‘Where were you lot when it happened?’ asked Elínborg, glancing from one poster to the next.
‘Kinda cool,’ commented Sigurdur Óli as he gazed at the cartoon heroes.
‘It’s just a load of old tat, isn’t it?’ said Elínborg.
Sigurdur Óli bent down to inspect the state-of-the-art sound system. Next to it lay a mobile phone and an iPod.
‘A nano,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘He’s got all the latest stuff.’
‘The ultra-thin one?’ asked Elínborg. ‘My younger boy says they’re too girly. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. I’ve never laid eyes on one.’
‘You don’t say,’ commented Sigurdur Óli, and blew his nose. He was feeling rather under the weather after a bout of flu.
‘Anything wrong with that?’ asked Elínborg as she opened the refrigerator.
The contents were sparse: the owner’s culinary skills appeared to have been limited. A banana, a pepper, cheese, jam, peanut butter, eggs. An open carton of skimmed milk.
‘Didn’t he have a computer?’ Sigurdur Óli asked one of the two forensics officers who were processing the scene.
‘We took it down to the station,’ he said. ‘We still haven’t found anything to explain the bloodbath. Have you heard about the Rohypnol?’
The forensics officer looked at each of them. He was thirtyish, unshaven and unkempt: slovenly was the word Elínborg was looking for. Sigurdur Óli, himself always immaculately turned out, had commented disparagingly to her that the grunge look was practically de rigueur today.
‘Rohypnol?’ asked Elínborg, with a shake of her head.
‘There are some pills in his jacket pocket, and quite a lot more on the table in the living room,’ said the officer, who was wearing a white overall and latex gloves.
‘The date-rape drug?’
‘Yes. They’ve just called us with the findings. We’re supposed to investigate with that in mind. He had some in his jacket pocket, as I said, which could mean that-’
‘He used it on Saturday evening,’ interjected Elínborg. ‘The landlord saw him leave. So he had it in his pocket when he went out on the town?’
‘Looks like it, assuming he was wearing this jacket. All his other clothes were neatly put away. The jacket and shirt are on this chair, the underpants and socks in the bedroom. He was lying here in the living room with his trousers around his ankles, but he wasn’t wearing any underwear. It looks as if he might have put the trousers on to leave the bedroom, maybe to get a glass of water. There’s a glass by the sink.’
‘So he took Rohypnol with him for a night out?’ Elínborg wondered aloud.
‘It looks as if he had sex just before he died,’ said the forensics officer. ‘We think the condom is his, and there were physical signs, so to speak. The autopsy will clarify the details.’
‘A date-rape drug,’ said Elínborg, recalling a recent case she had handled. A driver in the suburban town of Kópavogur had spotted a half-naked woman of twenty-six vomiting by the roadside and had come to her aid. She could give no account of where she had been and had no recollection of where she had spent the night. She asked the man to drive her home. In view of the state she was in he wanted to take her to hospital, but she insisted there was no need. The woman had no idea what she had been doing in Kópavogur. As soon as she got home she fell asleep and slept for twelve hours, but when she woke up she ached all over. She had a stinging pain in the genital area and her knees were reddened and sore, but her mind was a blank. She had never before blacked out from drinking and, despite her amnesia, she was convinced that she had not been drinking heavily. She took a long shower, washing thoroughly. Late that evening a friend rang to ask what had become of her; they had gone out with another woman, and she had become separated from them. Her friend had seen her leave with a man she did not recognise.
‘Wow,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t remember that at all. I don’t remember anything.’
‘Who was he?’ asked her friend.
‘No idea.’
As they chatted the woman gradually recalled meeting a man at the club. He had bought her a drink. She did not know him and had only a hazy recollection of his appearance, but he had seemed friendly. She had hardly finished her drink when another appeared on the table. She went to the loo, and when she returned the man suggested that they should move on. That was the last thing she remembered from that evening.
‘Where did you go with him?’ asked her friend.
‘I don’t know. I just …’
‘You didn’t know him?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think he might have put something in your drink?’
‘In my drink?’
‘Since you don’t remember anything. There are …’ Her friend hesitated.
‘What?’
‘Rapists who do that.’
Shortly after that the young woman went to the rape-trauma centre at the National Hospital. By the time the case landed on Elínborg’s desk the woman was convinced that she had been raped. A medical examination revealed that she had had sexual intercourse during the night, but there was no sign of any drug in her blood. This was not surprising because the most commonly used date-rape drug, Rohypnol, disappears within a few hours.
Elínborg showed her the gallery of mugshots of convicted rapists but she did not recognise anyone. She took the woman back to the club where she had met the man but the staff did not remember her, nor the man she was supposed to have met there. Elínborg knew that cases of drug-facilitated rape were difficult to prove. In general no trace of the drug was found in samples of blood or urine, as it had been eliminated from the body by the time the victim was examined, but there were other indications such as amnesia, semen in the vagina, and physical trauma. Elínborg informed the woman that she might have been drugged before the rape. It was possible that the man had slipped her some gamma-hydroxybutric acid or GHB, which works the same way as Rohypnol. Colourless and odourless, it can be administered in powder or liquid form; GHB targets the central nervous system, reducing the victim to a helpless state and sometimes leaving them with no recollection whatsoever of events.
‘Which makes it all the more difficult for us to prosecute the bastards,’ Elínborg told the young woman. ‘Rohypnol works for three to six hours, then vanishes completely from the body. You only need a few milligrams to induce a trance state, and if it’s taken with alcohol the effects are intensified. Side effects include hallucinations, depression, dizziness. Even seizures.’
Elínborg looked around the flat in Thingholt and thought about the attack on Runólfur, and the hatred that had evidently motivated it.
‘Did he have a car, this Runólfur?’ she asked the forensics officers.
‘Yes, it was parked outside,’ one of them replied. ‘We’ve taken it in to process it.’
‘I want to give you a DNA sample from a woman who was assaulted recently. I need to find out if he could have been her assailant — whether he drove her out to Kópavogur and chucked her out.’
‘No problem,’ said the forensics officer. ‘And there’s another thing.’
‘What?’
‘Everything in the flat belongs to a man — clothes, shoes, coats …’
‘Yes?’
‘Except that bundle over there,’ said the forensics officer, pointing at something rolled up in a plastic evidence bag.
‘What is it?’
‘Looks like a shawl,’ he replied, picking up the bag. ‘We found it in a heap under the bed. It certainly seems to corroborate the idea that he had a woman here.’