-mutilation, and other kinds of perverted behavior by seriously disturbed people.”

  Thóra was taken aback. “I’m not sure I know what all that involves.” Erotic asphyxiation, for example; she had never heard of that. If it meant having sex while suffocating, she would actually prefer her current situation: not having sex, but at least being able to breathe.

  When his smile returned it was not as friendly as before. “Oh, you’ll find out. Don’t worry about that.”

  They finished their coffee without saying a word, after which Thóra picked up the folder and made ready to leave for her office. They agreed to meet again the following day and exchanged good-byes.

  As Thóra headed toward the exit, he put his hand on her shoulder. “One final thing, Frau Gudmundsdóttir.”

  She turned round.

  “I forgot to tell you why I’m convinced that the man in police custody is not the murderer.”

  “Why?”

  “He did not have Harald’s eyes in his possession. They had been cut out.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Thóra was not usually afraid of thieves, but on her way from the meeting with Matthew she made sure to clutch her handbag tightly. She could not bear the thought of having to phone him to announce that the documents had been stolen. It was therefore with immense relief that she stepped inside the office.

  She was greeted by the stench of tobacco smoke. “Bella, you know smoking’s not allowed in here.”

  Bella jumped away from the window and threw something out in a fluster. “I wasn’t.” A thin strip of smoke curled up out of one side of her mouth.

  Thóra groaned to herself. “Oh, in that case, your mouth’s caught fire.” Then she added: “Close the window and smoke in the coffee room. Surely you’ll feel more comfortable there than hanging over the side of the building.”

  “I wasn’t smoking. I was shooing pigeons off the windowsill,” Bella retorted indignantly. Experience had taught Thóra that it was not worth arguing with the girl. She went into her office and closed the door.

  The file Matthew had given her was crammed full. It was black, which was somehow appropriate in light of its contents. The spine was unlabeled; no doubt it had been difficult to find an appropriate title. “Harald Guntlieb in life and death,” Thóra muttered as she opened the file and examined the neatly arranged table of contents. The file was divided into seven sections, apparently in chronological order: Germany, Military Service, the University of Munich, the University of Iceland, Bank Accounts, Police Investigation. The seventh and final section was called Autopsy. She decided to go through the file in the order in which it had been arranged.

  Looking at her watch, she saw it was almost two o’clock. She would hardly have time to read it all before having to fetch her daughter Sóley from after-school day care—unless she hurried. Thóra set her mobile phone alarm to a quarter to five. She was determined to get through most of the file by that time. She preferred not to have to take the documents home with her, although this was not uncommon when she was busy. What it contained was surely not the type of material to be left lying around in the presence of children. She turned over the first separator and started reading.

>   At the front was a stamped photocopy of a birth certificate. It stated that Frau Amelia Guntlieb had given birth to a healthy baby boy in Munich on June 18, 1978. The father’s name was given as Herr Johannes Guntlieb, bank director. Thóra did not recognize the hospital. Judging by the name it was not one of the large state hospitals. She assumed it was either an exorbitant private hospital or a clinic for the wealthy. The space for recording the baby’s religion had been filled in with “Roman Catholic.” If her memory did not deceive her, Thóra recalled that around one in every three Germans was of that denomination, with a higher percentage in the south of the country. As a student in Germany, Thóra had been surprised by how many Catholics there were. She had always associated Germans with Lutheranism and believed that Catholics were found mainly in more southerly countries such as Italy, Spain, and France.

  Thóra read on.

  The next few pages were plastic photo album sheets, filled mostly with photographs of the Guntliebs on various occasions. Accompanying each photograph was a strip of white paper with the names of the people it showed. Quickly flicking through the pictures, she saw that Harald was in every one. Besides family shots there were school photos of him at various ages, with the obligatory smartly combed look. Thóra wondered why the photographs were in the folder. The only logical reason was to remind the reader that the murder victim had once been a living person. It worked.

  The first photographs, which were the oldest, showed a small and chubby boy, with either his brother—who appeared to be two or three years older—or his mother. Thóra was struck by how beautiful Amelia Guntlieb was. Although some of the photographs were rather grainy, she was obviously one of those women who always seem effortlessly elegant. Thóra was captivated by one shot in particular in which the mother was helping her son practice walking. Taken outside in the garden, it showed Frau Guntlieb holding Harald’s hands as he stumbled forward with the clumsy gait of a one-year-old, one foot in the air, leg bent firmly at the knee. Frau Guntlieb was smiling into the camera and her beautiful face radiated joy. The cold voice that Thóra had heard over the telephone did not seem to fit that expression. The boy was young enough that his features were still hidden behind baby fat and a stubby nose, but the resemblance between mother and son could nevertheless be seen.

  The next photographs showed Harald at around two or three. Now he bore an even closer resemblance to his mother, although without appearing girlish. His mother was in the photographs too, pregnant first, then smiling as she held a baby wrapped in a thick blanket in her arms. In that particular shot Harald was beside the chair she was sitting in, standing on his tiptoes to peep at the bundled-up baby, his sister. His mother had her hand around his shoulders. From the label under the photograph Thóra saw that the girl had been named Amelia after her mother. Amelia Maria. This was the girl who had died from a congenital disease. Judging from the photograph, the family had not realized at first that she was ill. The mother, at least, looked ecstatic and free from worry. In the next scenes, however, something had changed. Where before she had been smiling in every photo, Frau Guntlieb now seemed distant and sad. In one pose she wore a smile for form’s sake, but it did not reach her eyes. Nor was there any of the physical contact between her and Harald that had characterized the earlier photographs. The little boy seemed subdued and confused as well. The baby girl was nowhere to be seen.

  Part of the family history seemed to have been omitted, because the next series took Thóra at least five years forward in time. It began with a posed family photograph, the first to feature Herr Guntlieb. He was a respectable-looking man, clearly a bit older than his wife. All the people in the photograph were dressed up smartly and a baby had joined the group, lying in her mother’s arms. This must have been the youngest child, the only one alive today. The little sick girl was back, in a wheelchair this time. It did not take a doctor to realize how seriously handicapped she was, strapped into the wheelchair with her head thrown back and mouth hanging open. Her lower jaw hung to one side, indicating that she had little control over it. This seemed to be the case with her limbs too: one arm was bent at the elbow and the hand was abnormally close to it. The fingers of that hand were curled into a claw. Her other hand lay powerless in her lap. Behind the wheelchair stood Harald, eight years old at a guess. His expression was unlike anything Thóra had seen her own son produce at that age; the child seemed devastated. Although the other family members—Herr and Frau Guntlieb and Harald’s elder brother—were not exactly the picture of happiness, the boy looked tragically miserable. Something had clearly happened and Thóra wondered whether such a young child could be so affected by his younger sister’s illness. Perhaps he simply had psychological problems, which was not unknown among children. He may have been depressed as a child and competing for attention with his younger siblings proved too much for him. If so, it was obvious from the following photographs that the parents did not know how to respond. None of them showed any physical affection for the boy, who always stood apart from the family except in a few instances when his elder brother was by his side. It was as if his mother had simply forgotten him or was deliberately ignoring him. Thóra reminded herself not to draw too many conclusions from the photographs. They captured only moments from these people’s lives and could never give a complete picture of what they did or thought.

  There was a knock on the door and Bragi, Thóra’s partner in the law firm and its founder, peeped inside. “Got a minute?”

  Thóra nodded and Bragi stepped inside. He was approaching sixty, stout and hefty, one of those men who are not just tall but simply huge. Thóra thought the best way to describe him was that he was two sizes too large in every respect—fingers, ears, nose and all. He slammed himself down in the chair facing her desk and pulled over the folder Thóra was looking at. “How did it go?”

  “The meeting? Fine, I think,” Thóra answered, watching Bragi as he flicked casually through the family photographs she had just been examining.

  “This lad looks awfully morose,” said Bragi, pointing to a photograph of Harald. “Is he the one who was murdered?”

  “Yes,” Thóra replied. “They’re rather strange photos.”

  “Well, I don’t know. You should see my childhood photos. I was a hopeless kid. Miserable, a total loser. As clearly shown by any photos from that time.”

  Thóra read nothing into this. She was used to all manner of peculiar remarks from Bragi. He was bound to be exaggerating in calling himself a hopeless loser as a boy, just as he did when he talked about how he had to work full-time as a night watchman weighing fish at the harbor and on a fishing boat over the weekends just to pay his way through law school. Nonetheless, she liked him. He had never been anything but kind to her, from the day three years ago when he invited her into a law partnership with him, which she gratefully accepted. At that time she was working with a medium-sized law firm and was relieved to get out; she did not miss the conversations beside the coffee machine about salmon fishing and neckties.

  Bragi pushed the folder back to Thóra. “Are you going to take it on?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she replied. “It’s a change. Besides, it’s always fun to tackle something new.”

  Bragi grunted. “That’s not always the case, I’ll tell you that. I didn’t find it exciting having to deal with colon cancer a few years back even though that was quite new to me.”

  Not wanting to pursue that line, Thóra hurried to say: “You know what I mean.”

  Bragi stood up. “Yes, sure. I just wanted to warn you not to expect too much.” He walked over to the door, then turned round and added: “Tell me, do you think you can use Thór on this case at all?”

  Thór had just graduated from law school and had been working for them for a little over half a year. He was something of a loner, unsociable, but all his work was exemplary and Thóra saw nothing wrong with having his help if she needed it. “I’d been thinking more about using him to take over other cases for me so that I could focus o
n this one. I have plenty of projects that he can easily keep afloat.”

  “No problem, just do as you think best.”

  Thóra picked up the folder again and flipped through the remaining photographs, watching Harald grow up into a handsome young man with his mother’s fair complexion. His father was much darker and not quite as memorable as his mother. The last page held only two photographs: one from a graduation ceremony, presumably at the University of Munich, and the other showing either the beginning or the end of his military service—at least, Harald was wearing a German army uniform. Thóra was not knowledgeable enough to be able to tell which regiment he belonged to. She assumed that this would come to light in the chapter on military service referred to on the contents page.

  The next pages contained photocopies of Harald’s certificates for completing various stages of his education, and it was obvious that he had been extraordinarily clever. He always earned top grades, which Thóra knew from her own experience was not easy to achieve in the German educational system. The last account, from the University of Munich where Harald earned a B.A. in history, was in the same vein. In fact, he had graduated cum laude. The chronology of the documents revealed that Harald had taken a gap year before enrolling in college, presumably because of military service.

  Thóra was surprised that this young man had chosen to join the army, given his splendid academic record. Although Germany had national service, it was simple to avoid, especially for the son of such rich parents. They could easily have had him relieved of that duty.

  Thóra flicked through to another part of the folder, marked “Military Service.” It was a slender chapter, only a couple of pages. The first contained a photocopy of Harald Guntlieb’s induction into the Bundeswehr in 1999. Apparently he enlisted for das deutsche Heer, the regular army. It puzzled her that he had not opted for the air force or navy. With his father’s influence, she was certain he could have had his pick of the regiments. On the next page was a document stating that Harald’s regiment was to be sent to Kosovo, and the third and final page was his discharge paper, dated seven months later. No explanation was given apart from a barely legible “medizinische Gründe”—on medical grounds. In the margin of the photocopy, a neat question mark had been made. Thóra assumed this was Matthew’s writing; to the best of her knowledge, he had gathered all the information alone. Thóra jotted down a memo to herself to ask about the exact reason for Harald’s discharge. She moved on to the next section.