Erlendur answered the phone at last.
"What was the smell in Holberg's flat like?" Erlendur took a while to realise it was Marion Briem's voice.
"The smell?" Erlendur repeated.
"What was the smell in his flat like?" Marion Briem repeated.
"It was a sort of nasty basement smell," Erlendur said. "A smell of damp. A stench. I don't know. Like horses?"
"No, it's not horses," Marion Briem said. "I was reading about Nordurmyri. I talked to a plumber friend of mine and he referred me to another plumber. I've talked to a lot of plumbers."
"Why plumbers?"
"Very interesting, the whole business. You didn't tell me about the fingerprints on the photo." There was a hint of accusation in Marion's voice.
"No," Erlendur said. "I didn't get round to it."
"I heard about Gretar and Holberg. Gretar knew the girl was Holberg's daughter. Maybe he knew something else."
Erlendur remained silent.
"What do you mean?" he said eventually.
"Do you know the most important thing about Nordurmyri?" Marion Briem asked.
"No," Erlendur said, finding it difficult to follow Marion's train of thought.
"It's so obvious that I missed it at the time."
"What is it?"
Marion paused for a moment as if to give extra weight to the words.
"Nordurmyri. North Mire."
"And?"
"The houses were built on marsh land."
26
Sigurdur Oli was surprised that the woman who answered the door knew what his business was before he explained it. He was standing on yet another staircase, this time in a three-storey block of flats in Grafarvogur. He had barely introduced himself and was halfway through explaining his presence there when the woman invited him to come inside, adding that she'd been expecting him.
It was early morning. Outside it was overcast with fine drizzle and the autumn gloom spread over the city as if in confirmation that it would very soon be winter, get darker and colder. On the radio, people had described it as the worst rainy spell for decades.
The woman offered to take his coat. Sigurdur Oli handed it to her and she hung it in a wardrobe. A man of a similar age to the woman came out of their kitchenette and greeted him with a handshake. They were both around 70, wearing some kind of track-suit and white socks as if they were on their way for a jog. He had interrupted them in the middle of morning coffee.
The flat was very small but efficiently furnished, with a small bathroom, kitchenette and sitting room and a spacious bedroom. It was boiling hot inside the flat. Sigurdur Oli accepted the offer of coffee and asked for a glass of water as well. His throat had immediately become parched. They exchanged a few words about the weather until Sigurdur Oli couldn't wait any longer.
"It looks as if you were expecting me," he said, sipping at the coffee. It was watery and tasted foul.
"Well, no-one's talking about anything except that poor woman you're looking for," she said.
Sigurdur Oli gave her a blank look.
"Everyone from Husavik," the woman said, as if she shouldn't need to explain something so obvious. "We haven't talked about anything else since you started looking for her. We've got a very big club for people from Husavik here in the city. I'm sure everyone knows you're looking for that woman."
"So it's the talk of the town?" Sigurdur Oli asked.
"Three of my friends from the north who now live here have phoned me since last night and this morning I had a call from Husavik. They're gossiping about it all the time."
"And have you come to any conclusions?"
"Not really," she said and looked at her husband. "What was this man supposed to have done to her?"
She didn't try to conceal her curiosity. Didn't try to hide her nosiness. Sigurdur Oli was disgusted by how eager she was to find out the details and instinctively tried to guard his words.
"It's a question of an act of violence," he said. "We're looking for the victim, but you probably know that already."
"Oh yes. But why? What did he do to her? And why now? I think, or we think," she said, looking at her husband, who was sitting silently following the conversation, "it's so strange how it matters after all these years. I heard she was raped. Was that it?"
"Unfortunately I can't divulge any details about the inquiry," Sigurdur Oli said. "And maybe it doesn't matter. I don't think you should make too much fuss about it. When you're talking to other people, I mean. Is there anything you could tell me that might be useful?"
The couple looked at each other.
"Make too much fuss about it?" she said, surprised. "We're not making any fuss about it. Do you think we're making any fuss about it, Eyvi?" She looked at her husband, who seemed unaware how to answer. "Go on, answer me!" she said sharply and he gave a start.
"No, I wouldn't say that, that's not right."
Sigurdur Oli's mobile phone rang. He didn't keep it loose in his pocket like Erlendur, but in a smart holder attached to the belt around his stiffly pressed trousers. Sigurdur Oli asked the couple to excuse him, stood up and answered the phone. It was Erlendur.
"Can you meet me at Holberg's flat?" he asked.
"What's going on?" Sigurdur Oli said.
"More digging," Erlendur said and rang off.
When Sigurdur Oli drove into Nordurmyri, Erlendur and Elinborg were already there. Erlendur was standing in the doorway to the basement smoking a cigarette. Elinborg was inside the flat. As far as Sigurdur Oli could see she was having a good sniff around, she stuck her head out and sniffed, exhaled and then tried somewhere else. He looked at Erlendur who shrugged and threw his cigarette into the garden and they went inside the flat together.
"What kind of smell do you think there is in here?" Erlendur asked Sigurdur Oli, and Sigurdur Oli started sniffing at the air like Elinborg. They walked from room to room with their noses in the air, except Erlendur who had a particularly poor sense of smell after so many years of smoking.
"When I first came in here," Elinborg said, "I thought that horsey people must live in the building or in this flat. The smell reminded me of horses, riding boots, saddles, or that sort of thing. Horse dung. Stables, really. It was the same smell that was in the first flat my husband and I bought. But there weren't any horse-lovers living there either. It was a combination of filth and rising damp. The radiators had been leaking onto the carpet and parquet for years and no-one had done anything about it. We also had the spare bathroom converted but the plumbers did it so badly, just stuffed straw into the hole and put a thin layer of concrete over it. So there was always a smell of sewers that came up through the repair."
"Which means?" Erlendur said.
"I think it's the same smell, except it's worse here. Rising damp and filth and sewer rats."
"I had a meeting with Marion Briem," Erlendur said, uncertain whether they knew the name. "Naturally Marion read up on Nordurmyri and reached the conclusion that the fact it's a marsh is important."
Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli exchanged glances.
"Nordurmyri used to be like a distinct village in the middle of Reykjavik," Erlendur went on. "The houses were built during or just after the war. Iceland had become a republic and they named the streets after the saga heroes, Gunnarsbraut, Skeggjagata and all that. It was a wide cross-section of society who gathered here, ranging from the reasonably well-off, even the rich, to those who barely had a penny to their name so they rented cheap basement flats like this one. A lot of old people like Holberg live in Nordurmyri, though most of them are more civilised than he was, and many of them live in precisely this type of basement flat. Marion told me all this."
Erlendur paused.
"Another feature of Nordurmyri is this sort of basement flat. Originally there weren't any basement flats, the owners had them converted, installed kitchens and walls, made rooms, made places to live. Previously these basements were where the work was done for, what did Marion call them? Self-contained homes. Do you
know what that is?"
They both shook their heads.
"You're too young, of course," Erlendur said, well aware that they would hate him saying that. "In basements like this were the girls' rooms. They were maids in the homes of the more wealthy people. They had rooms in holes like this. There was a laundry room too, a room for making haggis, for example, and other food, storerooms, a bathroom and all that."
"Not forgetting that it's a marsh." Sigurdur Oli said sarcastically.
"Are you trying to tell us something important?" Elinborg said.
"Under these basements are foundations …" Erlendur said.
"That's quite unusual," Sigurdur Oli said to Elinborg.
"… just like under all other houses," Erlendur continued, not letting Sigurdur Oli's quips disturb him. "If you talk to a plumber, as Marion Briem did. ."
"What's all this Marion Briem bullshit anyway?" Sigurdur Oli said.
"… you'll find out they've often been called out to Nordurmyri to deal with a problem that can arise years, decades after houses have been built on marsh land. It happens in some places but not others. You can see it happening on the outside of some houses. A lot of them are coated with pebbledash and you can see where the pebbledash ends and the bare wall of the house starts at ground level. A strip of maybe one or two feet. The point is that the ground subsides indoors too."
Erlendur noticed they'd stopped grinning.
"In the estate-agency business it's called a concealed fault and it's difficult to know how to deal with this sort of thing. When the houses subside it puts pressure on the sewage pipes and they burst under the floor. Before you know it, you're flushing your toilet straight into the foundations. It can go on for ages because the smell can't get through the concrete. But damp patches form because the hot-water outflow in many old houses is connected into the sewage pipe and leaks into the basement when the pipe breaks, it gets hot and the steam reaches the surface. The parquet warps."
Erlendur had their complete attention by now.
"And Marion told you all that?" Sigurdur Oli said.
"To fix it you have to break up the floor," Erlendur continued, "and go down into the foundations to mend the pipe. The plumbers told Marion that sometimes when they drilled through the floor they'd hit a hollow. The base plate is fairly thin in some places and underneath there's an air pocket. The ground has subsided by half a yard, maybe even a whole yard. All because of the marsh."
Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg looked at each other.
"So is it hollow under the floor here?" Elinborg asked, stamping with one foot.
Erlendur smiled.
"Marion even managed to locate a plumber who came to this house the same year as the national festival. Everyone remembers that year and this plumber clearly recalled coming here because of the damp in the floor."
"What are you trying to tell us?" Sigurdur Oli asked.
"The plumber broke up the floor in here. The base plate isn't very thick. It's hollow underneath in a lot of places. The plumber remembers the job so clearly because he was shocked that Holberg wouldn't let him finish."
"How come?"
"He opened up the floor and mended the pipe, then Holberg threw him out and said he'd finish it himself. And he did."
They stood in silence until Sigurdur Oli couldn't resist the temptation any longer.
"Marion Briem?" he said. "Marion Briem!" He said the name over and again as if struggling to understand it. Erlendur was right. He was too young to remember Marion from the force. He repeated the name like it was some kind of conundrum, then suddenly stopped and looked thoughtful and finally asked:
"Wait a minute. Who is this Marion? What kind of name is that anyway? Is it a man or a woman?"
Sigurdur Oli gave Erlendur a questioning look.
"I sometimes wonder myself," Erlendur replied and took out his mobile phone.
27
Forensics began by tearing away the flooring in each room of the flat, the kitchen and bathroom and the den. It had taken all day to get the necessary permission for the operation. Erlendur had argued his case at a meeting with the police commissioner who agreed, though reluctantly, that there were sufficient suspicions to justify breaking up the floor in Holberg's flat. The matter was rushed through because of the murder that had been committed in the building.
Erlendur presented the excavation as a link to the search for Holberg's murderer; he implied that Gretar could well be alive and might conceivably have been the killer. The police would doubly benefit from the excavation. If Marion Briem's hunch was correct, it would rule out Gretar as a suspect and solve the riddle of a person missing for more than a quarter of a century.
They ordered the largest available size of transit van into which to load the whole of Holberg's household effects, apart from the fixtures and their contents. It was starting to get dark when the van backed up to the house and shortly afterwards a tractor pulled up with a pneumatic drill. A team of forensics experts gathered there and more detectives joined them. The residents were nowhere to be seen.
It had been raining all day, as on the previous days. But now it was only a fine drizzle that rippled in the cold autumn breeze and settled on Erlendur's face where he stood to one side, a cigarette between his fingers. Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg stood with him. A crowd had gathered in front of the house but seemed reluctant to get too close. It included reporters, television cameramen and newspaper photographers. Cars of all sizes marked with newspaper and television company logos were spread all around the neighbourhood and Erlendur, who had prohibited all contact with the media, wondered whether to have them removed.
Holberg's flat was soon empty. The big van remained in the forecourt while it was being decided what to do with the effects. Eventually Erlendur ordered them to be sent to the police storage depot. Erlendur saw the linoleum and carpets being carried out of the flat and loaded into the van, which then rumbled off, out of the street.
The head of forensics greeted Erlendur with a handshake. He was about 50, named Ragnar, rather fat and with a black mop of hair standing out in all directions. He was educated in Britain, read only British thrillers and was a particular devotee of British detective series on television.
"What bloody nonsense have you got us into now?" he asked, looking over towards the media crews. There was a hint of humour in his voice. He thought it was marvellous that they were tearing up the floor to look for a body.
"How does it look?" Erlendur asked.
"All the floors have a thick coat of some kind of ship's paint," Ragnar said. "It's impossible to tell if they've been tampered with. We can't see any concrete of a different age or anything that might be a repair to it. We're banging on the floor with hammers, but it sounds hollow almost everywhere. Whether it's subsidence or something else, I don't know. The concrete in the building itself is thick, quality stuff. None of that alkaline bollocks. But there are a lot of damp patches on the floor. Couldn't that plumber you were in touch with help us?"
"He's in a retirement home in Akureyri and says he's not coming back south in this life. He gave us a fairly accurate description of where he opened the floor."
"We're also inserting a camera down the sewage pipe. Looking at the plumbing, seeing if it's all right, to find out if we can see the old repair."
"Do you really need a drill that big?" Erlendur asked, nodding towards the tractor.
"I haven't the faintest idea. We've got smaller electric drills, but they couldn't penetrate wet shit. We've got smaller pneumatics and if we find a hollow we can drill through the base plate and slip a little camera through it like they use for inspecting damaged sewage pipes."
"Hopefully that will do. We don't want to have to smash the whole house down."
"There's a bloody stench in that dump anyway," the head of forensics said, and they walked off towards the basement. Three forensic experts wearing white paper overalls, with plastic gloves and hammers, were walking around the flat, banging on the stone floor and markin
g with blue felt-tip pens where they thought it sounded hollow.
"According to the buildings surveyors' office the basement was converted into a flat in I959," Erlendur said. "Holberg bought it in I962 and probably moved in straightaway. He'd lived here ever since."
One of the forensics people came up to them and greeted Erlendur. He had a set of drawings of the building, one for each floor.
"The toilets are in the centre of each floor. The sewage pipes come down from the floors above and enter the foundations where the basement toilet is. It was already in the basement before the conversion, and you could imagine the flat being designed around it. The toilet's linked up to the sewage pipe in the bathroom, then the pipe continues due east through part of the sitting room, under the bedroom and out into the street."
"The search isn't confined to the sewage pipe," the head of forensics said.
"No, but we've put a camera into the drain from the street. They were just telling me the pipe's split where it enters the bedroom and we thought we'd ake a look there first. It's in a similar place to where I understand the floor was opened."
Ragnar nodded and looked at Erlendur, who shrugged as if what forensics did was none of his business.
"It can't be a very old split," the head of forensics said. "The smell must be coming from there. Are you saying this man was buried in the foundations over 25 years ago?"
"He disappeared then, at least," Erlendur said.
Their words merged into the hammering that became a continuous din echoing between the empty walls. The forensics expert took some ear defenders out of a black case the size of a small suitcase and put them on, then picked up one of the small electric drills and plugged it in. He pressed the trigger a few times to test it, then thrust it down on the floor and started breaking it up. The noise was awful and the rest of the forensic team put on ear defenders too. He made little headway. The solid concrete barely flaked. He gave up trying and shook his head.
"We need to start up the tractor," he said, fine dust covering his face. "And bring the pneumatic in. And we need masks. What bloody idiot had this brilliant idea anyway?" he said and spat on the floor.
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