Eva Lind met her father at the door when he got home. It was past 9 p.m. The bride had left. Before she went she had told Eva Lind she was going to talk to her husband and find out how he was feeling. She wasn’t sure whether she would tell him the real reason for running out of their wedding. Eva Lind urged her to, said she shouldn’t cover up for that bastard of a father of hers. The last thing she should do was cover up for him.

They sat down in the sitting room. Erlendur told Eva Lind all about the murder investigation, where it had led him and what was going through his mind. He did so not least to gain some kind of understanding of the case for his own benefit, a clearer picture of what had been happening over the past few days. He told her almost everything, from the moment they found Holberg’s body in the basement, the smell in his flat, the note, the old photograph in the drawer, the pornography on his computer, the epitaph on the gravestone, Kolbrun and her sister, Elin, Audur and her unexplained death, the dreams that haunted him, Ellidi in prison and Gretar’s disappearance, Marion Briem, the search for Holberg’s other victim and the man in front of Elin’s house, conceivably Holberg’s son. He tried to give a systematic account and discussed with himself various theories and questions, until he reached a dead end and stopped talking.

He didn’t tell Eva Lind the brain was missing from the child’s body. He hadn’t yet begun to understand how that could have happened.

Eva Lind listened to him without interrupting and she noticed how Erlendur rubbed his chest while he talked. She could feel how the Holberg case was affecting him. She could sense an air of resignation about him that she’d never noticed before. She could sense his weariness when he talked about the little girl. It was as if he withdrew inside himself, his voice went quieter and he became increasingly remote.

“Is Audur the girl you told me about when you were shouting at me this morning?” Eva Lind asked.

“She was, I don’t know, maybe some kind of godsend to her mother,” Erlendur said. “She loved the girl beyond death and the grave. Sorry if I’ve been nasty to you. I didn’t intend to, but when I see the way you live, when I see your careless attitude and your lack of self-respect, when I see the destruction, everything you do to yourself and then I watch the little coffin coming up out of the ground, then I can’t understand anything any more. I can’t understand what’s happening and I want to…”

Erlendur fell silent.

“Beat the shit out of me,” Eva Lind finished the sentence for him.

Erlendur shrugged.

“I don’t know what I want to do. Maybe the best thing is to do nothing. Maybe it’s best to let life run its course. Forget the whole business. Start doing something sensible. Why should I want to get involved in all this? All this filth. Talking to people like Ellidi. Doing deals with shits like Eddi. Seeing how people like Holberg get their kicks. Reading rape reports. Digging up the foundations of a house full of bugs and shit. Digging up little coffins.”

Erlendur stroked his chest even harder.

“You think it won’t affect you. You reckon you’re strong enough to withstand that sort of thing. You think you can put on armour against it over the years and can watch all the filth from a distance as if it’s none of your business, and try to keep your senses. But there isn’t any distance. And there’s no armour. No-one’s strong enough. The repulsion haunts you like an evil spirit that burrows into your mind and doesn’t leave you in peace until you believe that the filth is life itself because you’ve forgotten how ordinary people live. This case is like that. Like an evil spirit that’s been unleashed to run riot in your mind and ends up leaving you crippled.”

Erlendur heaved a deep sigh. “It’s all one great big bloody mire.”

He stopped talking and Eva Lind sat silently with him.

Some time passed like this until she got up, sat down beside her father, put her arm round him and sidled up against him. She could hear his heart beating rhythmically, like a soothing clock, and eventually fell asleep with a contented smile on her face.

Around 9 a.m. the following day the forensic and CID teams gathered at Holberg’s house. There was hardly a glimpse of daylight even at that time in the morning. The sky was gloomy and it was still raining. The radio had said the rain in Reykjavik was approaching the record of October 1926.

The sewage pipe had been cleaned and there was nothing left alive in the foundations. The hole in the base plate had been widened so that two men could go down through it at once. The owners of the flats above were standing in a group outside the basement door. They had ordered a plumber to mend the pipe and were waiting to call him in as soon as the police gave permission.

It soon emerged that the hollow area around the sewage pipe was relatively small. It measured about three square yards and was contained because the ground hadn’t sunk away from the base plate everywhere. The pipe had broken in the same place as before. The old repair was visible and there was a different kind of gravel underneath the pipe from that around it. The forensic technicians discussed whether to widen the hole even further, dig up the gravel from the foundations and empty it out until they could see everywhere under the base plate. After some argument they decided that the plate might break if what was under it was removed completely, so they opted for a safer and more technically advanced method, drilling holes through the floor here and there and putting a miniature camera down into the foundations.

Sigurdur Oli watched when they started drilling holes into the floor and then set up two monitors that were connected to the two cameras that forensics were using. The cameras were little more than pipes with a light on the front which were slipped into the holes and could be moved by remote control. Holes were drilled in the floor where it was thought to be hollow underneath, they slipped the cameras inside and switched on the two monitors. The picture came out in black-and-white and seemed of very poor quality to Sigurdur Oli, who owned a German television set costing half a million crowns.

Erlendur arrived at the basement just as they were starting to probe with the cameras and shortly afterwards Elinborg turned up. Sigurdur Oli noticed Erlendur had shaved and was wearing clean clothes which looked almost as though they’d been ironed.

“Anything happening?” Erlendur asked and lit a cigarette, to Sigurdur Oli’s chagrin.

“They’re going to do a camera probe,” Sigurdur Oli said. “We can watch it on the screen.”

“Nothing in the sewage?” Erlendur said, sucking down the smoke.

“Bugs and rats, nothing else.”

“Filthy stench down here,” Elinborg said and took out a perfumed handkerchief that she carried in her handbag. Erlendur offered her a cigarette, but she declined.

“Holberg could have used the hole the plumber made to put Gretar under the floor,” Erlendur said. “He would have seen it was hollow under the base plate and could have moved the gravel around once he’d put Gretar wherever he wanted.”

They gathered around the screen but couldn’t make out very much of what they saw. A little glow of light moved back and forth, up and down and to the sides. Sometimes they thought they could see the outline of the base plate and sometimes they appeared to see gravel. The ground had subsided to varying degrees. In some places it was right up to the plate, but elsewhere there was a gap of up to three feet.

They stood for a good while watching the cameras. It was noisy in the basement because the forensic team was continually drilling new holes and Erlendur soon lost his patience and walked out. Elinborg quickly followed him and then Sigurdur Oli. They all got into Erlendur’s car. He had told them the previous evening why he suddenly left for Keflavik, but they hadn’t had the opportunity to discuss it any further.