"They were scum. All three of them. You know Ellidi yourself. Grétar wasn't a bit better. More of a wimp. I had to deal with him once over a burglary and it looked to me like the start of a pathetic small-time criminal career. They worked together at the Harbour and Lighthouse Authority. That's how they met. Ellidi was the dumb sadist. Picked fights whenever he got the chance. Attacked weaker people. Hasn't changed either, so I believe. Holberg was a kind of ringleader. The most intelligent one. He got off lightly over Kolbrún. When I started asking about him at the time, people were reluctant to talk. Grétar was the wimp who latched onto them, unassertive, cowardly, but I had the feeling there was more to him than met the eye."
"Did Rúnar and Holberg know each other previously?"
"I don't think so."
"We haven't announced it yet," Erlendur said, "but we found a note on top of the body."
"A note?"
"The murderer wrote 'I am him' on a piece of paper and left it on top of Holberg."
"I am him?"
"Doesn't that suggest they were related?"
"Unless it's a Messiah complex. A religious maniac."
"I'd rather put it down to kinship."
" 'I am him'? What's he saying by that? What's the meaning?"
"I wish I knew," Erlendur said.
He stood up and put on his hat, saying he had to get home. Marion asked how Eva Lind was, Erlendur said she was dealing with her problems and left it at that. Marion accompanied him to the door and showed him out. They shook hands. When Erlendur went down the steps, Marion called out to him.
"Erlendur! Wait a minute, Erlendur."
Erlendur turned around and looked up to Marion standing in the doorway and he saw how age had left its mark on that air of respectability, how rounded shoulders could diminish dignity and a wrinkled face bear witness to a difficult life. It was a long time since he'd been to that flat and he had been thinking, while he sat facing Marion in the chair, about the treatment that time hands out to people.
"Don't let anything you find out about Holberg have too much effect on you," Marion Briem said. "Don't let him kill any part of you that you don't want rid of anyway. Don't let him win. That was all."
Erlendur stood still in the rain, unsure of what this advice was supposed to mean. Marion Briem nodded at him.
"What burglary was it?"
"Burglary?" Marion asked opening the door again.
"That Grétar did. What did he burgle?"
"A photographic shop. He had some kind of fixation with photographs," Marion Briem said. "He took pictures."
Two men, both wearing leather jackets and black leather boots laced up to their calves, knocked at Erlendur's door and disturbed him as he was nodding off in his armchair later that evening. He'd come home, called out to Eva Lind without getting a reply and sat down on the chicken portions that had lain on the chair ever since he'd slept sitting on them the night before. The two men asked for Eva Lind. Erlendur had never seen them before and hadn't seen his daughter since she had cooked him the meat stew. Their expressions were ruthless when they asked Erlendur where they could get hold of her and they tried to see inside the flat without actually pushing past him. Erlendur asked what they wanted his daughter for. They asked if he was hiding her inside his flat, the dirty old sod. Erlendur asked if they'd come to collect a debt. They told him to fuck off. He told them to bugger off. They told him to eat shit. When he was about to close the door, one of them stuck his knee in past the doorframe. "Your daughter's a fucking cunt," he shouted. He was wearing leather trousers.
Erlendur sighed. It had been a long, dull day.
He heard the knee crack and splinter when the door slammed against it with such force that the upper hinges ripped out of the frame.
20
Sigurdur Óli was wondering how to phrase the question. He was holding a list with the names of ten women who'd lived in Húsavík before and after 1960 but had since moved to Reykjavik. Two on the list were dead. Two had never had any children. The remaining six had all become mothers during the period when the rape was likely to have occurred. Sigurdur Óli was on his way to visit the first one. She lived on Barmahlíd. Divorced. She had three grown-up