Elínborg’s mind went to the Rohypnol. If it was found in the pocket of a young man who had gone out for the evening and brought a woman home, the inference was fairly obvious.
‘When Runólfur lived here,’ Elínborg asked cautiously, ‘was he involved with any women?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Kristjana answered. ‘Why are you asking about that? Women? I don’t know about any women!’
‘Well, could you tell me if there’s anyone in the village who knew him, who I could speak to?’ Elínborg asked calmly.
‘Answer me! Why are you asking about women?’
‘We know nothing about him. But …’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s possible that his conduct was unusual,’ said Elínborg. ‘With women.’
‘His conduct? Unusual?’
‘Maybe even involving drugs.’
‘What do you mean? What drugs?’
‘They’re sometimes called date-rape drugs,’ Elínborg replied.
Kristjana was staring at her.
‘It’s also possible that he was only selling the drugs, but we aren’t excluding the other possibility. We could be wrong. At this point we haven’t got much to go on. We don’t know why he had the drugs in his pocket when he was found dead.’
‘A date-rape drug?’
‘It’s called Rohypnol. It’s a sedative, which puts you to sleep and causes memory loss. We felt you should know. It’s the kind of detail that the media may get hold of.’
Suddenly the storm battered against the wall of the house. A blizzard masked the view from the windows, and the room grew darker still.
For a long time Kristjana sat without uttering a word. ‘I can’t imagine why he would carry such a thing,’ she said at last.
‘No, of course not.’
‘As if I hadn’t heard enough.’
‘I understand that this must be hard for you.’
‘Now I hardly know which is worse.’
‘I’m sorry?’
Kristjana gazed out of the window into the snowstorm. ‘That he was murdered, or that he was a rapist.’
‘We don’t know that for sure,’ said Elínborg.
Kristjana met her gaze. ‘No, you lot never know anything.’
6
Elínborg had to stay the night. She settled into her spacious room in a small guest house on a hill just outside the village, and rang Sigurdur Óli to tell him about her interview with Kristjana — not that it had yielded much. She rang home and spoke to Teddi, who had picked up a takeaway, and to Theodóra who was eager to tell her mother about a planned trip with the Girl Guides to Úlfljótsvatn lake in a fortnight’s time. They had a long talk. The boys were out at the cinema. Elínborg reflected that she would probably be able to read all about it on the Internet before long.
Not far from the guest house was a restaurant that also served as a pub, sports bar, video-rental shop and, apparently, a laundrette. As she entered, she saw a man handing his dirty washing over the bar, commenting that it would be good to have it back on Thursday. The menu included the usuals: sandwiches, burger and chips with pink cocktail-sauce, roast lamb, deep-fried fish. Elínborg opted for the fish. Two of the tables were occupied. At one of them three men were drinking beer and watching football on a flatscreen TV; at the other an elderly couple, outsiders like her, were eating the fried fish.
She was missing Theodóra, not having seen her for two days. Elínborg smiled to herself as she thought of her daughter. She would sometimes make surprising pronouncements about life. Her speech was rather formal and a little bit old-fashioned, and Elínborg worried that Theodóra might be teased at school. But apparently there was no cause for concern. ‘Why’s he so lugubrious?’ she had asked about a miserable newsreader on TV. ‘That’s rather droll,’ she would say when she read something funny in the paper. Elínborg assumed that she must have picked up such words from her extensive reading.
The fish was not bad, and the freshly baked bread served with it was delicious. Elínborg left the chips, which she had never particularly liked. When she had finished her fish she asked if the restaurant served espresso. The bartender, a woman of uncertain age who also cooked, baked, rented out videos and took in washing, conjured up a cup of good espresso in no time. The door opened, and someone came in to look at the videos.
The shawl that had been found in Runólfur’s flat was a puzzle. It did not necessarily mean that a woman had been there at the time of the killing — or that his assailant had been a woman. The shawl could have been lying on the floor where it was found, under the bed, for several days. Yet the inescapable conclusion was that Runólfur might have used the date-rape drug that evening, that he could have brought a woman home with him — a woman who’d accompanied him willingly or otherwise — and that something had happened which had prompted the violent attack. Perhaps the effects of the drug had worn off and when the woman had regained consciousness she had seized the nearest weapon, whether for self-defence or revenge.
The murder weapon, a knife, had not been found in the flat and the murderer had left no trace, except for his or her evident hatred and rage against the dead man. If Runólfur had raped the woman who owned the shawl, and had then been attacked and killed by her, how did that help the police? Where had the shawl been bought? Officers would try to identify the shop that had sold it, but it did not look new and that line of enquiry might yield no result. The woman had worn perfume that lingered in the shawl. The fragrance had not yet been identified but it was only a matter of time before it was, and enquiries would then be made at stores where it was sold. The shawl also smelt of smoke, which might only indicate that the owner had worn it in bars where people were smoking, or alternatively that she was a smoker herself. Runólfur was in his early thirties, and it was possible that he had met a woman of similar age. Dark hairs had been found on the shawl and in Runólfur’s flat. They were not dyed. So the woman was a brunette. She must wear her hair short, as the hairs found were not long.
Perhaps she worked at a restaurant that served tandoori dishes. Elínborg knew something about tandoori cookery, and had even included some tandoori dishes in the cookery book that she had published. She had read up on tandoori cuisine and felt pretty well-informed about it. She owned two different clay tandoori pots. In India they would traditionally be heated in a pit filled with burning charcoal so that the meat was cooked evenly from all sides at a high temperature. Elínborg had occasionally buried a tandoori pot in her back garden in the authentic manner, but usually she put it in the oven or heated it over charcoal on an old barbecue. The crucial factor was the marinade, for which Elínborg used a combination of spices, blending them to taste with plain yoghurt. For a red colour she added ground annatto seed; for yellow, saffron. She generally experimented with a mixture of cayenne pepper, coriander, ginger and garlic, or with a garam masala that she made herself by using roasted or ground cardamom, cumin, cinnamon, garlic and black pepper, with a little nutmeg. She had also been trying out variations using Icelandic herbs such as wild thyme, angelica root, dandelion leaves and lovage. She would rub the marinade into the meat — chicken or pork — and leave it for several hours before it went into the tandoori pot. Sometimes a little of the marinade would splash on to the hot coals, bringing out more strongly the tangy tandoori fragrance that Elínborg had smelt on the shawl. She wondered if the woman they were looking for might have a job in Indian cookery. Or perhaps, like Elínborg, she was simply interested in Indian food, or even specifically in tandoori dishes. She too might have a tandoori pot in her kitchen, along with all the spices that made the dish so mouth-watering.