Ashes to Dust (13 page)

‘Her mother still lives in the Islands,
remember,’ said Bella, looking around as if she expected the woman to be
living in one of the warehouses at the docks. ‘That old man today said
so, anyway. You should phone her, or go and see her.’

‘She may be living here,’ said
Thóra. ‘Still, I don’t think
it’s
right to visit her on this trip, in light of the circumstances.’

‘Isn’t it exactly the right time
to do it?’ asked Bella, flicking her cigarette into a barrel a short
distance away. ‘She’s sure to be vulnerable after losing her
daughter, and ready to open up.’

Thóra shook her head. ‘No,
that’s no use. If she’s in shock she might refuse to speak to me.
I’ll ask Markus’s brother about Alda’s family tomorrow
evening, and if he knows anything he can maybe tell me how I ought to proceed.
Hopefully he’ll know how her mother is holding up.’

Bella didn’t seem to be listening to
her. ‘Do you remember the cemetery we drove past?’ she asked
suddenly.
‘With the arched gate?’

‘Yes,’ replied Thóra,
wondering where Bella was going with this. Did she want to go and look around
the graveyard?

‘Could the bodies be from there?’
the other woman asked. ‘Maybe a relative or someone else had been trying
to save the bodies from disappearing in the eruption? The cemetery was buried
and dug up later. Maybe whoever disinterred the bodies wasn’t sure that
would happen?’

Thóra looked at her secretary in
surprise. ‘Digging up corpses just to put them in the basement of a house
that was going to go the same way as the cemetery? I highly doubt it.’

Bella shrugged. ‘Maybe whoever did it
regretted it, or didn’t have a chance to move the bodies again.’

Thóra wanted to put a stop to this
idle speculation, but couldn’t think of any clever way, so she just said,
‘Shouldn’t we get going? I’m happy to get an early night, so
that we can get plenty done tomorrow.’

Bella looked at her watch,
then
regarded Thóra quizzically. ‘Are you kidding? I haven’t gone
to bed this early since I was three years old.’

Thóra’s cheeks reddened
slightly. ‘I’m not necessarily talking about going to sleep right
away. I need to phone my children and a few other people first.’

Bella shrugged again. ‘Suit
yourself.’ She looked around. ‘I’m going to go for a wander
and see if I can’t find a bar or two.’

Thóra thought this was a bad idea, but
knew perfectly well that she had no say in how her employees spent their free
time. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ she said with
false cheer. ‘Tomorrow I’m going to visit the archaeologists overseeing
the excavations, and then we should stop by the archive. And then you never
know what might come up. In other words, we’ve got a busy day.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’
said Bella, as she set off in the opposite direction from their hotel.
‘I’m not the one who’s always late.’

Thóra couldn’t help letting
Bella’s retort get under her skin. You could say what you liked about her
secretary, but she always got to work on time. Thóra, in contrast, was
usually late because it took so long to get
herself
and the children ready in the mornings. Although the situation was far from
ideal when she only had her own children at home, it was a sight worse when her
grandson and future daughter-in-law were added to the mix. ‘You realize
that you can’t count this pub crawl as a company expense,’ she called
after the girl. ‘The accountant will refuse to pay it.’ No sooner
were the words out than she regretted them deeply. Could she have thought of a
more ridiculous comeback?

Bella did not turn around, but as she
walked away she lifted one hand in the air and gave Thóra the finger.

Monday 16 July

Thóra was furious to find Bella at
breakfast ahead of her. The secretary had taken a seat by the window and on the
table in front of her were plates piled up with high-calorie foods. She had
such a smug look on her face that Thóra briefly considered taking a seat
elsewhere, but she swallowed her pride and sat down opposite Bella.

‘Well,’ she said as she pulled
the coffee pot towards her, ‘did you have fun last night?’ She
herself had gone straight to her room and phoned home, since her parents had
gone out of their way to house-sit and babysit in her absence. This arrangement
was much less trouble than taking the whole gang over to their house, including
Orri and his mother. Thóra’s father was in high spirits having set
up camp in her garage, which he’d been itching to fix up for a very long
time although her mother hadn’t been too keen on the idea. In her opinion
everything at Thóra’s had gone to the dogs: the filter in the
washing machine was blocked, a flood of clothing poured from the wardrobes
every time she opened them in search of an outfit for Sóley, and in the
farthest corner of the fridge there was a jar of jam that had expired last
century. Thóra therefore had to endure a half-hour lecture about what a
terrible
housewife
she was, but she didn’t need
her mother to tell her that. At the end of the call she’d been allowed to
speak to Sóley, who told her happily that she was wearing Gylfi’s
huge socks because

Grandma couldn’t find any of hers.
Gylfi then came on and muttered into the receiver that she had to come home -
Grandma was driving him completely crazy and Sigga was depressed. Before
hanging up Thóra promised him that she would fix everything; she’d
been affected by the thought of her daughter- in-law’s depression. She
turned on the television and flicked through the channels without finding
anything that appealed to her. She ended up watching men in sunglasses play
poker, but finally fell asleep before figuring out how the game worked.

‘Crazy,’ said Bella, and she took
a large bite of bread and jam. She’d spread the jam so thickly that it
was more like jam and bread, causing one corner of the slice to break off from
the sheer weight and leave a purple jam stain on her chin. She was completely
unperturbed, wiping off the jam with her index finger and sticking it in her
mouth. ‘I met some great people.’

‘Good,’ said Thóra,
pouring milk into her coffee. ‘Were these people the same age as
you?’

‘I didn’t ask for ID,’ said
Bella, lifting her own coffee cup to her lips. She regarded Thóra over
the rim and wiggled her eyebrows. ‘I slept with someone.’

Thóra choked on her coffee.
‘What did you say?’ she spluttered.

‘You heard,’ said Bella proudly.
‘It was brilliant. Sailors really know what they’re doing.’

‘Sailorsf’ said Thóra,
still aghast. ‘Were there more than one?’ How could this girl get
herself a bedmate, or mates, as if it were nothing, when Thóra felt like
she herself would have trouble finding an interested party in a men’s
prison? Actually, that wasn’t entirely true: more often than not she was
the uninterested one, rather than the men she met. Still, she felt irritated.

‘No, it was just the one,’ said
Bella. ‘Not for any lack of opportunity - I certainly could have had
two.’

Thóra was speechless, and indeed said
nothing for the remainder of breakfast. That hardly mattered, because Bella
gave her such a comprehensive account of the events of the previous night that
Thóra wouldn’t have been able to get a word in edgeways.

Dís hid her head in her hands.
‘What do we do now?’ She was still recovering from the shock of
finding Alda’s body. The first night after the discovery she had lain in
bed, exhausted but unable to fall asleep. She kept wondering if her colleague
Agúst could have overlooked some clue that the nurse had felt ill. All
of their interactions with Alda that she could remember had to do with work,
the next operation or the state of the little storeroom. If there had been any
clues, they weren’t making themselves known. In the early hours of
morning, just before sleep was finally merciful to her, she comforted
herself
with the thought that time healed all wounds. But
mental scars took much longer to heal than physical ones, and it wasn’t
getting easier to come to terms with Alda’s death as time went by. If
anything, Dís thought that she felt worse now than the day she’d
discovered the nurse’s body. She knew she’d remember that moment
forever; after reporting the death, she had waited in the bedroom. In hindsight
it would have been wiser to wait down in the living room or the kitchen, or
even out in her car, but at the time she’d felt it would be disrespectful
to the deceased, so instead she had sat down at the little dressing table at
the end of the bed. Barely ten minutes had passed between the end of the
emergency call and the ambulance arriving, but those ten minutes had been the
longest of her life. For most of that time she had sat stiffly looking at
Alda’s body, at the staring eyes directed at the doorway as if there were
some great truth to be found there, the gaping mouth that appeared to be
contorted in a scream of anguish. Judging from the evidence on the bedside
table this was a suicide, although the appearance of the body suggested
otherwise. Dís was not familiar enough with pathology or forensic
medicine to know how a body should look after overdosing on the type of drugs
by the bed, but if the pills had killed Alda it was clear that she hadn’t
chosen well. Her fists were clenched, and to Dís it looked as though her
usually flawless cheeks had been scratched deeply enough to draw blood, enough
blood to form the dark pool in which her head lay.

‘What do you mean? We can’t do
anything. She killed herself,’ replied Agúst coldly.
‘We’ll bring flowers to the funeral.
A wreath or
whatever.’
His voice gave no indication that he was upset by
Alda’s death, although she had worked for them for a decade.

Dís pulled her hands from her face and
sat upright. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked sharply.
‘A nurse who has worked with us dies before her time and your idea is to
say goodbye to her with flowers - or “whatever”. That’s
pretty cold.’ She glanced around the room and asked herself why she was
surprised. Agúst’s office was a reflection of his personality:
cold and soulless. Although
her own
office was not all
that interesting, his was so bereft of any luxuries and so tidy that in an
emergency an operation could be performed on his desk. There was nothing in it
that didn’t have a purpose, not a thing displayed simply because it was
attractive or amusing. Even the framed pictures on the walls, which depicted
the most common plastic surgery techniques, were there for a purpose. Just
after hanging
them
up Agúst had told Dís
that they would frighten patients who were reluctant about operations. His
logic was that such individuals would thus be forced from the start to
determine whether they actually trusted themselves to undergo an operation just
to look better. Agúst had recently told Dís that after the photos
went up, last minute cancellations had decreased noticeably.

Now he rocked backwards in his seat, clearly
surprised. ‘Huh?’ he said,
then
fell
silent. He sighed. ‘I know this may sound cold, but I’m not one for
public displays of emotion.’ He reached across and took
Dís’s hand, which was resting on the edge of the desk. ‘You
know how highly I valued her. I just haven’t been able to get my head
around this, I think. All I can think of is how we’re going to find a
replacement nurse for the operations that we have coming up.’ He smiled
sadly. ‘It’s easier to deal with the small things.’

Dís returned his smile
sympathetically. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if I
haven’t been thinking about that too.’ She pulled her hand away
from his and placed it in her lap. She found it uncomfortable to touch his
skin, which was silly considering their latex-covered hands touched all the
time during operations. ‘This will all be fine,’ she said, and
pushed her chair back. ‘Things have a way of working out.’ She
stood up. ‘I think I would feel better if I hadn’t been the one who
found her.’

‘Of course,’ replied
Agúst. ‘Try to stop thinking about it. Remember Alda as she was in
life. She deserves to be remembered that way.’

Dís nodded. Then she asked: ‘Do
you think she might have been murdered?’

‘Murdered?’ asked Agúst,
flabbergasted. ‘Who would have had any reason to murder her?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said
Dís thoughtfully. ‘Some rapist out for revenge?’ she added.

‘For God’s sake, I don’t
think so,’ said Agúst, frowning. ‘I’m sure the rape
association keeps better control of things than that.’

Dís smiled. ‘They’re
called the Emergency Reception Unit Support Team for Rape Victims, and
I’m not entirely sure that they do have things under control. I know Alda
had had enough of them when she left her job at the A&E.’

Alda’s decision to give up her
part-time job had come out of the blue several months earlier. She had been
volunteering in the local A&E several nights a week and on the weekends,
and among other things had earned a good reputation for her support and
assistance of rape victims. She had seemed to enjoy this work, and perhaps her
decision to quit was the clue that Dís had been trying to remember. Who
knew, maybe the horrors Alda occasionally witnessed there had finally been too
much for her to handle. ‘Maybe it was someone else entirely,’ she
said cautiously.