Leifur shook his head. ‘I was in Reykjavik that weekend. Classes had started again after the Christmas holidays. I was in my third year at Reykjavik Junior College and I was living in the city.’
Thóra raised an eyebrow. ‘But you were here the night of the eruption,’ she said. ‘And that was in the middle of the week, wasn’t it?’
Leifur smiled at her, but unlike his mother’s his smile appeared genuine. The old lady was looking more bored and irritated by the second. ‘Markus getting drunk like that really hit the family hard,’ he said. ‘Mother was in pieces and Father was furious, so I decided to come home and give Markus a piece of my mind. We were off school that Monday anyway, so I didn’t miss much. I had planned to go back to town on Tuesday, although I hadn’t expected it to be in the middle of the night, as it turned out to be.’
‘Is that Sigridur?’ said the old man suddenly. He had stopped staring out of the window and was now peering in bewilderment at Thóra.
‘No, Dad,’ replied Leifur gently. ‘This woman is name Thóra. Sigridur is dead.’ He took his father’s hand. ‘Wow, your hands are like ice. Should we cover you up a bit better?’ Leifur didn’t wait for an answer, since the old man seemed to have tuned out again. Leifur looked at Thóra. ‘Sigridur was his sister. He probably thought you looked like her, although I don’t see a resemblance.’
Thóra smiled at father and son. ‘Hello, Magnus,’ she said loudly, even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t speak down to the old man. ‘My name is Thóra, and I’m a lawyer.’ The old man frowned, not taking his eyes off her. ‘I’m helping your son. Bodies were found in the basement of your old house on Sudurvegur Street, and the police think Markus is involved.’ Leifur and his mother had agreed that she could try to speak to him, though they both believed nothing would come of it. Mind you, the look on the faces of both mother and son indicated that they’d clearly not expected this topic when they gave their reluctant permission.
‘Sigridur?’ repeated the old man quizzically. ‘Basement?’ he added. Thóra’s words were filtering through to him, though possibly not their meaning. The man fell silent and turned back to the window.
‘There’s no point trying with him,’ said Klara, her voice gentler than before. ‘He can still speak, but it’s not really connected to what’s going on around him. Also, the conversations, the few he takes part in, go in whatever direction he wants. It’s impossible to manage them.’ She looked from her husband back to Thóra, and her expression hardened. ‘I would rather you didn’t badger him any more.’
Thóra agreed. She had hoped the man would be in better condition, even though everyone in the family had said that he was suffering from full dementia. ‘Klara,’ she said cheerfully, ‘do you think that your husband could somehow be involved in this case? Even the best of men can end up in situations that bring out the worst in them. No one really knows what happened, and there could even be a natural explanation for the deaths, one that’s hard to work out after so many years.’
The old woman leaned back as if to distance herself from Thóra as much as possible. The smell of her perfume subsided slightly. ‘It is my understanding that the men were beaten to death,’ she said. ‘My husband was a strong man and a very hard worker. However, he wasn’t violent. He couldn’t have killed anyone.’
‘Did he never get into any fights in his youth, do you remember?’ asked Thóra.
‘Fights?’ exclaimed Klara. ‘He was—’ She glanced over at her husband and corrected herself. ‘He is a man. Of course he got into fights in the old days, before the children entered the picture.’
‘Was he a bit of a handful when he’d had a drink, anything like that?’ persisted Thóra, mindful of Markus’s assertion that his father had been less than pleasant when drunk. She also knew that seamanship in the old days was usually accompanied by robust drinking. There were many so-called heroes of the sea in her mother’s family, and she’d heard tales of their long voyages, where they had worked hard under enormous pressure, then let off steam on shore. Now times had changed, and drunken sailors were no longer in evidence on the streets of the city.
‘Magnus wasn’t a violent drunk, if that’s what you mean,’ replied Klara sharply. ‘Nor was he an alcoholic, like some of his colleagues. I actually think that’s the reason he did better than them and managed to start a company that is now one of the largest here in the Islands.’
‘Of course, part of that was because he was also so hardworking,’ Leifur added. ‘There are a lot of stories of his diligence when he was a young man - he had to fight hard for everything he got in life.’ He put a hand on his father’s shoulder. ‘He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth like so many people nowadays.’
Thóra didn’t wish to point out that Leifur was one of those people: his father’s business had been handed to him on a plate. She also decided not to press them concerning Magnus’s drinking, since it didn’t seem relevant. ‘Could he have got into something in order to help someone out?’ asked Thóra. ‘Like Thórgeir, Alda’s father?’
‘Sigridur?’ asked Magnus suddenly, before mother or son could answer her. ‘Do you know Geiri’s girl, Alda?’
‘Yes,’ said Thóra, fearing the old man would retreat back into his shell if she said no.
‘How is she?’ he asked, picking at a thread on the edge of his fleece blanket. ‘That was an awful business.’
‘What business?’ asked Thóra calmly, trying not to break the thread of his concentration.
‘I wonder if the falcon survived?’ said the old man. ‘I hope so.’
‘I… I think it must have,’ said Thóra, desperate to say the right thing. ‘Did Alda kill the man?’ she asked, when nothing else came to mind.
The old man looked at her and his mood seemed to darken. ‘You’re always so difficult, Sigridur. Who invited you here?’
‘Klara did,’ replied Thóra, smiling as gently as possible.
When the only response she got was a blank stare, she added: ‘Klara, your wife.’
‘That poor child,’ said Magnus, shaking his head slowly. ‘Poor child, to have to rely on such people.’
‘Do you mean Alda?’ asked Thóra urgently, because the man appeared to be drifting away again. ‘Did Alda have a hard time as a child?’
‘I just hope the falcon survived,’ said Magnus, and shut his eyes.
Further attempts to get him to speak were in vain. Thóra sat thoughtfully, unable to make head nor tail of anything he’d said. Why was he talking about a falcon? Was it connected to some event in his own life, unconnected to the bodies in the basement or Alda’s murder? And which child was he talking about?
Chapter Twenty-four
Saturday 21 July2007
Bella seemed rather pleased with herself as she sat in the hotel lobby slurping her drink, which could have been plain Coke but seemed more likely to have a shot of rum in it. The sweet odour of alcohol was unmistakable when Thóra sat down by her secretary. ‘Remember you can’t charge alcoholic drinks to expenses,’ said Thóra. ‘It’s hard to claim a drink as being necessary for work,’ she added when she saw Bella’s expression. Strangely soothing Calypso music floated from the speakers behind them; perhaps it had inspired her secretary to order the drink. Thóra wouldn’t have said no to a Pina Colada herself.
‘Oh, do me a favour,’ said Bella. She took another sip, still smiling smugly. ‘I’ve seen Bragi’s bills when he goes out of town on business.’
Thóra had to admit her partner couldn’t enter a hotel without going to the bar, whether he was staying there or not.
‘Don’t you want to know what I found in the archive?’ asked her secretary, sucking at her straw thirstily. ‘They opened it for me. That Leifur clearly has the town in his pocket. All I had to do was say his name and they pulled out the keys.’
‘Yes, it’s in everyone’s interest to keep him happy,’ Thóra said. ‘So, what did you find? It’s good that one of us is making progress, because meeting Mark
us’s parents did me little good. His father was away with the fairies and his mother was such a dry old stick that she sucked all the moisture out of the air. The only thing I got out of it was some gibberish about a falcon and a child, and a headache from the old woman’s perfume. There wasn’t anything about a falcon in the files?’
‘No,’ said Bella. ‘Nothing that I saw, anyway. There are a million files in that archive. You’ve got to know what you’re looking for, and I wasn’t thinking about birds.’
Thóra sighed. ‘Oh, they were probably just the ramblings of a senile old man,’ she said. Suddenly she thought of Maria, Leifur’s wife, who acted as a kind of care assistant for her father-in-law. She must have heard him say all sorts of things. Maybe at some point he’d said something significant, but she hadn’t realized. Thóra decided to try to meet her again before they left, and see what she knew. It was entirely possible that he’d come out with something about a falcon or ‘that poor child’, but phrased it in a way that made it easier to determine if it meant something for the case. Her headache was getting worse. She raised a hand to her forehead.
‘Guess what?’ said Bella, putting down her glass. ‘I found out that Dadi and his wife Valgerdur built their house, so no one lived there before them.’
She seemed surprised when Thóra hardly reacted, but carried on: ‘And they had no children while they lived there.’ She watched Thóra, whose face still betrayed nothing. ‘But after the eruption they had a son, who they christened Adolf.’
‘Adolf?’ muttered Thóra. ‘Who calls a child Adolf?’
Bella appeared relieved that Thóra was finally showing some interest in her findings. ‘Well, they did, for starters. He lives in Reykjavik, and when I tried looking him up online I pulled up a blog where there’s a warning about him - for being a rapist. It was really hard to piece together - there were a lot of threats made against him in the comments section, by other bloggers who said that they were friends of the victim. In another entry several weeks later the blogger announced that he’d finally been charged.’
Thóra began rubbing her forehead, trying to dispel her headache. ‘Rape?’ she said. ‘Who did he attack?’
‘It didn’t say, but I figured out when it was supposed to have happened by looking at the date of the first entry. I searched in Morgunbladid’s archives and came across an article that seemed to tie into this. It wasn’t interesting enough to deserve much scrutiny, but something rang a bell when I read the article, because the rapist had slipped the girl an emergency contraceptive afterwards to stop her getting pregnant.’
‘What?’ exclaimed Thóra, dumbfounded. ‘Do you mean like a morning-after pill? I don’t remember reading about that.’
‘The case didn’t really get much attention, judging by the size of the article, and I doubt the papers would have reported it at all if it hadn’t been for that weird detail. It must have been on the news as well, since I recognized it and I never read the papers.’
Thóra waved to a passing waitress and ordered a Pina Colada. To hell with her headache, and to hell with the accountant. ‘Tell me,’ she said to Bella after the girl had taken her order, ‘what did the article say?’
‘This Adolf supposedly raped the girl at his house after they met at a bar downtown,’ said Bella. ‘She was drunk but she put up a fight, which was clear from the bruises on her body when she went to the A&E a day later.’
‘A day later?’ said Thóra, trying to fight the suspicion she immediately felt. ‘Why didn’t she go there right away, or to the police?’
‘The article said she’d been so devastated that she originally planned not to bring charges against the man at all. When she started to bleed heavily although it wasn’t her time of the month, she went to the hospital, where the story all came out. The bleeding turned out to be caused by the contraceptive, and when hospital staff pressed her she told them the whole story. She said that she hadn’t taken the pill herself, so the rapist must have stirred it into a drink he gave her.’
‘That wouldn’t hold up in court,’ said Thóra. ‘How could you prove that she didn’t take the pill herself when she regretted having slept with him?’
‘Because the drug was found at the man’s home when it was searched,’ said Bella. ‘In large quantities, according to the report. What’s a bachelor doing with contraceptive pills?’
‘I see,’ said Thóra. ‘I wonder if Alda was connected to this somehow?’ she wondered aloud. ‘When did it happen?’
‘The rape itself took place about seven months ago,’ Bella replied. ‘It was a Saturday night, but the girl didn’t go to A&E until the Monday evening.’
Alda was still working weekend and evening shifts at the hospital then, and may well have helped treat the victim. Had she perhaps recognized the name of the attacker because of her ties to the Islands? Thóra didn’t see how this could help Markus. This was of course extremely unlikely, but it was hard to be choosy when there was nothing else on offer. ‘Did you happen to find out where Valgerdur and Dadi moved to after the eruption?’ she asked Bella.
‘They moved to the Westfjords,’ Bella said. ‘The woman in the archive pointed me towards a summary of the new residences of all the Westmann Islands evacuees from about a year after the eruption. She knew who they were, and she thought a relative of Valgerdur’s had owned an empty house there that they’d moved into. I also saw in the file that Dadi worked on a trawler outfitted from Holmavik, but his wife hung around the house, since she’d just had a baby.’
Thóra smiled at Bella and decided to skip telling her that you didn’t simply ‘hang around the house’ when you had a baby. ‘Alda moved west with her parents, too,’ said Thóra. ‘Maybe they got to know Valgerdur better there. Ex-Islands residents probably stuck together during that period. That might explain why she was interested in the woman’s death.’
‘There was nothing written about the A&E staff in the article, though. All it said was that the girl he raped checked in there.’
‘It should be possible to find out more. I’m wondering whether this could be related to the trouble Alda had at work; she shouldn’t have assisted the victim if she knew the perpetrator.’
‘Are you sure she knew this Adolf?’ asked Bella.
‘No,’ replied Thóra. ‘I have no idea. Neither Leifur nor his mother remembered his name, so it seems likely that he didn’t maintain any ties to the Islands.’ Thóra sighed pensively. ‘I don’t know the legal ramifications of such a situation, either. Alda probably just took something from the A&E’s drug cabinet or something, but maybe it’s nothing her fellow nurses want to discuss. The chances are this Adolf has nothing to do with it. He was born after the eruption, so the bodies in the basement can’t be connected to him, but I suspect all these things have a common thread.’
‘Or the two cases could be entirely unrelated,’ suggested Bella. ‘Stranger things have happened.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Thóra, even though she had little to support her hunch. ‘The worst of it is, I suspect Markus’s family isn’t telling me the whole truth. One would expect a mother to put her children’s interests before her husband’s, especially if the man in question is at death’s door while Markus has half his life yet to live.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Bella, sucking on her straw. ‘I’m single and childless, so I have no idea which I would choose.’
A waitress appeared with Thóra’s drink. It wasn’t the one who had taken her order; this one was much older and looked world-weary. She held a tray bearing a creamy drink in a tall glass, adorned with an umbrella and a dyed-green cocktail cherry. Thóra thanked her and gave her her room number, and as the waitress scribbled it down and turned to leave Thóra detained her. ‘Do you happen to know of anyone who’s particularly knowledgeable about the eruption, and about Islands life at the time?’ she asked. ‘Someone who might be willing to talk to us?’
The woman looked at Thóra. ‘Couldn’t you just go to the theatre and watch
the film about the eruption? It’s very popular.’ She gestured at the clock. ‘The next show starts in just under an hour.’
‘No, that won’t be enough,’ said Thóra. ‘I’m looking for someone who can answer questions about specific residents.’ She smiled, hoping the woman wouldn’t start asking for further explanations.
The waitress shrugged. ‘I guess there are plenty of people here who enjoy talking about the disaster. Most of them just want to talk about their own experiences, but I imagine you’re looking for someone who can tell you more,’ she said. Thóra nodded. ‘I can think of one fellow in particular,’ she said. ‘His name is Paddi the Hook, and he knows all about it. The story goes that he’s only ever left the Islands once, for the evacuation. He knows more than anyone about the people round here. Besides that, he likes nothing better than a good gossip; you’ll have more trouble getting him to shut up. His answers might he hard to understand, but he’s not shy about giving his opinion.’
‘And where can we find this man?’ asked Thóra, eagerly.
‘He has a tourist boat. Mainly deep-sea fishing. I’d advise you to book one of his trips, otherwise you might not get him to talk to you. He’s always out on excursions and I don’t think he’d want to miss out on work.’ She smiled at them. ‘Do you want me to call and book one for you?’
Thóra thanked the woman and accepted her offer. It didn’t matter to her whether they booked a trip for sightseeing or fishing. She sipped her drink and allowed herself to enjoy the sweet coconutty taste for a moment. ‘Well,’ she said to Bella, ‘we’d better put on our wellies.’
Leifur sat at his father’s bedside in the room that the family had adapted on the ground floor after Klara had decided her husband should no longer sleep in the master bedroom. For some time Magnus had been waking his wife in the night to ask who she was, what time it was or even who he was. When his nocturnal behaviour had begun to get more angry and violent, she’d had enough. There were two options: they could move him to a healthcare facility, or make home-care arrangements so Klara didn’t need to look after him twenty-four hours a day. Leifur gazed at the bookshelves, which were all that remained of the original furniture in the erstwhile study. The rest had gone down into the basement, and would be given away after his parents died. Or thrown away. He and Maria didn’t have room for it, and his children had no interest in used furniture, even family heirlooms. It didn’t seem to matter to them that it was of far better quality than modern, fashionable furniture, or that it was worth a lot of money. Leifur’s son must have replaced his sofas more often in the eight years since leaving home than the old couple had done in all their married life. Maria was always whining about renovating the house and replacing all the furniture, or else selling it and building a new one. He had managed to avoid making that decision, but he knew he didn’t have much time before he either had to give in or run the risk of losing her. Something in her demeanour had changed: she still asked for the same things, but with less conviction. It made him anxious because he knew resignation often preceded some kind of drastic measure. What if this was her first step in the direction of the freedom that she desired so much, and that her mind associated with Reykjavik: the freedom to shop and wander from one cafe to another, the freedom to let her girlfriends envy all her material possessions? If she divorced Leifur she would be able to buy whatever her heart desired. Pre-nuptial agreements hadn’t been common when they got married, but even if they had been, Leifur would not have asked her to sign one.
Ashes to Dust Page 24
