Ashes to Dust (7 page)

Markus shook his head. ‘I don’t
actually remember every single person who lived on the Islands at that time,
but it’s completely ridiculous to think that any of the people I do
remember could have killed those three. Everyone here was normal; just your
typical Icelandic
fishermen’s
families.’
Markus started running his hands through his hair again. ‘My best
memories are of my friends, and naturally they were all just dumb kids like
me.’

‘Are you absolutely certain your father
couldn’t have had something to do with this?’ asked Thóra.
‘It was at your home, and I find it unlikely that someone would have
broken in there to hide bodies.’

‘Broken in?’ echoed Markus.
‘They wouldn’t have needed to break in. It was all unlocked. People
were asked to leave their houses open so that the rescue crews could go in and
out of them as they needed.’ He brightened. ‘Naturally, the place
filled up with people arriving from the mainland after the night of the
eruption. I don’t know any figures, but the rescue crews needed a lot of
manpower
and the majority of those who lent a hand
weren’t from the Islands. Our house wasn’t buried
immediately.’

Thóra considered this for a moment.
‘So you think it more likely that one of those people put the bodies
there?’

Markus shrugged. ‘What do I know? The
only thing that’s completely clear to me is that I had nothing to do with
it.’

Thóra hoped that this was indeed the
case. It was always more comfortable to fight for a just cause. ‘We might
be getting ahead of ourselves with this kind of speculation. We should wait for
the results of the forensic autopsy on the bodies and head.’ She smiled
weakly at Markus. How was an autopsy performed on a head? ‘Who knows,
maybe these people simply died of natural causes or suffocated in the basement.
Wasn’t that what happened in the only death to occur during the
eruption?’

‘No one died in the eruption,’
said Markus angrily, almost as if he were defending the eruption’s good
name.

‘Really?’ said Thóra.
‘I always thought that one person died.
And in a
basement, no less.’

‘Oh, him,’ said Markus.
‘That doesn’t count. He was an alcoholic.’

The confused look on Thóra’s
face forced him to explain
this a
little better.
‘He went down into the pharmacy basement looking for spirits. The
eruption had nothing to do with it.’

Except that the poison gases which killed him
came from the eruption - but Thóra had no desire to waste time
explaining this. She picked up the report again and leafed through it.
‘This is odd. Am I right in thinking that you’ve never been asked
whether you thought you’d seen any of the dead people before?’

Markus jerked his head to one side in
surprise. ‘They didn’t ask me that because the bodies are hardly in
a condition for anyone to be able to identify them. And I couldn’t really
see very clearly there in the basement.’

In other words, you think you’ve never
seen them before
?‘
If it were possible to
identify these people, it would be easier to determine what happened to them.

Markus shook his head slowly. ‘No,
I’m almost sure I haven’t,’ he said. ‘But as I said,
it’s possible that they’re people I knew. I would have to be able
to see them again under better conditions, although I doubt that would make any
difference.’

Thóra thought of the dried-out, dusty
corpses and knew that it would be difficult to identify them except in the lab
of a forensic pathologist.

‘They must be foreigners. Even though
there are cases of Icelanders vanishing without a trace, it’s out of the
question that three people disappeared at the same time without attracting
attention.’ She hurriedly corrected herself: ‘Four, I mean.’
The head was still so unreal to her that she kept forgetting to count it along
with the bodies. She thought for a moment. ‘Maybe they were
sailors?’ she asked. ‘They could have belonged to the crew of a
wrecked ship.’

‘And how would that crew have ended up
in our basement?’ asked Markus, puzzled.

‘Well, that’s another
question,’ said Thóra, and smiled at him. ‘We should wait
for the autopsy. I suppose the police will call you in again for questioning
after that, and after they’ve gone over the medical examiner’s
report. Until then I’ll try to find some witnesses or anything else that
could possibly support your statement about Alda and the box.’

Markus stood up and snorted. ‘Like
that’s going to happen,’ he said sulkily as he left. ‘She was
the only one who could possibly have backed me up.’

Thóra tried unsuccessfully to look
encouraging. This looked bad; the only hope of Markus getting off scot-free now
was if it turned out that the people in the basement had suffocated. Again she
had forgotten the head. How in the hell was it possible to explain that?

Stefán put down the phone, closed his
eyes and counted to ten. He shook himself. ‘That was the medical
examiner,’ he said to the
policeman
sitting
across from him, and pinched himself to keep calm. ‘He doubts that Alda
committed suicide. The autopsy revealed several details that need further
explanation.’ He paused for a moment.
‘How could
you possibly not have investigated anywhere but the bedroom?
Are you
completely useless when I’m not there?’ He tapped the stack of
papers on the table with his index finger for emphasis. The young officer
reddened and Stefán wondered whether it was from shame or anger. He
continued: ‘How did you leave the scene? Is the house marked in any way
that would let the relatives of the deceased
know
they
can’t go roaming about in there, or did you just shut the door and drive
away?’

‘Uh,’ said the young police
officer, his cheeks even redder.

‘Uh,’ parroted Stefán.
‘What does “uh” mean?’

‘We didn’t mark the house in any
particular way,’ replied the young man. ‘It looked like suicide.
I’ve seen several of them,’ he added, in a slightly more confident
tone.

‘Don’t you get arrogant with
me,’ hissed Stefán. ‘I couldn’t care less whether
you’ve seen three suicides or three thousand. It’s this one
particular incident I’m unhappy about, and I’m not about to listen
to the medical examiner scold me for the working methods of my men.’ He
took a moment to calm down. ‘According to him there are various things
lacking: you took almost no photos of the scene and your report on the search
of the house doesn’t cover any other room but the bedroom. What’s
more, he says that blood is never mentioned in the report, even though the
corpse’s injuries suggest there must have been blood present.’

‘ There
was blood,’ muttered the young officer, his own
face blood-red. ‘There were small pools on both sides of the head, from
injuries to the woman’s cheeks and neck.’

‘Oh, now you decide to tell us?’
hissed Stefán loudly. ‘You maybe want me to fix the report for
you? Something like that was certainly supposed to go in it! I’m so
bloody amazed, I’m almost speechless.’ Various words could be used
to describe Stefán’s state at that moment, but ‘speechless’
was not one of them.

‘We were told that the woman’s
injuries were self-inflicted. I think there was blood and skin under her
nails.’ The young man straightened up. ‘I want it put on record
that the doctor who came with the ambulance ruled
this a
suicide at the scene. It was also him who deduced this about the blood, and
that’s why I didn’t feel there was any reason to write it down in
the report. We proceeded with our work under the conviction that this was a
suicide, since there was nothing to suggest otherwise.’ He looked
curiously at his boss. ‘What exactly was discovered in the
autopsy?’

Stefán scowled. ‘It appears she
didn’t die of poisoning. The doctor tested her blood and stomach contents
for the active ingredient in the drugs found on the bedside table. It
wasn’t present in any life-threatening amount.’

The young officer raised his eyebrows.
‘Then how did she die?’

Stefán had calmed down completely. He
was relieved to hear that a doctor had declared it a suicide at the scene,
since this mostly cleared his men of any blame for ruining the case. ‘Of
course it’ll probably be necessary to conduct further tests before
it’s possible to confirm it, but the doctor thought it most likely that
the woman suffocated.’

‘Suffocated?’ echoed the young
police officer. ‘Choked?’

Stefán shook his head. ‘It’s
still uncertain. The examiner hasn’t ruled out illness as the cause, but
he says he wants the home of the deceased searched better in order to determine
whether a person or persons unknown might have played a part in her
death.’

‘I see,’ said the young man,
utterly relieved that Stefán’s disposition appeared to have
returned to normal. ‘Our shift is finishing — do you want us to go
back there first thing in the morning, or
… ?’

‘Stefán’s eyes narrowed.
’No.
You’ll go now. Immediately
.‘
He dared the young man to object by staring
directly into his eyes. ’You’ll go over every square centimetre and
then write a detailed report, as if you were investigating a murder scene. I
want a copy of the report waiting for me on my desk tomorrow morning
.‘
He waved his hand at the door. ’I would hurry
up if I were you, before your colleagues go home - and you’re left in the
lurch
.‘
The younger man opened his mouth his to
object, but stopped. He walked to the door. When he was standing in the
doorway, Stefán added: ’Take note of all the calls to or from her
home phone and her mobile. Since she probably died on the Sunday evening, calls
from that particular time are naturally the most important
.‘

‘Will do,’ replied the young man,
with a touch of bitterness in his voice. What a fucking mess. He was tired
after a long day and completely ready to throw himself onto the sofa and stare
at the television. It wasn’t an attractive thought, having to comb
through an entire house in search of God knows what.

‘One other thing,’ called
Stefán as the door was closing.

‘Sir?’
The young man stuck his head back through the
doorway.

‘I am particularly interested in
knowing whether Alda called the mobile phone of Markus Magnusson that same
night, and how long the phone call lasted. Understand?’

‘Understood.’

The door closed. Stefán stared at
it and thought things over. He knew that he should call his colleague in the
Westmann Islands and inform him of these developments, but he really had no
desire to do so. It could wait. He was going to go down to the National
Hospital, meet the examiner, and have a look at Alda’s body. He
stood up. He had to admit it wasn’t just because of his job that he
wanted to go there: the examiner had mentioned that the woman had been rather
significantly enhanced — a word Stefán couldn’t understand
until he got a better explanation for it. Stefán’s wife was always
complaining that she wanted to get breast enhancements, so he wanted to see
some for himself. Who knew, maybe he would give her the green light if he liked
what he saw.

Saturday 14 July
2007

The only guests at the prizegiving that Saturday
morning were the children who had won and their parents. Sóley sat
between her mother and her brother Gylfi, smiling broadly. The competition had
been part of the Arts Week at the City Library and involved drawing pictures of
home appliances that made a family’s life easier, and Sóley had
spent an entire afternoon conscientiously drawing and colouring. To
Thóra’s great surprise her daughter had won; up until that point
Sóley had displayed limited talent in the arts. The girl who had won in
the oldest age group walked back to her seat with a little bouquet and a cheque
from the sponsors of the competition, one of the largest electrical
equipment companies in the country. The city librarian called Sóley, who
took her place next to the woman, red-cheeked.

‘Congratulations on your
victory,’ said the librarian, taking Sóley’s small hand. She
pointed at the girl’s picture, which was hanging in a special display
along with the other illustrations that had been entered in the competition.
There were actually not very many of them, just as Thóra had suspected
when she received the news that Sóley had won. ‘I have to say,
this is a very artistically drawn picture of a steam iron that you’ve
done,’ said the librarian as she handed Sóley a large envelope and
bouquet.

Thóra knitted her brow. Why had
Sóley drawn a picture of an iron? Her ex-husband had taken it with him
when they separated, because none of Thóra’s clothing required
ironing. She doubted that Sóley knew what it looked like, but it seemed
she’d done a decent job even without a model. Thóra looked proudly
from the picture to her daughter, whose cheeks were even redder than before as
she stood there next to the librarian with the prize in her arms, staring at
her toes. Sóley seemed on the verge of tears, but she clenched her
teeth.