Tainted Blood

40

Erlendur didn’t expect Einar to be at home. They went to his flat on Storagerdi straight from Katrin’s house. It was noon and the traffic was heavy. On the way, Erlendur phoned Sigurdur Oli to describe the developments. They needed to ask the public about Einar’s whereabouts. Find a photograph of him to put in the papers and on television along with a short announcement. They arranged to meet on Storagerdi. When Erlendur arrived there he got out of the car and Elinborg drove off. Erlendur waited a while for Sigurdur Oli. The flat was in the basement of a three-storey house with the front door at street level. They rang the bell and hammered on the door but there was no answer. They tried the floors above and it turned out that Einar rented from the owner of one of the other flats, who had come home for lunch but was willing to go down with them and open his tenant’s flat. He said he hadn’t seen Einar for several days, possibly even a week; said he was a quiet man, had no complaints about him. He always paid the rent promptly. Couldn’t imagine what the police wanted him for in the first place. In order to avoid speculation, Sigurdur Oli said his family hadn’t heard from him and they were trying to find out where he might be. The owner of the flat asked whether they had a warrant to search the house. They didn’t, but would get one later that day. They asked him to excuse them when he had opened the door and they went inside. All the curtains were closed so it was dark inside. It was a very small flat. A sitting room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. Carpets everywhere except in the bathroom and the kitchen, which had linoleum. A television in the sitting room. A sofa in front of the television. The air in the flat was muggy. Instead of opening the curtains Erlendur switched on the sitting-room light so that they could see better.

They stared at the walls in the flat and looked at each other. The walls were covered with words they knew so well from Holberg’s flat, written with ballpoint pen, felt-tip and spray paint. Three words that had once been indecipherable to Erlendur but now became clear.

There were newspapers and magazines spread all around, Icelandic and foreign ones, and scientific textbooks were stacked here and there on the floor of the sitting room and the bedroom. Large photo albums were included in the stacks. In the kitchen were wrappers from takeaway food.

“Paternity,” Sigurdur Oli said, putting on his rubber gloves. “Can we ever be sure about that in Iceland?”

Erlendur started thinking again about genetic research. The Genetic Research Centre had recently begun collecting medical data about all the Ice-landers, past and present, to process into a database containing health information about the whole nation. It was linked up to a genealogy database in which the family of every single Icelander was traced back to the Middle Ages; they called it establishing the Icelandic genetic pool. The main aim was to discover how hereditary illnesses were transmitted, study them genetically and find ways to cure them, and other diseases if possible. It was said that the homogenous nation and lack of miscegenation made Iceland a living laboratory for genetic research.

The Genetic Research Centre and the Ministry of Health, which issued the licence for the database, guaranteed that no outsider could break into the database and announced a complex encryption system for the data which was impossible to crack.

“Are you worried about your paternity?” Erlendur asked. He’d also put on rubber gloves and stepped carefully further into the sitting room. He picked up one of the photo albums and leafed through it. It was old.

“Everyone always said I never resembled my father or mother or anyone else in my family.”

“I’ve always had that feeling too,” Erlendur said.

“What do you mean?”

“That you were a bastard.”

“Glad you’ve got your sense of humour back,” Sigurdur Oli said. “You’ve been a little distant recently.”

“What sense of humour?” Erlendur said.

He flicked through another of the albums. These were old black-and-white photographs. He thought he recognised Einar’s mother in some of them. So the man would be Albert and the boys, their three sons. Einar was the youngest. There were photo-graphs taken at Christmas and on summer holidays, many of them ordinary snapshots taken of the boys in the street or at the kitchen table, wearing patterned, knitted sweaters, which Erlendur remembered from the late ’60s. The elder brothers had let their hair grow long.

Further on in the album the boys were older and with longer hair and they were wearing suits with wide lapels and black shoes with stacked heels. Katrin with her hair waved. The photos were in colour now. Albert beginning to turn grey. Erlendur looked for Einar and when he compared his features with those of his brothers and his parents he could see how different he looked. The other two boys had strong features from their parents, especially their father. Einar was the ugly duckling.

He put the old album down and picked a more recent one. The photographs seemed to have be taken by Einar himself, showing his own family. They didn’t tell such a long story. It was as if Erlendur had dipped into the course of Einar’s life when he was getting to know his wife. He wondered if they were honeymoon photos. They had travelled around Iceland, been to Hornstrandir, he thought. Thorsmork. Herdubreidarlindir. Sometimes they were on bicycles. Sometimes driving a battered old car. Camping photos. Erlendur presumed they had been taken in the mid-’8os.

He flicked quickly through the album, put it down and picked up what looked to him like the most recent one. In it he saw a little girl in a hospital bed with tubes in her arms and an oxygen mask over her face. Her eyes were closed and she was surrounded by instruments. She seemed to be in intensive care. He hesitated for a moment before going on.

Erlendur was surprised by the sudden ringing of his mobile phone. He put the album down without closing it. It was Elin from Keflavik and she was very agitated.

“He was with me this morning,” she said at once.

“Who?”

“Audur’s brother. His name’s Einar. I tried to get hold of you. He was with me this morning and told me the whole story, the poor man. He lost his daughter, just like Kolbrun. He knew what Audur died of. It’s a disease in Holberg’s family.”

“Where is he now?” Erlendur asked.

“He was so terribly depressed,” Elin said. “He might do something stupid.”

“What do you mean, stupid?”

“He said it was over.”

“What was over?”

“He didn’t say, just said it was over.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“He said he was going back to Reykjavik.”

“To Reykjavik? Where?”

“He didn’t say,” Elin answered.

“Did he give any indication of what he was going to do?”

“No,” Elin said, “none at all. You must find him before he does something stupid. He feels so terrible, the poor man. It’s awful. Absolutely awful. My God, I’ve never known anything like it.”

“What?”

“He’s so like his father. He’s the spitting image of Holberg and he can’t live with that. He just can’t. After he heard what Holberg did to his mother. He says he’s a prisoner inside his own body. He says Holberg’s blood is running through his veins and he can’t stand it.”

“What’s he talking about?”

“It’s as if he hates himself,” Elin said. “He says he isn’t the person he used to be any more, but someone else, and he blames himself for what happened. No matter what I said, he wouldn’t listen to me.”

Erlendur looked down at the photo album, at the girl in the hospital bed.

“Why did he want to meet you?”

“He wanted to know about Audur. All about Audur. What kind of girl she was, how she died. He said I was his new family. Have you ever heard the like?”

“Where could he have gone?” Erlendur said, looking at his watch.

“For God’s sake try to find him before it’s too late.”

“We’ll do our best,” Erlendur said and was about to say goodbye but sensed that Elin had something else to say. “What? Was there anything else?” he asked.

“He saw when you exhumed Audur,” Elin said. “He found out where I was and followed us to the cemetery and saw you take the coffin out of the grave.”