Apart from the message.

It was written on a sheet of ruled A4 paper that looked as if it had been torn from a spiral-bound exercise book and was the only clue that a premeditated murder had been committed here; it suggested that the visitor had entered the house with the express purpose of killing. The visitor hadn’t been seized suddenly by a mad urge to murder as he stood there on the sitting-room floor. He had entered the flat with the intention of committing a murder. He had written a message. Three words Erlendur could make neither head nor tail of. Had he written the message before going to the house? Another obvious question that needed answering. Erlendur went over to the desk in the corner of the sitting room. It was a sprawl of documents, bills, envelopes and papers. On top of them all lay a spiral-bound exercise book, the corner ripped from one page. He looked for a pencil that could have been used to write the message but couldn’t see one. Looking around the desk, he found one underneath. He did not touch anything. Looked and thought.

“Isn’t this your typical Icelandic murder?” asked Detective Sigurdur Oli who had entered the basement without Erlendur noticing him and was now standing beside the body.

“What?” said Erlendur, engrossed in his thoughts.

“Squalid, pointless and committed without any attempt to hide it, change the clues or conceal the evidence.”

“Yes,” said Erlendur. “A pathetic Icelandic murder.”

“Unless he fell onto the table and hit his head on the ashtray,” Sigurdur Oli said. Their colleague Elinborg was with him. Erlendur had tried to limit the movements of the police, forensics team and paramedics while he strode around the house, his head bowed beneath his hat.

“And wrote an incomprehensible message as he fell?” Erlendur said.

“He could have been holding it in his hands.”

“Can you make anything of the message?”

“Maybe it’s God,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Maybe the murderer, I don’t know. The emphasis on the last word is intriguing. Capital letters for HIM .”

“It doesn’t look hurriedly written to me. The last word’s in block capitals but the first two are cursive. The visitor wasn’t hurried when he was writing this. But he didn’t close the door behind him. What does that mean? Attacks the man and runs out, but writes a cryptic note on a piece of paper and takes pains to emphasise the final word.”

“It must refer to him,” Sigurdur Oli said. “The body, I mean. It can’t refer to anyone else.”

“I don’t know,” Erlendur said. “What’s the point in leaving that sort of message behind and putting it on top of the body? What’s he trying to say by doing that? Is he telling us something? Is the murderer talking to himself? Is he talking to the victim?”

“A bloody nutter,” Elinborg said, reaching down to pick up the message. Erlendur stopped her.

“There may have been more than one of them,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Attackers, I mean.”

“Remember your gloves, Elinborg,” Erlendur said, as if talking to a child. “Don’t ruin the evidence.”

“The message was written out on the desk over there,” he added, pointing at the corner. “The paper was torn out of an exercise book owned by the victim.”

“There may have been more than one of them,” Sigurdur Oli repeated. He thought he had hit on an interesting point.

“Yes, yes,” Erlendur said. “Maybe.”

“A bit cold-hearted,” Sigurdur Oli said. “First you kill an old man and then you sit down to write a note. Doesn’t that take nerves of steel? Isn’t it a total bastard who does that sort of thing?”

“Or a fearless one,” Elinborg said.

“Or one with a Messiah complex,” Erlendur said.

He stooped to pick up the message and studied it in silence.

One huge Messiah complex, he thought to himself.

Erlendur got back to the block of flats where he lived at around 10 p.m. and put a ready meal in the microwave to heat through. He stood and watched the meal revolving behind the glass. Better than television, he thought. Outside, the autumn winds howled, nothing but rain and darkness.

He thought about people who left messages and vanished. In such a situation, what would he possibly write? Who would he leave a message for? His daughter, Eva Lind, entered his mind. She had a drug addiction and would probably want to know if he had any money. She had become increasingly pushy in that respect. His son, Sindri Snaer, had recently completed a third period in rehab. The message to him would be simple: No more Hiroshima.

Erlendur smiled to himself as the microwave made three beeps. Not that he had ever thought of vanishing at all.

Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli had talked to the neighbour who found the body. His wife was home by then and talked about taking the boys away from the house and to her mother’s. The neighbour, whose name was Olafur, had said that he and all his family, his wife and two sons, went to school and work every day at 8 a.m. and no-one came home until, at the earliest, 4 p.m. It was his job to fetch the boys from school. They hadn’t noticed anything unusual when they had left home that morning. The door to the man’s flat had been closed. They’d slept soundly the previous night. Heard nothing. They didn’t have much to do with their neighbour. To all intents and purposes he was a stranger, even though they had lived on the floor above him for several years.

The pathologist had yet to ascertain a precise time of death, but Erlendur imagined the murder had been committed around noon. In the busiest time of day as it was called. How could anyone even have the time for that these days? he thought to himself. A statement had been issued to the media that a man named Holberg aged about 70 had been found dead in his flat in Nordurmyri, probably murdered. Anyone who had noticed suspicious movements over the previous 24 hours in the area where Holberg lived was requested to contact the Reykjavik police.

Erlendur was roughly 50, divorced many years earlier, a father of two. He never let anyone sense that he couldn’t stand his children’s names. His ex-wife, with whom he had hardly spoken for more than two decades, thought they sounded sweet at the time. The divorce was a messy one and Erlendur had more or less lost touch with his children when they were young. They sought him out when they were older and he welcomed them, but regretted how they had turned out. He was particularly grieved by Eva Lind’s fate. Sindri Snaer had fared better. But only just.

He took his meal out of the microwave and sat at the kitchen table. It was a one-bedroom flat filled with books wherever there was any room to arrange them. Old family photographs hung on the walls showing his relatives in the East Fjords, where he was born. He had no photographs of himself or of his children. A battered old Nordmende television stood against one wall with an even more battered armchair in front of it. Erlendur kept the flat reasonably tidy with a minimum of cleaning.

He didn’t know exactly what it was that he ate. The ornate packaging promised something about oriental delights but the meal itself, concealed within some kind of pastry roll, tasted like hair oil. Erlendur pushed it away. He wondered whether he still had the rye bread he’d bought several days before. And the lamb pate. Then the doorbell rang. Eva Lind had decided to drop in.

“How’s it hanging?” she asked as she darted in through the door and flopped onto the sofa in the sitting room. The way she talked irritated him.

“Aiyee,” Erlendur said, and closed the door. “Don’t talk that nonsense to me.”

“I thought you wanted me to choose my words carefully,” said Eva Lind, who had repeatedly been lectured about language by her father.

“Say something sensible then.”

It was difficult to tell which personality she was sporting this evening. Eva Lind was the best actress he’d ever known, although this didn’t say much as he never went to the theatre or cinema and mostly watched educational programmes on television. Eva Lind’s play was generally a family drama in one to three acts and dealt with the best way to get money out of her father. This didn’t happen very often because Eva Lind had her own ways of getting hold of money, which Erlendur preferred to know as little about as possible. But occasionally, when she didn’t have “a goddamn cent", as she put it, she would turn to him.