Tainted Blood - By Arnaldur Indridason Page 0,17

up and down.

"Do I know you?" he said. "What are you talking about? Who are you?"

"My name's Erlendur. I'm investigating the murder of a man from Reykjavik by the name of Holberg. He was accused of rape almost 4o years ago. You were in charge of the investigation. The woman who was raped was called Kolbrún. She's dead. Her sister won't talk to the police for reasons I'm trying to establish. She said to me, 'After what you did to her.' I'd like you to tell me what she's referring to."

The man looked at Erlendur without saying a word. Looked him in the eye and remained silent.

"What did you do to her?" Erlendur repeated.

"I can't remember . .. what right have you got? What kind of an insult is this anyway?" His voice was trembling slightly. "Get out of my garden or I'll call the police."

"No, Rúnar, I am the police. And I don't have time for any of this bollocks."

Rúnar thought it over. "Is this the new method? Attacking people with accusations and abuse?"

"Good of you to mention methods and abuse," Erlendur said. "At one time you ran up eight charges for breaches of duty, including brutality. I don't know who you had to serve to keep your job, but you didn't do him well enough towards the end because eventually you left the police in disgrace. Dismissed ..."

"You shut up," said Rúnar, looking around shiftily. "How dare you."

"... for repeated sexual harassment."

His white, bony hands tightened their grip on the rake, stretching his pallid skin until the knuckles stood out. His face closed up, hateful lines around his mouth, his stare narrowed until his eyes were half closed. On his way to see him, while the information from Elinborg was running through his mind like an electric shock, Erlendur had wondered whether Rúnar should be condemned for what he'd done in another life, when he was a different man. Erlendur had been in the police force long enough to have heard the stories about him, about the trouble he caused. He had in fact met Rúnar a couple of times many years before, but the man he now saw in the garden was so old and decrepit that it took Erlendur a while to be sure that it was the same person. Stories about Rúnar still circulated among the police. Erlendur had once read that the past was a different country and he could understand that. He understood that times change and people too. But he wasn't prepared to erase the past.

They stood in the garden facing one another.

"What about Kolbrún?" Erlendur said.

"Bugger off!"

"Not until you tell me about Kolbrún."

"She was a fucking whore!" Rúnar suddenly said between clenched teeth. "So take that and bugger off! Everything she said about me and to me was bloody lies. There wasn't any fucking rape. She lied the whole time!"

Erlendur visualised Kolbrún sitting in front of this man all those years ago when she filed the rape charge. He imagined her gradually mustering up her courage until finally she dared to go to the police to tell what had happened to her. He imagined the terror she'd experienced and, above all else, wanted to forget as if it had never occurred, as if it had merely been a nightmare from which she'd eventually wake. Then she realised she would never wake up. She had been defiled. She'd been attacked and she'd been plundered.

"She turned up three days after the incident and accused the man of rape," Rúnar said. "It wasn't very convincing."

"So you threw her back out," Erlendur said.

"She was lying."

"And you laughed at her and belittled her and told her to forget it. But she didn't forget it, did she?"

The old man looked at Erlendur with loathing in his eyes.

"She went to Reykjavik, didn't she?" Erlendur said.

"Holberg was never convicted."

"Thanks to whom, do you reckon?"

Erlendur imagined Kolbrún wrangling with Rúnar at the office. Wrangling with him! That man! Arguing the truth of what she'd been through. Trying to convince him she was telling the truth as if he were the supreme judge in her case.

She had to summon all her strength to relate the events of that night to him and tried to give a systematic account, but it was just too painful. She couldn't describe it. Couldn't describe something indescribable, repulsive, hideous. Somehow she man-aged to piece together her disjointed story. Was that a grin? She didn't understand why the policeman was grinning. She had the impression it was