“A hereditary disease! I don’t know about any hereditary diseases.”
“We’re also looking for it in Holberg,” Erlendur said. “Another reason for an exhumation is to make sure that Audur was Holberg’s daughter. They do it with DNA tests.”
“Do you doubt that she is?”
“Not necessarily, but it has to be confirmed.”
“Why?”
“Holberg denied the child was his. He said he’d had sex with Kolbrun with her consent but denied the paternity. When the case was dropped they didn’t see any particular grounds for proving it or otherwise. Your sister never insisted on anything like that. She’d obviously had enough and wanted Holberg out of her life.”
“Who else could have been the father?”
“We need confirmation because of Holberg’s murder. It might help us find some answers.”
“Holberg’s murder?”
“Yes.”
Elin stood over Erlendur, staring at him.
“Is that monster going to torment us all beyond the grave?”
Erlendur was about to answer, but she went on.
“You still think my sister was lying,” Elin said. “You’re never going to believe her. You’re no better than that idiot Runar. Not in the slightest.”
She bent over him where he was sitting in the chair.
“Bloody cop!” she hissed. “I should never have let you into my house.”
18
Sigurdur Oli saw the car headlights approaching in the rain and knew it was Erlendur. The hydraulic digger rumbled as it took up a position by the grave, ready to start digging when the signal was given. It was a mini-digger that had chugged between the graves with jerks and starts. Its caterpillar tracks slid in the mud. It spewed out clouds of black smoke and filled the air with a thick stench of oil.
Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg stood by the grave with a pathologist, a lawyer from the Public Prosecutor’s office, a minister and churchwarden, several police-men from Keflavik and two council workers. The group stood in the rain, envying Elinborg, who was the only one with an umbrella, and Sigurdur Oli, who had been allowed to stand half under it. They noticed Erlendur was alone when he got out of his car and slowly walked towards them. They had papers authorising the exhumation, which was not to begin until Erlendur gave his permission.
Erlendur surveyed the area, silently rueing the disruption, the damage, the desecration. The grave-stone had been removed and laid on a pathway near the grave. Beside it was a green jar with a long point on the base that could be stuck down into the soil. The jar contained a withered bunch of roses and Erlendur thought to himself that Elin must have put it on the grave. He stopped, read the epitaph once again and shook his head. The white wooden pegging to mark out the grave, which had stood barely eight inches up from the ground, now lay broken beside the headstone. Erlendur had seen that kind of fencing around children’s graves, and it pained him to see it discarded this way. He looked up into the black sky. Water dripped from the brim of his hat onto his shoulders and he squinted against the falling rain. He scanned the group standing by the digger, finally looked at Sigurdur Oli and nodded. Sigurdur Oli made a sign to the digger operator. The bucket rose into the air then plunged deep into the porous soil.
Erlendur watched the digger tear up 30-year-old wounds. He winced at each thrust of the bucket. The pile of soil steadily grew and the deeper the hole became, the more darkness it consumed. Erlendur stood some distance away and watched the bucket digging deeper and deeper into the wound. Suddenly he felt a sensation of deja-vu, as if he had seen this all before in a dream, and for an instant the scene in front of him took on a dreamlike atmosphere: his colleagues standing there looking into the grave, the council workers in their orange overalls leaning forward onto their shovels, the minister in the big black overcoat, the rain that poured down into the grave and came back up in the bucket as if the hole were bleeding.
Had he dreamt it exactly like this?
Then the sensation disappeared and as always when something like that happened he couldn’t begin to understand where it had come from; why he felt he was reliving events that had never happened before. Erlendur didn’t believe in premonitions, visions or dreams, nor reincarnation or karma, he didn’t believe in God although he’d often read the Bible, nor in eternal life or that his conduct in this world would affect whether he went to heaven or hell. He felt that life itself offered a mixture of the two.
Then sometimes he experienced this incomprehensible and supernatural deja-vu, experienced time and place as if he’d seen it all before, as if he stepped outside himself, became an onlooker to his own life. There was no way he could explain what it was that happened or why his mind played tricks on him like this.
Erlendur came back to his senses when the bucket struck the lid of the coffin and a hollow clunk was heard from inside the grave. He moved a step closer. Through the rainwater pouring down into the hole he saw the vague outline of the coffin.
“Careful!” Erlendur shouted at the digger operator, throwing his hands up in the air.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw car headlights approaching. They all looked up in the direction of the lights and saw a car crawling along in the rain until it stopped by the cemetery gate. An old lady in a green coat got out. They noticed the taxi sign on the car roof. The taxi drove off and the lady stormed towards the grave. As soon as Erlendur was within earshot she started shouting and waving her fist at him.
“Grave-robber!” he heard Elin shout. “Grave-robbers! Body-snatchers!”
“Keep her back,” Erlendur said calmly to the policemen who walked over to Elin and stopped her when she was only a few yards from the grave. She tried to fight them off in her frenzy of rage but they held her arms and restrained her.
The two council workers climbed into the grave with their shovels, dug around the coffin and put ropes around the ends of it. It was fairly intact. The rain pounded on the lid with a hollow thudding, washing the soil from it. Erlendur imagined it would have been white. A tiny white casket with brass handles and a cross on the lid. The men tied the ropes to the bucket of the digger which very carefully lifted Audur’s coffin out of the ground. It was still in one piece but looked extremely fragile. Erlendur saw Elin had stopped struggling and shouting at him. She’d started to cry when the white casket emerged and hung motionless in the ropes above the grave before being lowered to the ground. The minister went up to it, made the sign of the cross over it and moved his lips in prayer. A small van backed slowly along the path and stopped. The council workers untied the ropes, lifted the coffin into the van and closed the doors. Elinborg got into the front seat beside the driver, who set off out of the cemetery, through the gate and down the road until the red rear lights disappeared in the rain and the gloom.
The minister went over to Elin and asked the policemen to let her go. They did so at once. The minister asked if there was anything he could do for her. They clearly knew each other well and spoke together in whispers. Elin appeared calmer. Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli exchanged glances and looked down into the grave. The rainwater had already started to collect in the bottom.
“I wanted to try to stop this repulsive desecration,” Erlendur heard Elin say to the minister. He was somewhat relieved to see that Elin had collected herself. He walked over to her with Sigurdur Oli following close behind.
“I’ll never forgive you for this,” Elin said to Erlendur. The minister was standing by her side. “Never!”
“I do understand,” Erlendur said, “but the investigation takes priority.”