Tainted Blood

43

There wasn't much traffic on the Keflavik road that night and Erlendur drove as fast as his little ten-year-old Japanese car could manage. The rain pounded on the windscreen too hard for the wipers to clear and Erlendur thought back to the first time he went to see Elin a few days before. It was like it would never stop raining.

He had ordered Sigurdur Oli to put the Keflavik police on alert and make sure that a back-up force from Reykjavik was available. Also to contact Einar's mother and warn her about the recent turn of events. He wanted to drive directly to the cemetery himself in the hope that Einar would be there with Audur's body. He could only imagine that Einar intended to return his sister to her grave.

When Erlendur pulled up by Hvalsnes cemetery gate he could see Einar's car there with the driver's door and one of the rear doors open. Erlendur switched off the engine, stepped out into the rain and looked at Einar's car. He strained to listen but could only hear the rain dropping vertically to the ground. There was no wind and he looked up into the black sky. In the distance he could see a light above the entrance to the church and when he looked across the cemetery he saw a gleam where Audur's grave was. He thought he could make out something moving at the graveside.

And the miniature white coffin.

He set off cautiously and crept up to the man he took to be Einar. The light came from a powerful lantern that the man had brought with him and put down on the ground by the coffin. Erlendur stepped slowly into the light. He looked up from what he was doing and stared into Erlendur's eyes. Erlendur had seen photographs of Holberg as a young man and there was no question about the resemblance. His forehead was low and a little rounded, his eyebrows thick, eyes close together, prominent cheekbones on a thin face and slightly protruding teeth. His nose was narrow and so were his lips, but his chin was large and his neck long. They looked each other in the eye for an instant.

"Who are you?" Einar asked.

"I'm Erlendur. Holberg's my case."

"Are you surprised how much I look like him?" Einar said.

"There is a certain resemblance," Erlendur said.

"You know he raped my mother," Einar said.

"That's not your fault," Erlendur said.

"He was my father."

"That's not your fault either."

"You shouldn't have done this," Einar said, pointing to the coffin.

"I felt I had to," Erlendur said. "I found out that she died from the same disease as your daughter."

"I'm going to put her back where she belongs," Einar said.

"That's all right," Erlendur said, inching his way over to the coffin. "You'll surely want to put this in the grave too." Erlendur held out the black leather case that he'd kept in his car ever since he left the collector.

"What's that?" Einar asked.

"The disease," Erlendur said.

"I don't understand. ."

"It's Audur's bio-sample. I think we ought to return it to her."

Einar looked at the bag and at Erlendur in turn, unsure of what to do. Erlendur moved even closer until he was beside the coffin, which separated them, and he put the bag down on it and calmly backed away again to where he had been standing before.

"I want to be cremated," Einar suddenly said.

"You've got your whole life to arrange that," Erlendur said.

"Oh yes, a whole life," Einar said, raising his voice. "What's that? What's a life when it's seven years? Can you tell me that? What kind of life is that?"

"I can't answer that," Erlendur said. "Do you have the gun on you?"

"I talked to Elin," Einar said, ignoring his question. "You probably know. We talked about Audur. My sister. I knew about her but I didn't know she was my sister until later. I saw you taking her out of the grave. I could understand Elin when she tried to attack you."

"How did you know about Audur?"

"From the database. I found all the people who died of this particular strain of the disease. I didn't know then that I was Holberg's son and Audur was my sister. I found that out later. How I was conceived. When I asked my mother."

He looked at Erlendur.

"After I discovered I was a carrier."

"How did you link Holberg and Audur?"

"Through the disease. The strain of it. The brain tumour is that rare."

Einar fell silent for a moment and then began giving, methodically and without any digressions or sentimentality, an exact account of his doings, as if he'd been preparing to do so. He never raised his voice but always spoke in the same low tone which sometimes dropped to a whisper. The rain fell to the ground and onto the coffin and the hollow echo from it could be heard in the still of the night. He described how his daughter fell ill out of the blue when she was four years old. The disease proved difficult to diagnose and months went by until the doctors concluded it was a rare neural disease. It was thought to be genetically transmitted and was confined to certain families but the peculiar thing was that it didn't occur on either his mother's or his father's side of the family. It was a kind of deviation or variant strain, which the doctors had difficulty explaining, unless some kind of mutation had taken place.

They said the disease was in the child's brain and could kill her in the space of a couple of years. What followed was a period that Einar said he couldn't begin to describe to Erlendur.

"Have you got any children?" he asked.

"Two," Erlendur said. "A boy and a girl."

"We just had her," he said, "and we split up when she died. Somehow there was nothing to keep us together except the sorrow and memories and the struggles at the hospital. When that was over it was like our lives were over too. There was nothing left."

Einar stopped talking and closed his eyes as if he was about to fall asleep. The rain dripped down his face.

"I was one of the first employees at the new company," he said then. "When the database was set up I seemed to come back to life. I couldn't accept the doctors' answers. I had to find explanations. I regained my interest in finding out how the disease had been transmitted to my daughter, if that was possible. The health database is linked to a genealogy database and the two can be processed together and if you know what you're looking for and have the key to the encryption you can see where the disease lies and you can trace it back along the family tree. You can even see the deviations. Deviations like me. And Audur."

"I talked to Karitas at the Genetic Research Centre," Erlendur said, wondering how he could get through to Einar. "She described to me the trick you played. This is all so new for us. People don't understand exactly what can be done with all the information that's been collected. What it contains and what you can read into it."

"I was beginning to suspect something. My daughter's doctors had a theory it was genetically transmitted. At first I thought I was simply adopted and it would certainly have been better that way. If they'd adopted me. Then I started suspecting my mother. I tricked her into giving me a blood sample. My father too. I couldn't find anything in them. Neither of them. But I found it in me."

"You don't have any symptoms?"

"Very few," Einar said, "I've lost most of my hearing in one ear. There's a tumour by the aural nerve. Benign. And I've got marks on my skin."

"Cafe au lait?"

"You've done your homework. I could have contracted the disease through a genetic change. A mutation. But I thought the other explanation was more plausible. In the end I went to the database and got the names of several carriers my mother could have had a relationship with. Holberg was one of them. She told me the whole story straightaway when I challenged her with my suspicions. How she'd kept quiet about the rape and that I'd never suffered for my origins. On the contrary. I'm the youngest son," he said by way of explanation. "The little baby boy."

"I know," Erlendur said.

"What a thing to hear!" Einar shouted out into the still of the night. "I wasn't my father's son; my real father raped my mother; I was the son of a rapist; he'd given me corrupt genes that hardly touched me but killed my daughter; I had a half-sister who died of the same disease. I still haven't taken it all in. Still haven't managed to grasp it. When my mother told me about Holberg the rage swelled up in me and I just snapped. He was a repulsive character."

"You started by phoning him."

"I wanted to hear his voice. Don't all bastards want to meet their father?" Einar said, a smile playing across his lips. "Even if it is just the once."