Ashes to Dust (8 page)

‘It’s a snowmobile. Not a steam
iron,’ said Sóley, chewing her bottom lip.

Now it was the librarian’s turn to
blush slightly, but to Thóra’s great relief she resolved the
problem successfully by saying that she’d misread her notes. On the other
hand, Gylfi’s burst of laughter did not help, and as they stood there
afterwards in front of the picture he continued to giggle.

‘It looks exactly like an iron,’
he said. ‘How did you ever get the idea of drawing a snowmobile? Do you
think it’s a household appliance?’

Thóra leapt to her daughter’s
rescue. ‘Of course it is. In the countryside snowmobiles count as home
appliances.’ She tightened her grip on her daughter’s hand,
while Sóley hung her head. ‘Don’t listen to him. He has no
idea what snowmobiles look like.’ The same actually went for
Sóley. ‘I’m going to buy you ice cream in honour of your
win.’ She looked from the snowmobile to the other pictures.
‘Sóley.
Yours is by far the most beautiful.
Stands head and shoulders above the rest.’

‘No, it’s ugly,’ said the
child. ‘I should have drawn a door, like I was going to at first.’

Thóra realized that she would have to
explain to her daughter at a better time what the words household appliance
meant. ‘There
there
,’ she said.
‘You won and that was no accident.

You drew the most beautiful picture. Steam
iron and snowmobile both start with the letter “s”.
That’s why the woman got mixed up
.‘
She
kissed Sóley on the cheek and gave her son the evil eye, since he
appeared to be on the verge of bursting into laughter again. ’Do me a
favour and find me a book about the eruption in the Westmann Islands
,‘
she said to him. This would get Gylfi thinking
about something other than the snow-mobile-steam iron and she would benefit
from reading up on the events of 1973, which she actually knew very little
about. While he went to find the book Thóra used the opportunity to
cheer up her daughter, although she didn’t actually smile until they were
sitting down with huge glasses full of ice cream with whipped cream on top.
Thóra’s mobile phone rang just as she was finishing her ice cream,
but she decided not to answer for fear the world would crumble around her
daughter. She changed her mind when she saw on the screen that it was Markus
calling. His world truly was crumbling around him, and ice cream would do very
little to improve his situation.

Thóra hung up on Bragi, her partner in
the legal firm, and sighed. She was exhausted after a long day, which had gone
differently than she’d planned. Markus had been called in for yet another
round of questioning, now under suspicion of involvement in the untimely death
of Alda and of being party to the death of the people in the basement. The
phone call from Markus had been urgent, so Thóra ended up at the police
station after finishing her ice cream, instead of going to the cinema or doing
something else with her children. She had had to listen to the same questions
put to her client as in the previous interviews, along with a few additional
questions about Alda. They all concerned whether he had been at her home
on the Sunday evening when she was thought to have died. Markus had denied this
and stuck to his story that they had only spoken on the phone. At first he
absolutely denied having gone to her house for weeks, but later admitted that
he had in fact been there - not on the night they were asking about, but the
night before. He had stopped there for a short time and had a glass of wine.

Thóra felt like screaming when Markus
let this slip. She was disappointed in him, mainly for trying to keep quiet
about his visit, especially since his meeting with Alda had occurred outside
the time in which the police were interested. As such, this only increased
their suspicion towards him. Thóra thought it likely that he’d
been so stubborn about not admitting his visit because he feared being charged
with drink-driving. This was not unusual - many people hid insignificant
details from the police if they involved illegal actions, and tended to focus
on keeping them secret even if they were suspected of much more serious crimes.
The police’s attempts to tie Markus to a murder didn’t seem to
bother him, but he was like a cat on a hot tin roof when attention turned to
his possible motor vehicle violation. He was obviously clinging to the childish
belief that in the end his name would be cleared of the murders without his
needing to put any great effort into it.

When the police came to the end of their list
of questions concerning Markus’s visit to Alda, Thóra felt that
the interrogation had run out of steam and that Markus had withstood the
worst of it. She was wrong. Markus responded furiously when the police
eventually said they wanted to question his closest relatives. For a time
Thóra thought that Markus’s protests would end with his being
arrested, but she was finally able to calm him down before it came to a
scuffle. After leaving the office Thóra pressed him on the cause of this
violent reaction: he said that he was worried about his elderly parents,
although they probably weren’t the only ones who would be called in for
questioning; the police also wanted to speak to his older brother, Leifur, who
ran the family’s fishing company in the Islands. Markus had demanded that
Thóra be present during all of the interrogations, and had a hard time
understanding that she was prohibited from doing so due to conflict of
interest. She also tried to explain to Markus that the police were simply
fishing; they weren’t just on the look-out for whatever would tighten the
rope around his neck, but also for anything that could cut it loose. The
purpose of the investigation was to gain a clear picture of events; this was
not a government inquisition aimed at pinning everything on him. She had
her doubts that Markus would accept all of this, but in the end he settled for
her explanations.

There was something else, however, that was
worrying Thóra - her imminent trip to the Westmann Islands. There she
planned to search high and low for someone who could shed light on the
discovery of the corpses in the basement, and perhaps even bear witness to the
exchanges between Markus and Alda in the days before the eruption. Around two
thirds of the residents of the Islands had returned home after the eruption,
and they formed a group that might conceivably have witnessed something
significant. Although this plan was far from fail-safe, it was the only idea
that Thóra could come up with at this stage of the case. Markus had
agreed to it without objection, and even liked it. He was desperate to free
himself from his current situation, and since the case had by now been reported
in the media, it was clear to him that it was only a matter of time before his
name would be dragged into the discussion. But as things stood now, it appeared
that the reporters had received little information from the police, even though
the case had naturally aroused a great deal of interest. Thóra felt it
her obligation to acquaint herself with the coverage and she could only admire
how creatively some reporters had managed to liven up their articles on
the case, even without any new information. This, of course, would not last
long, and soon the police would have to release information concerning the
investigation in order to save face. Markus’s name would not be included
in their press releases, but there was a risk they would have to announce that
one person was already being questioned as a suspect.

Then the game would be up and finally his
name would be leaked. It was therefore imperative to try to clear him of all
suspicion, as soon as possible, but Thóra could do little to speed up
the investigation before the autopsy report and the findings from the crime
scene were available. After she received these reports there would barely be
any time to go to the Islands to speak with possible witnesses. So it was now
or never. This was why it wasn’t the trip itself that was bothering
her - the Westmann Islands were beautiful enough, of course, and it was nice to
visit there. No, what annoyed her was that it had turned out that Thór,
the firm’s junior lawyer, was too busy to go with her. Thóra
thought it important to have a second set of eyes and ears with her in the
Islands and the only ones that were available belonged to her secretary, Bella.
Bragi had rightly pointed out that it mattered little whether Bella sat at the
telephone or was somewhere else, making it convenient to bring her along as an
assistant. The others at the firm were actually set on working when they
arrived in the mornings — so it was either Bella or no one.

Thóra sighed and scrolled through her
contacts list for her secretary’s number. She wished she could phone
Matthew and ask him to come to Iceland. He would certainly come if possible,
but calling him would break her resolution to leave him in peace while he
contemplated the future. An Icelandic bank had recently bought the German one
for which he worked, and as a result he had been offered the position of
supervisor of security at the main branch in Iceland. Soon he had to make a big
decision. The work was similar to what he was doing now, and the pay was much
better, which hadn’t surprised Thóra as much as it had him - the
banks were locally notorious for paying ridiculous salaries. So the
decision was not the job itself, but the move to Iceland. He knew no one there
but Thóra and her children, so she didn’t want to interfere with
his decision. If she encouraged him to come, she would be morally bound to
maintain their relationship. If she discouraged him, he might think she
didn’t care. A long time ago she had realized that any potential life
partner would have to live in Iceland, so her relationship with Matthew
depended on his decision. If Matthew did not come to Iceland, their relationship
would be finished. They were hardly ever together, and that simply didn’t
work. Thóra blushed at the thought of phone sex, which they had tried
unsuccessfully. It seemed clear that for sex she needed a flesh and blood man,
in the same room as her, and therefore it was better to be with someone who did
not live many thousands of kilometres away. On the other hand, she hoped that
he would come; she liked him and enjoyed being with him. There also seemed to
be a shortage of attractive men of the right age. She didn’t like any of
the ones that had recently tried it on with her, not even after her fifth
glass. And that said a lot about them. The men who attracted her attention were
either far
too young, already taken, or gay. Before
shaking off these thoughts it struck her that perhaps there was an
overabundance of men in the Westmann Islands. One could always dream, and it
didn’t hurt to have Bella in tow, especially since compared to her
secretary, Thóra resembled a Playboy centrefold. Enough of that for now,
she thought, and turning to the matter at hand, she called Bella’s
number.

After Sóley had gone to sleep and it
was clear there was nothing worth watching on television, Thóra decided
to have a look in the book Memorable Events 1971-1975, from the series Our
Century. She had acquired the collection after her grandfather died, and
although she didn’t open the books very often, they had occasionally come
in handy. The book wasn’t thick and obviously contained far from all the
newsworthy events of the period, but Thóra thought that the
disappearance of four people must have found its way into the book, assuming it
had made the news at the time. She flipped quickly through 1973 until she
reached the summer of that year and the eruption in the Westmann Islands
was finished. Markus’s childhood home had actually been buried some time
during the first month of the eruption; nonetheless Thóra wanted to make
sure that nothing got past her so she didn’t stop reading until she came
to the headline ‘Eruption Finished!’‘ from 4 July.

Upon reading, she found little that could
conceivably be connected to the corpses in the basement. The airplane Vor, with
five people on board, had crashed at the end of March north of Langjokull
Glacier, and in the first article about the incident, the crash site had still
not been located. A later article about the accident stated that rescue crews
had found it, as well as the plane’s passengers, who all turned out to be
dead. Another article that caught Thóra’s attention was from the
end of January, concerning the loss of the British smack Cuckoo, along with its
four-man crew. It had sailed from Thórlakshofn in the middle of the
month, but nothing was heard from it or its crew after that. Thóra sat
up on the sofa as she read this article, but lay back down again when several
pages later she read that wreckage from the ship had been driven ashore along
with remains of one of the crew’s bodies. The smack was thought to have
capsized with all hands in a storm that hit shortly after it left the harbour.
Thóra’s attention was captured again later in the book when she
read that a group of six hikers had got lost after setting out on a trip from
Landmannalaugar. The group had consisted of four foreign geologists and two
Icelandic guides who were supposed to have been very familiar with the area.
Thóra did not need to waste any time trying to imagine how part of the
group had sought shelter in a basement in the Westmann Islands to get away from
bad weather on the mainland, because immediately on the following page there
was a report that the men had been found hounded and cold in a little emergency
hut in the highlands. They had got lost in the drifting snow and could thank
their lucky stars that they had stumbled on the hut. Thóra then read one
report about people who had disappeared and were never found. In February, the
Seastar had sunk southeast of the mainland with a ten-man crew. The passengers
boarded two rubber life rafts but were never found. The group had consisted of
nine men and one woman: five Icelanders and five Faeroese, and despite repeated
searches through the articles Thóra could not discover anything about
whether the crew had ever been found. The only problem was that Markus’s
home had probably already been buried in ash by the time the ship perished,
and it was an enormous distance to the Islands from the place where it had
sunk.