Jar City Read online

  Photo credit: Einar Falur Ingólfsson

  Arnaldur Indriason was born in 1961. He worked at an Icelandic newspaper, first as a journalist and then for many years as a reviewer. He won the Nordic Crime Novel Award for Jar City and won again for its sequel, Silence of the Grave, which also won the prestigious Gold Dagger Award. He lives in Reykjavík, Iceland.

  Additional Praise For Jar City

  “Award-winning Iceland author Indriason makes a compelling American debut with this first in a series featuring Reykjavík police inspector Erlendur…. Quiet, morose, dryly witty, Erlendur makes a fine, complex companion…. Those who enjoy Karin Fossum, Henning Mankell, or Janwillem van de Wetering will welcome this new series.”

  —The Portsmouth Herald

  “A powerful, psychologically acute procedural drama.”

  —Booklist

  “Jar City is classic mystery fiction, both compassionate and thrilling. Indriason is about to become one of the brightest stars in the genre’s dark skies.”

  —John Connolly, author of Dark Hollow

  “There’s much to glean about the people of Iceland from this erudite and compelling story…. Jar City taps into the melancholy of Scandinavian perspective and manages to be quite thrilling, too.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “This careful, sparsely written book operates at a deeper level than most crime fiction: it conveys the sense of painful inevitability underlying the old stories that medieval Icelanders told through the long winter nights.”

  —The Independent (London)

  “The descriptions of Reykjavík and the surrounding area…are fascinating in their own right, and the plotting is riveting…. Detective Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson is an intense and introspective protagonist.”

  —BookPage

  “The author’s American debut, winner of the 2002 Nordic Crime Novel Award, is a model puzzle presented with clarity and crisp economy.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “An absorbing police procedural dense with psychological pressure. The plot is a twister, the setting unique, and Erlendur’s personal life is even bleaker than the Icelandic fall. Erlendur is a cop to watch. And I will.”

  —Marshall Browne, author of The Eye of the Abyss

  It’s all one great big bloody mire

  —INSPECTOR ERLENDUR SVEINSSON

  A Note On Icelandic Names

  Icelanders always address each other using first names, since most people have a patronymic rather than a “proper surname”, ending in -son for a son and -dóttir for a daughter. People are listed by first names even in the telephone directory. Strange as it may sound to the English ear, first names are therefore used throughout the police hierarchy and when police and criminals address one another. Erlendur’s full name is Erlendur Sveinsson, and his daughter is Eva Lind Erlendsdóttir. Matronymics are rare, although Audur is specifically said to be Kolbrúnardóttir, “Kolbrún’s daughter”. Some families do have traditional surnames, however, either derived directly from or else modelled on Danish, as a result of the colonial rule which lasted until early in the twentieth century. Briem is one of these traditional surnames, and as such it does not reveal the gender of the bearer – in the case of Marion Briem the ambiguous first name compounds this secondary mystery.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  1

  The words were written in pencil on a piece of paper placed on top of the body. Three words, incomprehensible to Erlendur.

  It was the body of a man of about 70. He was lying on the floor on his right side, against the sofa in a small sitting room, wearing a blue shirt and fawn corduroy trousers. He wore slippers on his feet. His hair was starting to thin, almost completely grey. It was stained with blood from a large wound on his head. On the floor not far from the body was a big glass ashtray with sharp corners. It too was covered in blood. The coffee table had been overturned.

  This was a basement flat in a two-storey house in Nordurmýri. It stood in a small garden enclosed on three sides by a stone wall. The trees had shed their leaves, which carpeted the garden and covered the ground, and the knotty branches stretched up towards the darkness of the sky. Along a gravel drive which led to the garage, Reykjavík CID were arriving at the scene. The District Medical Officer was expected, he would sign the death certificate. The body had been reported found about 15 minutes earlier. Erlendur, Detective Inspector with the Reykjavík police, was one of the first on the scene. He expected his colleague Sigurdur Óli any minute.

  The October dusk spread over the city and the rain slapped around in the autumn wind. Someone had switched on a lamp which stood on a table in the sitting room and cast a gloomy light on the surroundings. In other respects nothing on the scene had been touched. The forensics team were setting up powerful fluorescent lights on a tripod to illuminate the flat. Erlendur noticed a bookcase and a worn suite of furniture, the overturned coffee table, an old desk in one corner, a carpet on the floor, blood on the carpet. The sitting room opened into the kitchen and another door led from it to the den and on to a small corridor where there were two rooms and a toilet.

  The police had been notified by the upstairs neighbour. He had come home that afternoon after collecting his two boys from school and it struck him as strange to see the basement door wide open. He could see inside his neighbour’s flat and called out to discover whether he was in. There was no answer. He peered inside the flat and called his name again, but there was no response. They’d been living on the upper floor for several years but did not know the old man in the basement well. The elder son, 9 years old, was not as cautious as his father and quick as a flash he was in the neighbour’s sitting room. A moment later the child came back and said there was a dead man in the flat, and he really didn’t seem too perturbed by it.

  “You watch too many movies,” the boy’s father said and cautiously made his way into the flat where he saw his neighbour lying dead on the sitting-room floor.

  Erlendur knew the dead man’s name. It was on the doorbell. But to avoid the risk of making an idiot of himself he put on some thin rubber gloves and fished the man’s wallet out of a jacket hanging on a peg by the front doorway and found a payment card with a photograph on it. The man’s name was Holberg, 69 years old. Dead in his home. Presumed murdered.

  Erlendur walked around the flat and pondered the simplest questions. That was his job: investigating the obvious. Forensics handled the mysterious. He could see no signs of a break-in, neither on the windows nor the doors. On first impression the man seemed to have let his assailant into the flat himself. The upstairs neighbo
urs had left footprints all over the front hallway and sitting-room carpet when they came in out of the rain and the attacker must have done the same. Unless he took off his shoes by the front door. It looked to Erlendur as if he had been in too much of a rush to have had the chance to take off his shoes.

  The forensic team had brought along a vacuum cleaner to collect the tiniest particles and granules from which to produce clues. They searched for fingerprints and mud that did not belong in the house. They looked for something extraneous. Something that had left destruction in its wake.

  For all Erlendur could see, the man had shown his visitor no particular hospitality. He hadn’t made coffee. The percolator in the kitchen had apparently not been used in the past few hours. There were no signs of tea having been drunk, no cups taken out of the cupboards. Glasses stood untouched where they belonged. The murdered man had been the orderly type. Everything neat and tidy. Perhaps he did not know his assailant well. Perhaps the visitor had attacked him without any preamble, the moment the door opened. Without taking off his shoes.

  Can you murder someone in your socks?

  Erlendur looked all around and told himself that he really must organise his thoughts better.

  In any case, the visitor had been in a hurry. He hadn’t bothered to close the door behind him. The attack itself showed signs of haste, as if it had come out of the blue and without warning. There were no signs of a scuffle in the flat. The man had apparently fallen straight to the floor, struck the coffee table and overturned it. On first impression everything else seemed untouched. Erlendur could see no sign that the flat had been robbed. All the cupboards were firmly closed, the drawers too, a fairly new computer and an old stereo where they belonged, the man’s jacket on a peg by the front doorway still contained his wallet, in it one 2000-crown note and two payment cards, one debit and the other credit.

  It was as if the attacker had grabbed the first thing at hand and hit the man on the head. The ashtray was made of thick, green glass and weighed at least a kilo and a half, Erlendur thought. A murder weapon there for the taking. The assailant would hardly have brought it with him and left it behind on the sitting-room floor, covered in blood.

  These were the obvious clues: The man had opened the door and invited his visitor in or at least walked with him into the sitting room. Probably he knew his visitor, but not necessarily. He was attacked with an ashtray, one hard blow and the assailant quickly made his getaway, leaving the front door open. As simple as that.

  Apart from the message.

  It was written on a sheet of ruled A4 paper that looked as if it had been torn from a spiral-bound exercise book and was the only clue that a premeditated murder had been committed here; it suggested that the visitor had entered the house with the express purpose of killing. The visitor hadn’t been seized suddenly by a mad urge to murder as he stood there on the sitting-room floor. He had entered the flat with the intention of committing a murder. He had written a message. Three words Erlendur could make neither head nor tail of. Had he written the message before going to the house? Another obvious question that needed answering. Erlendur went over to the desk in the corner of the sitting room. It was a sprawl of documents, bills, envelopes and papers. On top of them all lay a spiral-bound exercise book, the corner ripped from one page. He looked for a pencil that could have been used to write the message but couldn’t see one. Looking around the desk, he found one underneath. He did not touch anything. Looked and thought.

  “Isn’t this your typical Icelandic murder?” asked Detective Sigurdur Óli who had entered the basement without Erlendur noticing him and was now standing beside the body.

  “What?” said Erlendur, engrossed in his thoughts.

  “Squalid, pointless and committed without any attempt to hide it, change the clues or conceal the evidence.”

  “Yes,” said Erlendur. “A pathetic Icelandic murder.”

  “Unless he fell onto the table and hit his head on the ashtray,” Sigurdur Óli said. Their colleague Elínborg was with him. Erlendur had tried to limit the movements of the police, forensics team and paramedics while he strode around the house, his head bowed beneath his hat.

  “And wrote an incomprehensible message as he fell?” Erlendur said.

  “He could have been holding it in his hands.”

  “Can you make anything of the message?”

  “Maybe it’s God,” Sigurdur Óli said. “Maybe the murderer, I don’t know. The emphasis on the last word is intriguing. Capital letters for HIM.”

  “It doesn’t look hurriedly written to me. The last word’s in block capitals but the first two are cursive. The visitor wasn’t hurried when he was writing this. But he didn’t close the door behind him. What does that mean? Attacks the man and runs out, but writes a cryptic note on a piece of paper and takes pains to emphasise the final word.”

  “It must refer to him,” Sigurdur Óli said. “The body, I mean. It can’t refer to anyone else.”

  “I don’t know,” Erlendur said. “What’s the point in leaving that sort of message behind and putting it on top of the body? What’s he trying to say by doing that? Is he telling us something? Is the murderer talking to himself? Is he talking to the victim?”

  “A bloody nutter,” Elínborg said, reaching down to pick up the message. Erlendur stopped her.

  “There may have been more than one of them,” Sigurdur Óli said. “Attackers, I mean.”

  “Remember your gloves, Elínborg,” Erlendur said, as if talking to a child. “Don’t ruin the evidence.”

  “The message was written out on the desk over there,” he added, pointing at the corner. “The paper was torn out of an exercise book owned by the victim.”

  “There may have been more than one of them,” Sigurdur Óli repeated. He thought he had hit on an interesting point.

  “Yes, yes,” Erlendur said. “Maybe.”

  “A bit cold-hearted,” Sigurdur Óli said. “First you kill an old man and then you sit down to write a note. Doesn’t that take nerves of steel? Isn’t it a total bastard who does that sort of thing?”

  “Or a fearless one,” Elínborg said.

  “Or one with a Messiah complex,” Erlendur said.

  He stooped to pick up the message and studied it in silence.

  One huge Messiah complex, he thought to himself.

  2

  Erlendur got back to the block of flats where he lived at around 10 p.m. and put a ready meal in the microwave to heat through. He stood and watched the meal revolving behind the glass. Better than television, he thought. Outside, the autumn winds howled, nothing but rain and darkness.

  He thought about people who left messages and vanished. In such a situation, what would he possibly write? Who would he leave a message for? His daughter, Eva Lind, entered his mind. She had a drug addiction and would probably want to know if he had any money. She had become increasingly pushy in that respect. His son, Sindri Snaer, had recently completed a third period in rehab. The message to him would be simple: No more Hiroshima.

  Erlendur smiled to himself as the microwave made three beeps. Not that he had ever thought of vanishing at all.

  Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli had talked to the neighbour who found the body. His wife was home by then and talked about taking the boys away from the house and to her mother’s. The neighbour, whose name was Ólafur, had said that he and all his family, his wife and two sons, went to school and work every day at 8 a.m. and no-one came home until, at the earliest, 4 p.m. It was his job to fetch the boys from school. They hadn’t noticed anything unusual when they had left home that morning. The door to the man’s flat had been closed. They’d slept soundly the previous night. Heard nothing. They didn’t have much to do with their neighbour. To all intents and purposes he was a stranger, even though they had lived on the floor above him for several years.

  The pathologist had yet to ascertain a precise time of death, but Erlendur imagined the murder had been committed around noon. In the busiest time of da
y as it was called. How could anyone even have the time for that these days? he thought to himself. A statement had been issued to the media that a man named Holberg aged about 70 had been found dead in his flat in Nordurmýri, probably murdered. Anyone who had noticed suspicious movements over the previous 24 hours in the area where Holberg lived was requested to contact the Reykjavík police.

  Erlendur was roughly 50, divorced many years earlier, a father of two. He never let anyone sense that he couldn’t stand his children’s names. His ex-wife, with whom he had hardly spoken for more than two decades, thought they sounded sweet at the time. The divorce was a messy one and Erlendur had more or less lost touch with his children when they were young. They sought him out when they were older and he welcomed them, but regretted how they had turned out. He was particularly grieved by Eva Lind’s fate. Sindri Snaer had fared better. But only just.

  He took his meal out of the microwave and sat at the kitchen table. It was a one-bedroom flat filled with books wherever there was any room to arrange them. Old family photographs hung on the walls showing his relatives in the East Fjords, where he was born. He had no photographs of himself or of his children. A battered old Nordmende television stood against one wall with an even more battered armchair in front of it. Erlendur kept the flat reasonably tidy with a minimum of cleaning.