Ashes to Dust (57 page)

Thóra leaned in towards Markus,
although it repulsed her to be close to him, and whispered in his ear:
‘You might want to be careful about mentioning your family members by
name.
Especially those who are still with us.
Of
course it’s up to you what you say, but you might regret it in the
morning.’

‘And is that when you put the head into
the box? To take it home?’ asked Gudni.

‘No, the box came later,’ replied
Markus. ‘I put it in a bag and just managed to hide behind a pile of nets
when Dad and Dadi came back down to the harbour. They discussed something until
some old
guy
turned up, but they got rid of him quite
quickly. Dad went aboard, brought out a birdcage and released the bird. He left
shortly after that, but I waited to see what Dadi was up to. He went down into
the boat and came up afterwards, looking very pale. He’d obviously been
startled to see that a head — and more - was missing from one of the
bodies. He went and got his pick-up, and hauled the other three bodies into it.
He spread a cloth over them and parked the pick-up a short distance away. Then
he pulled a little rubber dinghy on board the smack and sailed off in the smack
with the fourth body still on board. He sunk the ship and came back to shore on
the dinghy. I hurried home and hid the head in a box down in the basement, and
I also put the tools I used to cut it off in one of the boxes in the storeroom,
under all the other stuff.’

‘Why did you use the salmon
priest?’ Thóra blurted out. She could understand his needing a
knife, but not a mallet.

‘I took both of them because I thought
it might be difficult to cut through the spine.’ Markus stared at the
wall behind Gudni.

‘Did you know Dadi had taken the bodies
down into the basement?’ asked the inspector, trying to hide his
amazement.

‘No, they weren’t there the
evening before the eruption. I’m absolutely certain of that. I overheard
a conversation between Geiri and Dad on board their ship, Strokkur, when I was
helping them after school. They didn’t know I could hear them. According
to Geiri, Dadi had contacted him to say he still had the bodies as leverage if
Dad and Geiri didn’t keep to their side of the bargain. From what I could
understand, Dadi had panicked when he saw the head was missing, and
accused Geiri of having removed it in order to pin the murder on him. In other
words, Dadi thought that Dad and Geiri were going to bring the head to his
house to make it look as if he’d murdered the men. Geiri had no idea what
he was talking about, since he didn’t know anything about the
disappearance of the head, and neither did Dad. They thought Dadi was making it
up. They didn’t know where he was keeping the
bodies,
and neither did I, but I do know they weren’t in our basement yet.’

It took Thóra a while to digest this.
Dadi suspected that the two partners, Magnus and Geiri, were going to betray
him, and wanted to secure his position by hanging on to the bodies. She
exhaled. Clearly this Dadi hadn’t been the brightest person in the
Islands. How could he think that being in possession of the
mens
’
bodies would prove he hadn’t murdered them? Maybe he’d planned to
put them in Magnus and Geiri’s ship, since he thought they were going to
hide the head at his house. She nearly laughed out loud. This was so
ridiculous. These people must have been desperate. It seemed most likely to her
that Dadi would have hidden the bodies somewhere in the vicinity of his house,
but not actually inside. When the eruption had started he may have thought
it best to move them to Magnus’s basement, where they would be buried
forever. In the unlikely event that they were found, suspicion would then fall
on Magnus, not Dadi.

Maybe he had stored the bodies somewhere they
risked being found; the rescuers had wandered freely in and out of all the
houses, and someone could easily have stumbled across them. In all likelihood,
he had waited until he was certain

Magnus would not go back down into his own
basement.

Thóra realized she and Gudni were both
slowly nodding their heads in response to Markus’s last statement.
‘Yes, it must be easy to lose track of these things,’ said Gudni,
and Thóra had to bite her cheeks so as not to start laughing. For a
moment Gudni seemed too stunned to think of any more questions, but then he
said: ‘What about the excavation? Why was Alda so worried about
it?’

Markus shrugged. ‘Actually, she
wasn’t. I made that up,’ he said, shutting his eyes. He was clearly
getting tired of their questions. ‘It was like this: during the
evacuation to the mainland, Alda and I spoke. She was still in shock, both
from the rape and the murders, and it also seemed that seeing the head had
scared her. She asked me what had become of it, and I told her; I’d taken
the box back home and hidden it in the basement, intending to get rid of it the
next day. Her parents had told her the whole story that weekend, and she was
understandably afraid that her father would go to jail.’
Thóra could picture the scene only too well; Alda’s parents
describing the night’s events, persuading her to sacrifice herself to
save her father from prison.

Markus had more to say. ‘No one had mentioned
the head, since Geiri didn’t know about it until Dadi told him on Monday,
and nor did Alda. She never told her parents about it. I suppose she wanted to
destroy those memories, and she felt as if she’d got me into trouble. She
blamed herself lot everything that happened. When we met at Reykjavik Junior
College we never talked about it, and it didn’t come up again until they
were about to excavate the house. Of course I tried to stop the excavation from
the first day, but Alda acted as though it didn’t matter until a few
months ago. Then she said she was going to spill the beans, so I didn’t
need to pursue the injunction against the excavation. The truth would all come
out. I tried to talk her out of it, but it didn’t work. I asked her to
wait until I had gone down into the basement, and she agreed to that, thank
God. Then I made one last attempt to get her to change her mind the night
before I had to resort to my final option. I went to her house and begged her
to let sleeping dogs lie; I would go down into the basement, get the
head,
and no one would need to know anything about it. But
she wouldn’t budge.’

Alda had made the decision to confess
everything after meeting her son. She wanted to tell the truth because she had
nothing to lose. She had just been a pawn in this series of events, a victim.
Thóra realized that she herself had believed Markus blindly, and
everything he had told her about Alda. She had never doubted him.

‘How did you actually think this would
work?’ asked Gudni.

‘I was just going to get the head and
get rid of it. Everyone would think Alda had committed suicide, and no one
would connect it to the Westmann Islands. Lots of women kill themselves at that
age, and she had no family or friends to speak of. I also had an alibi if it came
to a murder investigation.’ Markus sat up straighten it all went wrong
with the discovery of the bodies. I didn’t expect them to be down there,
since they weren’t in the basement the night of the eruption. I would
never have got them past the archaeologists
.‘

‘So you turned the story round to pin
it all on Alda?’ said Gudni.

‘Yes, I suppose I did,’ replied
Markus. ‘I didn’t have much time to think; I was down in the
basement and I had to come up with something. I don’t think it was a bad
plan, in light of the circumstances.’ He looked almost proud of his
cunning, and Thóra was convinced at that moment that he was out of his
mind. ‘I decided to say that Alda had given me the box, and years later
asked me to remove it from the basement when the house was going to be
excavated. She wasn’t going to be around to defend herself, so it should
have been
foolproof
. I knew that any investigation of
what happened would bring the rape to light, sooner or later. I had to be sure
I wouldn’t be caught, and make suspicion fall on Alda.’

‘But why didn’t you tell us about
the phone call from the estate agent when you were taken into custody?’
said Gudni. ‘You’d had the foresight to prepare an alibi, and then
you didn’t use it.’

Markus grinned. ‘Of course, I knew the
estate agent had an unlisted number. When that was discovered, I didn’t
want to arouse any suspicion by immediately remembering who had called me. I
waited, to make my story more credible. I think it worked beautifully. Also, I
didn’t want to talk about anything in connection with that night years
ago, since I was supposed to have been drunk and unconscious.’

‘What about the biological
samples?’ asked
Gudni.
‘The
hair that was found on Alda’s genitals?
Did you forget about
that?’

‘I loved Alda,’ said Markus, and there
was no doubting
his conviction. Thóra gulped.
‘I always have. But she barely knew I was alive. I just lost control, and
I was going to force her — I’d waited for decades, this was my last
chance. I pulled down her underwear, but I stopped at the last minute when I
realized what I was doing. I put her clothes back on, but the hair must have
fallen off me.’ He looked from Thóra to Gudni. ‘I swear she
was alive when it happened. She was drifting in and out of consciousness, but
she wasn’t dead. I would never do that.’

Gudni did not respond to this, but instead
turned off the little tape recorder on the table. ‘Did Leifur know about
the murders?’ he asked, looking as though he hoped this was not the case.

‘He was aware of them. Dad called him
home from Reykjavik for support. He didn’t really come to tell me off for
drinking, since I never would have listened to him back then. I told him about
this thing with Alda afterwards. He wasn’t very pleased with me.’

Gudni nodded, it doesn’t matter what he
knew, as long as he didn’t take part in any criminal activity. In that
case, we don’t need to bring him into this
.‘
He turned the machine back on and Thóra stared open-mouthed at the
blinking light on its side. It must be nice to hold all the cards for an entire
community. Good for the one who does, not so
good
for
others. As she processed this new information, Gudni took her silence as
consent.

‘Aren’t we finished here
yet?’ she asked, ‘I’m not sure I can endure any more right
now, and I’m sure Markus has had enough too.’ In the hallway she
could see Sóley yawning widely. ‘You know where I am if you need
me.’ She wanted to ask Markus about Alda’s hair, whether he was the
one who’d cut it from Alda’s head as she slept in the gym, but
decided to let it wait. It seemed a rather trivial detail in the light of other
events, and the answer was obvious anyway. Now that she thought about it, the
hair in the storeroom that had sickened Bella so much must have been
Alda’s. Thóra suspected that Markus had been driven to do it by
jealousy and anger towards
Stebbi
, the boy that Alda
liked. He had wanted to teach Alda a lesson and show her what happened if she
rejected him.

Gudni stood up. ‘Yes, I think
that’s all for now. There’s a plane on its way from Reykjavik to
fetch you, Markus, and I doubt very much you’ll be back here in the
Islands any time soon. You might want to take the opportunity to admire the
view of the cliffs from my window, before you leave.’

Thóra walked out without looking back
at Gudni and Markus. Thanking the card-playing police officer for his patience,
she helped her daughter to her feet. Orri was still sleeping soundly in the
pushchair, and she was able to pull up his hood without waking him. The three
of them then headed out into the August night in search of a tourist truck to
drive them back to their apartment.

‘Did the police catch the bad
guy?’ asked Sóley sleepily, as they walked down the spotless
street. They could hear the noise from the festival at Herjolfsdalur, carried
on the breeze.

‘Yes, sweetheart,’ said
Thóra, trying to look pleased that the case was solved. She still felt
she’d been made a fool of.

‘And who was the bad guy?’ her
daughter asked eagerly. In her simple, childish world criminals were easy to
spot, like Robbie Rotten or the Beagle Boys in the books Thóra read to
her.

‘It was the one that I thought was the
good guy,’ replied Thóra, smiling down at her. ‘People
sometimes make mistakes.’ They waved down a truck and sat on a bench
among a group of festival-goers, who were all smiles. She wondered if she could
get a babysitter for the following night and allow herself some fun. Maybe she,
like Bella, could find herself a handsome sailor and forget everything for a
while.

It sounded nice, but Thóra knew it
would never happen.