“In principle it’s the same story as when Holberg attacked the woman in Keflavik,” Erlendur said. “She let him walk her home, admittedly. Then he asked to use the phone and attacked her in the kitchen.”
“Somehow he turned into a completely different person. Revolting. The things he said. He tore off the coat I was wearing, pushed me inside and called me awful names. He got very worked up. I tried to talk to him but it was useless and when I started to shout for help he jumped on me and silenced me. Then he dragged me into the bedroom…”
She mustered up all the courage she could and told them what Holberg did, systematically and without holding anything back. She hadn’t forgot-ten anything about that evening. On the contrary, she remembered every tiniest detail. Her account was devoid of sentimentality. It was as if she were reading out cold facts from a page. She’d never talked about the incident in this way, with such precision, but she’d created such a distance from it that Erlendur felt she was describing something that had befallen another woman. Not her personally, but someone else. Somewhere else. At another time. In another life.
At one point in her account Erlendur grimaced and Elinborg cursed under her breath.
Katrin stopped talking.
“Why didn’t you press charges against that bastard?” Elinborg asked.
“He was like a monster. He threatened to finish me off if I told anyone and the police arrested him. And what was worse, he said if I made an issue of it he’d claim I’d asked him to meet me at home and wanted to sleep with him. He didn’t use exactly those words, but I knew what he was getting at. He was incredibly strong, but he hardly left a mark on me. He made sure of that. I started thinking about that later. He hit me in the face a couple of times, but never hard.”
“When did this happen?”
“It was 1961. Late. In the autumn.”
“And wasn’t there any aftermath? Didn’t you ever see Holberg again or…”
“No. I never saw him after that. Not until I saw the photo of him in the paper.”
“You moved away from Husavik?”
“That was what we’d planned to do anyway really. Albert always had it in the back of his mind. I wasn’t against it so much after that. The people in Husavik are nice and it’s a good place to live, but I’ve never been back there since.”
“You had two children before, sons from the look of them,” Erlendur said, nodding in the direction of the confirmation photographs, “and then you had the third son… when?”
“Two years later,” Katrin said.
Erlendur looked at her and could see that, for some reason, for the first time in their conversation, she was lying.
33
“Why did you stop there?” Elinborg said when they left the house and went into the street.
She’d had trouble concealing her surprise when Erlendur suddenly thanked Katrin for being so cooperative. He said he knew how difficult it was for her to talk about these things and he’d make sure that nothing they had talked about would go any further. Elinborg gaped. They were only just starting to talk.
“She’d started lying,” Erlendur said. “It’s too much of an ordeal for her. We’ll meet her later. Her phone needs tapping and we should have a car outside the house to check on her movements and any visitors. We need to find out what her sons do, get recent photos of them if we can, but without drawing attention to ourselves, and we need to locate people who knew Katrin in Husavik and could even remember that evening, although that might be a bit of a long shot. I asked Sigurdur Oli to contact the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority to see if they can tell us when Holberg worked for them in Husavik. Maybe he’s done that by now. Get a copy of Katrin and Albert’s marriage certificate to find out the year they were married.”
Erlendur had got into his car.
“And Elinborg, you can come along the next time we talk to her.”
“Is anyone capable of doing what she described?” Elinborg asked, her mind still on Katrin’s story.
“With Holberg it seems anything’s possible,” Erlendur replied.
He drove down into Nordurmyri. Sigurdur Oli was still there. He’d contacted the phone company about the calls made to Holberg the weekend he was murdered. Two were from the Iceland Transport yard where he worked and another three were from public telephones: two from a phone box on Laekjargata and one from a payphone at Hlemmur Bus Station.
“Anything else?”
“Yes, the porn on his computer. Forensics have looked at quite a lot of it and it’s appalling. Downright sick. All the worst stuff you can find on the Internet, including animals and children. That guy was a total pervert. I think they gave up looking at it.”
“Maybe there’s no need to subject them to it any more,” said Erlendur.
“It does give us a small picture of what a filthy, disgusting creep he was,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Do you mean he deserved to be smashed over the head and killed?” Erlendur said.
“What do you think?”
“Have you asked the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority about Holberg?”
“No.”
“Get a move on then.”
“Is he waving to us?” Sigurdur Oli asked. They were standing in front of Holberg’s house. One of the forensic team had come out of the basement and was standing there in his white overalls waving to them to come over. He seemed quite excited. They got out of the car, went down into the basement and the forensic technician gestured to them to come over to one of the screens. He was holding a remote control which he told them operated the camera that had been inserted into one of the holes in the corner of the sitting room.
They watched the screen, but they couldn’t see anything on it that they could at all identify. The image was speckled, poorly lit, blurred and dull. They could see gravel and the underside of the flooring, but otherwise nothing unusual. Some time passed until the technician couldn’t hold back any longer.
“It’s this thing here,” he said, pointing to the top centre of the screen. “Right up underneath the flooring.”
“What?” said Erlendur, who couldn’t see a thing.
“Can’t you see it?” the forensics technician said.
“What?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“The ring.”
“The ring?” Erlendur said.
“That’s clearly a ring we’ve found under the floor. Can’t you see it?”
They squinted at the screen until they thought they could make out an object that could well be a ring. It was unclear, as if something was blocking the view. They couldn’t see anything else.
“It’s as if there’s something in the way,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“It could be insulating plastic like they use in building,” the technician said. More people had gathered around the screen to watch what was happening. “Look at this thing here,” he continued, “This line by the ring. It could easily be a finger. There’s something lying out in the corner that I think we ought to take a closer look at.”
“Break up the floor,” Erlendur ordered. “Let’s see what it is.”
The forensic team went to work at once. They marked out the spot on the sitting-room floor and began breaking it up with the pneumatic drill. A fine concrete dust swirled around the basement and Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli put gauze masks over their mouths. They stood behind the technicians, watching the hole widening in the floor. The base plate was seven or eight inches thick and it took the drill some time to get through it.
Once they’d broken through, the hole quickly widened. The men swept the concrete fragments away as fast as they were chipped loose and they could soon see the plastic that had been revealed by the camera. Erlendur looked at Sigurdur Oli, who nodded at him.