Tainted Blood - By Arnaldur Indridason Page 0,47

the bones. That could tell us something."

There was no mistaking the look of astonishment on Frank's face when he opened the door and saw Erlendur standing on the steps again in a torrential downpour.

"We exhumed the girl", Erlendur said without any preamble, "and the brain's missing. Do you know anything about it?"

"Exhumed her? The brain?" the doctor said and showed Erlendur into his office. "What do you mean, the brain's missing?"

"What I say. The brain's been removed. Probably to study it in connection with the cause of death, but it wasn't returned. You were her doctor. Do you know what happened? Do you know anything about the matter?"

"I was her general practitioner, as I think I explained to you the last time you came. She was under the supervision of Keflavík hospital and the doctors there."

"The person who performed the autopsy is dead. We were given a copy of his pathologist's report, which is very curt and mentions only a brain tumour. If he did any more studies of it, there's no record of them. Wouldn't it have been enough just to take samples? Did they need to remove the whole brain?"

The doctor shrugged. "I'm not sure." He hesitated for a moment. "Were more organs missing?" he asked.

"More organs?" Erlendur said.

"Besides the brain. Was that all that was missing?"

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing else was touched?"

"I don't think so. The pathologist didn't mention anything. What are you getting at?"

Frank looked at Erlendur, thoughtfully. "I don't expect you've ever heard Jar City mentioned, have you?"

"What Jar City?"

"It's now been closed, I believe, not so very long ago in fact. The room was called that. Jar City."

"What room?"

"Upstairs on Barónsstígur. Where they kept the organs."

"Go on."

"They were kept in formalin in glass jars. All kinds of organs that were sent there from the hospitals. For teaching. In the faculty of medicine. They were kept in a room the medical students called Jar City. Preserved innards. Hearts, livers and limbs. Brains too."

"From the hospitals?"

"People die in hospitals. They're given autopsies. The organs are examined. They're not always returned, some are kept for teaching purposes. At one time the organs were stored in Jar City."

"What are you telling me this for?"

"The brain needn't be lost for ever. It might still be in some Jar City. Samples that are preserved for teaching purposes are all documented and classified, for example. If you need to locate the brain there's a chance that you still can."

"I've never heard about this before. Are the organs taken without permission or do they obtain the relatives' consent . . . what's the arrangement?"

The doctor shrugged. "To tell the truth, I don't know. Naturally it all depends. Organs are extremely important for medical teaching. All university hospitals have large collections of organs. I've even heard that some doctors, medical researchers, have their own private collections, but I can't vouch for that."

"Organ collectors?"

"There are such people."

"What happened to this . . . Jar City? If it's not around any more?"

"I don't know."

"So you think that's where the brain could have ended up? Preserved in formalin?"

"Quite easily. Why did you exhume the girl?" "Maybe it was a mistake," Erlendur sighed.

"Maybe the whole case is one big mistake."

23

Elínborg located Klara, Grétar's sister. Her search for Holberg's other victim, the Húsavík woman as Erlendur called her, had produced no results. All the women she had approached showed the same reaction: enormous and genuine surprise followed by such a zealous interest that Elínborg had to use every trick in the book to avoid giving away any details of the case. She knew that no matter how much she and the other policemen who were looking for the woman emphasised that it was a sensitive case and not to be discussed with anyone, that wouldn't prevent the gossip lines from glowing red hot when evening came around.

Klara greeted Elínborg at the door of her neat flat in the Seljahverfi district of Breidholt suburb. She was a slender woman in her fifties, dark-haired, wearing jeans and a blue sweater. She was smoking a cigarette.

"Did you talk to Mum?" she said when Elínborg had introduced herself and Klara had invited her inside, friendly and interested.

"That was Erlendur," Elínborg said, "who works with me."

"She said he wasn't feeling very well," Klara said, walking in front of Elínborg into the sitting room and offering her a seat. "She's always making remarks you can't figure out."

Elínborg didn't answer her.

"I'm off work today," she said as if to explain why she was hanging around