“I don’t think so.”

“We haven’t announced it yet,” Erlendur said, “but we found a note on top of the body.”

“A note?”

“The murderer wrote ’I am him’ on a piece of paper and left it on top of Holberg.”

“I am him?”

“Doesn’t that suggest they were related?”

“Unless it’s a Messiah complex. A religious maniac.”

“I’d rather put it down to kinship.”

“ ’I am him’? What’s he saying by that? What’s the meaning?”

“I wish I knew,” Erlendur said.

He stood up and put on his hat, saying he had to get home. Marion asked how Eva Lind was, Erlendur said she was dealing with her problems and left it at that. Marion accompanied him to the door and showed him out. They shook hands. When Erlendur went down the steps, Marion called out to him.

“Erlendur! Wait a minute, Erlendur.”

Erlendur turned around and looked up to Marion standing in the doorway and he saw how age had left its mark on that air of respectability, how rounded shoulders could diminish dignity and a wrinkled face bear witness to a difficult life. It was a long time since he’d been to that flat and he had been thinking, while he sat facing Marion in the chair, about the treatment that time hands out to people.

“Don’t let anything you find out about Holberg have too much effect on you,” Marion Briem said. “Don’t let him kill any part of you that you don’t want rid of anyway. Don’t let him win. That was all.”

Erlendur stood still in the rain, unsure of what this advice was supposed to mean. Marion Briem nodded at him.

“What burglary was it?”

“Burglary?” Marion asked opening the door again.

“That Gretar did. What did he burgle?”

“A photographic shop. He had some kind of fixation with photographs,” Marion Briem said. “He took pictures.”

Two men, both wearing leather jackets and black leather boots laced up to their calves, knocked at Erlendur’s door and disturbed him as he was nodding off in his armchair later that evening. He’d come home, called out to Eva Lind without getting a reply and sat down on the chicken portions that had lain on the chair ever since he’d slept sitting on them the night before. The two men asked for Eva Lind. Erlendur had never seen them before and hadn’t seen his daughter since she had cooked him the meat stew. Their expressions were ruthless when they asked Erlendur where they could get hold of her and they tried to see inside the flat without actually pushing past him. Erlendur asked what they wanted his daughter for. They asked if he was hiding her inside his flat, the dirty old sod. Erlendur asked if they’d come to collect a debt. They told him to fuck off. He told them to bugger off. They told him to eat shit. When he was about to close the door, one of them stuck his knee in past the doorframe. “Your daughter’s a fucking cunt,” he shouted. He was wearing leather trousers.

Erlendur sighed. It had been a long, dull day.

He heard the knee crack and splinter when the door slammed against it with such force that the upper hinges ripped out of the frame.

Sigurdur Oli was wondering how to phrase the question. He was holding a list with the names of ten women who’d lived in Husavik before and after 1960 but had since moved to Reykjavik. Two on the list were dead. Two had never had any children. The remaining six had all become mothers during the period when the rape was likely to have occurred. Sigurdur Oli was on his way to visit the first one. She lived on Barmahlid. Divorced. She had three grown-up sons.

But how was he supposed to put the question to these middle-aged women? “Excuse me, madam, I’m from the police and I’ve been sent to ask you whether you were ever raped in Husavik when you lived there.” He talked it over with Elinborg, who had a list with the names of ten other women, but she didn’t understand the problem.

Sigurdur Oli regarded it as a futile operation that Erlendur had launched. Even if Ellidi happened to be telling the truth and the time and place fitted and they finally found the right woman after a long search, what guarantees were there that she would talk about the rape at all? She’d kept quiet about it all her life. Why should she start talking about it now? All she needed to say, when Sigurdur Oli or any of the five detectives who were carrying the same kind of list knocked on her door, was “no", and they could say little more than “sorry to bother you.” Even if they did find the woman, there were no guarantees that she had in fact had a child as a result of the rape.

“It’s a question of responses, you should use psychology,” Erlendur had said when Sigurdur Oli tried to make him see the problem. “Try to get into their homes, sit down, accept a coffee, chat, be a bit of a gossip.”

“Psychology!” Sigurdur Oli snorted when he got out of his car on Barmahlid and he thought about his partner, Bergthora. He didn’t even know how to use psychology on her. They’d met under unusual circumstances some years before, when Bergthora was a witness in a difficult case and after a short romance they decided to start living together. It turned out that they were well suited, had similar interests and both wanted to make a beautiful home for themselves with exclusive furniture and objets d’art, yuppies at heart. They always kissed when they met after a long day at work. Gave each other little presents. Even opened a bottle of wine. Sometimes they went straight to bed when they got home from work, but there’d been considerably less of that recently.

That was after she had given him a pair of very ordinary Finnish Wellington boots for his birthday. He tried to beam with delight but the expression of disbelief stayed on his face for too long and she saw there was something wrong. When he finally smiled, it was false.

“Because you didn’t have any,” she said.

“I haven’t had a pair of Wellington boots since I was… 10,” he said.

“Aren’t you pleased?”

“I think they’re great,” Sigurdur Oli said, knowing that he hadn’t answered the question. She knew it too. “No, seriously,” he added and could tell he was digging himself a cold grave. “It’s fantastic.”

“You’re not pleased with them,” she said morosely.

“Sure I am,” he said, still at a total loss because he couldn’t stop thinking about the 30,000-krona wristwatch he’d given her for her birthday, bought after a week of explorations all over town and discussions with watchmakers about brands, gold plating, mechanisms, straps, water-tightness, Switzerland and cuckoo clocks. He’d applied all his detective skills to find the right watch, found it in the end and she was ecstatic, her joy and delight were genuine.

Then he was sitting in front of her with his smile frozen on his face and tried to pretend to be overjoyed, but he simply couldn’t do it for all his life was worth.

“Psychology?” Sigurdur Oli snorted again.

He rang the bell when he’d arrived at the door of the first lady he was visiting on Barmahlid and asked the question with as much psychological depth as he could muster, but failed miserably. Before he knew it, in a fluster he’d asked the woman on the landing whether she might ever have been raped.

“What the bloody hell are you on about?” the lady said, war paint on her face, finery on her fingers and a ferocious expression which did not look likely to ease up. “Who are you? What kind of a pervert are you anyway?”

“No, sorry,” Sigurdur Oli said and was back down the stairs in a split second.

Elinborg had more luck, since she had her mind more on her work and wasn’t shy about chatting away to gain people’s confidence. Her speciality was cooking, she was an exceptionally interested and capable cook and had no trouble finding a talking point. If the chance presented itself she’d ask what that gorgeous aroma emanating from the kitchen was and even people who’d lived on nothing but popcorn for the past week would welcome her indoors.