Tainted Blood

20

Sigurdur Oli was wondering how to phrase the question. He was holding a list with the names of ten women who'd lived in Husavik before and after 1960 but had since moved to Reykjavik. Two on the list were dead. Two had never had any children. The remaining six had all become mothers during the period when the rape was likely to have occurred. Sigurdur Oli was on his way to visit the first one. She lived on Barmahlid. Divorced. She had three grown-up sons.

But how was he supposed to put the question to these middle-aged women? "Excuse me, madam, I'm from the police and I've been sent to ask you whether you were ever raped in Husavik when you lived there." He talked it over with Elinborg, who had a list with the names of ten other women, but she didn't understand the problem.

Sigurdur Oli regarded it as a futile operation that Erlendur had launched. Even if Ellidi happened to be telling the truth and the time and place fitted and they finally found the right woman after a long search, what guarantees were there that she would talk about the rape at all? She'd kept quiet about it all her life. Why should she start talking about it now? All she needed to say, when Sigurdur Oli or any of the five detectives who were carrying the same kind of list knocked on her door, was "no", and they could say little more than "sorry to bother you." Even if they did find the woman, there were no guarantees that she had in fact had a child as a result of the rape.

"It's a question of responses, you should use psychology," Erlendur had said when Sigurdur Oli tried to make him see the problem. "Try to get into their homes, sit down, accept a coffee, chat, be a bit of a gossip."

"Psychology!" Sigurdur Oli snorted when he got out of his car on Barmahlid and he thought about his partner, Bergthora. He didn't even know how to use psychology on her. They'd met under unusual circumstances some years before, when Bergthora was a witness in a difficult case and after a short romance they decided to start living together. It turned out that they were well suited, had similar interests and both wanted to make a beautiful home for themselves with exclusive furniture and objets d'art, yuppies at heart. They always kissed when they met after a long day at work. Gave each other little presents. Even opened a bottle of wine. Sometimes they went straight to bed when they got home from work, but there'd been considerably less of that recently.

That was after she had given him a pair of very ordinary Finnish Wellington boots for his birthday. He tried to beam with delight but the expression of disbelief stayed on his face for too long and she saw there was something wrong. When he finally smiled, it was false.

"Because you didn't have any," she said.

"I haven't had a pair of Wellington boots since I was. . 10," he said.

"Aren't you pleased?"

"I think they're great," Sigurdur Oli said, knowing that he hadn't answered the question. She knew it too. "No, seriously," he added and could tell he was digging himself a cold grave. "It's fantastic."

"You're not pleased with them," she said morosely.

"Sure I am," he said, still at a total loss because he couldn't stop thinking about the 30,000-krona wristwatch he'd given her for her birthday, bought after a week of explorations all over town and discussions with watchmakers about brands, gold plating, mechanisms, straps, water-tightness, Switzerland and cuckoo clocks. He'd applied all his detective skills to find the right watch, found it in the end and she was ecstatic, her joy and delight were genuine.

Then he was sitting in front of her with his smile frozen on his face and tried to pretend to be overjoyed, but he simply couldn't do it for all his life was worth.

"Psychology?" Sigurdur Oli snorted again.

He rang the bell when he'd arrived at the door of the first lady he was visiting on Barmahlid and asked the question with as much psychological depth as he could muster, but failed miserably. Before he knew it, in a fluster he'd asked the woman on the landing whether she might ever have been raped.

"What the bloody hell are you on about?" the lady said, war paint on her face, finery on her fingers and a ferocious expression which did not look likely to ease up. "Who are you? What kind of a pervert are you anyway?"

"No, sorry," Sigurdur Oli said and was back down the stairs in a split second.

Elinborg had more luck, since she had her mind more on her work and wasn't shy about chatting away to gain people's confidence. Her speciality was cooking, she was an exceptionally interested and capable cook and had no trouble finding a talking point. If the chance presented itself she'd ask what that gorgeous aroma emanating from the kitchen was and even people who'd lived on nothing but popcorn for the past week would welcome her indoors.

She was in the sitting room of a basement flat in Breidholt and accepted a cup of coffee from a lady from Husavik, widowed many years before and the mother of two grown-up children. Her name was Sigurlaug and she was last on Elinborg's list. She'd found it easy to phrase the sensitive question and asked the people she interviewed to contact her if they heard anything in their circle, gossip from Husavik if there was nothing better to be had.

". . and that's why we're looking for a woman of your age from Husavik who might have known Holberg at that time and even maybe had some trouble from him."

"I don't remember anyone called Holberg from Husavik," the woman said. "What kind of trouble do you mean?"

"Holberg just stayed in Husavik for a while," Elinborg said. "So you won't necessarily remember anything about him. He never lived there. And it was physical assault. We know he attacked a woman in the town several decades ago and we're trying to locate her."

"You must have that in your reports."

"The assault was never reported."

"What sort of assault?"

"Rape."

The woman instinctively put her hand to her mouth and her eyes grew to the size of saucers.

"Good Lord!" she said. "I don't know anything about that. Rape! My God! I've never heard about anything like that."

"No, it seems to have been a closely guarded secret," Elinborg said. She deftly dodged probing questions from the woman who wanted to know the details, and talked about preliminary enquiries and mere hearsay. "I was wondering", she said then, "whether you know anyone who might know about this matter." The woman gave her the names of two of her friends from Husavik and said they never missed anything. Elinborg wrote down their names, sat a while longer so as not to be rude, and then took her leave.

Erlendur had a cut on his forehead on which he had put a plaster. One of his two visitors from the previous night was out of action after Erlendur slammed the door on his knee and sent him howling to the floor. The other stared in astonishment at this treatment until the next thing he knew was that Erlendur was up against him on the landing and pushed him, without flinching for a moment, backwards down the stairs. He managed to grab the banister and stop himself falling the whole way down. He didn't fancy tackling Erlendur, who stood at the top of the stairs, with his swollen and bruised forehead; he looked for an instant at his companion lying on the floor roaring in pain, then back at Erlendur, and decided to make himself scarce. He was hardly more than 20.

Erlendur phoned an ambulance and while they waited for it he found out what the men wanted from Eva Lind. The man was reluctant at first, but when Erlendur offered to take a look at his knee he immediately became more talkative. They were debt collectors. Eva Lind owed both money and dope to some man Erlendur had never heard of before.

Erlendur didn't explain his plaster to anyone when he went to work the next day, and no-one dared ask him about it. The door had almost knocked him out when it bounced back off the debt collector's leg and hit him on the head. His forehead still ached, he was anxious about Eva Lind and hadn't been able to sleep much that night, dozing in the chair for the odd hour and hoping his daughter would come back before the situation got out of hand. He stopped in his office just long enough to find out that Gretar had had a sister and his mother was still alive, living at Grund old people's home.

As he'd told Marion Briem, he wasn't looking for Gretar in particular, any more than for the lost girl from Gardabaer, but he didn't think it would do any harm to know more about him. Gretar had been at the party the night Kolbrun was raped. Maybe he'd left behind a memory of that night, a stray detail he'd blurted out. Erlendur didn't expect to find out anything new about his disappearance, Gretar could rest in peace for all he cared, but he'd been interested in missing persons for a long time. Behind each and every one was a horror story, but to his mind there was also something intriguing about people vanishing without trace and no-one knowing why.

Gretar's mother was 90 and blind. Erlendur spoke briefly to the director of the home, who had difficulty in taking her eyes off his forehead, and told him that Theodora was one of the oldest and longest-standing residents there, a perfect member of the community in all respects, loved and admired by the staff and everyone else.

Erlendur was led in to see Theodora and introduced to her. The old woman was sitting in a wheelchair in her room, wearing a dressing gown, covered with a woollen blanket, her long grey hair in a plait running down the back of the chair, her body hunched up, her hands bony and her face kindly. There were few personal belongings there. A framed photograph of John F. Kennedy hung above her bed. Erlendur sat in a chair in front of her, looked into the eyes that could no longer see, and said he wanted to talk about Gretar. Her hearing seemed to be fine and her mind was sharp. She showed no sign of surprise but got straight to the point. Erlendur could tell she was from Skagafjordur. She spoke with a thick northern accent.

"My Gretar wasn't a perfect lad," she said. "To tell you the truth he was an awful wretch. I don't know where he got it from. A cheap wretch. Going around with other wretches, layabouts, riff-raff the lot of them. Have you found him?"

"No," Erlendur said. "One of his friends was murdered recently. Holberg. Maybe you've heard about it."

"I didn't know. He got bumped off, you say?"

Erlendur was amused and for the first time in a long while he saw reason to smile.

"At home. They used to work together in the old days, Holberg and your son. At the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority."

"The last I saw of my Gretar, and I still had decent sight then, was when he came home to see me the same summer as the national festival and stole some money from my purse and a bit of silver. I didn't find out until he'd left again and the money had disappeared. And then Gretar disappeared himself. Like he'd been stolen too. Do you know who stole him?"

"No," Erlendur said. "Do you know what he was up to before he went missing? Who he was in touch with?"

"No idea," the old woman said. "I never knew what Gretar was up to. I told you so at the time."

"Did you know he took photographs?"

"Yes. He took photographs. He was always taking those pictures. I don't know why. He told me once that photos were the mirrors of time, but I didn't have a clue what he was talking about."

"Wasn't that a bit highbrow for Gretar?"

"I'd never heard him talk like that."

"His last address was on Bergstadastraeti where he rented a room. Do you know what happened to his belongings, the camera and films, do you know that?"

"Maybe Klara knows," Theodora said. "My daughter. She cleaned out his room. Threw all that rubbish away, I think."

Erlendur stood up and she followed his movements with her head. He thanked her for her assistance, said she'd been very valuable and he wanted to praise her for how well she looked and how sharp her mind was, but he didn't. He didn't want to patronise her. He looked up along the wall above her bed at the photograph of Kennedy and couldn't restrain himself from asking.

"Why have you got a photograph of Kennedy above your bed?" he said, looking into her vacant eyes.

"Oh," Theodora sighed, "I was so fond of him while he was alive."