Tainted Blood rmm-1

by Arnaldur Indridason

  "Maybe there's no need to subject them to it any more," said Erlendur.

  "It does give us a small picture of what a filthy, disgusting creep he was," Sigurdur Oli said

  "Do you mean he deserved to be smashed over the head and killed?" Erlendur said.

  "What do you think?"

  "Have you asked the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority about Holberg?"

  "No."

  "Get a move on then."

  "Is he waving to us?" Sigurdur Oli asked. They were standing in front of Holberg's house. One of the forensic team had come out of the basement and was standing there in his white overalls waving to them to come over. He seemed quite excited. They got out of the car, went down into the basement and the forensic technician gestured to them to come over to one of the screens. He was holding a remote control which he told them operated the camera that had been inserted into one of the holes in the corner of the sitting room.

  They watched the screen, but they couldn't see anything on it that they could at all identify. The image was speckled, poorly lit, blurred and dull. They could see gravel and the underside of the flooring, but otherwise nothing unusual. Some time passed until the technician couldn't hold back any longer.

  "It's this thing here," he said, pointing to the top centre of the screen. "Right up underneath the flooring."

  "What?" said Erlendur, who couldn't see a thing.

  "Can't you see it?" the forensics technician said.

  "What?" Sigurdur Oli said.

  "The ring."

  "The ring?" Erlendur said.

  "That's clearly a ring we've found under the floor. Can't you see it?"

  They squinted at the screen until they thought they could make out an object that could well be a ring. It was unclear, as if something was blocking the view. They couldn't see anything else.

  "It's as if there's something in the way," Sigurdur Oli said.

  "It could be insulating plastic like they use in building," the technician said. More people had gathered around the screen to watch what was happening. "Look at this thing here," he continued, "This line by the ring. It could easily be a finger. There's something lying out in the corner that I think we ought to take a closer look at."

  "Break up the floor," Erlendur ordered. "Let's see what it is."

  The forensic team went to work at once. They marked out the spot on the sitting-room floor and began breaking it up with the pneumatic drill. A fine concrete dust swirled around the basement and Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli put gauze masks over their mouths. They stood behind the technicians, watching the hole widening in the floor. The base plate was seven or eight inches thick and it took the drill some time to get through it.

  Once they'd broken through, the hole quickly widened. The men swept the concrete fragments away as fast as they were chipped loose and they could soon see the plastic that had been revealed by the camera. Erlendur looked at Sigurdur Oli, who nodded at him.

  The plastic came increasingly into view. Erlendur thought it was thick building insulation plastic. It was impossible to see through. He'd forgotten the noise in the basement, the revolting stench and the dust swirling up. Sigurdur Oli had taken his mask off to see better. He bent down and called over the forensic team which was breaking up the floor.

  "Is this how they open the Pharaohs' tombs in Egypt?" he asked and the tension eased a little.

  "Except I'm afraid there's no Pharaoh under here," Erlendur said.

  "Could it actually be that we've found Gretar under Holberg's floor?" Sigurdur Oli said in eager anticipation. "After twenty-fucking-five years! Bloody brilliant!"

  "His mother was right," Erlendur said.

  "Gretar's mother?"

  "'It was like he'd been stolen,' she said."

  "Wrapped up in plastic and stashed away under the floor."

  "Marion Briem," Erlendur muttered to himself and shook his head.

  The forensic team bored away with their electric drills, the floor split open under the pressure and the hole widened until the entire plastic package could be seen. It was the length of an average man. The forensic team discussed how they ought to go about opening it. They decided to remove it from the floor cavity in one piece and not touch it until they'd taken it to the morgue on Baronsstigur where it could be handled without the loss of any potential evidence.

  They fetched a stretcher they had taken into the basement the night before and put it next to the hole in the floor. Two of them tried to lift the plastic package, but it turned out to be too heavy, so another two went down to help them. Soon it began to budge and they worked it free from its surroundings, lifted it out and placed it on the stretcher.

  Erlendur went up to the package, bent over it and tried to see through the plastic. He thought he could make out a face, shrivelled and rotten, teeth and part of a nose. He straightened up again.

  "He doesn't look so bad, considering," he said.

  "What's that?" Sigurdur Oli asked, leaning down into the hole.

  "What?" Erlendur said.

  "Are those rolls of film?" Sigurdur Oli said.

  Erlendur went up closer, knelt down and saw rolls of photographic film half buried in the gravel. Yards of film spread all around. He was hoping that some of it had been used.

  34

  Katrin didn't leave the house for the rest of the day. No-one visited her and she didn't use the telephone. In the evening a man driving an estate car pulled up outside the house and went in carrying a medium-sized suitcase. This was presumably Albert, her husband. He was due back from a business trip to Germany that afternoon.

  Two policemen in an unmarked car were watching the house. The phone was tapped. The whereabouts of the two older sons had been ascertained, but nothing was known about where the youngest one was. He was divorced and lived in a flat in the Gerdi district but there was nobody home. A watch was mounted outside it. The police were gathering information about the son and his description was sent to police stations all over the country. As yet there were not considered to be grounds for releasing an announcement about him to the media.

  Erlendur pulled up in front of the morgue on Baronsstigur. The body of the man who was thought to be Gretar had been taken there. The pathologist, the same one who had examined Holberg and Audur, had removed the plastic from the body. It turned out to be the body of a male with his head snapped back, his mouth open as if screaming in anguish and his arms by his sides. The skin was parched and shrivelled and pallid, with large patches of rot here and there on the naked body. The head appeared to have been badly damaged, and the hair was long and colourless, hanging down the sides of the face.

  "He removed his innards," the pathologist said.

  "What?"

  "The person who buried him. A sensible move if you want to keep a body. Because of the smell. He gradually dried up inside the plastic. Well preserved in that sense."

  "Can you establish the cause of death?"

  "There was a plastic bag over his head which suggests he may have been suffocated, but I'll have to take a better look at him. You'll find out more later. It all takes time. Do you know who he is? He's a bit of a runt, the poor bugger."

  "I have my suspicions," Erlendur said.

  "Did you talk to the professor?"

  "A lovely woman."

  "Isn't she just?"

  Sigurdur Oli was waiting for Erlendur at the office but when he arrived he said he was going straight to forensics. They had managed to develop and enlarge several exposures from the film that had been found in Holberg's flat. Erlendur told him about the conversation he and Elinborg had had with Katrin.

  Ragnar, the head of forensics, was waiting for them in his office with several rolls of film on his desk and some enlarged photographs. He handed them the photographs and they huddled over them.

  "We could only manage these three," Ragnar said, "and I can't actually tell what they show. There were seven rolls of Kodak with 24 exposures each. Three were completely black and we can't tell whether they'd
been used, but from one of them we managed to enlarge the little we can see here. Is this anything you recognise?"

  Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli squinted at the photographs. They were all black-and-white. Two of them were half black as if the aperture hadn't opened properly; the pictures were out of focus and so unclear that they couldn't make them out. The third and final print was intact and reasonably sharp and showed a man taking his own photograph in front of a mirror. The camera was small and flat, with a flash cube on the top with four bulbs, and the flash lit up the man in the mirror. He was wearing jeans and a shirt and a waist-length summer jacket.

  "Do you remember flash cubes?" Erlendur said with a hint of nostalgia in his voice. "What a revolution."

  "I remember them well," said Ragnar, who was the same age as Erlendur. Sigurdur Oli looked at them in turn and shook his head.

  "Is that what you'd call a self-portrait?" Erlendur said.

  "It's difficult to see his face with the camera in the way," Sigurdur Oli said, "but isn't it probable it's Gretar himself?"

  "Do you recognise the surroundings, what little of them is visible?" Ragnar asked.

  In the reflection they could make out part of the room behind the photographer. Erlendur could see the back of a chair and even a coffee table, the carpet on the floor and part of something that could have been a floor-length curtain, but everything else was difficult to discern. The face of the man in the mirror was brightly lit but to the sides the light faded to total darkness.

  They pored over the photograph for a long time. After much effort Erlendur began to distinguish something in the darkness to the left of the photographer, which he thought might be a human form, even a profile, eyebrows and a nose. This was only a hunch, but there was something uneven in the light, tiny shadows, that kindled his imagination.

  "Could we enlarge this area?" he asked Ragnar, who stared hard at the same part but couldn't see a thing. Sigurdur Oli took the photograph and held it up in front of his face, but he couldn't make out what Erlendur thought he could see either

  "It will only take a second," Ragnar said. They followed him from the office and over to the forensic team.

  "Are there any fingerprints on the film?" Sigurdur Oli asked.

  "Yes," Ragnar said, "two sets, the same ones as on the photo from the cemetery. Gretar's and Holberg's."

  The photograph was scanned and came up on a big computer screen. The area was enlarged. What had been only an unevenness in the light became countless dots that filled the screen. They couldn't discern anything from the photo and even Erlendur lost sight of what he thought he'd seen. The technician worked on the keyboard for a while, entered some commands and the image was reduced and compressed. He continued, the dots arranged themselves together until gradually the outline of a face began to emerge. It was still unclear, but Erlendur thought he recognised Holberg there.

  "Isn't that the bastard?" Sigurdur Oli said.

  "There's more here," the technician said and went on sharpening up the photograph. Waves soon appeared which reminded Erlendur of a woman's hair, and another more blurred profile. Erlendur stared at the image until he thought he could make out Holberg sitting talking to a woman. A strange hallucination seized him at the moment he saw this. He wanted to shout out to the woman to get out of the flat, but it was too late. Decades too late.

  A phone rang in the room, but no-one made a move. Erlendur thought the one on the desk was ringing.

  "It's yours," Sigurdur Oli said to Erlendur.

  It took Erlendur a while, but eventually he managed to find his mobile phone and fished it out of his coat pocket.

  It was Elinborg.

  "What are you playing around at?" she said when finally he answered.

  "Get to the point, will you," Erlendur said.

  "The point? What are you so stressed about?"

  "I knew you couldn't just say what you're going to say."

  "It's about Katrin's boys," Elinborg said. "Or men, actually, they're all grown men now."

  "What about them?"

  "All of them nice guys, probably, except one of them works at a rather interesting place. I thought you ought to hear about it straightaway but if you're so tense and busy and can't bear the thought of a little chat, I'll just phone Sigurdur Oli instead."

  "Elinborg."

  "Yes?"

  "Good Lord, woman," Erlendur shouted and looked at Sigurdur Oli, "are you going to tell me what you're going to tell me?"

  "The son works at the Genetic Research Centre."

  "What?"

  "He works at the Genetic Research Centre."

  "Which son?"

  "The youngest one. He's working on their new database. Works with family trees and illnesses, Icelandic families and hereditary diseases, genetic diseases. The man's an expert on genetic diseases."

  35

  Erlendur got home late in the evening. He planned to visit Katrin early the next morning and talk to her about his theory. He hoped that her son would soon be found. A prolonged search posed the risk of the story being sensationalised by the media, and he wanted to avoid that.

  Eva Lind wasn't at home. She had tidied up in the kitchen after Erlendur's tantrum. He put one of the two meals he'd bought at the late-night shop in the microwave, then pressed Start. Erlendur recalled when Eva Lind had come to him a few nights before, when he'd been standing by the microwave, and she told him she was pregnant. He felt as though a whole year had gone by since she had sat there facing him, scrounging money and dodging his questions, but it was only a few nights. He was still having bad dreams. He had never had many dreams and only ever remembered snatches of them when he woke up, but a feeling of discomfort lingered in him when he was awake and he couldn't shake it off. It didn't help that the pain in his chest was constantly making itself felt, a burning pain that he couldn't rub away.

  He thought about Eva Lind and the baby and about Kolbrun and Audur and about Elin and Katrin and her sons, about Holberg and Gretar and Ellidi in the prison and about the girl from Gardabaer and her father, and about himself and his own children, his son Sindri Snaer, whom he seldom saw, and Eva, who had made the effort to find him and with whom he argued bitterly when he disliked what she did. She was right. Who was he to go around handing out scoldings?

  He thought about mothers and daughters and fathers and sons and mothers and sons and fathers and daughters and children that were born and no-one wanted and children who died in that little community, Iceland, where everyone seemed related or connected in some way.

  If Holberg was the father of Katrin's youngest son, had he in fact been killed by his own son? Did the young man know Holberg was his father? How had he found out? Had Katrin told him? When? Why? Had he known all the time? Did he know about the rape? Had Katrin told him Holberg had raped her and she had fallen pregnant by him? What kind of a feeling is that? What kind of a feeling is it to discover you're not the person you thought you were? Not who you are? That your father isn't your father, you're not his son, you're the son of someone else you didn't know existed. Someone violent: a rapist.

  What's that like? Erlendur thought. How can you come to terms with that? Do you go and find your father and murder him? And then write: "I am him"?

  And if Katrin didn't tell her son about Holberg, how did he find out the truth? Erlendur turned the question over in his mind. The more he thought about the matter and considered the options, the more his thoughts turned to the message tree in Gardabaer. There was only one other way the son could have found out the truth and Erlendur intended to check that the following day.

  And what was it that Gretar saw? Why did he have to die? Was he blackmailing Holberg? Did he know about Holberg's rapes and plan to turn him in? Did he take photographs of Holberg? Who was the woman sitting with Holberg in the photograph? When was it taken? Gretar went missing in the summer of the national festival, so it had to have been taken before then. Erlendur wondered whether there weren't more victims of Holberg who had never said a thing.


  He heard a key turn in the lock and he stood up. Eva Lind was back.

  "I went to Gardabaer with the girl," she said when she saw Erlendur coming out of the kitchen, and closed the door behind her. "She said she was going to charge that sod for all the years he abused her. Her mother had a nervous breakdown. Then we left."

  "To see the husband?"

  "Yeah, back to their cosy little pad," Eva Lind said, kicking off her shoes by the door. "He went mad, but calmed down when he heard the explanation."

  "How did he take it?"

  "He's a great guy. When I left he was on his way to Gardabaer to talk to the old sod."

  "Really."

  "Do you think there's any point in charging that bastard?" Eva Lind asked.

  "They're difficult cases. The men deny everything and somehow they get away with it. Maybe it depends on the mother, what she says. Maybe she ought to go to the rape crisis centre. How are you doing, anyway?"

  "Just great," Eva Lind said.

  "Have you thought about a sonar or whatever they call it?" Erlendur asked. "I could go with you."

  "The time will come for that," Eva Lind said.

  "Will it?"

  "Yeah."

  "Good," Erlendur said.

  "What have you been up to anyway?" Eva Lind asked, putting the other meal into the microwave.

  "I don't think about anything except children these days," Erlendur said. "And a message tree, which is a kind of family tree: it can contain all kinds of messages to us if we only know what we're supposed to be looking for. And I'm thinking about obsessions with collecting things. How does that song about the carthorse go?"

  Eva Lind looked at her father. He knew she knew a lot about music.

  "Do you mean 'Life is Like a Carthorse'?" she said.

  "'Its head is stuffed with hay'," Erlendur said.

  "'Its heart is frozen solid'."

  "'And its brain has gone astray'," Erlendur finished the verse. He put on his hat and said he wouldn't be gone for long.