Ashes to Dust (14 page)

‘Like who?’ said Agúst in
irritation.
‘Mickey, Goofy and Pluto?’

‘No.
Like you, for
example,’ said Dís calmly, pulling a little paper bag from the
pocket of her scrubs.

Agúst stood up. He didn’t seem
angry, just surprised. ‘Me?’

Dís went over and put the bag on the
desk in front of him. ‘I took this from the table beside her bed. Judging
by her body, her death wasn’t painless. Not at all what one would expect
if sleeping pills had killed
her.
’

Agúst looked Dís in the eye,
stubbornly. ‘And this makes you think that I killed her?’

‘Look in the bag,’ she said
softly. ‘I haven’t completely lost my mind.’

Agúst looked down at the bag and
grabbed it. He glanced quickly back up at Dís.

‘Be careful not to touch what’s
inside,’ she said calmly. ‘This might have to go to the
police.’ She saw Agúst’s expression harden and hurried to
add, earnestly: ‘If you were connected to this in some way then it goes
no further. If not, then I’ve got to turn this in somehow. I took it from
her bedside table.’ She pointed at the bag. ‘But that’s a
problem for later. First we’ve got to get this cleared up.’ He
looked at her. ‘Don’t look at me like that until you’ve seen
what it is. Take a look.’

Agúst pulled the plastic down
carefully with his index finger. He didn’t need to open the bag the whole
way, as he recognized the contents as soon as they appeared.
‘Fucking hell,’ he said quietly, and his head drooped. ‘What
do we do now?’

‘All I know is that no one raised a
single objection against the excavation except for Markus,’ said Hjortur,
walking over to a shelf that appeared about to break under the strain of
folders and a tall stack of papers. The archaeologist placed the pages he was
holding on the top of the stack and turned back to Thóra and Bella.
‘Not his
parents,
and not his brother. And I can
assure you that this Alda you mentioned never got in touch with me. She might
have discussed things with someone else here in this office, but if she did no
one has mentioned it.’

Thóra nodded dejectedly. ‘Would
you be willing to ask? If she had, it could make a difference.’

Hjortur gave her a look that combined pity
with irritation. ‘I will, but I doubt it’ll lead
anywhere.’

Thóra sensed that she would have to
tread lightly in her dealings with the archaeologist so that he wouldn’t
block her out. He wasn’t obliged to answer her questions or assist her in
any way. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said humbly. ‘I know the
discovery of the bodies threw a large spanner in your works, and I expect
you’re just as eager as I am for the case to be solved. One might say we
share a common interest.’

Hjortur didn’t take the bait. ‘I
certainly hope that the police conclude this as soon as possible, but I’m
not in as much of a rush as you are. What’s waiting for me has been there
for thirty-five years, so several days or weeks ahead or behind schedule
isn’t going to change the overall picture. We’re not
comrades.’ He crossed his arms. ‘If there’s nothing else I
can help you with, I would really prefer to keep working. I’m using this
down-time to finish several reports that have been hanging over my head.
We’re not just sitting here twiddling our thumbs because the area is
temporarily closed.’

Bella snorted, and Thóra hurried to
say something before her secretary butted in. ‘I wanted to ask you a
couple of questions, and I promise to be quick,’ she said.
‘You’ll be rid of us before you know it.’ She smiled and
hoped for the best, but Bella was staring stonily at the archaeologist.

Thóra wasn’t sure if it was her
honey or her secretary’s vinegar that moved Hjortur, but he agreed to sit
down with them for a few minutes. They followed him into a small conference
room. ‘Has anything been found in the excavation that could possibly
be connected to the discovery of the bodies?’ Thóra began.
‘Something that might have had no particular significance when it was
found, but might now, in the light of what was in the basement? I’m not
confining my question to Markus’s parents’ house.’

‘No,’ replied Hjortur. ‘I
don’t remember any such thing. Nor have I given it much thought.’

‘I expect you log and store everything
that you find,’ said Thóra. ‘Is there any chance of us being
allowed to have a look at those things?’

He shook his head. ‘No, I can’t
imagine we’d allow you to do that. The plan is to let the owners of the
houses go over the items with us in the later stages and try to reach an agreement
on what happens to them,’ he said, pushing his empty coffee cup aside.
‘The idea is to set up an exhibition of these items on the site of the
excavations, and hopefully in the houses themselves. As you know, the Westmann
Islands Municipality owns everything that comes out from under the
ash,
on the other hand we would certainly want to try to
appease the original owners of these items. Something that might mean nothing
to us could be invaluable to its former owner, for sentimental reasons.’
Hjortur took a deep breath. ‘Many people have contacted us because of this,
mainly looking for photo albums and such like, although there have been some
enquiries about things like graduation caps, trophies and wristwatches. We do
log everything that’s found, and it’s stored in such a way that
it’s easy to trace which item came from each house. It would be a huge
undertaking to go through all that, so we can’t allow it at this
stage.’

‘Haven’t the police made a
request to search through the items?’ asked Thóra. ‘One
would think they would at least have some interest in whatever was found in
Markus’s house.’

Hjdrtur
shook his head. ‘Not yet, and hopefully they
won’t want to. A lot of work has gone into our system and it would be a
huge pain to have to tamper with the boxes.’

‘Do you have anything against my going
through the item log?’ asked Thóra. ‘That might be of some
help to me.’

Hjortur’s lips thinned.
‘I’ll have to check,’ he said tightly.

Thóra decided to back off a little.
‘Might someone have had access to the basement before Markus?’ she
asked. ‘Was the door open or closed while the ground floor was
cleaned?’

‘Are you asking whether the corpses
were put there before or after the house was excavated?’ said Hjortur.

‘Yes, actually, I am,’ replied
Thóra. ‘It would certainly increase the number of people who could
have links to the case.’

‘I believe we shut the basement door as
soon as we reached it, and you were quite satisfied with how we did it, as I
recall,’ he said, stony faced. ‘It wasn’t more than a couple
of hours from when we dug out the door until it was nailed shut. Everything was
in accordance with our agreement. Of course anyone who wanted to go down there
could have, but it’s out of the question that anyone took a corpse down
into that basement since the excavation.’

‘But how can you be sure?’ asked
Thóra. ‘Don’t get me wrong - I’m not suggesting that
you or your people had anything to do with it.’

‘I went down there with the police
after the corpses were found, and it didn’t take much archaeological
expertise to realize that they’d been lying there for years or even
decades, rather than several days.’

‘Wouldn’t it be possible to make
it look that way?’ persisted Thóra.
‘To
throw dust over the corpses, or something, making it appear as though
they’d been lying there untouched for years?’

‘No,’ said Hjortur resolutely.

‘Do you have any guesses as to who the
people lying there were?’ she said. ‘You’re from here,
aren’t you?’

Hjortur smiled into his beard. ‘The
volcano erupted on my third birthday, so I can’t tell you anything about
the event or the people who lived here,’ he said. ‘However, I think
it’s out of the question that these are men from the Islands. Everyone
escaped the eruption, so four people couldn’t have disappeared.’

Thóra decided not to mention the man
who had suffocated in the basement of the pharmacy.

‘Still, you must have thought about
it?’ she said.
‘Who those people were?
As
an archaeologist, you must be curious about your own dig?’

‘Of course I’ve thought about
it,’ agreed Hjortur. ‘But I don’t have much imagination so I
didn’t really get anywhere. I can tell you one thing, though,’ he
added. ‘Just out of curiosity I looked over the newspapers from that time
period - we have them here on old-fashioned microfilm - and I found nothing
about missing persons, either Icelandic or otherwise. So they appear not to
have been missed, which is very odd.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I
don’t know how well you could see when you were down there but
they’d set up floodlights by the time they came to get me. It looked to
me as if at least two of the men were wearing wedding rings. What sort of men
were they if their wives didn’t even look for them?’

An unpleasant thought about her ex-husband
crossed Thóra’s mind, but she pushed it away. ‘Good
question,’ she settled for saying. Then she asked: ‘Did you notice
anything that would indicate the men were sailors? I was sort of toying with
the notion that this could be related to the Cod War.’

Hjortur shook his head slowly. ‘As far
as I could see and can remember, they weren’t wearing waterproofs, or
anything else you’d expect to see on sailors at that time,’ he
said. ‘That’s not saying much, though, since sailors aren’t
always dressed in their work clothes, any more than anyone else is.’ He
smiled and looked down at his scruffy jeans.

‘I understand,’ said
Thóra, who had been hoping for a different answer, perhaps even that the
men had been holding ropes and nets. She thought for a moment before
continuing. ‘Do you think someone might have got confused and put the
bodies in the wrong place?’ she asked. ‘Was the eruption bad enough
at any point to make visibility that poor?’

Hjortur shrugged. ‘Well, I don’t
know,’ he said. ‘It seems unlikely, but I can’t be a hundred
per cent certain.’ He scratched his head. ‘There’s also the
possibility that the house where the bodies were supposed to have been put had
already disappeared, and Markus’s house was chosen instead. There’s
an excellent website about the houses that disappeared, both the ones in the
area the lava swallowed and those that were buried in ash that we’re
digging up. Maybe you’ll find something useful there.’

Thóra smiled at him as he scribbled
down the web address. He had made an excellent point; it was possible that the
corpses were not supposed to have ended up there at all, and the whims of the
volcano had determined where they could be buried. Why would a man put bodies
in his own basement if there were numerous other houses available? Had the
bodies and the head ended up in the same place by accident? This riddle about
the bodies was starting to infuriate Thóra. She had to uncover the story
behind them.
Mostly for Markus’s sake, but also to
satisfy her own curiosity.

Thóra sat with a steaming cappuccino
in the same restaurant that she and Bella had eaten in the night before.
She had noticed they had computer access for customers, so she could kill two
birds with one stone by having a cup of coffee and looking online. They had
split up their to-do list: Bella would visit the archive, while she looked at
the website

Hjortur had recommended. Thóra knew
her task was nicer than Bella’s — she got to sit in a cosy
environment with a cup of coffee while Bella searched through dusty files for
two names - but she felt this division of labour to be a small come-uppance for
the uneven distribution of luck with men the night before. Although
Thóra had in part sent Bella away to get her out of her sight, she
really hoped her secretary would accomplish her task, although the chances of
this were slim. Thóra had sent her to the archive without first checking
to see whether files transferred to Reykjavik the night of the eruption even
existed there, but since Bella hadn’t contacted her it seemed she’d
found something to rummage through. Either that or the archivist happened to be
a man, and Bella had seduced him.

Thóra scanned the text on the screen.
She quickly found information on Markus’s house and its residents at the
time, and recognized the names of his parents and brother. She noted down the
names of their nearest neighbours, and then those of the residents of the other
ten houses on the street. All the names told her was that Kjartan, whom she and
Bella had met at the harbour-master’s office, looked to have lived in the
house next to Markus’s. At least, the name of the family head was Kjartan
Helgason. There could have been two men with the same name, but no other information
on him was to be found on the website.

Thóra clicked on the next link,
Residents of Sudurvegur Street, and found short biographies of four residents.
Luckily, one of these biographical blurbs was about Kjartan Helgason and, even
better, the article was accompanied by a photograph. Thóra
recognized him immediately. On the downside, his biography didn’t tell
her much except that Kjartan had had a long career at sea,
then
worked in various jobs before taking up his current position as harbour-master.
He had married and had four children; they were all adults now. Upon finishing
this article Thóra skimmed through the other biographies, but found
nothing that seemed likely to help Markus. The only thing that drew her
attention was how many children there had been in each home. Apart from
one couple that appeared to be childless, Magnus and his wife Klara had had the
fewest children, just their two sons Leifur and Markus.