Tainted Blood rmm-1

by Arnaldur Indridason

  The earlier photo had been taken at a studio. It was black-and-white. The girl was probably no more than one year old and was sitting on a big cushion wearing a pretty dress, with a ribbon in her hair and a rattle in one hand. She was half turned towards the photographer and was smiling, showing four little teeth. In the other she was aged about three. Erlendur imagined her mother had taken it. It was in colour. The girl was standing among some shrubs and the sun was shining straight down on her. She was wearing a thick red jumper and a little skirt, with white socks and black shoes with shiny buckles. She was looking directly into the camera. Her expression serious. Maybe she'd refused to smile.

  "Kolbrun never got over it," said Elin, from the sitting-room doorway. Erlendur stood up straight.

  "That must be the worst thing anyone could go through," he said, taking a cup of coffee. Elin sat back down on the sofa with her cup and Erlendur sat down facing her again and sipped his coffee.

  "Do smoke if you want to," she said.

  "I'm trying to stop," Erlendur said, trying not to sound apologetic. His thoughts turned to the pain he had in his chest but nevertheless he fished a crumpled pack out of his coat pocket and took one out. His ninth cigarette of the day. She pushed an ashtray towards him.

  "Mercifully she didn't take long to die," Elin said. "Started feeling pains in her head. As if she had a headache, and the doctor who examined her only ever talked about child migraine. He gave her some pills, but they didn't do any good. He wasn't a good doctor. Kolbrun told me she smelled alcohol on his breath and she was worried about it. But then it all happened so suddenly. The girl's condition got worse. There was mention of a skin tumour that her doctor should have noticed. Marks. They called them cafe au lait at the hospital. Mainly under her arms. Finally she was sent to the hospital here in Keflavik where they decided it was some kind of neural tumour. It turned out to be a brain tumour. The whole thing took about six months."

  Elin fell silent. "As I said, Kolbrun was never the same after that," she sighed. "I don't expect anyone could get over such a tragedy."

  "Was an autopsy performed on Audur?" Erlendur asked, imagining the little body lit up by fluorescent lights on a cold steel table with a Y-cut across the chest.

  "Kolbrun wouldn't entertain the idea," Elin said, "but she had no say in the matter. She went crazy when she found out they'd opened her up. Went mad with grief, of course, after her child died, and she wouldn't listen to anyone. She couldn't bear to think of her little girl being cut open. She was dead and nothing could change that. The autopsy con-firmed the diagnosis. They found a malignant tumour in her brain."

  "And your sister?"

  "Kolbrun committed suicide three years later. She fell into an uncontrollable depression and needed medical care. Spent a while at a psychiatric ward in Reykjavik, then came back home to Keflavik. I tried to look after her as best I could but it was like she'd been switched off. She had no will to live. Audur had brought happiness into her life in spite of those terrible circumstances. But now she was gone."

  Elin looked at Erlendur. "You're probably wondering how she went about it."

  Erlendur didn't reply.

  "She got into the bath and slashed both her wrists. Bought razor blades to do it with."

  Elin stopped talking and the gloom in the sitting room enveloped them. "Do you know what comes into my mind when I think about that suicide? It's not the blood in the bath. Not my sister lying in the red water. Not the cuts. It's Kolbrun in the shop, buying the razor blades. Handing over the money for the razor blades. Counting out the coins."

  Elin stopped talking.

  "Don't you think it's funny the way your mind works?" she asked, as if she were talking to herself.

  Erlendur didn't know how to answer her.

  "I found her," Elin continued. "She set it up like that. Phoned me and asked me to come round that evening. We had a short chat. I was always on my guard because of her depression but she seemed to be improving towards the end. As if the fog was lifting. As if she was capable of tackling life again. There was no sign in her voice that evening that she was planning to kill herself. Far from it. We talked about the future. We were going to travel together. When I found her there she was at peace in a way I hadn't seen for ages. Peace and acceptance. But I know she didn't accept it in the slightest and she found no peace in her soul."

  "I have to ask you one thing and then I'll leave you alone," Erlendur said. "I have to hear your answer."

  "What's that."

  "Do you have any knowledge about Holberg's murder?"

  "No, I don't."

  "And you had no part in it, directly or indirectly?"

  "No."

  They remained silent for a short while.

  "The epitaph she chose for her daughter was about the enemy," Erlendur said.

  "'Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.' She chose it herself, even though it didn't go on her own gravestone," Elin said. She stood up, walked over to a beautiful glass-fronted cabinet, opened a drawer in it and took out a little black box. She opened it with a key, lifted up some envelopes and took out a little piece of paper. "I found this on the kitchen table the night she died, but I'm not sure if she wanted me to have it inscribed on her gravestone. I doubt it. I don't think I realised how much she'd suffered until I saw this."

  She handed Erlendur the piece of paper and he read the first five words from the Psalm he'd looked up in the Bible earlier: "Hear my voice, O God."

  12

  When Erlendur got home that evening his daughter, Eva Lind, was sitting up against the door to the flat, apparently asleep. He spoke to her and tried to wake her. She showed no response, so he put his hands under her arms, lifted her up and carried her inside. He didn't know whether she was sleeping or stoned. He lay her down on the sofa in the sitting room. Her breathing was regular. Her pulse seemed normal. He looked at her for a good while and wondered what to do. Most of all he wanted to put her in the bath. She gave off a stench, her hands were dirty and her hair matted with filth.

  "Where have you been?" Erlendur whispered to himself.

  He sat down in the chair beside her, still wearing his hat and coat, and thought about his daughter until he fell into a deep sleep.

  He didn't want to wake up when Eva Lind shook him the next morning. Tried to hold on to the snatches of dreams that aroused the same discomfort within him as the one of the night before. He knew this was the same dream, but couldn't manage to fix it in his mind any more than last time, couldn't get a handle on it. All that remained was a lingering discomfort.

  It was not yet 8 a.m. and it was still pitch dark outside. As far as Erlendur could tell the rain and autumn winds still hadn't let up. To his astonishment he smelled coffee from the kitchen and steam as if someone had been in the bath. He noticed Eva Lind was wearing one of his shirts and some old jeans that she tied tight around her thin waist with a belt. She was barefoot and clean.

  "You were on good form last night," he said, and immediately regretted it. Then he thought that he should have given up being considerate towards her long ago.

  "I've made a decision," Eva Lind said, walking into the kitchen. "I'm going to make you a grandfather. Grandad Erlendur."

  "So were you having your final fling last night, or what?"

  "Is it okay for me to stay here for a while, just until I find somewhere new?"

  "For all I care."

  He sat down at the kitchen table with her and sipped the coffee that she'd poured into a cup for him.

  "And how did you reach this conclusion?"

  "Just did."

  "Just did?"

  "Can I stay with you or not?"

  "As long as you want. You know that."

  "Will you stop asking me questions? Stop those interrogations of yours. It's like you're always at work."

  "I am always at work."

  "Have you found the girl from Gardabaer?"

  "No. It's not a priority case. I talked to her husband yesterday. He doesn't
know anything. The girl left a note saying 'He's a monster what have I done?'"

  "Someone must have been dissing her at the party."

  "Dissing?" said Erlendur. "Is that a word?"

  "What can you do to a bride at a wedding to make her do a runner?"

  "I don't know," Erlendur said without interest. "My hunch is that the groom was touching up the bridesmaids and she saw him. I'm glad you're going to have the baby. Maybe it'll help you out of this vicious circle. It's about time."

  He paused. "Strange how perky you are after the state you were in yesterday," he said eventually.

  He phrased this as cautiously as he could, but he also knew that, under normal circumstances, Eva Lind shouldn't be shining like a summer's day, fresh out of the bath, making coffee and acting as if she'd never done anything but look after her father. She looked at him and he saw her weighing up the options and waited for her speech, waited for her to leap to her feet and give him a piece of her mind. She didn't.

  "I brought some pills with me," she said very calmly. "It doesn't happen of its own accord. And not overnight. It happens slowly, over a long time, but it's the way I want to do it."

  "And the baby?"

  "It won't be harmed by what I use. I don't plan to harm the baby. I'm going to have it."

  "What do you know about the effect that dope has on an embryo?"

  "I know."

  "Have it your own way. Take something, bring yourself down or whatever you call it, stay here in the flat, have a good think about yourself. I can …"

  "No," Eva Lind said. "Don't you do anything. You go on with your life and stop spying on me. Don't think about what I'm doing. If I'm not here when you come home, it doesn't matter. If I come home late or don't come back to the flat at all, then don't interfere. If that happens, I'm gone, flnito."

  "So it's none of my business."

  "It's never been any of your business," said Eva Lind, and sipped her coffee.

  The phone rang and Erlendur got up and answered it. It was Sigurdur Oli, who was calling from home.

  "I couldn't get hold of you yesterday," he said. Erlendur remembered he'd switched off his mobile while he was talking to Elin in Keflaivk, and hadn't switched it back on.

  "Are there any new developments?" Erlendur asked.

  "I spoke to a man called Hilmar yesterday. Another lorry driver who sometimes slept at Holberg's place in Nordurmyri. A rest stop or whatever they call it. He told me Holberg was a good pal, nothing to complain about, and everyone at work seemed to like him, helpful and sociable, blah blah blah. Couldn't imagine he had any enemies, but added that he didn't know him particularly well. Hilmar also told me Holberg hadn't been his usual self the last time he stayed with him, which was about ten days ago. Apparently he was acting strange."

  "Strange in what way?"

  "The way Hilmar described it, he was sort of afraid to answer the phone. Said there was some bugger who wouldn't leave him in peace, as he put it, always phoning him up. Hilmar said he stayed with him on the Saturday night and Holberg asked him to answer the phone for him once. Hilmar did, but when the caller realised it wasn't Holberg who'd answered he slammed the phone down."

  "Can we find out who's been calling Holberg recently?"

  "I'm having that checked. Then there's another thing. I've got a printout from the telephone company of the calls Holberg made, and something interesting came out of that."

  "What?"

  "You remember his computer?"

  "Yes."

  "We never looked at it."

  "No. The technicians do that."

  "Did you notice if it was plugged in to the telephone?"

  "No."

  "Most of Holberg's calls, almost all of them in fact, were to an Internet server. He used to spend days on end surfing the net."

  "What does that mean?" asked Erlendur, who was particularly ill-informed about everything to do with computers.

  "Maybe we'll see that when we switch on his computer," Sigurdur Oli replied.

  They arrived at Holberg's flat in Nordurmyri at the same time. The yellow police tape had gone and there was no visible sign of a crime any more. No lights were on in the upper floors. The neighbours didn't appear to be at home. Erlendur had a key to the flat. They went straight over to the computer and switched it on. It started whirring.

  "It's quite a powerful computer," Sigurdur Oli said, wondering for a moment whether he should explain to Erlendur about the size and type, but decided to give it a miss.

  "Okay," he said, "I'll have a look to see what web addresses he had stored in his favourites. Loads of them, bloody loads of them. Maybe he's downloaded some files. Wow!"

  "What?" said Erlendur.

  "His hard drive's jam-packed."

  "Which means?"

  "You need a hell of a lot of stuff to fill a hard drive. There must be whole movies on here. Here's something he calls avideo3. Shall we see what it is?"

  "Definitely."

  Sigurdur Oli opened the file and a window popped up playing a video. They watched for a few seconds. It was a porn clip.

  "Was that a goat they were holding over her?" Erlendur asked in disbelief.

  "There are 312 avideo files," Sigurdur Oli said. "They could be clips like that one, even whole movies."

  "Avideo?" said Erlendur.

  "I don't know," said Sigurdur Oli. "Maybe animal videos. There's gvideo too. Should we look at, let's say, gvideo88} Double-click. . maximise the window …"

  "Double-?" said Erlendur, but stopped mid-sentence when four men having sex spread themselves across the 17-inch monitor.

  "Gvideo must mean gay videos," said Sigurdur Oli when the scene was over.

  "He was obviously obsessed then," Erlendur said. "How many films are there altogether?"

  "There are more than a thousand files here, but there could be a lot more stored elsewhere on the drive."

  Erlendur's mobile phone rang in his coat pocket. It was Elinborg. She'd been trying to trace the two men who went with Holberg to the party in Keflavik on the night that Kolbrun said she was assaulted. Elinborg told Erlendur that one of them, Gretar, had disappeared years ago.

  "Disappeared?" Erlendur said.

  "Yes. One of our missing persons."

  "And the other one?" Erlendur said.

  "The other one's in prison," Elinborg said. "Always been in trouble. He's got one year left to serve of a four-year sentence."

  "For what?"

  "You name it."

  13

  Erlendur reminded forensics about the computer. It would take quite a while to investigate everything on it. He told them to look at every single file, list it and classify it and make a detailed report on the contents. Then he and Sigurdur Oli set off for Litla-Hraun prison, east of the city. It took them just over an hour to get there. Visibility was poor, the road was icy and the car still had summer tyres, so they had to be careful. The weather warmed up once they were through Threngslin Pass. They crossed the river Olfusa and soon saw the two prison buildings rising up from the hard gravel banks in the hazy distance. The older building was three storeys high, in the gabled style. For years it had had a red corrugated-iron roof and, from a distance, looked like a gigantic old farmhouse. Now the roof had been painted grey to match the new building beside it. That was a steel-clad, cobalt-grey building with a watchtower, modern and fortified, not unlike a financial institution in Reykjavik.

  How the times change, Erlendur thought to himself.

  Eliborg had told the prison authorities to expect them and which inmate they wanted to talk to. The prison governor welcomed the detectives and accompanied them to his office. He wanted them to have some details about the prisoner before talking to him. They had arrived at the worst possible time. The prisoner in question was in solitary confinement after he and two others had assaulted a recently convicted paedophile and left him for dead. He said he preferred not to go into details, but wanted to inform the police, to make it perfectly clear, that their visi
t was a breach of his solitary confinement and the prisoner would be, at best, in an unstable condition. After the meeting the inspectors were accompanied to the visiting hall. They sat and waited for the prisoner.

  His name was Ellidi and he was a 56-year-old repeat offender. Erlendur knew him, he had in fact accompanied him to Litla-Hraun once himself. Ellidi had done various jobs during his miserable life: been at sea on fishing vessels and merchant ships, where he smuggled alcohol and drugs and was eventually convicted for it. He attempted an insurance fraud by setting fire to a 20-tonne boat off the south-west coast and sinking it. Three of them "survived". The fourth member of the group was left behind by mistake, locked in the engine room, and sank with the boat; the crime was discovered when divers went down to the wreck and it transpired that the fire had started in three places at once. Ellidi did four years at Litla-Hraun for insurance fraud, manslaughter and a number of minor offences of which he was convicted at the same time and that had been accumulating at the State Prosecutor's office. He spent two and a half years inside on that occasion.

  Ellidi was notorious for violent physical assaults which in the worst cases left the victims maimed and permanently disabled. Erlendur remembered one case in particular and described it to Sigurdur Oli while they were driving over the moor. Ellidi had a score to settle with a young man in a house on Snorrabraut. By the time the police arrived on the scene he'd beaten the man so badly he was in intensive care for four days. Having tied the man to a chair he had amused himself by cutting his face with a broken bottle. Before they managed to overpower Ellidi he knocked one policeman out cold and broke another's arm. Icelandic judges were notoriously lenient. He received a two-year sentence for that offence and several accumulated minor ones as before. When the verdict was read out, he scoffed at it.

  The door opened and Ellidi was brought into the hall by two wardens. He was powerfully built despite his age. Dark skinned, his head shaven bald. He had small ears with attached lobes but had nevertheless managed to pierce a hole in one from which a black swastika now dangled. His false teeth whistled when he spoke. He wore tattered jeans and a black T-shirt that revealed his thick biceps with tattoos up both arms. He towered well over six feet. They noticed he was handcuffed. One of his eyes was red, his face scratched and his upper lip swollen.