“So it’s none of my business.”

“It’s never been any of your business,” said Eva Lind, and sipped her coffee.

The phone rang and Erlendur got up and answered it. It was Sigurdur Oli, who was calling from home.

“I couldn’t get hold of you yesterday,” he said. Erlendur remembered he’d switched off his mobile while he was talking to Elin in Keflaivk, and hadn’t switched it back on.

“Are there any new developments?” Erlendur asked.

“I spoke to a man called Hilmar yesterday. Another lorry driver who sometimes slept at Holberg’s place in Nordurmyri. A rest stop or whatever they call it. He told me Holberg was a good pal, nothing to complain about, and everyone at work seemed to like him, helpful and sociable, blah blah blah. Couldn’t imagine he had any enemies, but added that he didn’t know him particularly well. Hilmar also told me Holberg hadn’t been his usual self the last time he stayed with him, which was about ten days ago. Apparently he was acting strange.”

“Strange in what way?”

“The way Hilmar described it, he was sort of afraid to answer the phone. Said there was some bugger who wouldn’t leave him in peace, as he put it, always phoning him up. Hilmar said he stayed with him on the Saturday night and Holberg asked him to answer the phone for him once. Hilmar did, but when the caller realised it wasn’t Holberg who’d answered he slammed the phone down.”

“Can we find out who’s been calling Holberg recently?”

“I’m having that checked. Then there’s another thing. I’ve got a printout from the telephone company of the calls Holberg made, and something interesting came out of that.”

“What?”

“You remember his computer?”

“Yes.”

“We never looked at it.”

“No. The technicians do that.”

“Did you notice if it was plugged in to the telephone?”

“No.”

“Most of Holberg’s calls, almost all of them in fact, were to an Internet server. He used to spend days on end surfing the net.”

“What does that mean?” asked Erlendur, who was particularly ill-informed about everything to do with computers.

“Maybe we’ll see that when we switch on his computer,” Sigurdur Oli replied.

They arrived at Holberg’s flat in Nordurmyri at the same time. The yellow police tape had gone and there was no visible sign of a crime any more. No lights were on in the upper floors. The neighbours didn’t appear to be at home. Erlendur had a key to the flat. They went straight over to the computer and switched it on. It started whirring.

“It’s quite a powerful computer,” Sigurdur Oli said, wondering for a moment whether he should explain to Erlendur about the size and type, but decided to give it a miss.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll have a look to see what web addresses he had stored in his favourites. Loads of them, bloody loads of them. Maybe he’s downloaded some files. Wow!”

“What?” said Erlendur.

“His hard drive’s jam-packed.”

“Which means?”

“You need a hell of a lot of stuff to fill a hard drive. There must be whole movies on here. Here’s something he calls avideo3. Shall we see what it is?”

“Definitely.”

Sigurdur Oli opened the file and a window popped up playing a video. They watched for a few seconds. It was a porn clip.

“Was that a goat they were holding over her?” Erlendur asked in disbelief.

“There are 312 avideo files,” Sigurdur Oli said. “They could be clips like that one, even whole movies.”

“Avideo?"said Erlendur.

“I don’t know,” said Sigurdur Oli. “Maybe animal videos. There’s gvideo too. Should we look at, let’s say, gvideo88} Double-click… maximise the window…”

“Double-?” said Erlendur, but stopped mid-sentence when four men having sex spread themselves across the 17-inch monitor.

“Gvideomust mean gay videos,” said Sigurdur Oli when the scene was over.

“He was obviously obsessed then,” Erlendur said. “How many films are there altogether?”

“There are more than a thousand files here, but there could be a lot more stored elsewhere on the drive.”

Erlendur’s mobile phone rang in his coat pocket. It was Elinborg. She’d been trying to trace the two men who went with Holberg to the party in Keflavik on the night that Kolbrun said she was assaulted. Elinborg told Erlendur that one of them, Gretar, had disappeared years ago.

“Disappeared?” Erlendur said.

“Yes. One of our missing persons.”

“And the other one?” Erlendur said.

“The other one’s in prison,” Elinborg said. “Always been in trouble. He’s got one year left to serve of a four-year sentence.”

“For what?”

“You name it.”

Erlendur reminded forensics about the computer. It would take quite a while to investigate everything on it. He told them to look at every single file, list it and classify it and make a detailed report on the contents. Then he and Sigurdur Oli set off for Litla-Hraun prison, east of the city. It took them just over an hour to get there. Visibility was poor, the road was icy and the car still had summer tyres, so they had to be careful. The weather warmed up once they were through Threngslin Pass. They crossed the river Olfusa and soon saw the two prison buildings rising up from the hard gravel banks in the hazy distance. The older building was three storeys high, in the gabled style. For years it had had a red corrugated-iron roof and, from a distance, looked like a gigantic old farmhouse. Now the roof had been painted grey to match the new building beside it. That was a steel-clad, cobalt-grey building with a watchtower, modern and fortified, not unlike a financial institution in Reykjavik.

How the times change, Erlendur thought to himself.

Eliborg had told the prison authorities to expect them and which inmate they wanted to talk to. The prison governor welcomed the detectives and accompanied them to his office. He wanted them to have some details about the prisoner before talking to him. They had arrived at the worst possible time. The prisoner in question was in solitary confinement after he and two others had assaulted a recently convicted paedophile and left him for dead. He said he preferred not to go into details, but wanted to inform the police, to make it perfectly clear, that their visit was a breach of his solitary confinement and the prisoner would be, at best, in an unstable condition. After the meeting the inspectors were accompanied to the visiting hall. They sat and waited for the prisoner.

His name was Ellidi and he was a 56-year-old repeat offender. Erlendur knew him, he had in fact accompanied him to Litla-Hraun once himself. Ellidi had done various jobs during his miserable life: been at sea on fishing vessels and merchant ships, where he smuggled alcohol and drugs and was eventually convicted for it. He attempted an insurance fraud by setting fire to a 20-tonne boat off the south-west coast and sinking it. Three of them “survived". The fourth member of the group was left behind by mistake, locked in the engine room, and sank with the boat; the crime was discovered when divers went down to the wreck and it transpired that the fire had started in three places at once. Ellidi did four years at Litla-Hraun for insurance fraud, manslaughter and a number of minor offences of which he was convicted at the same time and that had been accumulating at the State Prosecutor’s office. He spent two and a half years inside on that occasion.

Ellidi was notorious for violent physical assaults which in the worst cases left the victims maimed and permanently disabled. Erlendur remembered one case in particular and described it to Sigurdur Oli while they were driving over the moor. Ellidi had a score to settle with a young man in a house on Snorrabraut. By the time the police arrived on the scene he’d beaten the man so badly he was in intensive care for four days. Having tied the man to a chair he had amused himself by cutting his face with a broken bottle. Before they managed to overpower Ellidi he knocked one policeman out cold and broke another’s arm. Icelandic judges were notoriously lenient. He received a two-year sentence for that offence and several accumulated minor ones as before. When the verdict was read out, he scoffed at it.