took off his coat and shoes and went into the sitting room in his crumpled suit. He was wearing a brown sleeve-less cardigan under his jacket but hadn't done it up properly, so there was no hole for the bottom button. He sat in the same chair as when he had visited the house the last time. Elín had gone into the kitchen to switch on the coffee maker and the aroma began to fill the house. When she returned she sat in a chair facing him.
The traitor cleared his throat. "One of the people out on the town with Holberg the night he raped Kolbrún is called Ellidi and he's a prisoner at Litla-Hraun. It's a long time now since we started calling him 'one of the usual suspects'. The third man was called Grétar. He disappeared off the face of the earth in 1974. The year of the national festival."
"I was at Thingvellir then," Elín said. "I saw the poets there."
Erlendur cleared his throat again.
"And did you talk to this Ellidi?" Elín went on.
"A particularly nasty piece of work," Erlendur said.
Elín excused herself, stood up and went into the kitchen. He heard cups clinking. Erlendur's mobile phone rang in his jacket pocket and he held his breath as he answered it. He could see from the caller ID that it was Sigurdur Óli.
"We're ready," Sigurdur Óli said. Erlendur could hear it raining over the phone.
"Don't do anything until I get back to you," Erlendur said. "You understand? Don't make a move until you hear from me or I turn up there."
"Have you talked to the old bag?"
Without answering, Erlendur hung up and put the phone back in his pocket. Elín came in carrying a tray, put cups on the table in front of Erlendur and poured coffee for them both. They both took it black. She put the coffee pot on the table and sat down facing Erlendur. He began again.
"Ellidi told us Holberg had raped another woman before Kolbrún and probably bragged about it to her." He saw the look of astonishment on Elm's face.
"If Kolbrún knew about someone else, she never told me," she said and shook her head thoughtfully. "Could he be telling the truth?"
"We have to act on that assumption," Erlendur said. "Ellidi's so strung out he could lie about that sort of thing. But we haven't got our hands on anything to refute what he says."
"We didn't talk about the rape very often," Elín said. "I think that was because of Audur. Among other things. Kolbrún was a very reticent woman, shy, withdrawn, and she closed up even more after what happened. And of course it was repulsive to talk about that awful experience when she was pregnant by it, not to mention after the child was born. Kolbrún did everything she could to forget that the rape ever happened. Everything to do with it."
"I imagine if Kolbrún knew about another woman she'd have told the police to back up her own statement, if nothing else. But she didn't mention a word of it in any of the reports I've read."
"Maybe she wanted to spare the woman," Elín said.
"Spare her?"
"Kolbrún knew what it was like to suffer a rape. She knew what it was like to report a rape. She hesitated about it a lot herself and all that seemed to come out of it was humiliation. If the other woman didn't want to come forward, Kolbrún may have respected her wishes. I'd imagine so. But it's difficult to say, I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about."
"She may not have known any details, no name, maybe just a vague suspicion. If he only implied something through what he said."
"She never talked about anything like that to me."
"When you talked about the rape, in what terms was it?"
"It wasn't exactly about the act itself," Elín said.
The phone in Erlendur's pocket rang again and Elín stopped talking. Erlendur pulled the phone out and saw that it was Sigurdur Óli. Erlendur just switched it off and put it away.
"Sorry," he said.
"Aren't they a real pest, those phones?"
"Absolutely," Erlendur said. He was running out of time. "Please, go on."
"She talked about how much she loved her daughter, Audur. They had a very special relation-ship despite those awful circumstances. Audur meant the world to Kolbrún. I know it's a terrible thing to say, but I don't think she would have wanted to miss out on being a mother. Do you understand that? I even thought she regarded