Tainted Blood

5

“Where have you been?” Sigurdur Oli asked Erlendur when he came back to work, but he received no answer.

“Has Eva Lind tried to contact me?” he asked.

Sigurdur Oli said he didn’t think so. He knew about Erlendur’s daughter and her problems, but neither of them ever mentioned it. Personal matters seldom entered into their conversations.

“Anything new on Holberg?” Erlendur asked and walked straight into his office. Sigurdur Oli followed him and closed the door. Murders were rare in Reykjavik and generated enormous publicity on the few occasions they were committed. The CID made it a rule not to inform the media of details of their investigations unless absolutely necessary. That did not apply in this case.

“We know a little more about him,” Sigurdur Oli said, opening a file he was holding. “He was born in Saudarkrokur, 69 years old. Spent his last years working as a lorry driver for Iceland Transport. Still worked there on and off.”

Sigurdur Oli paused.

“Shouldn’t we talk to his workmates?” he said, straightening his tie. Sigurdur Oli was wearing a new suit, tall and handsome, a graduate in criminology from an American university. He was everything that Erlendur was not: modern and organised.

“What do people in the office think?” Erlendur asked, twiddling with a loose button on his cardigan which eventually dropped into his palm. He was stout and well-built with bushy ginger hair, one of the most experienced detectives on the team. He generally got his way. His superiors and colleagues had long since given up doing battle with him. Things had turned out that way over the years. Erlendur didn’t dislike it.

“Probably some nutcase,” Sigurdur Oli said. “At the minute we’re looking for that green army jacket. Some kid who wanted money but panicked when Holberg refused.”

“What about Holberg’s family? Did he have any?”

“No family, but we haven’t got all the information yet. We’re still gathering it together; family, friends, workmates.”

“From the look of his flat I’d say he was single and had been for a long time.”

“You would know, of course,” Sigurdur Oli blurted out, but Erlendur pretended not to hear.

“Anything from the pathologist? Forensics?”

“The provisional report’s in. Nothing in it we didn’t know. Holberg died from a blow to the head. It was a heavy blow, but basically it was the shape of the ashtray, the sharp edges, that were decisive. His skull caved in and he died instantly… or almost. He seems to have struck the corner of the coffee table as he fell. He had a nasty wound on his forehead that fitted the corner of the table. The fingerprints on the ashtray were Holberg’s but then there are at least two other sets, one of which is also on the pencil.”

“Are they the murderer’s then?”

“There’s every probability that they are the murderer’s, yes.”

“Right, a typical clumsy Icelandic murder.”

“Typical. And that’s the assumption we’re working on.”

It was still raining. The low-pressure fronts that moved in from deep in the Atlantic at that time of year headed east across Iceland in succession, bringing wind, wet and dark winter gloom. The CID was still at work in the building in Nordurmyri. The yellow police tape that had been set up around the building reminded Erlendur of the electricity board; a hole in the road, a filthy tent over it, a flicker of light inside the tent, all neatly gift-wrapped with yellow tape. In the same way, the police had wrapped the murder scene up with neat yellow plastic tape with the name of the authority printed on it. Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli met Elinborg and the other detectives who had been combing the building through the autumn night and into the morning and were just finishing their job.

People from neighbouring buildings were questioned but none of them had noticed any suspicious movements at the murder scene between the Monday morning and the time the body was found.

Soon there was no-one left in the building but Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli. The blood on the carpet had turned black. The ashtray had been removed as evidence. The pencil and pad too. In other respects it was as though nothing had happened. Sigurdur Oli went to look in the den and the passage to the bedroom, while Erlendur walked around the sitting room. They put on white rubber gloves. Prints were mounted and framed on the walls and looked as if they’d been bought at the front door from travelling salesmen. In the bookcase were thrillers in translation, paperbacks from a book club, some of them read, others apparently untouched. No interesting hard-bound volumes. Erlendur bent down almost to the floor to read the titles on the bottom shelf and recognised only one: Lolita by Nabokov; paperback. He took it from the bookshelf. It was an English edition and had clearly been read.

He replaced the book and inched his way towards the desk. It was L-shaped and took up one corner of the sitting room. A new, comfortable office chair was by the desk, with a plastic mat underneath it to protect the carpet. The desk looked much older than the chair. There were drawers on both sides underneath the broader desktop and a long one in the middle, nine in all. On the shorter desktop stood a 17-inch computer monitor with a sliding tray for a keyboard fitted beneath it. The tower was kept on the floor. All the drawers were locked.

Sigurdur Oli went through the wardrobe in the bedroom. It was reasonably organised, with socks in one drawer, underwear in another, trousers, sweaters. Some shirts and three suits were hanging on a rail, the oldest suit from the disco era, Sigurdur Oli thought, brown striped. Several pairs of shoes on the wardrobe floor. Bedclothes in the top drawer. The man had made his bed before his visitor arrived. A white blanket covered the duvet and pillow. It was a single bed.

On the bedside table were an alarm clock and two books, one a series of interviews with a well-known politician and the other a book of photographs of Scania-Vabis trucks. The bedside table had a cupboard in it too, containing medicine, surgical spirit, sleeping pills, Panadol and a small jar of Vaseline.

“Can you see any keys anywhere?” asked Erlendur, who was now by the door.

“No keys. Door keys, you mean?”

“No, to the desk.”

“None of those either.”

Erlendur went into the den and from there into the kitchen. He opened drawers and cupboards but could see only cutlery and glasses, ladles and plates. No keys. He went over to the hangers by the door, frisked the coats but found nothing except a little black pouch with a ring of keys and some coins in it. Two small keys were hanging from the ring with others to the front door, to the flat and to the rooms. Erlendur tried them on the desk. The same one fitted all nine drawers.

He opened the large drawer in the centre of the desk first. It contained mainly bills — telephone, electricity, heating and credit-card bills — and also a newspaper subscription. The bottom two drawers to the left were empty and in the next one up were tax forms and wage slips. In the top drawer was a photograph album. All black-and-white, old photographs of people from various times, sometimes dressed up in what appeared to be the sitting room in Nordurmyri, sometimes on picnics: dwarf birch, Gullfoss waterfall and Geysir. He saw two photo-graphs that he thought might be of the murdered man when he was young, but nothing taken recently.

He opened the drawers on the right-hand side. The top two were empty. In the third he found a pack of cards, a folding chess set, an old inkwell.

He found the photograph underneath the bottom drawer.

Erlendur was closing the bottom drawer again when he heard what sounded like a slight rustling from inside it. When he opened and closed it again he heard the same rustling. It rubbed against something on its way in. He sighed and squatted down, looked inside but could see nothing. He pulled it back out but heard nothing, then closed it and the noise came again. He knelt on the floor, pulled the drawer right out, saw something stuck and stretched out to get it.

It was a small black-and-white photograph, showing a grave in a cemetery in wintertime. He didn’t recognise the cemetery. There was a headstone on the grave and most of the inscription on it was fairly clear. A woman’s name was carved there.AUDUR. No second name. Erlendur couldn’t see the dates very clearly. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his glasses, put them on and held the photograph up to his nose. 1964-1968. He could vaguely make out an epitaph, but the letters were small and he could not read it. Carefully he blew the dust off the photo.

The girl was only four when she died.

Erlendur looked up as the autumn rain thrashed against the windows. It was the middle of the day but the sky was a gloomy black.