“Do you know if he kept his rolls of film, or did you see any at his place?” Elinborg asked.
“No, none,” Klara said as she bent over for the trays.
“Do you know where he might have kept them?”
“No.”
“So do you know what this photography was all about?”
“Well, he enjoyed it, I expect,” Klara said.
“I mean the subjects: did you see any of his photos?”
“No, he never showed me anything. As I said, we didn’t have much contact. I don’t know where his photos are. Gretar was a damn layabout,” she said, uncertain whether she was repeating herself, then shrugged as if deciding you can’t say a good thing too often.
“I’d like to take this box away with me,” Elinborg said. “I hope that’s okay. It’ll be returned shortly.”
“What’s going on?” Klara asked, for the first time showing an interest in the police inquiry and the questions about her brother. “Do you know where Gretar is?”
“No,” Elinborg stressed, trying to dispel all doubt. “Nothing new has emerged. Nothing.”
The two women who were with Kolbrun the night Holberg attacked her were named in the police investigation documents. Erlendur had launched a search for them and it turned out that both were from Keflavik, but neither lived there any more.
One of them had married an American from the NATO base shortly after the incident and now lived in the USA, while the other had moved from Keflavik to Stykkisholmur five years later. She was still registered as living there. Erlendur wondered whether he should spend the whole day on a trip out west to Stykkisholmur or phone her and hope that would be enough.
Erlendur’s English was poor so he asked Sigurdur Oli to locate the woman in America. He spoke to her husband. She had died 15 years earlier. From cancer. The woman was buried in America.
Erlendur phoned Stykkisholmur and had no difficulty making contact with the second woman. First he phoned her home and was told that she was at work. She was a nurse at the hospital there.
The woman listened to Erlendur’s questions but said unfortunately she couldn’t help him. She hadn’t been able to help the police at the time and nothing had changed.
“Holberg has been murdered", Erlendur said, “and we think it might even be connected with this incident.”
“I saw that on the news,” the voice on the phone said. The woman’s name was Agnes and Erlendur tried to visualise her from the sound of her voice. At first he imagined an efficient, firm woman in her sixties, overweight because she was short of breath. Then he noticed her smoker’s cough and Agnes assumed a different image in his mind, turned thin as a rake, her skin yellow and wrinkled. She coughed with a nasty, gravelly sound at regular intervals.
“Do you remember that night in Keflavik?” Erlendur asked.
“I went home before them,” Agnes said.
“There were three men with you.”
“I went home with a man called Gretar. I told the police at the time. I find it rather uncomfortable to talk about.”
“It’s news to me that you went home with Gretar,” Erlendur said, riffling through the reports in front of him.
“I told them when they asked me the same question all those years ago.” She coughed again but tried to spare Erlendur the throaty noises. “Sorry. I’ve never been able to give up those damn cigarettes. He was a bit of a loser. That Gretar. I never saw him after that.”
“How did you and Kolbrun know each other?”
“We used to work together. That was before I studied nursing. We were working in a shop in Keflavik which closed down long ago. That was the first and only time we went out anywhere together. Understandably.”
“Did you believe Kolbrun when she talked about a rape?”
“I didn’t hear about it until the police suddenly turned up at my house and started asking me about that night. I can’t imagine she’d have lied about something like that. Kolbrun was very respectable. Thoroughly honest about everything she did, although a bit feeble perhaps. Delicate and sickly. Not a strong character. Maybe it’s an awful thing to say, but she wasn’t the fun type, if you know what I mean. Not a lot of action going on around her.”
Agnes stopped talking and Erlendur waited for her to start again.
“She wasn’t fond of going out and I really had to cajole her to come out with me and my friend Helga that evening. She moved to America but passed away many years ago, maybe you know that. Kolbrun was so reserved and sort of lonely and I wanted to do something for her. She agreed to go to the dance, then came back with us to Helga’s afterwards, but she wanted to go home soon after that. I left before her so I don’t really know what happened there. She didn’t turn up for work on the Monday and I remember phoning her, but she didn’t answer. A few days later the police came to ask about Kolbrun. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t notice anything about Holberg that was abnormal in any way. He was quite a charmer if I remember right. I was very surprised when the police started talking about rape.”
“He apparently made a good impression,” Erlendur said. “A ladies’ man, I think he was described as.”
“I remember him coming into the shop.”
“Him? Holberg?”
“Yes, Holberg. I think that was why they sat down with us that night. He said he was an accountant from Reykjavik, but that was just a lie, wasn’t it?”
“They all worked at the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority. What kind of a shop was it?”
“A boutique. We sold ladieswear. Lingerie too.”
“And he came to the shop?”
“Yes. The day before. On the Friday. I had to go back through all this at the time and I still remember it well. He said he was looking for something for his wife. I served him and when we met at the dance he behaved as though we knew each other.”
“Did you have any contact with Kolbrun after the incident? Did you talk to her about what happened?”
“She never came back to the shop and, as I say, I didn’t know what happened until the police started questioning me. I didn’t know her that well. I tried to phone her a few times when she didn’t turn up for work and I went to where she lived once, but didn’t catch her in. I didn’t want to interfere too much. She was like that. Mysterious. Then her sister came in and said Kolbrun had quit her job. I heard she died a few years afterwards. By then I’d moved up here to Stykkisholmur. Was it suicide? That’s what I heard.”
“She died,” Erlendur said, and thanked Agnes politely for talking to him.
His thoughts turned to a man called Sveinn he’d been reading about. He survived a storm on Mos-fellsheidi. His companions’ suffering and deaths seemed to have little effect on Sveinn. He was the best equipped of the travellers and the only one who reached civilisation safe and sound, and the first thing he did after they’d tended to him on the closest farm to the heath was to put on ice skates and amuse himself by skating on a nearby lake.
At the same time his companions were still freezing to death on the heath.
After that he was never called anything but Sveinn the Soulless.
24
The search for the woman from Husavik had still not led anywhere when towards evening Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg sat down at Erlendur’s office to talk things over before going home. Sigurdur Oli said he wasn’t surprised, they’d never find the woman this way. When Erlendur asked peevishly if he knew a better method, he shook his head.
“I don’t feel as if we’re looking for Holberg’s murderer,” Elinborg said, staring at Erlendur. “It’s as if we’re looking for something completely different and I’m unclear what it is. You’ve exhumed a little girl’s body and I, for one, have no idea why. You’ve started looking for a man who went missing a generation ago and who I can’t see has anything to do with the case. I don’t think we’re asking ourselves the obvious question: either the murderer was someone close to Holberg or a total stranger, someone who broke in intending to burgle him. Personally I think that’s the most likely explanation. I think we ought to step up the search for that person. Some dopehead. The green army jacket. We haven’t really done anything about that.”