Tainted Blood by Arnaldur Indridason Page A

stared up towards him and she opened her mouth and he heard her pitiful cry of anguish from the grave
    He woke with a start gasping for breath and stared into space while he collected himself. He called out to Eva Lind but received no reply. He walked to her room but sensed the emptiness there before he even opened the door. He knew she had left.
    After examining the register of the inhabitants of Húsavík, Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli had compiled a list of 176 women who were potential victims of rape by Holberg. All they had to go on was Ellidi's word that it had been "the same sort of job", so they used Kolbrún's age as a reference with a ten-year deviation either side. On first examination it emerged that the women could be roughly divided into three groups: a quarter of them still lived in Húsavík, half had moved to Reykjavík and the remaining quarter was scattered throughout Iceland.
    "Enough to drive you mad," Elínborg sighed, looking down the list before she handed it to Erlendur. She noticed he was scruffier than usual. The stubble on his face was several days old, his bushy ginger hair stood out in all directions, his tatty and crumpled suit needed dry-cleaning: Elínborg was wondering whether to offer to point this out to him, but Erlendur's expression didn't invite any joking.
    "How are you sleeping these days, Erlendur?" she asked guardedly.
    "On my arse," Erlendur said.
    "And then what?" Sigurdur Óli said. "Should we just walk up to each of these women and ask if they were raped 40 years ago? Isn't that a bit . . . brash?"
    "I can't see any other way to do it. Let's start with the ones who've moved away from Húsavík," Erlendur said. "We'll start looking in Reykjavik and see if we can't gather any more information about this woman in the process. If that stupid bugger Ellidi isn't lying, Holberg mentioned her to Kolbrún. She may well have repeated it, to her sister, maybe to Rúnar. I need to go back to Keflavík."
    "Maybe we can narrow the group down a bit," he said, after a moment's thought.
    "Narrow it down? How?" said Elínborg. "What are you thinking?"
    "I just had an idea."
    "What?" Elínborg was impatient already. She'd turned up for work in a new, pale green dress suit that no-one seemed likely to pay any attention to.
    "Kinship, heredity and diseases," Erlendur said.
    "Right," Sigurdur Óli said.
    "Let's assume Holberg was the rapist. We have no idea how many women he raped. We know about two and actually about only one for certain. Even though he denied it, everything points to the fact that he did rape Kolbrún. He was Audur's father, or, at least, we should work on that assumption, but he could equally have had another child with the woman from Húsavík."
    "Another child?" Elínborg said.
    "Before Audur," Erlendur said.
    "Isn't that unlikely?" Sigurdur Óli said.
    Erlendur shrugged.
    "Do you want us to narrow the group down to women who had children just before, what was it, 1964?"
    "I don't think that would be such a bad idea."
    "He could have kids all over the place," Elínborg said.
    "True. He didn't necessarily commit more than one rape either so it's a long shot," Erlendur said. "Did you find out what his sister died of?"
    "No, I'm working on it," Sigurdur Óli said. "I tried to find out about their family, but nothing came out of it."
    "I checked on Grétar," Elínborg said. "He disappeared suddenly, like the ground had opened up and swallowed him. No-one missed him in the slightest. When his mother hadn't heard from him for two whole months she finally phoned the police. They put his picture in the papers and on TV but drew a blank. It was in 1974, the year of the big festival to commemorate the settlement of Iceland. In the summer. Did you go to the festival at Thingvellir then?"
    "I was there," Erlendur said. "What about Thing-vellir? Do you think that's where he went missing?"
    "Perhaps, but that's all I know," Elínborg said. "They made a routine missing-persons investigation and