House of Evidence (12 page)

June 11, 1915. I visited the office of the British Embassy this morning to apply for a visa. The purpose I gave for my visit was that I wanted to look up some friends of mine with whom I had lost touch. I had to give a thorough account of my stay in Berlin. In the end I got my visa on condition that during my stay I present myself each week at the office of the Immigration Authority…

June 12, 1915. The old railway station here in Copenhagen has been turned into a cinema. I went
to a film show, but could think of nothing but my recollection of the day, five years ago, when I first came here and saw the trains. I feel as if a whole lifetime has gone by since then. I do remember the arched roof, though; otherwise it all seems a lot smaller than it was in my memory…

June 15, 1915. I heard that the Icelandic Steamship Company’s brand new ship the
Godafoss
is to embark on its first journey to Iceland on the 19th of this month. The ship stops en route in Leith, so it seems an excellent idea to try and get a passage on it…

June 19, 1915. It was a festive occasion when the
Godafoss
set off from the dock in Copenhagen. The ship is 70 meters long and 1,374 tonnes. It has a crew of 31 and accommodation for 56 passengers. Everything here on board is new and splendid. The only thing I do not like is that the ship has two Danish flags and the word “Danmark” in large white letters painted on each side, but this is of course necessary because of the war. It must be clear that the ship comes from a neutral country. The captain told me that they had painted over these markings on the
Gullfoss
before it entered the port of
Reykjavik this spring…The
Godafoss
is, apparently, the first Icelandic ship with radiotelegraphic equipment, and through this, we heard that the Danish government had today approved a new constitution for Iceland and also agreed on a new Icelandic national flag, which will have an ultra-marine field with a red cross superimposed upon a white cross. The blue color is lighter than, for instance, the blue of the French, Norwegian, and English flags…

J
óhann had a visitor at the lab that afternoon; Erlendur’s son, Halli, had come to the office, as he occasionally did, to get a lift home with his father. Erlendur couldn’t always leave on time, and on those occasions Halli would seek refuge in the lab with Jóhann. He would sit in a corner drawing with a pencil on squared paper, always starting his pictures in the top left-hand corner and working systematically down the sheet. His illustrations depicted things from daily life: cars, roads, houses, or people skiing. Each drawing was careful and exact, though completely devoid of any sense of perspective.

Blue-eyed Halli was tanned and handsome, with blond hair cut straight across his forehead. His right ear was slightly deformed, and his long hair concealed the hearing aid he wore there. Halli usually had a smile on his face that highlighted his straight white teeth, but when he was busy drawing, as he was now, his expression became serious as he frowned in concentration.

Jóhann had arrived at the lab just after five o’clock with all the data he had collected at Birkihlíd. He arranged the cards with the known fingerprints in a semicircle on the table in front of him, and began sorting the unknown prints he had retrieved at
the scene. Marteinn had taken the film to be developed, before heading to the hospital for the postmortem. When Fridrik had extracted the bullet, Marteinn was to bring it to Jóhann for examination.

It didn’t take Jóhann long to recognize and put aside the prints that
matched those of the dead man and of Sveinborg, the housekeeper. One print lifted from the telephone table obviously belonged to his colleague Egill; not an unusual occurrence in cases like this. The detectives were not always quick enough in donning their gloves, leaving fingerprints in unhelpful places, but Jóhann could recognize most of them by sight. It was an unusual talent, one that he developed at college in the States. He remembered fingerprints almost as well as faces, and if a print was clean, he could often tell immediately whether he had examined it before.

In the end, there were only two samples left that he had no match for, but they seemed to belong to the same person. Someone had opened the lid to the keyboard of the grand piano in the parlor, and also picked up one of the stamp frames from the desk. He knew that Sveinborg had polished the frames the previous day, so her prints would be on them, but the frames had been picked up again after that. To his surprise, he recognized these prints.

Some weeks before, a building that housed one of the city’s best music studios had been broken into; many valuable instruments and pieces of equipment had been stolen, and damage had been done. Jóhann had carried out the fingerprint examination, acquiring some exemplar prints from the staff and all the musicians who had been there recently. One set of prints in particular had attracted his attention; their owner was a guitar player, so his fingertips were unusually calloused. He had also been left-handed, and the fingerprints on the stamp frame at Birkihlíd matched those of a left-handed guitar player. Though he had taken the man’s fingerprints himself, he did not recall his face well, but he did remember the prints, and these were the same.

Now he needed to find the paperwork for the burglary and hope that those prints were still on file; privacy rights required that prints taken from innocent people during the course of a criminal investigation be destroyed as soon as the investigation was completed, but there was sometimes a bit of a delay in the process. Even if the prints had been destroyed, it would be easy enough to find the man and get some new prints. But that, Jóhann thought, would be for someone else to worry about.

Jóhann checked his notes on the shoe print that he had taken in the garden, wondering if it could possibly belong to the same man as the fingerprints on the frame. It seemed unlikely; the guitar player had not been a very large man as he could remember, but even so, the footprint they found was very small.

He was reasonably pleased with the results of his day’s work, which had established that two people had arrived at the house in the hours around the time of death—the person with the small footprint, and the left-handed guitarist. Whether these visits had anything to do with the death was another matter, and again not for him to investigate.

“That was disgusting,” Marteinn exclaimed, entering the lab and handing Jóhann a clear plastic bag containing a bloody bullet. He was short of breath from his run up the stairs to the fourth floor, a common practice of his—part of his training regimen, he claimed.

Jóhann opened the bag to examine its content. “What was disgusting?”

“The autopsy.”

“You didn’t stand over them while they were cutting?”

“Yes, wasn’t I supposed to?”

“No, not necessarily,” Jóhann said, smiling. “I always wait outside.” Moistening a cloth with denatured alcohol, he tipped the bullet from the bag onto the cloth and wiped the blood away.

“Can you find out what sort of a gun was used?”

“I’ll try,” said Jóhann, “but I’m no firearms expert. At college they told us if you are going to be any good at ballistics, you have to be crazy about guns; you can’t learn it from a book. I’ve only ever fired a gun in the lab, so my knowledge of this stuff is limited.”

He measured the diameter of the bullet with calipers.

“9.6 or 9.7 millimeters,” he said, getting up and going to the corner where Halli was working on his drawing. Jóhann put a hand on his shoulder and the boy looked up.

“Halli! We need to calculate,” Jóhann said in a loud, clear voice.

Halli looked up and smiled broadly. “Calculate, yes, I like calculating. Absolutely.”

He happily followed Jóhann to the workbench.

“First, we’ll convert to inches. What is 97 divided by 254?” Jóhann asked in a loud tone, and making sure to look Halli straight in the eye.

“What is 97 divided by 254?” Halli repeated, closing his eyes and bobbing his head up and down.

Jóhann took out a slide rule and moved the slide back and forth.

“Why do you speak so loudly to him?” Marteinn whispered.

“He’s hard of hearing,” Jóhann replied.

“I know; 97 divided by 254 is 0.3819. Absolutely,” Halli said.

Jóhann had also completed his calculations. “That’s right, 97 divided by 254 is approximately 0.38 inches, or .38 caliber.”

“That narrows the field,” Jóhann explained, turning to Marteinn. “That’s the way ballistics investigations usually
work, through elimination, but if we wanted to rely on this sort of thing in court, I would send the stuff to a lab abroad for confirmation.”

He then got a small pair of scales along with a box of small weights down from a shelf; on one of its trays he placed the bullet, on the other a ten-gram weight. The side with the bullet swung down, so he kept adding one-gram weights until the scales balanced.

“Thirteen grams,” he said, looking at Halli, who had been waiting patiently. “How many grains is that? Thirteen times 15.4.”

“What is 13 times 15.4?” he repeated, closing his eyes and bobbing his head once again.

Jóhann began again to calculate with his slide rule.

“I know; 13 times 15.4 is 200.2. Absolutely,” Halli said.

“That’s right; it is…about 200 grains. Now you can finish your picture,” he said kindly, dismissing the boy.

“Finish the picture, absolutely,” Halli said, scurrying happily back to his corner.

“About 200…I’m beginning to get some ideas,” Jóhann said. He took out an American ballistics manual and leafed through some tables.

“I know the type of gun this might come from. It was often called the 38/200. Smith and Wesson in the United States started to produce these for the British army in 1940, and a few of them remained in circulation here in Iceland after the war, left behind by British officers, but it was difficult to get ammunition for them after the British army left.”

Jóhann read from the manual: “
Rifling: Five-groove right-hand.
I think that means that there are five grooves in the bore that spiral around to the right.” He looked at Marteinn. “Do you know what that is for?”

“So that the bullet spins as it flies, then it goes straight and doesn’t tumble. I learned that at Police College,” Marteinn replied, clearly pleased with himself.

“That’s right,” Jóhann said, examining the bullet under a magnifying glass. “One, two, three, four, five grooves turned to the right. It figures.” He put the magnifying glass down and added, “The parts of the bore between the grooves are called the lands. When the bullet is fired, it gets hot and expands into the grooves as it goes down the barrel, so the lands leave marks on it. There are five such marks on this bullet.”

Jóhann retrieved a wooden box from the bottom of a closet in one corner of the lab. “I brought this back from the States,” he said, placing the heavy box on the table. It had several labeled, shallow drawers, and Jóhann opened the second to last drawer, marked
Smith & Wesson etc.
The drawer was divided into many compartments, each containing one unused cartridge and one used bullet, along with an information sheet.

“This box contains samples of the most common ammo used in the States,” Jóhann said. “I’m sure there is a 38/200 here somewhere.” He ran his finger across the compartments as he read the information. “Yes, it’s here.” He took the used bullet and compared it with the bullet that had killed Jacob Junior. The color finish was slightly different but the shape was identical.

“That’s the one,” he said, flipping through the manual to the index. He turned to the relevant page and found some good color photographs of the gun from both sides, together with a comprehensive description. “
Repeating handgun with revolving cartridge cylinder.
” On the left side of the barrel was the maker’s name,
SMITH & WESSON
; on the left side of the butt the trademark; and, attached beneath the butt, a lanyard loop.

Jóhann read out some numerical information, writing it down as he did: “
Length 10 inches or 254 millimeters. Weight 29
ounces or 820 grams. Length of barrel 5 inches or 127 millimeters. Six rounds fully loaded. Muzzle velocity 198 meters per second.
”

He referred to a table listing the muzzle energy and velocity of handguns.

“This gun seems to me to have been rather underpowered compared with other types of the same caliber,” he said after comparing some numbers.

Just then Hrefna entered the lab and sneezed; her face was gray with fine dust. “I went to the document store and finally managed to find the file on the death of Jacob Senior,” she announced, then sneezed again and blew her nose into a tissue. “I must be allergic to this stupid dust,” she said. “Here’s the bullet.” She handed Jóhann a brown transparent paper envelope, its glue long since dried out. Jóhann took out the bullet and examined it.

“This is interesting. Another 38/200, as far as I can see.” He told Hrefna what he had discovered about the other bullet as he marked each one on its flat end with a felt-tip pen,
A
on the new bullet and
B
on the old one.

“Now let’s check to see if this could be the same weapon,” he said. “We’ll use the comparison microscope.”

This was the largest piece of equipment in the lab, and it was composed of two gray-colored microscopes linked by a white crossbar, with lenses for both eyes. Jóhann carefully clamped the bullets in place, one under each microscope. The clamps were designed so that objects under observation could be aligned in any direction, and miniature lamps enabled Jóhann to illuminate both bullets from exactly the same angle.

“The light sharpens the marks,” he said, peering into the microscope. It took a moment for him to synchronize the focus, and then he slowly revolved bullet A to find the deepest mark. He
repeated the process with bullet B, turning a fine adjusting screw back and forth until he was finally satisfied.

“Here, take a look at this,” he said.

Marteinn and Hrefna took turns examining the bullets through the microscope. “That’s very interesting,” said Marteinn tentatively.

“What am I supposed to be seeing?” Hrefna asked impatiently. Neither of them had been able to discern anything aside from a mass of horizontal marks bisected by a central black vertical line.

“The horizontal marks fit perfectly together,” Jóhann explained. “You are looking at the two bullets on either side of the black vertical line.”

Hrefna peered into the microscope again. It was true; the marks were unbroken across the whole image.

“Does this mean that the same gun was used to fire both shots?” she asked.

“Probably,” Jóhann replied. He looked again into the microscope and slowly turned both bullets a full 360 degrees. They had been distorted on contact with their targets, but it was very clear that the pattern was the same all the way round.

“Very probably the same gun,” Jóhann repeated.

Diary III

June 22, 1915. Elizabeth met me on my arrival at Leicester and introduced me to her fiancé, Mr. Peter Faidley, a lieutenant in the army. I was, naturally, deeply disappointed but I was also happy for them. They certainly make a handsome couple. I had never asked for Elizabeth’s hand in marriage, nor indicated that I had any intentions of that nature.
And she heard nothing from me for two years. I can only blame myself that I have lost her. They plan to marry when Mr. Faidley has completed his military service…