Ashes to Dust (34 page)

Bella seemed rather pleased with herself as
she sat in the hotel lobby slurping her drink, which could have been plain Coke
but seemed more likely to have a shot of rum in it. The sweet odour of alcohol
was unmistakable when Thóra sat down by her secretary. ‘Remember
you can’t charge alcoholic drinks to expenses,’ said Thóra.
‘It’s hard to claim a drink as being necessary for work,’ she
added when she saw Bella’s expression. Strangely soothing Calypso music
floated from the speakers behind them; perhaps it had inspired her secretary
to order the drink. Thóra wouldn’t have said no to a Pina Colada
herself.

‘Oh, do me a favour,’ said Bella.
She took another sip, still smiling smugly. ‘I’ve seen
Bragi’s bills when he goes out of town on business.’

Thóra had to admit her partner
couldn’t enter a hotel without going to the bar, whether he was staying
there or not.

‘Don’t you want to know what I
found in the archive?’ asked her secretary, sucking at her straw
thirstily. ‘They opened it for me. That Leifur clearly has the town in
his pocket. All I had to do was say his name and they pulled out the
keys.’

‘Yes, it’s in everyone’s
interest to keep him happy,’ Thóra said. ‘So, what did you
find? It’s good that one of us is making progress, because meeting
Markus’s parents did me little good. His father was away with the fairies
and his mother was such a dry old stick that she sucked all the moisture out of
the air. The only thing I got out of it was some gibberish about a falcon and a
child, and a headache from the old woman’s perfume. There wasn’t
anything about a falcon in the files?’

‘No,’ said Bella.
‘Nothing that I saw, anyway.
There are a million files
in that archive. You’ve got to know what you’re looking for, and I
wasn’t thinking about birds.’

Thóra sighed. ‘Oh, they were
probably just the ramblings of a senile old man,’ she said. Suddenly she
thought of Maria, Leifur’s wife, who acted as a kind of care assistant
for her father-in-law. She must have heard him say all sorts of things. Maybe
at some point he’d said something significant, but she hadn’t
realized. Thóra decided to try to meet her again before they left, and
see what she knew. It was entirely possible that he’d come out with
something about a falcon or ‘that poor child’, but phrased it in a
way that made it easier to determine if it meant something for the case.
Her headache was getting worse. She raised a hand to her forehead.

‘Guess what?’ said Bella, putting
down her glass. ‘I found out that Dadi and his wife Valgerdur built their
house, so no one lived there before them.’

She seemed surprised when Thóra hardly
reacted, but carried on: ‘And they had no children while they lived
there.’ She watched Thóra, whose face still betrayed nothing.
‘But after the eruption they had a son, who they christened Adolf.’

‘Adolf?’ muttered Thóra.
‘Who calls a child Adolf?’

Bella appeared relieved that Thóra was
finally showing some interest in her findings. ‘Well, they did, for
starters. He lives in Reykjavik, and when I tried looking him up online I
pulled up a blog where there’s a warning about him - for being a rapist.
It was really hard to piece together - there were a lot of threats made against
him in the comments section, by other bloggers who said that they were friends
of the victim. In another entry several weeks later the blogger announced that
he’d finally been charged.’

Thóra began rubbing her forehead,
trying to dispel her headache. ‘Rape?’ she said. ‘Who did he
attack?’

‘It didn’t say, but I figured out
when it was supposed to have happened by looking at the date of the first
entry. I searched in Morgunbladid’s archives and came across an article
that seemed to tie into this. It wasn’t interesting enough to deserve
much scrutiny, but something rang a bell when I read the article, because the
rapist had slipped the girl an emergency contraceptive afterwards to stop her
getting pregnant.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Thóra,
dumbfounded.
‘Do you mean like a morning-after pill? I
don’t remember reading about that.’

‘The case didn’t really get much
attention, judging by the size of the article, and I doubt the papers would
have reported it at all if it hadn’t been for that weird detail. It must
have been on the news as well, since I recognized it and I never read the
papers.’

Thóra waved to a passing
waitress
and ordered a Pina Colada.
To
hell with her headache, and to hell with the accountant.
‘Tell
me,’ she said to Bella after the girl had taken her order, ‘what
did the article say?’

‘This Adolf supposedly raped the girl
at his house after they met at a bar downtown,’ said Bella. ‘She
was drunk but she put up a fight, which was clear from the bruises on her body
when she went to the A&E a day later.’

‘A day later?’ said Thóra,
trying to fight the suspicion she immediately felt. ‘Why didn’t she
go there right away, or to the police?’

‘The article said she’d been so
devastated that she originally planned not to bring charges against the
man at all. When she started to bleed heavily although it wasn’t her time
of the month, she went to the hospital, where the story all came out. The
bleeding turned out to be caused by the contraceptive, and when hospital
staff pressed her she told them the whole story. She said that she hadn’t
taken the pill herself, so the rapist must have stirred it into a drink he gave
her.’

‘That wouldn’t hold up in
court,’ said Thóra. ‘How could you prove that she
didn’t take the pill herself when she regretted having slept with
him?’

‘Because the drug was found at the
man’s home when it was searched,’ said Bella.
‘In
large quantities, according to the report.
What’s a bachelor doing
with contraceptive pills?’

‘I see,’ said Thóra.
‘I wonder if Alda was connected to this somehow?’ she wondered
aloud. ‘When did it happen?’

‘The rape itself took place about seven
months ago,’ Bella replied. ‘It was a Saturday night, but the girl
didn’t go to A&E until the Monday evening.’

Alda was still working weekend and evening
shifts at the hospital then, and may well have helped treat the victim. Had she
perhaps recognized the name of the attacker because of her ties to the Islands?
Thóra didn’t see how this could help Markus. This was of course
extremely unlikely, but it was hard to be choosy when there was nothing else on
offer. ‘Did you happen to find out where Valgerdur and Dadi moved to
after the eruption?’ she asked Bella.

‘They moved to the Westfjords,’
Bella said. ‘The woman in the archive pointed me towards a summary of the
new residences of all the Westmann Islands evacuees from about a year after the
eruption. She knew who they were, and she thought a relative of
Valgerdur’s had owned an empty house there that they’d moved into.
I also saw in the file that Dadi worked on a trawler outfitted from Holmavik,
but his wife hung around the house, since she’d just had a baby.’

Thóra smiled at Bella and decided to
skip telling her that you didn’t simply ‘hang around the
house’ when you had a baby. ‘Alda moved west with her parents,
too,’ said Thóra. ‘Maybe they got to know Valgerdur better
there. Ex-Islands residents probably stuck together during that period. That
might explain why she was interested in the woman’s death.’

‘There was nothing written about the
A&E staff in the article, though. All it said was that the girl he raped
checked in there.’

‘It should be possible to find out
more. I’m wondering whether this could be related to the trouble Alda had
at work; she shouldn’t have assisted the victim if she knew the
perpetrator.’

‘Are you sure she knew this
Adolf?’ asked Bella.

‘No,’ replied Thóra.
‘I have no idea. Neither Leifur nor his mother remembered his name, so it
seems likely that he didn’t maintain any ties to the Islands.’
Thóra sighed pensively. ‘I don’t know the legal
ramifications of such a situation, either. Alda probably just took something
from the A&E’s drug cabinet or something, but maybe it’s
nothing her fellow nurses want to discuss. The chances are this Adolf has
nothing to do with it. He was born after the eruption, so the bodies in the
basement can’t be connected to him, but I suspect all these things have a
common thread.’

‘Or the two cases could be entirely
unrelated,’ suggested Bella. ‘Stranger things have happened.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said
Thóra, even though she had little to support her hunch. ‘The worst
of it is, I suspect Markus’s family isn’t telling me the whole
truth. One would expect a mother to put her children’s interests before
her husband’s, especially if the man in question is at death’s door
while Markus has half his life yet to live.’

‘I wouldn’t know about
that,’ said Bella, sucking on her straw. ‘I’m single and
childless, so I have no idea which I would choose.’

A
waitress
appeared
with Thóra’s drink. It wasn’t the one who had taken her
order; this one was much older and looked world-weary. She held a tray bearing
a creamy drink in a tall glass, adorned with an umbrella and a dyed-green
cocktail cherry. Thóra thanked her and gave her
her
room number, and as the
waitress
scribbled it down and
turned to leave Thóra detained her. ‘Do you happen to know of
anyone who’s particularly knowledgeable about the
eruption,
and about Islands life at the time?’ she asked.
‘Someone
who might be willing to talk to us?’

The woman looked at Thóra.
‘Couldn’t you just go to the theatre and watch the film about the
eruption? It’s very popular.’ She gestured at the clock. ‘The
next show starts in just under an hour.’

‘No, that won’t be enough,’
said Thóra. ‘I’m looking for someone who can answer
questions about specific residents.’ She smiled, hoping the woman
wouldn’t start asking for further explanations.

The
waitress
shrugged. ‘I guess there are plenty of people here who enjoy talking
about the disaster. Most of them just want to talk about their own experiences,
but I imagine you’re looking for someone who can tell you more,’
she said. Thóra nodded. ‘I can think of one fellow in
particular,’ she said. ‘His name is Paddi the Hook, and he knows
all about it. The story goes that he’s only ever left the Islands once,
for the evacuation. He knows more than anyone about the people round here.
Besides that, he likes nothing better than a good gossip; you’ll have
more trouble getting him to shut up. His answers might he hard to understand,
but he’s not shy about giving his opinion.’

‘And where can we find this man?’
asked Thóra, eagerly.

‘He has a tourist boat.
Mainly deep-sea fishing.
I’d advise you to book one of
his
trips,
otherwise you might not get him to talk to
you. He’s always out on excursions and I don’t think he’d
want to miss out on work.’ She smiled at them. ‘Do you want me to
call and book one for you?’

Thóra thanked the woman and accepted
her offer. It didn’t matter to her whether they booked a trip for
sightseeing or fishing. She sipped her drink and allowed herself to enjoy the
sweet coconutty taste for a moment. ‘Well,’ she said to Bella, ‘we’d
better put on our wellies.’

Leifur sat at his father’s bedside in
the room that the family had adapted on the ground floor after Klara had
decided her husband should no longer sleep in the master bedroom. For some time
Magnus had been waking his wife in the night to ask who she was, what time it
was or even who he was. When his nocturnal behaviour had begun to get more
angry and violent, she’d had enough. There were two options: they could
move him to a healthcare facility, or make home-care arrangements so Klara
didn’t need to look after him twenty-four hours a day. Leifur gazed at
the bookshelves, which were all that remained of the original furniture in the
erstwhile study. The rest had gone down into the basement, and would be given
away after his parents died.
Or thrown away.
He and
Maria didn’t have room for it, and his children had no interest in used
furniture, even family heirlooms. It didn’t seem to matter to them that
it was of far better quality than modern, fashionable furniture, or that it was
worth a lot of money. Leifur’s son must have replaced his sofas more
often in the eight years since leaving home than the old couple had done in all
their married life. Maria was always whining about renovating the house and
replacing all the furniture, or else selling it and building a new one. He had
managed to avoid making that decision, but he knew he didn’t have much
time before he either had to give in or run the risk of losing her. Something
in her demeanour had changed: she still asked for the same things, but with
less conviction. It made him anxious because he knew resignation often preceded
some kind of drastic measure. What if this was her first step in the direction
of the freedom that she desired so much, and that her mind associated with
Reykjavik: the freedom to shop and wander from one cafe to another, the freedom
to let her girlfriends envy all her material possessions? If she divorced
Leifur she would be able to buy whatever her heart desired. Pre-nuptial
agreements hadn’t been common when they got married, but even if they had
been, Leifur would not have asked her to sign one.