I am HIM
There were newspapers and magazines spread all around, Icelandic and foreign ones, and scientific textbooks were stacked here and there on the floor of the sitting room and the bedroom. Large photo albums were included in the stacks. In the kitchen were wrappers from takeaway food.
“Paternity,” Sigurdur Óli said, putting on his rubber gloves. “Can we ever be sure about that in Iceland?”
Erlendur started thinking again about genetic research. The Genetic Research Centre had recently begun collecting medical data about all the Icelanders, past and present, to process into a database containing health information about the whole nation. It was linked up to a genealogy database in which the family of every single Icelander was traced back to the Middle Ages; they called it establishing the Icelandic genetic pool. The main aim was to discover how hereditary illnesses were transmitted, study them genetically and find ways to cure them, and other diseases if possible. It was said that the homogenous nation and lack of miscegenation made Iceland a living laboratory for genetic research.
The Genetic Research Centre and the Ministry of Health, which issued the licence for the database, guaranteed that no outsider could break into the database and announced a complex encryption system for the data which was impossible to crack.
“Are you worried about your paternity?” Erlendur asked. He’d also put on rubber gloves and stepped carefully further into the sitting room. He picked up one of the photo albums and leafed through it. It was old.
“Everyone always said I never resembled my father or mother or anyone else in my family.”
“I’ve always had that feeling too,” Erlendur said.
“What do you mean?”
“That you were a bastard.”
“Glad you’ve got your sense of humour back,” Sigurdur Óli said. “You’ve been a little distant recently.”
“What sense of humour?” Erlendur said.
He flicked through another of the albums. These were old black-and-white photographs. He thought he recognised Einar’s mother in some of them. So the man would be Albert and the boys, their three sons. Einar was the youngest. There were photographs taken at Christmas and on summer holidays, many of them ordinary snapshots taken of the boys in the street or at the kitchen table, wearing patterned, knitted sweaters, which Erlendur remembered from the late ’60s. The elder brothers had let their hair grow long.
Further on in the album the boys were older and with longer hair and they were wearing suits with wide lapels and black shoes with stacked heels. Katrín with her hair waved. The photos were in colour now. Albert beginning to turn grey. Erlendur looked for Einar and when he compared his features with those of his brothers and his parents he could see how different he looked. The other two boys had strong features from their parents, especially their father. Einar was the ugly duckling.
He put the old album down and picked a more recent one. The photographs seemed to have be taken by Einar himself, showing his own family. They didn’t tell such a long story. It was as if Erlendur had dipped into the course of Einar’s life when he was getting to know his wife. He wondered if they were honeymoon photos. They had travelled around Iceland, been to Hornstrandir, he thought. Thórsmörk. Herdubreidarlindir. Sometimes they were on bicycles. Sometimes driving a battered old car. Camping photos. Erlendur presumed they had been taken in the mid-’80s.
He flicked quickly through the album, put it down and picked up what looked to him like the most recent one. In it he saw a little girl in a hospital bed with tubes in her arms and an oxygen mask over her face. Her eyes were closed and she was surrounded by instruments. She seemed to be in intensive care. He hesitated for a moment before going on.
Erlendur was surprised by the sudden ringing of his mobile phone. He put the album down without closing it. It was Elín from Keflavík and she was very agitated.
“He was with me this morning,” she said at once.
“Who?”
“Audur’s brother. His name’s Einar. I tried to get hold of you. He was with me this morning and told me the whole story, the poor man. He lost his daughter, just like Kolbrún. He knew what Audur died of. It’s a disease in Holberg’s family.”
“Where is he now?” Erlendur asked.
“He was so terribly depressed,” Elín said. “He might do something stupid.”
“What do you mean, stupid?”
“He said it was over.”
“What was over?”
“He didn’t say, just said it was over.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“He said he was going back to Reykjavík.”
“To Reykjavík? Where?”
“He didn’t say,” Elín answered.
“Did he give any indication of what he was going to do?”
“No,” Elín said, “none at all. You must find him before he does something stupid. He feels so terrible, the poor man. It’s awful. Absolutely awful. My God, I’ve never known anything like it.”
“What?”
“He’s so like his father. He’s the spitting image of Holberg and he can’t live with that. He just can’t. After he heard what Holberg did to his mother. He says he’s a prisoner inside his own body. He says Holberg’s blood is running through his veins and he can’t stand it.”
“What’s he talking about?”
“It’s as if he hates himself,” Elín said. “He says he isn’t the person he used to be any more, but someone else, and he blames himself for what happened. No matter what I said, he wouldn’t listen to me.”
Erlendur looked down at the photo album, at the girl in the hospital bed.
“Why did he want to meet you?”
“He wanted to know about Audur. All about Audur. What kind of girl she was, how she died. He said I was his new family. Have you ever heard the like?”
“Where could he have gone?” Erlendur said, looking at his watch.
“For God’s sake try to find him before it’s too late.”
“We’ll do our best,” Erlendur said and was about to say goodbye but sensed that Elín had something else to say. “What? Was there anything else?” he asked.
“He saw when you exhumed Audur,” Elín said. “He found out where I was and followed us to the cemetery and saw you take the coffin out of the grave.”
41
Erlendur had the search for Einar stepped up. Photographs of him were sent to police stations in and around Reykjavík and the main regional towns; announcements were sent to the media. He ordered that the man was to be let alone; if anyone sighted him they were to contact Erlendur immediately and not do anything else. He had a short telephone conversation with Katrín who said she didn’t know where her son was. Her two elder sons were with her. She had told them the truth. They didn’t know anything about their brother’s whereabouts. Albert had stayed in his room at Hotel Esja all day. He made two phone calls, both to his office.
“What a bloody tragedy,” Erlendur mumbled on his way back to his office. They hadn’t found any clue in Einar’s flat as to where he might be staying.
The day passed and they shared out the duties. Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli talked to Einar’s ex-wife while Erlendur went to the Genetic Research Centre. The company’s large new premises were on the West Country Road outside Reykjavík. It was a five-storey building with strict security at the entrance. Two security guards met Erlendur in the impressive lobby. He’d announced that he was coming and the director of the company had felt compelled to talk to him for a few minutes. The director was one of the company owners, an Icelandic molecular geneticist, educated in Britain and America, who had championed the idea of Iceland as a base for genetic research targeted at pharmaceutical production. Using the database, all the medical records in the country could be centralised and health information processed which could help to identify genetic disorders.
The director was waiting for Erlendur in her office, a woman aged about 50 by the name of Karítas, slim and delicate with
short, jet-black hair and a friendly smile. She was smaller than Erlendur had imagined from seeing her on television, but cordial. She couldn’t understand what the CID wanted from the company. She offered Erlendur a seat. While he looked at the walls adorned with contemporary Icelandic art he told her bluntly there were grounds for suspecting that someone had broken into the database and retrieved potentially damaging information from it. He didn’t know exactly what he was talking about himself but she seemed to understand perfectly. And she didn’t beat about the bush, to Erlendur’s great relief. He had been expecting opposition. A conspiracy of silence.
“The matter’s so sensitive because of data privacy,” she said as soon as Erlendur finished speaking, “and that’s why I have to ask you to keep this completely between the two of us. We’ve known for some time about unauthorised accessing of the database. We’ve made an in-house inquiry into the matter. Our suspicions are directed at one particular biologist but we’ve been unable to speak to him because he seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet.”
“Einar?”
“Yes, that’s him. We’re still designing the database, so to speak, but naturally we don’t want word to get out that the encryption can be cracked and people can waltz through it as they please. You understand that. Although in fact it’s not a question of encryption.”
“Why didn’t you inform the police about the matter?”
“As I say, we wanted to sort it out ourselves. It’s embarrassing for us. People trust that the information in the database isn’t passed around or used for dubious purposes or simply stolen. The community is extremely sensitive about this as you perhaps know and we wanted to avoid mass hysteria.”
“Mass hysteria?”
“Sometimes it’s like the whole country is against us.”
“Did he crack the code? Why isn’t this a question of encryption?”
“You really do make it sound like a cloak-and-dagger affair. No, he didn’t crack any code. Not really. He went about it differently.”
“What did he do?”
“He set up a research project that no-one had authorised. He forged signatures, including mine. He pretended the company was researching the genetic transmission of an oncogenic disease found in several families in Iceland. He tricked the data privacy committee – a kind of monitoring agency for the database. He tricked the scientific ethics committee. He tricked us all here.”
She stopped talking for a moment and looked at her watch. She stood up and went over to her desk and called her secretary to postpone a meeting for ten minutes then sat back down with Erlendur.
“That’s been the dynamics up to now,” she said.
“Dynamics?” Erlendur said.
Karítas looked at him thoughtfully. The mobile phone in Erlendur’s pocket started ringing. He excused himself and answered. It was Sigurdur Óli.
“Forensics have been through Einar’s flat on StÓragerdi,” he said. “I called them and they haven’t really found anything except that Einar got himself a fire-arms licence two years ago or so.”
“A fire-arms licence?” Erlendur repeated.
“It’s on our register. But that’s not all. He owns a shotgun and we found the sawn-off barrel under his bed.”
“The barrel?”
“He’d sawn off the barrel. They do that sometimes. Makes it easier to shoot themselves.”
“Do you think he could be dangerous?”
“When we find him,” Sigurdur Óli said, “we need to approach him carefully. We can’t predict what he’ll do with a gun.”
“He can hardly intend to kill anyone with it,” said Erlendur, who had stood up and turned his back on Karítas for some kind of privacy.
“Why not?”
“He would have already used it,” Erlendur said in a low voice. “On Holberg. Don’t you think?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“See you,” Erlendur said, switched off the phone and repeated his apologies before he sat down again.
“That’s been the process up to now,” Karítas resumed where she’d left off. “We apply to these authorities for permission to conduct a research project, like in Einar’s case, the study of the genetic transmission of a specific disease. We’re given an encrypted list of names of people who suffer from the disease or are conceivable carriers and compare it to the encrypted genealogy database. Then we can produce a kind of encrypted family tree.”
“Like a message tree,” Erlendur said.
“What?”
“No, do go on.”
“The data privacy committee decodes the list with the names of the people we want to study, what we call a sample group, both patients and relatives, and it produces a list of participants with their ID numbers. Do you follow?”
“And that’s how Einar obtained the names and ID numbers of anyone who had the disease in their family.”
She nodded.
“Does this all go through the data privacy committee?”
“I don’t know how deeply you want to go into this. We’re working with doctors and various establishments. They submit the names of patients to the privacy committee, which encrypts the names and ID numbers and sends them here to the Genetic Research Centre. We have a dedicated genealogical tracer program which arranges patients into cluster groups on the basis of their relationship to one another. Using this program we can select the patients who provide the best statistical information for searching for specific genetic disorders. Then we ask individuals from this group to take part in the study. Genealogy is valuable for seeing whether a genetic disease is involved, selecting a good sample, and it’s a powerful tool in the search for genetic disorders.”
“All that Einar needed to do was to pretend to create a sample and have the names decoded, all with the help of the data privacy committee.”
“He lied and tricked everyone and he got away with it.”
“I can understand how this could be embarrassing for you.”
“Einar is among our top management here and one of our most capable scientists. A fine man. Why did he do it?” the director asked.
“He lost his daughter,” Erlendur said. “Didn’t you know about that?”
“No,” she said, staring at him.
“How long’s he been working here?”
“Two years.”
“It was some time before then.”
“How did he lose his daughter?”
“She had a genetically transmitted neural disease. He was the carrier but didn’t know about the disease in his family.”
“A question of paternity?”
Erlendur didn’t answer her. Felt he’d said enough.
“That’s one of the problems with this kind of genealogy database. Diseases tend to jump out of the family tree at random and then pop up again where you least expected them.”
Erlendur stood up. “And you keep all these secrets. Old family secrets. Tragedies, sorrows and death, all carefully classified in computers. Family stories and stories of individuals. Stories about me and you. You keep the whole secret and can call it up whenever you want. A Jar City for the whole nation.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Karítas said. “A Jar City?”
“No, of course not,” Erlendur said and took his leave.
42
When Erlendur got back to his flat that evening there was still no word about Einar. His family had gathered at his parents’ house. Albert had checked out of his hotel in the afternoon and returned home after an emotional telephone conversation with Katrín. Their elder sons were there with their wives and Einar’s ex-wife soon joined them. Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli had spoken to her earlier that day but she said she couldn’t imagine where Einar was staying. He hadn’t been in touch with her for about half a year.
Eva Lind arrived home soon after Erlendur and he told her all about the investigation. Fingerprints found at Holberg’s flat matched Einar’s own prints from his home on Stóragerdi.
/> He had finally gone to meet his father and had apparently murdered him. Erlendur also told Eva Lind about Grétar, how the only palpable theory about his disappearance and death was that Grétar had been blackmailing Holberg in some way, probably with photographs. Exactly what they showed was uncertain but based on the evidence they had Erlendur thought that it wasn’t unlikely that Grétar had photographed what Holberg got up to, even rapes no-one knew about and would probably never surface after all this time. The photograph of Audur’s gravestone suggested that Grétar knew what had happened and might even have testified, and that he’d been gathering information about Holberg, possibly to blackmail him.
The two of them talked together into the night while the rain beat down on the windows and the autumn winds howled. She asked him why he was rubbing his chest, almost instinctively. Erlendur told her about the pains he’d been feeling. He blamed his old mattress but Eva Lind ordered him to see a doctor. He wasn’t keen on the idea.
“What do you mean, you’re not going to the doctor?” she said and Erlendur immediately regretted having admitted to his pain.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“How many have you smoked today?”
“What is all this?”
“Hang on, you’ve got chest pains, you smoke like a chimney, never go anywhere except by car, you live on deep-fried junk food and refuse to get yourself looked at! And then you hurl abuse at me about my lifestyle until I end up crying like a little baby. Do you think that’s normal? Are you crazy?”
Eva Lind was standing up, glaring down, like the god of thunder, at her father who flinched from looking up at her and stared sheepishly at the floor.
“I’ll have it looked at,” he said at last.
“Have it looked at! You bet you’ll have it looked at!” Eva Lind shouted. “And you should have done long ago. Wimp.”
“First thing tomorrow morning,” he said, looking at his daughter.
“Just as well,” she said.
Erlendur was going to bed when the phone rang. It was Sigurdur Óli to tell him that the police had received a report of a break-in at the morgue on Barónsstígur.
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