Tainted Blood Page 21

  "Nothing you say can change that in the slight-est," Katrín said in a subdued tone and looked at Elínborg, "so don't go telling me who I can and can't blame. There's no point."

  "He hung around us at the dance," she continued after a pause. "Certainly didn't make a bad impression. He was funny and he knew how to make us girls laugh. Played games with us and got us to play along. I remembered later that he had asked about Albert and found out I was at home alone. But he did it in such a way that I never suspected what lay behind it."

  "In principle it's the same story as when Holberg attacked the woman in Keflavík," Erlendur said. "She let him walk her home, admittedly. Then he asked to use the phone and attacked her in the kitchen."

  "Somehow he turned into a completely different person. Revolting. The things he said. He tore off the coat I was wearing, pushed me inside and called me awful names. He got very worked up. I tried to talk to him but it was useless and when I started to shout for help he jumped on me and silenced me. Then he dragged me into the bedroom ..."

  She mustered up all the courage she could and told them what Holberg did, systematically and without holding anything back. She hadn't forgot-ten anything about that evening. On the contrary, she remembered every tiniest detail. Her account was devoid of sentimentality. It was as if she were reading out cold facts from a page. She'd never talked about the incident in this way, with such precision, but she'd created such a distance from it that Erlendur felt she was describing something that had befallen another woman. Not her personally, but someone else. Somewhere else. At another time. In another life.

  At one point in her account Erlendur grimaced and Elínborg cursed under her breath.

  Katrín stopped talking.

  "Why didn't you press charges against that bastard?" Elínborg asked.

  "He was like a monster. He threatened to finish me off if I told anyone and the police arrested him. And what was worse, he said if I made an issue of it he'd claim I'd asked him to meet me at home and wanted to sleep with him. He didn't use exactly those words, but I knew what he was getting at. He was incredibly strong, but he hardly left a mark on me. He made sure of that. I started thinking about that later. He hit me in the face a couple of times, but never hard."

  "When did this happen?"

  "It was 1961. Late. In the autumn."

  "And wasn't there any aftermath? Didn't you ever see Holberg again or ..."

  "No. I never saw him after that. Not until I saw the photo of him in the paper."

  "You moved away from Húsavík?"

  "That was what we'd planned to do anyway really. Albert always had it in the back of his mind. I wasn't against it so much after that. The people in Húsavík are nice and it's a good place to live, but I've never been back there since."

  "You had two children before, sons from the look of them," Erlendur said, nodding in the direction of the confirmation photographs, "and then you had the third son . . . when?"

  "Two years later," Katrín said.

  Erlendur looked at her and could see that, for some reason, for the first time in their conversation, she was lying.

  33

  "Why did you stop there?" Elínborg said when they left the house and went into the street.

  She'd had trouble concealing her surprise when Erlendur suddenly thanked Katrín for being so cooperative. He said he knew how difficult it was for her to talk about these things and he'd make sure that nothing they had talked about would go any further. Elínborg gaped. They were only just starting to talk.

  "She'd started lying," Erlendur said. "It's too much of an ordeal for her. We'll meet her later. Her phone needs tapping and we should have a car outside the house to check on her movements and any visitors. We need to find out what her sons do, get recent photos of them if we can, but without drawing attention to ourselves, and we need to locate people who knew Katrín in Húsavík and could even remember that evening, although that might be a bit of a long shot. I asked Sigurdur Óli to contact the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority to see if they can tell us when Holberg worked for them in Húsavík. Maybe he's done that by now. Get a copy of Katrín and Albert's marriage certificate to find out the year they were married."

  Erlendur had got into his car.

  "And Elínborg, you can come along the next time we talk to her."

  "Is anyone capable of doing what she described?" Elínborg asked, her mind still on Katrín's story.

  "With Holberg it seems anything's possible," Erlendur replied.

  He drove down into Nordurmýri. Sigurdur Óli was still there. He'd contacted the phone company about the calls made to Holberg the weekend he was murdered. Two were from the Iceland Transport yard where he worked and another three were from public telephones: two from a phone box on Laekjargata and one from a payphone at Hlemmur Bus Station.

  "Anything else?"

  "Yes, the porn on his computer. Forensics have looked at quite a lot of it and it's appalling. Downright sick. All the worst stuff you can find on the Internet, including animals and children. That guy was a total pervert. I think they gave up looking at it."

  "Maybe there's no need to subject them to it any more," said Erlendur.

  "It does give us a small picture of what a filthy, disgusting creep he was," Sigurdur Óli said

  "Do you mean he deserved to be smashed over the head and killed?" Erlendur said.

  "What do you think?"

  "Have you asked the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority about Holberg?"

  "No."

  "Get a move on then."

  "Is he waving to us?" Sigurdur Óli asked. They were standing in front of Holberg's house. One of the forensic team had come out of the basement and was standing there in his white overalls waving to them to come over. He seemed quite excited. They got out of the car, went down into the basement and the forensic technician gestured to them to come over to one of the screens. He was holding a remote control which he told them operated the camera that had been inserted into one of the holes in the corner of the sitting room.

  They watched the screen, but they couldn't see anything on it that they could at all identify. The image was speckled, poorly lit, blurred and dull. They could see gravel and the underside of the flooring, but otherwise nothing unusual. Some time passed until the technician couldn't hold back any longer.

  "It's this thing here," he said, pointing to the top centre of the screen. "Right up underneath the flooring."

  "What?" said Erlendur, who couldn't see a thing.

  "Can't you see it?" the forensics technician said.

  "What?" Sigurdur Óli said.

  "The ring."

  "The ring?" Erlendur said.

  "That's clearly a ring we've found under the floor. Can't you see it?"

  They squinted at the screen until they thought they could make out an object that could well be a ring. It was unclear, as if something was blocking the view. They couldn't see anything else.

  "It's as if there's something in the way," Sigurdur Óli said.

  "It could be insulating plastic like they use in building," the technician said. More people had gathered around the screen to watch what was happening. "Look at this thing here," he continued, "This line by the ring. It could easily be a finger. There's something lying out in the corner that I think we ought to take a closer look at."

  "Break up the floor," Erlendur ordered. "Let's see what it is."

  The forensic team went to work at once. They marked out the spot on the sitting-room floor and began breaking it up with the pneumatic drill. A fine concrete dust swirled around the basement and Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli put gauze masks over their mouths. They stood behind the technicians, watching the hole widening in the floor. The base plate was seven or eight inches thick and it took the drill some time to get through it.

  Once they'd broken through, the hole quickly widened. The men swept the concrete fragments away as fast as they were chipped loose and they could soon see the plastic that had been revealed by the camera
. Erlendur looked at Sigurdur Óli, who nodded at him.

  The plastic came increasingly into view. Erlendur thought it was thick building insulation plastic. It was impossible to see through. He'd forgotten the noise in the basement, the revolting stench and the dust swirling up. Sigurdur Óli had taken his mask off to see better. He bent down and called over the forensic team which was breaking up the floor.

  "Is this how they open the Pharaohs' tombs in Egypt?" he asked and the tension eased a little.

  "Except I'm afraid there's no Pharaoh under here," Erlendur said.

  "Could it actually be that we've found Grétar under Holberg's floor?" Sigurdur Óli said in eager anticipation. "After twenty-fucking-five years! Bloody brilliant!"

  "His mother was right," Erlendur said.

  "Grétar's mother?"

  "'It was like he'd been stolen,' she said."

  "Wrapped up in plastic and stashed away under the floor."

  "Marion Briem," Erlendur muttered to himself and shook his head.

  The forensic team bored away with their electric drills, the floor split open under the pressure and the hole widened until the entire plastic package could be seen. It was the length of an average man. The forensic team discussed how they ought to go about opening it. They decided to remove it from the floor cavity in one piece and not touch it until they'd taken it to the morgue on Barónsstígur where it could be handled without the loss of any potential evidence.

  They fetched a stretcher they had taken into the basement the night before and put it next to the hole in the floor. Two of them tried to lift the plastic package, but it turned out to be too heavy, so another two went down to help them. Soon it began to budge and they worked it free from its surroundings, lifted it out and placed it on the stretcher.

  Erlendur went up to the package, bent over it and tried to see through the plastic. He thought he could make out a face, shrivelled and rotten, teeth and part of a nose. He straightened up again.

  "He doesn't look so bad, considering," he said.

  "What's that?" Sigurdur Óli asked, leaning down into the hole.

  "What?" Erlendur said.

  "Are those rolls of film?" Sigurdur Óli said.

  Erlendur went up closer, knelt down and saw rolls of photographic film half buried in the gravel. Yards of film spread all around. He was hoping that some of it had been used.

  34

  Katrín didn't leave the house for the rest of the day. No-one visited her and she didn't use the telephone. In the evening a man driving an estate car pulled up outside the house and went in carrying a medium-sized suitcase. This was presumably Albert, her husband. He was due back from a business trip to Germany that afternoon.

  Two policemen in an unmarked car were watching the house. The phone was tapped. The whereabouts of the two older sons had been ascertained, but nothing was known about where the youngest one was. He was divorced and lived in a flat in the Gerdi district but there was nobody home. A watch was mounted outside it. The police were gathering information about the son and his description was sent to police stations all over the country. As yet there were not considered to be grounds for releasing an announcement about him to the media.

  Erlendur pulled up in front of the morgue on Barónsstígur. The body of the man who was thought to be Grétar had been taken there. The pathologist, the same one who had examined Holberg and Audur, had removed the plastic from the body. It turned out to be the body of a male with his head snapped back, his mouth open as if screaming in anguish and his arms by his sides. The skin was parched and shrivelled and pallid, with large patches of rot here and there on the naked body. The head appeared to have been badly damaged, and the hair was long and colourless, hanging down the sides of the face.

  "He removed his innards," the pathologist said.

  "What?"

  "The person who buried him. A sensible move if you want to keep a body. Because of the smell. He gradually dried up inside the plastic. Well preserved in that sense."

  "Can you establish the cause of death?"

  "There was a plastic bag over his head which suggests he may have been suffocated, but I'll have to take a better look at him. You'll find out more later. It all takes time. Do you know who he is? He's a bit of a runt, the poor bugger."

  "I have my suspicions," Erlendur said.

  "Did you talk to the professor?"

  "A lovely woman."

  "Isn't she just?"

  Sigurdur Óli was waiting for Erlendur at the office but when he arrived he said he was going straight to forensics. They had managed to develop and enlarge several exposures from the film that had been found in Holberg's flat. Erlendur told him about the conversation he and Elínborg had had with Katrín.

  Ragnar, the head of forensics, was waiting for them in his office with several rolls of film on his desk and some enlarged photographs. He handed them the photographs and they huddled over them.

  "We could only manage these three," Ragnar said, "and I can't actually tell what they show. There were seven rolls of Kodak with 24 exposures each. Three were completely black and we can't tell whether they'd been used, but from one of them we managed to enlarge the little we can see here. Is this anything you recognise?"

  Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli squinted at the photographs. They were all black-and-white. Two of them were half black as if the aperture hadn't opened properly; the pictures were out of focus and so unclear that they couldn't make them out. The third and final print was intact and reasonably sharp and showed a man taking his own photograph in front of a mirror. The camera was small and flat, with a flash cube on the top with four bulbs, and the flash lit up the man in the mirror. He was wearing jeans and a shirt and a waist-length summer jacket.

  "Do you remember flash cubes?" Erlendur said with a hint of nostalgia in his voice. "What a revolution."

  "I remember them well," said Ragnar, who was the same age as Erlendur. Sigurdur Óli looked at them in turn and shook his head.

  "Is that what you'd call a self-portrait?" Erlendur said.

  "It's difficult to see his face with the camera in the way," Sigurdur Óli said, "but isn't it probable it's Grétar himself?"

  "Do you recognise the surroundings, what little of them is visible?" Ragnar asked.

  In the reflection they could make out part of the room behind the photographer. Erlendur could see the back of a chair and even a coffee table, the carpet on the floor and part of something that could have been a floor-length curtain, but everything else was difficult to discern. The face of the man in the mirror was brightly lit but to the sides the light faded to total darkness.

  They pored over the photograph for a long time. After much effort Erlendur began to distinguish something in the darkness to the left of the photographer, which he thought might be a human form, even a profile, eyebrows and a nose. This was only a hunch, but there was something uneven in the light, tiny shadows, that kindled his imagination.

  "Could we enlarge this area?" he asked Ragnar, who stared hard at the same part but couldn't see a thing. Sigurdur Óli took the photograph and held it up in front of his face, but he couldn't make out what Erlendur thought he could see either

  "It will only take a second," Ragnar said. They followed him from the office and over to the forensic team.

  "Are there any fingerprints on the film?" Sigurdur Óli asked.

  "Yes," Ragnar said, "two sets, the same ones as on the photo from the cemetery. Grétar's and Holberg's."