Jar City

by Arnaldur Indridason

  “When I first came in here,” Elínborg said, “I thought that horsey people must live in the building or in this flat. The smell reminded me of horses, riding boots, saddles, or that sort of thing. Horse dung. Stables, really. It was the same smell that was in the first flat my husband and I bought. But there weren’t any horse-lovers living there either. It was a combination of filth and rising damp. The radiators had been leaking onto the carpet and parquet for years and no-one had done anything about it. We also had the spare bathroom converted but the plumbers did it so badly, just stuffed straw into the hole and put a thin layer of concrete over it. So there was always a smell of sewers that came up through the repair.”

  “Which means?” Erlendur said.

  “I think it’s the same smell, except it’s worse here. Rising damp and filth and sewer rats.”

  “I had a meeting with Marion Briem,” Erlendur said, uncertain whether they knew the name. “Naturally Marion read up on Nordurmýri and reached the conclusion that the fact it’s a marsh is important.”

  Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli exchanged glances.

  “Nordurmýri used to be like a distinct village in the middle of Reykjavík,” Erlendur went on. “The houses were built during or just after the war. Iceland had become a republic and they named the streets after the saga heroes, Gunnarsbraut, Skeggjagata and all that. It was a wide cross-section of society who gathered here, ranging from the reasonably well-off, even the rich, to those who barely had a penny to their name so they rented cheap basement flats like this one. A lot of old people like Holberg live in Nordurmýri, though most of them are more civilised than he was, and many of them live in precisely this type of basement flat. Marion told me all this.”

  Erlendur paused.

  “Another feature of Nordurmýri is this sort of basement flat. Originally there weren’t any basement flats, the owners had them converted, installed kitchens and walls, made rooms, made places to live. Previously these basements were where the work was done for, what did Marion call them? Self-contained homes. Do you know what that is?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “You’re too young, of course,” Erlendur said, well aware that they would hate him saying that. “In basements like this were the girls’ rooms. They were maids in the homes of the more wealthy people. They had rooms in holes like this. There was a laundry room too, a room for making haggis, for example, and other food, storerooms, a bathroom and all that.”

  “Not forgetting that it’s a marsh.” Sigurdur Óli said sarcastically.

  “Are you trying to tell us something important?” Elínborg said.

  “Under these basements are foundations…” Erlendur said.

  “That’s quite unusual,” Sigurdur Óli said to Elínborg.

  “…just like under all other houses,” Erlendur continued, not letting Sigurdur Óli’s quips disturb him. “If you talk to a plumber, as Marion Briem did…”

  “What’s all this Marion Briem bullshit anyway?” Sigurdur Óli said.

  “…you’ll find out they’ve often been called out to Nordurmýri to deal with a problem that can arise years, decades after houses have been built on marsh land. It happens in some places but not others. You can see it happening on the outside of some houses. A lot of them are coated with pebbledash and you can see where the pebbledash ends and the bare wall of the house starts at ground level. A strip of maybe one or two feet. The point is that the ground subsides indoors too.”

  Erlendur noticed they’d stopped grinning.

  “In the estate-agency business it’s called a concealed fault and it’s difficult to know how to deal with this sort of thing. When the houses subside it puts pressure on the sewage pipes and they burst under the floor. Before you know it, you’re flushing your toilet straight into the foundations. It can go on for ages because the smell can’t get through the concrete. But damp patches form because the hot-water outflow in many old houses is connected into the sewage pipe and leaks into the basement when the pipe breaks, it gets hot and the steam reaches the surface. The parquet warps.”

  Erlendur had their complete attention by now.

  “And Marion told you all that?” Sigurdur Óli said.

  “To fix it you have to break up the floor,” Erlendur continued, “and go down into the foundations to mend the pipe. The plumbers told Marion that sometimes when they drilled through the floor they’d hit a hollow. The base plate is fairly thin in some places and underneath there’s an air pocket. The ground has subsided by half a yard, maybe even a whole yard. All because of the marsh.”

  Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg looked at each other.

  “So is it hollow under the floor here?” Elínborg asked, stamping with one foot.

  Erlendur smiled.

  “Marion even managed to locate a plumber who came to this house the same year as the national festival. Everyone remembers that year and this plumber clearly recalled coming here because of the damp in the floor.”

  “What are you trying to tell us?” Sigurdur Óli asked.

  “The plumber broke up the floor in here. The base plate isn’t very thick. It’s hollow underneath in a lot of places. The plumber remembers the job so clearly because he was shocked that Holberg wouldn’t let him finish.”

  “How come?”

  “He opened up the floor and mended the pipe, then Holberg threw him out and said he’d finish it himself. And he did.”

  They stood in silence until Sigurdur Óli couldn’t resist the temptation any longer.

  “Marion Briem?” he said. “Marion Briem!” He said the name over and again as if struggling to understand it. Erlendur was right. He was too young to remember Marion from the force. He repeated the name like it was some kind of conundrum, then suddenly stopped and looked thoughtful and finally asked:

  “Wait a minute. Who is this Marion? What kind of name is that anyway? Is it a man or a woman?”

  Sigurdur Óli gave Erlendur a questioning look.

  “I sometimes wonder myself,” Erlendur replied and took out his mobile phone.

  27

  Forensics began by tearing away the flooring in each room of the flat, the kitchen and bathroom and the den. It had taken all day to get the necessary permission for the operation. Erlendur had argued his case at a meeting with the police commissioner who agreed, though reluctantly, that there were sufficient suspicions to justify breaking up the floor in Holberg’s flat. The matter was rushed through because of the murder that had been committed in the building.

  Erlendur presented the excavation as a link to the search for Holberg’s murderer; he implied that Grétar could well be alive and might conceivably have been the killer. The police would doubly benefit from the excavation. If Marion Briem’s hunch was correct, it would rule out Grétar as a suspect and solve the riddle of a person missing for more than a quarter of a century.

  They ordered the largest available size of transit van into which to load the whole of Holberg’s household effects, apart from the fixtures and their contents. It was starting to get dark when the van backed up to the house and shortly afterwards a tractor pulled up with a pneumatic drill. A team of forensics experts gathered there and more detectives joined them. The residents were nowhere to be seen.

  It had been raining all day, as on the previous days. But now it was only a fine drizzle that rippled in the cold autumn breeze and settled on Erlendur’s face where he stood to one side, a cigarette between his fingers. Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg stood with him. A crowd had gathered in front of the house but seemed reluctant to get too close. It included reporters, television cameramen and newspaper photographers. Cars of all sizes marked with newspaper and television company logos were spread all around the neighbourhood and Erlendur, who had prohibited all contact with the media, wondered whether to have them removed.

  Holberg’s flat was soon empty. The big van remained in the forecourt while it was being decided what to do with the effects. Eventually Erlendur ordered them to be sent to the
police storage depot. Erlendur saw the linoleum and carpets being carried out of the flat and loaded into the van, which then rumbled off, out of the street.

  The head of forensics greeted Erlendur with a handshake. He was about 50, named Ragnar, rather fat and with a black mop of hair standing out in all directions. He was educated in Britain, read only British thrillers and was a particular devotee of British detective series on television.

  “What bloody nonsense have you got us into now?” he asked, looking over towards the media crews. There was a hint of humour in his voice. He thought it was marvellous that they were tearing up the floor to look for a body.

  “How does it look?” Erlendur asked.

  “All the floors have a thick coat of some kind of ship’s paint,” Ragnar said. “It’s impossible to tell if they’ve been tampered with. We can’t see any concrete of a different age or anything that might be a repair to it. We’re banging on the floor with hammers, but it sounds hollow almost everywhere. Whether it’s subsidence or something else, I don’t know. The concrete in the building itself is thick, quality stuff. None of that alkaline bollocks. But there are a lot of damp patches on the floor. Couldn’t that plumber you were in touch with help us?”

  “He’s in a retirement home in Akureyri and says he’s not coming back south in this life. He gave us a fairly accurate description of where he opened the floor.”

  “We’re also inserting a camera down the sewage pipe. Looking at the plumbing, seeing if it’s all right, to find out if we can see the old repair.”

  “Do you really need a drill that big?” Erlendur asked, nodding towards the tractor.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. We’ve got smaller electric drills, but they couldn’t penetrate wet shit. We’ve got smaller pneumatics and if we find a hollow we can drill through the base plate and slip a little camera through it like they use for inspecting damaged sewage pipes.”

  “Hopefully that will do. We don’t want to have to smash the whole house down.”

  “There’s a bloody stench in that dump anyway,” the head of forensics said, and they walked off towards the basement. Three forensic experts wearing white paper overalls, with plastic gloves and hammers, were walking around the flat, banging on the stone floor and marking with blue felt-tip pens where they thought it sounded hollow.

  “According to the buildings surveyors’ office the basement was converted into a flat in 1959,” Erlendur said. “Holberg bought it in 1962 and probably moved in straightaway. He’d lived here ever since.”

  One of the forensics people came up to them and greeted Erlendur. He had a set of drawings of the building, one for each floor.

  “The toilets are in the centre of each floor. The sewage pipes come down from the floors above and enter the foundations where the basement toilet is. It was already in the basement before the conversion, and you could imagine the flat being designed around it. The toilet’s linked up to the sewage pipe in the bathroom, then the pipe continues due east through part of the sitting room, under the bedroom and out into the street.”

  “The search isn’t confined to the sewage pipe,” the head of forensics said.

  “No, but we’ve put a camera into the drain from the street. They were just telling me the pipe’s split where it enters the bedroom and we thought we’d take a look there first. It’s in a similar place to where I understand the floor was opened.”

  Ragnar nodded and looked at Erlendur, who shrugged as if what forensics did was none of his business.

  “It can’t be a very old split,” the head of forensics said. “The smell must be coming from there. Are you saying this man was buried in the foundations over 25 years ago?”

  “He disappeared then, at least,” Erlendur said.

  Their words merged into the hammering that became a continuous din echoing between the empty walls. The forensics expert took some ear defenders out of a black case the size of a small suitcase and put them on, then picked up one of the small electric drills and plugged it in. He pressed the trigger a few times to test it, then thrust it down on the floor and started breaking it up. The noise was awful and the rest of the forensic team put on ear defenders too. He made little headway. The solid concrete barely flaked. He gave up trying and shook his head.

  “We need to start up the tractor,” he said, fine dust covering his face. “And bring the pneumatic in. And we need masks. What bloody idiot had this brilliant idea anyway?” he said and spat on the floor.

  “Holberg would hardly have used a pneumatic drill under cover of darkness,” the head of forensics said.

  “He didn’t need to do anything under cover of darkness,” Erlendur said. “The plumber made the hole in the floor for him.”

  “Do you reckon he put him down the shithole?”

  “We’ll see. Maybe he needed to rearrange things in the foundations. Maybe it’s all a misunderstanding.”

  Erlendur went out into the night air. Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg were sitting in the car eating hotdogs that Sigurdur Óli had bought from the nearest kiosk. A hotdog was waiting for Erlendur on the dashboard. He wolfed it down.

  “If we find Grétar’s body here, what does that tell us?” Elínborg asked Erlendur and wiped her mouth.

  “I wish I knew,” Erlendur said thoughtfully. “I just wish I knew.”

  At that moment the chief superintendent came hurrying over, banged on the window, opened the door and told Erlendur to come with him for a moment. Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg got out of the car as well. The chief superintendent’s name was Hrólfur and he’d been off sick during the day but seemed fit as a fiddle now. He was very fat and the way he dressed hid it badly. He was the lethargic type and rarely contributed anything to the investigations. He was off sick for weeks every year.

  “Why wasn’t I contacted about these operations?” he asked, visibly angry.

  “You’re ill,” Erlendur said.

  “Bollocks,” Hrólfur said. “Don’t you think you can go running the department as you please. I’m your superior. You talk to me about this kind of operation before you go putting your bloody stupid brainwaves into practice!”

  “Wait a minute, I thought you were ill,” Erlendur repeated, feigning surprise.

  “And how did it ever occur to you to hoodwink the police commissioner like that?” Hrólfur hissed. “How did it occur to you that there’s a man under the floor here? You’ve got nothing to go on. Absolutely nothing except some crap about house foundations and a smell. Have you gone mad?”

  Sigurdur Óli walked hesitantly over to them.

  “There’s a woman here I think you ought to talk to, Erlendur,” he said, holding out the phone which Erlendur had left behind in the car. “It’s personal. She’s quite worked up.”

  Hrólfur turned to Sigurdur Óli and told him to piss off and leave them alone.

  Sigurdur Óli didn’t give way.

  “You ought to talk to her immediately, Erlendur,” he said.

  “What’s the meaning of this? You act as if I don’t exist!” Hrólfur shouted, stamping his foot. “Is this a bloody conspiracy? Erlendur, if we’re going to smash up the foundations of people’s houses because they smell, we’ll end up never doing anything else. It’s totally absurd! It’s ridiculous.”

  “Marion Briem had this interesting idea,” Erlendur said as calmly as before, “and I thought it was worth investigating. The police commissioner thought so too. Do excuse me for not contacting you, but I’m pleased to see you’re back on your feet. And I really must say, Hrólfur, that you’re looking exceptionally perky. Please excuse me.”

  Erlendur walked past Hrólfur, who stared at him and Sigurdur Óli, ready to say something, but not knowing what it ought to be.

  “One thing occurred to me,” Erlendur said. “I should have done it ages ago.”

  “What?” Sigurdur Óli said.

  “Contact the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority and find out if they can tell whether Holberg was in Húsavík or thereabouts in the early
‘60s.”

  “Okay. Here, talk to this woman.”

  “Which woman?” Erlendur said and took the phone. “I don’t know any woman.”

  “They put her through to your mobile. She’d been asking for you at the office. They told her you were busy, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  At that moment the pneumatic drill on the tractor started up. A deafening noise came from the basement and they saw a thick cloud of dust billowing out. The police had covered all the windows so no-one could see inside. Everyone apart from the drill operator had gone outside and they all stood at a distance, waiting. They looked at their watches and seemed to be discussing how late it was. They knew they couldn’t go on making that noise all evening in the middle of a residential area. They’d have to stop soon and continue the next morning or take other action.

  Erlendur hurried into the car with his phone and closed the door on the noise. He recognised the voice immediately.

  “He’s here,” Elín said, as soon as she heard Erlendur’s voice on the phone. She seemed very agitated.

  “Relax, Elín,” Erlendur said. “Who are you talking about?”

  “He’s standing in front of the house in the rain, staring in at me.” Her voice turned to a whisper.

  “Who, Elín? Are you at home? In Keflavík?”

  “I don’t know when he came, I don’t know how long he’s been standing there. I just noticed him. They wouldn’t put me through to you.”

  “I don’t quite follow. Who are you talking about, Elín?”

  “The man of course. It’s that beast. I’m sure of it.”

  “Who?”

  “That brute who attacked Kolbrún!”

  “Kolbrún? What are you talking about?”

  “I know. It can’t be, but he’s standing here all the same.”

  “Aren’t you getting things mixed up?”