Tainted Blood

by Arnaldur Indridason

  "What was the cause of death?"

  "It probably wouldn't have made any difference if I'd acted faster and sent her to hospital," the doctor said thoughtfully. "At least that's what I tried to tell myself. There weren't many paediatricians around then and we didn't have those brain scans. We had to act much more on what we felt and knew and, as I said, I didn't feel anything much except the need to drink in those years. A messy divorce didn't help. I'm not making excuses for myself," he said with a look at Erlendur, although he obviously was.

  Erlendur nodded.

  "After about two months, I think, I started to suspect it could be something more serious than child migraine. The girl didn't get any better. It didn't let up. She just got worse and worse. Withered away, got very skinny. There were a number of possibilities. I thought it might be something like a tubercular infection of the head. At one time the stock diagnosis was to call it a head cold when actually no-one had a clue. Then the hypothesis was meningitis, but various symptoms were absent; it works much faster too. The girl got what they call café au lait on her skin and I finally started thinking about an oncogenic disease."

  "Cafe au lait?" Erlendur said, remembering he had heard this mentioned before.

  "It can accompany oncogenic diseases."

  "You sent her to Keflavík hospital then?"

  "She died there," the doctor said. "I remember what a tragic loss it was for the mother. She went out of her mind. We had to tranquillise her. She flatly refused to let them do an autopsy on the girl. Screamed at us not to do it."

  "But they did an autopsy all the same."

  The doctor hesitated.

  "It couldn't be avoided. There was no way."

  "And what transpired?"

  "An oncogenic disease, like I said."

  "What do you mean by an oncogenic disease?"

  "A brain tumour," the doctor said. "She died of a brain tumour."

  "What kind of brain tumour?"

  "I'm not sure," the doctor said. "I don't know whether they studied it in depth though I expect they probably did. I seem to recall mention of some kind of genetic disease."

  "Genetic disease!" Erlendur said, raising his voice.

  "Isn't that the fashion these days? What does this have to do with Holberg's murder?" the doctor asked.

  Erlendur sat there deep in thought.

  "Why are you asking about this girl?"

  "I have these dreams," Erlendur said.

  16

  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.

  17

  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.