The body was almost completely drained of blood, much of which had pooled and dried on the floor of the flat. That meant that the man’s heart had continued to beat for a little while after the attack.
After seeing all that gore Elínborg simply could not have cooked a bloody steak, however much her elder son moaned about the dinner menu.
3
The name of the murdered man in Thingholt was Runólfur. He had worked for a telecoms company, had no criminal record, and had never come to the attention of the police. He had moved to Reykjavík from his home village more than ten years ago, and he lived alone. His elderly mother, who was still living in the same village, said he had not been in touch recently. A police officer and the local clergyman went to her home to notify her of her son’s death. Runólfur was an only child, and it transpired that his father had died in an accident some years before: he had collided with a lorry on the upland road over the Holtavörduheidi moor.
Runólfur’s landlord spoke well of him. He always paid his rent on time; he was neat and tidy; there was never any noise from his flat; he went out to work every morning. The landlord could not praise him highly enough.
‘All that blood,’ he said, with a resentful look at Elínborg. ‘I’ll have to get a cleaning company in. I’ll probably have to replace the flooring. Who would do a thing like that? It won’t be easy to find new tenants.’
‘So you’ve never heard anything from the flat?’ Elinborg asked.
‘Not a whisper,’ replied the landlord. He had a protruding belly, a week’s growth of white whiskers, a balding head, sagging shoulders and stubby arms. He lived above Runólfur. He said he had rented out the downstairs flat for years, and Runólfur had been his tenant for the past two years or so. He had discovered the body when he brought down some bills which had been mistakenly delivered to his flat; he pushed them through the letter box, but as he passed the living-room window he had seen the bare feet of someone who was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. He had felt the best thing was to ring the police at once.
‘Were you home on Saturday evening?’ asked Elínborg. She pictured the inquisitive landlord peering into the flat. It couldn’t have been easy to see in. The curtains were drawn, with only a narrow gap between them.
Preliminary investigations indicated that the murder had been committed either on the Saturday evening or during the night. It seemed more likely that someone had been in the flat with Runólfur before the attack occurred than that anyone had forced entry. The odds were on a woman. It looked as if Runólfur had had sex shortly before he died, as a condom had been found on the bedroom floor. The T-shirt he was wearing when he was discovered probably did not belong to him but to a woman. It was far too small for him, and in addition dark hairs were found on it, matching hairs collected from Runólfur’s sofa. There was a hair on his jacket, possibly from the same person, and in his bed, in a bedroom off the living room, there were pubic hairs. He might have invited a woman to stay the night.
It would have been easy to leave the house through the garden and climb over into an adjacent garden behind a three-storey concrete house in the next street. Nobody had been seen in the garden two days ago.
‘I’m at home most days,’ said the landlord.
‘You say Runólfur went out that evening?’
‘Yes, I saw him walk off down the street. It must have been about eleven. I didn’t see him after that.’
‘You didn’t notice when he came home?’
‘No. I was probably asleep by then.’
‘So you don’t know if anyone came back with him?’
‘No.’
‘Runólfur didn’t live with a woman, did he?’
‘No, nor with a man,’ the landlord replied, with an enigmatic smile.
‘Not at any time while he was your tenant?’
‘No.’
‘But do you know if he had girlfriends who stayed over?’ The landlord scratched his head. It was shortly past lunchtime; he had just finished eating horsemeat sausage, and now he was sitting calmly on a sofa opposite Elínborg. She had spotted the leftovers on a plate in the kitchen; a rancid smell hung in the air and she hoped the odour would not taint her coat, a recent sale bargain. She had no desire to stay here any longer than necessary.
‘Not particularly,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t think I ever saw him with a woman. Not as far as I remember.’
‘You didn’t know him all that well?’
‘No. I soon realised he wanted to be left alone. So … No, I didn’t have much to do with him.’
Elínborg stood up. She saw Sigurdur Óli at the door of the house across the road, talking to the neighbours. Other police officers were taking statements from local residents.
‘When can I hose down the flat?’ asked the landlord.
‘Soon,’ answered Elínborg. ‘We’ll let you know.’
Runólfur’s body had been removed the previous evening, but when Elínborg arrived with Sigurdur Óli, the morning after the discovery of the body, forensics officers were still at work in the flat. The evidence was that this was the home of a neat young man, who had wanted to make a pleasant, comfortable base for himself.
Elínborg had the impression that the fittings had been carefully selected. They included porcelain wall-plaques — not a common sight in a young person’s home — a beautiful rug on the parquet floor, a sofa and a matching easy chair. The bathroom was small but tasteful. In the bedroom was a double bed. The kitchen, adjoining the living room, was spotless. There were no books and no family photographs, only a huge flatscreen TV and three framed posters of superheroes: Spider-Man, Superman and Batman. High-quality collectible superhero figures were displayed on a table.
‘Where were you lot when it happened?’ asked Elínborg, glancing from one poster to the next.
‘Kinda cool,’ commented Sigurdur Óli as he gazed at the cartoon heroes.
‘It’s just a load of old tat, isn’t it?’ said Elínborg.
Sigurdur Óli bent down to inspect the state-of-the-art sound system. Next to it lay a mobile phone and an iPod.
‘A nano,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘He’s got all the latest stuff.’
‘The ultra-thin one?’ asked Elínborg. ‘My younger boy says they’re too girly. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. I’ve never laid eyes on one.’
‘You don’t say,’ commented Sigurdur Óli, and blew his nose. He was feeling rather under the weather after a bout of flu.
‘Anything wrong with that?’ asked Elínborg as she opened the refrigerator.
The contents were sparse: the owner’s culinary skills appeared to have been limited. A banana, a pepper, cheese, jam, peanut butter, eggs. An open carton of skimmed milk.
‘Didn’t he have a computer?’ Sigurdur Óli asked one of the two forensics officers who were processing the scene.
‘We took it down to the station,’ he said. ‘We still haven’t found anything to explain the bloodbath. Have you heard about the Rohypnol?’
The forensics officer looked at each of them. He was thirtyish, unshaven and unkempt: slovenly was the word Elínborg was looking for. Sigurdur Óli, himself always immaculately turned out, had commented disparagingly to her that the grunge look was practically de rigueur today.
‘Rohypnol?’ asked Elínborg, with a shake of her head.
‘There are some pills in his jacket pocket, and quite a lot more on the table in the living room,’ said the officer, who was wearing a white overall and latex gloves.
‘The date-rape drug?’
‘Yes. They’ve just called us with the findings. We’re supposed to investigate with that in mind. He had some in his jacket pocket, as I said, which could mean that-’
‘He used it on Saturday evening,’ interjected Elínborg. ‘The landlord saw him leave. So he had it in his pocket when he went out on the town?’
‘Looks like it, assuming he was wearing this jacket. All his other clothes were neatly put away. The jacket and shirt are o
n this chair, the underpants and socks in the bedroom. He was lying here in the living room with his trousers around his ankles, but he wasn’t wearing any underwear. It looks as if he might have put the trousers on to leave the bedroom, maybe to get a glass of water. There’s a glass by the sink.’
‘So he took Rohypnol with him for a night out?’ Elínborg wondered aloud.
‘It looks as if he had sex just before he died,’ said the forensics officer. ‘We think the condom is his, and there were physical signs, so to speak. The autopsy will clarify the details.’
‘A date-rape drug,’ said Elínborg, recalling a recent case she had handled. A driver in the suburban town of Kópavogur had spotted a half-naked woman of twenty-six vomiting by the roadside and had come to her aid. She could give no account of where she had been and had no recollection of where she had spent the night. She asked the man to drive her home. In view of the state she was in he wanted to take her to hospital, but she insisted there was no need. The woman had no idea what she had been doing in Kópavogur. As soon as she got home she fell asleep and slept for twelve hours, but when she woke up she ached all over. She had a stinging pain in the genital area and her knees were reddened and sore, but her mind was a blank. She had never before blacked out from drinking and, despite her amnesia, she was convinced that she had not been drinking heavily. She took a long shower, washing thoroughly. Late that evening a friend rang to ask what had become of her; they had gone out with another woman, and she had become separated from them. Her friend had seen her leave with a man she did not recognise.
‘Wow,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t remember that at all. I don’t remember anything.’
‘Who was he?’ asked her friend.
‘No idea.’
As they chatted the woman gradually recalled meeting a man at the club. He had bought her a drink. She did not know him and had only a hazy recollection of his appearance, but he had seemed friendly. She had hardly finished her drink when another appeared on the table. She went to the loo, and when she returned the man suggested that they should move on. That was the last thing she remembered from that evening.
‘Where did you go with him?’ asked her friend.
‘I don’t know. I just …’
‘You didn’t know him?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think he might have put something in your drink?’
‘In my drink?’
‘Since you don’t remember anything. There are …’ Her friend hesitated.
‘What?’
‘Rapists who do that.’
Shortly after that the young woman went to the rape-trauma centre at the National Hospital. By the time the case landed on Elínborg’s desk the woman was convinced that she had been raped. A medical examination revealed that she had had sexual intercourse during the night, but there was no sign of any drug in her blood. This was not surprising because the most commonly used date-rape drug, Rohypnol, disappears within a few hours.
Elínborg showed her the gallery of mugshots of convicted rapists but she did not recognise anyone. She took the woman back to the club where she had met the man but the staff did not remember her, nor the man she was supposed to have met there. Elínborg knew that cases of drug-facilitated rape were difficult to prove. In general no trace of the drug was found in samples of blood or urine, as it had been eliminated from the body by the time the victim was examined, but there were other indications such as amnesia, semen in the vagina, and physical trauma. Elínborg informed the woman that she might have been drugged before the rape. It was possible that the man had slipped her some gamma-hydroxybutric acid or GHB, which works the same way as Rohypnol. Colourless and odourless, it can be administered in powder or liquid form; GHB targets the central nervous system, reducing the victim to a helpless state and sometimes leaving them with no recollection whatsoever of events.
‘Which makes it all the more difficult for us to prosecute the bastards,’ Elínborg told the young woman. ‘Rohypnol works for three to six hours, then vanishes completely from the body. You only need a few milligrams to induce a trance state, and if it’s taken with alcohol the effects are intensified. Side effects include hallucinations, depression, dizziness. Even seizures.’
Elínborg looked around the flat in Thingholt and thought about the attack on Runólfur, and the hatred that had evidently motivated it.
‘Did he have a car, this Runólfur?’ she asked the forensics officers.
‘Yes, it was parked outside,’ one of them replied. ‘We’ve taken it in to process it.’
‘I want to give you a DNA sample from a woman who was assaulted recently. I need to find out if he could have been her assailant — whether he drove her out to Kópavogur and chucked her out.’
‘No problem,’ said the forensics officer. ‘And there’s another thing.’
‘What?’
‘Everything in the flat belongs to a man — clothes, shoes, coats …’
‘Yes?’
‘Except that bundle over there,’ said the forensics officer, pointing at something rolled up in a plastic evidence bag.
‘What is it?’
‘Looks like a shawl,’ he replied, picking up the bag. ‘We found it in a heap under the bed. It certainly seems to corroborate the idea that he had a woman here.’
He opened the bag and held it up to Elínborg’s face.
‘It’s got an unusual smell,’ he said. ‘A bit of cigarette smoke, her perfume, and then there’s something … sort of spicy.’
Elínborg sniffed.
‘We haven’t identified it yet,’ the officer observed.
Elínborg took a deep breath. The woollen shawl was purple. She smelt the odour of cigarettes and perfume, and he was right — there was another familiar pungent fragrance.
‘Do you recognise it?’ Sigurdur Óli asked in astonishment.
She nodded. ‘It’s my favourite,’ she said.
‘What do you mean, favourite?’ asked the forensics officer.
‘Your favourite spice?’ asked Sigurdur Óli.
‘Yes,’ Elínborg replied. ‘But it’s not one spice. It’s a masala, a mixture of spices. Indian. It’s like … it reminds me of tandoori.’
4
The neighbours were on the whole eager to help. The police conducted systematic interviews with everyone living within a certain radius of the crime scene, whether or not they believed they had anything to contribute. The police would determine what was important and what was irrelevant. In the lower Thingholt district, most of the inhabitants said they had been asleep that night and so had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. None of them knew the victim. Nobody had observed anyone near the house or seen anything unusual in the days before the crime. Residents nearby were interviewed first, then the area of enquiry was gradually widened. Elínborg spoke to the investigating officers to review what had been revealed, and paused when she saw the statement of one woman who lived at the periphery of the area under investigation. Although the information provided seemed meagre, she decided to call on the woman herself.
‘I don’t know if it’s worth it,’ said the policeman who had questioned her.
‘Oh?’
‘She’s a bit odd.’
‘Odd? How?’
‘She kept going on about electromagnetic waves. She said they gave her a constant headache.’
‘Electromagnetic waves?’
‘She said she’s measured them, using some rods she has. The waves come mainly from her walls.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘I don’t know if you’ll get anything useful out of her.’
The woman lived on the upper floor of a two-storey building in the street up the hill from Runólfur’s home but some distance away, so whatever she thought she had seen might well be irrelevant. Yet Elínborg was curious. And since the police had little to go on as yet, she reckoned that she might as well check the woman out and see if she remembered anything more.
Petrína was in her late six
ties. She opened the door to Elínborg, wearing a dressing gown and worn felt slippers. Her hair was a mess, her face pale and wrinkled, her eyes bloodshot. In one hand she held a cigarette. As she welcomed Elínborg in she said she was pleased that someone was taking an interest at last.
‘It’s about time,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you. They’re massive waves, I tell you.’
Petrína vanished into the flat, leaving Elínborg to follow her. Elínborg found herself in a stifling cigarette fug; all the curtains were drawn and the rooms were dark. She managed to work out that it would be possible to see down into the street from the living-room window. The woman had gone into her bedroom, and now called out to her. Elínborg went through the living room, past the kitchen and into the bedroom where she saw Petrína beneath a solitary light bulb that hung unadorned from the ceiling. A bed and bedside table stood in the centre of the room.
‘I’d like to tear the walls down,’ said Petrína. ‘I can’t afford to have all the electrical wiring insulated. I must just be especially sensitive. Look here.’
Elínborg gazed in astonishment at the two longer walls of the room, which were covered from floor to ceiling in aluminium cooking foil.
‘It gives me such a headache,’ said Petrína.
‘Did you do all this yourself?’ asked Elínborg.
‘Me? Myself? Of course I did. The foil helps, but I don’t think it’s enough. You’ll have to take a look.’ Petrína picked up two metal rods and held them loosely in her hands with the ends towards Elínborg, who stood motionless in the doorway. Then the rods turned gradually until they pointed at one of the walls.
‘It’s the electrical wiring,’ said Petrína.
‘Oh?’ said Elínborg.
‘You can see that the foil helps. Come on.’
She shoved past Elínborg, her wild hair sticking out and the metal rods in her hands, looking like a caricature of a mad scientist. She went into the living room and switched on the TV. The test card appeared.
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