Jar City

by Arnaldur Indridason

  “Is this how they open the Pharaohs’ tombs in Egypt?” he asked and the tension eased a little.

  “Except I’m afraid there’s no Pharaoh under here,” Erlendur said.

  “Could it actually be that we’ve found Grétar under Holberg’s floor?” Sigurdur Óli said in eager anticipation. “After twenty-fucking-five years! Bloody brilliant!”

  “His mother was right,” Erlendur said.

  “Grétar’s mother?”

  “‘It was like he’d been stolen,’ she said.”

  “Wrapped up in plastic and stashed away under the floor.”

  “Marion Briem,” Erlendur muttered to himself and shook his head.

  The forensic team bored away with their electric drills, the floor split open under the pressure and the hole widened until the entire plastic package could be seen. It was the length of an average man. The forensic team discussed how they ought to go about opening it. They decided to remove it from the floor cavity in one piece and not touch it until they’d taken it to the morgue on BarÓnsstígur where it could be handled without the loss of any potential evidence.

  They fetched a stretcher they had taken into the basement the night before and put it next to the hole in the floor. Two of them tried to lift the plastic package, but it turned out to be too heavy, so another two went down to help them. Soon it began to budge and they worked it free from its surroundings, lifted it out and placed it on the stretcher.

  Erlendur went up to the package, bent over it and tried to see through the plastic. He thought he could make out a face, shrivelled and rotten, teeth and part of a nose. He straightened up again.

  “He doesn’t look so bad, considering,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Sigurdur Óli asked, leaning down into the hole.

  “What?” Erlendur said.

  “Are those rolls of film?” Sigurdur Óli said.

  Erlendur went up closer, knelt down and saw rolls of photographic film half buried in the gravel. Yards of film spread all around. He was hoping that some of it had been used.

  34

  Katrín didn’t leave the house for the rest of the day. No-one visited her and she didn’t use the telephone. In the evening a man driving an estate car pulled up outside the house and went in carrying a medium-sized suitcase. This was presumably Albert, her husband. He was due back from a business trip to Germany that afternoon.

  Two policemen in an unmarked car were watching the house. The phone was tapped. The whereabouts of the two older sons had been ascertained, but nothing was known about where the youngest one was. He was divorced and lived in a flat in the Gerdi district but there was nobody home. A watch was mounted outside it. The police were gathering information about the son and his description was sent to police stations all over the country. As yet there were not considered to be grounds for releasing an announcement about him to the media.

  Erlendur pulled up in front of the morgue on BarÓnsstígur. The body of the man who was thought to be Grétar had been taken there. The pathologist, the same one who had examined Holberg and Audur, had removed the plastic from the body. It turned out to be the body of a male with his head snapped back, his mouth open as if screaming in anguish and his arms by his sides. The skin was parched and shrivelled and pallid, with large patches of rot here and there on the naked body. The head appeared to have been badly damaged, and the hair was long and colourless, hanging down the sides of the face.

  “He removed his innards,” the pathologist said.

  “What?”

  “The person who buried him. A sensible move if you want to keep a body. Because of the smell. He gradually dried up inside the plastic. Well preserved in that sense.”

  “Can you establish the cause of death?”

  “There was a plastic bag over his head which suggests he may have been suffocated, but I’ll have to take a better look at him. You’ll find out more later. It all takes time. Do you know who he is? He’s a bit of a runt, the poor bugger.”

  “I have my suspicions,” Erlendur said.

  “Did you talk to the professor?”

  “A lovely woman.”

  “Isn’t she just?”

  Sigurdur Óli was waiting for Erlendur at the office but when he arrived he said he was going straight to forensics. They had managed to develop and enlarge several exposures from the film that had been found in Holberg’s flat. Erlendur told him about the conversation he and Elínborg had had with Katrín.

  Ragnar, the head of forensics, was waiting for them in his office with several rolls of film on his desk and some enlarged photographs. He handed them the photographs and they huddled over them.

  “We could only manage these three,” Ragnar said, “and I can’t actually tell what they show. There were seven rolls of Kodak with 24 exposures each. Three were completely black and we can’t tell whether they’d been used, but from one of them we managed to enlarge the little we can see here. Is this anything you recognise?”

  Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli squinted at the photographs. They were all black-and-white. Two of them were half black as if the aperture hadn’t opened properly; the pictures were out of focus and so unclear that they couldn’t make them out. The third and final print was intact and reasonably sharp and showed a man taking his own photograph in front of a mirror. The camera was small and flat, with a flash cube on the top with four bulbs, and the flash lit up the man in the mirror. He was wearing jeans and a shirt and a waist-length summer jacket.

  “Do you remember flash cubes?” Erlendur said with a hint of nostalgia in his voice. “What a revolution.”

  “I remember them well,” said Ragnar, who was the same age as Erlendur. Sigurdur Óli looked at them in turn and shook his head.

  “Is that what you’d call a self-portrait?” Erlendur said.

  “It’s difficult to see his face with the camera in the way,” Sigurdur Óli said, “but isn’t it probable it’s Grétar himself?”

  “Do you recognise the surroundings, what little of them is visible?” Ragnar asked.

  In the reflection they could make out part of the room behind the photographer. Erlendur could see the back of a chair and even a coffee table, the carpet on the floor and part of something that could have been a floor-length curtain, but everything else was difficult to discern. The face of the man in the mirror was brightly lit but to the sides the light faded to total darkness.

  They pored over the photograph for a long time. After much effort Erlendur began to distinguish something in the darkness to the left of the photographer, which he thought might be a human form, even a profile, eyebrows and a nose. This was only a hunch, but there was something uneven in the light, tiny shadows, that kindled his imagination.

  “Could we enlarge this area?” he asked Ragnar, who stared hard at the same part but couldn’t see a thing. Sigurdur Óli took the photograph and held it up in front of his face, but he couldn’t make out what Erlendur thought he could see either

  “It will only take a second,” Ragnar said. They followed him from the office and over to the forensic team.

  “Are there any fingerprints on the film?” Sigurdur Óli asked.

  “Yes,” Ragnar said, “two sets, the same ones as on the photo from the cemetery. Grétar’s and Holberg’s.”

  The photograph was scanned and came up on a big computer screen. The area was enlarged. What had been only an unevenness in the light became countless dots that filled the screen. They couldn’t discern anything from the photo and even Erlendur lost sight of what he thought he’d seen. The technician worked on the keyboard for a while, entered some commands and the image was reduced and compressed. He continued, the dots arranged themselves together until gradually the outline of a face began to emerge. It was still unclear, but Erlendur thought he recognised Holberg there.

  “Isn’t that the bastard?” Sigurdur Óli said.

  “There’s more here,” the technician said and went on sharpening up the photograph. Waves soon appeared which reminded
Erlendur of a woman’s hair, and another more blurred profile. Erlendur stared at the image until he thought he could make out Holberg sitting talking to a woman. A strange hallucination seized him at the moment he saw this. He wanted to shout out to the woman to get out of the flat, but it was too late. Decades too late.

  A phone rang in the room, but no-one made a move. Erlendur thought the one on the desk was ringing.

  “It’s yours,” Sigurdur Óli said to Erlendur.

  It took Erlendur a while, but eventually he managed to find his mobile phone and fished it out of his coat pocket.

  It was Elínborg.

  “What are you playing around at?” she said when finally he answered.

  “Get to the point, will you,” Erlendur said.

  “The point? What are you so stressed about?”

  “I knew you couldn’t just say what you’re going to say.”

  “It’s about Katrín’s boys,” Elínborg said. “Or men, actually, they’re all grown men now.”

  “What about them?”

  “All of them nice guys, probably, except one of them works at a rather interesting place. I thought you ought to hear about it straightaway but if you’re so tense and busy and can’t bear the thought of a little chat, I’ll just phone Sigurdur Óli instead.”

  “Elínborg.”

  “Yes?”

  “Good Lord, woman,” Erlendur shouted and looked at Sigurdur Óli, “are you going to tell me what you’re going to tell me?”

  “The son works at the Genetic Research Centre.”

  “What?”

  “He works at the Genetic Research Centre.”

  “Which son?”

  “The youngest one. He’s working on their new database. Works with family trees and illnesses, Icelandic families and hereditary diseases, genetic diseases. The man’s an expert on genetic diseases.”

  35

  Erlendur got home late in the evening. He planned to visit Katrín early the next morning and talk to her about his theory. He hoped that her son would soon be found. A prolonged search posed the risk of the story being sensationalised by the media, and he wanted to avoid that.

  Eva Lind wasn’t at home. She had tidied up in the kitchen after Erlendur’s tantrum. He put one of the two meals he’d bought at the late-night shop in the microwave, then pressed Start. Erlendur recalled when Eva Lind had come to him a few nights before, when he’d been standing by the microwave, and she told him she was pregnant. He felt as though a whole year had gone by since she had sat there facing him, scrounging money and dodging his questions, but it was only a few nights. He was still having bad dreams. He had never had many dreams and only ever remembered snatches of them when he woke up, but a feeling of discomfort lingered in him when he was awake and he couldn’t shake it off. It didn’t help that the pain in his chest was constantly making itself felt, a burning pain that he couldn’t rub away.

  He thought about Eva Lind and the baby and about Kolbrún and Audur and about Elín and Katrín and her sons, about Holberg and Grétar and Ellidi in the prison and about the girl from Gardabaer and her father, and about himself and his own children, his son Sindri Snaer, whom he seldom saw, and Eva, who had made the effort to find him and with whom he argued bitterly when he disliked what she did. She was right. Who was he to go around handing out scoldings?

  He thought about mothers and daughters and fathers and sons and mothers and sons and fathers and daughters and children that were born and no-one wanted and children who died in that little community, Iceland, where everyone seemed related or connected in some way.

  If Holberg was the father of Katrín’s youngest son, had he in fact been killed by his own son? Did the young man know Holberg was his father? How had he found out? Had Katrín told him? When? Why? Had he known all the time? Did he know about the rape? Had Katrín told him Holberg had raped her and she had fallen pregnant by him? What kind of a feeling is that? What kind of a feeling is it to discover you’re not the person you thought you were? Not who you are? That your father isn’t your father, you’re not his son, you’re the son of someone else you didn’t know existed. Someone violent: a rapist.

  What’s that like? Erlendur thought. How can you come to terms with that? Do you go and find your father and murder him? And then write: “I am him”?

  And if Katrín didn’t tell her son about Holberg, how did he find out the truth? Erlendur turned the question over in his mind. The more he thought about the matter and considered the options, the more his thoughts turned to the message tree in Gardabaer. There was only one other way the son could have found out the truth and Erlendur intended to check that the following day.

  And what was it that Grétar saw? Why did he have to die? Was he blackmailing Holberg? Did he know about Holberg’s rapes and plan to turn him in? Did he take photographs of Holberg? Who was the woman sitting with Holberg in the photograph? When was it taken? Grétar went missing in the summer of the national festival, so it had to have been taken before then. Erlendur wondered whether there weren’t more victims of Holberg who had never said a thing.

  He heard a key turn in the lock and he stood up. Eva Lind was back.

  “I went to Gardabaer with the girl,” she said when she saw Erlendur coming out of the kitchen, and closed the door behind her. “She said she was going to charge that sod for all the years he abused her. Her mother had a nervous breakdown. Then we left.”

  “To see the husband?”

  “Yeah, back to their cosy little pad,” Eva Lind said, kicking off her shoes by the door. “He went mad, but calmed down when he heard the explanation.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “He’s a great guy. When I left he was on his way to Gardabaer to talk to the old sod.”

  “Really.”

  “Do you think there’s any point in charging that bastard?” Eva Lind asked.

  “They’re difficult cases. The men deny everything and somehow they get away with it. Maybe it depends on the mother, what she says. Maybe she ought to go to the rape crisis centre. How are you doing, anyway?”

  “Just great,” Eva Lind said.

  “Have you thought about a sonar or whatever they call it?” Erlendur asked. “I could go with you.”

  “The time will come for that,” Eva Lind said.

  “Will it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” Erlendur said.

  “What have you been up to anyway?” Eva Lind asked, putting the other meal into the microwave.

  “I don’t think about anything except children these days,” Erlendur said. “And a message tree, which is a kind of family tree: it can contain all kinds of messages to us if we only know what we’re supposed to be looking for. And I’m thinking about obsessions with collecting things. How does that song about the carthorse go?”

  Eva Lind looked at her father. He knew she knew a lot about music.

  “Do you mean ‘Life is Like a Carthorse’?” she said.

  “‘Its head is stuffed with hay’,” Erlendur said.

  “‘Its heart is frozen solid’.”

  “‘And its brain has gone astray’,” Erlendur finished the verse. He put on his hat and said he wouldn’t be gone for long.

  36

  Hanna had warned the doctor so he wasn’t surprised to see Erlendur that evening. He lived in an elegant house in the old part of Hafnarfjördur and welcomed Erlendur at the door, the very picture of gentility and courteousness, a short man, bald as a billiard ball and portly beneath his thick dressing gown. A bon viveur, Erlendur thought, with a perpetual and slightly feminine redness in his cheeks. He was of an indeterminate age, could be around 60. Greeted Erlendur with a hand as dry as paper and invited him into the lounge.

  Erlendur sat on a large wine-red leather sofa and declined the offer of a drink. The doctor sat facing him and waited for him to begin. Erlendur looked around the lounge, which was spacious and lavishly adorned with paintings and objets d’art, and wondered whether the doctor lived alo
ne. He asked him.

  “Always lived alone,” the doctor said. “I’m extremely happy with that and always have been. It’s said that men who reach my age regret not having had a family and children. My colleagues go around waving pictures of their grandchildren at conferences all around the world, but I’ve never had any interest in starting a family. Never had any interest in children.”

  He was convivial, talkative and chummy as if Erlendur was a bosom pal, as if implicitly recognising him on equal terms. Erlendur was not impressed.

  “But you’re interested in organs in jars,” he said.

  The doctor refused to let Erlendur throw him off balance.

  “Hanna told me you were angry,” he said. “I don’t know why you should be angry. I’m not doing anything illegal. Yes, I do have a little collection of organs. Most of them are preserved in formalin in glass jars. I keep them in the house here. They were due to be destroyed, but I took them and kept them a little longer. I also keep another type of bio-sample, tissue samples.

  “Why, you’re probably wondering,” he continued, but Erlendur shook his head.

  “How many organs have you stolen? was actually the question I was going to ask,” he said, “but we can get to that later.”

  “I haven’t stolen any organs,” the doctor said, slowly stroking his bald head. “I can’t understand this antagonism. Do you mind if I have a drop of sherry?” he asked and stood up. Erlendur waited while he went over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a glass. He offered one to Erlendur, who declined, and sipped at the sherry with his thick lips. It was clear from his round face how he relished the taste.

  “People don’t normally wonder about this,” he said then, “and there’s no reason to either. Everything dead is useless in our world, and so is a dead human body. No need to get sentimental about it. The soul’s gone. Only the dross left and dross is nothing. You have to look at it from a medical perspective. The body’s nothing, you understand?”