Tainted Blood

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."