House of Evidence(36)
June 8, 1915. I am going to stay here in Copenhagen for a few days, rest and decide what to do next…
June 10, 1915. I am thinking of going to England to visit Elizabeth. The crossing is dangerous, of course, yet I must not be afraid of undertaking this journey but once, when the sailors are doing it all the time. I read in a newspaper that 1,382 steamships sailed in and out of British seaports in one week and that 8 of these had been sunk. That is just over half of one percent. The Danish ships are, of course, neutral and they fly the Danish flag…
June 11, 1915. I visited the office of the British Embassy this morning to apply for a visa. The purpose I gave for my visit was that I wanted to look up some friends of mine with whom I had lost touch. I had to give a thorough account of my stay in Berlin. In the end I got my visa on condition that during my stay I present myself each week at the office of the Immigration Authority…
June 12, 1915. The old railway station here in Copenhagen has been turned into a cinema. I went to a film show, but could think of nothing but my recollection of the day, five years ago, when I first came here and saw the trains. I feel as if a whole lifetime has gone by since then. I do remember the arched roof, though; otherwise it all seems a lot smaller than it was in my memory…
June 15, 1915. I heard that the Icelandic Steamship Company’s brand new ship the Godafoss is to embark on its first journey to Iceland on the 19th of this month. The ship stops en route in Leith, so it seems an excellent idea to try and get a passage on it…
June 19, 1915. It was a festive occasion when the Godafoss set off from the dock in Copenhagen. The ship is 70 meters long and 1,374 tonnes. It has a crew of 31 and accommodation for 56 passengers. Everything here on board is new and splendid. The only thing I do not like is that the ship has two Danish flags and the word “Danmark” in large white letters painted on each side, but this is of course necessary because of the war. It must be clear that the ship comes from a neutral country. The captain told me that they had painted over these markings on the Gullfoss before it entered the port of Reykjavik this spring…The Godafoss is, apparently, the first Icelandic ship with radiotelegraphic equipment, and through this, we heard that the Danish government had today approved a new constitution for Iceland and also agreed on a new Icelandic national flag, which will have an ultra-marine field with a red cross superimposed upon a white cross. The blue color is lighter than, for instance, the blue of the French, Norwegian, and English flags…
Jóhann had a visitor at the lab that afternoon; Erlendur’s son, Halli, had come to the office, as he occasionally did, to get a lift home with his father. Erlendur couldn’t always leave on time, and on those occasions Halli would seek refuge in the lab with Jóhann. He would sit in a corner drawing with a pencil on squared paper, always starting his pictures in the top left-hand corner and working systematically down the sheet. His illustrations depicted things from daily life: cars, roads, houses, or people skiing. Each drawing was careful and exact, though completely devoid of any sense of perspective.
Blue-eyed Halli was tanned and handsome, with blond hair cut straight across his forehead. His right ear was slightly deformed, and his long hair concealed the hearing aid he wore there. Halli usually had a smile on his face that highlighted his straight white teeth, but when he was busy drawing, as he was now, his expression became serious as he frowned in concentration.
Jóhann had arrived at the lab just after five o’clock with all the data he had collected at Birkihlíd. He arranged the cards with the known fingerprints in a semicircle on the table in front of him, and began sorting the unknown prints he had retrieved at the scene. Marteinn had taken the film to be developed, before heading to the hospital for the postmortem. When Fridrik had extracted the bullet, Marteinn was to bring it to Jóhann for examination.
It didn’t take Jóhann long to recognize and put aside the prints that matched those of the dead man and of Sveinborg, the housekeeper. One print lifted from the telephone table obviously belonged to his colleague Egill; not an unusual occurrence in cases like this. The detectives were not always quick enough in donning their gloves, leaving fingerprints in unhelpful places, but Jóhann could recognize most of them by sight. It was an unusual talent, one that he developed at college in the States. He remembered fingerprints almost as well as faces, and if a print was clean, he could often tell immediately whether he had examined it before.
In the end, there were only two samples left that he had no match for, but they seemed to belong to the same person. Someone had opened the lid to the keyboard of the grand piano in the parlor, and also picked up one of the stamp frames from the desk. He knew that Sveinborg had polished the frames the previous day, so her prints would be on them, but the frames had been picked up again after that. To his surprise, he recognized these prints.