Ashes to Dust (47 page)

Thóra went online to check whether
anything was being reported on the news websites. You never knew, perhaps the
media would get the news before her.
This turned out not to
be the case.
The only report she found stated briefly that it was still
unclear whether an extension of Markus Magnusson’s custody period would
be requested before it expired tomorrow. Thóra gave up and decided to
call Stefán, so that she could stop wondering when he would call her and
get on with something else.

‘We’re going to request two more
weeks of confinement based on his being party to the murders of the men in the
basement,’ replied Stefán brusquely. ‘The decision will be
made before two p.m. tomorrow.’

Thóra stifled a sigh, not wanting to
betray her disappointment. ‘But is he no longer a suspect in
Alda’s death?’ she asked hopefully. Even that would be some
progress.

‘Given the estate agent’s
statement and the evidence that backs him up, not to mention the information
that has recently come to our attention, we no longer consider Markus to have
had a hand in that.’

Stefán’s tone made it clear that
he disagreed with this position. He was just as convinced of
Markus’s guilt as before, but the police department’s lawyer had
probably made the decision and informed him that there was no way to corroborate
his suspicions. It seemed clear to Thóra that the new information
Stefán had mentioned had come from the plastic surgeon, Dís.
According to Bragi, after their meeting he and Dís had gone together to
the police station, where the doctor had told the police some facts pertinent
to the investigation.

‘What information was this?’

‘As your client is no longer a suspect
in Alda’s case, that is none of your business,’ said Stefán.
‘Now he’s only a suspect in the small matter of the bodies found on
the Islands.’

‘Do you mean you’re going to
overlook what I found out about them?’ snapped Thóra.

‘We don’t see that these details
of yours make much of a difference,’ said Stefán.
‘We’d already received information about some of them from Gudni,
including the mysterious pool of blood. Even if Markus’s father was
involved, that doesn’t preclude Markus playing his own part in it.’

‘I don’t understand your
reasoning,’ said Thóra, feeling her spirits start to sink.
‘There’s no indication that Markus isn’t telling the truth
about the head in the box, and what little evidence has come to light seems to
point to other people.’

‘Your man is involved in the case,
whether you like it or not.’

‘Do you even know who the dead men
were? Even if you’re in no hurry, it’s in my client’s
interests that the case be resolved quickly.’

‘Yes,’ said Stefán,
without appearing to register Thóra’s jibe. ‘They were the
crew of a boat that disappeared off the coast of Iceland in January 1973. We
sent X-rays of the teeth abroad and all the men have been identified.’

‘What?’ said
Thóra.
She recalled what she had read about two shipwrecks in Our Century, one with a
crew of Icelanders and Faroese and the other a crew of four British men, one of
whom had been found. She had ruled out both incidents, since they didn’t
seem to fit. ‘Which boat was it, and when did it sink?’ she asked.

‘I see no harm in telling you
that,’ said Stefán, and she heard him rustling some papers.
‘It was a fishing smack named the Cuckoo, and it was seen last on the
eighteenth of January 1973 off the south coast.’

Thóra sat silently, her mind reeling.
Magnus had mentioned a cuckoo but she had not made the connection, the
vessel’s name from the Our Century article forgotten. ‘I read an
old news report about it,’ she said. ‘It said the body of one of
the four-man crew had washed up on shore, along with some other wreckage. If
the bodies in the basement are the rest of the crew, then this begs the
question: who did the head belong to?’ Could it be that there was no
connection between the three bodies and the head in the box after all?

‘There’s no doubt about who the
fourth man in the basement was,’ said Stefán. ‘Body parts
were washed ashore, among them a torso. Its head was missing, and it was
thought at the time that it had been torn off by the force of the wreck. The
body was in terrible condition and it was missing more than just the head: an
arm was gone, and also the body part that was found along with the head.’
He cleared his throat. ‘That is to say, in its mouth.’

Thóra knew which body part he meant.
She was struggling to understand what this new information meant for
Markus. The crew had vanished before the eruption, while he was still in the
Islands. But she couldn’t see how Stefán and his colleagues would
prove any link between them and Markus. This must have been the boat that
stopped at the Islands on the night Markus was at the school dance, then at
home in a drunken stupor. ‘Did these men have any connection to
alcohol smuggling?’ she asked.

Stefán hesitated. ‘Yes…
you could say smuggling plays a part in this story,’ he said. ‘How
did you know?’ She told him about the alcohol smuggling case, and her
suspicion that it was connected to the murders. She also mentioned that
she’d already told Inspector Gudni Leifsson about it. Stefán,
however, didn’t appear to think this significant. ‘No, it
didn’t have anything to do with liquor smuggling,’ he said.
‘These men were stealing birds, and searching for nesting sites before
the spring.’

‘Bird smuggling?’ said
Thóra. ‘Birds of prey, like falcons, maybe?’

‘Yes, falcons and eagles, and probably
some other species I don’t know about,’ replied Stefán.
‘I know it’s possible to get huge sums for them abroad. At the
time, the police had been informed that these men were travelling through the
country asking about nesting sites. It seems likely that they planned to return
in the summer to steal eggs and hatchlings. If they hadn’t sailed away
when they did, they would at least have been brought in for questioning. We
think the scars on their hands were caused by raptors’ claws.
They’d been doing it for years.’

‘Do you know if they had any falcons,
or other birds, with them?’ asked Thóra, and told Stefán
about Magnus’s repeated references to a falcon.

‘No, not as far as I know,’ he
replied. ‘But you know you can’t take much of what
Alzheimer’s patients say seriously.’

‘But it seems obvious from this that
Magnus was involved,’ she said, furious at Stefán’s contrary
attitude. ‘He also definitely mentioned a cuckoo, so he was probably
talking about the boat.’

‘I’m not going to get into that.
Of course we will investigate all potential leads, but your man
isn’t getting out just because his father blurts out something so open to
interpretation, which may or may not be linked to the case.’

‘So you’re not going to
investigate Markus’s father, or
Dadi ?
I know
one of them is senile and the other dead, but there’s nothing preventing
you from changing the focus of your enquiry.’

‘Of course we’re following every
lead, as I said,’ replied Stefán. ‘Among other things,
we’re examining the knife and the salmon priest you found in the
basement, although it’s too early to know what they will tell us. So
there’s no point making snide comments about our working methods. On the
other hand, nothing has been discovered that proves your client is not
involved.
Far from it.
He’s the only one
behaving suspiciously. For example, he denies having put the head there.’

‘You know his explanation for
that,’ fumed Thóra.
‘An explanation from
which he has never deviated, despite countless interrogations and now
solitary confinement.’

‘That may be because he knows no one
can confirm or deny it,’ said Stefán. ‘And it may be that he
himself orchestrated that convenient state of affairs.’

Thóra didn’t feel like
responding to these insinuations. Markus had an alibi for Alda’s murder,
and besides, Dís’s information directed the spotlight away
from him. It didn’t actually matter how convinced Stefán was of
his guilt: no judge would be persuaded that Markus had murdered her.
‘Obviously I will object vigorously to your request for an extension of
custody,’ she snapped. ‘For your sake, I hope you have more than
just your opinion to bring to the table tomorrow.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Stefán.
‘Whatever you say.
See you tomorrow, bright and
early.’

Thóra did not respond to this asinine
comment, taking her leave and hanging up. She had allowed her anger to show in
her voice, and felt a little bit better. This was not shaping up to be the cosy
TV evening with her daughter she’d hoped for. It also looked as though
she wouldn’t be finished with the case before Matthew arrived.
Thóra stood up and started to scrape together the files that she needed
to go over to prepare herself. Hopefully she could work on the case at home
without upsetting Sóley. If not, she would wait until her daughter had
gone to bed and work on it late into the night. Lately her relationship with
her daughter had been characterized by too many broken promises. She was torn
from her thoughts about Sóley by the realization that she was supposed
to call Markus’s son, Hjalti. He simply moaned ‘No’ when
Thóra told him about the police’s decision, then she could hear his
rapid breathing. ‘I should remind you that even though the police are
still pursuing this, there’s nothing to say that the ruling will go their
way,’ she tried to assure him.

‘Yes, there is,’ said Hjalti,
sounding petulant - more like a small child than a young man.
‘They’re going to torture him into confessing.’

‘Let’s not start accusing the
police of torture,’ said Thóra evenly. She knew how to handle
children by now, since she had all sizes and shapes of them at home. The boy
needed to hear an adult tell him that everything would be all right; that his
father would be released from prison, come home shortly, and buy Hjalti an
apartment in the Islands, as he had planned. ‘These cases are very tough
while they’re going on, and often those who least deserve it end up
caught in the slipstream. I have no doubt that your father is one of those. If
he didn’t murder any of those people, he won’t be convicted.
I’ll make sure of it.’ She was going to add something about the
truth always coming out, but the boy interrupted her.

‘But what if someone didn’t
commit a murder
himself,
just helped the murderer?
What then?’ he asked frantically.

Thóra knew that this
‘someone’ was the boy’s father, and that Hjalti had realized
that Markus might be tied to the murderer or murderers. He was, in other words,
not completely clueless, poor boy, although he was deeply troubled.
‘In my opinion there’s nothing to suggest that your father did
anything that makes him an accomplice. He might have helped the murderer
unknowingly, but that’s not a crime.’ She hoped he wouldn’t
start asking what she meant, since she didn’t want to talk to the boy
about the severed head in the box.

‘Okay,’ said Hjalti, his voice
still tinged with nervousness. ‘Maybe I’ll come tomorrow at two
o’clock. Is that all right?’

‘I don’t think you’ll get
to see your father, if that’s what you’re hoping,’ said
Thóra. ‘But you can always come and wait outside, if you want.
Then I could meet you afterwards and tell you how it went, which might make you
feel better.’ The boy agreed to this, although she wished he
hadn’t. They said goodbye.

The phone rang again, and this time it was
Bella. ‘I’ve found the tattoo,’ she said. ‘You’d
better come and see this.’

The recent smoking ban hadn’t reached
the tattoo parlour; Bella blew a thick cloud of smoke in Thóra’s
direction. The
multicoloured
man who owned the
parlour also had a burning cigarette between his lips, so Thóra
couldn’t scold Bella. She settled for a glare, wondering what she was
actually doing here: Markus was pretty much absolved of all suspicion in
Alda’s murder, and the Love Sex tattoo wasn’t linked to the bodies
in the basement. However, she didn’t want to make light of Bella’s
investigation of the tattoo’s origin, so she acted as though nothing were
out of the ordinary. ‘So you think it’s unlikely that this tattoo
was put on anyone else?’ asked Thóra.

‘That would be a pretty fucking huge
coincidence,’ said the man, without removing the cigarette from the
corner of his mouth. He took a puff and blew out the smoke, still without
touching the cigarette. In the light of Bella’s prowess with the men in
the Islands, Thóra wondered for a moment whether they’d just been
up to something. ‘A girl made it up from two tattoos I’ve got in this
folder.’ He lifted his foot and kicked at a tired old folder on the couch
in front of Thóra. His black army boot shoved it across to her.

Thóra smiled politely and reached for
it. ‘Why do you remember this so well?’ she asked, looking around.
Every wall was hung with drawings or photos of tattoos. ‘It looks like
you do a lot of these. You can hardly be expected to remember each and every
one.’ Unless he was a modern version of the old farmers who were said to
be able to recognize every sheep marking in the country, she thought.

‘Nah,’ said the man, crossing his
muscular arms. When Thóra had first walked into the tiny, dilapidated
tattoo parlour she had thought he was wearing a garish fitted T-shirt beneath
his leather waistcoat. She was wrong. His arms were covered with colourful
pictures from the backs of his hands up: tigers and rainforest foliage that
rippled as though in the wind when he flexed or contracted his muscles.
‘I actually remember a lot of them.
Usually the most
beautiful ones, but also the really lame ones.’