Jar City (22 page)

The rain had been gradually letting up and now it stopped. The lantern cast a yellow glow onto the ground and the rain, which ran in little streams down the path by the graves. They stood motionless, facing one another, with the coffin between them, looking each other in the eye.

“He must have been shocked to see you,” Erlendur said eventually. He knew the police were on their way to the cemetery and he wanted to make the most of this time he had with Einar before the fuss began. He also knew Einar was almost certainly armed. There was no sign of the shotgun but he couldn't rule out that Einar had it with him. Einar had one hand inside his coat.

“You should have seen his face,” Einar said. “It was like he'd seen a ghost from the past, and that ghost was his own self.”

Holberg stood in the doorway looking at the man who rang the bell. He had never seen him before but still he recognised the face immediately.

“Hello, Dad,” Einar said sarcastically. He couldn't hide his rage.

“Who are you?” Holberg said, astonished.

“I'm your son,” Einar said.

“What is all this…are you the one who's been phoning me? I want to ask you to leave me in peace. I don't know you in the slightest. You're not in your right mind.”

They were similar in height and appearance but what Einar found most surprising was how elderly and feeble Holberg looked. When he spoke it was with a wheeze from deep within his lungs after decades of smoking. His face was drawn, sharp-featured, with dark rings under the eyes. His dirty, grey hair stuck down firmly against his head. His skin withered, his fingertips yellow, a slight stoop, his eyes colourless and dull.

Holberg was about to close the door but Einar was stronger and pushed his way into the flat. He sensed the smell immediately. Like the smell of horses, but worse.

“What are you keeping in here?” Einar said.

“Will you get out this minute.” Holberg's voice was squeaky when he shouted at Einar and he backed away into the sitting room.

“I've got every right to be here,” Einar said, looking around at the bookcase and the computer in the corner. “I'm your son. The prodigal son. Can I ask you one thing, Dad? Did you rape more women besides my mother?”

“I'll call the police!” The wheezing became more noticeable as he got worked up.

“Someone should have done that long ago,” Einar said.

Holberg hesitated.

“What do you want from me?” he said.

“You haven't got a clue about what's happened and it's none of your business. You couldn't care less about it. I'm right, aren't I?”

“That face,” Holberg said but didn't finish the sentence. He looked at Einar with his colourless eyes and watched him for a long while until it dawned on him what Einar had been saying, that he was his son. Einar noticed him hesitate, saw how he puzzled over what he'd said.

“I've never raped anyone in my life,” Holberg said eventually. “It's all a bloody lie. They said I had a daughter in Keflavík and her mother accused me of rape but she could never prove it. I was never convicted.”

“Do you know what happened to that daughter of yours?”

“I think the girl died young. I never had any contact with her or the mother. Surely you understand that. She accused me of rape, dammit!”

“Maybe you're aware of child mortality in your family?” Einar asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“Have any children died in your family?”

“What's all this about?”

“I know of several cases this century. One of them was your sister.”

Holberg stared at Einar.

“What do you know about my family? How…?”

“Your brother, 20 years older than you, died 15 years ago. Lost his young daughter in 1941. You were 11. There were just you two brothers and you were born so far apart.”

Holberg said nothing and Einar continued.

“The disease should have died with you. You should have been the last carrier. You're the last in line. Unmarried. Childless. No family. But you were a rapist. A hopeless fucking rapist!”

Einar stopped talking and stared at Holberg with hateful eyes.

“And now I'm the last carrier.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Audur got the disease from you. My daughter got it from me. It's as simple as that. I've looked at this in the database. There hadn't been any new cases of the disease in this family since Audur died, apart from my daughter. We're the last ones.”

Einar moved a step closer, picked up a heavy glass ashtray and rolled it in his hands.

“And now it's over.”

“I didn't go there to kill him. He must have thought he was in big danger. I don't know why I picked up the ashtray. Maybe I was going to throw it at him. Maybe I wanted to attack him. He moved first. Attacked me and grabbed me by the throat but I hit him over the head and he fell to the floor. I did it without thinking. I was angry and could just as easily have attacked him. I'd wondered how our meeting would end, but I never foresaw that. Never. He hit his head on the table when he fell and then he hit the floor and started bleeding. I knew he was dead when I bent down to him. I looked around, saw a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote that I was him. It was the only thing I could think of after I saw him at the door. That I was him. That I was that man. And that man was my father.”

Einar looked down at the open grave.

“There's water in it,” he said.

“We'll fix that,” Erlendur said. “If you've got the gun on you, let me have it.” Erlendur inched closer to him but Einar didn't seem to care.

“Children are philosophers. My daughter asked me once at the hospital, Why have we got eyes?' I said it was so we could see.”

Einar paused. “She corrected me,” he said as if to himself. He looked at Erlendur. “She said it was so we could cry.”

Then he seemed to make a decision.

“Who are you if you're not yourself?” he said.

“Take it easy,” Erlendur said.

“Who are you then?”

“Everything will be all right.”

“I didn't plan for it to turn out this way but it's too late now.”

Erlendur couldn't figure out what he meant.

“It's over.”

Erlendur looked at him in the lamplight.

“It ends here,” Einar said.

Erlendur saw Einar take the gun out from under his coat and point it at him as he moved closer. Erlendur stopped. In a flash, Einar turned the barrel round and pointed it at his heart. He did it in a split second. Erlendur made a move for him, shouting as he did so. A thundering shot rang out. Erlendur was deafened for a second. He threw himself at Einar and they both fell to the ground.

Sometimes he felt as if his life had deserted him and only his empty body remained, staring with vacant eyes out into the darkness.

Erlendur stood on the edge of the grave and looked down at Einar lying beside it. He picked up the lantern, shone it down and saw that Einar was dead. After putting the lamp down he started to lower the coffin into the ground. He opened it first, put the jar inside and closed it again. He had to struggle to lower the coffin by himself but he managed it in the end. He found a shovel that had been left behind on a pile of dirt. After making the sign of the cross over the coffin he started shovelling dirt over it and it pained him every time the heavy soil slammed onto the white lid with a dark, hollow thud.

Erlendur took the white pegging that lay broken beside the grave, tried to put it back in its place and drew on every ounce of his strength to raise the headstone. He was finishing the job when he heard the first cars and people calling out as they arrived at the cemetery. He heard Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg shouting at him in turn. He heard the voices of people who were lit up by the headlights, their shadows gigantic in the dark night. He saw more and more torch beams approaching him.

He saw Katrín and soon afterwards he noticed Elín. Katrín gave him a questioning look and when she realised what had happened she threw herself on top of Einar, crying, and hugged him. He didn't try to stop her. He saw Elín kneel down beside her.

He heard Sigurdur Óli ask if he was all right and saw Elínborg pick up the shotgun that had dropped to the ground. He saw other policemen arriving and the flash bulbs of cameras in the distance like little bolts of lightning.

He looked up. It had started raining again but he thought the rain was somehow milder.

 

Einar was buried by his daughter's side in Grafarvogur cemetery. It was a private funeral. Erlendur contacted Katrín. He told her about the meeting between Einar and Holberg. Erlendur talked about selfdefence but Katrín knew he was trying to soothe her pain.

It kept on raining but the autumn winds died down. Soon it would be winter and frost and darkness. Erlendur welcomed that.

At his daughter's insistence Erlendur finally went to the doctor. The doctor said the pain in his chest was caused by a bruised costal cartilage which was probably the fault of sleeping on a bad mattress and a general lack of exercise.

 

One day, over a piping bowl of meat stew, Erlendur asked Eva Lind whether he could choose the name if she gave birth to a girl. She said she'd expected him to make some suggestions.

“What do you want to call her?” she asked.

Erlendur looked at her.

“Audur,” he said. “I thought it would be nice to call her Audur.”

Read on for an excerpt from
the sequel to
Jar City

 

SILENCE OF THE GRAVE

 

now available

 

Copyright © 2002 by Arnaldur Indri
ason.
English translation copyright © 2005 by Bernard Scudder.

He knew at once it was a human bone, when he took it from the baby who was sitting on the floor chewing it.

The birthday party had just reached its climax with a deafening noise. The pizza delivery boy came and went and the children gorged themselves on pizza and swigged Coca-Cola, shouting each other down the whole time. Then they jumped up from the table together, as if a signal had been given, and started running around again, some armed with machine guns and pistols, the younger ones clutching cars or plastic dinosaurs. He couldn't figure out what the game involved, For him it was all one maddening din.

The mother of the birthday boy popped some corn in the microwave. She told the man she would try to calm the children down, switch on the television and play a video. If that failed she would throw them out. This was the third time they had celebrated her son's eighth birthday and her nerves were stretched to breaking point. The third birthday party in a row! First all the family went out for a meal at an extortionate hamburger joint that played earsplitting rock music. Then she gave a party for relatives and friends of the family, which was as grand an occasion as if he were being confirmed. Today, the boy had invited his classmates and friends from the neighbourhood.

She opened the microwave, took out the swollen bag of popcorn, put another in its place and thought to herself that she would keep it simple next year. One party and have done with it. As when she was a little girl.

It did not help matters that the young man sitting on the sofa was totally withdrawn. She had tried chatting to him, hut she gave up and felt stressful with him in her sitting room. Conversation was out of the question: the noise and commotion that the boys were making left her nonplussed. He had not offered to help. Just sat there staring into space, saying nothing. Desperately shy, she thought to herself.

She had never seen the man before. He was probably aged around 25 and was the brother of one of her son's friends at the party. Almost 20 years between them. He was thin as a rake and he shook her hand at the door with long fingers, a clammy palm, reticent. He had come to fetch his brother, who refused point blank to leave while the party was still in full swing. They decided that he should step inside for a while. It would soon be over, she said. He explained to her that their parents, who lived in a town house down the road, were abroad and he was looking after his brother; he actually rented a flat in town. He fidgeted uncomfortably in the hallway. His little brother had escaped back into the fray.

Now he was sitting on the sofa watching the birthday boy's one-year-old sister crawling across the floor in front of one of the children's bedrooms. She wore a white frilly dress and a ribbon in her hair, and squealed to herself He silently cursed his little brother. Being in an unfamiliar household made him uncomfortable. He wondered whether to offer his assistance. The mother told him that the boy's father was working late into the evening. He nodded and tried to smile. Declined the offer of pizza and Coke.

He noticed that the girl was holding some kind of toy which she gnawed at when she sat down, dribbling profusely. Her gums seemed to be irritating her. Probably teething, he thought.

As the baby girl approached him with her toy in her hand he wondered what it could be. She stopped, wriggled herself onto her backside, then sat on the floor with her mouth open, looking at him. A string of saliva dripped onto her chest. She put the toy in her mouth and bit it, then crawled towards him with it clutched in her jaws. When she stretched forward, pulled a face and giggled, the toy fell out of her mouth. With some difficulty she found it again and went right up to him holding it in her hand, then pulled herself up to the arm of the sofa and stood beside him, wobbly but pleased with her achievement.

He took the object from her and examined it. The baby looked at him in confusion, then started screaming for all she was worth. It did not take long for him to realise that he was holding a human bone – a rib, ten centimetres long. It was off white in colour and worn smooth where it had broken so the edges were no longer sharp, and inside the break were brown blotches, like dirt.

He guessed that it was the front of the rib and saw that it was quite old.

When the mother heard the baby crying, she looked into the sitting room and saw her standing at the sofa beside the stranger. She put down the bowl of popcorn, went over to her daughter, picked her up and looked at the man, who seemed oblivious both to her and to the screaming baby.

“What happened?” the mother asked anxiously as she tried to comfort her child. She raised her voice in an effort to shout over the noisy boys.

The man looked up, got slowly to his feet and handed the mother the bone.

“Where did she get this?” he asked.

“What?” she said.

“This bone,” he said. “Where did she get this bone?”

“Bone?” the mother said. When the girl saw the bone again she calmed down and made a grab for it, cross-eyed with concentration, more drool dangling from her gaping mouth. The baby snatched the bone and examined it in her hands.

“I think that's a bone,” the man said.

The baby put it in her mouth and calmed down again.

“The thing she's gnawing,” he said. “I think it's a human bone.”

The mother looked at her baby chomping on the bone.

“I've never seen it before. What do you mean, a human bone?”

“I think it's part of a human rib,” he said. “I'm a medical student,” he added by way of explanation, “in my fifth year.”

“Rubbish! Did you bring it with you?”

“Me? No. Do you know where it came from?” he asked.

The mother looked at her baby, then jerked the bone out of its mouth and threw it on the floor. Once again, the baby broke into a wail. The man picked up the bone to examine it more closely.

“Her brother might know…”

He looked at the mother, who looked back awkwardly. She looked at her crying daughter. Then at the bone, and then through the sitting-room window at the half-built houses all around, then back at the bone and the stranger, and finally at her son, who came running in from one of the children's bedrooms.

“Tóti!” she called out. The boy ignored her. She waded into the crowd of children, pulled her son out with considerable difficulty and stood him in front of the medical student.

“Is this yours?” he asked the boy, handing him the bone.

“I found it,” Tóti said. He didn't want to miss any of his birthday party.

“Where?” his mother asked. She put the baby down on the floor and it stared up at her, uncertain whether to begin howling again.

“Outside,” the boy said. “It's a funny stone. I washed it.” He was panting for breath. A drop of sweat trickled down his cheek.

“Outside where?” his mother asked. “When? What were you doing?”

The boy looked at his mother. He did not know whether he'd done anything wrong, but the look on her face suggested as much, and he wondered what it could be.

“Yesterday, I think,” he said. “In the foundations at the end of the road. What's up?”

His mother and the stranger looked each other in the eye.

“Could you show me exactly where you found it?” she asked.

“Do I have to? It's my birthday party,” he said.

“Yes,” his mother said. “Show us.”

She snatched up her baby from the floor and pushed her son out of the room in the direction of the front door. The man followed close behind. The children fell silent when their host was grounded and they watched his mother push Tóti out of the house with a stern look on her face, holding his little sister on her arm. They looked at each other, then set off after them.

This was in the new estate by the road up to Lake Reynisvatn. The Millennium Quarter. It was built on the slopes of Grafarholt hill, on top of which the monstrous brown-painted geothermal water tanks towered like a citadel over the suburb. Roads had been cleared up the slope on either side of the tanks and a succession of houses was being built along them, the occasional one already sporting a garden, freshly laid turf and saplings that would eventually grow and provide shade for their owners.

The throng set off in hot pursuit behind Tóti along the uppermost street next to the tanks. Newly built town houses stretched out into the grassland, while in the distance to the north and east the old summer chalets owned by people from Reykjavík took over. As in all new estates, the children played in the half-built houses, climbed up the scaffolding, hid in the shadows of solitary walls, or slid down into recently dug foundations to splash in the water that collected there.

Tóti led the stranger, his mother and the whole flock down into one such foundation and pointed out where he had found the strange white stone that was so light and smooth that he put it in his pocket and decided to keep it. The boy remembered the precise location, jumped down into the foundation ahead of them and went straight over to where it had lain in the dry earth. His mother ordered him to keep away, and with the young man's help she clambered down into the foundation. Tóti took the bone from her and placed it in the soil.

“It was lying like this,” he said, still imagining the bone to be an interesting stone.

It was a Friday afternoon and no-one was working in the foundation. Timber had been put in place on two sides to prepare for concreting, but the earth was exposed where there were still no walls. The young man went up to the wall of dirt and scrutinised the place above where the boy had found the bone. He scraped at the dirt with his fingers and was horrified to see what looked like the bone of an upper arm buried deep in the ground.

The boy's mother watched the young man staring at the wall of dirt and followed his gaze until she too saw the bone. Moving closer, she thought she could make out a jawbone and one or two teeth.

She gave a start, looked back at the young man and then at her daughter, and instinctively started wiping the baby's mouth.

She hardly realised what had happened until she felt the pain in her temple. Out of the blue, he had struck her head with his clenched fist, so fast that she did not see it coming. Or perhaps she did not believe he had hit her. This was the first punch, and in the years that followed she would wonder if her life could have been different had she walked out on him there and then.

If he had allowed her to.

She looked at him in astonishment, at a loss as to why he suddenly struck her. No-one had ever hit her before. It was three months after their wedding.

“Did you punch me?” she said, putting her hand to her temple.

“Do you think I didn't see the way you were looking at him?” he hissed.

“Him? What…? Do you mean Snorri? Looking at Snorri?”

“Don't you think I didn't notice? How you acted like you were on heat?”

She had never seen this side to him before. Never heard him use that expression. On heat. What was he talking about? She had exchanged a few quick words with Snorri at the basement door, to thank him for returning something she forgot to take from the house where she had been working as a maid; she did not want to invite him in because her husband, who had been peevish all day, said he did not want to see him. Snorri made a joke about the merchant she used to worked for, they laughed and said goodbye.

“It was only Snorri,” she said. “Don't act like that. Why have you been in such a foul mood all day?”

“Are you contradicting me?” he asked, approaching her again. “I saw you through the window. Saw you dancing round him. Like a slut!”

“No, you can't…”

He hit her in the face again with his clenched fist, sending her flying into the crockery cupboard in the kitchen. It happened so quickly that she did not have time to shield her head with her hands.

“Don't go lying to me!” he shouted. “I saw the way you were looking at him. I saw you flirting with him! Saw it with my own eyes! You filthy cunt!”

Another expression she heard him use for the first time.

“My God,” she said. Blood trickled into her mouth from her split upper lip. The taste mingled with the salty tears running down her face. “Why did you do that? What have I done?”

He stood over her, poised to attack. His red face burned with wrath. He gnashed his teeth and stamped his foot, then swung round and strode out of the basement. She was left standing there, unable to fathom what had happened.

Later she often thought back to that moment and whether anything would have changed if she had tried to answer his violence immediately by leaving him, walking out on him for good, instead of just finding reasons for self-accusation. She must have done something to produce such a reaction. Something that she might be unaware of, but which he saw, and she could talk to him about it when he came back, promise to make amends and everything would return to normal.

She had never seen him behave like that, neither with her nor anyone else. He was a quiet person with a serious side. A brooder, even. That was one thing she liked about him when they were getting to know each other. He worked in Kjós for the brother of the merchant who employed her, and he delivered goods to him. That was how they met almost a year and a half ago. They were roughly the same age and he talked about giving up labouring and maybe going to sea. There was money to be had from fishing. And he wanted his own house. Be his own master. Labouring was repressive, old-fashioned and ill-paid.