He’d felt the pain in his chest that morning, but it had gone now.
Erlendur was backing away from the house when Elin knocked on his window.
“Were you coming to see me?” she asked from under her umbrella when he wound down the window.
Erlendur put on an inscrutable smile and gave a slight nod. She opened the door to her house for him and he suddenly felt like a traitor. The others had already set off for the cemetery.
He took off his hat and hung it on a peg, took off his coat and shoes and went into the sitting room in his crumpled suit. He was wearing a brown sleeve-less cardigan under his jacket but hadn’t done it up properly, so there was no hole for the bottom button. He sat in the same chair as when he had visited the house the last time. Elin had gone into the kitchen to switch on the coffee maker and the aroma began to fill the house. When she returned she sat in a chair facing him.
The traitor cleared his throat. “One of the people out on the town with Holberg the night he raped Kolbrun is called Ellidi and he’s a prisoner at Litla-Hraun. It’s a long time now since we started calling him ’one of the usual suspects’. The third man was called Gretar. He disappeared off the face of the earth in 1974. The year of the national festival.”
“I was at Thingvellir then,” Elin said. “I saw the poets there.”
Erlendur cleared his throat again.
“And did you talk to this Ellidi?” Elin went on.
“A particularly nasty piece of work,” Erlendur said.
Elin excused herself, stood up and went into the kitchen. He heard cups clinking. Erlendur’s mobile phone rang in his jacket pocket and he held his breath as he answered it. He could see from the caller ID that it was Sigurdur Oli.
“We’re ready,” Sigurdur Oli said. Erlendur could hear it raining over the phone.
“Don’t do anything until I get back to you,” Erlendur said. “You understand? Don’t make a move until you hear from me or I turn up there.”
“Have you talked to the old bag?”
Without answering, Erlendur hung up and put the phone back in his pocket. Elin came in carrying a tray, put cups on the table in front of Erlendur and poured coffee for them both. They both took it black. She put the coffee pot on the table and sat down facing Erlendur. He began again.
“Ellidi told us Holberg had raped another woman before Kolbrun and probably bragged about it to her.” He saw the look of astonishment on Elm’s face.
“If Kolbrun knew about someone else, she never told me,” she said and shook her head thoughtfully. “Could he be telling the truth?”
“We have to act on that assumption,” Erlendur said. “Ellidi’s so strung out he could lie about that sort of thing. But we haven’t got our hands on anything to refute what he says.”
“We didn’t talk about the rape very often,” Elin said. “I think that was because of Audur. Among other things. Kolbrun was a very reticent woman, shy, withdrawn, and she closed up even more after what happened. And of course it was repulsive to talk about that awful experience when she was pregnant by it, not to mention after the child was born. Kolbrun did everything she could to forget that the rape ever happened. Everything to do with it.”
“I imagine if Kolbrun knew about another woman she’d have told the police to back up her own statement, if nothing else. But she didn’t mention a word of it in any of the reports I’ve read.”
“Maybe she wanted to spare the woman,” Elin said.
“Spare her?”
“Kolbrun knew what it was like to suffer a rape. She knew what it was like to report a rape. She hesitated about it a lot herself and all that seemed to come out of it was humiliation. If the other woman didn’t want to come forward, Kolbrun may have respected her wishes. I’d imagine so. But it’s difficult to say, I’m not sure exactly what you’re talking about.”
“She may not have known any details, no name, maybe just a vague suspicion. If he only implied something through what he said.”
“She never talked about anything like that to me.”
“When you talked about the rape, in what terms was it?”
“It wasn’t exactly about the act itself,” Elin said.
The phone in Erlendur’s pocket rang again and Elin stopped talking. Erlendur pulled the phone out and saw that it was Sigurdur Oli. Erlendur just switched it off and put it away.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Aren’t they a real pest, those phones?”
“Absolutely,” Erlendur said. He was running out of time. “Please, go on.”
“She talked about how much she loved her daughter, Audur. They had a very special relation-ship despite those awful circumstances. Audur meant the world to Kolbrun. I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I don’t think she would have wanted to miss out on being a mother. Do you understand that? I even thought she regarded Audur as some kind of compensation, or something, for the rape. I know it’s a clumsy way to put it, but it was as if the girl was some kind of godsend amidst all that misfortune. I can’t say what my sister thought, how she felt or what feelings she kept to herself, I only have a limited picture of that and I wouldn’t presume to speak for her. But as time went by she came to worship her little girl and never let her out of her sight. Never. Their relationship was strongly coloured by what had happened, but Kolbrun never thought of her in terms of the beast who ruined her life. She only saw the beautiful child that Audur was. My sister was overprotective of her daughter and that went beyond death and the grave, as the epitaph shows. ’Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.’”
“Do you know exactly what your sister meant by those words?”
“It was a plea to God, as you’ll see if you read the Psalm. Naturally, the little girl’s death had some-thing to do with it. How it happened and how tragic it was. Kolbrun couldn’t bear the thought of Audur having an autopsy. She wouldn’t think of it.”
Erlendur looked awkwardly at the floor but Elin didn’t notice.
“You could easily imagine,” Elin said, “how those terrible things that Kolbrun went through, the rape and then her daughter’s death, had a serious effect on her mental health. She had a nervous breakdown. When they started talking about an autopsy her paranoia built up, and in her need to protect Audur she saw the doctors as enemies. She had her daughter in those terrible circumstances and lost her so soon. She saw that as God’s will. My sister wanted her daughter to be left in peace.”
Erlendur waited a moment before he made his move.
“I think I’m one of those enemies.”
Elin looked at him, not understanding what he meant.
“I think we need to dig up the coffin and do a more precise autopsy, if that’s possible.”
Erlendur said this as carefully as he could. It took Elin a while to understand his words and put them in context, and when their meaning had sunk in she gave him a blank look.
“What are you saying?”
“We may be able to find an explanation for why she died.”
“Explanation? It was a brain tumour!”
“It could be…”
“What are you talking about? Dig her up? The child? I don’t believe it! I was just telling you…”
“We have two reasons.”
“Two reasons?”
“For the autopsy,” Erlendur said.
Elin had stood up and was pacing the room in a frenzy. Erlendur sat tight and had sunk deeper into the soft armchair.
“I’ve talked to the doctors at the hospital here in Keflavik. They couldn’t find any reports about Audur except a provisional post-mortem by the doctor who performed the autopsy. He’s dead now. The year Audur died was his last year as a doctor at the hospital. He mentioned only the brain tumour and ascribed her death to that. I want to know what kind of disease it was that caused her death. I want to know if it could have been a hereditary disease.”