Tainted Blood

by Arnaldur Indridason

  "Eh?" Erlendur said, unable to take his eyes off the white heap. There was a tone of gleeful anticipation in the pathologist's voice that he could not fathom.

  "The girl in the bikini, I mean," the pathologist said with a nod at the scent card. "I need to get a new card. You probably never get used to the smell. Do come in. Don't be afraid. It's just meat. He waved the knife over Holberg's body. No soul, no life, just a carcass of meat. Do you believe in ghosts?"

  "Eh?" Erlendur said again.

  "Do you think their souls are watching us? Do you think they're hovering around the room here or do you think they've taken up residence in another body? Been reincarnated. Do you believe in life after death?"

  "No, I don't," Erlendur replied.

  "This man died after a heavy blow to the head that punctured his scalp, smashed his skull and forced its way through to the brain. It looks to me as if the person who delivered the blow was standing facing him. It's not unlikely that they looked each other in the eye. The attacker is probably right-handed, the wound's on the left side. And he's in good physical shape, a young man or middle-aged at most, hardly a woman unless she's done manual labour. The blow would have killed him almost instantaneously. He would have seen the tunnel and the bright lights."

  "It's quite probable he took the other route," Erlendur said.

  "Well. The intestine is almost empty, remains of eggs and coffee, the rectum is full. He suffered, if that isn't too strong a word, from constipation. Not uncommon at that age. No-one has claimed the body, I understand, so we've applied for permission to use it for teaching purposes. How does that grab you?"

  "So he's more use dead than alive."

  The pathologist looked at Erlendur, walked up to a table, took a red slice of meat from a metal tray and held it up with one hand.

  "I can't tell whether people were good or bad," he said. "This could just as easily be the heart of a saint. What we need to find out, if I understand you correctly, is whether it pumped bad blood."

  Erlendur looked in astonishment at the pathologist holding Holberg's heart and examining it. Watched him handling the dead muscle as if nothing could be more natural in the world.

  "It's a strong heart," the pathologist went on. "It could have gone on pumping for a good few years, could have taken its owner past a hundred."

  The pathologist put the heart back on the metal tray.

  "There's something quite interesting about this Holberg, though I haven't examined him particularly in that respect. You probably want me to. He has various mild symptoms of a specific disease. I found a small tumour in his brain, a benign tumour which would have troubled him a little, and there's café au lait on his skin, especially here under his arms."

  "Café au lait?" Erlendur said.

  "Café au lait is what it's called in the textbooks. It looks like coffee stains. Do you know anything about it?"

  "Nothing at all."

  "I'll undoubtedly find more symptoms when I look at him more closely."

  "There was talk of café au lait on the girl. She developed a brain tumour. Malignant. Do you know what the disease is?"

  "I can't say anything about it yet."

  "Are we talking about a genetic disease?"

  "I don't know."

  The pathologist went over to the table where Audur lay.

  "Have you heard the story about Einstein?" he asked.

  "Einstein?" Erlendur said.

  "Albert Einstein."

  "What story?"

  "A weird story. True. Thomas Harvey? Never heard of him? A pathologist."

  "No."

  "He was on duty when Einstein died," the pathologist continued. "A curious chap. Performed the autopsy, but because it was Einstein he couldn't resist and opened up his head and looked at the brain. And he did more than that. He stole Einstein's brain."

  Erlendur said nothing. He couldn't make head or tail of what the pathologist was talking about.

  "He took it home. That strange urge to collect things that some people have, especially when famous people are involved. Harvey lost his job when the theft was discovered and over the years he became a mysterious figure, a legend really. All kinds of stories circulated about him. He always kept the brain in his house. I don't know how he got away with it. Einstein's relatives were always trying to recover the brain from him, but in vain. Eventually in his old age he made his peace with the relatives and decided to return the brain to them. Put it in the boot of his car and drove right across America to Einstein's grandchild in California."

  "Is this true?"

  "True as daylight."

  "Why are you telling me this?" Erlendur asked.

  The pathologist lifted up the sheet from the child's body and looked underneath it.

  "Her brain's missing," he said, and the look of nonchalance vanished from his face.

  "What?"

  "The brain," the pathologist said, "isn't where it belongs."

  22

  Erlendur didn't immediately understand what the pathologist had said and looked at him as if he hadn't heard. He couldn't fathom what he was talking about. For a moment he looked down at the body, then looked up quickly again when he saw a bone from a little hand protruding from beneath the sheet. He didn't think he could handle the image of what was lying underneath it. He didn't want to know what the girl's earthly remains looked like. Didn't want that image to appear every time he thought about her.

  "She's been opened up before," the pathologist said.

  "Is the brain missing?" Erlendur groaned.

  "An autopsy was performed before."

  "Yes, at Keflavík hospital."

  "When did she die?"

  "1968," Erlendur said.

  "And, if I understand correctly, Holberg was her father, but they didn't live together, her parents?"

  "The girl only had her mother."

  "Was permission given to use her organs for research purposes?" the pathologist continued. "Do you know about that at all? Did the mother give her permission?"

  "She wouldn't have done," Erlendur said.

  "It could have been taken without her permission. Who was looking after her when she died? Who was her doctor?"

  Erlendur named Frank. The pathologist was silent for a while.

  "I can't say that I'm entirely unfamiliar with such incidents. Relatives are sometimes asked whether organs may be removed for research purposes. All in the name of science, of course. We need that. For teaching, too. I know of instances when, if there is no next of kin, certain organs are removed for research before the body is buried. But I don't know many cases of organs being stolen outright when the relatives have been consulted."

  "How could the brain be missing?" Erlendur went on asking.

  "The head's been sawn in half and it was removed in one piece."

  "No, I mean . . ."

  "A neat job," the pathologist continued. "A skilled person at work. You cut through the spinal cord, through the neck from the rear here and take the brain out."

  "I know the brain was studied in connection with a tumour," Erlendur said. "Do you mean that it wasn't put back?"

  "That's one explanation," the pathologist said, covering up the body. "If they removed the brain to study it they would hardly have been able to return it in time for the funeral. It needs to be fixed."

  "Fixed?"

  "To make it better to work on. It turns like cheese. Brains take a while to fix."

  "Wouldn't it have been enough just to take samples?"

  "I don't know," the pathologist said. "All I know is that the brain isn't in place, which makes it difficult to determine the cause of death. Maybe we can see with DNA tests on the bones. That could tell us something."

  There was no mistaking the look of astonishment on Frank's face when he opened the door and saw Erlendur standing on the steps again in a torrential downpour.

  "We exhumed the girl", Erlendur said without any preamble, "and the brain's missing. Do you know anything about it?"

/>   "Exhumed her? The brain?" the doctor said and showed Erlendur into his office. "What do you mean, the brain's missing?"

  "What I say. The brain's been removed. Probably to study it in connection with the cause of death, but it wasn't returned. You were her doctor. Do you know what happened? Do you know anything about the matter?"

  "I was her general practitioner, as I think I explained to you the last time you came. She was under the supervision of Keflavík hospital and the doctors there."

  "The person who performed the autopsy is dead. We were given a copy of his pathologist's report, which is very curt and mentions only a brain tumour. If he did any more studies of it, there's no record of them. Wouldn't it have been enough just to take samples? Did they need to remove the whole brain?"

  The doctor shrugged. "I'm not sure." He hesitated for a moment. "Were more organs missing?" he asked.

  "More organs?" Erlendur said.

  "Besides the brain. Was that all that was missing?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Nothing else was touched?"

  "I don't think so. The pathologist didn't mention anything. What are you getting at?"

  Frank looked at Erlendur, thoughtfully. "I don't expect you've ever heard Jar City mentioned, have you?"

  "What Jar City?"

  "It's now been closed, I believe, not so very long ago in fact. The room was called that. Jar City."

  "What room?"

  "Upstairs on Barónsstígur. Where they kept the organs."

  "Go on."

  "They were kept in formalin in glass jars. All kinds of organs that were sent there from the hospitals. For teaching. In the faculty of medicine. They were kept in a room the medical students called Jar City. Preserved innards. Hearts, livers and limbs. Brains too."

  "From the hospitals?"

  "People die in hospitals. They're given autopsies. The organs are examined. They're not always returned, some are kept for teaching purposes. At one time the organs were stored in Jar City."

  "What are you telling me this for?"

  "The brain needn't be lost for ever. It might still be in some Jar City. Samples that are preserved for teaching purposes are all documented and classified, for example. If you need to locate the brain there's a chance that you still can."

  "I've never heard about this before. Are the organs taken without permission or do they obtain the relatives' consent . . . what's the arrangement?"

  The doctor shrugged. "To tell the truth, I don't know. Naturally it all depends. Organs are extremely important for medical teaching. All university hospitals have large collections of organs. I've even heard that some doctors, medical researchers, have their own private collections, but I can't vouch for that."

  "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?"