Ashes to Dust (33 page)

‘That may well be the case,’ said
Klara crossly. ‘But it was still unforgivable. She couldn’t expect
simply to jump into the inner circle here, and after I had cleared up the mess
she was as isolated as before. It was most unwise of her.’ Klara folded
her hands demurely on her broad thighs.

Thóra decided there was little to be
gained from continuing this line of questioning. ‘Do you know if the
couple lost any children?’ she asked instead, although she knew that
Bella was at that moment working hard to dig up that information.

‘No,’ replied Klara. ‘They
had no children while they lived here. They tried for a long time, but with no
luck. Valgerdur miscarried at least twice and that just made her
more bitter
. Of course back then there weren’t all
those psychiatrists people run crying to now, but there’s no doubt that
her sheer delight in our children’s failures was due to her
childlessness. She was always ready to spread stories about the kids in the
neighbourhood, and my boys were no exception because they were quite
mischievous.’

‘There’s a child’s room in
their house,’ said Thóra, hoping that no one would wonder how she
knew this. ‘Could the people who lived there before Valgerdur and Dadi
have had a child?’ Again, Bella was hopefully finding out the answer to
that very question as she spoke.

‘They built that house, so no one lived
there before them. The neighbourhood was the newest part of town, so some of
the houses weren’t completely finished even after everyone moved
in,’ said Klara. ‘I went to their house extremely rarely, only if I
couldn’t avoid it.’ She rolled her shoulders gingerly, as if they
were sore.

‘I never saw a children’s room
but they may well have set one up. Actually, I heard they had a son not long
after the evacuation, so maybe she was pregnant but hadn’t told anyone,
in the light of her previous experiences. They might have been preparing for
the birth of that child. But I can’t imagine it, because I heard from a
woman I know that rumour had it Valgerdur showed little motherly affection for
her newborn at first. It sounds like there were some issues there.’

‘Did you keep in touch with them after
they moved to the mainland?’ asked Thóra. ‘No,’ said
Klara indignantly. ‘Why would I? I just told you, they weren’t much
to my liking. A lot of good people moved away from here and didn’t return,
and 1 had enough trouble keeping in touch with them.’‘

‘I understand,’ said Thóra
politely. ‘Do you think Dadi and Valgerdur were connected in any way to
the bodies found in your basement?’

‘I wouldn’t know anything about
that,’ replied the woman, still bristling. ‘I’ve already told
the police I have no idea how this could have happened, and I’ve said
over and over that I had nothing to do with it.’

Thóra noticed that the old woman said
‘I’ and not ‘we’. This was something she’d also
noticed in the police report — the briefest one in the entire file,
written up by Gudni Leifsson. In it Klara had been asked a few questions, and
had answered as succinctly as possible. Thóra suspected that
Stefán and his colleagues would not be quite so considerate if and when
they came to interview her. ‘But did they have connections to any
foreigners here in the Islands?’ asked Thóra hopefully.

‘Well, yes — Valgerdur worked at
the hospital, of course, besides serving as school nurse two afternoons a
week,’ replied Klara. ‘In school there were no foreign teachers or
staff, but the hospital sometimes admitted wounded foreign fishermen, as well
as other foreigners, I imagine. You couldn’t really call that a
connection, though, her taking care of their injuries. As for Dadi, he worked
for one of the smaller fishing companies in the Islands. Only Icelanders
worked there, to my knowledge. Beyond that it’s probably better to direct
the questions to their son; I’m sure he could tell you more than I
can, since I have never had any interest in them.’

‘Has Dadi passed away?’ asked
Thóra. ‘I know Valgerdur died recently, but I have yet to check on
him.’

‘As far as I know, he died of cirrhosis
of the liver a couple of years ago,’ said Klara crisply. ‘But I
think their son is alive.’

‘Do you know his name?’

‘No, I don’t remember. I heard it
once but forgot it a long time ago.’

Thóra nodded. Maybe Bella would find
it in the archive. She had managed to loosen the woman’s tongue, so now
it was time to change gears again; in any case, she had run out of questions
about the neighbours.

‘There is something else,’ she
said. ‘On Friday the nineteenth of January 1973, the weekend before
the eruption, there was a school dance here in town that got out of hand.
Markus was picked up by his father, since he’d had too much to drink with
his friends and schoolmates.’ She gazed levelly at the woman. ‘Do
you remember that evening?’

From
Klara’s
reaction, you would have thought Thóra had asked for permission to
rummage through the family’s dirty laundry. ‘I vaguely remember
that,’ she replied, though she clearly remembered the evening in question
quite well. ‘It wasn’t just Markus but the whole class, as I
recall. Markus never drank, unlike the other teenagers, so it came as a shock
to us.’

‘I have no interest in Markus’s
drinking, but I was wondering if you might remember anything else unusual from
that evening,’ said Thóra. ‘Do you remember whether your
husband went out after he brought Markus home, perhaps down to the
harbour?’

Klara paled. ‘Magnus didn’t go
anywhere,’ she said. ‘He brought the boy home and that’s all.
Magnus wasn’t in the habit of wandering off in the middle of the night,
and he’d hardly have been in the mood to do so after seeing the state his
son was in.’
She
fiddled with the large gold
rings on two fingers of her left hand, and looked away.

Thóra didn’t believe a word of
this. For the first time in the conversation, the woman wore a hunted
expression, and she was clearly no
actress
. She
appeared to be just as poor a liar as her son when under pressure.
‘How about you, Leifur?’
Thóra asked.
‘Do you remember anything from that night?’ She smiled brightly at
Klara. ‘Maybe Magnus went out after you were asleep.’

Leifur shook his head. ‘I was in
Reykjavik that weekend. Classes had started again after the Christmas holidays.
I was in my third year at Reykjavik Junior College and I was living in the
city.’

Thóra raised an eyebrow. ‘But
you were here the night of the eruption,’ she said. ‘And that was
in the middle of the week, wasn’t it?’

Leifur smiled at her, but unlike his
mother’s his smile appeared genuine. The old
lady
was looking more bored and irritated by the second. ‘Markus getting drunk
like that really hit the family hard,’ he said. ‘Mother was in
pieces and Father was furious, so I decided to come home and give Markus a
piece of my mind. We were off school that Monday anyway, so I didn’t miss
much. I had planned to go back to town on Tuesday, although I hadn’t
expected it to be in the middle of the night, as it turned out to be.’

‘Is that Sigridur?’ said the old
man suddenly. He had stopped staring out of the window and was now peering in
bewilderment at Thóra.

‘No, Dad,’ replied Leifur gently.
‘This woman is name Thóra. Sigridur is dead.’ He took his
father’s hand. ‘Wow, your hands are like ice. Should we cover you
up a bit better?’ Leifur didn’t wait for an answer, since the old
man seemed to have tuned out again. Leifur looked at Thóra.
‘Sigridur was his sister. He probably thought you looked like her,
although I don’t see a resemblance.’

Thóra smiled at father and son.
‘Hello, Magnus,’ she said loudly, even though she’d promised
herself she wouldn’t speak down to the old man. ‘My name is
Thóra, and I’m a lawyer.’ The old man frowned, not taking
his eyes off her. ‘I’m helping your son. Bodies were found in the
basement of your old house on Sudurvegur Street, and the police think Markus is
involved.’ Leifur and his mother had agreed that she could try to speak
to him, though they both believed nothing would come of it. Mind you, the look
on the faces of both mother and son indicated that they’d clearly not
expected this topic when they gave their reluctant permission.

‘Sigridur?’ repeated the old man
quizzically. ‘Basement?’ he added. Thóra’s words were
filtering through to him, though possibly not their meaning. The man fell
silent and turned back to the window.

‘There’s no point trying with
him,’ said Klara, her voice gentler than before. ‘He can still
speak, but it’s not really connected to what’s going on around him.
Also, the conversations, the few he takes part in, go in whatever
direction he wants. It’s impossible to manage them.’ She looked
from her husband back to Thóra, and her expression hardened. ‘I
would rather you didn’t badger him
any more
.’

Thóra agreed. She had hoped the man
would be in better condition, even though everyone in the family had said that
he was suffering from full dementia. ‘Klara,’ she said cheerfully,
‘do you think that your husband could somehow be involved in this case?
Even the best of men can end up in situations that bring out the worst in them.
No one really knows what happened, and there could even be a natural
explanation for the deaths, one that’s hard to work out after so many years.’

The old woman leaned back as if to distance
herself from Thóra as much as possible. The smell of her perfume
subsided slightly. ‘It is my understanding that the men were beaten to
death,’ she said. ‘My husband was a strong man and a very hard
worker. However, he wasn’t violent. He couldn’t have killed
anyone.’

‘Did he never get into any fights in
his youth, do you remember?’ asked Thóra.

‘Fights?’ exclaimed Klara.
‘He was—’ She glanced over at her husband and corrected
herself. ‘He is a man. Of course he got into fights in the old days,
before the children entered the picture.’

‘Was he a bit of a handful when
he’d had a drink, anything like that?’
persisted
Thóra, mindful of Markus’s assertion that his father had been less
than pleasant when drunk. She also knew that seamanship in the old days was
usually accompanied by robust drinking. There were many so-called heroes
of the sea in her mother’s family, and she’d heard tales of their
long voyages, where they had worked hard under enormous pressure, then let
off steam on shore. Now times had changed, and drunken sailors were no longer
in evidence on the streets of the city.

‘Magnus wasn’t a violent drunk,
if that’s what you mean,’ replied Klara sharply. ‘Nor was he
an alcoholic, like some of his colleagues. I actually think that’s the
reason he did better than them and managed to start a company that is now one
of the largest here in the Islands.’

‘Of course, part of that was because he
was also so
hardworking
,’ Leifur added.
‘There are a lot of stories of his diligence when he was a young man - he
had to fight hard for everything he got in life.’ He put a hand on his
father’s shoulder. ‘He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his
mouth like so many people nowadays.’

Thóra didn’t wish to point out
that Leifur was one of those people: his father’s business had been
handed to him on a plate. She also decided not to press them concerning
Magnus’s drinking, since it didn’t seem relevant. ‘Could he
have got into something in order to help someone out?’ asked Thóra.
‘Like Thórgeir, Alda’s father?’

‘Sigridur?’ asked Magnus
suddenly, before mother or son could answer her. ‘Do you know
Geiri’s girl, Alda?’

‘Yes,’ said Thóra, fearing
the old man would retreat back into his shell if she said no.

‘How is she?’ he asked, picking
at a thread on the edge of his fleece blanket. ‘That was an awful
business.’

‘What business?’ asked
Thóra calmly, trying not to break the thread of his concentration.

‘I wonder if the falcon
survived?’ said the old man. ‘I hope so.’

‘I… I think it must have,’
said Thóra, desperate to say the right thing. ‘Did Alda kill the
man?’ she asked, when nothing else came to mind.

The old man looked at her and his mood seemed
to darken. ‘You’re always so difficult, Sigridur. Who invited you
here?’

‘Klara did,’ replied
Thóra, smiling as gently as possible.

When the only response she got was a blank
stare, she added: ‘Klara, your wife.’

‘That poor child,’ said Magnus,
shaking his head slowly.
‘Poor child, to have to rely
on such people.’

‘Do you mean Alda?’ asked
Thóra urgently, because the man appeared to be drifting away again.
‘Did Alda have a hard time as a child?’

‘I just hope the falcon
survived,’ said Magnus, and shut his eyes.

Further attempts to get him to speak were
in vain. Thóra sat thoughtfully, unable to
make head
nor
tail of anything he’d said. Why was he talking about a falcon?
Was it connected to some event in his own life, unconnected to the bodies in
the basement or Alda’s murder? And which child was he talking about?

Saturday 21 July
2007