“Isn’t that the bastard?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“There’s more here,” the technician said and went on sharpening up the photograph. Waves soon appeared which reminded Erlendur of a woman’s hair, and another more blurred profile. Erlendur stared at the image until he thought he could make out Holberg sitting talking to a woman. A strange hallucination seized him at the moment he saw this. He wanted to shout out to the woman to get out of the flat, but it was too late. Decades too late.
A phone rang in the room, but no-one made a move. Erlendur thought the one on the desk was ringing.
“It’s yours,” Sigurdur Oli said to Erlendur.
It took Erlendur a while, but eventually he managed to find his mobile phone and fished it out of his coat pocket.
It was Elinborg.
“What are you playing around at?” she said when finally he answered.
“Get to the point, will you,” Erlendur said.
“The point? What are you so stressed about?”
“I knew you couldn’t just say what you’re going to say.”
“It’s about Katrin’s boys,” Elinborg said. “Or men, actually, they’re all grown men now.”
“What about them?”
“All of them nice guys, probably, except one of them works at a rather interesting place. I thought you ought to hear about it straightaway but if you’re so tense and busy and can’t bear the thought of a little chat, I’ll just phone Sigurdur Oli instead.”
“Elinborg.”
“Yes?”
“Good Lord, woman,” Erlendur shouted and looked at Sigurdur Oli, “are you going to tell me what you’re going to tell me?”
“The son works at the Genetic Research Centre.”
“What?”
“He works at the Genetic Research Centre.”
“Which son?”
“The youngest one. He’s working on their new database. Works with family trees and illnesses, Icelandic families and hereditary diseases, genetic diseases. The man’s an expert on genetic diseases.”
35
Erlendur got home late in the evening. He planned to visit Katrin early the next morning and talk to her about his theory. He hoped that her son would soon be found. A prolonged search posed the risk of the story being sensationalised by the media, and he wanted to avoid that.
Eva Lind wasn’t at home. She had tidied up in the kitchen after Erlendur’s tantrum. He put one of the two meals he’d bought at the late-night shop in the microwave, then pressed Start. Erlendur recalled when Eva Lind had come to him a few nights before, when he’d been standing by the microwave, and she told him she was pregnant. He felt as though a whole year had gone by since she had sat there facing him, scrounging money and dodging his questions, but it was only a few nights. He was still having bad dreams. He had never had many dreams and only ever remembered snatches of them when he woke up, but a feeling of discomfort lingered in him when he was awake and he couldn’t shake it off. It didn’t help that the pain in his chest was constantly making itself felt, a burning pain that he couldn’t rub away.
He thought about Eva Lind and the baby and about Kolbrun and Audur and about Elin and Katrin and her sons, about Holberg and Gretar and Ellidi in the prison and about the girl from Gardabaer and her father, and about himself and his own children, his son Sindri Snaer, whom he seldom saw, and Eva, who had made the effort to find him and with whom he argued bitterly when he disliked what she did. She was right. Who was he to go around handing out scoldings?
He thought about mothers and daughters and fathers and sons and mothers and sons and fathers and daughters and children that were born and no-one wanted and children who died in that little community, Iceland, where everyone seemed related or connected in some way.
If Holberg was the father of Katrin’s youngest son, had he in fact been killed by his own son? Did the young man know Holberg was his father? How had he found out? Had Katrin told him? When? Why? Had he known all the time? Did he know about the rape? Had Katrin told him Holberg had raped her and she had fallen pregnant by him? What kind of a feeling is that? What kind of a feeling is it to discover you’re not the person you thought you were? Not who you are? That your father isn’t your father, you’re not his son, you’re the son of someone else you didn’t know existed. Someone violent: a rapist.
What’s that like? Erlendur thought. How can you come to terms with that? Do you go and find your father and murder him? And then write: “I am him"?
And if Katrin didn’t tell her son about Holberg, how did he find out the truth? Erlendur turned the question over in his mind. The more he thought about the matter and considered the options, the more his thoughts turned to the message tree in Gardabaer. There was only one other way the son could have found out the truth and Erlendur intended to check that the following day.
And what was it that Gretar saw? Why did he have to die? Was he blackmailing Holberg? Did he know about Holberg’s rapes and plan to turn him in? Did he take photographs of Holberg? Who was the woman sitting with Holberg in the photograph? When was it taken? Gretar went missing in the summer of the national festival, so it had to have been taken before then. Erlendur wondered whether there weren’t more victims of Holberg who had never said a thing.
He heard a key turn in the lock and he stood up. Eva Lind was back.
“I went to Gardabaer with the girl,” she said when she saw Erlendur coming out of the kitchen, and closed the door behind her. “She said she was going to charge that sod for all the years he abused her. Her mother had a nervous breakdown. Then we left.”
“To see the husband?”
“Yeah, back to their cosy little pad,” Eva Lind said, kicking off her shoes by the door. “He went mad, but calmed down when he heard the explanation.”
“How did he take it?”
“He’s a great guy. When I left he was on his way to Gardabaer to talk to the old sod.”
“Really.”
“Do you think there’s any point in charging that bastard?” Eva Lind asked.
“They’re difficult cases. The men deny everything and somehow they get away with it. Maybe it depends on the mother, what she says. Maybe she ought to go to the rape crisis centre. How are you doing, anyway?”
“Just great,” Eva Lind said.
“Have you thought about a sonar or whatever they call it?” Erlendur asked. “I could go with you.”
“The time will come for that,” Eva Lind said.
“Will it?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Erlendur said.
“What have you been up to anyway?” Eva Lind asked, putting the other meal into the microwave.
“I don’t think about anything except children these days,” Erlendur said. “And a message tree, which is a kind of family tree: it can contain all kinds of messages to us if we only know what we’re supposed to be looking for. And I’m thinking about obsessions with collecting things. How does that song about the carthorse go?”
Eva Lind looked at her father. He knew she knew a lot about music.
“Do you mean ’Life is Like a Carthorse’?” she said.
“’Its head is stuffed with hay’,” Erlendur said.
“’Its heart is frozen solid’.”
“’And its brain has gone astray’,” Erlendur finished the verse. He put on his hat and said he wouldn’t be gone for long.
36
Hanna had warned the doctor so he wasn’t surprised to see Erlendur that evening. He lived in an elegant house in the old part of Hafnarfjordur and welcomed Erlendur at the door, the very picture of gentility and courteousness, a short man, bald as a billiard ball and portly beneath his thick dressing gown. A bon viveur, Erlendur thought, with a perpetual and slightly feminine redness in his cheeks. He was of an indeterminate age, could be around 60. Greeted Erlendur with a hand as dry as paper and invited him into the lounge.