‘She said one thing I didn’t understand,’ said Jóhanna thoughtfully. ‘She asked me under what circumstances I would get a tattoo. She was in such a good mood that it didn’t seem to matter to her that I couldn’t answer the question. And then there was some rigmarole about how one should be careful of judging others and that she wouldn’t make that mistake again. She said she would explain it all the following weekend, but I felt like the tattoo question was somehow connected to her cheerfulness.’
‘Tattoo?’ Thóra frowned. How could something like that be relevant to all this?
Chapter Thirteen
Tuesday 17 July2007
Thóra was pleased with Bella. The young woman stood at her side, her arms crossed over her chest and a thunderous look on her face that was making even Inspector Leifsson squirm in his seat. ‘It absolutely beggars belief that one should hear of developments in a police investigation out on the street,’ continued Thóra. ‘Since you’re in charge of the station, and since the information must originally have come from here, I have no choice but to hold you responsible for the leak.’ The thundercloud next to her nodded its head emphatically.
Gudni was completely silent for a moment, as was his wont. He rocked back and forth in his chair and then leaned forwards, placing his elbows on the desk. ‘I haven’t leaked anything,’ he said calmly. ‘Six police officers work here in addition to me, not to mention the receptionist and the cleaner. Any one of them could have blurted something out without me having had anything to do with it. So you’d better think twice before you start accusing me of a breach of confidence.’
‘Accusing you?’ snapped Thóra. ‘I’m not accusing you of anything. I’ve come here to demand a copy of the autopsy report, which I understand you have. I wish to inform myself of its contents first-hand rather than relying on street gossip.’
‘I understand,’ said Gudni quietly. He was clearly unhappy about this new development, but trying not to show it. Thóra noticed some small muscles twitching around his mouth.
‘I don’t have any objection to you seeing the documents. Should I check and see what the book says about such things?’
‘Kindly do so,’ she replied, knowing he wouldn’t have the first idea where to look for the laws regulating access to files in a criminal case. She actually doubted that a copy of the relevant regulations existed in Gudni’s office, and he probably wouldn’t even know where to find them on the Internet.
‘But I don’t see what purpose it will serve,’ said Gudni, as he stood up. He picked up some papers stapled together in one corner and waved them at her. ‘No doubt you’ll get hold of this soon enough, because I have trouble believing that Markus won’t be arrested very soon. The autopsy does not look good for him.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Thóra. She longed to tear the report from the man’s hands and start reading it.
‘I mean that it provides, for the first time, clear evidence that these men were murdered. In other words, this is now a murder investigation. In addition, the report contains indications of the men’s nationality. They are probably British, and contact has already been made with the British police, asking them to investigate who these men might have been. So no doubt this case will soon be all over the British newspapers, and when that happens I can promise you that the police department will be a hive of activity, and the demand for answers will ensure that Markus will be taken into custody. He is the only suspect we have at this stage.’ Gudni stared straight at Thóra. ‘The autopsy does not implicate Alda.’
‘No, we didn’t expect it to,’ said Thóra. Although she was disappointed, Gudni did have a point. She sighed deeply. The only people who could have explained things and cleared Markus’s name were either dead or demented.
‘It doesn’t help that these British men were murdered during the Cod War,’ said Gudni. ‘Certain individuals in particular social groups still harbour a grudge over that dispute, both here and in Britain. The British press are sure to play up that angle.’
‘Do you think that these men were murdered because of fish?’ cried Bella. ‘Because of cod?’‘
Gudni gave her a reproachful look. ‘The codfish is money with fins and gills. You shouldn’t underestimate its importance.’
Bella was about to defend herself so Thóra hurried to interrupt her. ‘Were they fishermen, then?’
‘That is not stated directly, but you can read this at your leisure and draw your own conclusions,’ replied Gudni. ‘It’s best that I go and make a copy of it.’ He walked past them without another word.
Bella scowled at him, then looked around the little office. ‘Fucking idiot,’ she said, seemingly more to herself than to Thóra. She went over to Gudni’s desk and ran her eyes over the things lying on it.
‘For God’s sake don’t start looking at anything,’ Thóra hissed exasperatedly.
‘He wouldn’t have left us alone if there was anything here he didn’t want us to see,’ said Bella as she bent towards the desk. She turned one of the pieces of paper on the table face up. ‘When did the volcano erupt, again?’ she asked.
Thóra moved closer. ‘January 1973. The eruption started on the night of the twenty-third. Why?’
‘This is an old report,’ said Bella. ‘It’s dated the twentieth of January 1973. Don’t you find it a bit odd that he’s got such an old report on his table?’
‘What does it say?’ asked Thóra anxiously. She looked over at the doorway but there was no one to be seen. How long did it take to photocopy ten pages? ‘Quickly!’ she whispered.
‘Wait,’ said Bella, as she picked up the page to get a better look. ‘It’s a report about signs of a fight or injury at the pier. The police were called out by the harbour-master, who found a lot of blood on the pier on the morning of Saturday the twentieth of January. He couldn’t think of any natural explanation for it and called the police, thinking that a crime might have been committed. He said the harbour had been unsupervised from midnight on Friday evening until he turned up for his next shift, at eight o’clock on Saturday morning.’ Bella ran her finger down the page. ‘The police officer examined the evidence, which was compelling, and asked the harbour-master what ships had been moored there. It turned out that no boat had been moored there for several days. The police also checked whether anyone had gone to the hospital with injuries that night, but no one had been admitted after midnight except a married couple with a sick baby.’ Bella looked up at Thóra. ‘Couldn’t this be linked to the bodies?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Thóra half whispered. ‘Quickly, keep reading.’ She glanced at the door out of the corner of her eye, but all was quiet. ‘The police interviewed several people in the wake of this, and two witnesses reported seeing Dadi Karlsson up and about early in the morning. One of them said that he’d been docking in a dinghy, and the other that he’d been at the place where the blood was found. The police officer spoke to Dadi but he denied this and said he hadn’t been there. He claimed he’d been at home sleeping and said his wife could verify that, which she did. The officer then boarded the trawler that Dadi piloted but found nothing unusual there. The case was considered unsolved, but plans were made to investigate whether the blood could conceivably have come from an animal or an illegal catch that had been landed under the cover of night.’ Bella looked up from the report. ‘That’s all there is.’
‘Which police officer wrote the report?’ Thóra asked hurriedly, and waved her hand to indicate that their time was running out. Footsteps could be heard approaching in the corridor.
‘Gudni Leifsson,’ said Bella, and hurried to put the paper back in its place. No sooner had she done so than they heard Gudni walking through the door behind them.
Thóra turned to him, trying to look innocent. She couldn’t be certain, but if this report wasn’t connected to the case, why would he be looking at such an old document? She also had a feeling that Gudni was not investigating a cold case in cooperation with his colleagues from Reykjavik, but working
on it alone. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing for Markus, she’d have to wait and see. ‘Well,’ she said, and walked up to Gudni. He handed her a copy of the medical examiner’s report and looked inquisitively at Bella, who was still standing very close to the desk.
‘Do you need something?’ he asked her coldly.
Bella looked back at him, equally impassive. ‘No, why do you ask?’ Her glare dared him to accuse her of prying.
Gudni did not fall into her trap, but frowned for a second before turning back to Thóra. ‘There’s more there that will catch the attention of the media if and when the report’s contents are made public,’ he said. ‘It’s about the head, and the evidence is indisputable.’ He smiled nastily. ‘Which comes as a surprise in a case I thought had already reached its dramatic peak.’
‘There are a lot of surprises still to come in this case, it seems to me,’ said Thóra, against her better judgement. There was something about this man that ruffled her feathers. However, she avoided glancing at the papers on his desk as she said this. It was better to leave him wondering what she meant.
Thóra put down the papers and drummed her fingers as she tried to gather her thoughts. She’d finished going through three of the four sections; a specific report had been written for each of the bodies, as well as for the head. The sections she had read concerned the three bodies, which turned out to be of two men in their thirties and a man of around fifty. The men were Caucasian and all the bodies were extremely well preserved, owing to the unusual conditions in which they had been stored. The heat of the eruption was thought to have played a large part in protecting them, along with the lack of humidity in the basement and the fact that heavy toxic gases had destroyed all insect life down there.
Even though the text was hard to read, every other word being an incomprehensible medical term, it was clear that the men had not been killed by toxic gases. Although no conclusion was reached on the exact cause of death, it was strongly suggested that the three men had all been victims of violence. They all had peculiar wounds on their hands that appeared to have healed long before, and which were therefore unconnected to the events that had led to their deaths. They seemed to be scars from deep scratches whose origin was unclear, but it was considered unlikely that they had been made by tools or knives because of the irregularity of their shapes. Two of the men were thought to have died from head injuries, since their skulls had been smashed, seemingly by the same unidentified blunt weapon. The nose of one of them had been so badly broken that the cartilage had been driven into his brain, although the medical examiner could not determine whether he had died from this injury or from his fractured skull. The report further stated that while the third man’s head injuries were minor, he had both a broken back and three broken ribs, which had punctured one of his lungs. The report concluded that the latter injury had caused bleeding into the chest cavity and lungs, which would eventually have caused the man to drown in his own blood. Thóra shuddered, but it was clear to her that a teenage girl on her own could not have done so much damage to a group of men.
The examiner’s conclusion concerning the men’s nationality was supported by various factors. It was noted that each taken on its own would not be enough to determine the men’s origin, but together they lent sufficient weight to the hypothesis that the men were British. It was also noted that the person or persons who had transported the bodies to the basement had seemed not to expect them to be found, since no attempt had been made to remove the dead men’s clothing or anything else that could be used to identify them. This had proved useful in determining the men’s nationality, since the brand labels on their clothing and shoes were still partly legible and turned out to be mostly from British companies; the brands of the oldest man’s clothing were more expensive than those of the younger men. The material in the younger men’s fillings turned out to be the one British dentists had used around 1960, and one of them also had a steel pin in his ankle from an old injury, stamped with the trademark of a British manufacturer. Other things were taken into account;
the two younger men were both tattooed with the initials HMS, which if taken to stand for Her Majesty’s Service would suggest that they could have served in the military for a time and had wished to commemorate this in ink on their skin. Two of the men also had British pound notes in their pockets, and one had an elderly packet of British cigarettes.
Thóra wondered if the tattoo that Alda had mentioned to her sister could conceivably have been the same as the ones mentioned in the report. What had she said again? Under what circumstances would you get a tattoo? Could she have been talking about entry into the military? Thóra shook her head instinctively - it couldn’t be that. She was sure it had nothing to do with the case, but marked the text to make it easier to recall that particular detail if tattoos came up again.
The report made for melancholy reading as a whole, but Thóra was pleased to read that the bodies had probably been put there after the eruption started. This was based on the discovery of traces of ash on the back of the men’s jackets - the corpses had been lying on their backs. The fine layer of ash that slipped in through the chinks in the house and covered all the surfaces in the basement could not have got in underneath the bodies after they’d been laid on the floor. In addition, there were tiny burn holes in the men’s clothing, which indicated that they’d either been alive and walking around during the eruption and been hit by the small embers that had rained from the sky during that time, or that the same had happened while the bodies were being carried to the house. No embers could have got into the basement, since its few windows had been boarded up, though fine ash had managed to slip in through all the cracks. In other words, the men had been on the move during the eruption, alive or dead. This meant, to Thóra’s great relief, that Markus could not have taken the corpses there.
When she started reading the section of the report that focused on the head, she was even more relieved. It began by describing the box Markus said had contained the head, and it concluded that the evidence indicated this had indeed been the case. Long-dried-out remains of blood and other biological matter at the bottom of the box indicated that the head had been inside. There were also no traces of ash in the hair, which was taken as an indication that the head had been enclosed in something and had not got dusty like everything else in the basement. This, too, strengthened Markus’s defence, and Thóra took a moment to mark this section in the margin. Unfortunately, analysis of the fingerprints on the box revealed nothing of significance except that only one set could be distinguished. The prints in question were recent, and at the time the autopsy report was written they had not been compared with Markus’s prints, which were not yet on file. Thóra knew that he would now be called in for fingerprinting, but was unconcerned as his prints on the box would fit perfectly with the sequence of events he had described. These were the only legible prints: any others that may have been on the box had not been deliberately erased, but rather had faded due to the unusual conditions and to the time that had passed before the box was discovered. This was unfortunate, since Alda’s finger prints on the box would have been particularly useful. These results were not considered conclusive, so the report stated that the box would be sent to a laboratory overseas that was better equipped to analyse such things. There were similar plans for the analysis of the men’s back molars. Thóra hurriedly scribbled a note to herself to remind her to phone and request that fingerprints be taken from Alda’s body if more prints were found on the box, although she imagined that would happen as a matter of course.
Then there was the head itself. Thóra still hadn’t come across anything to explain Gudni’s snide hints about Markus, so she steeled herself to find something here. The autopsy breakdown started quite innocently with notes on the age of the teeth, which indicated that the head belonged to a young man, probably around twenty years of age. Then the report turned to the cause of death, which was impossible to determine in the absence of the body. The
evidence suggested the head had been removed post-mortem. This conclusion was drawn from the saw cuts, which were unnaturally even, suggesting that the man could not have been alive while they were made. Thóra looked up from her reading and wondered whether this meant that a living man, even unconscious, would have moved around while his head was being sawn off. As before, a surreal feeling came over her when she thought about the severed head. None of her law tutors at university could have thought to prepare their students for anything like this, and in fact Thóra doubted any level of tuition could have prepared her either. She kept reading. The head was thought to be male based on measurements of X-ray images of the jawbone, as well as other size ratios of the skull. In addition, stubble was still perceptible around the chin. There were no dental fillings, so no attempt could be made to determine the nationality or even the race of the head. This was bad, in Thóra’s opinion. If it had been another British man, that would suggest that the head belonged to someone from the same group of men, with whom Markus had no provable connection. Then she could easily have argued that Markus had become accidentally entangled in a serious matter of which he had no knowledge, and therefore had been ignorant of its significance when he put the box in the basement. As it was, this was not ideal.
She turned the page and read on. She hadn’t read more than two more lines when she clapped her hand over her mouth. This was what Gudni had meant. She looked up at the ceiling and drew a deep breath. The thing she had seen in the head’s mouth in the basement, and thought to be a tongue, was something very, very different.
Chapter Fourteen
Tuesday 17 July2007
Adolf reread the brief message he had typed before pushing send. He was lying on the sofa at home, with one eye on a golf tournament whose location and name he didn’t know He didn’t like golf, but was oddly fascinated by how boring it was on television. He stared as if hypnotized as one white ball after another was whipped into the air, vanished against the pale sky and then reappeared, bouncing and rolling along the manicured grass. Adolf wondered if he’d forgotten to turn his phone’s ringer back on when he left his lawyer’s office. But he hadn’t, and the message he’d just sent had definitely gone out.
Ashes to Dust Page 13
