Tainted Blood Page 4

  "Anything new on Holberg?" Erlendur asked and walked straight into his office. Sigurdur Óli followed him and closed the door. Murders were rare in Reykjavik and generated enormous publicity on the few occasions they were committed. The CID made it a rule not to inform the media of details of their investigations unless absolutely necessary. That did not apply in this case.

  "We know a little more about him," Sigurdur Óli said, opening a file he was holding. "He was born in Saudárkrókur, 69 years old. Spent his last years working as a lorry driver for Iceland Transport. Still worked there on and off."

  Sigurdur Óli paused.

  "Shouldn't we talk to his workmates?" he said, straightening his tie. Sigurdur Óli was wearing a new suit, tall and handsome, a graduate in criminology from an American university. He was everything that Erlendur was not: modern and organised.

  "What do people in the office think?" Erlendur asked, twiddling with a loose button on his cardigan which eventually dropped into his palm. He was stout and well-built with bushy ginger hair, one of the most experienced detectives on the team. He generally got his way. His superiors and colleagues had long since given up doing battle with him. Things had turned out that way over the years. Erlendur didn't dislike it.

  "Probably some nutcase," Sigurdur Óli said. "At the minute we're looking for that green army jacket. Some kid who wanted money but panicked when Holberg refused."

  "What about Holberg's family? Did he have any?"

  "No family, but we haven't got all the information yet. We're still gathering it together; family, friends, workmates."

  "From the look of his flat I'd say he was single and had been for a long time."

  "You would know, of course," Sigurdur Óli blurted out, but Erlendur pretended not to hear.

  "Anything from the pathologist? Forensics?"

  "The provisional report's in. Nothing in it we didn't know. Holberg died from a blow to the head. It was a heavy blow, but basically it was the shape of the ashtray, the sharp edges, that were decisive. His skull caved in and he died instantly . . . or almost. He seems to have struck the corner of the coffee table as he fell. He had a nasty wound on his forehead that fitted the corner of the table. The fingerprints on the ashtray were Holberg's but then there are at least two other sets, one of which is also on the pencil."

  "Are they the murderer's then?"

  "There's every probability that they are the murderer's, yes."

  "Right, a typical clumsy Icelandic murder."

  "Typical. And that's the assumption we're working on."

  It was still raining. The low-pressure fronts that moved in from deep in the Atlantic at that time of year headed east across Iceland in succession, bringing wind, wet and dark winter gloom. The CID was still at work in the building in Nordurmýri. The yellow police tape that had been set up around the building reminded Erlendur of the electricity board; a hole in the road, a filthy tent over it, a flicker of light inside the tent, all neatly gift-wrapped with yellow tape. In the same way, the police had wrapped the murder scene up with neat yellow plastic tape with the name of the authority printed on it. Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli met Elínborg and the other detectives who had been combing the building through the autumn night and into the morning and were just finishing their job.

  People from neighbouring buildings were questioned but none of them had noticed any suspicious movements at the murder scene between the Monday morning and the time the body was found.

  Soon there was no-one left in the building but Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli. The blood on the carpet had turned black. The ashtray had been removed as evidence. The pencil and pad too. In other respects it was as though nothing had happened. Sigurdur Óli went to look in the den and the passage to the bedroom, while Erlendur walked around the sitting room. They put on white rubber gloves. Prints were mounted and framed on the walls and looked as if they'd been bought at the front door from travelling salesmen. In the bookcase were thrillers in translation, paperbacks from a book club, some of them read, others apparently untouched. No interesting hard-bound volumes. Erlendur bent down almost to the floor to read the titles on the bottom shelf and recognised only one: Lolita by Nabokov; paperback. He took it from the bookshelf. It was an English edition and had clearly been read.

  He replaced the book and inched his way towards the desk. It was L-shaped and took up one corner of the sitting room. A new, comfortable office chair was by the desk, with a plastic mat underneath it to protect the carpet. The desk looked much older than the chair. There were drawers on both sides underneath the broader desktop and a long one in the middle, nine in all. On the shorter desktop stood a 17-inch computer monitor with a sliding tray for a keyboard fitted beneath it. The tower was kept on the floor. All the drawers were locked.

  Sigurdur Óli went through the wardrobe in the bedroom. It was reasonably organised, with socks in one drawer, underwear in another, trousers, sweaters. Some shirts and three suits were hanging on a rail, the oldest suit from the disco era, Sigurdur Óli thought, brown striped. Several pairs of shoes on the wardrobe floor. Bedclothes in the top drawer. The man had made his bed before his visitor arrived. A white blanket covered the duvet and pillow. It was a single bed.

  On the bedside table were an alarm clock and two books, one a series of interviews with a well-known politician and the other a book of photographs of Scania-Vabis trucks. The bedside table had a cupboard in it too, containing medicine, surgical spirit, sleeping pills, Panadol and a small jar of Vaseline.

  "Can you see any keys anywhere?" asked Erlendur, who was now by the door.

  "No keys. Door keys, you mean?"

  "No, to the desk."

  "None of those either."

  Erlendur went into the den and from there into the kitchen. He opened drawers and cupboards but could see only cutlery and glasses, ladles and plates. No keys. He went over to the hangers by the door, frisked the coats but found nothing except a little black pouch with a ring of keys and some coins in it. Two small keys were hanging from the ring with others to the front door, to the flat and to the rooms. Erlendur tried them on the desk. The same one fitted all nine drawers.

  He opened the large drawer in the centre of the desk first. It contained mainly bills – telephone, electricity, heating and credit-card bills – and also a newspaper subscription. The bottom two drawers to the left were empty and in the next one up were tax forms and wage slips. In the top drawer was a photograph album. All black-and-white, old photographs of people from various times, sometimes dressed up in what appeared to be the sitting room in Nordurmýri, sometimes on picnics: dwarf birch, Gullfoss waterfall and Geysir. He saw two photo-graphs that he thought might be of the murdered man when he was young, but nothing taken recently.

  He opened the drawers on the right-hand side. The top two were empty. In the third he found a pack of cards, a folding chess set, an old inkwell.

  He found the photograph underneath the bottom drawer.

  Erlendur was closing the bottom drawer again when he heard what sounded like a slight rustling from inside it. When he opened and closed it again he heard the same rustling. It rubbed against something on its way in. He sighed and squatted down, looked inside but could see nothing. He pulled it back out but heard nothing, then closed it and the noise came again. He knelt on the floor, pulled the drawer right out, saw something stuck and stretched out to get it.

  It was a small black-and-white photograph, showing a grave in a cemetery in wintertime. He didn't recognise the cemetery. There was a headstone on the grave and most of the inscription on it was fairly clear. A woman's name was carved there. AUDUR. No second name. Erlendur couldn't see the dates very clearly. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his glasses, put them on and held the photograph up to his nose. 1964—1968. He could vaguely make out an epitaph, but the letters were small and he could not read it. Carefully he blew the dust off the photo.

  The girl was only four when she died.

  Erlendur looked up as the autumn rain thra
shed against the windows. It was the middle of the day but the sky was a gloomy black.

  6

  The big lorry rocked in the storm like a prehistoric beast and the rain pounded against it. It had taken the police some time to locate as it wasn't parked where Holberg lived in Nordurmýri, but in a car park west of Snorrabraut, by the Domus Medica health centre, several minutes' walk from Holberg's home. In the end they had made a radio announcement asking for information about the lorry's whereabouts. A police patrol had found it at about the same time that Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli left Holberg's flat with the photograph. A forensic team was called out to comb the vehicle for clues. It was an MAN model with a red cab. All that a quick search revealed was a collection of hardcore pornographic magazines. It was decided to move the lorry to CID headquarters for further investigation.

  While this was going on, forensics got to work on the photograph. It transpired that it was printed on Ilford photographic paper, which was used a lot in the 1960s but had long since been discontinued. Probably the photograph had been developed by the photographer himself or by an amateur; it had begun to fade as if the job had not been done very carefully. There was nothing written on the back and there were no landmarks by which to determine the cemetery in which it had been taken. It could be anywhere in the country.

  The photographer had stood about three metres from the headstone. The shot was taken more or less directly in front of it; the photographer must have had to bend his knees unless he was very short. Even from that distance the angle was quite narrow. There was nothing growing near the grave. A powdery snow lay on the ground. No other grave could be seen. Behind the headstone, all that was visible was a white haze.

  Forensics concentrated on the epitaph which was largely indistinguishable because the photographer had stood so far away. Numerous reproductions were made of the photograph and the epitaph was enlarged until every single letter had been printed out on A5 paper, numbered and arranged in the same sequence as on the headstone. They were coarse-grained pictures, hardly more than alternating black-and-white dots that created nuances of light and shade, but once scanned into a computer the shadowing and resolution could be processed. Some letters were clearer than others, which left the forensic team to fill in the gaps. The letters M, F and O were clearly discernible. Others were more difficult.

  Erlendur phoned the home of a department manager from the National Statistics Office who agreed, cursing and swearing, to meet him at the offices on Skuggasund. Erlendur knew all the death certificates issued since 1916 were housed there. No-one was in the building, all the staff having left work some time before. The department manager pulled up in his car outside the Statistics Office half an hour later and shook Erlendur's hand curtly. He entered a PIN in the security system and let them into the building with a card. Erlendur outlined the matter to him, telling him only the bare essentials.

  They looked at all death certificates issued in 1968 and found two in the name of Audur. One was in her fourth year. She had died in the February. A doctor had signed the death certificate and they soon found his name in the national registry. He lived in Reykjavik. The girl's mother was named on the certificate. They found her without any problems. Her name was Kolbrún. She had last been domiciled in Keflavík in the early 1970s. They then checked again among the death certificates. Kolbrún had died in 1971, three years after her daughter.

  The girl had died from a malignant tumour on the brain.

  The mother had committed suicide.

  7

  The bridegroom welcomed Erlendur into his office. He was a quality and marketing manager for a wholesaling company that imported breakfast cereal from America and Erlendur, who had never tasted American breakfast cereal in his life, pondered as he sat down in the office what a quality and marketing manager at a wholesaling company actually did. He couldn't be bothered to ask. The bridegroom was wearing a well-ironed white shirt and thick braces and he had rolled up his sleeves as if managing quality issues required every ounce of his strength. Average height, a little chubby and with a ring of beard around his thick-lipped mouth. Viggó was his name.

  "I haven't heard from Dísa," Viggó said quickly and sat down facing Erlendur.

  "Was it something you said to her that . . ."

  "That's what everyone thinks," Viggó said. "Everyone assumes it's my fault. That's the worst thing. The worst part of the whole business. I can't stand it."

  "Did you notice anything unusual about her before she ran away? Anything that might have upset her?"

  "Everyone was just having fun. You know, a wedding, you know what I mean."

  "No."

  "Surely you've been to a wedding?"

  "Once. A long time ago."

  "It was time for the first dance. The speeches were over and Dísa's girlfriends had organised some entertainment, the accordionist had arrived and we were supposed to dance. I was sitting at our table and everyone started looking for Dísa, but she was gone."

  "Where did you last see her?"

  "She was sitting with me and said she needed to go to the toilet."

  "And did you say anything that could have made her sulk?"

  "Not at all! I gave her a kiss and told her to be quick."

  "How much time passed from when she left until you started looking for her?"

  "I don't know. I sat down with my friends and then went outside for a smoke – all the smokers had to go outside – I talked to some people there and on the way out and back, sat down again and the accordionist came over and talked to me about the dance and music. I talked to some other people, I guess it must have been half an hour, I don't know."

  "And you never saw her during that time?"

  "No. When we realised she was gone it was a total disaster. Everyone stared at me as though it was my fault."

  "What do you think has happened to her?"

  "I've looked everywhere. Spoken to all her friends and relatives but no-one knows a thing, or that's what they say anyway."

  "Do you think someone's lying?"

  "Well, she must be somewhere."

  "Did you know she left a message?"

  "No. What message? What do you mean?"

  "She hung a card on the message tree thing. 'He's a monster, what have I done?' it said. Do you know what she means by that?"

  "He's a monster," Viggó repeated. "Who was she talking about?"

  "I had thought it might be you."

  "Me?" said Viggó, becoming agitated. "I haven't done a thing to her, not a thing. Never. It's not me. It can't be me."

  "The car she took was found on Gardastraeti. Does that tell you anything?"

  "She doesn't know anyone there. Are you going to report her missing?"

  "I think her parents want to give her time to come back."

  "And if she doesn't?"

  "Then we'll see." Erlendur hesitated. "I would have thought she'd have contacted you. To tell you everything's all right."

  "Wait a minute, are you suggesting it was my fault and she won't talk to me because I did something to her? Jesus, what a bloody horror story. Do you know what it was like coming to work on Monday? All my colleagues were at the party. My boss was at the party! Do you think it's my fault? Fuck it! Everyone thinks it's my fault."

  "Women," Erlendur said as he stood up. "They're difficult to quality control."

  Erlendur had just arrived at his office when the phone rang. He recognised the voice immediately although he had not heard it for a long time. It was still clear and strong and firm despite its advanced age. Erlendur had known Marion Briem for almost 30 years and it hadn't always been plain sailing.

  "I've just come from the chalet", the voice said, "and I didn't hear the news until I reached town just now."