Ashes to Dust (23 page)

Several minutes later a chilly female voice
announced itself as belonging to Elin, who sounded as if she had no overwhelming
inclination to relieve the suffering of the sick and wounded.

Thóra introduced herself and explained
her business. She said she was seeking information about Alda
Thórgeirsdóttir, and asked whether she might stop by and speak to
her former colleagues about a case concerning a childhood friend of the
recently deceased nurse. ‘I’m familiar with the workings of your
busy department, and I promise to trouble you as little as possible,’ she
concluded hopefully. These people had enough to do, and no one knew this better
than Thóra. She fully expected to have to interview the hospital staff
over open wounds.

‘Alda Thórgeirsdóttir was
no longer working here when she died,’ said the head nurse. ‘She
was never actually a full- time employee; she just took shifts on weekends and
the occasional evening. She worked at a clinic in town, so perhaps you should
try them.’

How helpful, telling Thóra something
she already knew. ‘Of course I’ll be doing that,’ she
replied, echoing the woman’s frosty tone. ‘But I would also like to
speak to your staff.’

‘I can’t see how that would
help,’
came
the reply. ‘Firstly because
there is nothing to tell, secondly because I’m not sure such a thing
would be proper, and thirdly because we simply have no obligation to speak to
some lawyer who appears from out of the blue. We value propriety very highly
here.’

Propriety?
How old was this woman - a hundred?
A hundred and fifty?
‘Naturally you’re not
obliged to speak to me,’ Thóra replied, ‘unless of course I
were
injured. If you prefer, I could always have you
subpoenaed to find out whether you have any information that might count. Might
that be the best solution, do you think?’

‘Subpoenaed?’ exclaimed the
woman, sounding noticeably less assured than before. ‘That’s
completely unnecessary. I told you she wasn’t working here
any more
.’ She hesitated. ‘What is this about,
may I ask?
Alda’s death?’

‘It’s a case I’m working on
for a man who knew Alda,’ replied Thóra, enjoying holding the
cards.

‘Is this about the rape case?’
asked the woman, her voice now full of suspicion. ‘We have no comment.
We’re not protecting anyone, and you’ll find nothing out by
snooping around under false pretences. The case is on its way to court, where
guilt or innocence will be determined and our part will be finished. We follow
the rules for such cases, and there’s no leeway for letting a lawyer in
off the street to chat about God knows what.’

Now it was Thóra’s turn to
hesitate.
Rape?
She had to be careful not to get
involved with something unconnected to Markus’s case. Actually, the nurse
had been quite correct; the hospital had no obligation to her or to Markus, and
the interests of those who came to them for assistance naturally took
precedence. ‘No, this has nothing to do with a rape. That I can promise
you,’ said Thóra earnestly. ‘Unfortunately it seems as though
this can’t happen, so we’ll have to leave it. You have enough to
worry about.’

Thóra hung up. She hadn’t given
up her efforts to speak to the staff of the A&E out of respect for the
hospital or the Hippocratic Oath. She simply planned to make her way in through
the back door. Swallowing her pride, she dialled her ex-husband’s number.

As Dís listened to the message on the
answering machine the smile she usually wore after a successful operation
vanished. Now what? A lawyer who wanted to speak to them about Alda? Not the
police, as she had feared, but the lawyer of some childhood friend of Alda,
someone Dís had
never
heard of before. She
listened to the message again and tried to read more into it, but without
success. The voice was soft and courteous, seeming to suggest neither that the
speaker felt Dís and Agúst
were hiding
something nor that this was a formality unrelated to who they were. Dís
wondered whether she should fetch Agúst, who was finishing up a
consultation with the last patient of the day: yet another young man who wanted
to have a scar from a fight removed. She decided not to. Agúst tended
towards the melodramatic, and she had no desire to nourish her own anxiety with
his paranoia. She felt sick thinking of the one court case their work had
involved them in. Agúst had rendered himself almost incapable of working
with the stress of the case and his wild flights of fancy about what might
happen. By the time a settlement was finally reached, Dís was on the
verge of offering up her soul along with the damages they were ordered to pay.
It would be a small price to pay for peace of mind at work.

Dís scribbled down the lawyer’s
number then erased the message, resolving to phone and arrange to meet her
tomorrow, when Agúst would not be at the office. This was undoubtedly
something unimportant, probably concerning her estate; whether Alda had had
life insurance from the office, or some such. Dís could take care of
this herself, and in the unlikely event it was about something else, she would get
Agúst involved — but not until she had to.

She went over to Alda’s tidy desk,
which was conveniently located behind a partition separating it from the
waiting room. Alda hadn’t had an office of her own like Dís and
Agúst, since she mainly assisted them in the operating room and only a
tiny bit with paperwork. Dís looked over the well-ordered workspace,
which in that sense resembled Agúst’s office. However Alda, unlike
Agúst, had given her little area a tiny bit of personality: on the
table was a framed photograph of a woman whom Dís recalled was
Alda’s younger and only sister, and there was also a little daintily
painted flowerpot containing a cactus which seemed to be thriving.
Poor little thing, thought Dis.
Neither she nor Agúst
had the ability to keep so much as a weed alive, and it would take a lot for
the receptionist to tear herself away from Facebook to look after a plant.
Dís was about to throw the plant into the rubbish bin to avoid having to
watch it wither away, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, for
Alda’s sake. She would try to remember the plant and nurse it as best she
could. At least she would have tried, even if the cactus died. Out of respect
for Alda, she didn’t want to throw out something she had cared about.

Pleased with her noble thoughts, Dís
sat down and started to scrutinize Alda’s desk and computer. It
didn’t occur to her that such a thing was inappropriate. She owned the
company that owned the computer, like everything else in the office, and if
Alda kept any secrets that she wouldn’t have wanted to come out at work,
then it was best if it were Dís who uncovered them. Agúst was a
gossip and the receptionist, at best, a simpleton. Both of them lacked the
maturity to respect others’ privacy.

As the computer was firing up, Dís
looked through Alda’s desk drawers. In the top drawer the stationery had
been so tidily arranged that Dís wouldn’t have been able to
recreate the layout if her life depended on it. In Dís’s top
drawer everything was a jumble: pens, paperclips, stamps and anything else
that ended up there for want of its own particular place.

The other two drawers had little in them,
although there were some files that Dís had trouble understanding. Among
them was the autopsy report of an older woman who had died in the hospital in
Isafjördur. She skimmed through it and could see nothing in it connected
to Alda or to her work in the office. She didn’t recognize the
woman’s name, and when the computer was ready she tried running it
through their database. The woman hadn’t been one of her or
Agúst’s patients. She shrugged, assuming the woman was a relative
or friend of Alda’s, although the age difference between them did not
suggest the latter. Dís put the report on the table so it wouldn’t
end up in a box with other things for disposal or storage. Maybe she could find
an explanation for this somehow. The death had occurred quite recently, so
perhaps it would help explain why Alda had killed herself. Dís
suppressed a shudder at the thought that the cause of death might be something
other than suicide. Although suicide was awful, there were many things worse,
and Dís wouldn’t hesitate to share any information that
supported Alda’s having died by her own hand.

The drawer also contained a photograph of a
young man Dís did not recognize. The photo was very artistic, and the
subject clearly wasn’t aware of the photographer. He sat slouched on a
chair, looking out into space, solemn but not scowling. He had the look of
someone who wasn’t scared of anything. Dís couldn’t tell
where the photograph had been taken, as all you could see was the man, a yellow
wall and the chair, but something made him look very distinguished. Before
Dís put the photo down she frowned and tried to figure out what it was
she found so attractive about him. She couldn’t, but wondered whether
Alda had kept this photo because she felt the same.

She shut the drawer and turned to the
computer, smiling when she saw what Alda had chosen as her desktop wallpaper.
It was a kitten that had been photoshopped and now smiled idiotically at her
with a set of human teeth. Dís thought she’d have nothing against
owning a kitten if it were possible to make it look like that, and idly
wondered whether she could use her expertise to do the work. She was obviously
tired after a long day.

She quickly gave up reading through the files
on the computer, which were countless. After opening several at random she
found nothing that drew her attention, so she went online and out of curiosity
checked which pages Alda had bookmarked as favourites. As she read the list her
mouth dropped open in amazement.

She clicked on one link after another in the
hope that they wouldn’t be what their names suggested, but unfortunately
they were. A succession of pornographic sites popped up. Dís gaped. Alda
had been a completely different person than she appeared. Could this be
connected to her work at the A&E, and the rape cases that they sometimes
had to deal with? The more Dís saw, the clearer it became that this
explanation didn’t hold up. Here she saw the entire spectrum of
sexual relations: sado-masochism, homosexuality, conventional sex between
a man and woman, and numerous other variations. Dís breathed easier when
she had ascertained that children were not included. What had Alda got
herself
into? Was this the reason she wasn’t in a
steady relationship: that she didn’t know what she wanted?

She logged off the Internet and felt almost
abused herself, although it had been her choice to look at the material and she
had known what she was getting into. It wasn’t the contents of the pages
that upset her so much as the fact that she’d looked through a door into
a part of Alda’s world that she hadn’t known existed. Ugh, it would
be very difficult to write the obituary now, and Dís cursed herself for
not having even started it. She exhaled and considered whether she should just
leave well enough alone and turn off the computer. But curiosity overruled her
better judgement, and she went into Alda’s email. She vowed to herself
she wouldn’t open any message that could possibly be connected to
Alda’s sex life, but she allowed herself to arrange the messages
according to the senders and recipients in order to see what had gone on
between Alda and the people she knew.

Messages from Agúst were at the
top of the list, and Dís only had to open a few of them to realize what
had been going on. She leaned back in her chair. The websites were nothing
compared to this. She fervently hoped that whatever this Thóra
Gudmundsdóttir wanted, it didn’t have anything to do with this.

Wednesday 18 July
2007

The booklet about rape was certainly
informative, but it did not hold Thóra’s interest for long. There
was no other reading material in sight, and after rearranging everything in her
handbag there was nothing else for Thóra to do. She was sitting with her
legs crossed in an uncomfortable chair in an empty hallway in the old City
Hospital, and had started to swing her feet to and fro in boredom. She
couldn’t read the booklet a third time. Hannes had arranged for her to
meet a nurse who had known Alda, but the problem was that the
woman wasn’t certain when she could get a break and had
suggested that Thóra come and take
her chances.

Thóra was about to give up when she
heard footsteps approaching. A middle-aged woman in a white gown and matching
trousers came around the corner. She held a stack of papers tightly to her
chest. The woman slowed down as she approached Thóra.

Are you Thóra Gudmundsdóttir?
I’m Bjargey. Sorry to make you wait
,‘
she
said, extending her hand. She wore no rings and her nails were clipped tidily
short. ’I was in a meeting that I thought would never end
.‘
She pointed with her chin towards the door next to
Thóra. ’We can sit down in there. It’s in a terrible mess
but at least it’s quiet
.‘

Thóra had certainly had no shortage of
quiet in the last forty minutes, but she smiled and stood up.
‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘I won’t take too much of your
time.’