Tainted Blood

34

Katrin didn’t leave the house for the rest of the day. No-one visited her and she didn’t use the telephone. In the evening a man driving an estate car pulled up outside the house and went in carrying a medium-sized suitcase. This was presumably Albert, her husband. He was due back from a business trip to Germany that afternoon.

Two policemen in an unmarked car were watching the house. The phone was tapped. The whereabouts of the two older sons had been ascertained, but nothing was known about where the youngest one was. He was divorced and lived in a flat in the Gerdi district but there was nobody home. A watch was mounted outside it. The police were gathering information about the son and his description was sent to police stations all over the country. As yet there were not considered to be grounds for releasing an announcement about him to the media.

Erlendur pulled up in front of the morgue on Baronsstigur. The body of the man who was thought to be Gretar had been taken there. The pathologist, the same one who had examined Holberg and Audur, had removed the plastic from the body. It turned out to be the body of a male with his head snapped back, his mouth open as if screaming in anguish and his arms by his sides. The skin was parched and shrivelled and pallid, with large patches of rot here and there on the naked body. The head appeared to have been badly damaged, and the hair was long and colourless, hanging down the sides of the face.

“He removed his innards,” the pathologist said.

“What?”

“The person who buried him. A sensible move if you want to keep a body. Because of the smell. He gradually dried up inside the plastic. Well preserved in that sense.”

“Can you establish the cause of death?”

“There was a plastic bag over his head which suggests he may have been suffocated, but I’ll have to take a better look at him. You’ll find out more later. It all takes time. Do you know who he is? He’s a bit of a runt, the poor bugger.”

“I have my suspicions,” Erlendur said.

“Did you talk to the professor?”

“A lovely woman.”

“Isn’t she just?”

Sigurdur Oli was waiting for Erlendur at the office but when he arrived he said he was going straight to forensics. They had managed to develop and enlarge several exposures from the film that had been found in Holberg’s flat. Erlendur told him about the conversation he and Elinborg had had with Katrin.

Ragnar, the head of forensics, was waiting for them in his office with several rolls of film on his desk and some enlarged photographs. He handed them the photographs and they huddled over them.

“We could only manage these three,” Ragnar said, “and I can’t actually tell what they show. There were seven rolls of Kodak with 24 exposures each. Three were completely black and we can’t tell whether they’d been used, but from one of them we managed to enlarge the little we can see here. Is this anything you recognise?”

Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli squinted at the photographs. They were all black-and-white. Two of them were half black as if the aperture hadn’t opened properly; the pictures were out of focus and so unclear that they couldn’t make them out. The third and final print was intact and reasonably sharp and showed a man taking his own photograph in front of a mirror. The camera was small and flat, with a flash cube on the top with four bulbs, and the flash lit up the man in the mirror. He was wearing jeans and a shirt and a waist-length summer jacket.

“Do you remember flash cubes?” Erlendur said with a hint of nostalgia in his voice. “What a revolution.”

“I remember them well,” said Ragnar, who was the same age as Erlendur. Sigurdur Oli looked at them in turn and shook his head.

“Is that what you’d call a self-portrait?” Erlendur said.

“It’s difficult to see his face with the camera in the way,” Sigurdur Oli said, “but isn’t it probable it’s Gretar himself?”

“Do you recognise the surroundings, what little of them is visible?” Ragnar asked.

In the reflection they could make out part of the room behind the photographer. Erlendur could see the back of a chair and even a coffee table, the carpet on the floor and part of something that could have been a floor-length curtain, but everything else was difficult to discern. The face of the man in the mirror was brightly lit but to the sides the light faded to total darkness.

They pored over the photograph for a long time. After much effort Erlendur began to distinguish something in the darkness to the left of the photographer, which he thought might be a human form, even a profile, eyebrows and a nose. This was only a hunch, but there was something uneven in the light, tiny shadows, that kindled his imagination.

“Could we enlarge this area?” he asked Ragnar, who stared hard at the same part but couldn’t see a thing. Sigurdur Oli took the photograph and held it up in front of his face, but he couldn’t make out what Erlendur thought he could see either.

“It will only take a second,” Ragnar said. They followed him from the office and over to the forensic team.

“Are there any fingerprints on the film?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“Yes,” Ragnar said, “two sets, the same ones as on the photo from the cemetery. Gretar’s and Holberg’s.”

The photograph was scanned and came up on a big computer screen. The area was enlarged. What had been only an unevenness in the light became countless dots that filled the screen. They couldn’t discern anything from the photo and even Erlendur lost sight of what he thought he’d seen. The technician worked on the keyboard for a while, entered some commands and the image was reduced and compressed. He continued, the dots arranged themselves together until gradually the outline of a face began to emerge. It was still unclear, but Erlendur thought he recognised Holberg there.

“Isn’t that the bastard?” Sigurdur Oli said.

“There’s more here,” the technician said and went on sharpening up the photograph. Waves soon appeared which reminded Erlendur of a woman’s hair, and another more blurred profile. Erlendur stared at the image until he thought he could make out Holberg sitting talking to a woman. A strange hallucination seized him at the moment he saw this. He wanted to shout out to the woman to get out of the flat, but it was too late. Decades too late.

A phone rang in the room, but no-one made a move. Erlendur thought the one on the desk was ringing.

“It’s yours,” Sigurdur Oli said to Erlendur.

It took Erlendur a while, but eventually he managed to find his mobile phone and fished it out of his coat pocket.

It was Elinborg.

“What are you playing around at?” she said when finally he answered.

“Get to the point, will you,” Erlendur said.

“The point? What are you so stressed about?”

“I knew you couldn’t just say what you’re going to say.”

“It’s about Katrin’s boys,” Elinborg said. “Or men, actually, they’re all grown men now.”

“What about them?”

“All of them nice guys, probably, except one of them works at a rather interesting place. I thought you ought to hear about it straightaway but if you’re so tense and busy and can’t bear the thought of a little chat, I’ll just phone Sigurdur Oli instead.”

“Elinborg.”

“Yes?”

“Good Lord, woman,” Erlendur shouted and looked at Sigurdur Oli, “are you going to tell me what you’re going to tell me?”

“The son works at the Genetic Research Centre.”

“What?”

“He works at the Genetic Research Centre.”

“Which son?”

“The youngest one. He’s working on their new database. Works with family trees and illnesses, Icelandic families and hereditary diseases, genetic diseases. The man’s an expert on genetic diseases.”