Jar City (17 page)

Elínborg found the woman from Húsavík.

She had two remaining names on her list so she left Óli behind in Nordurmýri with the forensic team. The first woman's reaction was a familiar one, great but somehow predetermined surprise, she'd heard the story elsewhere, even several times. She said that to tell the truth she'd been expecting the police. The second woman, the last one on Elínborg's list, refused to talk to her. Refused to let her in. Closed the door saying she didn't know what Elínborg was talking about and couldn't help her.

But the woman was somehow hesitant. It was as if she needed to summon up all the strength she could muster to say what she wanted and Elínborg felt the role was rehearsed. She behaved as if she'd been expecting the police, but, unlike the others, she didn't want to know anything. Wanted to get rid of Elínborg immediately.

Elínborg could tell she'd found the woman they'd been looking for. She took another look at her documents. The woman's name was Katrín and she was a department manager at Reykjavík City Library. Her husband was the manager of a large advertising agency. She was 60. Three children, all born from 1958 to 1962. She'd moved from Húsavík in '62 and had lived in Reykjavík ever since.

Elínborg rang the bell a second time.

“I think you ought to talk to me,” she said when Katrín opened the door again.

The woman looked at her.

“There's nothing I can help you with,” she said at once, in a surprisingly sharp tone of voice. “I know what the case is about. I've heard the rumours. But I don't know about any rape. Hopefully you'll make do with that. Don't disturb me again.”

She tried to close the door on Elínborg.

“I may make do with that but a detective called Erlendur, who's investigating Holberg's murder, won't. The next time you open the door he'll be standing here and he won't leave. He won't let you slam the door in his face. He could have you brought down the station if things get difficult.”

“Will you please leave me alone,” Katrín said as the door shut against the frame.

I wish I could, Elínborg thought. She took out her mobile phone and called Erlendur, who was just leaving the university. Elínborg described the situation to him. He said he'd be there in ten minutes.

He couldn't see Elínborg anywhere outside Katrín's house when he arrived, but he recognised her car in the parking space. It was a large detached house in Vogar district, two storeys with a double garage. He rang the bell and to his astonishment Elínborg answered the door.

“I think I've found her,” she said in a low voice and let Erlendur in. “She came out to me just now and apologised for her behaviour. She said she'd rather talk to us here than down the station. She'd heard stories about the rape and she was expecting us.”

Elínborg went inside the house ahead of Erlendur and into the sitting room where Katrín was standing. She shook his hand and tried to smile, but didn't make a very good job of it. She was conservatively dressed, wearing a grey skirt and white blouse, with straight, thick hair down to her shoulders, combed to one side. She was tall, with thin legs and small shoulders, pretty with a mild but anxious expression.

Erlendur looked around in the sitting room. It was dominated by books shelved in closed, glass-fronted cupboards. A beautiful writing desk stood by one of the book cupboards, an old but well-preserved leather suite was in the middle of the room, a smoking table in one corner. Paintings on the walls. Little watercolours in beautiful frames, photographs of her family. He took a closer look at them. All the photographs were old. The three boys with their parents. The most recent ones had been taken when they were confirmed. They did not seem to have graduated from school or university, or got married.

“We're going to buy a smaller place,” Katrín said almost apologetically when she saw Erlendur looking around. “It's far too big for us, this huge house.”

Erlendur nodded.

“Your husband, is he at home too?”

“Albert won't be home until late tonight. He's abroad. I was hoping we could talk about this before he gets back.”

“Shouldn't we sit down?” Elínborg asked. Katrín apologised for her rudeness and invited them to sit down. She sat down on the sofa by herself, with Erlendur and Elínborg in the two leather armchairs facing her.

“What exactly is it you want of me?” Katrín asked, looking at them each in turn. “I don't really understand how I fit into the picture. The man's dead. That's nothing to do with me.”

“Holberg was a rapist,” Erlendur said. “He raped a woman in Keflavík and, as a result, she had a child. A daughter. When we starting checking more closely we were told he'd done this before, to a woman from Húsavík, a similar age to the second victim. Holberg may have raped again, later. We don't know. But we need to track down his victim from Húsavík. Holberg was murdered at his home and we have reason to presume that the explanation may be found in his sordid past.”

Erlendur and Elínborg both noticed how his speech didn't seem to have any effect on Katrín. She wasn't shocked at hearing about Holberg's rapes or his daughter, and she asked neither about the woman from Keflavík nor the girl.

“You're not shocked to hear that?” he said.

“No,” Katrín said, “what should I be shocked about?”

“What can you tell us about Holberg?” Erlendur asked after a pause.

“I recognised him at once from the photos in the papers,” Katrín said, and it was as if the last trace of resistance vanished from her voice. Her words turned into a whisper. “Even though he'd changed a lot,” she said.

“We had his photograph on file,” Elínborg said by way of explanation. “The photo was from an HGV licence he had recently renewed. Lorry driver. Drove all over the country.”

“He told me at the time he was a lawyer in Reykjavík.”

“He was probably working for the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority at that time,” Erlendur said.

“I'd just turned 20. Albert and I had two children when it happened. We started living together very young. He was at sea, Albert I mean. That didn't happen very often. He ran a little shop and was an agent for an insurance company.”

“Does he know what happened?” Erlendur asked.

Katrín hesitated for a moment.

“No, I never told him. And I'd prefer it if you didn't tell him now.”

They fell silent.

“Didn't you tell anyone what happened?” Erlendur asked.

“I didn't tell anyone.” She fell silent again.

Erlendur and Elínborg waited.

“I blame myself for it. My God,” she sighed. “I know that isn't right of me. I know it was none of my doing. It was nearly 40 years ago and I'm still accusing myself although I know I shouldn't. Forty years.”

They waited.

“I don't know how much detail you want me to go into. What matters to you. As I said, Albert was at sea. I was out having fun with some friends and we met these men at the dance.”

“These men?” Erlendur interjected.

“Holberg and someone else who was with him. I never found out what his name was. He showed me a little camera that he carried around with him. I spoke to him about photography a bit. They went back to my girlfriend's place with us and we went on drinking there. There was a group of four of us girlfriends who went out together. Two of us were married. After a while I said I wanted to go and he offered to walk me home.”

“Holberg?” Elínborg said.

“Yes, Holberg. I said no and said goodbye to my friends and walked home alone. It wasn't far to walk. But when I opened the door – we lived in a little detached house in a new street they were building inHúsavík – suddenly he was standing behind me. He said something I didn't hear properly, then pushed me inside and closed the door. I was completely taken aback. Didn't know whether to be scared or surprised. The alcohol dulled my senses. Of course I didn't know that man in the slightest, I'd never seen him before that night.”

“So why do you blame yourself?” Elínborg asked.

“I'd been fooling around at the dance a bit,” Katrín said after a while. “I asked him to dance. I don't know why I did it. I'd had a bit to drink and I could never handle alcohol. I was having fun with my friends and let my hair down a bit. Irresponsible. Drunk.”

“But you mustn't blame yourself…” Elínborg began.

“Nothing you say can change that in the slightest,” Katrín said in a subdued tone and looked at Elínborg, “so don't go telling me who I can and can't blame. There's no point.”

“He hung around us at the dance,” she continued after a pause. “Certainly didn't make a bad impression. He was funny and he knew how to make us girls laugh. Played games with us and got us to play along. I remembered later that he had asked about Albert and found out I was at home alone. But he did it in such a way that I never suspected what lay behind it.”

“In principle it's the same story as when Holberg attacked the woman in Keflavík,” Erlendur said. “She let him walk her home, admittedly. Then he asked to use the phone and attacked her in the kitchen.”

“Somehow he turned into a completely different person. Revolting. The things he said. He tore off the coat I was wearing, pushed me inside and called me awful names. He got very worked up. I tried to talk to him but it was useless and when I started to shout for help he jumped on me and silenced me. Then he dragged me into the bedroom…”

She mustered up all the courage she could and told them what Holberg did, systematically and without holding anything back. She hadn't forgotten anything about that evening. On the contrary, she remembered every tiniest detail. Her account was devoid of sentimentality. It was as if she were reading out cold facts from a page. She'd never talked about the incident in this way, with such precision, but she'd created such a distance from it that Erlendur felt she was describing something that had befallen another woman. Not her personally, but someone else. Somewhere else. At another time. In another life.

At one point in her account Erlendur grimaced and Elínborg cursed under her breath.

Katrín stopped talking.

“Why didn't you press charges against that bastard?” Elínborg asked.

“He was like a monster. He threatened to finish me off if I told anyone and the police arrested him. And what was worse, he said if I made an issue of it he'd claim I'd asked him to meet me at home and wanted to sleep with him. He didn't use exactly those words, but I knew what he was getting at. He was incredibly strong, but he hardly left a mark on me. He made sure of that. I started thinking about that later. He hit me in the face a couple of times, but never hard.”

“When did this happen?”

“It was 1961. Late. In the autumn.”

“And wasn't there any aftermath? Didn't you ever see Holberg again or…

“No. I never saw him after that. Not until I saw the photo of him in the paper.”

“You moved away from Húsavík?”

“That was what we'd planned to do anyway really. Albert always had it in the back of his mind. I wasn't against it so much after that. The people in Húsavík are nice and it's a good place to live, but I've never been back there since.”

“You had two children before, sons from the look of them,” Erlendur said, nodding in the direction of the confirmation photographs, “and then you had the third son…when?”

“Two years later,” Katrín said.

Erlendur looked at her and could see that, for some reason, for the first time in their conversation, she was lying.

“Why did you stop there?” Elínborg said when they left the house and went into the street.

She'd had trouble concealing her surprise when Erlendur suddenly thanked Katrín for being so cooperative. He said he knew how difficult it was for her to talk about these things and he'd make sure that nothing they had talked about would go any further. Elínborg gaped. They were only just starting to talk.

“She'd started lying,” Erlendur said. “It's too much of an ordeal for her. We'll meet her later. Her phone needs tapping and we should have a car outside the house to check on her movements and any visitors. We need to find out what her sons do, get recent photos of them if we can, but without drawing attention to ourselves, and we need to locate people who knew Katrín in Húsavík and could even remember that evening, although that might be a bit of a long shot. I asked Sigurdur Óli to contact the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority to see if they can tell us when Holberg worked for them in Húsavík. Maybe he's done that by now. Get a copy of Katrín and Albert's marriage certificate to find out the year they were married.”

Erlendur had got into his car.

“And Elínborg, you can come along the next time we talk to her.”

“Is anyone capable of doing what she described?” Elínborg asked, her mind still on Katrín's story.

“With Holberg it seems anything's possible,” Erlendur replied.

He drove down into Nordurmýri. Sigurdur Óli was still there. He'd contacted the phone company about the calls made to Holberg the weekend he was murdered. Two were from the Iceland Transport yard where he worked and another three were from public telephones: two from a phone box on Laekjargata and one from a payphone at Hlemmur Bus Station.

“Anything else?”

“Yes, the porn on his computer. Forensics have looked at quite a lot of it and it's appalling. Downright sick. All the worst stuff you can find on the Internet, including animals and children. That guy was a total pervert. I think they gave up looking at it.”

“Maybe there's no need to subject them to it any more,” said Erlendur.

“It does give us a small picture of what a filthy, disgusting creep he was,” Sigurdur Óli said

“Do you mean he deserved to be smashed over the head and killed?” Erlendur said.

“What do you think?”

“Have you asked the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority about Holberg?”

“No.”

“Get a move on then.”

“Is he waving to us?” Sigurdur Óli asked. They were standing in front of Holberg's house. One of the forensic team had come out of the basement and was standing there in his white overalls waving to them to come over. He seemed quite excited. They got out of the car, went down into the basement and the forensic technician gestured to them to come over to one of the screens. He was holding a remote control which he told them operated the camera that had been inserted into one of the holes in the corner of the sitting room.

They watched the screen, but they couldn't see anything on it that they could at all identify. The image was speckled, poorly lit, blurred and dull. They could see gravel and the underside of the flooring, but otherwise nothing unusual. Some time passed until the technician couldn't hold back any longer.

“It's this thing here,” he said, pointing to the top centre of the screen. “Right up underneath the flooring.”

“What?” said Erlendur, who couldn't see a thing.

“Can't you see it?” the forensics technician said.

“What?” Sigurdur Óli said.

“The ring.”

“The ring?” Erlendur said.

“That's clearly a ring we've found under the floor. Can't you see it?”

They squinted at the screen until they thought they could make out an object that could well be a ring. It was unclear, as if something was blocking the view. They couldn't see anything else.

“It's as if there's something in the way,” Sigurdur Óli said.

“It could be insulating plastic like they use in building,” the technician said. More people had gathered around the screen to watch what was happening. “Look at this thing here,” he continued, “This line by the ring. It could easily be a finger. There's something lying out in the corner that I think we ought to take a closer look at.”

“Break up the floor,” Erlendur ordered. “Let's see what it is.”

The forensic team went to work at once. They marked out the spot on the sitting-room floor and began breaking it up with the pneumatic drill. A fine concrete dust swirled around the basement and Erlendur and Sigurdur Óli put gauze masks over their mouths. They stood behind the technicians, watching the hole widening in the floor. The base plate was seven or eight inches thick and it took the drill some time to get through it.

Once they'd broken through, the hole quickly widened. The men swept the concrete fragments away as fast as they were chipped loose and they could soon see the plastic that had been revealed by the camera. Erlendur looked at Sigurdur Óli, who nodded at him.

The plastic came increasingly into view. Erlendur thought it was thick building insulation plastic. It was impossible to see through. He'd forgotten the noise in the basement, the revolting stench and the dust swirling up. Sigurdur Óli had taken his mask off to see better. He bent down and called over the forensic team which was breaking up the floor.

“Is this how they open the Pharaohs' tombs in Egypt?” he asked and the tension eased a little.

“Except I'm afraid there's no Pharaoh under here,” Erlendur said.

“Could it actually be that we've found Grétar under Holberg's floor?” Sigurdur Óli said in eager anticipation. “After twenty-fucking-five years! Bloody brilliant!”

“His mother was right,” Erlendur said.

“Grétar's mother?”

“‘It was like he'd been stolen,' she said.”

“Wrapped up in plastic and stashed away under the floor.”

“Marion Briem,” Erlendur muttered to himself and shook his head.

The forensic team bored away with their electric drills, the floor split open under the pressure and the hole widened until the entire plastic package could be seen. It was the length of an average man. The forensic team discussed how they ought to go about opening it. They decided to remove it from the floor cavity in one piece and not touch it until they'd taken it to the morgue on BarÓnsstígur where it could be handled without the loss of any potential evidence.

They fetched a stretcher they had taken into the basement the night before and put it next to the hole in the floor. Two of them tried to lift the plastic package, but it turned out to be too heavy, so another two went down to help them. Soon it began to budge and they worked it free from its surroundings, lifted it out and placed it on the stretcher.

Erlendur went up to the package, bent over it and tried to see through the plastic. He thought he could make out a face, shrivelled and rotten, teeth and part of a nose. He straightened up again.

“He doesn't look so bad, considering,” he said.

“What's that?” Sigurdur Óli asked, leaning down into the hole.

“What?” Erlendur said.

“Are those rolls of film?” Sigurdur Óli said.

Erlendur went up closer, knelt down and saw rolls of photographic film half buried in the gravel. Yards of film spread all around. He was hoping that some of it had been used.