Jar City

by Arnaldur Indridason

  “You know Holberg’s dead,” he called out.

  She didn’t answer.

  “He was murdered in his home. You know that.”

  Erlendur was at the bottom of the steps, hurrying after her. She held a black umbrella onto which the rain poured above her head. He had nothing more than a hat to keep the rain off. She quickened her pace. He ran to catch up with her. He didn’t know what to say to make her listen to him. Didn’t know why she reacted to him as she did.

  “I wanted to ask you about Audur,” he said.

  Elín suddenly stopped and turned round and marched up to him with a contemptuous look on her face.

  “You bloody cop,” she hissed between her clenched teeth. “Don’t you dare mention her name. How dare you? After what you did to her mother. Get lost! Get lost this minute! Bloody cop!”

  She looked at Erlendur with hatred in her eyes and he stared back at her.

  “After all we did to her?” he said. “To whom?”

  “Go away,” she shouted, and turned and walked away, leaving Erlendur where he was. He gave up the chase and watched her disappearing in the rain, stooping slightly, in her green raincoat and black ankle boots. He turned around and walked back to her house and his car, deep in thought. He got inside and lit a cigarette, opened the window a crack, started the engine and slowly drove away from the house.

  As he inhaled he felt a slight pain in the middle of his chest again. It wasn’t new. It had been causing Erlendur some concern for almost a year now. A vague pain that greeted him in the mornings but generally disappeared soon after he got out of bed. He didn’t have a good mattress to sleep on. Sometimes his whole body ached if he lay in bed for too long.

  He inhaled the smoke. Hopefully it was the mattress.

  As Erlendur was putting out his cigarette his mobile phone rang in his coat pocket. It was the head of forensics with the news that they had managed to decipher the inscription on the grave and had located it in the Bible.

  “It’s taken from Psalm 64,” the head of forensics said.

  “Yes,” said Erlendur.

  “ ‘Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.’ ”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s what it says on the gravestone: Preserve my life from fear of the enemy. From Psalm 64.”

  “ ‘Preserve my life from fear of the enemy’.”

  “Does that help you at all?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “There were two sets on fingerprints on the photograph.”

  “Yes, Sigurdur Óli told me.”

  “One set is Holberg’s but we don’t have the others on our files. They’re quite blurred. Very old fingerprints.”

  “Can you tell what kind of camera the photo was taken with?” Erlendur asked.

  “Impossible to tell. But I doubt it was a high-quality one.”

  9

  Sigurdur Óli parked his car in the Iceland Transport yard where he hoped it would be out of the way. Lorries were standing in rows in the yard. Some were being loaded, some driven away, others reversed up to the cargo warehouse. A stench of diesel and oil filled the air and the noise from the engines of the trucks was deafening. Staff and customers were rushing around the yard and the warehouse.

  The Met Office had forecast yet more wet weather. Sigurdur Óli tried to protect himself from the rain by pulling his coat over his head as he ran to the warehouse. He was directed to the foreman who was sitting in a glass cubicle checking papers and appeared to be extremely busy.

  A plump man wearing a blue anorak done up with a single button across his paunch and holding a cigar stub between his fingers, the foreman had heard about Holberg’s death and said he’d known him quite well. Described him as a reliable man, a hard worker who’d been driving from one end of the country to the other for decades and knew Iceland’s road network like the back of his hand. Said he was a secretive type, never talked about himself or in personal terms, never made any friends at the company or talked about what he’d done before, thought he’d always been a lorry driver. Talked as if he had been. Unmarried with no children, as far as he knew. Never talked about his nearest and dearest.

  “That’s the long and the short of it,” the foreman said as if to put an end to the conversation, took a lighter from his anorak pocket and lit the cigar stub. “Damn shame,” puff, puff, “to go like that,” puff.

  “Who did he associate with here mainly?” Sigurdur Óli asked, trying not to inhale the foul-smelling cigar smoke.

  “You can talk to Hilmar, I reckon he knew him best. Hilmar’s out the front. He’s from Reydarfjördur so sometimes he used to stay at Holberg’s place in Nordurmýri when he needed to rest in town. There are rest rules that drivers have to comply with, so they have to have somewhere to stay in the city.”

  “Did he stay there last weekend, do you know?”

  “No, he was working in the east. But he might have been there the weekend before.”

  “Can you imagine who would have wanted to do Holberg any harm? Some friction here at work or…”

  “No, no, nothing”, puff, “like”, puff, “that,” puff. The man was having trouble keeping his cigar alight. “Talk to”, puff, “Hilmar,” puff, “mate. He might be able to help you.”

  Sigurdur Óli found Hilmar after following the foreman’s directions. He was standing by one of the warehouse bays supervising a lorry being unloaded. Hilmar was a hulk, two metres tall, muscular, ruddy, bearded and with hairy arms protruding from his T-shirt. Looked about 50. Old-fashioned blue braces held up his tatty jeans. A small forklift was unloading the lorry. Another lorry was backing up to the next bay along; at the same time two drivers beeped their horns and hurled abuse at each other in the yard.

  Sigurdur Óli went up to Hilmar and tapped him lightly on the shoulder, but the man didn’t notice him. He tapped harder and eventually Hilmar turned round. He could see Sigurdur Óli talking to him but couldn’t hear what he was saying and looked down at him with bovine eyes. Sigurdur Óli raised his voice, but to no avail. He raised his voice further and thought he detected a glimmer of comprehension in Hilmar’s eyes, but he was mistaken. Hilmar just shook his head and pointed at his ear.

  At this, Sigurdur Óli redoubled his efforts, arched himself and stood on tiptoe and shouted at the top of his voice at the very moment everything fell completely silent and his words echoed in all their glory around the walls of the gigantic warehouse and out into the yard:

  “DID YOU SLEEP WITH HOLBERG?”

  10

  He was raking up leaves in his garden when Erlendur saw him. He didn’t look up until Erlendur had been standing watching him for a long time as he toiled away with the slow movements of an old man. He wiped a drip from the end of his nose. It didn’t seem to matter that it was raining and the leaves were stuck together and awkward to deal with. He did nothing hurriedly, hooked the leaves with his rake and tried to scrape them into little piles. He still lived in Keflavík. Born and bred there.

  Erlendur had asked Elínborg to collect information about him and she’d dug up the main details about the old man whom Erlendur now watched in the garden; his police career, the numerous criticisms of his conduct and procedures during his many years in the force, the handling of Kolbrún’s case and how he had been specifically reprimanded over it. She phoned back with the information while Erlendur was sitting over a meal, still in Keflavík. He considered saving the visit until the following day, then thought to himself that he couldn’t be bothered driving there and back in a raging storm so he would just go direct.

  The man was wearing a green parka and a baseball cap. His white, bony hands held the shaft of the rake. He was tall and had obviously once been sturdier and cut a more authoritative figure but he was old, wrinkled and runny-nosed now. Erlendur watched him, an old man pottering around in his garden. The man looked up from his leaves, but paid no particular attention to his observer. A good while passed like this until Erlendur decided to make a move.

  “Why doe
sn’t her sister want to talk to me?” he said and the old man looked up with a start.

  “Eh? What was that?” The man stopped what he was doing. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “How did you treat Kolbrún when she came to you to press charges?” Erlendur asked.

  The old man looked at this stranger who had entered his garden, and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He looked Erlendur up and down.

  “Do I know you?” he said. “What are you talking about? Who are you?”

  “My name’s Erlendur. I’m investigating the murder of a man from Reykjavík by the name of Holberg. He was accused of rape almost 40 years ago. You were in charge of the investigation. The woman who was raped was called Kolbrún. She’s dead. Her sister won’t talk to the police for reasons I’m trying to establish. She said to me, ‘After what you did to her.’ I’d like you to tell me what she’s referring to.”

  The man looked at Erlendur without saying a word. Looked him in the eye and remained silent.

  “What did you do to her?” Erlendur repeated.

  “I can’t remember…what right have you got? What kind of an insult is this anyway?” His voice was trembling slightly. “Get out of my garden or I’ll call the police.”

  “No, Rúnar, I am the police. And I don’t have time for any of this bollocks.”

  Rúnar thought it over. “Is this the new method? Attacking people with accusations and abuse?”

  “Good of you to mention methods and abuse,” Erlendur said. “At one time you ran up eight charges for breaches of duty, including brutality. I don’t know who you had to serve to keep your job, but you didn’t do him well enough towards the end because eventually you left the police in disgrace. Dismissed…”

  “You shut up,” said Rúnar, looking around shiftily. “How dare you.”

  “…for repeated sexual harassment.”

  His white, bony hands tightened their grip on the rake, stretching his pallid skin until the knuckles stood out. His face closed up, hateful lines around his mouth, his stare narrowed until his eyes were half closed. On his way to see him, while the information from Elínborg was running through his mind like an electric shock, Erlendur had wondered whether Rúnar should be condemned for what he’d done in another life, when he was a different man. Erlendur had been in the police force long enough to have heard the stories about him, about the trouble he caused. He had in fact met Rúnar a couple of times many years before, but the man he now saw in the garden was so old and decrepit that it took Erlendur a while to be sure that it was the same person. Stories about Rúnar still circulated among the police. Erlendur had once read that the past was a different country and he could understand that. He understood that times change and people too. But he wasn’t prepared to erase the past.

  They stood in the garden facing one another.

  “What about Kolbrún?” Erlendur said.

  “Bugger off!”

  “Not until you tell me about Kolbrún.”

  “She was a fucking whore!” Rúnar suddenly said between clenched teeth. “So take that and bugger off! Everything she said about me and to me was bloody lies. There wasn’t any fucking rape. She lied the whole time!”

  Erlendur visualised Kolbrún sitting in front of this man all those years ago when she filed the rape charge. He imagined her gradually mustering up her courage until finally she dared to go to the police to tell what had happened to her. He imagined the terror she’d experienced and, above all else, wanted to forget as if it had never occurred, as if it had merely been a nightmare from which she’d eventually wake. Then she realised she would never wake up. She had been defiled. She’d been attacked and she’d been plundered.

  “She turned up three days after the incident and accused the man of rape,” Rúnar said. “It wasn’t very convincing.”

  “So you threw her back out,” Erlendur said.

  “She was lying.”

  “And you laughed at her and belittled her and told her to forget it. But she didn’t forget it, did she?”

  The old man looked at Erlendur with loathing in his eyes.

  “She went to Reykjavík, didn’t she?” Erlendur said.

  “Holberg was never convicted.”

  “Thanks to whom, do you reckon?”

  Erlendur imagined Kolbrún wrangling with Rúnar at the office. Wrangling with him! That man! Arguing the truth of what she’d been through. Trying to convince him she was telling the truth as if he were the supreme judge in her case.

  She had to summon all her strength to relate the events of that night to him and tried to give a systematic account, but it was just too painful. She couldn’t describe it. Couldn’t describe something indescribable, repulsive, hideous. Somehow she managed to piece together her disjointed story. Was that a grin? She didn’t understand why the policeman was grinning. She had the impression it was a grin, but it couldn’t be. Then he started questioning her about the details.

  “Tell me exactly what it was like.”

  She looked at him, confused. Hesitantly began her story again.

  “No, I’ve heard that. Tell me exactly what happened. You were wearing panties. How did he get your panties off? How did he get it inside you?”

  Was he serious? Eventually she asked if there were any women working there.

  “No. If you want to charge this man with rape, you have to be more precise than this, understand? Had you led him on somehow so he might have thought you were up for it?”

  Up for it? She told him in an almost inaudible voice that she certainly had not.

  “You’ll have to speak up. How did he get your panties off?”

  She was sure it was a grin. He questioned her brashly, queried what she said, was rude, some of the questions were downright abusive, filthy, he behaved as though she had provoked the assault, had wanted to have sex with the man, perhaps changed her mind but then it was too late, you know, too late to back out of that kind of thing. “There’s no point in going to a dancehall, flirting with the man and then stopping halfway. No point at all,” he said.

  She was sobbing when she eventually opened her handbag, took out a plastic bag and handed it to him. He opened the bag and took out her ripped panties…

  Rúnar let go of the rake and was about to walk past Erlendur, but Erlendur blocked his way and pinned him against the wall of the house. They looked each other in the eye.

  “She gave you some evidence,” Erlendur said. “The only evidence she had. She was certain Holberg had left something behind.”

  “She never gave me anything,” Rúnar hissed. “Leave me alone.”

  “She gave you a pair of panties.”

  “She was lying.”

  “They should have fired you on the spot. You pathetic fucking beast.” With an expression of revulsion Erlendur backed slowly away from the decrepit old man now huddled against the wall.

  “I was just showing her what to expect if she pressed charges,” he said in a squeaky voice. “I was doing her a favour. The courts laugh at that kind of case.”

  Erlendur turned around and walked away, wondering how God, if he existed, could possibly justify allowing someone like Rúnar live to an old age but taking the life of an innocent 4-year-old girl.

  He planned to go back to see Kolbrún’s sister but called in at the Keflavík library first. He walked among the bookshelves, running his eyes over the spines of the books until he found the Bible. Erlendur knew the Bible well. He opened it at the Psalms and found No. 64. He found the line that was inscribed on the headstone. “Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.”

  He had remembered correctly. The epitaph was a continuation of the first line of the Psalm. Erlendur read it over several times, pensively tracing his fingers across the lines, and quietly repeating the sentence to himself as he stood by the bookshelf.

  The first line of the Psalm was a plea to the Lord. Erlendur could almost hear the woman’s silent cry across the years.

  “Hear my voice, O God, in my pra
yer.”

  11

  Erlendur pulled up outside the corrugated-iron-clad white house and switched off the engine. He stayed in the car and finished his cigarette. He was trying to cut back on smoking and was down to five a day when things went well. This was number eight that day and it wasn’t even 3 p.m.

  He got out of the car, walked up the steps to the house and rang the bell. He waited a good while, but nothing happened. He rang again, but with no result. He put his face to the window and saw the green raincoat and umbrella and boots. He rang a third time, stood on the top step and tried to keep out of the rain. Suddenly, the door opened and Elín glared at him.

  “Leave me alone, you hear? Go away! Get out!” She tried to slam the door but Erlendur blocked it with his foot.

  “We’re not all like Rúnar,” he said. “I know your sister wasn’t treated fairly. I went and talked to Rúnar. What he did is inexcusable, but it can’t be changed now. He’s senile and geriatric and he’ll never see anything wrong in what he did.”

  “Will you leave me alone!”

  “I have to talk to you. If it doesn’t work like this I’ll have to bring you in for questioning. I want to avoid that.” He took the photograph from the cemetery out of his pocket and slipped it through the crack in the door. “I found this photo in Holberg’s flat,” he said.

  Elín didn’t answer him. A long while passed. Erlendur held the photo through the opening in the door, but he couldn’t see Elín, who was still pushing against it. Gradually he felt the pressure on his foot easing and Elín took the photograph. Soon the door was open. She went inside holding the photograph. Erlendur stepped inside and closed the door carefully behind him.

  Elín disappeared into a little sitting room and for a moment Erlendur wondered if he ought to take off his wet shoes. He wiped them on the mat and followed Elín into the sitting room, past the tidy kitchen and study. In the sitting room there were pictures and embroidery in gilded frames on the walls and a small electric organ in one corner.