Tainted Blood

8

Next morning it was still raining and on the road to Keflavik the water collected in deep tyre tracks that the cars tried to avoid. The rain was so torrential Erlendur could hardly see out of the car windows, which were veiled in spray and rattled in the unrelenting south-easterly storm. The wipers couldn’t clear the water from the windscreen fast enough and Erlendur gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white. He could vaguely make out the red rear lights of the car in front and tried to follow them as best he could.

He was travelling alone. Thought this was best after a difficult telephone conversation with Kolbrun’s sister earlier that morning. She was listed as next of kin on the death certificate. The sister was not cooperative. She refused to meet him. The papers had printed a photograph of the dead man, along with his name. Erlendur asked whether she’d seen it and was about to ask whether she remembered him when she hung up. He decided to test what she would do if he appeared on her doorstep. He preferred not to have the police bring her in to him.

Erlendur had slept badly that night. He was worried about Eva Lind and feared she would do something stupid. She had a mobile phone, but every time he called a mechanical voice answered saying that the number could not be reached. Erlendur rarely remembered his dreams. It made him uncomfortable when he awoke to snatches of a bad dream passing through his mind before finally vanishing from him completely.

The police had precious little information about Kolbrun. She was born in I934 and brought charges of rape against Holberg on November 23, I963. Before Erlendur set off to Keflavik, Sigurdur Oli had outlined the rape charge to him, including a description of the incident taken from a police file he’d found in the archives — after a tip-off from Marion Briem.

Kolbrun was 30 when she gave birth to her daughter, Audur. Nine months after the rape. According to Kolbrun’s witnesses, she’d met Hol-berg at the Cross dancehall between Keflavik and Njardvik. It was a Saturday night. Kolbrun didn’t know him and had never seen him before. She was with two girlfriends and Holberg and two other men had been with them at the dance that evening. “When it finished they all went to a party at the house of one of Kolbrun’s girlfriends. Quite late into the night Kolbrun had got ready to go home. Holberg offered to accompany her, for safety’s sake. She didn’t object. Neither of them was under the influence of alcohol. Kolbrun stated that she’d had two single vodka and Cokes at the dance and nothing after she left. Holberg drank nothing that evening. He said, in Kolbrun’s hearing, that he was taking penicillin for an ear infection. A doctor’s certificate, included with the charge sheet, confirmed this.

Holberg asked if he could phone a taxi to take him to Reykjavik. She hesitated for a moment then told him where the phone was. He went into the sitting room to make this call while she took off her coat in the hallway and then went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She did not hear him finish his telephone conversation, if indeed there was one. She sensed that he was suddenly behind her as she stood at the kitchen sink.

She was so startled that she dropped her glass, spilling water over the kitchen table. She shouted out when his hands grabbed her breasts, and backed away from him into a corner.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Shouldn’t we have a bit of fun?” he said and stood in front of her, muscularly built with strong hands and thick fingers.

“I want you to leave,” she said firmly. “Now! Will you please get out of here.”

“Shouldn’t we have a bit of fun?” he repeated. He took a step closer to her and she held out her arms as if in self-defence.

“Keep off!” she shouted. “I’ll phone the police!” Suddenly she could feel how alone and defenceless she was facing this stranger whom she had let into her home and who by now had moved up close to her, had twisted her arms behind her back and was trying to kiss her.

She fought back, but it was useless. She tried to talk to him, talk him out of it, but all she could feel was her own vulnerability.

Erlendur snapped out of his thoughts when a gigantic lorry sounded its horn and overtook him with a mighty rumbling that sent waves of rainwater washing over his car. He tugged at the steering wheel and the car danced on the water for a moment. The rear of the car slid around and, for a second, Erlendur thought he was going to lose control and be thrown out into the lava field. He ground almost to a halt and managed to keep himself on the road, then hurled abuse at the lorry driver who by now had vanished from his sight in the spray of rain.

Twenty minutes later he pulled up outside a small corrugated-iron-clad house in the oldest part of Keflavik. It was painted white with a little white fence around it and a garden that was kept almost too fastidiously. The sister’s name was Elin. She was several years older than Kolbrun and now retired. She was standing in the hallway, wearing her coat and on her way out, when Erlendur rang the doorbell. She looked at him in astonishment, a short, slim woman with a tough expression on her face, piercing eyes, high cheekbones and wrinkles around her mouth.

“I thought I told you on the phone I didn’t want anything to do with you or the police,” she said angrily when Erlendur had introduced himself.

“I know,” Erlendur said, “but…”

“I’m asking you to leave me alone,” she said. “You shouldn’t have wasted your time coming all the way out here.”

She stepped out onto the doorstep, closed the door behind her, went down the three steps leading to the garden and opened the little gate in the fence, leaving it open as a sign that she wanted Erlendur to leave. She didn’t look at him. Erlendur stood on the steps, watching her walk away.

“You know Holberg’s dead,” he called out.

She didn’t answer.

“He was murdered in his home. You know that.”

Erlendur was at the bottom of the steps, hurrying after her. She held a black umbrella onto which the rain poured above her head. He had nothing more than a hat to keep the rain off. She quickened her pace. He ran to catch up with her. He didn’t know what to say to make her listen to him. Didn’t know why she reacted to him as she did.

“I wanted to ask you about Audur,” he said.

Elin suddenly stopped and turned round and marched up to him with a contemptuous look on her face.

“You bloody cop,” she hissed between her clenched teeth. “Don’t you dare mention her name. How dare you? After what you did to her mother. Get lost! Get lost this minute! Bloody cop!”

She looked at Erlendur with hatred in her eyes and he stared back at her.

“After all we did to her?” he said. “To whom?”

“Go away,” she shouted, and turned and walked away, leaving Erlendur where he was. He gave up the chase and watched her disappearing in the rain, stooping slightly, in her green raincoat and black ankle boots. He turned around and walked back to her house and his car, deep in thought. He got inside and lit a cigarette, opened the window a crack, started the engine and slowly drove away from the house.

As he inhaled he felt a slight pain in the middle of his chest again. It wasn’t new. It had been causing Erlendur some concern for almost a year now. A vague pain that greeted him in the mornings but generally disappeared soon after he got out of bed. He didn’t have a good mattress to sleep on. Some-times his whole body ached if he lay in bed for too long.

He inhaled the smoke. Hopefully it was the mattress.

As Erlendur was putting out his cigarette his mobile phone rang in his coat pocket. It was the head of forensics with the news that they had managed to decipher the inscription on the grave and had located it in the Bible.

“It’s taken from Psalm 64,” the head of forensics said.

“Yes,” said Erlendur.

“ ’Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.’ ”

“Pardon?”

“It’s what it says on the gravestone: Preserve my life from fear of the enemy. From Psalm 64.”

“’Preserve my life from fear of the enemy’.”

“Does that help you at all?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“There were two sets on fingerprints on the photograph.”

“Yes, Sigurdur Oli told me.”

“One set is Holberg’s but we don’t have the others on our files. They’re quite blurred. Very old fingerprints.”

“Can you tell what kind of camera the photo was taken with?” Erlendur asked.

“Impossible to tell. But I doubt it was a high-quality one.”