Tainted Blood Page 13

  Erlendur turned around and looked up to Marion standing in the doorway and he saw how age had left its mark on that air of respectability, how rounded shoulders could diminish dignity and a wrinkled face bear witness to a difficult life. It was a long time since he'd been to that flat and he had been thinking, while he sat facing Marion in the chair, about the treatment that time hands out to people.

  "Don't let anything you find out about Holberg have too much effect on you," Marion Briem said. "Don't let him kill any part of you that you don't want rid of anyway. Don't let him win. That was all."

  Erlendur stood still in the rain, unsure of what this advice was supposed to mean. Marion Briem nodded at him.

  "What burglary was it?"

  "Burglary?" Marion asked opening the door again.

  "That Grétar did. What did he burgle?"

  "A photographic shop. He had some kind of fixation with photographs," Marion Briem said. "He took pictures."

  Two men, both wearing leather jackets and black leather boots laced up to their calves, knocked at Erlendur's door and disturbed him as he was nodding off in his armchair later that evening. He'd come home, called out to Eva Lind without getting a reply and sat down on the chicken portions that had lain on the chair ever since he'd slept sitting on them the night before. The two men asked for Eva Lind. Erlendur had never seen them before and hadn't seen his daughter since she had cooked him the meat stew. Their expressions were ruthless when they asked Erlendur where they could get hold of her and they tried to see inside the flat without actually pushing past him. Erlendur asked what they wanted his daughter for. They asked if he was hiding her inside his flat, the dirty old sod. Erlendur asked if they'd come to collect a debt. They told him to fuck off. He told them to bugger off. They told him to eat shit. When he was about to close the door, one of them stuck his knee in past the doorframe. "Your daughter's a fucking cunt," he shouted. He was wearing leather trousers.

  Erlendur sighed. It had been a long, dull day.

  He heard the knee crack and splinter when the door slammed against it with such force that the upper hinges ripped out of the frame.

  20

  Sigurdur Óli was wondering how to phrase the question. He was holding a list with the names of ten women who'd lived in Húsavík before and after 1960 but had since moved to Reykjavik. Two on the list were dead. Two had never had any children. The remaining six had all become mothers during the period when the rape was likely to have occurred. Sigurdur Óli was on his way to visit the first one. She lived on Barmahlíd. Divorced. She had three grown-up sons.

  But how was he supposed to put the question to these middle-aged women? "Excuse me, madam, I'm from the police and I've been sent to ask you whether you were ever raped in Húsavík when you lived there." He talked it over with Elínborg, who had a list with the names of ten other women, but she didn't understand the problem.

  Sigurdur Óli regarded it as a futile operation that Erlendur had launched. Even if Ellidi happened to be telling the truth and the time and place fitted and they finally found the right woman after a long search, what guarantees were there that she would talk about the rape at all? She'd kept quiet about it all her life. Why should she start talking about it now? All she needed to say, when Sigurdur Óli or any of the five detectives who were carrying the same kind of list knocked on her door, was "no", and they could say little more than "sorry to bother you." Even if they did find the woman, there were no guarantees that she had in fact had a child as a result of the rape.

  "It's a question of responses, you should use psychology," Erlendur had said when Sigurdur Óli tried to make him see the problem. "Try to get into their homes, sit down, accept a coffee, chat, be a bit of a gossip."

  "Psychology!" Sigurdur Óli snorted when he got out of his car on Barmahlíd and he thought about his partner, Bergthóra. He didn't even know how to use psychology on her. They'd met under unusual circumstances some years before, when Bergthóra was a witness in a difficult case and after a short romance they decided to start living together. It turned out that they were well suited, had similar interests and both wanted to make a beautiful home for themselves with exclusive furniture and objets d'art, yuppies at heart. They always kissed when they met after a long day at work. Gave each other little presents. Even opened a bottle of wine. Sometimes they went straight to bed when they got home from work, but there'd been considerably less of that recently.

  That was after she had given him a pair of very ordinary Finnish Wellington boots for his birthday. He tried to beam with delight but the expression of disbelief stayed on his face for too long and she saw there was something wrong. When he finally smiled, it was false.

  "Because you didn't have any," she said.

  "I haven't had a pair of Wellington boots since I was . . . 10," he said.

  "Aren't you pleased?"

  "I think they're great," Sigurdur Óli said, knowing that he hadn't answered the question. She knew it too. "No, seriously," he added and could tell he was digging himself a cold grave. "It's fantastic."

  "You're not pleased with them," she said morosely.

  "Sure I am," he said, still at a total loss because he couldn't stop thinking about the 30,000-króna wristwatch he'd given her for her birthday, bought after a week of explorations all over town and discussions with watchmakers about brands, gold plating, mechanisms, straps, water-tightness, Switzerland and cuckoo clocks. He'd applied all his detective skills to find the right watch, found it in the end and she was ecstatic, her joy and delight were genuine.

  Then he was sitting in front of her with his smile frozen on his face and tried to pretend to be overjoyed, but he simply couldn't do it for all his life was worth.

  "Psychology?" Sigurdur Óli snorted again.

  He rang the bell when he'd arrived at the door of the first lady he was visiting on Barmahlíd and asked the question with as much psychological depth as he could muster, but failed miserably. Before he knew it, in a fluster he'd asked the woman on the landing whether she might ever have been raped.

  "What the bloody hell are you on about?" the lady said, war paint on her face, finery on her fingers and a ferocious expression which did not look likely to ease up. "Who are you? What kind of a pervert are you anyway?"

  "No, sorry," Sigurdur Óli said and was back down the stairs in a split second.

  Elínborg had more luck, since she had her mind more on her work and wasn't shy about chatting away to gain people's confidence. Her speciality was cooking, she was an exceptionally interested and capable cook and had no trouble finding a talking point. If the chance presented itself she'd ask what that gorgeous aroma emanating from the kitchen was and even people who'd lived on nothing but popcorn for the past week would welcome her indoors.

  She was in the sitting room of a basement flat in Breidholt and accepted a cup of coffee from a lady from Húsavík, widowed many years before and the mother of two grown-up children. Her name was Sigurlaug and she was last on Elínborg's list. She'd found it easy to phrase the sensitive question and asked the people she interviewed to contact her if they heard anything in their circle, gossip from Húsavík if there was nothing better to be had.

  ". . . and that's why we're looking for a woman of your age from Húsavík who might have known Holberg at that time and even maybe had some trouble from him."

  "I don't remember anyone called Holberg from Húsavík," the woman said. "What kind of trouble do you mean?"

  "Holberg just stayed in Húsavík for a while," Elínborg said. "So you won't necessarily remember anything about him. He never lived there. And it was physical assault. We know he attacked a woman in the town several decades ago and we're trying to locate her."

  "You must have that in your reports."

  "The assault was never reported."

  "What sort of assault?"

  "Rape."

  The woman instinctively put her hand to her mouth and her eyes grew to the size of saucers.

  "Good Lord!" she said.
"I don't know anything about that. Rape! My God! I've never heard about anything like that."

  "No, it seems to have been a closely guarded secret," Elínborg said. She deftly dodged probing questions from the woman who wanted to know the details, and talked about preliminary enquiries and mere hearsay. "I was wondering", she said then, "whether you know anyone who might know about this matter." The woman gave her the names of two of her friends from Húsavík and said they never missed anything. Elínborg wrote down their names, sat a while longer so as not to be rude, and then took her leave.

  Erlendur had a cut on his forehead on which he had put a plaster. One of his two visitors from the previous night was out of action after Erlendur slammed the door on his knee and sent him howling to the floor. The other stared in astonishment at this treatment until the next thing he knew was that Erlendur was up against him on the landing and pushed him, without flinching for a moment, backwards down the stairs. He managed to grab the banister and stop himself falling the whole way down. He didn't fancy tackling Erlendur, who stood at the top of the stairs, with his swollen and bruised forehead; he looked for an instant at his companion lying on the floor roaring in pain, then back at Erlendur, and decided to make himself scarce. He was hardly more than 20.

  Erlendur phoned an ambulance and while they waited for it he found out what the men wanted from Eva Lind. The man was reluctant at first, but when Erlendur offered to take a look at his knee he immediately became more talkative. They were debt collectors. Eva Lind owed both money and dope to some man Erlendur had never heard of before.

  Erlendur didn't explain his plaster to anyone when he went to work the next day, and no-one dared ask him about it. The door had almost knocked him out when it bounced back off the debt collector's leg and hit him on the head. His forehead still ached, he was anxious about Eva Lind and hadn't been able to sleep much that night, dozing in the chair for the odd hour and hoping his daughter would come back before the situation got out of hand. He stopped in his office just long enough to find out that Grétar had had a sister and his mother was still alive, living at Grund old people's home.

  As he'd told Marion Briem, he wasn't looking for Grétar in particular, any more than for the lost girl from Gardabaer, but he didn't think it would do any harm to know more about him. Grétar had been at the party the night Kolbrún was raped. Maybe he'd left behind a memory of that night, a stray detail he'd blurted out. Erlendur didn't expect to find out anything new about his disappearance, Grétar could rest in peace for all he cared, but he'd been interested in missing persons for a long time. Behind each and every one was a horror story, but to his mind there was also something intriguing about people vanishing without trace and no-one knowing why.

  Grétar's mother was 90 and blind. Erlendur spoke briefly to the director of the home, who had difficulty in taking her eyes off his forehead, and told him that Theodóra was one of the oldest and longest-standing residents there, a perfect member of the community in all respects, loved and admired by the staff and everyone else.

  Erlendur was led in to see Theodóra and introduced to her. The old woman was sitting in a wheelchair in her room, wearing a dressing gown, covered with a woollen blanket, her long grey hair in a plait running down the back of the chair, her body hunched up, her hands bony and her face kindly. There were few personal belongings there. A framed photograph of John F. Kennedy hung above her bed. Erlendur sat in a chair in front of her, looked into the eyes that could no longer see, and said he wanted to talk about Grétar. Her hearing seemed to be fine and her mind was sharp. She showed no sign of surprise but got straight to the point. Erlendur could tell she was from Skagafjördur. She spoke with a thick northern accent.

  "My Grétar wasn't a perfect lad," she said. "To tell you the truth he was an awful wretch. I don't know where he got it from. A cheap wretch. Going around with other wretches, layabouts, riff-raff the lot of them. Have you found him?"

  "No," Erlendur said. "One of his friends was murdered recently. Holberg. Maybe you've heard about it."

  "I didn't know. He got bumped off, you say?"

  Erlendur was amused and for the first time in a long while he saw reason to smile.

  "At home. They used to work together in the old days, Holberg and your son. At the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority."

  "The last I saw of my Grétar, and I still had decent sight then, was when he came home to see me the same summer as the national festival and stole some money from my purse and a bit of silver. I didn't find out until he'd left again and the money had disappeared. And then Grétar disappeared himself. Like he'd been stolen too. Do you know who stole him?"

  "No," Erlendur said. "Do you know what he was up to before he went missing? Who he was in touch with?"

  "No idea," the old woman said. "I never knew what Grétar was up to. I told you so at the time."

  "Did you know he took photographs?"

  "Yes. He took photographs. He was always taking those pictures. I don't know why. He told me once that photos were the mirrors of time, but I didn't have a clue what he was talking about."

  "Wasn't that a bit highbrow for Grétar?"

  "I'd never heard him talk like that."

  "His last address was on Bergstadastraeti where he rented a room. Do you know what happened to his belongings, the camera and films, do you know that?"

  "Maybe Klara knows," Theodóra said. "My daughter. She cleaned out his room. Threw all that rubbish away, I think."

  Erlendur stood up and she followed his movements with her head. He thanked her for her assistance, said she'd been very valuable and he wanted to praise her for how well she looked and how sharp her mind was, but he didn't. He didn't want to patronise her. He looked up along the wall above her bed at the photograph of Kennedy and couldn't restrain himself from asking.

  "Why have you got a photograph of Kennedy above your bed?" he said, looking into her vacant eyes.

  "Oh," Theodóra sighed, "I was so fond of him while he was alive."

  21

  The bodies lay side by side on the cold slabs in the morgue on Barónsstígur. Erlendur tried not to think about how he had brought the father and daughter together in death. An autopsy and tests had already been performed on Holberg's body, but it was awaiting further studies which would focus on genetic diseases and whether he was related to Audur. Erlendur noticed that the body's fingers were black. He'd been fingerprinted after his death. Audur's body lay wrapped in a white canvas sheet on a table beside Holberg. She was still untouched.

  Erlendur didn't know the pathologist and saw little of him. He was tall, with large hands. He wore thin plastic gloves, wearing a white apron over a green gown, tied at the back, and wearing green trousers of the same material. He had a gauze over his mouth and a blue plastic cap on his head and white trainers.

  Erlendur had been to the morgue often enough before and always felt equally bad there. The smell of death filled his senses and settled in his clothes, the smell of formalin and sterilising agents and the horrifying stench of dead bodies that had been opened. Bright fluorescent lamps were suspended from the ceiling, casting a pure white light around the windowless room. There were large white tiles on the floor and the walls were partly tiled, the upper half painted with white plastic paint. Standing up against them were tables with microscopes and other research equipment. On the walls were many cupboards, some with glass doors, revealing instruments and jars that were beyond Erlendur's comprehension. However, he did understand the function of the scalpels, tongs and saws that were spread out in a neat row on a long instrument table.

  Erlendur noticed a scent card hanging down from a fluorescent lamp above one of the two operating tables. It showed a girl in a red bikini running along a white sandy beach. There was a tape recorder on one of the tables and several cassettes beside it. It was playing classical music. Mahler, Erlendur thought. The pathologist's lunch box was on a table beside one of the microscopes.

  "She stopped giving off any scent long ago, but he
r body's still in good shape," the pathologist said and looked over to Erlendur, who was standing by the door as if hesitant about entering the brightly lit chamber of death and decay.