Tainted Blood (8 page)

Eva Lind wasn't in the flat when Erlendur returned home that evening. He tried to follow her advice not to dwell on where she was, whether she'd come back and what kind of state she'd be in if she did. He'd called in at a takeaway and picked up a bag of fried chicken for dinner. He threw it down on a chair and was taking off his coat when he smelled the familiar old aroma of cooking. He hadn't smelled something being cooked in his kitchen for a very long time. Chicken like that lying on the chair was his food, hamburgers, takeaways from the greasy spoon, ready meals from the supermarket, cold boiled sheep head, tubs of curds, tasteless microwave dinners. He couldn't remember the last time he'd actually cooked himself a proper meal in the kitchen. He couldn't remember when he'd last even wanted to.

Erlendur carefully made his way to the kitchen as if expecting to find an intruder there and saw that the table had been laid for two with beautiful plates that he vaguely recalled owning. Wine glasses on high stalks stood beside each plate, there were serviettes and red candles burning in two candle-holders that didn't match and which Erlendur had never seen before.

Slowly he made his way further into the kitchen and saw something simmering in a big pot. Lifting the lid, he looked down at a particularly delicious-looking meat stew. A slick of cooking oil was floating above turnips, potatoes, cubes of meat and spices, the whole thing giving off an aroma that filled his flat with the smell of real home cooking. He stooped over the pot and inhaled the smell of boiled meat and vegetables.

"I needed some more veg," Eva Lind said at the kitchen door. Erlendur hadn't noticed her enter the flat. She was wearing his anorak and holding a bag of carrots.

"Where did you learn to make meat stew?" Erlendur asked.

"Mum was always making meat stew," Eva Lind said. "Once when she wasn't bad-mouthing you she said her meat stew used to be your favourite meal. Then she said you were a bastard."

"Right on both counts," Erlendur said. He watched Eva Lind chop up the carrots and add them to the pot with the other vegetables. The thought occurred to him that he was experiencing proper family life and it made him both sad and happy at the same time. He didn't allow himself the luxury of expecting this joy to last.

"Have you found the murderer?" Eva Lind asked.

"Ellidi sends his regards," Erlendur said. The words had escaped before he could entertain the notion that a beast like Ellidi didn't belong in this environment.

"Ellidi. He's at Litla-Hraun. Does he know who I am?"

"The scumbags I talk to mention you by name sometimes," Erlendur said. "They think they're scoring points off me."

"And are they?"

"Some of them. Like Ellidi. How do you know him?" Erlendur asked cautiously.

"I've heard stories about him. Met him once years ago. He'd stuck his false teeth in with plastic glue. But I don't really know him."

"He's an incredible idiot."

They didn't talk about Ellidi any more that evening. When they sat down to eat, Eva Lind poured water into the wine glasses and Erlendur ate so much that he could barely stagger into the sitting room afterwards. He fell asleep there in his clothes and slept badly until the morning.

This time he remembered most of the dream. He knew it was the same dream that had visited him in recent nights but which he had failed to get hold of before the waking state turned it into nothing.

Eva Lind appeared to him as he had never seen her before enveloped in a light coming from somewhere he couldn't tell in a beautiful summer dress reaching down to her ankles and with long dark hair down to her back and the vision was perfect almost scented with summer and she walked towards him or maybe she floated because he thought to himself that she never touched the ground he could not identify the surroundings all he could see was that glaring light and Eva Lind in the middle of the light approached him smiling from ear to ear and he saw himself open his arms to greet her and wait to be able to hold her and he felt his impatience but she never entered his arms but handed him a photograph and the light disappeared and Eva Lind disappeared and he was holding the photo he knew so well that was taken in the cemetery and the photograph came to life and he was inside it and looked up at the dark sky and felt the raining pounding down on his face and when he looked down he saw the tombstone drop back and the grave opened into the darkness until the coffin appeared and it opened and he saw the girl in the coffin cut along the middle of her torso and up to her shoulders and suddenly the girl opened her eyes and stared up towards him and she opened her mouth and he heard her pitiful cry of anguish from the grave

He woke with a start gasping for breath and stared into space while he collected himself. He called out to Eva Lind but received no reply. He walked to her room but sensed the emptiness there before he even opened the door. He knew she had left.

After examining the register of the inhabitants of Húsavík, Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli had compiled a list of 176 women who were potential victims of rape by Holberg. All they had to go on was Ellidi's word that it had been "the same sort of job", so they used Kolbrún's age as a reference with a ten-year deviation either side. On first examination it emerged that the women could be roughly divided into three groups: a quarter of them still lived in Húsavík, half had moved to Reykjavík and the remaining quarter was scattered throughout Iceland.

"Enough to drive you mad," Elínborg sighed, looking down the list before she handed it to Erlendur. She noticed he was scruffier than usual. The stubble on his face was several days old, his bushy ginger hair stood out in all directions, his tatty and crumpled suit needed dry-cleaning: Elínborg was wondering whether to offer to point this out to him, but Erlendur's expression didn't invite any joking.

"How are you sleeping these days, Erlendur?" she asked guardedly.

"On my arse," Erlendur said.

"And then what?" Sigurdur Óli said. "Should we just walk up to each of these women and ask if they were raped 40 years ago? Isn't that a bit . . . brash?"

"I can't see any other way to do it. Let's start with the ones who've moved away from Húsavík," Erlendur said. "We'll start looking in Reykjavik and see if we can't gather any more information about this woman in the process. If that stupid bugger Ellidi isn't lying, Holberg mentioned her to Kolbrún. She may well have repeated it, to her sister, maybe to Rúnar. I need to go back to Keflavík."

"Maybe we can narrow the group down a bit," he said, after a moment's thought.

"Narrow it down? How?" said Elínborg. "What are you thinking?"

"I just had an idea."

"What?" Elínborg was impatient already. She'd turned up for work in a new, pale green dress suit that no-one seemed likely to pay any attention to.

"Kinship, heredity and diseases," Erlendur said.

"Right," Sigurdur Óli said.

"Let's assume Holberg was the rapist. We have no idea how many women he raped. We know about two and actually about only one for certain. Even though he denied it, everything points to the fact that he did rape Kolbrún. He was Audur's father, or, at least, we should work on that assumption, but he could equally have had another child with the woman from Húsavík."

"Another child?" Elínborg said.

"Before Audur," Erlendur said.

"Isn't that unlikely?" Sigurdur Óli said.

Erlendur shrugged.

"Do you want us to narrow the group down to women who had children just before, what was it, 1964?"

"I don't think that would be such a bad idea."

"He could have kids all over the place," Elínborg said.

"True. He didn't necessarily commit more than one rape either so it's a long shot," Erlendur said. "Did you find out what his sister died of?"

"No, I'm working on it," Sigurdur Óli said. "I tried to find out about their family, but nothing came out of it."

"I checked on Grétar," Elínborg said. "He disappeared suddenly, like the ground had opened up and swallowed him. No-one missed him in the slightest. When his mother hadn't heard from him for two whole months she finally phoned the police. They put his picture in the papers and on TV but drew a blank. It was in 1974, the year of the big festival to commemorate the settlement of Iceland. In the summer. Did you go to the festival at Thingvellir then?"

"I was there," Erlendur said. "What about Thing-vellir? Do you think that's where he went missing?"

"Perhaps, but that's all I know," Elínborg said. "They made a routine missing-persons investigation and talked to people his mother knew that he knew, including Holberg and Ellidi. They questioned three others too but no-one knew anything. No-one missed Grétar except his mother and sister. He was born in Reykjavik, no wife or children, no girlfriend, no extended family. The case was left open for a few months and then it just died. He was 34."

"If he was as pleasant as his mates Ellidi and Holberg, I'm not surprised nobody missed him," Sigurdur Óli said.

"Thirteen people went missing in Iceland in the 1970s when Grétar disappeared," Elínborg said. "Twelve in the 1980s, not counting fishermen lost at sea."

"Thirteen disappearances," Sigurdur Óli said, "isn't that rather a lot? None of them solved?"

"There doesn't have to be anything criminal behind it," Elínborg said. "People disappear, want to disappear, make themselves disappear."

"If I understand correctly," Erlendur said, "the scenario is like this: Ellidi, Holberg and Grétar are having a night out at a dance in the Cross one weekend in the autumn of 1963."

He saw that Sigurdur Ólí's face was one huge question mark.

"The Cross was an old military hospital post that was converted into a dancehall. They used to hold really raunchy dances there."

"I think that was where the Icelandic Beatles started playing," Elínborg interjected.

"They meet some women at the dance and one of the women has a party at her house afterwards," Erlendur went on. "We need to try to find these women. Holberg walks one of them home and rapes her. Apparently he'd played the same trick before. He whispers to her what he did to another woman. She might have lived in Húsavík and in all likelihood never pressed charges. Three days later Kolbrún has finally plucked up the courage to report the crime but runs into a policeman who has no sympathy for women who invite men in after a dance and then shout rape. Kolbrún has a baby girl. Holberg could have known about the baby, we find a photo of her gravestone in his desk. Who took it? Why? The girl dies from a fatal illness and her mother commits suicide three years later. Three years after that, one of Holberg's mates disappears. Holberg is murdered a few days ago and an incomprehensible message is left behind.

"Why was Holberg murdered now, in his old age? Was his attacker connected to this background? And, if so, why wasn't Holberg attacked before? Why all the wait? Or didn't his murder have anything to do with the fact, if it is a fact, that Holberg was a rapist?"

"It doesn't look like premeditated murder, I don't think we can ignore that," Sigurdur Óli interjected. "As Ellidi put it, what kind of wanker uses an ashtray? It's not as if there was a long historical build-up to it. The message is just a joke, indecipherable. Holberg's murder doesn't have anything to do with any rape. We should probably be looking for the young man in the green army jacket."

"Holberg was no angel," Elínborg said. "Maybe it's a revenge murder. Someone probably thought he deserved it."

"The only person we know for certain who hated Holberg is Kolbrún's sister in Keflavík," Erlendur said. "I can't imagine her killing anyone with an ashtray."

"Couldn't she have got someone else to do it?" said Sigurdur Óli.

"Who?" Erlendur asked.

"I don't know. Anyway, I'm coming round to the idea that someone was prowling around the neighbourhood planning to break in somewhere, burgle the place and maybe smash it up, Holberg caught him and got hit over the head with the ashtray. It was some junkie who couldn't tell his arse from his elbow. Nothing to do with the past, just the present. Reykjavík the way it is these days."

"At least, someone thought the right thing to do was to bump him off," Elínborg said. "We have to take the message seriously. It's no joke."

Sigurdur Óli looked at Erlendur. "When you talked about wanting to know precisely what the girl died of, do you mean what I think you mean?" he asked.

"I have a nasty feeling I might," Erlendur said.

Rúnar answered the door himself and looked at Erlendur for a good while without being able to place his face. Erlendur was standing in a communal hallway, soaking wet after running from the car to building. To his right was a staircase leading to the upper flat. The stairs were carpeted but the carpet was worn through where it had been walked on the most. There was a musty smell in the air and Erlendur wondered whether horse-lovers lived in the house. Erlendur asked Rúnar whether he remembered him and Rúnar seemed to do so, because he immediately tried to slam the door, but Erlendur was too fast for him. He was inside the flat before Rúnar could do a thing about it.

"Cosy," Erlendur said, looking around the dim interior.

"Will you leave me alone!" Rúnar tried to shout at Erlendur, but his voice cracked and squeaked.

"Watch your blood pressure. I'd hate to have to give you the kiss of life if you dropped dead on me. I need to get some details from you and then I'm gone and you can get back to dying in here. Shouldn't take you very long. You don't exactly look like Super Senior of the Year."

"Bugger off!" Rúnar said, as angrily as his age allowed him, turned round, walked into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa. Erlendur followed him and sat down heavily in a chair facing him. Rúnar didn't look at him.

"Did Kolbrún talk about another rape when she came to you about Holberg?"

Rúnar didn't answer him.

"The sooner you answer, the sooner you get rid of me.

Rúnar looked up and stared at Erlendur.

"She never mentioned any other rape. Will you leave now?"

"We have reason to believe that Holberg had raped someone before he met Kolbrún. He may have played the same trick again after her raped her, we don't know. Kolbrún is the only woman who pressed charges against him even if nothing ever came of it, thanks to you."

"Get out!"

"Are you sure she didn't mention any other woman? It's conceivable that Holberg bragged to Kolbrún about another rape."

"She didn't say a thing about that," Rúnar said, looking down at the table.

"Holberg was with two of his friends that night. One of them was Ellidi, an old lag you might know of. He's in prison, fighting ghosts and monsters in solitary confinement. The other one was Grétar. He vanished off the face of the earth the summer the national festival was held. Do you know anything about the company Holberg kept?"

"No. Leave me alone!"

"What were they doing in town here the night Kolbrún was raped?"

"I don't know."

"Didn't you ever talk to them?"

"No."

"Who handled the investigation in Reykjavik?"

Rúnar looked Erlendur in the face for the first time.

"It was Marion Briem."

"Marion Briem!"

"That bloody idiot."

Elín wasn't at home when Erlendur knocked on her door, so he got back inside his car, lit a cigarette and pondered whether to continue on his journey to Sandgerdi. The rain beat down on the car and Erlendur, who never watched the weather forecasts, wondered whether the wet spell would ever come to an end. Maybe this was a mini-version of Noah's flood, he thought to himself through the blue cigarette smoke. Maybe it was necessary to wash people's sins away every now and again.

Erlendur was apprehensive about meeting Elín again and was half relieved when it turned out she wasn't home. He knew she'd turn on him and the last thing he wanted was to provoke her, as when she called him a "bloody cop". But it couldn't be avoided. Either now or later. He heaved a deep sigh and burnt his cigarette down until he felt the heat against his fingertips. He held down the smoke while he stubbed out the cigarette, then exhaled heavily. A line from an anti-smoking campaign ran through his mind: It only takes one cell to start cancer.

He'd felt the pain in his chest that morning, but it had gone now.

Erlendur was backing away from the house when Elín knocked on his window.

"Were you coming to see me?" she asked from under her umbrella when he wound down the window.

Erlendur put on an inscrutable smile and gave a slight nod. She opened the door to her house for him and he suddenly felt like a traitor. The others had already set off for the cemetery.

He took off his hat and hung it on a peg, took off his coat and shoes and went into the sitting room in his crumpled suit. He was wearing a brown sleeve-less cardigan under his jacket but hadn't done it up properly, so there was no hole for the bottom button. He sat in the same chair as when he had visited the house the last time. Elín had gone into the kitchen to switch on the coffee maker and the aroma began to fill the house. When she returned she sat in a chair facing him.

The traitor cleared his throat. "One of the people out on the town with Holberg the night he raped Kolbrún is called Ellidi and he's a prisoner at Litla-Hraun. It's a long time now since we started calling him 'one of the usual suspects'. The third man was called Grétar. He disappeared off the face of the earth in 1974. The year of the national festival."

"I was at Thingvellir then," Elín said. "I saw the poets there."

Erlendur cleared his throat again.

"And did you talk to this Ellidi?" Elín went on.

"A particularly nasty piece of work," Erlendur said.

Elín excused herself, stood up and went into the kitchen. He heard cups clinking. Erlendur's mobile phone rang in his jacket pocket and he held his breath as he answered it. He could see from the caller ID that it was Sigurdur Óli.

"We're ready," Sigurdur Óli said. Erlendur could hear it raining over the phone.

"Don't do anything until I get back to you," Erlendur said. "You understand? Don't make a move until you hear from me or I turn up there."

"Have you talked to the old bag?"

Without answering, Erlendur hung up and put the phone back in his pocket. Elín came in carrying a tray, put cups on the table in front of Erlendur and poured coffee for them both. They both took it black. She put the coffee pot on the table and sat down facing Erlendur. He began again.

"Ellidi told us Holberg had raped another woman before Kolbrún and probably bragged about it to her." He saw the look of astonishment on Elm's face.

"If Kolbrún knew about someone else, she never told me," she said and shook her head thoughtfully. "Could he be telling the truth?"

"We have to act on that assumption," Erlendur said. "Ellidi's so strung out he could lie about that sort of thing. But we haven't got our hands on anything to refute what he says."

"We didn't talk about the rape very often," Elín said. "I think that was because of Audur. Among other things. Kolbrún was a very reticent woman, shy, withdrawn, and she closed up even more after what happened. And of course it was repulsive to talk about that awful experience when she was pregnant by it, not to mention after the child was born. Kolbrún did everything she could to forget that the rape ever happened. Everything to do with it."

"I imagine if Kolbrún knew about another woman she'd have told the police to back up her own statement, if nothing else. But she didn't mention a word of it in any of the reports I've read."

"Maybe she wanted to spare the woman," Elín said.

"Spare her?"

"Kolbrún knew what it was like to suffer a rape. She knew what it was like to report a rape. She hesitated about it a lot herself and all that seemed to come out of it was humiliation. If the other woman didn't want to come forward, Kolbrún may have respected her wishes. I'd imagine so. But it's difficult to say, I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about."

"She may not have known any details, no name, maybe just a vague suspicion. If he only implied something through what he said."

"She never talked about anything like that to me."

"When you talked about the rape, in what terms was it?"

"It wasn't exactly about the act itself," Elín said.

The phone in Erlendur's pocket rang again and Elín stopped talking. Erlendur pulled the phone out and saw that it was Sigurdur Óli. Erlendur just switched it off and put it away.

"Sorry," he said.

"Aren't they a real pest, those phones?"

"Absolutely," Erlendur said. He was running out of time. "Please, go on."

"She talked about how much she loved her daughter, Audur. They had a very special relation-ship despite those awful circumstances. Audur meant the world to Kolbrún. I know it's a terrible thing to say, but I don't think she would have wanted to miss out on being a mother. Do you understand that? I even thought she regarded Audur as some kind of compensation, or something, for the rape. I know it's a clumsy way to put it, but it was as if the girl was some kind of godsend amidst all that misfortune. I can't say what my sister thought, how she felt or what feelings she kept to herself, I only have a limited picture of that and I wouldn't presume to speak for her. But as time went by she came to worship her little girl and never let her out of her sight. Never. Their relationship was strongly coloured by what had happened, but Kolbrún never thought of her in terms of the beast who ruined her life. She only saw the beautiful child that Audur was. My sister was overprotective of her daughter and that went beyond death and the grave, as the epitaph shows. 'Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.'"

"Do you know exactly what your sister meant by those words?"

"It was a plea to God, as you'll see if you read the Psalm. Naturally, the little girl's death had some-thing to do with it. How it happened and how tragic it was. Kolbrún couldn't bear the thought of Audur having an autopsy. She wouldn't think of it."

Erlendur looked awkwardly at the floor but Elín didn't notice.

"You could easily imagine," Elín said, "how those terrible things that Kolbrún went through, the rape and then her daughter's death, had a serious effect on her mental health. She had a nervous breakdown. When they started talking about an autopsy her paranoia built up, and in her need to protect Audur she saw the doctors as enemies. She had her daughter in those terrible circumstances and lost her so soon. She saw that as God's will. My sister wanted her daughter to be left in peace."

Erlendur waited a moment before he made his move.

"I think I'm one of those enemies."

Elín looked at him, not understanding what he meant.

"I think we need to dig up the coffin and do a more precise autopsy, if that's possible."

Erlendur said this as carefully as he could. It took Elín a while to understand his words and put them in context, and when their meaning had sunk in she gave him a blank look.

"What are you saying?"

"We may be able to find an explanation for why she died."

"Explanation? It was a brain tumour!"

"It could be . . ."

"What are you talking about? Dig her up? The child? I don't believe it! I was just telling you . . ."

"We have two reasons."

"Two reasons?"

"For the autopsy," Erlendur said.

Elín had stood up and was pacing the room in a frenzy. Erlendur sat tight and had sunk deeper into the soft armchair.

"I've talked to the doctors at the hospital here in Keflavík. They couldn't find any reports about Audur except a provisional post-mortem by the doctor who performed the autopsy. He's dead now. The year Audur died was his last year as a doctor at the hospital. He mentioned only the brain tumour and ascribed her death to that. I want to know what kind of disease it was that caused her death. I want to know if it could have been a hereditary disease."

"A hereditary disease! I don't know about any hereditary diseases."

"We're also looking for it in Holberg," Erlendur said. "Another reason for an exhumation is to make sure that Audur was Holberg's daughter. They do it with DNA tests."

"Do you doubt that she is?"

"Not necessarily, but it has to be confirmed."

"Why?"

"Holberg denied the child was his. He said he'd had sex with Kolbrún with her consent but denied the paternity. When the case was dropped they didn't see any particular grounds for proving it or otherwise. Your sister never insisted on anything like that. She'd obviously had enough and wanted Holberg out of her life."

"Who else could have been the father?"

"We need confirmation because of Holberg's murder. It might help us find some answers."

"Holberg's murder?"

"Yes."

Elín stood over Erlendur, staring at him.

"Is that monster going to torment us all beyond the grave?"

Erlendur was about to answer, but she went on.

"You still think my sister was lying," Elín said. "You're never going to believe her. You're no better than that idiot Rúnar. Not in the slightest."

She bent over him where he was sitting in the chair.

"Bloody cop!" she hissed. "I should never have let you into my house."