from the child's body. He hadn't yet begun to understand how that could have happened.
Eva Lind listened to him without interrupting and she noticed how Erlendur rubbed his chest while he talked. She could feel how the Holberg case was affecting him. She could sense an air of resignation about him that she'd never noticed before. She could sense his weariness when he talked about the little girl. It was as if he withdrew inside himself, his voice went quieter and he became increasingly remote.
"Is Audur the girl you told me about when you were shouting at me this morning?" Eva Lind asked.
"She was, I don't know, maybe some kind of godsend to her mother," Erlendur said. "She loved the girl beyond death and the grave. Sorry if I've been nasty to you. I didn't intend to, but when I see the way you live, when I see your careless attitude and your lack of self-respect, when I see the destruction, everything you do to yourself and then I watch the little coffin coming up out of the ground, then I can't understand anything any more. I can't understand what's happening and I want to ..."
Erlendur fell silent.
"Beat the shit out of me," Eva Lind finished the sentence for him.
Erlendur shrugged.
"I don't know what I want to do. Maybe the best thing is to do nothing. Maybe it's best to let life run its course. Forget the whole business. Start doing something sensible. Why should I want to get involved in all this? All this filth. Talking to people like Ellidi. Doing deals with shits like Eddi. Seeing how people like Holberg get their kicks. Reading rape reports. Digging up the foundations of a house full of bugs and shit. Digging up little coffins."
Erlendur stroked his chest even harder.
"You think it won't affect you. You reckon you're strong enough to withstand that sort of thing. You think you can put on armour against it over the years and can watch all the filth from a distance as if it's none of your business, and try to keep your senses. But there isn't any distance. And there's no armour. No-one's strong enough. The repulsion haunts you like an evil spirit that burrows into your mind and doesn't leave you in peace until you believe that the filth is life itself because you've forgotten how ordinary people live. This case is like that. Like an evil spirit that's been unleashed to run riot in your mind and ends up leaving you crippled."
Erlendur heaved a deep sigh. "It's all one great big bloody mire."
He stopped talking and Eva Lind sat silently with him.
Some time passed like this until she got up, sat down beside her father, put her arm round him and sidled up against him. She could hear his heart beating rhythmically, like a soothing clock, and eventually fell asleep with a contented smile on her face.
30
Around 9 a.m. the following day the forensic and CID teams gathered at Holberg's house. There was hardly a glimpse of daylight even at that time in the morning. The sky was gloomy and it was still raining. The radio had said the rain in Reykjavík was approaching the record of October 1926.
The sewage pipe had been cleaned and there was nothing left alive in the foundations. The hole in the base plate had been widened so that two men could go down through it at once. The owners of the flats above were standing in a group outside the basement door. They had ordered a plumber to mend the pipe and were waiting to call him in as soon as the police gave permission.
It soon emerged that the hollow area around the sewage pipe was relatively small. It measured about three square yards and was contained because the ground hadn't sunk away from the base plate everywhere. The pipe had broken in the same place as before. The old repair was visible and there was a different kind of gravel underneath the pipe from that around it. The forensic technicians discussed whether to widen the hole even further, dig up the gravel from the foundations and empty it out until they could see everywhere under the base plate. After some argument they decided that the plate might break if what was under it was removed completely, so they opted for a safer and more technically advanced method, drilling holes through the floor here and there and putting a miniature camera down into the foundations.