Tainted Blood rmm-1

by Arnaldur Indridason

  "Hopeless," her husband said. "Came rushing in, delivered a few cliches and then he was off again with his briefcase. I can't understand why he's so popular."

  His wife wouldn't let anything mar the beauty of the wedding.

  "A marvellous day! Sunshine and lovely autumn weather. Definitely a hundred people at the church alone. She has so many friends. Such a popular girl. We held the reception at a hall here in Gardabaer. What's that place called? I always forget."

  "Gardaholt," the father said.

  "Such a wonderful cosy place," she went on. "We filled it. The hall, I mean. So many presents. And then when. . then when. ."

  "They were supposed to dance the first dance," the father continued when his wife burst into tears, "and that idiot of a boy was standing on the dance floor. We called out to Disa Ros, but she didn't show up. We started looking for her, but it was as if the ground had opened up and swallowed her."

  "Disa Ros?" Erlendur said.

  "It turned out that she'd taken the wedding car."

  "The wedding car?"

  "The limousine. With the flowers and ribbons, that brought them from the church. She just ran away from the wedding. No warning! No explanation!"

  "From her own wedding!" the mother shouted.

  "And you don't know what made her do that?"

  "She obviously changed her mind," the mother said. "Must have regretted the whole thing."

  "But why?" Erlendur said.

  "Please, can you find her for us?" the father asked. "She hasn't been in touch and you can see how terribly worried we are. The party was a total flop. The wedding was ruined. We're completely stumped. And our little girl is missing."

  "The wedding car. Was it found?"

  "Yes. In Gardastraeti."

  "Why there?"

  "I don't know. She doesn't know anyone there. Her clothes were in the car. Her proper clothes."

  Erlendur hesitated.

  "Her proper clothes were in the wedding car?" he said eventually, briefly pondering the plane this conversation had dropped to and whether he was in some way responsible.

  "She took off her wedding gown and put on the clothes she'd apparently kept in the car," the wife said.

  "Do you think you can find her?" the father asked. "We've contacted everyone she knows and no-one knows a thing. We just don't know where to turn. I have a photo of her here."

  He handed Erlendur a school photograph of the young, beautiful blonde who was now in hiding. She smiled at him from the photograph.

  "You have no idea what happened?"

  "Not a clue," the girl's mother replied.

  "None," the father said.

  "And these are the presents?" Erlendur looked at the gigantic dining table, piled high with colourful parcels, pretty bows, cellophane and flowers. He walked towards it as the couple watched. He'd never seen so many presents in his life and he wondered what was inside the parcels. Crockery and more crockery, he imagined.

  What a life.

  "And what's this here?" he said, pointing to some offcuts from a tree that stood in a large vase at one end of the table. Heart-shaped red cards hung from the branches by ribbons.

  "It's a message tree."

  "A what?" Erlendur said. He'd only been to one wedding in his life and that was a long time ago. No message trees there.

  "The guests write greetings to the bride and groom on cards and then hang them on the tree. A lot of cards had been hung up before Disa Ros went missing," the mother said, still holding her handkerchief to her nose.

  Erlendur's mobile phone rang in his overcoat pocket. As he fumbled to get it, the phone got stuck in the opening and, instead of patiently working it loose, which would have been so easy, Erlendur tugged at it vigorously until the pocket gave way. The hand holding the phone flew back and sent the message tree flying to the floor. Erlendur looked at the couple apologetically and answered his phone.

  "Are you coming with us to Nordurmyri?" Sigurdur Oli said without any preamble. "To take a better look at the flat."

  "Are you down there already?" Erlendur asked. He had withdrawn to one side.

  "No. I'll wait for you," Sigurdur Oli said. "Where the hell are you?"

  Erlendur hung up.

  "I'll see what I can do," he said to the couple. "I don't think there's any danger involved. Your daughter probably just lost her nerve and she's staying with some friends. You shouldn't worry too much. I'm sure she'll ring before long."

  The couple bent down over the little cards that had fallen to the floor. He noticed that they had overlooked several cards that had slid under a chair and he bent down to pick them up. Erlendur read the greetings and looked at the couple.

  "Had you seen this?" he asked and handed them the card.

  The father read the message and a look of astonishment crossed his face. He handed the card to his wife. She read it over and again but didn't seem to understand. Erlendur held out his hand for the card and read it again. The message was unsigned.

  "Is this your daughter's handwriting?" he asked.

  "I think so," the mother replied.

  Erlendur turned the card over in his hands and reread the message:

  HE'S A MONSTER WHAT HAVE I DONE?

  5

  "Where have you been?" Sigurdur Oli asked Erlendur when he came back to work, but he received no answer.

  "Has Eva Lind tried to contact me?" he asked.

  Sigurdur Oli said he didn't think so. He knew about Erlendur's daughter and her problems, but neither of them ever mentioned it. Personal matters seldom entered into their conversations.

  "Anything new on Holberg?" Erlendur asked and walked straight into his office. Sigurdur Oli followed him and closed the door. Murders were rare in Reykjavik and generated enormous publicity on the few occasions they were committed. The CID made it a rule not to inform the media of details of their investigations unless absolutely necessary. That did not apply in this case.

  "We know a little more about him," Sigurdur Oli said, opening a file he was holding. "He was born in Saudarkrokur, 69 years old. Spent his last years working as a lorry driver for Iceland Transport. Still worked there on and off."

  Sigurdur Oli paused.

  "Shouldn't we talk to his workmates?" he said, straightening his tie. Sigurdur Oli was wearing a new suit, tall and handsome, a graduate in criminology from an American university. He was everything that Erlendur was not: modern and organised.

  "What do people in the office think?" Erlendur asked, twiddling with a loose button on his cardigan which eventually dropped into his palm. He was stout and well-built with bushy ginger hair, one of the most experienced detectives on the team. He generally got his way. His superiors and colleagues had long since given up doing battle with him. Things had turned out that way over the years. Erlendur didn't dislike it.

  "Probably some nutcase," Sigurdur Oli said. "At the minute we're looking for that green army jacket. Some kid who wanted money but panicked when Holberg refused."

  "What about Holberg's family? Did he have any?"

  "No family, but we haven't got all the information yet. We're still gathering it together; family, friends, workmates."

  "From the look of his flat I'd say he was single and had been for a long time."

  "You would know, of course," Sigurdur Oli blurted out, but Erlendur pretended not to hear.

  "Anything from the pathologist? Forensics?"

  "The provisional report's in. Nothing in it we didn't know. Holberg died from a blow to the head. It was a heavy blow, but basically it was the shape of the ashtray, the sharp edges, that were decisive. His skull caved in and he died instantly. . or almost. He seems to have struck the corner of the coffee table as he fell. He had a nasty wound on his forehead that fitted the corner of the table. The fingerprints on the ashtray were Holberg's but then there are at least two other sets, one of which is also on the pencil."

  "Are they the murderer's then?"

  "There's every probability that they are the murdere
r's, yes."

  "Right, a typical clumsy Icelandic murder."

  "Typical. And that's the assumption we're working on."

  It was still raining. The low-pressure fronts that moved in from deep in the Atlantic at that time of year headed east across Iceland in succession, bringing wind, wet and dark winter gloom. The CID was still at work in the building in Nordurmyri. The yellow police tape that had been set up around the building reminded Erlendur of the electricity board; a hole in the road, a filthy tent over it, a flicker of light inside the tent, all neatly gift-wrapped with yellow tape. In the same way, the police had wrapped the murder scene up with neat yellow plastic tape with the name of the authority printed on it. Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli met Elinborg and the other detectives who had been combing the building through the autumn night and into the morning and were just finishing their job.

  People from neighbouring buildings were questioned but none of them had noticed any suspicious movements at the murder scene between the Monday morning and the time the body was found.

  Soon there was no-one left in the building but Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli. The blood on the carpet had turned black. The ashtray had been removed as evidence. The pencil and pad too. In other respects it was as though nothing had happened. Sigurdur Oli went to look in the den and the passage to the bedroom, while Erlendur walked around the sitting room. They put on white rubber gloves. Prints were mounted and framed on the walls and looked as if they'd been bought at the front door from travelling salesmen. In the bookcase were thrillers in translation, paperbacks from a book club, some of them read, others apparently untouched. No interesting hard-bound volumes. Erlendur bent down almost to the floor to read the titles on the bottom shelf and recognised only one: Lolita by Nabokov; paperback. He took it from the bookshelf. It was an English edition and had clearly been read.

  He replaced the book and inched his way towards the desk. It was L-shaped and took up one corner of the sitting room. A new, comfortable office chair was by the desk, with a plastic mat underneath it to protect the carpet. The desk looked much older than the chair. There were drawers on both sides underneath the broader desktop and a long one in the middle, nine in all. On the shorter desktop stood a 17-inch computer monitor with a sliding tray for a keyboard fitted beneath it. The tower was kept on the floor. All the drawers were locked.

  Sigurdur Oli went through the wardrobe in the bedroom. It was reasonably organised, with socks in one drawer, underwear in another, trousers, sweaters. Some shirts and three suits were hanging on a rail, the oldest suit from the disco era, Sigurdur Oli thought, brown striped. Several pairs of shoes on the wardrobe floor. Bedclothes in the top drawer. The man had made his bed before his visitor arrived. A white blanket covered the duvet and pillow. It was a single bed.

  On the bedside table were an alarm clock and two books, one a series of interviews with a well-known politician and the other a book of photographs of Scania-Vabis trucks. The bedside table had a cupboard in it too, containing medicine, surgical spirit, sleeping pills, Panadol and a small jar of Vaseline.

  "Can you see any keys anywhere?" asked Erlendur, who was now by the door.

  "No keys. Door keys, you mean?"

  "No, to the desk."

  "None of those either."

  Erlendur went into the den and from there into the kitchen. He opened drawers and cupboards but could see only cutlery and glasses, ladles and plates. No keys. He went over to the hangers by the door, frisked the coats but found nothing except a little black pouch with a ring of keys and some coins in it. Two small keys were hanging from the ring with others to the front door, to the flat and to the rooms. Erlendur tried them on the desk. The same one fitted all nine drawers.

  He opened the large drawer in the centre of the desk first. It contained mainly bills — telephone, electricity, heating and credit-card bills — and also a newspaper subscription. The bottom two drawers to the left were empty and in the next one up were tax forms and wage slips. In the top drawer was a photograph album. All black-and-white, old photographs of people from various times, sometimes dressed up in what appeared to be the sitting room in Nordurmyri, sometimes on picnics: dwarf birch, Gullfoss waterfall and Geysir. He saw two photo-graphs that he thought might be of the murdered man when he was young, but nothing taken recently.

  He opened the drawers on the right-hand side. The top two were empty. In the third he found a pack of cards, a folding chess set, an old inkwell.

  He found the photograph underneath the bottom drawer.

  Erlendur was closing the bottom drawer again when he heard what sounded like a slight rustling from inside it. When he opened and closed it again he heard the same rustling. It rubbed against something on its way in. He sighed and squatted down, looked inside but could see nothing. He pulled it back out but heard nothing, then closed it and the noise came again. He knelt on the floor, pulled the drawer right out, saw something stuck and stretched out to get it.

  It was a small black-and-white photograph, showing a grave in a cemetery in wintertime. He didn't recognise the cemetery. There was a headstone on the grave and most of the inscription on it was fairly clear. A woman's name was carved there. AUDUR. No second name. Erlendur couldn't see the dates very clearly. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his glasses, put them on and held the photograph up to his nose. 1964–1968. He could vaguely make out an epitaph, but the letters were small and he could not read it. Carefully he blew the dust off the photo.

  The girl was only four when she died.

  Erlendur looked up as the autumn rain thrashed against the windows. It was the middle of the day but the sky was a gloomy black.

  6

  The big lorry rocked in the storm like a prehistoric beast and the rain pounded against it. It had taken the police some time to locate as it wasn't parked where Holberg lived in Nordurmyri, but in a car park west of Snorrabraut, by the Domus Medica health centre, several minutes' walk from Holberg's home. In the end they had made a radio announcement asking for information about the lorry's whereabouts. A police patrol had found it at about the same time that Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli left Holberg's flat with the photograph. A forensic team was called out to comb the vehicle for clues. It was an MAN model with a red cab. All that a quick search revealed was a collection of hardcore pornographic magazines. It was decided to move the lorry to CID headquarters for further investigation.

  While this was going on, forensics got to work on the photograph. It transpired that it was printed on Ilford photographic paper, which was used a lot in the 1960s but had long since been discontinued. Probably the photograph had been developed by the photographer himself or by an amateur; it had begun to fade as if the job had not been done very carefully. There was nothing written on the back and there were no landmarks by which to determine the cemetery in which it had been taken. It could be anywhere in the country.

  The photographer had stood about three metres from the headstone. The shot was taken more or less directly in front of it; the photographer must have had to bend his knees unless he was very short. Even from that distance the angle was quite narrow. There was nothing growing near the grave. A powdery snow lay on the ground. No other grave could be seen. Behind the headstone, all that was visible was a white haze.

  Forensics concentrated on the epitaph which was largely indistinguishable because the photographer had stood so far away. Numerous reproductions were made of the photograph and the epitaph was enlarged until every single letter had been printed out on A5 paper, numbered and arranged in the same sequence as on the headstone. They were coarse-grained pictures, hardly more than alternating black-and-white dots that created nuances of light and shade, but once scanned into a computer the shadowing and resolution could be processed. Some letters were clearer than others, which left the forensic team to fill in the gaps. The letters M, F and O were clearly discernible. Others were more difficult.

  Erlendur phoned the home of a department manager from the National Statistics Office who agree
d, cursing and swearing, to meet him at the offices on Skuggasund. Erlendur knew all the death certificates issued since 1916 were housed there. No-one was in the building, all the staff having left work some time before. The department manager pulled up in his car outside the Statistics Office half an hour later and shook Erlendur's hand curtly. He entered a PIN in the security system and let them into the building with a card. Erlendur outlined the matter to him, telling him only the bare essentials.

  They looked at all death certificates issued in 1968 and found two in the name of Audur. One was in her fourth year. She had died in the February. A doctor had signed the death certificate and they soon found his name in the national registry. He lived in Reykjavik. The girl's mother was named on the certificate. They found her without any problems. Her name was Kolbrun. She had last been domiciled in Keflavik in the early 1970s. They then checked again among the death certificates. Kolbrun had died in 1971, three years after her daughter.

  The girl had died from a malignant tumour on the brain.

  The mother had committed suicide.

  7

  The bridegroom welcomed Erlendur into his office. He was a quality and marketing manager for a wholesaling company that imported breakfast cereal from America and Erlendur, who had never tasted American breakfast cereal in his life, pondered as he sat down in the office what a quality and marketing manager at a wholesaling company actually did. He couldn't be bothered to ask. The bridegroom was wearing a well-ironed white shirt and thick braces and he had rolled up his sleeves as if managing quality issues required every ounce of his strength. Average height, a little chubby and with a ring of beard around his thick-lipped mouth. Viggo was his name.

  "I haven't heard from Disa," Viggo said quickly and sat down facing Erlendur.

  "Was it something you said to her that. ."

  "That's what everyone thinks," Viggo said. "Everyone assumes it's my fault. That's the worst thing. The worst part of the whole business. I can't stand it."