“Organ collectors?”
“There are such people.”
“What happened to this…Jar City? If it’s not around any more?”
“I don’t know.”
“So you think that’s where the brain could have ended up? Preserved in formalin?”
“Quite easily. Why did you exhume the girl?”
“Maybe it was a mistake,” Erlendur sighed. “Maybe the whole case is one big mistake.”
23
Elínborg located Klara, Grétar’s sister. Her search for Holberg’s other victim, the Húsavík woman as Erlendur called her, had produced no results. All the women she had approached showed the same reaction: enormous and genuine surprise followed by such a zealous interest that Elínborg had to use every trick in the book to avoid giving away any details of the case. She knew that no matter how much she and the other policemen who were looking for the woman emphasised that it was a sensitive case and not to be discussed with anyone, that wouldn’t prevent the gossip lines from glowing red hot when evening came around.
Klara greeted Elínborg at the door of her neat flat in the Seljahverfi district of Breidholt suburb. She was a slender woman in her fifties, dark-haired, wearing jeans and a blue sweater. She was smoking a cigarette.
“Did you talk to Mum?” she said when Elínborg had introduced herself and Klara had invited her inside, friendly and interested.
“That was Erlendur,” Elínborg said, “who works with me.”
“She said he wasn’t feeling very well,” Klara said, walking in front of Elínborg into the sitting room and offering her a seat. “She’s always making remarks you can’t figure out.”
Elínborg didn’t answer her.
“I’m off work today,” she said as if to explain why she was hanging around at home in the middle of the day, smoking cigarettes. She said she worked at a travel agency. Her husband was at work, the two children had flown the nest; the daughter studying medicine, she said, proudly. She’d hardly put out one cigarette before she took out another and lit it. Elínborg gave a polite cough, but Klara didn’t take the hint.
“I read about Holberg in the papers,” Klara said as if she wanted to stop herself rambling on. “Mum said the man asked about Grétar. We were half-brother and -sister. Mum forgot to tell him that. We had the same mother. Our fathers are both long since dead.”
“We didn’t know that,” Elínborg said.
“Do you want to see the stuff I cleared out of Grétar’s flat?”
“If you don’t mind,” Elínborg said.
“A filthy hole he lived in. Have you found him?”
Klara looked at Elínborg and hungrily sucked the smoke down into her lungs.
“We haven’t found him,” Elínborg said, “and I don’t think we’re looking for him especially.” She gave another polite cough. “It’s more than a quarter of a century since he disappeared, so…”
“I have no idea what happened,” Klara interrupted, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke. “We weren’t often in touch. He was quite a bit older than me, selfish, a real pain actually. You could never get a word out of him, he swore at Mum and stole from both of us if he got the chance. Then he left home.”
“So you didn’t know Holberg?” Elínborg asked.
“No.”
“Or Ellidi?” she added.
“Who’s Ellidi?”
“Never mind.”
“I didn’t know who Grétar went around with. When he went missing someone called Marion contacted me and took me to where he’d been living. It was a filthy hole. A disgusting smell in the room and the floor covered with rubbish, and the half-eaten sheep heads and mouldy mashed turnips that he used to live on.”
“Marion?” Elínborg asked. She hadn’t been working for the CID long enough to recognise the name.
“Yes, that was the name.”
“Do you remember a camera among your brother’s belongings?”
“That was the only thing in the room in one piece. I took it but I’ve never used it. The police thought it was stolen and I don’t approve of that sort of thing. I keep it down in the storeroom in the basement. Do you want to see it? Did you come about the camera?”
“Could I have a look at it?” Elínborg asked.
Klara stood up. She asked Elínborg to wait a moment and went into the kitchen to fetch a key ring. They walked out into the corridor and down to the basement. Klara opened the door that led to the storerooms, switched on the light, went up to one of the doors and opened it. Inside, old rubbish was piled everywhere, deckchairs and sleeping bags, skiing equipment and camping gear. Elínborg noticed a blue foot-massage device and a Sodastream drinks maker.
“I had it in a box here,” Klara said after squeezing her way, past the rubbish, halfway into the storeroom. She bent down and picked up a little brown cardboard box. “I put all Grétar’s stuff in this. He didn’t own anything except that camera.” She opened the box and was about to empty it when Elínborg stopped her.
“Don’t take anything out of the box,” she said and put out her hands to take it. “You never know what significance the contents might have for us,” she added by way of explanation.
Klara handed her the box with a half-insulted expression and Elínborg opened it. It contained three tattered paperback thrillers, a penknife, a few coins and a camera – a pocket-size Kodak Instamatic that Elínborg recalled had been a popular Christmas and confirmation present years before. Not a remarkable possession for someone with a burning interest in photography, but it undoubtedly served its purpose. She couldn’t see any films in the box. Erlendur had asked her to check specifically whether Grétar had left behind any films. She took out a handkerchief and turned the camera round and saw there was no film in it. There were no photos in the box either.
“Then there are all kinds of trays and liquids here,” Klara said and pointed inside the storeroom. “I think he developed the photos himself. There’s some photographic paper too. It must be useless by now, mustn’t it?”
“I should take that too,” Elínborg said and Klara dived back into the rubbish.
“Do you know if he kept his rolls of film, or did you see any at his place?” Elínborg asked.
“No, none,” Klara said as she bent over for the trays.
“Do you know where he might have kept them?”
“No.”
“So do you know what this photography was all about?”
“Well, he enjoyed it, I expect,” Klara said.
“I mean the subjects: did you see any of his photos?”
“No, he never showed me anything. As I said, we didn’t have much contact. I don’t know where his photos are. Grétar was a damn layabout,” she said, uncertain whether she was repeating herself, then shrugged as if deciding you can’t say a good thing too often.
“I’d like to take this box away with me,” Elínborg said. “I hope that’s okay. It’ll be returned shortly.”
“What’s going on?” Klara asked, for the first time showing an interest in the police inquiry and the questions about her brother. “Do you know where Grétar is?”
“No,” Elínborg stressed, trying to dispel all doubt. “Nothing new has emerged. Nothing.”
The two women who were with Kolbrún the night Holberg attacked her were named in the police investigation documents. Erlendur had launched a search for them and it turned out that both were from Keflavík, but neither lived there any more.
One of them had married an American from the NATO base shortly after the incident and now lived in the USA, while the other had moved from Keflavík to Stykkishólmur five years later. She was still registered as living there. Erlendur wondered whether he should spend the whole day on a trip out west to Stykkishólmur or phone her and hope that would be enough.
Erlendur’s English was poor so he asked Sigurdur Óli to locate the woman in America. He spoke to her husband. She had died 15 years earlier. From cancer. The woman was buried in America.
Erlendur p
honed Stykkishólmur and had no difficulty making contact with the second woman. First he phoned her home and was told that she was at work. She was a nurse at the hospital there.
The woman listened to Erlendur’s questions but said unfortunately she couldn’t help him. She hadn’t been able to help the police at the time and nothing had changed.
“Holberg has been murdered”, Erlendur said, “and we think it might even be connected with this incident.”
“I saw that on the news,” the voice on the phone said. The woman’s name was Agnes and Erlendur tried to visualise her from the sound of her voice. At first he imagined an efficient, firm woman in her sixties, overweight because she was short of breath. Then he noticed her smoker’s cough and Agnes assumed a different image in his mind, turned thin as a rake, her skin yellow and wrinkled. She coughed with a nasty, gravelly sound at regular intervals.
“Do you remember that night in Keflavík?” Erlendur asked.
“I went home before them,” Agnes said.
“There were three men with you.”
“I went home with a man called Grétar. I told the police at the time. I find it rather uncomfortable to talk about.”
“It’s news to me that you went home with Grétar,” Erlendur said, riffling through the reports in front of him.
“I told them when they asked me the same question all those years ago.” She coughed again but tried to spare Erlendur the throaty noises. “Sorry. I’ve never been able to give up those damn cigarettes. He was a bit of a loser. That Grétar. I never saw him after that.”
“How did you and Kolbrún know each other?”
“We used to work together. That was before I studied nursing. We were working in a shop in Keflavík which closed down long ago. That was the first and only time we went out anywhere together. Understandably.”
“Did you believe Kolbrún when she talked about a rape?”
“I didn’t hear about it until the police suddenly turned up at my house and started asking me about that night. I can’t imagine she’d have lied about something like that. Kolbrún was very respectable. Thoroughly honest about everything she did, although a bit feeble perhaps. Delicate and sickly. Not a strong character. Maybe it’s an awful thing to say, but she wasn’t the fun type, if you know what I mean. Not a lot of action going on around her.”
Agnes stopped talking and Erlendur waited for her to start again.
“She wasn’t fond of going out and I really had to cajole her to come out with me and my friend Helga that evening. She moved to America but passed away many years ago, maybe you know that. Kolbrún was so reserved and sort of lonely and I wanted to do something for her. She agreed to go to the dance, then came back with us to Helga’s afterwards, but she wanted to go home soon after that. I left before her so I don’t really know what happened there. She didn’t turn up for work on the Monday and I remember phoning her, but she didn’t answer. A few days later the police came to ask about Kolbrún. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t notice anything about Holberg that was abnormal in any way. He was quite a charmer if I remember right. I was very surprised when the police started talking about rape.”
“He apparently made a good impression,” Erlendur said. “A ladies’ man, I think he was described as.”
“I remember him coming into the shop.”
“Him? Holberg?”
“Yes, Holberg. I think that was why they sat down with us that night. He said he was an accountant from Reykjavík, but that was just a lie, wasn’t it?”
“They all worked at the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority. What kind of a shop was it?”
“A boutique. We sold ladieswear. Lingerie too.”
“And he came to the shop?”
“Yes. The day before. On the Friday. I had to go back through all this at the time and I still remember it well. He said he was looking for something for his wife. I served him and when we met at the dance he behaved as though we knew each other.”
“Did you have any contact with Kolbrún after the incident? Did you talk to her about what happened?”
“She never came back to the shop and, as I say, I didn’t know what happened until the police started questioning me. I didn’t know her that well. I tried to phone her a few times when she didn’t turn up for work and I went to where she lived once, but didn’t catch her in. I didn’t want to interfere too much. She was like that. Mysterious. Then her sister came in and said Kolbrún had quit her job. I heard she died a few years afterwards. By then I’d moved up here to Stykkishólmur. Was it suicide? That’s what I heard.”
“She died,” Erlendur said, and thanked Agnes politely for talking to him.
His thoughts turned to a man called Sveinn he’d been reading about. He survived a storm on Mosfellsheidi. His companions’ suffering and deaths seemed to have little effect on Sveinn. He was the best equipped of the travellers and the only one who reached civilisation safe and sound, and the first thing he did after they’d tended to him on the closest farm to the heath was to put on ice skates and amuse himself by skating on a nearby lake.
At the same time his companions were still freezing to death on the heath.
After that he was never called anything but Sveinn the Soulless.
24
The search for the woman from Húsavík had still not led anywhere when towards evening Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg sat down at Erlendur’s office to talk things over before going home. Sigurdur Óli said he wasn’t surprised, they’d never find the woman this way. When Erlendur asked peevishly if he knew a better method, he shook his head.
“I don’t feel as if we’re looking for Holberg’s murderer,” Elínborg said, staring at Erlendur. “It’s as if we’re looking for something completely different and I’m unclear what it is. You’ve exhumed a little girl’s body and I, for one, have no idea why. You’ve started looking for a man who went missing a generation ago and who I can’t see has anything to do with the case. I don’t think we’re asking ourselves the obvious question: either the murderer was someone close to Holberg or a total stranger, someone who broke in intending to burgle him. Personally I think that’s the most likely explanation. I think we ought to step up the search for that person. Some dopehead. The green army jacket. We haven’t really done anything about that.”
“Maybe it’s someone Holberg paid for his services,” Sigurdur Óli said. “With all that porn on his computer there’s a good chance he paid for sex.”
Erlendur sat through the criticism in silence and stared into his lap. He knew that most of what Elínborg had said was true. Maybe his judgment had been distorted by worrying about Eva Lind. He didn’t know where she was, he didn’t know what state she was in, she was being chased by people who wanted to harm her and he was helpless to protect her. He told neither Sigurdur Óli nor Elínborg of what he had discovered from the pathologist.
“We have the note,” he said. “It’s no coincidence we found it with the body.”
The door suddenly opened and the head of forensics peeped inside.
“I’m leaving,” he said. “I just wanted to let you know they’re still examining the camera and they’ll call you as soon as they find anything worth reporting.”
He closed the door behind him without saying goodbye.
“Maybe we can’t see the wood for the trees,” Erlendur said. “Maybe there’s a terribly simple solution to the whole thing. Maybe it was some nutcase. But maybe, and this is what I think to be the case, the murder has much deeper roots than we realise. Maybe there’s nothing simple about it. Maybe the explanation lies in Holberg’s character and what he did in his past.”
Erlendur paused.
“And the note,” he said. “ ‘I am him.’ What do you want to do with that?”
“It could be from some ‘friend’,” Sigurdur Óli said, making quotation marks with his fingers. “Or a workmate. We haven’t applied ourselves much in those areas. To tell the truth I don’t know where all this searching for an old woman i
s supposed to lead us. I don’t have a clue how to ask them if they’ve been raped without getting hit over the head with a rolling pin.”
“And hasn’t Ellidi told that sort of lie before in his life?” Elínborg said. “Isn’t that precisely what he wants, to make fools of us? Have you considered that?”
“Oh, come on,” Erlendur said as if he couldn’t be bothered to listen to this nagging any more. “The inquiry has led us onto this path. It would be wrong for us not to investigate the clues we get, wherever they come from. I know Icelandic murders aren’t complicated, but there’s something about this one that doesn’t fit if you just want to put it down to coincidence. I don’t think it’s a mindless act of brutality.”
The telephone on Erlendur’s desk rang. He answered, listened for a short while and then nodded and said thank you before putting the phone down. His suspicion had been confirmed.
“Forensics,” he said, looking at Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli. “Grétar’s camera was used to take the photo of Audur’s grave in the cemetery. We took a photograph using his camera and the same kind of scratches came out. So now we know there’s at least a strong probability that Grétar took the picture. Possibly someone else used his camera, but the alternative is much more likely.”
“And what does that tell us?” Sigurdur Óli asked, looking at the clock. He had invited Bergthóra out for a meal that evening and intended to make up for his clumsiness on his birthday.
“For example, it tells us that Grétar knew Audur was Holberg’s daughter. Not many people were aware of that. And it also tells us that Grétar saw particular reason, a) to locate the grave, and b) to take a photo of it. Did he do it because Holberg asked him to? Did he do it to spite him? Is Grétar’s disappearance connected with the photograph? If so, how? What did Grétar want with the photo? Why did we find it hidden in Holberg’s desk? What sort of person takes pictures of children’s graves?”
Jar City Page 13