My Soul to Take Read online

  “Hello, Bella. This is Thóra. Did you find out anything about the connection between foxes and horses?” Thóra couldn’t be bothered to scold her yet again for her telephone manner.

  “Eh?” replied the girl idiotically. “Oh, that.” When she stopped talking, Thóra thought she could discern a sucking noise followed by a quick exhalation.

  “Bella, are you smoking in the office?” she asked, irritated. “You know that’s not allowed.”

  “Of course not,” replied Bella. “Are you crazy?”

  Thóra was sure she could hear the crackle of burning tobacco. Could the girl have taken up smoking a pipe?

  Before she had time to ask, Bella went on, “The horse-riding types I spoke to hadn’t heard of any specific connection between the two, so I talked to a foxhunter I know and I got a bit more out of him.”

  Thóra completely forgot about the smoking. “What did he say?” she asked eagerly. Would her secretary prove useful for once?

  “Well,” said Bella, “he told me horses can go mad with fear if they smell the scent of a dead fox, especially if it’s started to rot.”

  “Is that something only foxhunters would know,” Thóra asked excitedly, “or would all riders be aware of this? Do you think the ones you spoke to could have been particularly ill informed?”

  “Ill informed about foxes?” Bella asked sarcastically. “I don’t have the faintest idea, but I’d say they don’t know about it, as a rule. I mean, how often do you come across a fox?”

  “Thanks, Bella,” said Thóra, meaning it for probably the first time ever. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?” Her offer wasn’t that generous, since the secretary’s absence would have no discernible effect on the company’s operation. She hung up and recounted the conversation to Matthew.

  “So the murderer tied a fox to Eiríkur to drive the horse wild—to make sure the poor man would be killed and not just badly injured.” Matthew raised an eyebrow. “A pretty cold customer.”

  “But as a rule riders don’t know how horses react to a dead fox,” said Thóra pensively. “It’s mainly foxhunters who do.” After reflecting for a moment she added, “I wonder if Bergur hunts foxes. He has ducks on his farm.” She looked up at Matthew. “There was a box of rifle cartridges in the stables, in the coffee room.”

  Matthew stared back at her. “Could ‘RER’ have been an attempt at ‘BER,’ for ‘Bergur,’ but Eiríkur couldn’t write it properly?” He took out his mobile and called up the photograph he had taken of the scrawl on the wall. It took him a while to enlarge the image and center it. “I’ll be damned,” he said after scrutinizing the photograph. He handed the phone to Thóra. “The lower diagonal on the first R isn’t straight like on the second one.”

  THÓRA PUT DOWN THE TELEPHONE AND TURNED TO MATTHEW. “I think Thórólfur took the news quite well,” she said. “He played it cool, but I could tell he was delighted. I predict Bergur will have a visit from the police soon.”

  “Or his wife will,” said Matthew. “You never know.”

  “Yes, you do,” she replied. “Some things you just know. I read the autopsy report and it’s obvious that Birna was the victim of a very brutal rape, so no women are in the frame, except perhaps as accomplices. If Rósa did play a part in the murder, it wasn’t with her husband. I doubt they could agree on the time of day, let alone something on this scale.”

  Just then, Sóldís walked over to them. “Granny wants a word with you,” she said awkwardly. “She asked me to ask you to phone her. It’s something to do with what you were talking about yesterday.” She looked down at her feet. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, you know, but here’s her number.” She handed Thóra a Post-it.

  Thóra thanked her kindly and took out her mobile immediately, while Sóldís turned around and quickly left the bar. The telephone was answered after a single ring.

  “Hello, Lára. This is Thóra, the lawyer from the hotel. Sóldís told me you wanted a word.”

  “Yes, hello. I’m so glad you called. I haven’t been able to think about anything but Gudný since we talked yesterday. I believe that you’ll lead to the child’s fate being discovered at long last.” Thóra had the feeling that Lára was in a very emotional state, although her voice didn’t betray it. “I’m holding the letter from her, the one I told you about yesterday,” said the old woman, sniffing almost inaudibly. “I searched everywhere and eventually found it stored away with a couple of other things that I still keep from that time. I’ve read it over and again, and I think I’ve found something by reading between the lines.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Thóra.

  “In one place she says the baby takes after its father and I’ll see the resemblance at once,” said Lára. “At the time, when all that talk about incest started up, I half believed she was referring to her father or uncle. Now that I’m older, I realize that no woman would say that about a child born under such circumstances. She also asks whether I know the whereabouts of a young man she was keen on before I moved away. She wanted to drop him a line.” Lára stopped to take a deep breath. “I think that young man must have been the child’s father. He moved to Reykjavík soon after me, and I remember how strangely he acted when I bumped into him a year or so later. He refused to talk to me. I didn’t understand it then, and still don’t, really. The baby might explain his reaction. Perhaps he thought I knew about the baby or Gudný’s pregnancy and didn’t want to discuss it. He had a young lady on his arm.”

  “Who was it?” Thóra asked. “Is he still alive?”

  “Most definitely,” Lára replied. “When he dies, it will be reported in all the newspapers. He used to be a cabinet minister.”

  Thóra felt her grip tightening on the handset. “Magnús Baldvinsson?” she asked, as calmly as she could.

  “Yes, how did you guess?” exclaimed Lára, astounded. “Do you know him?”

  “He’s staying at the hotel,” replied Thóra, “but he may have left by now—his grandson came to fetch him yesterday evening.”

  “How odd,” Lára said. “He’s only come back for a few flying visits since he moved to Reykjavík all those years ago.”

  “Well, I never,” was all Thóra could think to say. “Could he have been so unhappy about the baby that he…” She hesitated, searching for a suitable phrase. Adults were one thing, but babies quite another “That he somehow had the child adopted after Gudný died, or simply…disposed of it?” She hoped her euphemism would be clear enough.

  “I don’t know,” said Lára. Her elderly voice faltered. “Heavens, I can’t believe anyone could do such a thing. Magnús was spineless, yes, but evil? I just don’t know. I can’t really imagine anyone behaving that way. They wouldn’t be shown any mercy in our society. Not today, and not back then.” She stopped to blow her nose. “Then there was your other question—about the coal bunker. I had a think about that and remembered that both farms switched to electrical heating before I moved away, which everyone thought was very posh. Bjarni set up a small generator by one of the waterfalls on the mountainside, north of the main road. I don’t know if it helps you at all, but both farms stopped having to bother with coal then and the coal bunkers were never used again.” Talking about something as down-to-earth as central heating seemed to restore the strength to Lára’s voice, and she spoke now with no hint of sadness. “In the box where I kept Gudný’s letter I found an old photo of the two of us behind the farm, and when I looked at it more closely, all this came back to me. You can see the coal hatch and the memories just flooded back.”

  Thóra interrupted her. “When you say ‘behind the farm,’ which farm do you mean?”

  “Kirkjustétt,” Lára said. “We didn’t go to Kreppa much in those days. Bjarni and Grímur were barely on speaking terms and I’m fairly sure that their only contact was over the generator, which supplied both farms.”

  “So Kreppa had the same type of coal bunker?” said Thóra. “There are no signs of it behind the hotel.
Could it have been covered over by the annex?”

  “No, it shouldn’t have been,” replied Lára. “If I recall correctly, it was a little ways away from the farmhouse, not in the area where the annex was built. The hatch ought to be in the lawn behind the hotel. Both farms had the same layout. It was considered awfully modern to have the coal bunker away from the house, because it was much more expensive than tipping the coal straight into the basement. The most impressive thing of all was to have an entrance to the bunker from the basement even if it was some distance away.”

  Thóra looked at Matthew, her eyes wide. She ended her conversation with Lára, excited at the prospect of exploring the basement for a door to the bunker, but before she rang off, she promised to let Lára know if she found any clues about the fate of the mysterious child.

  “I need to make a quick call,” she told Matthew as she dialed the number of the prison. “I promise you I’ll explain everything in a minute.” Thinking back to the photograph that Birna had asked Robin to take of the basement wall, Thóra didn’t expect to find a door down there. When Jónas was brought to the telephone, she got straight to the point. “Jónas, I might need to make a hole in the basement wall, under the old part of the hotel. I just wanted to let you know. Are you all right otherwise?”

  THÓRA, MATTHEW, AND GYLFI STOOD IN THE BASEMENT, IN FRONT of the wall they had agreed must be the one backing on to the lawn. It had taken them a long time to figure out where to begin, but by lifting Sóley so that she could see out through the dirty little windows, they could confirm that the wall from Birna’s photograph was the right one. Matthew put down the photograph and picked up a sledgehammer. Thóra moved back to where Sigga and Sóley were watching excitedly. Gylfi stood by Matthew, ready to take turns when the German wanted a break.

  Her son had insisted on joining them when they took shovels out on to the lawn—to make sure that the hatch was there before they began modifying the interior of the hotel—and the girls insisted on coming too, delighted to have something different to do. They found the hatch some thirty centimeters down, just beyond the inscribed rock, but instead of arduously digging around it, they had gone to the basement to look for the door they knew was there somewhere—a hatch that had been buried for decades, said Matthew, would be no easier to open than the one they had struggled with behind Kreppa.

  “What do you reckon you’ll find back there?” asked Gylfi, not entirely convinced of the wisdom of breaking it down.

  “Honestly? I have no idea,” replied Thóra, “but it was obviously designed to keep people away. There’s absolutely no reason to concrete over a basement door. It would only have been sealed this way if the point was to hide it.”

  “And what if there’s nothing there?” he said. “What will the owner say?”

  “Nothing,” she reassured him. “I’ve informed him of our plans, and if worst comes to worst, he’ll just have some wall repairs to keep him busy when he gets out of custody.” Impatiently, she waved them on. “Fire away!”

  Not needing to be told twice, Gylfi and Matthew pounded at the wall. Thóra and the girls looked on expectantly, but soon realized that it would be a lengthy operation. It was more than half an hour, in which time Sóley had fallen asleep from boredom on top of a pile of boxes and Sigga was yawning almost constantly, before the gap in the plaster, timber, and rock was big enough to climb through. Matthew and Gylfi stood back with their sleeves rolled up, dirty, sweaty, and out of breath.

  “I’m not going in first,” Thóra said as she withdrew her head from the hole. “It’s awfully stuffy in there. It smells like burning.”

  “I’ll go,” offered Gylfi, but Thóra knew him well enough to realize that he didn’t mean it.

  “Matthew, you go first,” she said, pushing him toward the hole. “Where’s the flashlight?”

  After all three had squeezed through the hole, Thóra and Gylfi followed Matthew along the dim passage. The slender beam from the flashlight only helped Matthew in front, and the Icelanders bumped into him when he stopped at a door at the end of the passage. He turned around, shining the flashlight under his chin. Both Thóra and Gylfi recoiled in horror, much to his amusement. He took the flashlight away from his face and lit up the door. “Shall I open it?”

  They should have said no.

  CHAPTER 31

  SO I IMAGINE you found this by pure coincidence, like the photograph?” said Thórólfur. “You just happened to be down in the basement armed with sledgehammers and thought it would improve the décor if you removed one of the walls?”

  Thóra plucked a sliver of wood from her hair and was pleased to see that it was not a tooth, as she had feared. “No,” she said. “I thought I made myself clear. We wanted to be sure we weren’t sending you on some fool’s errand and wasting the taxpayers’ money. There was no way to verify what was down there without checking it. I must admit I didn’t expect this.” She shuddered as two detectives walked past pushing a wheelbarrow full of bones. A stench of burning wafted with them.

  The hotel was teeming with police officers from neighboring constabularies, as well as expert investigators from Reykjavík. Thóra suspected that few of them had any genuine reason to be there, but were driven by mere curiosity. She winced. “As I said, I expected to find the skeleton of one child, not bones stacked up to the ceiling.”

  “You didn’t realize they were animal bones?” asked Thórólfur. “Maybe it was hard to see properly in the dark down there?”

  “The bones I saw first weren’t from an animal,” Thóra said firmly. “Before the heap collapsed, the flashlight lit up a little woolen mitten. A bone was sticking out below the cuff, so I can only assume there’s a dead child in there somewhere. There couldn’t be anything except a hand inside the mitten. It was protruding from the stack before it collapsed, so it presumably won’t be found until all the bones have been removed. In your shoes, I’d tell the men to proceed with caution because underneath there’s a—” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “As you may have noticed, this is a slow job,” Thórólfur said, gesturing at the men and women working around him. “We follow all the procedures governing the investigation of a crime scene, whether we find human bones or not. We need to establish what happened, because it’s hardly normal to bury half-burned carcasses like this. So don’t worry about us destroying any evidence. You’d do better to keep worrying about Jónas, because this has no bearing on the issue of his guilt.”

  “Not even if I told you that under all this lies the skeleton of the illegitimate child of Magnús Baldvinsson, from World War Two?”

  “I don’t see why that would make any difference,” said Thórólfur offhandedly, although his interest was clearly aroused. “Or perhaps you mean that he murdered his own child, then slaughtered dozens of animals and threw their bones over the body?” He smirked. “And then came back, sixty years later, to pick up where he left off?”

  “It’s up to you what you deduce from all this, but paternity will be provable because a DNA sample must be taken from the child’s remains. Even though it won’t prove who killed her, the paternity test is bound to raise questions and I don’t think Magnús Baldvinsson will come out of it smelling of roses.”

  “So you’re back to your theory that Magnús or Baldvin killed both Birna and Eiríkur?” Thórólfur asked.

  Thóra picked more debris from her hair. “Not really. Like I told you on the phone I was beginning to think that it could be either Bergur or his wife with a male accomplice,” she said. “Matthew and I saw the wife leave the hotel with a waiter who works here. They seemed very close,” said Thóra. “It occurred to us that Rósa might have seduced him and got him to kill Birna. She could have done that in revenge for the affair with her husband.”

  Thórólfur’s eyebrows rose so high they disappeared into his hair. “You’ve met Bergur’s wife,” he said. “Does she seem a likely seductress?”

  “No, actually, she doesn’t,” admitted Thóra, “but beauty
is in the eye of the beholder, so you never know.”

  Thórólfur grinned maliciously. “Does this waiter’s name happen to be Jökull Gudmundsson?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Thóra said. “I’m not sure about his second name, but his first name is certainly Jökull. Did you know they were an item?”

  “They’re brother and sister,” he said. “That presumably explains how ‘close’ they seemed when you saw them.”

  Thóra said nothing. Now she understood Jökull’s antipathy toward Birna; his brother-in-law had been having an affair with her. It also explained his reaction to her question about Steini. His father had caused the accident, so he was bound to be as touchy about discussing it as his sister was. “Ah,” she said finally. “That changes things slightly.”

  “Yes, doesn’t it?” replied Thórólfur. “But there’s no harm in telling you that we’re still investigating Bergur’s possible involvement,” he added mildly, giving her no hint as to whether he was a suspect along with Jónas. “I can also tell you that his rifle is being cross-matched with the shell found in the fox’s carcass. We don’t have the facilities in Iceland, so it was sent abroad. Unfortunately, it takes a few days to get the results from there, but in the meantime we’ve got a few things to look into.” The police inspector took his leave of her, and headed down to the basement to see what progress was being made.

  Thóra went over to Matthew, who was reaching the end of his statement to the police. This had taken a considerable time because the officer insisted on using an interpreter.

  “Do you reckon we’re off to join Jónas in prison?” Matthew said, grinning, as they walked away. “The way I look right now I’d fit right in there,” he added. His clothes were covered in dust and earth, since he hadn’t had time to change since the bones had fallen on them.

  Thóra looked him up and down, amused. “How long is it since you’ve got this dirty?” she asked, removing what turned out to be a fragment of bone from his sweater.