Ashes to Dust (53 page)

‘How are you feeling?’ asked the
woman in Icelandic, coming over to the bedside. Tinna relaxed a little.

‘I need to talk to my mother,’
she replied. Her voice sounded whiny, although she hadn’t intended it to
come out that way.
‘Now.’

‘Your mother is coming tonight,’
said the nurse, leaning over the bed. She lifted one of Tinna’s eyelids
and stared into her eye. ‘Are you feeling okay?’ We know best.

‘I want to talk to my mother. I need to
tell her about the man. No one knows about this man but me.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the nurse.
‘We know about that.’ She’s pathetic. We know best. ‘I
think it’s time for your medicine, dear. You’ll feel better
afterwards.’ She turned and walked towards the door.

‘I need to talk to my mother. I know
his name and everything.’ The nurse did not react. She quickly
returned and put four white tablets in Tinna’s mouth, lifting her head
from the pillow and pressing the glass of water to her lips. She poured the
cold liquid in and held Tinna’s chin until she was certain that the girl
had swallowed everything. Tinna coughed weakly as the last mouthful of water
got caught in her throat. ‘We can find out what his name is. The note
fell out.’

‘All right, sweetheart,’ said the
woman with a smile. ‘Now you should sleep for a while, and when you wake
up your mother will be here.’

A while later her mother
came, but Tinna was still under the influence of the drugs and was groggy all
through visiting hours.
Every time
she forced her eyes open she saw the same thing - her mother crying. ‘I
can find out his name, Mum,’ she mumbled. Her voice was as thick and
fuzzy as her tongue. She wanted water, but it was more important to tell what
she knew. She had to do it. ‘He’s called Hjalti,’ she said.
‘I couldn’t read his last name, it was so poorly written.’
Her mother stroked Tinna’s forehead, still crying.
‘The
bad man.
He’s called Hjalti, Mother.’

Her mother wiped her eyes. ‘Shhh, my
Tinna. Sleep. Just sleep.’

Tinna gave up and closed her eyes. We
know best.

Tuesday 24 July
2007

Even though not everything had been cleared
up, the events from long ago were starting to take shape. Thóra
couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked for so long —
not sober, anyway. Despite the aching in her jaw and the dryness in her mouth,
she was happy with her monologue, since her words appeared to have had the
desired effect. Stefán and the police department lawyer were on the
verge of coming to the same conclusion as her - that Markus was innocent. The
three of them sat in Stefán’s office, where Thóra had
rushed after leaving Alda’s mother in the church. Though there was an
hour to go before they were due in court, Thóra was fairly sure the
custody request would be dropped. Officers had been sent to fetch Alda’s
mother, but her formal questioning had been delayed because of the funeral. Stefán
had settled for speaking to her for long enough to confirm Thóra’s
story. A plain-clothes
policeman
would accompany her
for the rest of the day, in the unlikely event that she should try to get away.
Thóra watched as she was brought to the police station. She walked bent
over, her face set hard.

There was no way to put
yourself
in her shoes. How did a woman feel, faced with the knowledge that she had made
a terrible mistake in bringing up her child? Thóra was unable to
comprehend how she could have sent her daughter with strangers to the
Westfjords and forced her to carry a child for another woman; a child that had
been created in such an abominable way. Alda’s mother had told her how
Valgerdur and Dadi wanted Alda to have the child under Valgerdur’s name,
since they had no chance of adopting a child the traditional way. They had
tried before, but had been refused.

At the time there had been no option to adopt
children from abroad. And Valgerdur had tried and failed to carry a pregnancy
to term herself. For them, this was their only hope of having a child.

In order for the deception to work, Dadi and
Valgerdur had to move to an isolated place with Alda and see to it that she had
contact with as few people as possible, which meant limited medical check-ups.
On the few occasions that she was around other people, Alda had to pretend to
be much older, so as not to arouse suspicion. According to Alda’s mother
that wasn’t that difficult after the rape; it was as though all the light
in Alda’s eyes had been extinguished, and she didn’t care about
anything. In the west the three of them settled on an abandoned farm owned by
Valgerdur’s relatives. The couple made sure to visit friends and
relations in the surrounding area several times with Valgerdur claiming to be
pregnant, to back up their story. No one suspected a thing. However, things
became more complicated when it came to the actual birth. The plan was for Alda
to deliver at home with Valgerdur’s assistance, but when it turned out
that the placenta was blocking the birth canal they had to rush Alda to the
hospital in Isafjördur. There the child was delivered by Caesarean
section.

Alda had been bedridden longer than was
usual, to recover from the Caesarean section but also because the site of the
incision had become infected. In that time, no one had commented on how young
the mother was, or expressed any misgivings as to whether she really was
Valgerdur Bjolfsdottir. The staff at the hospital did notice how peculiarly the
new mother behaved towards the child, appearing to care little for it and
refusing to suckle it. However, it seemed as if progress was starting to be
made by the time mother and
child were
released. The
midwife who visited them in Holmavik after they’d been discharged
informed the hospital that the mother’s behaviour had improved greatly,
although she still refused to breastfeed. This woman was not on the hospital
staff, so did not realize that the reason for this change in behaviour was that
the ‘mother’ was a different person. Dadi had had no trouble keeping
visitors away from the hospital, since the couple weren’t any more
popular in the west than they had been in the Islands. Alda was released just
over two weeks after the birth, with Dadi accompanying her and a newborn male
child in her arms. She went to the farm to get her things, then left; the boy
remained behind with Valgerdur and Dadi. The hospital in Isafjördur had
therefore made no mistake in its drug prescription when Valgerdur was admitted
there more than three decades later. In a cruel twist of fate, Alda had been
given penicillin for her post-operative infection — an antibiotic to
which the real Valgerdur proved severely allergic many years later.

Alda’s mother said that Alda had never
spoken about the baby, not wanting to know his name or hear anything about him.
Thóra did not blame her for that. The child was not welcome in this
world in Alda’s eyes, and it had never really been ‘hers’. It
was understandable that she had shut out the whole experience and looked past
it. Mind you, Thóra could well imagine that as the years passed her
outlook might have changed, especially when it became clear that she
wouldn’t have another child. She didn’t know if Alda had found out
Adolf’s name before Halldora Dogg pressed charges against him for rape,
or whether she put two and two together when she found out his surname and age.
Either way it must have been a great shock for Alda to discover that her only
child, the son of a rapist, was as much of a brute as his father. It must have
opened up old wounds. Alda must have harboured some feeling for her son, and
may have suffered from guilt over giving him away. This would explain the phone
calls to Adolf; first she was accusatory, then pleading. Alda had judged him
severely. And when she realized who he was, she must have thought she’d
failed him. Thóra wondered whether that had made her want to come clean,
to give Adolf the information that proved his innocence and even tell him about
his origins. Adolf, on the other hand, had turned a deaf ear and refused to
meet her; he thought she would jeopardize his chance of a quick buck from the
hospital compensation. Now that he realized he stood to inherit from Alda,
everything looked different. But it was too late for Alda.

Thóra had learned while practising law
not to judge others by their actions. They had all made disastrous mistakes -
Alda’s parents, Dadi and Valgerdur, Adolf, even Markus himself - and none
of them had realized the consequences until it was too late. Thóra had
seen so many inconceivable things in her work that this didn’t surprise
her. Most of the missteps her client had taken could be put down to pure
stupidity, but the others arose from bad choices, made more often than not in
haste or desperation. Alda’s fate had been determined by people on the
edge of despair, who had reacted the wrong way at the crucial moment.
Thóra could only pity those who were left behind and who were now
staring their old sins in the face. She felt particularly sorry for
Alda’s mother, who was actually a victim of circumstance. Her husband
Thórgeir, Markus’s father Magnus, and Dadi and Valgerdur bore the
greatest responsibility, but none of them had been given the chance to repent
or atone for what they did. So that left an aged mother who many years ago had
become entangled in a sequence of events beyond her control, and now had to
bury her daughter.

The same went for Klara, Markus’s
mother - according to Alda’s mother, she had known about the murders. It
would, however, be difficult to prove this unless she confessed, and
Thóra doubted she would. Klara seemed to have a heart of stone, and with
her son Leifur backing her up it was unlikely that she could be made to admit
what she knew. Luckily, that was not Thóra’s problem. She had had
more than enough of this case, with all its corpses.

In the end, though, the question remained:
who had murdered Alda? This was the main reason for the police’s
reluctance to release Markus, despite their previous declaration that he was no
longer a suspect in the case. Thóra hadn’t expected them to jump
for joy at her revelations, but she was disappointed at how forcefully
they objected to his release. They were forced to admit that Markus had in all
likelihood never been near the men in the basement. How Alda had ended up with
her attacker’s head in a box would no doubt be explained later, but it
had nothing to do with Markus. The unwillingness of the police to admit
that Markus was no longer a suspect in Alda’s murder was fairly
understandable; there wasn’t any other suspect, so it was no small matter
to admit they had the wrong man in custody. Thóra could feel that the
unpleasant sensation in her head, which had started in the church as a faint
nagging pain, was getting worse.

‘Couldn’t the woman simply have
committed suicide?’ she asked. ‘Is there something that clearly
suggests she was murdered? Her psychological state can’t have been
good.’

Stefán looked up from the report
he’d been going over and frowned. ‘The autopsy proved that she was
murdered,’ he said. ‘So I have to reject such speculation.’

Thóra sighed deeply. ‘One of the
plastic surgeons Alda worked for contacted me about information that she wanted
to give to the police. I understood her to mean that the information concerned
Alda and was important for the investigation. Could some of what she had to
convey shed light on the case?’ She had to pause in her questioning to
raise a hand to her forehead and rub it. This dulled the pain, but the headache
returned as soon as she dropped her hand. ‘Is there any new information I
ought to be made aware of? I think I have the right to know, since you’re
starting to direct your attention back towards my client in the case of
Alda’s death.’

‘What Alda’s colleague told us
changes nothing for Markus,’ said Stefán. ‘We were given
information that might be significant, but at this point we can’t say
whether it’s positive or negative for him.’

‘Is it possible that Alda’s
murderer has ties to her work? The drug used to kill her suggests this quite
strongly.’

‘Not
any more
,’
said Stefán calmly. ‘Whoever killed her didn’t need to have
access to it.’

Thóra gave him an appraising look and
cursed her headache under her breath. She was finding it harder and harder to
concentrate. The police appeared to have discovered something about the
drug that suggested it had already been in Alda’s home. Dís must
have explained this to them. She settled for saying ‘I see,’ since
it was clear they weren’t going to tell her anything more at this point. ‘The
other thing I want to ask is whether you’re planning to speak to the
victim in the rape case involving Alda’s son. She could conceivably have
wished Alda harm, since she could hardly have been pleased when Alda suddenly
switched sides.’

The police lawyer puffed himself up. He was
wearing a dark suit that had no doubt cost a pretty penny, and seemed more than
ready to appear in the district court. A wide gold ring on his left hand
glittered, and Thóra was sure he had polished it specially. She,
however, had not had much time to get ready, and if the police didn’t
drop their request for a custody extension she would have to stop by her office
where she kept a white shirt, dark trousers and comfortable high heels for just
such an emergency. It didn’t look very good to turn up in court dressed like
a tramp, and jeans and a T-shirt hardly sufficed, even though her
lawyer’s gown covered most of her. At least she didn’t have to
polish a wedding ring.