at Erlendur as if he were a cancerous growth that needed to be removed from her office at the earliest possible opportunity. She was somewhat younger than Erlendur but extremely firm, spoke fast and was quick to reply, and gave the impression that she couldn't stand any nonsense or unnecessary digressions. She asked Erlendur quite brashly to get to the point when he embarked upon a long speech about his reasons for being in her office. Erlendur smiled to himself. He took an immediate liking to her and knew they'd be at each other's throats before their meeting was over. She was wearing a dark suit, plump, no make-up, short, blond hair, her hands practical, her expression serious and pro-found. Erlendur would have liked to see her smile. His wish was not granted.
He had disturbed her during a lecture. Knocked on the door to ask for her as if he'd lost his way. She came to the door and asked him kindly to wait until the lecture was over. Erlendur stood in the corridor, as if he had been caught playing truant, for a quarter of an hour before the door opened. Hanna strode out into the corridor and past Erlendur and told him to follow her. He had trouble doing so. She seemed to take two steps for every one of his.
"I can't understand what the CID wants of me," she said as she breezed along, turning her head slightly as if to reassure herself that Erlendur was keeping up with her.
"You'll find out," Erlendur panted.
"I certainly hope so," Hanna said and showed him into her office.
When Erlendur told her his business she sat and thought about it for a long time. Erlendur managed to slow her down a little with the account of Audur and her mother and the autopsy, the diagnosis and the brain that had been removed.
"Which hospital did you say the girl was admitted to?" she asked eventually.
"Keflavík. How do you obtain organs for teaching?"
Hanna stared at Erlendur.
"I don't see what you're getting at."
"You use human organs for teaching purposes," Erlendur said. "Bio-samples, I think they're called, I'm no expert, but the question is very simple. Where do you get them from?"
"I don't think I need to tell you anything about that," she said and started to fiddle with some papers lying on her desk as if she was too busy to pay proper attention to Erlendur.
"It's quite important to us," Erlendur said, "to us at the police, to find out if the brain still exists. Conceivably it's in your records. It was studied at the time but not returned to its rightful place. There may be a perfectly straightforward explanation. The tumour took time to examine and the body had to be buried. The university and hospitals are the most likely places for storing organs. You can sit there with your poker face, but I can do a couple of things to cause a bit of aggro for you, the university and the hospitals. Just think what a pain the media can be sometimes, and I just happen to have a couple of friends on the papers."
Hanna took a long look at Erlendur, who stared back.
"A crow starves sitting," she said eventually.
"But finds flying," Erlendur completed the proverb.
"That was really the only rule in this respect, but I can't tell you anything, as you can possibly imagine. These are fairly sensitive issues."
"I'm not investigating it as a criminal act," Erlendur said. "I don't even know whether an organ theft was involved. What you do to dead people is none of my business, if it's kept within reasonable limits."
Hanna's expression turned even more ferocious.
"If this is what the medical profession needs, I'm sure it can be justified to some people. I need to locate a specific organ from a specific individual to study it again and if we can trace its history from the time it was removed until the present day I'd be extremely grateful. This is private information for my own purposes."
"What kind of private information?"
"I'm not interested in letting this go any further. We need to get the organ back if possible. What I was wondering is whether it wouldn't have sufficed to take a sample, whether the whole organ needed to be removed."
"Of course I don't know the specific case to which you're referring but there are stricter rules in force about autopsies now than in the old days," Hanna said after some thought. "If this case was in the '60s