Ashes to Dust (22 page)

Luckily, the next page was neither empty nor
completely crossed out. Still, it looked as though Alda had been on drugs or
had had a fever when she wrote the entry for that day. Thóra
couldn’t make head or tail of the text which, unlike Alda’s previous
entries, was written in waves all over the page instead of following the lines.
The entry was composed of repetitions of the word disgusting
disgusting
disgusting
and several
instances of why did I go out?
why
?
why
?
as
well as I want to die. These sentences were all
strung together and Thóra couldn’t discern any particular order in
them. On a line below this jumble was the sentence:

I’m not going to write any more.
I’ll do this for God and Mum and Dad and then I’m going to kill
myself. I’m not coming back here.

This appeared to have been written in a
calmer state, because the letters were straighter and better formed. There was
nothing else. The pen had been dragged down along the margin and at the bottom
of the page there was a single word in writing so tiny it was barely legible:
Markus

Thóra lowered the book and sighed.
Why couldn’t Alda have been clearer? However, this did show something: it
strongly suggested that the girl had experienced a shock. If Thóra used
her imagination, Markus’s name might be interpreted as a declaration
that he could help Alda. On the other hand, her client’s name on the page
did not substantiate his statement. After this entry, the diary consisted
only of empty pages.

Wednesday 18 July
2007

Thóra put down the newspaper. She
could take comfort in the fact that the photo on the front page could have been
any prosperous fifty-year-old man. There were enough of them around. Hopefully
that would be of some consolation to Markus, who stared at her from the grainy
image like a convict. The press must have searched high and low for a
photograph showing her client with a cruel expression. Although his face was
quite blurry, the photo seemed to show a man who was capable of anything. The
headline Four Dead — Autopsy Suggests Murder, was positioned in a way
that made it quite clear Markus was being portrayed as a criminal. The
accompanying article barely elaborated on the headline except to say that
Markus Magnusson, Reykjavik
businessman
, was helping
police with their enquiries. A short biographical summary, in a separate box at
the bottom of the page, pointed out that Markus had resided in the Westmann
Islands at the time the men seemed likely to have been murdered. However, no
mention was made of his youth at the time. Markus seemed not to have got around
very much, because the photograph from the front page also accompanied an
article later in the paper, along with two photos of the excavation site and an
aerial photo of Heimaey. It was clear the
newsmen
hadn’t acquired a copy of the medical examiner’s report, and they
still hadn’t connected

Alda to the case.
The main body of the article was a review of
everything that was already known about the case of the discovery of the
bodies, but with the addition of Markus’s involvement and the case
becoming a murder investigation. Surely the media would soon make the
connection and drag Alda’s name into it.

Thóra felt it was important to
thoroughly investigate the nurse’s role in all of this, but as soon as
the media became interested in Alda, lots of doors would close. She thumbed
through her notes and went over the little she’d written about Alda. She
decided she ought to contact Isafjördur Junior College in the hope of
tracking down her schoolfriends, speak to the plastic surgeon’s office
where Alda had worked, then interview the employees of the A&E department
where she’d taken evening and weekend shifts. Thóra wondered
whether she should speak to a doctor there whom she knew quite well - her
ex-husband - but decided not to so that she wouldn’t owe him a favour.
Experience had taught her that the saying ‘an eye for an eye’ fit
their relationship well.

She looked up the number of the college and
crossed her fingers, hoping someone would answer. It was midsummer, so she
couldn’t be sure anyone would be there. Luckily, the school’s
office was open and she spoke to the secretary, who was extremely obliging.

Thóra agreed to hold while the woman
went to look up Alda, in case she couldn’t get through to her again.
After a long wait the woman returned to the phone.

‘Well, you know what, there was no Alda
Thórgeirsdóttir registered here during the winter of
1972-1973,’ said the woman, sounding apologetic. ‘Could she have
gone by any other name? These are just paper records, in alphabetical order. We
were supposed to have gone paperless a long time ago but never had the time to
do it, which is why I’m afraid I need to have a full name.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’
replied Thóra. ‘Could she be missing from the file because she
started studying there after the
new year
?
At the end of January, after the eruption in the Islands?’

‘That wouldn’t change
anything,’ said the woman, still sounding regretful. ‘Of course
it’s possible that someone here made a filing error, but I find that
rather unlikely. The school’s public funding is based on the number of
students, so we’ve always been careful with our records. Although many
things are done differently now, that’s one thing that hasn’t
changed.’

Thóra thanked the woman and hung up. Had
Alda gone there under another name, or
did
 Jóhanna
simply misremember which school her sister attended
in the wake of the disaster? It must be the latter,
since
 Jóhanna’s
story didn’t fit in any way.
Teenagers didn’t jump up a class and start a new educational level in the
middle of term. Wondering who could help her unravel this mystery, Thóra
concluded that she would have to speak to Alda’s mother. She would be
sure to know the details of Alda’s schooling, and Thóra could use
the opportunity to try to find out other information, too. In her notes
she
had  Jóhanna’s
mobile number,
but when she rang to ask her to arrange a meeting with her mother, there was no
answer.  Jóhanna was probably at work, which meant Thóra had
no choice but to try again later. She also wanted to
tell
 Jóhanna
that nothing in the diaries suggested anything out
of the ordinary in Alda’s relationship with her father.

She decided to ask Alda’s childhood
girlfriends again about her whereabouts following the evacuation, in case by
some chance they had remembered anything further. Only two of them picked up
the phone, and it was clear from their tone that they feared her telephone
calls would become daily occurrences now they’d made the mistake of
humouring her the first time she rang. Both of them were noticeably less
friendly this time, and neither of them could remember anything beyond what
they’d already told her. Both stood firmly by their assertion that Alda
had attended Reykjavik Junior College, though they didn’t know when she’d
started there or whether she’d completed her studies. At the end of their
conversation, the first woman muttered something about being late and said
goodbye without giving Thóra a chance to ask any further questions, but
the second wasn’t as crafty and Thóra managed to ask her about a
number of things she’d been mulling over since reading the diary entries.
‘Could something have happened to Alda just before the eruption, and was
she acting any differently from usual?’ asked Thóra.

‘God, it was such a long time
ago,’ replied the woman, sounding as if she thought the phone call would
never end. ‘If she was, I don’t remember it.’

‘No depression, irritability, nothing
like that?’ urged Thóra.

‘I don’t remember
anything,’ replied the woman, but then paused for a moment as if
something had occurred to her. Actually, we had all ended up in a little bit of
trouble the previous weekend - I’d completely forgotten about that
.‘

‘What happened?’ asked
Thóra anxiously.

‘Oh, just typical teenage stuff,’
said the woman. ‘We tried alcohol for the first time the Friday before
the eruption. We got completely wasted, and things got a bit crazy. I was
grounded because of it and wasn’t supposed to go out for two months, but
that fell apart after the volcano, of course.

If Alda was in a bad mood, it was probably
because her parents were so angry with her
.‘

‘Where were you drinking? At
someone’s house?’ asked Thóra, thinking back to her own
youth.

‘No, it was a school dance,’
replied the woman. ‘It was actually stopped and we were all sent home,
even though not everyone had been drinking.’

Thóra pressed her for more information
but got little for her trouble. The kids had made plans to steal alcohol from
their parents; each of them had filled a Coke bottle with whatever they could
get their hands on, and most had taken small amounts of many different spirits
so as not to arouse suspicion. Some strange cocktails had resulted and everything
got out of control, as might be expected. The woman Thóra was talking
to
had got sick herself, which meant that she was one of
those whose parents were called and asked to come and pick them up, vomiting
and crying. Thus she had no idea if Alda had managed to get herself home, or
whether she had also had to be collected. She couldn’t remember anything
from the latter part of the night, because of her drunkenness. Thóra
decided not to press her any further about this, but to take it up with Markus
in good time. Hopefully he hadn’t been as badly affected and could
remember more details.

‘There’s just one more thing and
then I promise to let you go,’ she said. ‘Do you know why Alda was
unhappy about her hair?’ Thóra expected the woman to be baffled,
but she wasn’t.

‘Oh, that,’ she said sadly.
‘That was horrendous.’

‘Did something happen to her
hair?’ Thóra’s mind spun with all the horror stories
she’d heard over the years about hairdressers who accidentally burned the
hair off their clients with perming solution or hair bleach that was too
strong.

‘It was all cut off,’ replied the
woman. ‘Our class stayed over in the gym one night after our exams,
before Christmas. When Alda woke up in the morning someone had hacked off her
hair, presumably while she slept. They never found out who did it.’

Thóra frowned. ‘Who was there,
or had access to the gym?’

‘The whole class was there, as far as I
can remember. Of course there were a couple who either didn’t want to
come or were off sick, but most of the kids came. There were also two teachers
there, and the teaching assistant. There might have been other adults, but I
don’t remember who. I would probably have forgotten it if it hadn’t
been Alda’s hair. Naturally, she was hysterical, because she had particularly
beautiful hair, long and blonde. It had been hacked off with scissors and it
was such a mess afterwards. Of course what was left was tidied up at the
hairdresser’s immediately, but it still looked pretty ridiculous.
Far too short, like a boy’s.’

Thóra thanked her and hung up. She was
dumbfounded, since she well remembered how sensitive adolescents could be about
their hair. She doubted this ugly event could be connected to the case in any
way, but you never knew. Yet another detail to ask Markus about, along with
what the woman had said about the teenagers’ drunkenness the weekend
before the eruption - the night before the blood was found at the pier.

Thóra turned her attention to the
doctor’s office where Alda had worked. An Internet search revealed that
it was run by two plastic surgeons, Dís Haflidadottir and Agúst
Agústsson. Thóra thought she recognized Agúst’s
name, having heard it mentioned in her sewing circle when they’d
discussed beauty treatments. Those of her friends who thought they were in the
know said he was the best breast man in town. There were even unconfirmed
stories about people who’d travelled all the way from Hollywood to go
under his knife, but Thóra remembered thinking that sounded ludicrous.
If you couldn’t find decent breasts in Hollywood you were hardly going to
get them in Reykjavik. Surely practice made perfect? Dís hadn’t
been mentioned, though; if people flocked to her from the other side of the
world for operations, no one in Thóra’s sewing circle knew about
it.

The answering machine informed Thóra
that appointments could be made before noon on weekdays. Those who needed to
speak to the doctors about operations that had already taken place could call
the phone number printed in their aftercare pack; this emergency number was
clearly not up for grabs. Thóra left a message.

That left only the A&E, whose number
Thóra knew off by heart thanks to a long marriage to a doctor who often
worked past the end of his shifts. Those nights had always seemed to drag on
and on. She recognized the voice of the woman who answered, even though she and
Hannes had been divorced for around five years. The woman on the other end
clearly had no such recollection: Thóra’s voice appeared to ring
no bells with her, nor did her name awaken any friendliness. Thóra
tried to console herself with the fact that the
staff
was large and her name was quite common. After asking to speak to Alda
Thórgeirsdóttir’s supervisor, Thóra was informed
sullenly that the phone call would be transferred to the head nurse on call.
She tried to thank the woman, but before she could do so the call was transferred
and Thóra’s eardrums were assailed by a frightful, tinny tune that
sounded like nothing she had ever heard.