Tainted Blood

11

Erlendur pulled up outside the corrugated-iron-clad white house and switched off the engine. He stayed in the car and finished his cigarette. He was trying to cut back on smoking and was down to five a day when things went well. This was number eight that day and it wasn’t even 3 p.m.

He got out of the car, walked up the steps to the house and rang the bell. He waited a good while, but nothing happened. He rang again, but with no result. He put his face to the window and saw the green raincoat and umbrella and boots. He rang a third time, stood on the top step and tried to keep out of the rain. Suddenly, the door opened and Elin glared at him.

“Leave me alone, you hear? Go away! Get out!” She tried to slam the door but Erlendur blocked it with his foot.

“We’re not all like Runar,” he said. “I know your sister wasn’t treated fairly. I went and talked to Runar. What he did is inexcusable, but it can’t be changed now. He’s senile and geriatric and he’ll never see anything wrong in what he did.”

“Will you leave me alone!”

“I have to talk to you. If it doesn’t work like this I’ll have to bring you in for questioning. I want to avoid that.” He took the photograph from the cemetery out of his pocket and slipped it through the crack in the door. “I found this photo in Holberg’s flat,” he said.

Elin didn’t answer him. A long while passed. Erlendur held the photo through the opening in the door, but he couldn’t see Elin, who was still pushing against it. Gradually he felt the pressure on his foot easing and Elin took the photograph. Soon the door was open. She went inside holding the photograph. Erlendur stepped inside and closed the door care-fully behind him.

Elin disappeared into a little sitting room and for a moment Erlendur wondered if he ought to take off his wet shoes. He wiped them on the mat and followed Elin into the sitting room, past the tidy kitchen and study. In the sitting room there were pictures and embroidery in gilded frames on the walls and a small electric organ in one corner.

“Do you recognise this photo?” Erlendur asked cautiously.

“I’ve never seen it before,” she said.

“Did your sister have any contact with Holberg after the… incident?”

“None that I knew of. Never. You can imagine.”

“Wasn’t a blood test taken to determine if he was the father?”

“What for?”

“It would have backed up your sister’s statement. That she was raped.”

She looked up from the photo and gave him a long stare, then said, “You’re all the same, you police. Too lazy to do your homework.”

“Really?”

“Haven’t you looked into the case?”

“The main details. I thought.”

“Holberg didn’t deny they had sex. He was smarter than that. He denied it was rape. He said my sister wanted him. Said she’d enticed him and invited him back to her place. That was his big defence. That Kolbrun had sex with him of her own free will. He played innocent. Played innocent, the bastard.”

“But…”

“Kolbrun didn’t care about proving paternity. She didn’t want him to have anything to do with her child. Proving that Holberg was Audur’s father wouldn’t have made any difference to her rape claim so a blood test would have been futile.”

“I hadn’t realised.”

“All my sister had was a pair of ripped panties,” Elin went on. “She didn’t look very roughed up. She wasn’t strong, couldn’t put up much of a fight, and she told me she was almost paralysed with fright when he started groping at her in the kitchen. He forced her into the bedroom and had his way with her there. Twice. Held her down and groped and talked filth until he was ready to do it again. It took her three days to pluck up the courage to go to the police. The medical examination they gave her later didn’t help either. She never understood what made him attack her. She accused herself of provoking what he did. She thought she might have been leading him on at that party they went to after the dancehall closed. That she said something or suggested something that might have aroused him. She blamed herself. I expect that’s a common reaction.”

Elin stopped talking for a moment.

“When she finally acted, she ran into Runar,” she continued. “I would have gone with her, but she was so ashamed that she didn’t tell anyone what had happened until long afterwards. Holberg threatened her. Said that if she did anything about it he’d come back and torture her. When she went to the police she thought she was heading for safety. She’d be helped. They’d look after her. It wasn’t until Runar sent her back home, after playing around with her and taking her panties and telling her to forget it, that she came to me.”

“The panties were never found,” Erlendur said. “Runar denied…”

“Kolbrun said she gave them to him and I never knew my sister to lie. I don’t know what that man was thinking of. I see him walking around town here sometimes, in the supermarket or at the fish shop. I shouted at him once. Couldn’t control myself. He looked as if he enjoyed it. Grinned. Kolbrun talked about that grin of his once. He said he’d never been given any panties and her statement was so vague he thought she was under the influence. That’s why he sent her home.”

“He was given a warning in the end,” Erlendur said, “but it didn’t have much effect. Runar was always getting warnings. He was well known as a thug in the police but someone was protecting him, that is, until he couldn’t be protected any more. Then he was dismissed.”

“There were insufficient grounds for bringing charges, that’s what they said. What Runar said was right, Kolbrun should just have forgotten it. Of course she dithered around for a long time, too long, and she was stupid enough to clean up the whole house from top to bottom, her bedclothes too, removed all the evidence. She kept the panties. After all that she still tried to keep some piece of evidence. As if she felt it would be enough. As if it was enough just to tell the truth. She wanted to wash the incident clean from her life. She didn’t want to live with it. And, as I said, she didn’t look too roughed up. She had a split lip where he held her mouth and one of her eyes was bloodshot but there were no other injuries.”

“Did she get over it?”

“Never. She was a very sensitive woman, my sister. A beautiful soul and easy prey for anyone to harm. Like Holberg. Like Runar. They sensed that, both of them. They attacked her in their own separate ways. Savaged their prey.” She looked down at the floor. “The beasts.”

Erlendur waited for a moment before continuing.

“How did she react when she discovered she was pregnant?” he asked.

“Very sensibly, I thought. She decided straight-away to be happy about the child despite the circumstances, and she genuinely loved Audur. They were very attached to each other and my sister took particularly good care of her daughter. Did every-thing she could for her. That poor sweet girl.”

“So Holberg knew the child was his?”

“Of course he knew, but he denied it completely. Said she was nothing to do with him. Accused my sister of sleeping around.”

“They never kept in contact then, not about their daughter or…”

“Contact! Never. How could you imagine such a thing? That could never have happened.”

“Kolbrun couldn’t have sent him the photo?”

“No. No, I can’t imagine that. That’s out of the question.”

“He could have taken it himself. Or someone who knew the background took it and sent it to him. Maybe he saw the death announcement in the papers. Were any obituaries written about Audur?”

“There was a death announcement in the local paper. I wrote a short obituary. He could have read that.”

“Is Audur buried here in Keflavik?”

“No, we’re from Sandgerdi, my sister and me, and there’s a small cemetery at Hvalsnes, just outside it. Kolbrun wanted her to be buried there. It was the middle of winter. Took them ages to dig the grave.”

“The death certificate says she had a brain tumour.”

“That was the explanation they gave my sister. She just died. Died on us, poor little thing, and we couldn’t do a thing, in her fourth year.”

Elin looked up from the photograph to Erlendur. “She just died.”

It was dark in the house and the words echoed through the gloom full of questioning and grief. Elin stood up slowly and switched on the dull light of a standard lamp as she walked out to the hallway and into the kitchen. Erlendur heard her turn on the tap, fill something with water, pour it, open a tin, he smelled the aroma of coffee. He stood up and looked at the pictures on the walls. They were drawings and paintings. A pastel by a child was in a thin black frame. Eventually he found what he was looking for. There were two, probably taken two years apart. Photographs of Audur.

The earlier photo had been taken at a studio. It was black-and-white. The girl was probably no more than one year old and was sitting on a big cushion wearing a pretty dress, with a ribbon in her hair and a rattle in one hand. She was half turned towards the photographer and was smiling, showing four little teeth. In the other she was aged about three. Erlendur imagined her mother had taken it. It was in colour. The girl was standing among some shrubs and the sun was shining straight down on her. She was wearing a thick red jumper and a little skirt, with white socks and black shoes with shiny buckles. She was looking directly into the camera. Her expression serious. Maybe she’d refused to smile.

“Kolbrun never got over it,” said Elin, from the sitting-room doorway. Erlendur stood up straight.

“That must be the worst thing anyone could go through,” he said, taking a cup of coffee. Elin sat back down on the sofa with her cup and Erlendur sat down facing her again and sipped his coffee.

“Do smoke if you want to,” she said.

“I’m trying to stop,” Erlendur said, trying not to sound apologetic. His thoughts turned to the pain he had in his chest but nevertheless he fished a crumpled pack out of his coat pocket and took one out. His ninth cigarette of the day. She pushed an ashtray towards him.

“Mercifully she didn’t take long to die,” Elin said. “Started feeling pains in her head. As if she had a headache, and the doctor who examined her only ever talked about child migraine. He gave her some pills, but they didn’t do any good. He wasn’t a good doctor. Kolbrun told me she smelled alcohol on his breath and she was worried about it. But then it all happened so suddenly. The girl’s condition got worse. There was mention of a skin tumour that her doctor should have noticed. Marks. They called them cafe au lait at the hospital. Mainly under her arms. Finally she was sent to the hospital here in Keflavik where they decided it was some kind of neural tumour. It turned out to be a brain tumour. The whole thing took about six months.”

Elin fell silent. “As I said, Kolbrun was never the same after that,” she sighed. “I don’t expect anyone could get over such a tragedy.”

“Was an autopsy performed on Audur?” Erlendur asked, imagining the little body lit up by fluorescent lights on a cold steel table with a Y-cut across the chest.

“Kolbrun wouldn’t entertain the idea,” Elin said, “but she had no say in the matter. She went crazy when she found out they’d opened her up. Went mad with grief, of course, after her child died, and she wouldn’t listen to anyone. She couldn’t bear to think of her little girl being cut open. She was dead and nothing could change that. The autopsy con-firmed the diagnosis. They found a malignant tumour in her brain.”

“And your sister?”

“Kolbrun committed suicide three years later. She fell into an uncontrollable depression and needed medical care. Spent a while at a psychiatric ward in Reykjavik, then came back home to Keflavik. I tried to look after her as best I could but it was like she’d been switched off. She had no will to live. Audur had brought happiness into her life in spite of those terrible circumstances. But now she was gone.”

Elin looked at Erlendur. “You’re probably wondering how she went about it.”

Erlendur didn’t reply.

“She got into the bath and slashed both her wrists. Bought razor blades to do it with.”

Elin stopped talking and the gloom in the sitting room enveloped them. “Do you know what comes into my mind when I think about that suicide? It’s not the blood in the bath. Not my sister lying in the red water. Not the cuts. It’s Kolbrun in the shop, buying the razor blades. Handing over the money for the razor blades. Counting out the coins.”

Elin stopped talking.

“Don’t you think it’s funny the way your mind works?” she asked, as if she were talking to herself.

Erlendur didn’t know how to answer her.

“I found her,” Elin continued. “She set it up like that. Phoned me and asked me to come round that evening. We had a short chat. I was always on my guard because of her depression but she seemed to be improving towards the end. As if the fog was lifting. As if she was capable of tackling life again. There was no sign in her voice that evening that she was planning to kill herself. Far from it. We talked about the future. We were going to travel together. When I found her there she was at peace in a way I hadn’t seen for ages. Peace and acceptance. But I know she didn’t accept it in the slightest and she found no peace in her soul.”

“I have to ask you one thing and then I’ll leave you alone,” Erlendur said. “I have to hear your answer.”

“What’s that.”

“Do you have any knowledge about Holberg’s murder?”

“No, I don’t.”

“And you had no part in it, directly or indirectly?”

“No.”

They remained silent for a short while.

“The epitaph she chose for her daughter was about the enemy,” Erlendur said.

“’Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.’ She chose it herself, even though it didn’t go on her own gravestone,” Elin said. She stood up, walked over to a beautiful glass-fronted cabinet, opened a drawer in it and took out a little black box. She opened it with a key, lifted up some envelopes and took out a little piece of paper. “I found this on the kitchen table the night she died, but I’m not sure if she wanted me to have it inscribed on her gravestone. I doubt it. I don’t think I realised how much she’d suffered until I saw this.”

She handed Erlendur the piece of paper and he read the first five words from the Psalm he’d looked up in the Bible earlier: “Hear my voice, O God.”