Elin disappeared into a little sitting room and for a moment Erlendur wondered if he ought to take off his wet shoes. He wiped them on the mat and followed Elin into the sitting room, past the tidy kitchen and study. In the sitting room there were pictures and embroidery in gilded frames on the walls and a small electric organ in one corner.
“Do you recognise this photo?” Erlendur asked cautiously.
“I’ve never seen it before,” she said.
“Did your sister have any contact with Holberg after the… incident?”
“None that I knew of. Never. You can imagine.”
“Wasn’t a blood test taken to determine if he was the father?”
“What for?”
“It would have backed up your sister’s statement. That she was raped.”
She looked up from the photo and gave him a long stare, then said, “You’re all the same, you police. Too lazy to do your homework.”
“Really?”
“Haven’t you looked into the case?”
“The main details. I thought.”
“Holberg didn’t deny they had sex. He was smarter than that. He denied it was rape. He said my sister wanted him. Said she’d enticed him and invited him back to her place. That was his big defence. That Kolbrun had sex with him of her own free will. He played innocent. Played innocent, the bastard.”
“But…”
“Kolbrun didn’t care about proving paternity. She didn’t want him to have anything to do with her child. Proving that Holberg was Audur’s father wouldn’t have made any difference to her rape claim so a blood test would have been futile.”
“I hadn’t realised.”
“All my sister had was a pair of ripped panties,” Elin went on. “She didn’t look very roughed up. She wasn’t strong, couldn’t put up much of a fight, and she told me she was almost paralysed with fright when he started groping at her in the kitchen. He forced her into the bedroom and had his way with her there. Twice. Held her down and groped and talked filth until he was ready to do it again. It took her three days to pluck up the courage to go to the police. The medical examination they gave her later didn’t help either. She never understood what made him attack her. She accused herself of provoking what he did. She thought she might have been leading him on at that party they went to after the dancehall closed. That she said something or suggested something that might have aroused him. She blamed herself. I expect that’s a common reaction.”
Elin stopped talking for a moment.
“When she finally acted, she ran into Runar,” she continued. “I would have gone with her, but she was so ashamed that she didn’t tell anyone what had happened until long afterwards. Holberg threatened her. Said that if she did anything about it he’d come back and torture her. When she went to the police she thought she was heading for safety. She’d be helped. They’d look after her. It wasn’t until Runar sent her back home, after playing around with her and taking her panties and telling her to forget it, that she came to me.”
“The panties were never found,” Erlendur said. “Runar denied…”
“Kolbrun said she gave them to him and I never knew my sister to lie. I don’t know what that man was thinking of. I see him walking around town here sometimes, in the supermarket or at the fish shop. I shouted at him once. Couldn’t control myself. He looked as if he enjoyed it. Grinned. Kolbrun talked about that grin of his once. He said he’d never been given any panties and her statement was so vague he thought she was under the influence. That’s why he sent her home.”
“He was given a warning in the end,” Erlendur said, “but it didn’t have much effect. Runar was always getting warnings. He was well known as a thug in the police but someone was protecting him, that is, until he couldn’t be protected any more. Then he was dismissed.”
“There were insufficient grounds for bringing charges, that’s what they said. What Runar said was right, Kolbrun should just have forgotten it. Of course she dithered around for a long time, too long, and she was stupid enough to clean up the whole house from top to bottom, her bedclothes too, removed all the evidence. She kept the panties. After all that she still tried to keep some piece of evidence. As if she felt it would be enough. As if it was enough just to tell the truth. She wanted to wash the incident clean from her life. She didn’t want to live with it. And, as I said, she didn’t look too roughed up. She had a split lip where he held her mouth and one of her eyes was bloodshot but there were no other injuries.”
“Did she get over it?”
“Never. She was a very sensitive woman, my sister. A beautiful soul and easy prey for anyone to harm. Like Holberg. Like Runar. They sensed that, both of them. They attacked her in their own separate ways. Savaged their prey.” She looked down at the floor. “The beasts.”
Erlendur waited for a moment before continuing.
“How did she react when she discovered she was pregnant?” he asked.
“Very sensibly, I thought. She decided straight-away to be happy about the child despite the circumstances, and she genuinely loved Audur. They were very attached to each other and my sister took particularly good care of her daughter. Did every-thing she could for her. That poor sweet girl.”
“So Holberg knew the child was his?”
“Of course he knew, but he denied it completely. Said she was nothing to do with him. Accused my sister of sleeping around.”
“They never kept in contact then, not about their daughter or…”
“Contact! Never. How could you imagine such a thing? That could never have happened.”
“Kolbrun couldn’t have sent him the photo?”
“No. No, I can’t imagine that. That’s out of the question.”
“He could have taken it himself. Or someone who knew the background took it and sent it to him. Maybe he saw the death announcement in the papers. Were any obituaries written about Audur?”
“There was a death announcement in the local paper. I wrote a short obituary. He could have read that.”
“Is Audur buried here in Keflavik?”
“No, we’re from Sandgerdi, my sister and me, and there’s a small cemetery at Hvalsnes, just outside it. Kolbrun wanted her to be buried there. It was the middle of winter. Took them ages to dig the grave.”
“The death certificate says she had a brain tumour.”
“That was the explanation they gave my sister. She just died. Died on us, poor little thing, and we couldn’t do a thing, in her fourth year.”
Elin looked up from the photograph to Erlendur. “She just died.”
It was dark in the house and the words echoed through the gloom full of questioning and grief. Elin stood up slowly and switched on the dull light of a standard lamp as she walked out to the hallway and into the kitchen. Erlendur heard her turn on the tap, fill something with water, pour it, open a tin, he smelled the aroma of coffee. He stood up and looked at the pictures on the walls. They were drawings and paintings. A pastel by a child was in a thin black frame. Eventually he found what he was looking for. There were two, probably taken two years apart. Photographs of Audur.
The earlier photo had been taken at a studio. It was black-and-white. The girl was probably no more than one year old and was sitting on a big cushion wearing a pretty dress, with a ribbon in her hair and a rattle in one hand. She was half turned towards the photographer and was smiling, showing four little teeth. In the other she was aged about three. Erlendur imagined her mother had taken it. It was in colour. The girl was standing among some shrubs and the sun was shining straight down on her. She was wearing a thick red jumper and a little skirt, with white socks and black shoes with shiny buckles. She was looking directly into the camera. Her expression serious. Maybe she’d refused to smile.