Erlendur answered the phone at last.
“What was the smell in Holberg’s flat like?” Erlendur took a while to realise it was Marion Briem’s voice.
“The smell?” Erlendur repeated.
“What was the smell in his flat like?” Marion Briem repeated.
“It was a sort of nasty basement smell,” Erlendur said. “A smell of damp. A stench. I don’t know. Like horses?”
“No, it’s not horses,” Marion Briem said. “I was reading about Nordurmyri. I talked to a plumber friend of mine and he referred me to another plumber. I’ve talked to a lot of plumbers.”
“Why plumbers?”
“Very interesting, the whole business. You didn’t tell me about the fingerprints on the photo.” There was a hint of accusation in Marion’s voice.
“No,” Erlendur said. “I didn’t get round to it.”
“I heard about Gretar and Holberg. Gretar knew the girl was Holberg’s daughter. Maybe he knew something else.”
Erlendur remained silent.
“What do you mean?” he said eventually.
“Do you know the most important thing about Nordurmyri?” Marion Briem asked.
“No,” Erlendur said, finding it difficult to follow Marion’s train of thought.
“It’s so obvious that I missed it at the time.”
“What is it?”
Marion paused for a moment as if to give extra weight to the words.
“Nordurmyri. North Mire.”
“And?”
“The houses were built on marsh land.”
26
Sigurdur Oli was surprised that the woman who answered the door knew what his business was before he explained it. He was standing on yet another staircase, this time in a three-storey block of flats in Grafarvogur. He had barely introduced himself and was halfway through explaining his presence there when the woman invited him to come inside, adding that she’d been expecting him.
It was early morning. Outside it was overcast with fine drizzle and the autumn gloom spread over the city as if in confirmation that it would very soon be winter, get darker and colder. On the radio, people had described it as the worst rainy spell for decades.
The woman offered to take his coat. Sigurdur Oli handed it to her and she hung it in a wardrobe. A man of a similar age to the woman came out of their kitchenette and greeted him with a handshake. They were both around 70, wearing some kind of track-suit and white socks as if they were on their way for a jog. He had interrupted them in the middle of morning coffee.
The flat was very small but efficiently furnished, with a small bathroom, kitchenette and sitting room and a spacious bedroom. It was boiling hot inside the flat. Sigurdur Oli accepted the offer of coffee and asked for a glass of water as well. His throat had immediately become parched. They exchanged a few words about the weather until Sigurdur Oli couldn’t wait any longer.
“It looks as if you were expecting me,” he said, sipping at the coffee. It was watery and tasted foul.
“Well, no-one’s talking about anything except that poor woman you’re looking for,” she said.
Sigurdur Oli gave her a blank look.
“Everyone from Husavik,” the woman said, as if she shouldn’t need to explain something so obvious. “We haven’t talked about anything else since you started looking for her. We’ve got a very big club for people from Husavik here in the city. I’m sure everyone knows you’re looking for that woman.”
“So it’s the talk of the town?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“Three of my friends from the north who now live here have phoned me since last night and this morning I had a call from Husavik. They’re gossiping about it all the time.”
“And have you come to any conclusions?”
“Not really,” she said and looked at her husband. “What was this man supposed to have done to her?”
She didn’t try to conceal her curiosity. Didn’t try to hide her nosiness. Sigurdur Oli was disgusted by how eager she was to find out the details and instinctively tried to guard his words.
“It’s a question of an act of violence,” he said. “We’re looking for the victim, but you probably know that already.”
“Oh yes. But why? What did he do to her? And why now? I think, or we think,” she said, looking at her husband, who was sitting silently following the conversation, “it’s so strange how it matters after all these years. I heard she was raped. Was that it?”
“Unfortunately I can’t divulge any details about the inquiry,” Sigurdur Oli said. “And maybe it doesn’t matter. I don’t think you should make too much fuss about it. When you’re talking to other people, I mean. Is there anything you could tell me that might be useful?”
The couple looked at each other.
“Make too much fuss about it?” she said, surprised. “We’re not making any fuss about it. Do you think we’re making any fuss about it, Eyvi?” She looked at her husband, who seemed unaware how to answer. “Go on, answer me!” she said sharply and he gave a start.
“No, I wouldn’t say that, that’s not right.”
Sigurdur Oli’s mobile phone rang. He didn’t keep it loose in his pocket like Erlendur, but in a smart holder attached to the belt around his stiffly pressed trousers. Sigurdur Oli asked the couple to excuse him, stood up and answered the phone. It was Erlendur.
“Can you meet me at Holberg’s flat?” he asked.
“What’s going on?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“More digging,” Erlendur said and rang off.
When Sigurdur Oli drove into Nordurmyri, Erlendur and Elinborg were already there. Erlendur was standing in the doorway to the basement smoking a cigarette. Elinborg was inside the flat. As far as Sigurdur Oli could see she was having a good sniff around, she stuck her head out and sniffed, exhaled and then tried somewhere else. He looked at Erlendur who shrugged and threw his cigarette into the garden and they went inside the flat together.
“What kind of smell do you think there is in here?” Erlendur asked Sigurdur Oli, and Sigurdur Oli started sniffing at the air like Elinborg. They walked from room to room with their noses in the air, except Erlendur who had a particularly poor sense of smell after so many years of smoking.
“When I first came in here,” Elinborg said, “I thought that horsey people must live in the building or in this flat. The smell reminded me of horses, riding boots, saddles, or that sort of thing. Horse dung. Stables, really. It was the same smell that was in the first flat my husband and I bought. But there weren’t any horse-lovers living there either. It was a combination of filth and rising damp. The radiators had been leaking onto the carpet and parquet for years and no-one had done anything about it. We also had the spare bathroom converted but the plumbers did it so badly, just stuffed straw into the hole and put a thin layer of concrete over it. So there was always a smell of sewers that came up through the repair.”
“Which means?” Erlendur said.
“I think it’s the same smell, except it’s worse here. Rising damp and filth and sewer rats.”
“I had a meeting with Marion Briem,” Erlendur said, uncertain whether they knew the name. “Naturally Marion read up on Nordurmyri and reached the conclusion that the fact it’s a marsh is important.”
Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli exchanged glances.
“Nordurmyri used to be like a distinct village in the middle of Reykjavik,” Erlendur went on. “The houses were built during or just after the war. Iceland had become a republic and they named the streets after the saga heroes, Gunnarsbraut, Skeggjagata and all that. It was a wide cross-section of society who gathered here, ranging from the reasonably well-off, even the rich, to those who barely had a penny to their name so they rented cheap basement flats like this one. A lot of old people like Holberg live in Nordurmyri, though most of them are more civilised than he was, and many of them live in precisely this type of basement flat. Marion told me all this.”