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rather droll,’ she would say when she read something funny in the paper. Elinborg assumed that she must have picked up such words from her extensive reading.
    The fish was not bad, and the freshly baked bread served with it was delicious. Elinborg left the chips, which she had never particularly liked. When she had finished her fish she asked if the restaurant served espresso. The bartender, a woman of uncertain age who also cooked, baked, rented out videos and took in washing, conjured up a cup of good espresso in no time. The door opened, and someone came in to look at the videos.
    The shawl that had been found in Runolfur’s flat was a puzzle. It did not necessarily mean that a woman had been there at the time of the killing - or that his assailant had been a woman. The shawl could have been lying on the floor where it was found, under the bed, for several days. Yet the inescapable conclusion was that Runolfur might have used the date-rape drug that evening, that he could have brought a woman home with him - a woman who’d accompanied him willingly or otherwise - and that something had happened which had prompted the violent attack. Perhaps the effects of the drug had worn off and when the woman had regained consciousness she had seized the nearest weapon, whether for self-defence or revenge.
    The murder weapon, a knife, had not been found in the flat and the murderer had left no trace, except for his or her evident hatred and rage against the dead man. If Runolfur had raped the woman who owned the shawl, and had then been attacked and killed by her, how did that help the police? Where had the shawl been bought? Officers would try to identify the shop that had sold it, but it did not look new and that line of enquiry might yield no result. The woman had worn perfume that lingered in the shawl. The fragrance had not yet been identified but it was only a matter of time before it was, and enquiries would then be made at stores where it was sold. The shawl also smelt of smoke, which might only indicate that the owner had worn it in bars where people were smoking, or alternatively that she was a smoker herself. Runolfur was in his early thirties, and it was possible that he had met a woman of similar age. Dark hairs had been found on the shawl and in Runolfur’s flat. They were not dyed. So the woman was a brunette. She must wear her hair short, as the hairs found were not long.
    Perhaps she worked at a restaurant that served tandoori dishes. Elinborg knew something about tandoori cookery, and had even included some tandoori dishes in the cookery book that she had published. She had read up on tandoori cuisine and felt pretty well-informed about it. She owned two different clay tandoori pots. In India they would traditionally be heated in a pit filled with burning charcoal so that the meat was cooked evenly from all sides at a high temperature. Elinborg had occasionally buried a tandoori pot in her back garden in the authentic manner, but usually she put it in the oven or heated it over charcoal on an old barbecue. The crucial factor was the marinade, for which Elinborg used a combination of spices, blending them to taste with plain yoghurt. For a red colour she added ground annatto seed; for yellow, saffron. She generally experimented with a mixture of cayenne pepper, coriander, ginger and garlic, or with a garam masala that she made herself by using roasted or ground cardamom, cumin, cinnamon, garlic and black pepper, with a little nutmeg. She had also been trying out variations using Icelandic herbs such as wild thyme, angelica root, dandelion leaves and lovage. She would rub the marinade into the meat - chicken or pork - and leave it for several hours before it went into the tandoori pot. Sometimes a little of the marinade would splash on to the hot coals, bringing out more strongly the tangy tandoori fragrance that Elinborg had smelt on the shawl. She wondered if the woman they were looking for might have a job in