as a sign that she wanted Erlendur to leave. She didn't look at him. Erlendur stood on the steps, watching her walk away.
"You know Holberg's dead," he called out.
She didn't answer.
"He was murdered in his home. You know that."
Erlendur was at the bottom of the steps, hurrying after her. She held a black umbrella onto which the rain poured above her head. He had nothing more than a hat to keep the rain off. She quickened her pace. He ran to catch up with her. He didn't know what to say to make her listen to him. Didn't know why she reacted to him as she did.
"I wanted to ask you about Audur," he said.
Elín suddenly stopped and turned round and marched up to him with a contemptuous look on her face.
"You bloody cop," she hissed between her clenched teeth. "Don't you dare mention her name. How dare you? After what you did to her mother. Get lost! Get lost this minute! Bloody cop!"
She looked at Erlendur with hatred in her eyes and he stared back at her.
"After all we did to her?" he said. "To whom?"
"Go away," she shouted, and turned and walked away, leaving Erlendur where he was. He gave up the chase and watched her disappearing in the rain, stooping slightly, in her green raincoat and black ankle boots. He turned around and walked back to her house and his car, deep in thought. He got inside and lit a cigarette, opened the window a crack, started the engine and slowly drove away from the house.
As he inhaled he felt a slight pain in the middle of his chest again. It wasn't new. It had been causing Erlendur some concern for almost a year now. A vague pain that greeted him in the mornings but generally disappeared soon after he got out of bed. He didn't have a good mattress to sleep on. Some-times his whole body ached if he lay in bed for too long.
He inhaled the smoke. Hopefully it was the mattress.
As Erlendur was putting out his cigarette his mobile phone rang in his coat pocket. It was the head of forensics with the news that they had managed to decipher the inscription on the grave and had located it in the Bible.
"It's taken from Psalm 64," the head of forensics said.
"Yes," said Erlendur.
" 'Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.' "
"Pardon?"
"It's what it says on the gravestone: Preserve my life from fear of the enemy. From Psalm 64."
"'Preserve my life from fear of the enemy'."
"Does that help you at all?"
"I've no idea."
"There were two sets on fingerprints on the photograph."
"Yes, Sigurdur Óli told me."
"One set is Holberg's but we don't have the others on our files. They're quite blurred. Very old fingerprints."
"Can you tell what kind of camera the photo was taken with?" Erlendur asked.
"Impossible to tell. But I doubt it was a high-quality one."
9
Sigurdur Óli parked his car in the Iceland Transport yard where he hoped it would be out of the way. Lorries were standing in rows in the yard. Some were being loaded, some driven away, others reversed up to the cargo warehouse. A stench of diesel and oil filled the air and the noise from the engines of the trucks was deafening. Staff and customers were rushing around the yard and the warehouse.
The Met Office had forecast yet more wet weather. Sigurdur Óli tried to protect himself from the rain by pulling his coat over his head as he ran to the warehouse. He was directed to the foreman who was sitting in a glass cubicle checking papers and appeared to be extremely busy.
A plump man wearing a blue anorak done up with a single button across his paunch and holding a cigar stub between his fingers, the foreman had heard about Holberg's death and said he'd known him quite well. Described him as a reliable man, a hard worker who'd been driving from one end of the country to the other for decades and knew Iceland's road network like the back of his hand. Said he was a secretive type, never talked about himself or in personal terms, never made any friends at the company or talked about what he'd done before, thought he'd always been a lorry driver. Talked as if he had been. Unmarried with no children, as far as he knew. Never talked about his nearest and dearest.
"That's the long and the short of it," the foreman said as if to put an end to