Tainted Blood

10

He was raking up leaves in his garden when Erlendur saw him. He didn’t look up until Erlendur had been standing watching him for a long time as he toiled away with the slow movements of an old man. He wiped a drip from the end of his nose. It didn’t seem to matter that it was raining and the leaves were stuck together and awkward to deal with. He did nothing hurriedly, hooked the leaves with his rake and tried to scrape them into little piles. He still lived in Keflavik. Born and bred there.

Erlendur had asked Elinborg to collect information about him and she’d dug up the main details about the old man whom Erlendur now watched in the garden; his police career, the numerous criticisms of his conduct and procedures during his many years in the force, the handling of Kolbrun’s case and how he had been specifically reprimanded over it. She phoned back with the information while Erlendur was sitting over a meal, still in Keflavik. He considered saving the visit until the following day, then thought to himself that he couldn’t be bothered driving there and back in a raging storm so he would just go direct.

The man was wearing a green parka and a baseball cap. His white, bony hands held the shaft of the rake. He was tall and had obviously once been sturdier and cut a more authoritative figure but he was old, wrinkled and runny-nosed now. Erlendur watched him, an old man pottering around in his garden. The man looked up from his leaves, but paid no particular attention to his observer. A good while passed like this until Erlendur decided to make a move.

“Why doesn’t her sister want to talk to me?” he said and the old man looked up with a start.

“Eh? What was that?” The man stopped what he was doing. “Who are you?” he asked.

“How did you treat Kolbrun when she came to you to press charges?” Erlendur asked.

The old man looked at this stranger who had entered his garden, and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He looked Erlendur up and down.

“Do I know you?” he said. “What are you talking about? Who are you?”

“My name’s Erlendur. I’m investigating the murder of a man from Reykjavik by the name of Holberg. He was accused of rape almost 4oyears ago. You were in charge of the investigation. The woman who was raped was called Kolbrun. She’s dead. Her sister won’t talk to the police for reasons I’m trying to establish. She said to me, ’After what you did to her.’ I’d like you to tell me what she’s referring to.”

The man looked at Erlendur without saying a word. Looked him in the eye and remained silent.

“What did you do to her?” Erlendur repeated.

“I can’t remember .… what right have you got? What kind of an insult is this anyway?” His voice was trembling slightly. “Get out of my garden or I’ll call the police.”

“No, Runar, I am the police. And I don’t have time for any of this bollocks.”

Runar thought it over. “Is this the new method? Attacking people with accusations and abuse?”

“Good of you to mention methods and abuse,” Erlendur said. “At one time you ran up eight charges for breaches of duty, including brutality. I don’t know who you had to serve to keep your job, but you didn’t do him well enough towards the end because eventually you left the police in disgrace. Dismissed…”

“You shut up,” said Runar, looking around shiftily. “How dare you.”

“… for repeated sexual harassment.”

His white, bony hands tightened their grip on the rake, stretching his pallid skin until the knuckles stood out. His face closed up, hateful lines around his mouth, his stare narrowed until his eyes were half closed. On his way to see him, while the information from Elinborg was running through his mind like an electric shock, Erlendur had wondered whether Runar should be condemned for what he’d done in another life, when he was a different man. Erlendur had been in the police force long enough to have heard the stories about him, about the trouble he caused. He had in fact met Runar a couple of times many years before, but the man he now saw in the garden was so old and decrepit that it took Erlendur a while to be sure that it was the same person. Stories about Runar still circulated among the police. Erlendur had once read that the past was a different country and he could understand that. He understood that times change and people too. But he wasn’t prepared to erase the past.

They stood in the garden facing one another.

“What about Kolbrun?” Erlendur said.

“Bugger off!”

“Not until you tell me about Kolbrun.”

“She was a fucking whore!” Runar suddenly said between clenched teeth. “So take that and bugger off! Everything she said about me and to me was bloody lies. There wasn’t any fucking rape. She lied the whole time!”

Erlendur visualised Kolbrun sitting in front of this man all those years ago when she filed the rape charge. He imagined her gradually mustering up her courage until finally she dared to go to the police to tell what had happened to her. He imagined the terror she’d experienced and, above all else, wanted to forget as if it had never occurred, as if it had merely been a nightmare from which she’d eventually wake. Then she realised she would never wake up. She had been defiled. She’d been attacked and she’d been plundered.

“She turned up three days after the incident and accused the man of rape,” Runar said. “It wasn’t very convincing.”

“So you threw her back out,” Erlendur said.

“She was lying.”

“And you laughed at her and belittled her and told her to forget it. But she didn’t forget it, did she?”

The old man looked at Erlendur with loathing in his eyes.

“She went to Reykjavik, didn’t she?” Erlendur said.

“Holberg was never convicted.”

“Thanks to whom, do you reckon?”

Erlendur imagined Kolbrun wrangling with Runar at the office. Wrangling with him! That man! Arguing the truth of what she’d been through. Trying to convince him she was telling the truth as if he were the supreme judge in her case.

She had to summon all her strength to relate the events of that night to him and tried to give a systematic account, but it was just too painful. She couldn’t describe it. Couldn’t describe something indescribable, repulsive, hideous. Somehow she man-aged to piece together her disjointed story. Was that a grin? She didn’t understand why the policeman was grinning. She had the impression it was a grin, but it couldn’t be. Then he started questioning her about the details.

“Tell me exactly what it was like.”

She looked at him, confused. Hesitantly began her story again.

“No, I’ve heard that. Tell me exactly what happened. You were wearing panties. How did he get your panties off? How did he get it inside you?”

Was he serious? Eventually she asked if there were any women working there.

“No. If you want to charge this man with rape, you have to be more precise than this, understand? Had you led him on somehow so he might have thought you were up for it?”

Up for it? She told him in an almost inaudible voice that she certainly had not.

“You’ll have to speak up. How did he get your panties off?”

She was sure it was a grin. He questioned her brashly, queried what she said, was rude, some of the questions were downright abusive, filthy, he behaved as though she had provoked the assault, had wanted to have sex with the man, perhaps changed her mind but then it was too late, you know, too late to back out of that kind of thing. “There’s no point in going to a dancehall, flirting with the man and then stopping halfway. No point at all,” he said.

She was sobbing when she eventually opened her handbag, took out a plastic bag and handed it to him. He opened the bag and took out her ripped panties…

Runar let go of the rake and was about to walk past Erlendur, but Erlendur blocked his way and pinned him against the wall of the house. They looked each other in the eye.

“She gave you some evidence,” Erlendur said. “The only evidence she had. She was certain Holberg had left something behind.”

“She never gave me anything,” Runar hissed. “Leave me alone.”

“She gave you a pair of panties.”

“She was lying.”

“They should have fired you on the spot. You pathetic fucking beast.” With an expression of revulsion Erlendur backed slowly away from the decrepit old man now huddled against the wall.

“I was just showing her what to expect if she pressed charges,” he said in a squeaky voice. “I was doing her a favour. The courts laugh at that kind of case.”

Erlendur turned around and walked away, wondering how God, if he existed, could possibly justify allowing someone like Runar live to an old age but taking the life of an innocent 4-year-old girl.

He planned to go back to see Kolbrun’s sister but called in at the Keflavik library first. He walked among the bookshelves, running his eyes over the spines of the books until he found the Bible. Erlendur knew the Bible well. He opened it at the Psalms and found No. 64. He found the line that was inscribed on the headstone. “Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.”

He had remembered correctly. The epitaph was a continuation of the first line of the Psalm. Erlendur read it over several times, pensively tracing his fingers across the lines, and quietly repeating the sentence to himself as he stood by the bookshelf.

The first line of the Psalm was a plea to the Lord. Erlendur could almost hear the woman’s silent cry across the years.

“Hear my voice, O God, in my prayer.”