Ashes to Dust

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  Dís nodded. Then she asked: ‘Do you think she might have been murdered?’

  ‘Murdered?’ asked Agúst, flabbergasted. ‘Who would have had any reason to murder her?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Dís thoughtfully. ‘Some rapist out for revenge?’ she added.

  ‘For God’s sake, I don’t think so,’ said Agúst, frowning. ‘I’m sure the rape association keeps better control of things than that.’

  Dís smiled. ‘They’re called the Emergency Reception Unit Support Team for Rape Victims, and I’m not entirely sure that they do have things under control. I know Alda had had enough of them when she left her job at the A&E.’

  Alda’s decision to give up her part-time job had come out of the blue several months earlier. She had been volunteering in the local A&E several nights a week and on the weekends, and among other things had earned a good reputation for her support and assistance of rape victims. She had seemed to enjoy this work, and perhaps her decision to quit was the clue that Dís had been trying to remember. Who knew, maybe the horrors Alda occasionally witnessed there had finally been too much for her to handle. ‘Maybe it was someone else entirely,’ she said cautiously.

  ‘Like who?’ said Agúst in irritation. ‘Mickey, Goofy and Pluto?’

  ‘No. Like you, for example,’ said Dís calmly, pulling a little paper bag from the pocket of her scrubs.

  Agúst stood up. He didn’t seem angry, just surprised. ‘Me?’

  Dís went over and put the bag on the desk in front of him. ‘I took this from the table beside her bed. Judging by her body, her death wasn’t painless. Not at all what one would expect if sleeping pills had killed her.’

  Agúst looked Dís in the eye, stubbornly. ‘And this makes you think that I killed her?’

  ‘Look in the bag,’ she said softly. ‘I haven’t completely lost my mind.’

  Agúst looked down at the bag and grabbed it. He glanced quickly back up at Dís.

  ‘Be careful not to touch what’s inside,’ she said calmly. ‘This might have to go to the police.’ She saw Agúst’s expression harden and hurried to add, earnestly: ‘If you were connected to this in some way then it goes no further. If not, then I’ve got to turn this in somehow. I took it from her bedside table.’ She pointed at the bag. ‘But that’s a problem for later. First we’ve got to get this cleared up.’ He looked at her. ‘Don’t look at me like that until you’ve seen what it is. Take a look.’

  Agúst pulled the plastic down carefully with his index finger. He didn’t need to open the bag the whole way, as he recognized the contents as soon as they appeared. ‘Fucking hell,’ he said quietly, and his head drooped. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘All I know is that no one raised a single objection against the excavation except for Markus,’ said Hjortur, walking over to a shelf that appeared about to break under the strain of folders and a tall stack of papers. The archaeologist placed the pages he was holding on the top of the stack and turned back to Thóra and Bella. ‘Not his parents, and not his brother. And I can assure you that this Alda you mentioned never got in touch with me. She might have discussed things with someone else here in this office, but if she did no one has mentioned it.’

  Thóra nodded dejectedly. ‘Would you be willing to ask? If she had, it could make a difference.’

  Hjortur gave her a look that combined pity with irritation. ‘I will, but I doubt it’ll lead anywhere.’

  Thóra sensed that she would have to tread lightly in her dealings with the archaeologist so that he wouldn’t block her out. He wasn’t obliged to answer her questions or assist her in any way. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said humbly. ‘I know the discovery of the bodies threw a large spanner in your works, and I expect you’re just as eager as I am for the case to be solved. One might say we share a common interest.’

  Hjortur didn’t take the bait. ‘I certainly hope that the police conclude this as soon as possible, but I’m not in as much of a rush as you are. What’s waiting for me has been there for thirty-five years, so several days or weeks ahead or behind schedule isn’t going to change the overall picture. We’re not comrades.’ He crossed his arms. ‘If there’s nothing else I can help you with, I would really prefer to keep working. I’m using this down-time to finish several reports that have been hanging over my head. We’re not just sitting here twiddling our thumbs because the area is temporarily closed.’

  Bella snorted, and Thóra hurried to say something before her secretary butted in. ‘I wanted to ask you a couple of questions, and I promise to be quick,’ she said. ‘You’ll be rid of us before you know it.’ She smiled and hoped for the best, but Bella was staring stonily at the archaeologist.

  Thóra wasn’t sure if it was her honey or her secretary’s vinegar that moved Hjortur, but he agreed to sit down with them for a few minutes. They followed him into a small conference room. ‘Has anything been found in the excavation that could possibly be connected to the discovery of the bodies?’ Thóra began. ‘Something that might have had no particular significance when it was found, but might now, in the light of what was in the basement? I’m not confining my question to Markus’s parents’ house.’

  ‘No,’ replied Hjortur. ‘I don’t remember any such thing. Nor have I given it much thought.’

  ‘I expect you log and store everything that you find,’ said Thóra. ‘Is there any chance of us being allowed to have a look at those things?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I can’t imagine we’d allow you to do that. The plan is to let the owners of the houses go over the items with us in the later stages and try to reach an agreement on what happens to them,’ he said, pushing his empty coffee cup aside. ‘The idea is to set up an exhibition of these items on the site of the excavations, and hopefully in the houses themselves. As you know, the Westmann Islands Municipality owns everything that comes out from under the ash, on the other hand we would certainly want to try to appease the original owners of these items. Something that might mean nothing to us could be invaluable to its former owner, for sentimental reasons.’ Hjortur took a deep breath. ‘Many people have contacted us because of this, mainly looking for photo albums and such like, although there have been some enquiries about things like graduation caps, trophies and wristwatches. We do log everything that’s found, and it’s stored in such a way that it’s easy to trace which item came from each house. It would be a huge undertaking to go through all that, so we can’t allow it at this stage.’

  ‘Haven’t the police made a request to search through the items?’ asked Thóra. ‘One would think they would at least have some interest in whatever was found in Markus’s house.’

  Hjdrtur shook his head. ‘Not yet, and hopefully they won’t want to. A lot of work has gone into our system and it would be a huge pain to have to tamper with the boxes.’

  ‘Do you have anything against my going through the item log?’ asked Thóra. ‘That might be of some help to me.’

  Hjortur’s lips thinned. ‘I’ll have to check,’ he said tightly.

  Thóra decided to back off a little. ‘Might someone have had access to the basement before Markus?’ she asked. ‘Was the door open or closed while the ground floor was cleaned?’

  ‘Are you asking whether the corpses were put there before or after the house was excavated?’ said Hjortur.

  ‘Yes, actually, I am,’ replied Thóra. ‘It would certainly increase the number of people who could have links to the case.’

  ‘I believe we shut the basement door as soon as we reached it, and you were quite satisfied with how we did it, as I recall,’ he said, stony faced. ‘It wasn’t more than a couple of hours from when we dug out the door until it was nailed shut. Everything was in accordance with our agreement. Of course anyone who wanted to go down there could have, but it’s out of the question that anyone took a corpse down into that basement since the excavation.’

  ‘But how can you be sure?’ asked Thóra. ‘Don’t get me wrong - I’m not suggesting that you or
your people had anything to do with it.’

  ‘I went down there with the police after the corpses were found, and it didn’t take much archaeological expertise to realize that they’d been lying there for years or even decades, rather than several days.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be possible to make it look that way?’ persisted Thóra. ‘To throw dust over the corpses, or something, making it appear as though they’d been lying there untouched for years?’

  ‘No,’ said Hjortur resolutely.

  ‘Do you have any guesses as to who the people lying there were?’ she said. ‘You’re from here, aren’t you?’

  Hjortur smiled into his beard. ‘The volcano erupted on my third birthday, so I can’t tell you anything about the event or the people who lived here,’ he said. ‘However, I think it’s out of the question that these are men from the Islands. Everyone escaped the eruption, so four people couldn’t have disappeared.’

  Thóra decided not to mention the man who had suffocated in the basement of the pharmacy.

  ‘Still, you must have thought about it?’ she said. ‘Who those people were? As an archaeologist, you must be curious about your own dig?’

  ‘Of course I’ve thought about it,’ agreed Hjortur. ‘But I don’t have much imagination so I didn’t really get anywhere. I can tell you one thing, though,’ he added. ‘Just out of curiosity I looked over the newspapers from that time period - we have them here on old-fashioned microfilm - and I found nothing about missing persons, either Icelandic or otherwise. So they appear not to have been missed, which is very odd.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know how well you could see when you were down there but they’d set up floodlights by the time they came to get me. It looked to me as if at least two of the men were wearing wedding rings. What sort of men were they if their wives didn’t even look for them?’

  An unpleasant thought about her ex-husband crossed Thóra’s mind, but she pushed it away. ‘Good question,’ she settled for saying. Then she asked: ‘Did you notice anything that would indicate the men were sailors? I was sort of toying with the notion that this could be related to the Cod War.’

  Hjortur shook his head slowly. ‘As far as I could see and can remember, they weren’t wearing waterproofs, or anything else you’d expect to see on sailors at that time,’ he said. ‘That’s not saying much, though, since sailors aren’t always dressed in their work clothes, any more than anyone else is.’ He smiled and looked down at his scruffy jeans.

  ‘I understand,’ said Thóra, who had been hoping for a different answer, perhaps even that the men had been holding ropes and nets. She thought for a moment before continuing. ‘Do you think someone might have got confused and put the bodies in the wrong place?’ she asked. ‘Was the eruption bad enough at any point to make visibility that poor?’

  Hjortur shrugged. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It seems unlikely, but I can’t be a hundred per cent certain.’ He scratched his head. ‘There’s also the possibility that the house where the bodies were supposed to have been put had already disappeared, and Markus’s house was chosen instead. There’s an excellent website about the houses that disappeared, both the ones in the area the lava swallowed and those that were buried in ash that we’re digging up. Maybe you’ll find something useful there.’

  Thóra smiled at him as he scribbled down the web address. He had made an excellent point; it was possible that the corpses were not supposed to have ended up there at all, and the whims of the volcano had determined where they could be buried. Why would a man put bodies in his own basement if there were numerous other houses available? Had the bodies and the head ended up in the same place by accident? This riddle about the bodies was starting to infuriate Thóra. She had to uncover the story behind them. Mostly for Markus’s sake, but also to satisfy her own curiosity.

  Thóra sat with a steaming cappuccino in the same restaurant that she and Bella had eaten in the night before. She had noticed they had computer access for customers, so she could kill two birds with one stone by having a cup of coffee and looking online. They had split up their to-do list: Bella would visit the archive, while she looked at the website

  Hjortur had recommended. Thóra knew her task was nicer than Bella’s — she got to sit in a cosy environment with a cup of coffee while Bella searched through dusty files for two names - but she felt this division of labour to be a small come-uppance for the uneven distribution of luck with men the night before. Although Thóra had in part sent Bella away to get her out of her sight, she really hoped her secretary would accomplish her task, although the chances of this were slim. Thóra had sent her to the archive without first checking to see whether files transferred to Reykjavik the night of the eruption even existed there, but since Bella hadn’t contacted her it seemed she’d found something to rummage through. Either that or the archivist happened to be a man, and Bella had seduced him.

  Thóra scanned the text on the screen. She quickly found information on Markus’s house and its residents at the time, and recognized the names of his parents and brother. She noted down the names of their nearest neighbours, and then those of the residents of the other ten houses on the street. All the names told her was that Kjartan, whom she and Bella had met at the harbour-master’s office, looked to have lived in the house next to Markus’s. At least, the name of the family head was Kjartan Helgason. There could have been two men with the same name, but no other information on him was to be found on the website.

  Thóra clicked on the next link, Residents of Sudurvegur Street, and found short biographies of four residents. Luckily, one of these biographical blurbs was about Kjartan Helgason and, even better, the article was accompanied by a photograph. Thóra recognized him immediately. On the downside, his biography didn’t tell her much except that Kjartan had had a long career at sea, then worked in various jobs before taking up his current position as harbour-master. He had married and had four children; they were all adults now. Upon finishing this article Thóra skimmed through the other biographies, but found nothing that seemed likely to help Markus. The only thing that drew her attention was how many children there had been in each home. Apart from one couple that appeared to be childless, Magnus and his wife Klara had had the fewest children, just their two sons Leifur and Markus.

  Thóra finished her coffee and phoned Bella to check on her progress - and set her mind at rest about the archivist’s safety. Her secretary was sullen. The files were obviously in the archive, but Bella hadn’t yet been able to discover which boat Markus had travelled on. Thóra regretted not having asked Markus what the boat was called, since the files were arranged by name of vessel. Thóra did her best to be encouraging and tell Bella how important her task was, then she said goodbye and informed her secretary that she was going back to the hotel, where they would meet and decide how best to take advantage of the rest of the day until their dinner with Leifur and his family.

  The weather was so pleasant that Thóra decided to make a detour and enjoy the sunshine. She walked past a souvenir shop and went in to buy a statue of a puffin for Sóley, as well as a tiny pair of woollen mittens for her grandson Orri. Just as the saleswoman was ringing up the items, Bella called.

  ‘Guess what I found out?’ she said proudly. ‘Markus and Alda took the same boat to the mainland.’

  Thóra thanked her, hung up and smiled happily at the saleswoman as she handed her her credit card. They’d cleared the first hurdle.

  Chapter Eleven

  Monday 16 July2007

  ‘Could you please pass the salt?’ asked Thóra, trying to sound nonchalant. On a beautiful porcelain plate in front of her was a light blue egg, flecked with brown, which she had cracked open halfway. Doing so had exposed an almost transparent white, even though the egg was supposed to be hard-boiled. Thóra wasn’t very adventurous when it came to food, and a wild bird’s egg wasn’t very high on her list of delicacies. Normally she would have refused it politely and waited for the main course, but at a dinner with unfamil
iar hosts she had no other choice but to salt it well, swallow it and smile. Leifur grinned at her and handed her the salt- shaker. ‘It’s not for everyone,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to.’

  Thóra smiled back. ‘No, I would really like to try it,’ she lied, and shook the slender shaker over the greyish albumen. Then she handed the salt on to Bella and watched as her secretary did much the same. Bella peered out of the corner of her eye at Thóra, clearly suffering the same dilemma.

  Maria, Leifur’s wife, was watching them closely from the opposite end of the table. She was visibly displeased. She looked away from the two women and turned to her husband. ‘I don’t know why you always have to force this on your guests, especially as we have visitors so rarely,’ she said, lifting her glass and gulping down her white wine. ‘It stopped being clever a long time ago.’ Her glass banged loudly on the table when she put it down, and it was embarrassingly clear that she’d had a bit too much to drink. She was an extremely good-looking woman who had probably been a great beauty in her youth, but she was painfully thin and Thóra would have bet anything she’d had medical assistance to keep herself looking so good. Her clothing was impeccable and appeared to be mostly brand new, although it wasn’t the latest fashion. Her outfit was classic, a knee-length beige skirt and cream silk shirt that matched her pale suede high heels. Since Maria had very fair colouring, she looked so monotone that Thóra thought she’d be invisible if she walked in front of a haystack.

  ‘Maybe you’d have preferred to serve your famous burnt French onion soup, dear,’ said Leifur, shooting his wife a look that was anything but loving. He did not seem to be dressed as formally as her, although he wore a shirt and smart trousers. Perhaps the casual impression came from his gestures and facial expressions, since he was in every respect more relaxed than his wife.