“Don’t do anything until I get back to you,” Erlendur said. “You understand? Don’t make a move until you hear from me or I turn up there.”
“Have you talked to the old bag?”
Without answering, Erlendur hung up and put the phone back in his pocket. Elín came in carrying a tray, put cups on the table in front of Erlendur and poured coffee for them both. They both took it black. She put the coffee pot on the table and sat down facing Erlendur. He began again.
“Ellidi told us Holberg had raped another woman before Kolbrún and probably bragged about it to her.” He saw the look of astonishment on Elín’s face.
“If Kolbrún knew about someone else, she never told me,” she said and shook her head thoughtfully. “Could he be telling the truth?”
“We have to act on that assumption,” Erlendur said. “Ellidi’s so strung out he could lie about that sort of thing. But we haven’t got our hands on anything to refute what he says.”
“We didn’t talk about the rape very often,” Elín said. “I think that was because of Audur. Among other things. Kolbrún was a very reticent woman, shy, withdrawn, and she closed up even more after what happened. And of course it was repulsive to talk about that awful experience when she was pregnant by it, not to mention after the child was born. Kolbrún did everything she could to forget that the rape ever happened. Everything to do with it.”
“I imagine if Kolbrún knew about another woman she’d have told the police to back up her own statement, if nothing else. But she didn’t mention a word of it in any of the reports I’ve read.”
“Maybe she wanted to spare the woman,” Elín said.
“Spare her?”
“Kolbrún knew what it was like to suffer a rape. She knew what it was like to report a rape. She hesitated about it a lot herself and all that seemed to come out of it was humiliation. If the other woman didn’t want to come forward, Kolbrún may have respected her wishes. I’d imagine so. But it’s difficult to say, I’m not sure exactly what you’re talking about.”
“She may not have known any details, no name, maybe just a vague suspicion. If he only implied something through what he said.”
“She never talked about anything like that to me.”
“When you talked about the rape, in what terms was it?”
“It wasn’t exactly about the act itself,” Elín said.
The phone in Erlendur’s pocket rang again and Elín stopped talking. Erlendur pulled the phone out and saw that it was Sigurdur Óli. Erlendur just switched it off and put it away.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Aren’t they a real pest, those phones?”
“Absolutely,” Erlendur said. He was running out of time. “Please, go on.”
“She talked about how much she loved her daughter, Audur. They had a very special relationship despite those awful circumstances. Audur meant the world to Kolbrún. I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I don’t think she would have wanted to miss out on being a mother. Do you understand that? I even thought she regarded Audur as some kind of compensation, or something, for the rape. I know it’s a clumsy way to put it, but it was as if the girl was some kind of godsend amidst all that misfortune. I can’t say what my sister thought, how she felt or what feelings she kept to herself, I only have a limited picture of that and I wouldn’t presume to speak for her. But as time went by she came to worship her little girl and never let her out of her sight. Never. Their relationship was strongly coloured by what had happened, but Kolbrún never thought of her in terms of the beast who ruined her life. She only saw the beautiful child that Audur was. My sister was overprotective of her daughter and that went beyond death and the grave, as the epitaph shows. ‘Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.’ ”
“Do you know exactly what your sister meant by those words?”
“It was a plea to God, as you’ll see if you read the Psalm. Naturally, the little girl’s death had something to do with it. How it happened and how tragic it was. Kolbrún couldn’t bear the thought of Audur having an autopsy. She wouldn’t think of it.”
Erlendur looked awkwardly at the floor but Elín didn’t notice.
“You could easily imagine,” Elín said, “how those terrible things that Kolbrún went through, the rape and then her daughter’s death, had a serious effect on her mental health. She had a nervous breakdown. When they started talking about an autopsy her paranoia built up, and in her need to protect Audur she saw the doctors as enemies. She had her daughter in those terrible circumstances and lost her so soon. She saw that as God’s will. My sister wanted her daughter to be left in peace.”
Erlendur waited a moment before he made his move.
“I think I’m one of those enemies.”
Elín looked at him, not understanding what he meant.
“I think we need to dig up the coffin and do a more precise autopsy, if that’s possible.”
Erlendur said this as carefully as he could. It took Elín a while to understand his words and put them in context, and when their meaning had sunk in she gave him a blank look.
“What are you saying?”
“We may be able to find an explanation for why she died.”
“Explanation? It was a brain tumour!”
“It could be…”
“What are you talking about? Dig her up? The child? I don’t believe it! I was just telling you…”
“We have two reasons.”
“Two reasons?”
“For the autopsy,” Erlendur said.
Elín had stood up and was pacing the room in a frenzy. Erlendur sat tight and had sunk deeper into the soft armchair.
“I’ve talked to the doctors at the hospital here in Keflavík. They couldn’t find any reports about Audur except a provisional postmortem by the doctor who performed the autopsy. He’s dead now. The year Audur died was his last year as a doctor at the hospital. He mentioned only the brain tumour and ascribed her death to that. I want to know what kind of disease it was that caused her death. I want to know if it could have been a hereditary disease.”
“A hereditary disease! I don’t know about any hereditary diseases.”
“We’re also looking for it in Holberg,” Erlendur said. “Another reason for an exhumation is to make sure that Audur was Holberg’s daughter. They do it with DNA tests.”
“Do you doubt that she is?”
“Not necessarily, but it has to be confirmed.”
“Why?”
“Holberg denied the child was his. He said he’d had sex with Kolbrún with her consent but denied the paternity. When the case was dropped they didn’t see any particular grounds for proving it or otherwise. Your sister never insisted on anything like that. She’d obviously had enough and wanted Holberg out of her life.”
“Who else could have been the father?”
“We need confirmation because of Holberg’s murder. It might help us find some answers.”
“Holberg’s murder?”
“Yes.”
Elín stood over Erlendur, staring at him. “Is that monster going to torment us all beyond the grave?”
Erlendur was about to answer, but she went on.
“You still think my sister was lying,” Elín said. “You’re never going to believe her. You’re no better than that idiot Rúnar. Not in the slightest.”
She bent over him where he was sitting in the chair.
“Bloody cop!” she hissed. “I should never have let you into my house.”
18
Sigurdur Óli saw the car headlights approaching in the rain and knew it was Erlendur. The hydraulic digger rumbled as it took up a position by the grave, ready to start digging when the signal was given. It was a mini-digger that had chugged between the graves with jerks and starts. Its caterpillar tracks slid in the mud. It spewed out clouds of black smoke and filled the air with a thick stench of oil.
Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg stood by the grave with a pathologist, a lawyer from the Public Prosecutor�
�s office, a minister and churchwarden, several policemen from Keflavík and two council workers. The group stood in the rain, envying Elínborg, who was the only one with an umbrella, and Sigurdur Óli, who had been allowed to stand half under it. They noticed Erlendur was alone when he got out of his car and slowly walked towards them. They had papers authorising the exhumation, which was not to begin until Erlendur gave his permission.
Erlendur surveyed the area, silently rueing the disruption, the damage, the desecration. The gravestone had been removed and laid on a pathway near the grave. Beside it was a green jar with a long point on the base that could be stuck down into the soil. The jar contained a withered bunch of roses and Erlendur thought to himself that Elín must have put it on the grave. He stopped, read the epitaph once again and shook his head. The white wooden pegging to mark out the grave, which had stood barely eight inches up from the ground, now lay broken beside the headstone. Erlendur had seen that kind of fencing around children’s graves, and it pained him to see it discarded this way. He looked up into the black sky. Water dripped from the brim of his hat onto his shoulders and he squinted against the falling rain. He scanned the group standing by the digger, finally looked at Sigurdur Óli and nodded. Sigurdur Óli made a sign to the digger operator. The bucket rose into the air then plunged deep into the porous soil.
Erlendur watched the digger tear up 30-year-old wounds. He winced at each thrust of the bucket. The pile of soil steadily grew and the deeper the hole became, the more darkness it consumed. Erlendur stood some distance away and watched the bucket digging deeper and deeper into the wound. Suddenly he felt a sensation of déjà-vu, as if he had seen this all before in a dream, and for an instant the scene in front of him took on a dreamlike atmosphere: his colleagues standing there looking into the grave, the council workers in their orange overalls leaning forward onto their shovels, the minister in the big black overcoat, the rain that poured down into the grave and came back up in the bucket as if the hole were bleeding.
Had he dreamt it exactly like this?
Then the sensation disappeared and as always when something like that happened he couldn’t begin to understand where it had come from; why he felt he was reliving events that had never happened before. Erlendur didn’t believe in premonitions, visions or dreams, nor reincarnation or karma, he didn’t believe in God although he’d often read the Bible, nor in eternal life or that his conduct in this world would affect whether he went to heaven or hell. He felt that life itself offered a mixture of the two.
Then sometimes he experienced this incomprehensible and supernatural déjà-vu, experienced time and place as if he’d seen it all before, as if he stepped outside himself, became an onlooker to his own life. There was no way he could explain what it was that happened or why his mind played tricks on him like this.
Erlendur came back to his senses when the bucket struck the lid of the coffin and a hollow clunk was heard from inside the grave. He moved a step closer. Through the rainwater pouring down into the hole he saw the vague outline of the coffin.
“Careful!” Erlendur shouted at the digger operator, throwing his hands up in the air.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw car headlights approaching. They all looked up in the direction of the lights and saw a car crawling along in the rain until it stopped by the cemetery gate. An old lady in a green coat got out. They noticed the taxi sign on the car roof. The taxi drove off and the lady stormed towards the grave. As soon as Erlendur was within earshot she started shouting and waving her fist at him.
“Grave-robber!” he heard Elín shout. “Grave-robbers! Bodysnatchers!”
“Keep her back,” Erlendur said calmly to the policemen who walked over to Elín and stopped her when she was only a few yards from the grave. She tried to fight them off in her frenzy of rage but they held her arms and restrained her.
The two council workers climbed into the grave with their shovels, dug around the coffin and put ropes around the ends of it. It was fairly intact. The rain pounded on the lid with a hollow thudding, washing the soil from it. Erlendur imagined it would have been white. A tiny white casket with brass handles and a cross on the lid. The men tied the ropes to the bucket of the digger which very carefully lifted Audur’s coffin out of the ground. It was still in one piece but looked extremely fragile. Erlendur saw Elín had stopped struggling and shouting at him. She’d started to cry when the white casket emerged and hung motionless in the ropes above the grave before being lowered to the ground. The minister went up to it, made the sign of the cross over it and moved his lips in prayer. A small van backed slowly along the path and stopped. The council workers untied the ropes, lifted the coffin into the van and closed the doors. Elínborg got into the front seat beside the driver, who set off out of the cemetery, through the gate and down the road until the red rear lights disappeared in the rain and the gloom.
The minister went over to Elín and asked the policemen to let her go. They did so at once. The minister asked if there was anything he could do for her. They clearly knew each other well and spoke together in whispers. Elín appeared calmer. Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli exchanged glances and looked down into the grave. The rainwater had already started to collect in the bottom.
“I wanted to try to stop this repulsive desecration,” Erlendur heard Elín say to the minister. He was somewhat relieved to see that Elín had collected herself. He walked over to her with Sigurdur Óli following close behind.
“I’ll never forgive you for this,” Elín said to Erlendur. The minister was standing by her side. “Never!”
“I do understand,” Erlendur said, “but the investigation takes priority.”
“Investigation? Bugger your investigation,” Elín shouted. “Where are you taking the body?”
“To Reykjavík.”
“And when are you bringing it back?”
“Two days from now.”
“Look what you’ve done to her grave,” Elín said in a puzzled tone of resignation, as if she hadn’t yet completely taken in what had happened. She walked past Erlendur towards the headstone and what remained of the fencing, the vase of flowers and the open grave.
Erlendur decided to tell her about the message that was found in Holberg’s flat.
“A note was left behind at Holberg’s place when we found him,” Erlendur said, walking after Elín. “We couldn’t make much of it until Audur entered the picture and we talked to her old doctor. Icelandic murderers generally don’t leave anything behind but a mess, but the one who killed Holberg wanted to give us something to rack our brains over. When the doctor talked about the possibility of a hereditary disease the message suddenly took on a certain meaning. Also after what Ellidi told me in the prison. Holberg has no living relatives. He had a sister who died at the age of nine. Sigurdur Óli here”, Erlendur said, pointing to his colleague, “found the medical reports about her – Ellidi was right. Like Audur, Holberg’s sister died of a brain tumour. Very probably from the same disease.”
“What is it you’re saying? What was the message?” Elín asked.
Erlendur hesitated. He looked at Sigurdur Óli who looked first at Elín and then back at Erlendur.
“I am him,” Erlendur said.
“What do you mean?”
“That was the message: ‘I am him’ with the final word, ‘him’, in capitals.”
“I am him,” Elín repeated. “What does that mean?”
“It’s impossible to say really but I’ve been wondering if it doesn’t imply some kind of relation,” Erlendur said. “The person who wrote ‘I am him’ would have felt he had something in common with Holberg. It could be a fantasy by some nutcase who didn’t even know him. Just nonsense. But I don’t think so. I think the disease will help us. I think we have to find out exactly what it was.”
“What kind of relation?”
“According to the records, Holberg didn’t have any children. Audur wasn’t named after him. Her last name was Kolbrúnardóttir. But if Ellidi’s
telling the truth when he says Holberg raped more women besides Kolbrún, women who didn’t come forward, it could be just as likely that he’s had other children. That Kolbrún wasn’t the only victim who had his child. We’ve narrowed down the search for a possible victim in Húsavík to the women who had children over a certain period and we’re hoping something will come out of this soon.”
“Húsavík?”
“Holberg’s previous victim was from there, apparently.”
“What do you mean by a hereditary disease?” Elín said. “What sort of disease? Is it the one that killed Audur?”
“We have to examine Holberg, confirm that he was Audur’s father and piece everything together. But if this theory is correct, it’s probably a rare, genetically transmitted disease.”
“And did Audur have it?”
“She may have died too long ago to give a satisfactory result but that’s what we want to find out.”
By now they had walked to the church, Elín by Erlendur’s side and Sigurdur Óli following behind them. Elín led the way. The church was open; they went in out of the rain and stood in the vestibule looking out at the gloomy autumn day.
“I think Holberg was Audur’s father,” Erlendur said. “Actually I have no reason to doubt your word and what your sister told you. But we need confirmation. It’s vital from the point of view of the police investigation. If a genetic disease is involved which Audur got from Holberg, it could be somewhere else too. It’s possible that the disease is linked to Holberg’s murder.”
They didn’t notice a car driving slowly away from the cemetery along the rough old track of a road, its lights switched off and barely visible in the darkness. When it reached Sandgerdi it picked up speed, the headlights were switched on and it had soon caught up with the van carrying the body. On the Keflavík road the driver made sure he kept two or three cars behind the van. In this way, he followed the coffin all the way to Reykjavík.
When the van stopped in front of the morgue on Barónsstígur he parked the car some distance away and watched as the coffin was carried into the building and the doors closed behind it. He watched the van drive away and saw when the woman who’d accompanied the coffin left the morgue and got into a taxi.
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