Tainted Blood - By Arnaldur Indridason Page 0,33

him in the slightest. When his mother hadn't heard from him for two whole months she finally phoned the police. They put his picture in the papers and on TV but drew a blank. It was in 1974, the year of the big festival to commemorate the settlement of Iceland. In the summer. Did you go to the festival at Thingvellir then?"

"I was there," Erlendur said. "What about Thing-vellir? Do you think that's where he went missing?"

"Perhaps, but that's all I know," Elínborg said. "They made a routine missing-persons investigation and talked to people his mother knew that he knew, including Holberg and Ellidi. They questioned three others too but no-one knew anything. No-one missed Grétar except his mother and sister. He was born in Reykjavik, no wife or children, no girlfriend, no extended family. The case was left open for a few months and then it just died. He was 34."

"If he was as pleasant as his mates Ellidi and Holberg, I'm not surprised nobody missed him," Sigurdur Óli said.

"Thirteen people went missing in Iceland in the 1970s when Grétar disappeared," Elínborg said. "Twelve in the 1980s, not counting fishermen lost at sea."

"Thirteen disappearances," Sigurdur Óli said, "isn't that rather a lot? None of them solved?"

"There doesn't have to be anything criminal behind it," Elínborg said. "People disappear, want to disappear, make themselves disappear."

"If I understand correctly," Erlendur said, "the scenario is like this: Ellidi, Holberg and Grétar are having a night out at a dance in the Cross one weekend in the autumn of 1963."

He saw that Sigurdur Ólí's face was one huge question mark.

"The Cross was an old military hospital post that was converted into a dancehall. They used to hold really raunchy dances there."

"I think that was where the Icelandic Beatles started playing," Elínborg interjected.

"They meet some women at the dance and one of the women has a party at her house afterwards," Erlendur went on. "We need to try to find these women. Holberg walks one of them home and rapes her. Apparently he'd played the same trick before. He whispers to her what he did to another woman. She might have lived in Húsavík and in all likelihood never pressed charges. Three days later Kolbrún has finally plucked up the courage to report the crime but runs into a policeman who has no sympathy for women who invite men in after a dance and then shout rape. Kolbrún has a baby girl. Holberg could have known about the baby, we find a photo of her gravestone in his desk. Who took it? Why? The girl dies from a fatal illness and her mother commits suicide three years later. Three years after that, one of Holberg's mates disappears. Holberg is murdered a few days ago and an incomprehensible message is left behind.

"Why was Holberg murdered now, in his old age? Was his attacker connected to this background? And, if so, why wasn't Holberg attacked before? Why all the wait? Or didn't his murder have anything to do with the fact, if it is a fact, that Holberg was a rapist?"

"It doesn't look like premeditated murder, I don't think we can ignore that," Sigurdur Óli interjected. "As Ellidi put it, what kind of wanker uses an ashtray? It's not as if there was a long historical build-up to it. The message is just a joke, indecipherable. Holberg's murder doesn't have anything to do with any rape. We should probably be looking for the young man in the green army jacket."

"Holberg was no angel," Elínborg said. "Maybe it's a revenge murder. Someone probably thought he deserved it."

"The only person we know for certain who hated Holberg is Kolbrún's sister in Keflavík," Erlendur said. "I can't imagine her killing anyone with an ashtray."

"Couldn't she have got someone else to do it?" said Sigurdur Óli.

"Who?" Erlendur asked.

"I don't know. Anyway, I'm coming round to the idea that someone was prowling around the neighbourhood planning to break in somewhere, burgle the place and maybe smash it up, Holberg caught him and got hit over the head with the ashtray. It was some junkie who couldn't tell his arse from his elbow. Nothing to do with the past, just the present. Reykjavík the way it is these days."

"At least, someone thought the right thing to do was to bump him off," Elínborg said. "We have to take the message seriously. It's no joke."

Sigurdur Óli looked at Erlendur. "When you talked about wanting to know precisely what the girl died of, do