“Unless the Icelanders used to be a nation of dwarves,” said Matthew, standing up. He walked over to where Thóra stood, by the stairs up to the balcony. “Should we have a look up there?” he asked. “I reckon we’ve seen everything down here in the fifteen seconds we’ve been here.”
They went up the narrow stairs and on to the balcony. Everything was painted in the same subdued colors. There was a good view over the nave from the handrail and for the first time Thóra noticed a brass chandelier in the middle of the ceiling. They looked all around, but there wasn’t much to see: just an impressive organ with an open book of sheet music on it and a wooden chest that turned out to contain hymn books and other choral paraphernalia. There was nothing else on the platform.
“That was a waste of time,” she said, disappointed. “I expected something much more exciting.”
“Like what?” Matthew asked. “There won’t be anything connected with the murder here. Birna was just excited about the building. She was an architect, after all.”
Thóra frowned, unconvinced. “Shouldn’t there be some kind of storage room here? Surely the ministers don’t have to lug everything to the church and back when they come here for the service.”
Matthew shrugged. “There’s a Bible on the altar. Maybe that’s enough for them. And a couple of candlesticks.”
“What about church records? Aren’t all churches obliged to keep records?” Thóra went back to the handrail for a better view of the church. Maybe there was a cupboard or box cleverly hidden away somewhere, though she couldn’t see anything to suggest that. “They have to record everything that takes place here.”
Matthew regarded her quizzically. “What do you mean?”
“Weddings, christenings, confirmations—it’s all written down in the church records.” Crossing to the wall at the far end of the balcony by the stairs, Thóra walked along it hoping to find a hatch. “I knew it!” she shouted excitedly, spotting a rectangular hatch on the ceiling above. “There’s something up there.”
Joining her, Matthew looked up. The ceiling was low, so he had no trouble opening the hatch. They both looked up into the dark hole. “I think I can see steps,” he said. “We need more light.”
Thóra flicked an old-fashioned switch by the stairs and a few wall lights came on. “Is that better?”
“Yes and no,” he said. “It’s better in that I can see, but worse in that I can see there’s nothing there.”
“Nothing? No books?” asked Thóra disconsolately, craning to see inside.
“No,” replied Matthew. “It’s just for access to the steeple, as far as I can tell. I doubt any books are kept there.” He grabbed the edge of the opening with both hands and heaved himself up. “No, there’s definitely nothing here.” He lowered himself to the floor and clapped his hands to brush the dust off them. “Maybe Vigdís knows where the church records are kept. She has the keys, so who knows, maybe she’s been put in charge of stuff like that.”
“I’m just going to have a closer look at the altar,” Thóra said. “It must be here somewhere.” They descended from the balcony, and she walked ahead of Matthew toward the suffering Jesus. A cursory glance revealed only the Bible and two large candlesticks. They sat on a table covered in a beautifully embroidered purple cloth, against the far wall beneath the altarpiece. Lifting the cloth, she saw that the table was in fact a small cupboard. “Matthew, look,” she called. She bent down and took hold of the recessed handles. Fortunately the cupboard was unlocked and the doors opened with a soft creak. Thóra beamed triumphantly over her shoulder at Matthew and took out three large leather-bound books.
The top one looked quite new, and when Thóra opened it, she knew she needn’t waste any time examining it: the date on the first page was 1996. She opened the next book and flicked through it until she found a date around 1940. “I think Kristín was here during the war,” she said to Matthew. “The film-star photos I found under the rafters were from then.” She flipped through the whole section, but found nothing. There were several births, christenings, marriages, and deaths, but no Kristín was to be found anywhere.
There was something strange about the entry for 1941, where the left-hand page ended with the name of a bride but the page facing it appeared to refer to a funeral. “That’s odd,” she said, opening the book wider and examining the join in the center. She handed it to Matthew. “Look,” she said, “a page has been removed. Maybe two.”
Matthew examined the book and nodded. “You’re right,” he said, passing the register back to Thóra. “Bizarre. Who would do such a thing? Someone who wanted to erase a wedding?”
“Or someone who wanted to erase a child’s christening,” Thóra said. “If you erase the birth records of a child born in that era, you’ve pretty much succeeded in wiping out every trace of it. I don’t know whether the national registry had been established by then, and even if it was, we can’t know whether it was used properly in rural areas. It can’t have been too difficult to keep yourself, or someone else, outside the system.”
They replaced the books after Thóra had searched through them all with no sign of Kristín.
Outside in the cemetery, they didn’t need to walk past many graves to appreciate how much times had changed. Most of the graves in the tiny cemetery bore inscriptions like “Boy—stillborn” or “Girl—unchristened.” More often than not, several children of the same parents lay side by side, or one gravestone served a group of siblings. Thóra carefully examined every inscription in the hope of finding names she recognized. She found two graves whose headstones bore the name Kristín, but both occupants had died in old age. She thought it unlikely that these women were connected with the inscription under the rafters.
Eventually they came to two neighboring plots separated by a low fence. Both had particularly large and impressive headstones, at least five feet high and carved from pale stone. Orange moss or lichen had spread across them. The carving on one showed a snake curling around to bite its tail, along with an oil lamp. Thóra recognized neither symbol, but she remembered that there was a lamp on the cover of the Gideon Bible. She asked Matthew whether the images meant anything to him, but they didn’t. She read the inscription, which bore the names of the family from Kirkjustétt, the farm that was now part of Jónas’s hotel. At the top was the head of the household: “Bjarni Thórólfsson, farmer from Kirkjustétt, b. 1896 d. 1944.” Beneath it stood “His wife, Adalheidur Jónsdóttir, b. 1900 d. 1928.” Two more names were inscribed below: “Bjarni b. 1923 d. 1923” and “Gudný b. 1924 d. 1945.”
“These are the people from the photograph I told you about, the ones Magnús Baldvinsson knew.” Matthew didn’t need to speak Icelandic to understand the headstone, so he stooped to read it. Thóra continued, “According to Magnús, the farmer and his daughter died of TB, and his wife of blood poisoning years earlier.” She pointed to the dates on Adalheidur’s inscription. “A girl who works for Jónas claims that incest was committed at the farm. Presumably it involved Bjarni and his daughter, Gudný.”
“We can’t assume that’s true,” Matthew pointed out. “How would a girl her age know about incest that took place seventy years ago?”
“Her grandmother told her,” said Thóra. “As a rule I don’t think grandmothers tell lies.”
“Not all grandmothers are the same.” Matthew grinned. “I’d take a story like that with a pinch of salt, even if it was a sweet little old lady telling it.”
“I suppose so,” Thóra conceded. “And I hope for Gudný’s sake that it was nonsense.” Then she pointed out the name of the son who had died in his first year. “I noticed on the photographs that Adalheidur appeared to be pregnant, but there were no pictures of a baby. He must have only lived a few days.”
“Like most children around here,” Matthew said, indicating the other graves. “More than half of these seem to be children who didn’t survive infancy.”
“It does seem that people here had trouble raising their children to adul
thood,” she said, looking around. “Unless infant mortality was this common all over Iceland.” She shuddered. “Thank God that’s all in the past,” she said, moving on to the next gravestone, which was more modest. “That’s strange.” It looked half empty. “Just two inscriptions: ‘His wife, Kristrún Valgeirsdóttir, b. 1894 d. 1940’ and below it ‘Edda Grímsdóttir b. 1921 d. 1924.’ ” Thóra looked at Matthew. “The husband’s name is missing, but it must be Grímur Thórólfsson, the elder brother. The woman has the same name as his wife, and the child as his daughter.”
“Is he likely to be the ‘dad’ who killed Kristín? Maybe a murderer would not have been buried with his loved ones,” he said. “Or could he still be alive? Either way, he’s not buried here.”
Thóra shook her head. “No, that can’t be right. Magnús said Grímur died a few years after moving to Reykjavík.”
“Where is he, then?” asked Matthew. “He’s supposed to be here. There’s plenty of room for his name. It feels weird, seeing it blank.”
Thóra turned and looked around the cemetery. “He can’t be buried here, since he’s not mentioned on this stone.” They strolled around the rest of the churchyard but found neither Grímur’s nor Kristín’s grave. “Maybe Kristín was just a cat after all,” Thóra said glumly, as they left through the squeaking gate.
“Then what about the missing page in the church records? I think our next move should be talking to the brother and sister who sold Jónas the land,” said Matthew. “You could use that ghost nonsense as a pretext to grill them about the history of the farm, and about Grímur and Kristín.”
Thóra nodded thoughtfully. That wasn’t a bad idea …
Elín Thórdardóttir kept her hand on the telephone after hanging up. She heaved a deep sigh, lifted it again and put it to her ear. She quickly dialed a number and waited impatiently for an answer. “Börkur,” she blurted, “guess what?”
“What is it, Elín? Now’s not a good time.” Börkur was always moody when his sister phoned him. “There’s a situation here.”
“What’s going on?” Elín asked, although she knew it must involve Svava, Börkur’s wife, who was a bag of nerves, always on the brink of a nervous breakdown over something minor.
“None of your business,” growled Börkur. “What do you want?”
Accustomed to his unfriendliness, Elín ignored it. In fact, she enjoyed winding him up. She had always been against selling the land but had given in to his constant nagging in the end. It was a pity their mother had not opposed the idea, because the place had still belonged to her even though the proceeds would go to her children. Börkur had managed to talk her into selling. Now Elín had the chance to take revenge on her brother for his bossiness. “A woman called Thóra phoned. She’s a lawyer for Jónas, who bought Kirkjustétt and Kreppa.” She paused deliberately, determined to force him to ask.
“And?” asked her brother, irritated but intrigued. “What did she want?”
“Turns out there’s a problem, dear brother,” Elín said smugly. “She wants to see us about a hidden defect she says Jónas has found in the property.”
“What horseshit! A hidden defect? On a plot of land? They need their heads examined. What the hell could it be? Is it soil contamination?”
Elín let him run on for a while before interrupting. “We didn’t go into details. She just wanted to arrange a meeting. On-site if possible.”
“On-site? Does she think I’ve got nothing better to do than trek over to Snæfellsnes?” Börkur was almost shouting now. “I’m up to my eyes in work! Drowning!”
“Oh, poor you,” said Elín, feigning sympathy. “Maybe I should just go by myself.”
Börkur thought for a moment. “No. I’ll come too. When do we have to meet her?”
“Tomorrow,” she replied. “Wouldn’t it be easier to pop over to Stykkishólmur tonight, so we don’t need to drive there early in the morning?”
“We’ll see. Call me later. I might, if I can sort some business out before this evening.”
“Börkur,” said Elín, “one more thing. I think ‘hidden defect’ might be something weird. The lawyer acted very strangely on the phone.”
“How do you mean, ‘strangely?’ ” asked Börkur.
“Just strangely,” she told him. “There’s something odd going on, that’s for sure, but I don’t know what.”
“Do you think it might have to do with the body that was on the news?” he asked, his voice suddenly shrill with panic.
“Oh. No, that hadn’t crossed my mind,” Elín said, surprised. Her brother didn’t sound like himself.
They hung up and Elín sat by the telephone, deep in thought. She tried to remember what she had heard about the body, and had an idea it had been found just before the weekend. She frowned. That was when Börkur had been out to Snæfellsnes on some fool’s errand. How odd.
CHAPTER 16
This must be the place.” Thóra scanned the beach. “We won’t learn much from coming out here, really.” The rocks at her feet glistened. The tide was out, but the smooth rocks were still damp. Nothing in this dramatic landscape suggested that a body had been found here not long ago, and Thóra wondered what she’d expected to see. Yellow police tape, perhaps?
Matthew looked at his watch. “Except that it took us exactly thirtyfive minutes to walk here from the hotel.”
“But we weren’t hurrying,” she said. “What’s the quickest we could have got here?”
Matthew shrugged. “I don’t know. You might be able to get here in twenty-five minutes, not much less, unless you were running.”
“So somebody could have come down here from the hotel, murdered Birna, and got back within the hour,” mused Thóra.
Matthew smiled. “Well, that doesn’t give the murderer much lee way. He would have had to come here explicitly to murder the woman, as there wasn’t time for them to meet up and argue.”
“What an awful noise those birds make,” Thóra said, facing the cliffs. “Their poor chicks.” She watched the chaotic mass of birds for a moment, before turning back to Matthew. “No one would have heard her scream. Not through this din.”
Matthew waved his arms. “Who was there to hear, anyway? There’s never anybody out here.”
Thóra looked around, and was about to agree when she noticed two people at the top of the incline leading down to the beach. “You may have spoken too soon,” she said, nodding in their direction.
They watched the pair slowly descend the pebbled slope—a young woman pushing someone in a wheelchair. They could not discern the sex of the occupant, whose head and face were concealed by the hood of his or her coat. The girl seemed to be struggling to move the wheel-chair through the loose shale on the track.
“They must be the young people the Japanese mentioned,” Thóra said. “The ones they saw talking to Birna. Should we have a word with them?” She looked at Matthew.
“Why not?” agreed Matthew. “It wouldn’t be the silliest thing you’ve done for this weird investigation.” He added hastily, “Not that I’m complaining. I’m enjoying it, even though I don’t have the faintest idea where it’s all leading.”
Thóra elbowed him in the ribs. “Have you suddenly turned anarchist in your old age? Come on.”
They set off slowly up the slope toward the pair. At first, when they drew nearer, Thóra thought she must have had something in her eye—no matter how she tried, she couldn’t focus properly on the face visible beneath the hood—but soon she realized there was nothing wrong with her eyes. Her stomach knotted, and she fought the urge to turn back and run. What was wrong with the wheelchair occupant’s features? Although she tried to concentrate on the girl, who was rosy cheeked and smiling, her eyes kept involuntarily returning to the face under the hood and the stretched, shiny pink skin that covered its entire left half. Thóra couldn’t look directly at the man’s disfigured eye sockets, the tragic remnants of his nose, and the scarred, plasticky skin that went from his chin to his forehead, as
far as she could see under his deep hood. Thóra prayed that the poor man—who looked young—was unaware of the effect he had, but deep down inside she knew he couldn’t be. She hoped Matthew was coping better than her, but didn’t dare glance over at him in case her expression revealed her horror.
She squeezed out a smile. “Hello,” she said, addressing the girl.
“Hello,” the girl answered, smiling warmly. She had a thick blond ponytail that swung when she spoke. She looked vaguely familiar, but Thóra couldn’t place her. “I’m not sure we’ll make it down here,” the girl said. “And if we do, it’ll be even harder getting back up.”
“There’s not much to see,” replied Thóra. “If you want, Matthew here can help you down.” She pointed at Matthew without looking at him. “And back up, of course.”
“Well, maybe,” the girl said, bending her head over the wheelchair. “What do you reckon?” she asked the man. “Should we accept their help or just turn back? Apparently there’s nothing to see.” The young man mumbled something that Thóra couldn’t hear, but the girl seemed to understand. “Okay, if that’s what you want.” She looked up at Thóra. “I think we’ll just head back. Could he lend me a hand, perhaps?”
Matthew took control of the wheelchair and they all set off up the slope.
“I could have done with your help last Thursday.” The blond girl grinned.
“Thursday?” Thóra said, startled. “Were you here in the evening?” Might the girl and the young man have witnessed something without realizing its significance, or could they be implicated in Birna’s murder? Thóra waited eagerly for the reply, but was disappointed when it came.
“No, we weren’t here,” the girl said, still panting after the ordeal. “We were both planning to go to the séance at the hotel but in the end I went by myself because I couldn’t get the wheelchair over a huge hole that had been dug across the driveway. That was quite a drag because there’s not much going on around here and Steini was looking forward to it.” She rolled her eyes at Thóra. “Actually, he didn’t miss much. It was pretty ridiculous, and I think the medium was a fraud.”
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