“She never talked about anything like that to me.”

“When you talked about the rape, in what terms was it?”

“It wasn’t exactly about the act itself,” Elin said.

The phone in Erlendur’s pocket rang again and Elin stopped talking. Erlendur pulled the phone out and saw that it was Sigurdur Oli. Erlendur just switched it off and put it away.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Aren’t they a real pest, those phones?”

“Absolutely,” Erlendur said. He was running out of time. “Please, go on.”

“She talked about how much she loved her daughter, Audur. They had a very special relation-ship despite those awful circumstances. Audur meant the world to Kolbrun. I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I don’t think she would have wanted to miss out on being a mother. Do you understand that? I even thought she regarded Audur as some kind of compensation, or something, for the rape. I know it’s a clumsy way to put it, but it was as if the girl was some kind of godsend amidst all that misfortune. I can’t say what my sister thought, how she felt or what feelings she kept to herself, I only have a limited picture of that and I wouldn’t presume to speak for her. But as time went by she came to worship her little girl and never let her out of her sight. Never. Their relationship was strongly coloured by what had happened, but Kolbrun never thought of her in terms of the beast who ruined her life. She only saw the beautiful child that Audur was. My sister was overprotective of her daughter and that went beyond death and the grave, as the epitaph shows. ’Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.’”

“Do you know exactly what your sister meant by those words?”

“It was a plea to God, as you’ll see if you read the Psalm. Naturally, the little girl’s death had some-thing to do with it. How it happened and how tragic it was. Kolbrun couldn’t bear the thought of Audur having an autopsy. She wouldn’t think of it.”

Erlendur looked awkwardly at the floor but Elin didn’t notice.

“You could easily imagine,” Elin said, “how those terrible things that Kolbrun went through, the rape and then her daughter’s death, had a serious effect on her mental health. She had a nervous breakdown. When they started talking about an autopsy her paranoia built up, and in her need to protect Audur she saw the doctors as enemies. She had her daughter in those terrible circumstances and lost her so soon. She saw that as God’s will. My sister wanted her daughter to be left in peace.”

Erlendur waited a moment before he made his move.

“I think I’m one of those enemies.”

Elin looked at him, not understanding what he meant.

“I think we need to dig up the coffin and do a more precise autopsy, if that’s possible.”

Erlendur said this as carefully as he could. It took Elin a while to understand his words and put them in context, and when their meaning had sunk in she gave him a blank look.

“What are you saying?”

“We may be able to find an explanation for why she died.”

“Explanation? It was a brain tumour!”

“It could be…”

“What are you talking about? Dig her up? The child? I don’t believe it! I was just telling you…”

“We have two reasons.”

“Two reasons?”

“For the autopsy,” Erlendur said.

Elin had stood up and was pacing the room in a frenzy. Erlendur sat tight and had sunk deeper into the soft armchair.

“I’ve talked to the doctors at the hospital here in Keflavik. They couldn’t find any reports about Audur except a provisional post-mortem by the doctor who performed the autopsy. He’s dead now. The year Audur died was his last year as a doctor at the hospital. He mentioned only the brain tumour and ascribed her death to that. I want to know what kind of disease it was that caused her death. I want to know if it could have been a hereditary disease.”

“A hereditary disease! I don’t know about any hereditary diseases.”

“We’re also looking for it in Holberg,” Erlendur said. “Another reason for an exhumation is to make sure that Audur was Holberg’s daughter. They do it with DNA tests.”

“Do you doubt that she is?”

“Not necessarily, but it has to be confirmed.”

“Why?”

“Holberg denied the child was his. He said he’d had sex with Kolbrun with her consent but denied the paternity. When the case was dropped they didn’t see any particular grounds for proving it or otherwise. Your sister never insisted on anything like that. She’d obviously had enough and wanted Holberg out of her life.”

“Who else could have been the father?”

“We need confirmation because of Holberg’s murder. It might help us find some answers.”

“Holberg’s murder?”

“Yes.”

Elin stood over Erlendur, staring at him.

“Is that monster going to torment us all beyond the grave?”

Erlendur was about to answer, but she went on.

“You still think my sister was lying,” Elin said. “You’re never going to believe her. You’re no better than that idiot Runar. Not in the slightest.”

She bent over him where he was sitting in the chair.

“Bloody cop!” she hissed. “I should never have let you into my house.”

Sigurdur Oli saw the car headlights approaching in the rain and knew it was Erlendur. The hydraulic digger rumbled as it took up a position by the grave, ready to start digging when the signal was given. It was a mini-digger that had chugged between the graves with jerks and starts. Its caterpillar tracks slid in the mud. It spewed out clouds of black smoke and filled the air with a thick stench of oil.

Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg stood by the grave with a pathologist, a lawyer from the Public Prosecutor’s office, a minister and churchwarden, several police-men from Keflavik and two council workers. The group stood in the rain, envying Elinborg, who was the only one with an umbrella, and Sigurdur Oli, who had been allowed to stand half under it. They noticed Erlendur was alone when he got out of his car and slowly walked towards them. They had papers authorising the exhumation, which was not to begin until Erlendur gave his permission.

Erlendur surveyed the area, silently rueing the disruption, the damage, the desecration. The grave-stone had been removed and laid on a pathway near the grave. Beside it was a green jar with a long point on the base that could be stuck down into the soil. The jar contained a withered bunch of roses and Erlendur thought to himself that Elin must have put it on the grave. He stopped, read the epitaph once again and shook his head. The white wooden pegging to mark out the grave, which had stood barely eight inches up from the ground, now lay broken beside the headstone. Erlendur had seen that kind of fencing around children’s graves, and it pained him to see it discarded this way. He looked up into the black sky. Water dripped from the brim of his hat onto his shoulders and he squinted against the falling rain. He scanned the group standing by the digger, finally looked at Sigurdur Oli and nodded. Sigurdur Oli made a sign to the digger operator. The bucket rose into the air then plunged deep into the porous soil.

Erlendur watched the digger tear up 30-year-old wounds. He winced at each thrust of the bucket. The pile of soil steadily grew and the deeper the hole became, the more darkness it consumed. Erlendur stood some distance away and watched the bucket digging deeper and deeper into the wound. Suddenly he felt a sensation of deja-vu, as if he had seen this all before in a dream, and for an instant the scene in front of him took on a dreamlike atmosphere: his colleagues standing there looking into the grave, the council workers in their orange overalls leaning forward onto their shovels, the minister in the big black overcoat, the rain that poured down into the grave and came back up in the bucket as if the hole were bleeding.