‘Yes?’ said Elínborg. She was annoyed by people who did not identify themselves on the phone, even if they were close colleagues. She glanced at her watch. ‘Couldn’t this have waited until tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘Do you want to know what they found or don’t you?’
‘Sigurdur …’
‘They found Rohypnol,’ said Sigurdur Óli.
‘Yes, I know. I was there with you when they told us.’
‘No, I mean they found Rohypnol in Runólfur. Inside him. There was a load of it in his mouth and throat.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He was up to his eyeballs in the stuff himself!’
8
The manager of the Customer Support Division at the phone company met Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli after lunch. Sigurdur Óli was distracted — he was working on another demanding case and had only half his mind on the Thingholt murder. In addition, his relationship with Bergthóra was not improving. He had moved out and their attempts to resolve their differences had failed. She had invited him over one evening recently but they had finished up quarrelling. He did not tell Elínborg. He wanted to keep his personal life private. They had hardly spoken on the way to the phone company except for Elínborg asking if he had heard anything from Erlendur since he left for the East Fjords.
‘Nothing,’ said Sigurdur Óli.
Elínborg had gone to bed late and had not managed to get to sleep until the middle of the night. Her mind had been racing with thoughts of Runólfur and the date-rape drug. She had not yet spoken to Valthór about his blog. He had been out of the house when she intended to tell him to stop writing about his family on the net.
Teddi snored quietly next to her. She never remembered him having any trouble sleeping, or having a restless night — no doubt a sign that he was at peace with himself and with the world. He did not complain, and was not much of a talker. He did not take the initiative, preferring to live in peace and quiet. His job was not particularly stressful and he never brought it home with him. Sometimes, when Elínborg felt oppressed by her work, she considered whether she should have stuck to geology and imagined what she might be doing now if she had not joined the police. She might be a teacher; she had taught a few courses at the Police Training College and she enjoyed the role of instructor. She might have pursued postgraduate studies and become a scientist, researching glacial floods and earthquakes. Sometimes, when she observed the work of the police forensics officers, she thought that it might have suited her. She was not especially unhappy in her work, but from time to time she was overcome by the degradation and horrors she had to witness. She could not fathom how human beings could behave like savage beasts.
‘What is it exactly that a telecoms engineer does?’ Elínborg asked the manager. ‘What does the job involve?’
‘Well, it can involve various things,’ the manager — Lárus — said. ‘They’re responsible for the telephone system, and they handle maintenance and installation. I checked up on Runólfur in our records. He’d been with us for several years — joined us straight from technical college. An excellent worker. The company was very happy with him.’
‘Was he liked?’
‘Yes, so far as I know. I didn’t have much direct contact with him but I’m told he was sober, punctual and pleasant. Nobody here understands this. We can’t grasp what really happened.’
‘No,’ Elínborg replied. ‘Do they go to people’s houses, these engineers?’
‘Runólfur did. He handled Internet connections, broadband, in-house phone systems, digital tuners, fibre optics. We offer an outstanding service. People have no idea about computers and technology. Someone who had been stamping on his mouse all day rang recently. He thought it was a foot pedal.’
‘Can you give us a list of customers that Runólfur visited in recent months?’ asked Elínborg. ‘He covered the Reykjavík area, didn’t he?’
‘You’ll need a warrant. I’m sure we’ve got a list, but I should think it’s confidential, so …’
‘No problem,’ said Elínborg. ‘You’ll have one by close of business today.’
‘Are you going to interview everyone he visited?’
‘If necessary,’ said Elínborg. ‘Do you know of any friends of Runólfur we could speak to? Either here at the company, or anyone at all?’
‘I don’t, but I’ll ask around.’
On the weekend when he was murdered Runólfur had not been picked up by any CCTV camera in the downtown area where his landlord assumed he had gone on the last evening of his life. There were eight cameras monitoring the busiest locations in the city centre. Perhaps it meant nothing: there were many other routes to and from his home. Perhaps Runólfur knew where the cameras were and had deliberately avoided them. Taxi drivers were questioned: had they seen him, or even picked him up? But this yielded no result. The same applied to the drivers of night buses in the area. Runólfur’s credit- and debit-card transactions were checked, but he seemed to use the cards only for grocery shopping and instalment payments on his computer and iPod, and regular outgoings like phone, heating, electricity and TV bills.
The police had been provided with data that tracked Runólfur’s mobile-phone signal so they could tell whether he had moved from one transmission zone to another on the night in question. Even if he had not used his phone his movements could still be tracked, but as a telecoms engineer he must have known that his position still could not be pinpointed since the whole of the downtown area was covered by a single transmitter with a radius of three kilometres. Had Runólfur wanted to go farther afield without his movements being traceable he might have left his mobile at home: it turned out that the phone had not left the downtown area that night.
A hair sample from the young woman who had been found in distress in Kópavogur was sent abroad for DNA analysis, so that it could be compared with samples from Runólfur’s home and car. It would take some time to establish whether she had been his victim a few weeks before he was killed. But she was not a suspect and had a reliable alibi. The T-shirt that Runólfur had been wearing when he’d died and the shawl found in his flat were also sent for analysis, to reveal whether both had belonged to the same woman. Nothing had been found on his computer that would help the police to determine who had been with him on the night of the murder. In fact the computer contained very little history of Internet usage at all. It appeared that he had been intending to buy a second-hand car since websites selling used cars were listed prominently on the day of his death, along with Icelandic and foreign sports sites, and subjects relevant to his job. All his e-mails related to his work.
‘He didn’t use e-mail as most of us tend to,’ said the forensics officer. ‘And it looks to me as if that’s deliberate.’
‘What do you mean, deliberate?’
‘He leaves no trail,’ he explained.
Elínborg was standing in the doorway of an office at police headquarters. The space was so tiny and constricted that she could not actually enter the room. The officer, who was both tall and proportionately broad, seemed almost to be trapped in his miniature office, unable to move.
‘But is there anything unusual about that? Some people write whatever comes into their heads, while others are more cautious. After all, how do we know who will read our e-mails?’
‘You can get access to anything, and steal it,’ he observed. ‘As we’ve seen in practice — suddenly people’s private affairs appear on the front pages of the papers. Speaking for myself, I would never put anything important in an e-mail. But I have a feeling that this man is rather more than just cautious — he seems to be almost obsessive. It’s as if he did his utmost not to leave anything personal whatsoever on the hard drive. There are no links, other than those relating to his work. No chat rooms. No documents. No personal thoughts. No calendar. Nothing. We know he was interested in films and football. That’s all we got.’