Tainted Blood - By Arnaldur Indridason Page 0,23

be harmed by what I use. I don't plan to harm the baby. I'm going to have it."

"What do you know about the effect that dope has on an embryo?"

"I know."

"Have it your own way. Take something, bring yourself down or whatever you call it, stay here in the flat, have a good think about yourself. I can ..."

"No," Eva Lind said. "Don't you do anything. You go on with your life and stop spying on me. Don't think about what I'm doing. If I'm not here when you come home, it doesn't matter. If I come home late or don't come back to the flat at all, then don't interfere. If that happens, I'm gone, flnito."

"So it's none of my business."

"It's never been any of your business," said Eva Lind, and sipped her coffee.

The phone rang and Erlendur got up and answered it. It was Sigurdur Óli, who was calling from home.

"I couldn't get hold of you yesterday," he said. Erlendur remembered he'd switched off his mobile while he was talking to Elín in Keflaívk, and hadn't switched it back on.

"Are there any new developments?" Erlendur asked.

"I spoke to a man called Hilmar yesterday. Another lorry driver who sometimes slept at Holberg's place in Nordurmýri. A rest stop or whatever they call it. He told me Holberg was a good pal, nothing to complain about, and everyone at work seemed to like him, helpful and sociable, blah blah blah. Couldn't imagine he had any enemies, but added that he didn't know him particularly well. Hilmar also told me Holberg hadn't been his usual self the last time he stayed with him, which was about ten days ago. Apparently he was acting strange."

"Strange in what way?"

"The way Hilmar described it, he was sort of afraid to answer the phone. Said there was some bugger who wouldn't leave him in peace, as he put it, always phoning him up. Hilmar said he stayed with him on the Saturday night and Holberg asked him to answer the phone for him once. Hilmar did, but when the caller realised it wasn't Holberg who'd answered he slammed the phone down."

"Can we find out who's been calling Holberg recently?"

"I'm having that checked. Then there's another thing. I've got a printout from the telephone company of the calls Holberg made, and something interesting came out of that."

"What?"

"You remember his computer?"

"Yes."

"We never looked at it."

"No. The technicians do that."

"Did you notice if it was plugged in to the telephone?"

"No."

"Most of Holberg's calls, almost all of them in fact, were to an Internet server. He used to spend days on end surfing the net."

"What does that mean?" asked Erlendur, who was particularly ill-informed about everything to do with computers.

"Maybe we'll see that when we switch on his computer," Sigurdur Óli replied.

They arrived at Holberg's flat in Nordurmýri at the same time. The yellow police tape had gone and there was no visible sign of a crime any more. No lights were on in the upper floors. The neighbours didn't appear to be at home. Erlendur had a key to the flat. They went straight over to the computer and switched it on. It started whirring.

"It's quite a powerful computer," Sigurdur Óli said, wondering for a moment whether he should explain to Erlendur about the size and type, but decided to give it a miss.

"Okay," he said, "I'll have a look to see what web addresses he had stored in his favourites. Loads of them, bloody loads of them. Maybe he's downloaded some files. Wow!"

"What?" said Erlendur.

"His hard drive's jam-packed."

"Which means?"

"You need a hell of a lot of stuff to fill a hard drive. There must be whole movies on here. Here's something he calls avideo3. Shall we see what it is?"

"Definitely."

Sigurdur Óli opened the file and a window popped up playing a video. They watched for a few seconds. It was a porn clip.

"Was that a goat they were holding over her?" Erlendur asked in disbelief.

"There are 312 avideo files," Sigurdur Óli said. "They could be clips like that one, even whole movies."

"Avideo?" said Erlendur.

"I don't know," said Sigurdur Óli. "Maybe animal videos. There's gvideo too. Should we look at, let's say, gvideo88} Double-click . . . maximise the window ..."

"Double—?" said Erlendur, but stopped mid-sentence when four men having sex spread themselves across the 17-inch monitor.

"Gvideo must mean gay videos," said Sigurdur Óli when the scene was over.

"He was obviously obsessed then," Erlendur said. "How many films are there altogether?"

"There are more than a thousand files here,