Outrage (3 page)

Elinborg had the impression that the fittings had been carefully selected. They included porcelain wall-plaques - not a common sight in a young person’s home - a beautiful rug on the parquet floor, a sofa and a matching easy chair. The bathroom was small but tasteful. In the bedroom was a double bed. The kitchen, adjoining the living room, was spotless. There were no books and no family photographs, only a huge flatscreen TV and three framed posters of superheroes: Spider-Man, Superman and Batman. High-quality collectible superhero figures were displayed on a table.

‘Where were you lot when it happened?’ asked Elinborg, glancing from one poster to the next.

‘Kinda cool,’ commented Sigurdur Oli as he gazed at the cartoon heroes.

‘It’s just a load of old tat, isn’t it?’ said Elinborg.

Sigurdur Oli bent down to inspect the state-of-the-art sound system. Next to it lay a mobile phone and an iPod.

‘A
nano
,’ said Sigurdur Oli. ‘He’s got all the latest stuff.’

‘The ultra-thin one?’ asked Elinborg. ‘My younger boy says they’re too girly. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. I’ve never laid eyes on one.’

‘You don’t say,’ commented Sigurdur Oli, and blew his nose. He was feeling rather under the weather after a bout of flu.

‘Anything wrong with that?’ asked Elinborg as she opened the refrigerator.

The contents were sparse: the owner’s culinary skills appeared to have been limited. A banana, a pepper, cheese, jam, peanut butter, eggs. An open carton of skimmed milk.

‘Didn’t he have a computer?’ Sigurdur Oli asked one of the two forensics officers who were processing the scene.

‘We took it down to the station,’ he said. ‘We still haven’t found anything to explain the bloodbath. Have you heard about the Rohypnol?’

The forensics officer looked at each of them. He was thirtyish, unshaven and unkempt:
slovenly
was the word Elinborg was looking for. Sigurdur Oli, himself always immaculately turned out, had commented disparagingly to her that the grunge look was practically de rigueur today.

‘Rohypnol?’ asked Elinborg, with a shake of her head.

‘There are some pills in his jacket pocket, and quite a lot more on the table in the living room,’ said the officer, who was wearing a white overall and latex gloves.

‘The date-rape drug?’

‘Yes. They’ve just called us with the findings. We’re supposed to investigate with that in mind. He had some in his jacket pocket, as I said, which could mean that—’

‘He used it on Saturday evening,’ interjected Elinborg. ‘The landlord saw him leave. So he had it in his pocket when he went out on the town?’

‘Looks like it, assuming he was wearing this jacket. All his other clothes were neatly put away. The jacket and shirt are on this chair, the underpants and socks in the bedroom. He was lying here in the living room with his trousers around his ankles, but he wasn’t wearing any underwear. It looks as if he might have put the trousers on to leave the bedroom, maybe to get a glass of water. There’s a glass by the sink.’

‘So he took Rohypnol with him for a night out?’ Elinborg wondered aloud.

‘It looks as if he had sex just before he died,’ said the forensics officer. ‘We think the condom is his, and there were physical signs, so to speak. The autopsy will clarify the details.’

‘A date-rape drug,’ said Elinborg, recalling a recent case she had handled. A driver in the suburban town of Kopavogur had spotted a half-naked woman of twenty-six vomiting by the roadside and had come to her aid. She could give no account of where she had been and had no recollection of where she had spent the night. She asked the man to drive her home. In view of the state she was in he wanted to take her to hospital, but she insisted there was no need. The woman had no idea what she had been doing in Kopavogur. As soon as she got home she fell asleep and slept for twelve hours, but when she woke up she ached all over. She had a stinging pain in the genital area and her knees were reddened and sore, but her mind was a blank. She had never before blacked out from drinking and, despite her amnesia, she was convinced that she had not been drinking heavily. She took a long shower, washing thoroughly. Late that evening a friend rang to ask what had become of her; they had gone out with another woman, and she had become separated from them. Her friend had seen her leave with a man she did not recognise.

‘Wow,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t remember that at all. I don’t remember anything.’

‘Who was he?’ asked her friend.

‘No idea.’

As they chatted the woman gradually recalled meeting a man at the club. He had bought her a drink. She did not know him and had only a hazy recollection of his appearance, but he had seemed friendly. She had hardly finished her drink when another appeared on the table. She went to the loo, and when she returned the man suggested that they should move on. That was the last thing she remembered from that evening.

‘Where did you go with him?’ asked her friend.

‘I don’t know. I just …’

‘You didn’t know him?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think he might have put something in your drink?’

‘In my drink?’

‘Since you don’t remember anything. There are …’ Her friend hesitated.

‘What?’

‘Rapists who do that.’

Shortly after that the young woman went to the rape-trauma centre at the National Hospital. By the time the case landed on Elinborg’s desk the woman was convinced that she had been raped. A medical examination revealed that she had had sexual intercourse during the night, but there was no sign of any drug in her blood. This was not surprising because the most commonly used date-rape drug, Rohypnol, disappears within a few hours.

Elinborg showed her the gallery of mugshots of convicted rapists but she did not recognise anyone. She took the woman back to the club where she had met the man but the staff did not remember her, nor the man she was supposed to have met there. Elinborg knew that cases of drug-facilitated rape were difficult to prove. In general no trace of the drug was found in samples of blood or urine, as it had been eliminated from the body by the time the victim was examined, but there were other indications such as amnesia, semen in the vagina, and physical trauma. Elinborg informed the woman that she might have been drugged before the rape. It was possible that the man had slipped her some gamma-hydroxybutric acid or GHB, which works the same way as Rohypnol. Colourless and odourless, it can be administered in powder or liquid form; GHB targets the central nervous system, reducing the victim to a helpless state and sometimes leaving them with no recollection whatsoever of events.

‘Which makes it all the more difficult for us to prosecute the bastards,’ Elinborg told the young woman. ‘Rohypnol works for three to six hours, then vanishes completely from the body. You only need a few milligrams to induce a trance state, and if it’s taken with alcohol the effects are intensified. Side effects include hallucinations, depression, dizziness. Even seizures.’

Elinborg looked around the flat in Thingholt and thought about the attack on Runolfur, and the hatred that had evidently motivated it.

‘Did he have a car, this Runolfur?’ she asked the forensics officers.

‘Yes, it was parked outside,’ one of them replied. ‘We’ve taken it in to process it.’

‘I want to give you a DNA sample from a woman who was assaulted recently. I need to find out if he could have been her assailant - whether he drove her out to Kopavogur and chucked her out.’

‘No problem,’ said the forensics officer. ‘And there’s another thing.’

‘What?’

‘Everything in the flat belongs to a man - clothes, shoes, coats …’

‘Yes?’

‘Except that bundle over there,’ said the forensics officer, pointing at something rolled up in a plastic evidence bag.

‘What is it?’

‘Looks like a shawl,’ he replied, picking up the bag. ‘We found it in a heap under the bed. It certainly seems to corroborate the idea that he had a woman here.’

He opened the bag and held it up to Elinborg’s face.

‘It’s got an unusual smell,’ he said. ‘A bit of cigarette smoke, her perfume, and then there’s something … sort of spicy.’

Elinborg sniffed.

‘We haven’t identified it yet,’ the officer observed.

Elinborg took a deep breath. The woollen shawl was purple. She smelt the odour of cigarettes and perfume, and he was right - there was another familiar pungent fragrance.

‘Do you recognise it?’ Sigurdur Oli asked in astonishment.

She nodded. ‘It’s my favourite,’ she said.

‘What do you mean, favourite?’ asked the forensics officer.

‘Your favourite spice?’ asked Sigurdur Oli.

‘Yes,’ Elinborg replied. ‘But it’s not one spice. It’s a masala, a mixture of spices. Indian. It’s like … it reminds me of tandoori.’

4

The neighbours were on the whole eager to help. The police conducted systematic interviews with everyone living within a certain radius of the crime scene, whether or not they believed they had anything to contribute. The police would determine what was important and what was irrelevant. In the lower Thingholt district, most of the inhabitants said they had been asleep that night and so had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. None of them knew the victim. Nobody had observed anyone near the house or seen anything unusual in the days before the crime. Residents nearby were interviewed first, then the area of enquiry was gradually widened. Elinborg spoke to the investigating officers to review what had been revealed, and paused when she saw the statement of one woman who lived at the periphery of the area under investigation. Although the information provided seemed meagre, she decided to call on the woman herself.

‘I don’t know if it’s worth it,’ said the policeman who had questioned her.

‘Oh?’

‘She’s a bit odd.’

‘Odd? How?’

‘She kept going on about electromagnetic waves. She said they gave her a constant headache.’

‘Electromagnetic waves?’

‘She said she’s measured them, using some rods she has. The waves come mainly from her walls.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘I don’t know if you’ll get anything useful out of her.’

The woman lived on the upper floor of a two-storey building in the street up the hill from Runolfur’s home but some distance away, so whatever she thought she had seen might well be irrelevant. Yet Elinborg was curious. And since the police had little to go on as yet, she reckoned that she might as well check the woman out and see if she remembered anything more.

Petrina was in her late sixties. She opened the door to Elinborg, wearing a dressing gown and worn felt slippers. Her hair was a mess, her face pale and wrinkled, her eyes bloodshot. In one hand she held a cigarette. As she welcomed Elinborg in she said she was pleased that someone was taking an interest at last.

‘It’s about time,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you. They’re massive waves, I tell you.’

Petrina vanished into the flat, leaving Elinborg to follow her. Elinborg found herself in a stifling cigarette fug; all the curtains were drawn and the rooms were dark. She managed to work out that it would be possible to see down into the street from the living-room window. The woman had gone into her bedroom, and now called out to her. Elinborg went through the living room, past the kitchen and into the bedroom where she saw Petrina beneath a solitary light bulb that hung unadorned from the ceiling. A bed and bedside table stood in the centre of the room.

‘I’d like to tear the walls down,’ said Petrina. ‘I can’t afford to have all the electrical wiring insulated. I must just be especially sensitive. Look here.’

Elinborg gazed in astonishment at the two longer walls of the room, which were covered from floor to ceiling in aluminium cooking foil.

‘It gives me such a headache,’ said Petrina.

‘Did you do all this yourself?’ asked Elinborg.

‘Me? Myself? Of course I did. The foil helps, but I don’t think it’s enough. You’ll have to take a look.’ Petrina picked up two metal rods and held them loosely in her hands with the ends towards Elinborg, who stood motionless in the doorway. Then the rods turned gradually until they pointed at one of the walls.

‘It’s the electrical wiring,’ said Petrina.

‘Oh?’ said Elinborg.

‘You can see that the foil helps. Come on.’

She shoved past Elinborg, her wild hair sticking out and the metal rods in her hands, looking like a caricature of a mad scientist. She went into the living room and switched on the TV. The test card appeared.

‘Roll up your sleeve,’ Petrina told Elinborg, who did so without a word. ‘Hold your arm near the screen, but don’t touch it.’

Elinborg brought her arm close to the screen. The hairs on her forearm bristled, and she felt the magnetic field. She had often noticed the effect at home if she stood close to the TV.

‘That’s what the walls of my room were like,’ said Petrina. ‘Just like that. They made my hair stand on end. It was like sleeping up against a television screen all night. Alterations were made to the flat, you see - they installed wooden partition walls, plywood, all full of electrical wiring.’

As she rolled down her sleeve Elinborg asked cautiously: ‘Who do you think I am?’

‘You?’ asked Petrina. ‘Aren’t you from the power company? They were going to send someone. Isn’t it you?’

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ said Elinborg. ‘I’m not from the power company.’

‘You were going to take readings here,’ said Petrina. ‘You were supposed to come today. I can’t go on like this.’

‘I’m from the police,’ said Elinborg. ‘A serious crime was committed in the next street, and I believe you saw someone outside here, in front of the building.’

‘But I spoke to a policeman this morning,’ said Petrina. ‘Why have you come back? And where’s the man from the power company?’

‘I don’t know, but I can ring them if you like.’

‘He should have been here ages ago.’

‘Perhaps he’ll come later today. May I ask what you saw?’

‘What I saw? What am I supposed to have seen?’

‘According to your statement this morning, you saw a man in the street on Saturday night. Is that right?’