Ashes to Dust Read online

  ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Thóra said calmly. ‘Did they encourage you or not?’

  Markus smiled bitterly. ‘My father has Alzheimer’s. He’s in no shape either to encourage or discourage anyone. Mum, on the other hand, has all her spark-plugs firing, and her feelings about the excavation were the opposite of mine. She was even really excited about it. She was hoping to recover some fine dinnerware from the house. Even though Dad had managed to get most of what we owned out of the house before it disappeared, he still left quite a few things behind. He hadn’t given much thought to the dinnerware.’

  Thóra nodded. The man had no doubt put a lot of effort into saving the home’s stereo system and such like. Of course, Markus’ mother’s excitement about the excavation did not rule out her husband as a suspect; he could very well have put the bodies there without his wife knowing. ‘Someone put the bodies there, that much is certain. Does anyone come to mind?’

  Markus shook his head. ‘I don’t actually remember every single person who lived on the Islands at that time, but it’s completely ridiculous to think that any of the people I do remember could have killed those three. Everyone here was normal; just your typical Icelandic fishermen’s families.’ Markus started running his hands through his hair again. ‘My best memories are of my friends, and naturally they were all just dumb kids like me.’

  ‘Are you absolutely certain your father couldn’t have had something to do with this?’ asked Thóra. ‘It was at your home, and I find it unlikely that someone would have broken in there to hide bodies.’

  ‘Broken in?’ echoed Markus. ‘They wouldn’t have needed to break in. It was all unlocked. People were asked to leave their houses open so that the rescue crews could go in and out of them as they needed.’ He brightened. ‘Naturally, the place filled up with people arriving from the mainland after the night of the eruption. I don’t know any figures, but the rescue crews needed a lot of manpower and the majority of those who lent a hand weren’t from the Islands. Our house wasn’t buried immediately.’

  Thóra considered this for a moment. ‘So you think it more likely that one of those people put the bodies there?’

  Markus shrugged. ‘What do I know? The only thing that’s completely clear to me is that I had nothing to do with it.’

  Thóra hoped that this was indeed the case. It was always more comfortable to fight for a just cause. ‘We might be getting ahead of ourselves with this kind of speculation. We should wait for the results of the forensic autopsy on the bodies and head.’ She smiled weakly at Markus. How was an autopsy performed on a head? ‘Who knows, maybe these people simply died of natural causes or suffocated in the basement. Wasn’t that what happened in the only death to occur during the eruption?’

  ‘No one died in the eruption,’ said Markus angrily, almost as if he were defending the eruption’s good name.

  ‘Really?’ said Thóra. ‘I always thought that one person died. And in a basement, no less.’

  ‘Oh, him,’ said Markus. ‘That doesn’t count. He was an alcoholic.’

  The confused look on Thóra’s face forced him to explain this a little better. ‘He went down into the pharmacy basement looking for spirits. The eruption had nothing to do with it.’

  Except that the poison gases which killed him came from the eruption - but Thóra had no desire to waste time explaining this. She picked up the report again and leafed through it. ‘This is odd. Am I right in thinking that you’ve never been asked whether you thought you’d seen any of the dead people before?’

  Markus jerked his head to one side in surprise. ‘They didn’t ask me that because the bodies are hardly in a condition for anyone to be able to identify them. And I couldn’t really see very clearly there in the basement.’

  In other words, you think you’ve never seen them before?‘ If it were possible to identify these people, it would be easier to determine what happened to them.

  Markus shook his head slowly. ‘No, I’m almost sure I haven’t,’ he said. ‘But as I said, it’s possible that they’re people I knew. I would have to be able to see them again under better conditions, although I doubt that would make any difference.’

  Thóra thought of the dried-out, dusty corpses and knew that it would be difficult to identify them except in the lab of a forensic pathologist.

  ‘They must be foreigners. Even though there are cases of Icelanders vanishing without a trace, it’s out of the question that three people disappeared at the same time without attracting attention.’ She hurriedly corrected herself: ‘Four, I mean.’ The head was still so unreal to her that she kept forgetting to count it along with the bodies. She thought for a moment. ‘Maybe they were sailors?’ she asked. ‘They could have belonged to the crew of a wrecked ship.’

  ‘And how would that crew have ended up in our basement?’ asked Markus, puzzled.

  ‘Well, that’s another question,’ said Thóra, and smiled at him. ‘We should wait for the autopsy. I suppose the police will call you in again for questioning after that, and after they’ve gone over the medical examiner’s report. Until then I’ll try to find some witnesses or anything else that could possibly support your statement about Alda and the box.’

  Markus stood up and snorted. ‘Like that’s going to happen,’ he said sulkily as he left. ‘She was the only one who could possibly have backed me up.’

  Thóra tried unsuccessfully to look encouraging. This looked bad; the only hope of Markus getting off scot-free now was if it turned out that the people in the basement had suffocated. Again she had forgotten the head. How in the hell was it possible to explain that?

  Stefán put down the phone, closed his eyes and counted to ten. He shook himself. ‘That was the medical examiner,’ he said to the policeman sitting across from him, and pinched himself to keep calm. ‘He doubts that Alda committed suicide. The autopsy revealed several details that need further explanation.’ He paused for a moment. ‘How could you possibly not have investigated anywhere but the bedroom? Are you completely useless when I’m not there?’ He tapped the stack of papers on the table with his index finger for emphasis. The young officer reddened and Stefán wondered whether it was from shame or anger. He continued: ‘How did you leave the scene? Is the house marked in any way that would let the relatives of the deceased know they can’t go roaming about in there, or did you just shut the door and drive away?’

  ‘Uh,’ said the young police officer, his cheeks even redder.

  ‘Uh,’ parroted Stefán. ‘What does “uh” mean?’

  ‘We didn’t mark the house in any particular way,’ replied the young man. ‘It looked like suicide. I’ve seen several of them,’ he added, in a slightly more confident tone.

  ‘Don’t you get arrogant with me,’ hissed Stefán. ‘I couldn’t care less whether you’ve seen three suicides or three thousand. It’s this one particular incident I’m unhappy about, and I’m not about to listen to the medical examiner scold me for the working methods of my men.’ He took a moment to calm down. ‘According to him there are various things lacking: you took almost no photos of the scene and your report on the search of the house doesn’t cover any other room but the bedroom. What’s more, he says that blood is never mentioned in the report, even though the corpse’s injuries suggest there must have been blood present.’

  ‘ There was blood,’ muttered the young officer, his own face blood-red. ‘There were small pools on both sides of the head, from injuries to the woman’s cheeks and neck.’

  ‘Oh, now you decide to tell us?’ hissed Stefán loudly. ‘You maybe want me to fix the report for you? Something like that was certainly supposed to go in it! I’m so bloody amazed, I’m almost speechless.’ Various words could be used to describe Stefán’s state at that moment, but ‘speechless’ was not one of them.

  ‘We were told that the woman’s injuries were self-inflicted. I think there was blood and skin under her nails.’ The young man straightened up. ‘I want it put on record that the doctor w
ho came with the ambulance ruled this a suicide at the scene. It was also him who deduced this about the blood, and that’s why I didn’t feel there was any reason to write it down in the report. We proceeded with our work under the conviction that this was a suicide, since there was nothing to suggest otherwise.’ He looked curiously at his boss. ‘What exactly was discovered in the autopsy?’

  Stefán scowled. ‘It appears she didn’t die of poisoning. The doctor tested her blood and stomach contents for the active ingredient in the drugs found on the bedside table. It wasn’t present in any life-threatening amount.’

  The young officer raised his eyebrows. ‘Then how did she die?’

  Stefán had calmed down completely. He was relieved to hear that a doctor had declared it a suicide at the scene, since this mostly cleared his men of any blame for ruining the case. ‘Of course it’ll probably be necessary to conduct further tests before it’s possible to confirm it, but the doctor thought it most likely that the woman suffocated.’

  ‘Suffocated?’ echoed the young police officer. ‘Choked?’

  Stefán shook his head. ‘It’s still uncertain. The examiner hasn’t ruled out illness as the cause, but he says he wants the home of the deceased searched better in order to determine whether a person or persons unknown might have played a part in her death.’

  ‘I see,’ said the young man, utterly relieved that Stefán’s disposition appeared to have returned to normal. ‘Our shift is finishing — do you want us to go back there first thing in the morning, or… ?’

  ‘Stefán’s eyes narrowed. ’No. You’ll go now. Immediately.‘ He dared the young man to object by staring directly into his eyes. ’You’ll go over every square centimetre and then write a detailed report, as if you were investigating a murder scene. I want a copy of the report waiting for me on my desk tomorrow morning.‘ He waved his hand at the door. ’I would hurry up if I were you, before your colleagues go home - and you’re left in the lurch.‘ The younger man opened his mouth his to object, but stopped. He walked to the door. When he was standing in the doorway, Stefán added: ’Take note of all the calls to or from her home phone and her mobile. Since she probably died on the Sunday evening, calls from that particular time are naturally the most important.‘

  ‘Will do,’ replied the young man, with a touch of bitterness in his voice. What a fucking mess. He was tired after a long day and completely ready to throw himself onto the sofa and stare at the television. It wasn’t an attractive thought, having to comb through an entire house in search of God knows what.

  ‘One other thing,’ called Stefán as the door was closing.

  ‘Sir?’ The young man stuck his head back through the doorway.

  ‘I am particularly interested in knowing whether Alda called the mobile phone of Markus Magnusson that same night, and how long the phone call lasted. Understand?’

  ‘Understood.’

  The door closed. Stefán stared at it and thought things over. He knew that he should call his colleague in the Westmann Islands and inform him of these developments, but he really had no desire to do so. It could wait. He was going to go down to the National Hospital, meet the examiner, and have a look at Alda’s body. He stood up. He had to admit it wasn’t just because of his job that he wanted to go there: the examiner had mentioned that the woman had been rather significantly enhanced — a word Stefán couldn’t understand until he got a better explanation for it. Stefán’s wife was always complaining that she wanted to get breast enhancements, so he wanted to see some for himself. Who knew, maybe he would give her the green light if he liked what he saw.

  Chapter Six

  Saturday 14 July2007

  The only guests at the prizegiving that Saturday morning were the children who had won and their parents. Sóley sat between her mother and her brother Gylfi, smiling broadly. The competition had been part of the Arts Week at the City Library and involved drawing pictures of home appliances that made a family’s life easier, and Sóley had spent an entire afternoon conscientiously drawing and colouring. To Thóra’s great surprise her daughter had won; up until that point Sóley had displayed limited talent in the arts. The girl who had won in the oldest age group walked back to her seat with a little bouquet and a cheque from the sponsors of the competition, one of the largest electrical equipment companies in the country. The city librarian called Sóley, who took her place next to the woman, red-cheeked.

  ‘Congratulations on your victory,’ said the librarian, taking Sóley’s small hand. She pointed at the girl’s picture, which was hanging in a special display along with the other illustrations that had been entered in the competition. There were actually not very many of them, just as Thóra had suspected when she received the news that Sóley had won. ‘I have to say, this is a very artistically drawn picture of a steam iron that you’ve done,’ said the librarian as she handed Sóley a large envelope and bouquet.

  Thóra knitted her brow. Why had Sóley drawn a picture of an iron? Her ex-husband had taken it with him when they separated, because none of Thóra’s clothing required ironing. She doubted that Sóley knew what it looked like, but it seemed she’d done a decent job even without a model. Thóra looked proudly from the picture to her daughter, whose cheeks were even redder than before as she stood there next to the librarian with the prize in her arms, staring at her toes. Sóley seemed on the verge of tears, but she clenched her teeth.

  ‘It’s a snowmobile. Not a steam iron,’ said Sóley, chewing her bottom lip.

  Now it was the librarian’s turn to blush slightly, but to Thóra’s great relief she resolved the problem successfully by saying that she’d misread her notes. On the other hand, Gylfi’s burst of laughter did not help, and as they stood there afterwards in front of the picture he continued to giggle.

  ‘It looks exactly like an iron,’ he said. ‘How did you ever get the idea of drawing a snowmobile? Do you think it’s a household appliance?’

  Thóra leapt to her daughter’s rescue. ‘Of course it is. In the countryside snowmobiles count as home appliances.’ She tightened her grip on her daughter’s hand, while Sóley hung her head. ‘Don’t listen to him. He has no idea what snowmobiles look like.’ The same actually went for Sóley. ‘I’m going to buy you ice cream in honour of your win.’ She looked from the snowmobile to the other pictures. ‘Sóley. Yours is by far the most beautiful. Stands head and shoulders above the rest.’

  ‘No, it’s ugly,’ said the child. ‘I should have drawn a door, like I was going to at first.’

  Thóra realized that she would have to explain to her daughter at a better time what the words household appliance meant. ‘There there,’ she said. ‘You won and that was no accident.

  You drew the most beautiful picture. Steam iron and snowmobile both start with the letter “s”. That’s why the woman got mixed up.‘ She kissed Sóley on the cheek and gave her son the evil eye, since he appeared to be on the verge of bursting into laughter again. ’Do me a favour and find me a book about the eruption in the Westmann Islands,‘ she said to him. This would get Gylfi thinking about something other than the snow-mobile-steam iron and she would benefit from reading up on the events of 1973, which she actually knew very little about. While he went to find the book Thóra used the opportunity to cheer up her daughter, although she didn’t actually smile until they were sitting down with huge glasses full of ice cream with whipped cream on top. Thóra’s mobile phone rang just as she was finishing her ice cream, but she decided not to answer for fear the world would crumble around her daughter. She changed her mind when she saw on the screen that it was Markus calling. His world truly was crumbling around him, and ice cream would do very little to improve his situation.

  Thóra hung up on Bragi, her partner in the legal firm, and sighed. She was exhausted after a long day, which had gone differently than she’d planned. Markus had been called in for yet another round of questioning, now under suspicion of involvement in the untimely death of Alda and of being party to the death of
the people in the basement. The phone call from Markus had been urgent, so Thóra ended up at the police station after finishing her ice cream, instead of going to the cinema or doing something else with her children. She had had to listen to the same questions put to her client as in the previous interviews, along with a few additional questions about Alda. They all concerned whether he had been at her home on the Sunday evening when she was thought to have died. Markus had denied this and stuck to his story that they had only spoken on the phone. At first he absolutely denied having gone to her house for weeks, but later admitted that he had in fact been there - not on the night they were asking about, but the night before. He had stopped there for a short time and had a glass of wine.

  Thóra felt like screaming when Markus let this slip. She was disappointed in him, mainly for trying to keep quiet about his visit, especially since his meeting with Alda had occurred outside the time in which the police were interested. As such, this only increased their suspicion towards him. Thóra thought it likely that he’d been so stubborn about not admitting his visit because he feared being charged with drink-driving. This was not unusual - many people hid insignificant details from the police if they involved illegal actions, and tended to focus on keeping them secret even if they were suspected of much more serious crimes. The police’s attempts to tie Markus to a murder didn’t seem to bother him, but he was like a cat on a hot tin roof when attention turned to his possible motor vehicle violation. He was obviously clinging to the childish belief that in the end his name would be cleared of the murders without his needing to put any great effort into it.

  When the police came to the end of their list of questions concerning Markus’s visit to Alda, Thóra felt that the interrogation had run out of steam and that Markus had withstood the worst of it. She was wrong. Markus responded furiously when the police eventually said they wanted to question his closest relatives. For a time Thóra thought that Markus’s protests would end with his being arrested, but she was finally able to calm him down before it came to a scuffle. After leaving the office Thóra pressed him on the cause of this violent reaction: he said that he was worried about his elderly parents, although they probably weren’t the only ones who would be called in for questioning; the police also wanted to speak to his older brother, Leifur, who ran the family’s fishing company in the Islands. Markus had demanded that Thóra be present during all of the interrogations, and had a hard time understanding that she was prohibited from doing so due to conflict of interest. She also tried to explain to Markus that the police were simply fishing; they weren’t just on the look-out for whatever would tighten the rope around his neck, but also for anything that could cut it loose. The purpose of the investigation was to gain a clear picture of events; this was not a government inquisition aimed at pinning everything on him. She had her doubts that Markus would accept all of this, but in the end he settled for her explanations.