that situation, sat down at the kitchen table and waited for his daughter to come back out. Quite a while passed, he filled two cups. Eva Lind came out at last. She had wiped her face. Erlendur thought she looked terrible. Her body was so scrawny it barely hung together.
"I knew she did dope sometimes," Eva Lind said in a hoarse voice when she sat down with Erlendur, "but I met her by pure chance."
"What happened to you?" Erlendur asked.
She looked at her father.
"I'm trying," she said, "but it's difficult."
"Two lads came here asking for you. Filthy-mouthed. I gave some Eddi character some money you owed him. It was him who told me where that the hovel was."
"Eddi's okay."
"Are you going to keep trying?"
"Should I get rid of it?" Eva Lind stared down at the floor.
"I don't know."
"I'm so scared I've damaged it."
"Maybe you're trying on purpose."
Eva Lind looked up at her father.
"You're fucking pathetic," she said.
"Me!"
"Yes, you."
"What am I supposed to think? Tell me that!" Erlendur shouted. "Can you possibly handle this endless self-pity? What a bloody loser you can be sometimes. Do you really feel so good in that company you keep that you can't think there's anything better for you? What right do you have to treat your life like that? What right do you have to treat the life inside you like that? Do you really think things are so horrible for you? Do you really think no-one in the world feels as bad as you? I'm investigating the death of a girl who didn't even reach the age of five. She fell ill and died. Something no-one understands destroyed her and killed her. Her coffin was three feet long. Can you hear what I'm saying? What right have you got to live? Tell me that!"
Erlendur was shouting. He stood up and hammered on the kitchen table with such a force that the cups started jumping around and when he saw that he picked one up and threw it at the wall behind Eva Lind. His rage flared up and for a moment he lost control of himself. He overturned the table, swept everything off the kitchen surfaces, pots and glasses slammed into the walls and floor. Eva Lind sat still in her chair, watched her father go berserk and her eyes filled with tears.
Finally Erlendur's rage abated, he turned to Eva Lind and saw her shoulders were shaking and she was hiding her face in her hands. He looked at his daughter, her dirty hair, thin arms, wrists hardly thicker than his fingers, her skinny, trembling body. She was barefoot and there was dirt under all her nails. He went over to her and tried to pull her hands away from her face, but she wouldn't let him. He wanted to apologise to her. Wanted to take her in his arms. He did neither.
Instead, he sat down on the floor beside her. The phone rang but he didn't answer it. There was no sign of the other girl from the bedroom. The phone stopped ringing and the flat fell silent again. The only sound was Eva Lind sobbing. Erlendur knew he was no model father and the speech he'd delivered could just as easily have been directed at himself. Probably he was talking just as much to himself and was as angry with himself as with Eva Lind. A psychologist would say he'd been venting his anger on the girl. But maybe what he said did have some effect. He hadn't seen Eva Lind cry before. Not since she was a small child. He left her when she was two.
At last Eva Lind took her hands away from her face, sniffed and wiped her face.
"It was her dad," she said.
"Her dad?" Erlendur said.
"Who was a monster," Eva Lind said. " 'He's a monster. What have I done?' It was her dad. He started touching her up when she started growing breasts and he kept going further and further. Couldn't even keep his hands off her at her own wedding. Took her off to some empty part of the house. Told her she looked so sexy in her wedding dress he couldn't control himself. Couldn't stand the thought of her leaving him. Started goosing her. She freaked out."
"What a crowd!" Erlendur groaned.
"I knew she did dope sometimes. She's asked me to score for her before. She totally flipped and went to see Eddi. She's been lying in that dump ever since."